Imani Moise

Retail giants including Walmart, Target, and Home Depot all pointed to increasingly budget-conscious shoppers this week, while high gas prices and lingering uncertainty around the conflict in the Middle East continued to weigh on consumer sentiment.

Still, investors saw more to be excited about than scared of.

The Dow gained 2.1% and ended the week at a new record high, while the Nasdaq rose about half a percent.

The S&P 500 increased 0.9%, notching its eighth straight week of gains, the longest weekly winning streak since 2023.

For months, Wall Street has been obsessing over AI's biggest private companies from the sidelines.

But this week, it finally got a meaningful glimpse behind the curtain.

Three of Silicon Valley's hottest startups moved closer to going public, setting the stage for what could become the biggest IPO boom since the dot-com era.

Elon Musk's SpaceX filed paperwork for a blockbuster stock offering that could raise as much as $80 billion and potentially make Musk the world's first trillionaire.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, which was recently valued at more than $850 billion, is preparing to file for its own IPO soon.

And rival Anthropic surprised investors by forecasting its first-ever quarterly operating profit, a rare feat in the cash-burning AI industry.

While investors wait for those monster debuts, many are looking for other ways to cash in on the frenzy.

European satellite stocks surged this week after SpaceX's filing ignited excitement across the industry.

France's Eutelsat jumped nearly 35%, while German satellite developer OHB climbed more than 28%.

Investors' obsession with finding the next big market winner may be creating a problem for the company sitting on top of the mountain.

Shares in NVIDIA, currently the most valuable company in the world with a valuation of more than $5 trillion, fell more than 4% over the week despite the chip giant reporting another blockbuster quarter.

CEO Jensen Huang told investors that demand for AI chips has gone, quote, parabolic as companies race to build AI agents and massive data centers.

The company posted more than $81 billion in quarterly revenue, up 85% from a year ago, while profits more than tripled.

But investors appear more interested in finding the next NVIDIA than rewarding the current one.

Take Intel, for example.

The once-struggling chipmaker has suddenly become one of Wall Street's hottest AI comeback bets.