Imani Moise

I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal.

And this is What's News in Markets, our look at the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them.

Let's dive in.

Markets spent this week chasing the next big thing.

From AI to outer space and quantum computing, investors poured money into futuristic bets while brushing aside lingering concerns about the economy.

A new $2 billion federal investment in quantum computing helped fuel rallies in companies tied to the emerging technology.

NVIDIA beat Wall Street expectations for the 14th straight quarter, according to data from FactSet.

And SpaceX prepared to launch what could be the biggest IPO in history.

That lifted space-related stocks across the market.

Here on Earth, warning signs about the U.S.

consumer continued to pile up.

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.