Optimists looking for an encore performance from Wall Street were handsomely rewarded in 2024. Last year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite all achieved multiple record-closing highs and ended higher by 13%, 23%, and 29%, respectively.

As the global tech sector was catching up to the disruption caused by DeepSeek’s r1 AI model, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced its brand new Qwen 2.5 AI model on the first day of the Lunar New Year. The Qwen 2.5 is pre-trained on large-scale multilingual and multimodal data and rivals DeepSeek’s AI model.

Micron (NASDAQ: MU) makes memory chips and storage for phones and computers. However, these chips can also be used for data centers and it is now one of the key players in the AI business. The stock is down 24% from its peak but analysts are eyeing a massive rebound here.

Certain Wall Street analysts expect Nvidia and Microsoft to achieve market values of $4 trillion in 2025, something no publicly traded company has accomplished. Nvidia is the market leader in data center graphics processing units,

Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms helped lead most US stocks higher on Thursday following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies. The S&P 500 rose 0.5%, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed.