By Anders Bylund
Publication Date: 2026-05-14 17:12:00
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI +0.66%) just crossed 50,000 for the first time ever, and honestly, it feels like the market has been building toward this moment all week.
As of 12:17 p.m. ET Thursday, all three major indexes are up by very similar percentages. The Nasdaq-100 has increased by 1%, the S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.61%) is also up 1%, and the Dow is a rounding error away from 1% at a 0.94% gain.
The session began unevenly. The Nasdaq-100 opened flat, the S&P 500 started up 0.3%, and the Dow opened with a 0.8% gain. By 10:30 a.m. ET, all three indexes had converged around 0.5% and climbed steadily from there.
The catalysts behind today’s gains
If you guessed “AI chip stocks” as today’s market engine, congratulations on paying attention this year. Nvidia (NVDA +3.41%) is up 4.3%, with shares hitting $235.63 and casually adding $248 billion to its market cap. As CEO Jensen Huang followed President Trump on a state visit to China, U.S. regulators just approved Nvidia’s request to sell H200 AI accelerators in the Chinese market.
Broadcom (AVGO +3.59%) is tagging along nicely, up 4.1% to $434. Wells Fargo just raised its price target to $545, noting that AI semiconductor revenue is running 30% to 40% hotter than expected. That’s another trillion-dollar tech stock with a roughly 4% move, easily moving the needle on cap-weighted indexes.
But it’s not all high-level politics and Chinese export approvals. Networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO +12.23%)
