Midday Market Movers Roundup

CNBC reported Wednesday that a fresh wave of buying swept through equity markets at midday, with semiconductor names and AI-adjacent stocks capturing most of the attention.

Chip Stocks Rally Broad and Hard

The chip stocks rally was widespread. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF climbed more than 1% on the session. Micron Technology gained roughly 3%, while Marvell Technology surged 7% and On Semiconductor jumped a sharp 10%. Nvidia added around 2% on the day.

The move extended a recovery trade in semiconductors that had been building through the week as investor confidence in AI hardware demand held firm.

Nebius and Alibaba Add Fuel

Nebius, the AI-focused cloud infrastructure company, was among the session’s standout performers. Shares climbed 16% after the firm posted first-quarter revenue of $399 million. That figure represented a 684% jump from the same period a year earlier, driven by strong demand for cloud and GPU capacity. Nebius also announced it has secured up to 1.2 gigawatts of power and land in Pennsylvania for a new AI data facility.

Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares rose 6% after the Chinese technology giant disclosed its cloud division posted a 38% year-on-year revenue increase in the first quarter, alongside continued heavy spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Akamai Technologies added almost 7% after Bank of America upgraded the stock to buy and raised its price target to $175 from $130. The bank argued the company had successfully repositioned from a legacy content delivery network into a credible AI infrastructure platform.

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Background: AI Infrastructure Spending Drives Valuations

The gains in Nebius, Akamai and Alibaba follow a months-long investor thesis that enterprise AI infrastructure spending will sustain elevated revenue growth across cloud and networking businesses. Optical networking names also benefited Wednesday. Coherent rose 6% to rank among the S&P 500’s top performers, while Lumentum and Corning each added roughly 2%.

EchoStar climbed 4% after the Federal Communications Commission approved the company’s $40 billion spectrum sale to AT&T and SpaceX.

Sharp Declines Hit Wix and Resideo

Not every name participated in the rally. Wix.com plunged 30% after the web platform company reported adjusted earnings of 68 cents per share, far short of analyst forecasts near $1.24.

Resideo Technologies fell 17% after issuing weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter on both earnings and revenue, despite beating estimates for the first quarter itself.

Birkenstock slid more than 10% after missing revenue and earnings estimates, with the footwear brand pointing to conflict in the Middle East as a drag on its Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

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