US STOCKS-S & P 500, Dow Rise As Investors Digest Earnings, Rate Cut

Alphabet falls almost 8% after downbeat profits, heavy AI spend

Indexes: Dow up 0.47%, S&P 500 up 0.19%, annunciogratis.net Nasdaq down 0.07%

(Updates as of mid afternoon)

By Abigail Summerville and Shashwat Chauhan

The S&P 500 and photorum.eclat-mauve.fr the Dow rose on Wednesday, as investors started to brush off frustrating Alphabet profits and weighed the prospect of future rates of interest cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Google-parent Alphabet dropped 7.3% after posting downbeat cloud income development on Tuesday and earmarking a higher-than-expected $75 billion investment for photorum.eclat-mauve.fr its AI buildout this year.

AI-related stocks showed signs of healing after being rocked recently following the skyrocketing popularity of an affordable Chinese synthetic intelligence design established by start-up DeepSeek. Nvidia, which signed up among the most significant losses, trade-britanica.trade was up 3.3% on Wednesday.

“Ultimately, need is not disappearing for AI even with the DeepSeek news. They ´ re all going to have to invest more money which ´ s what the AI story has actually been. This is a fairly long cycle story,” said Rob Haworth, senior investment strategist at U.S. Bank Asset Management.

Advanced Micro Devices, meanwhile, lost 8.2% after CEO Lisa Su said the company’s current-quarter data center sales – a proxy for its AI income – would fall about 7% from the previous quarter.

On the data front, financiers are expecting the January nonfarm payrolls report, expected to be launched on Friday.

U.S. services sector activity all of a sudden slowed in January amidst cooling demand, assisting curb rate growth, a report from the Institute for Supply Management revealed on Wednesday.

“There are some issues that the Fed might need to alleviate faster, that the economy is slowing, but that ´ s in fact positive news for the marketplaces since they ´ re searching for those Fed rate cuts,” Haworth said.

The next Federal Open Markets Committee conference remains in March, and while just 16.5% of traders anticipate a rate cut then, a majority of traders expect a cut in June, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.

Richmond Fed president Thomas Barkin said the Fed was still leaning towards more rate cuts this year, but flagged uncertainty around the effect of new tariffs, immigration, guidelines and other initiatives from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

At 2:00 p.m. ET (1900 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 207.53 points, or 0.47%, setiathome.berkeley.edu to 44,763.57, the S&P 500 gained 11.61 points, or 0.19%, ai-db.science to 6,049.49 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 12.91 points, or 0.07%, to 19,641.11.

Nine of the 11 S&P 500 sectors traded higher, with realty and utility stocks leading the gains while communication services tipped over 3%.

Shares of Apple slipped 1.2% as Bloomberg News reported that China’s antitrust regulator was getting ready for a possible examination of the iPhone maker.

Fiserv advanced 7.3% as the beat quotes for fourth-quarter revenue, assisted by strong demand in its banking and wolvesbaneuo.com payments processing system.

Markets likewise await developments on the tariffs front after Trump said on Tuesday he remained in no hurry to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping to attempt to pacify a brand-new trade war in between the nations.

The Cboe Volatility Index, called Wall Street’s fear gauge, dropped 6.3% to 16.1 today.

In corporate movers, FMC Corp plunged 32% after the agrichemicals producer projection first-quarter revenue listed below price quotes.

Johnson Controls jumped 12.5% as the building solutions business called Joakim Weidemanis as president and raised its 2025 earnings forecast.

Advancing concerns surpassed decliners by a 2.62-to-1 ratio on the New York Stock Exchange, and by a 1.88-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

The S&P 500 posted 31 new 52-week highs and 12 new lows while the Nasdaq Composite tape-recorded 100 new highs and 85 new lows.

(Reporting by Abigail Summerville in New York City, Shashwat Chauhan and Sukriti Gupta in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai, Devika Syamnath, Maju Samuel and Nia Williams)