The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were set for their biggest one-day gain in more than a month on Monday, as tech stocks advanced after Anthropic's initial public offering filing put artificial intelligence back in focus in a week packed with corporate earnings.
Anthropic disclosed steep losses and great revenue growth in its filing for a US IPO, detailing its ambition to build AI systems capable of reshaping the global economy despite the high costs of developing the technology.
The AI lab is pushing ahead with its listing plans even as a once-busy autumn IPO calendar has thinned out, with market volatility prompting companies to delay offerings.
"It's a challenging environment, to say the least, exactly when this IPO will take place, but there's a lot riding on not only the company, but the AI industry," said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield.
Semiconductor and chip-related companies, widely regarded as some of the biggest winners of the AI boom, were leading the gains. The broader Philadelphia chips index was up more than 3 per cent after a turbulent few weeks.
Anthropic's filing arrives as investors increasingly scrutinise the profit from AI spending. About a third of S&P 500 companies are scheduled to report earnings this week, including hyperscalers Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon, whose results would be scanned for signs of whether AI investments are translating into growth.
The focus follows a subdued reception to earnings from AI-linked mega-caps last week. Meta disappointed investors after raising its annual AI spending forecast again and saying it would sell new stock to help pay for it, while Tesla also came under pressure after its results.
Meta said on Monday it plans to raise up to $95 billion in equity to fund its AI-related expansion of data centres, cloud computing power and other infrastructure. Its shares were last up 0.2 per cent.
The AI trade has come under pressure this month amid concerns that debt-funded spending may become harder to justify in the face of rising borrowing costs.
Sentiment, however, improved on Monday as neo-cloud companies such as CoreWeave and Nebius, which have been at the centre of the AI storm, reversed initial losses to trade higher.
Other AI-linked companies, including photonic product makers Lumentum and Coherent, along with server makers Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, were among the best-performing stocks.
