By Elaine Kurtenbach
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 04:55:00
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market is rising on Wednesday, led by its most influential stock, Nvidia.
The S&P 500 rose 0.6% and pulled within 1.4% of its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 116 points, or 0.2%, as of 2:15 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1% higher.
Nvidia lifted the market and climbed 2.2% after Meta Platforms announced a long-term partnership where it will use millions of chips and other equipment from Nvidia for its artificial-intelligence data centers.
“No one deploys AI at Meta’s scale,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. Because his company is the most valuable on Wall Street, Nvidia’s stock was the single most powerful force pulling the S&P 500 higher.
That performance demonstrated the upside of AI development for the U.S. stock market. But investors have also focused on the potential downsides recently, which has led to sharp swings for Wall Street. Worries are rising, for example, about how much companies like Meta are spending on AI and whether they can possibly make back their huge investments through higher profits and productivity in the future.
Meta’s stock fell as much as 1.7% before bouncing back to a gain of 0.1%.
Another big worry is that if AI succeeds in creating tools to do complicated tasks more cheaply, companies in industries as far flung as software and legal services and trucking logistics may see their businesses get…
