NVIDIA, ranked first in Friday's U.S. stock trading volume, closed down 2.23%, with a turnover of $29.369 billion. Reports indicate that Samsung and SK Hynix are facing challenges with HBM4 production capacity and yield rates, which may lead NVIDIA to relax its requirements. Although Samsung was the first to mass-produce HBM4, the yield rate for its 1c DRAM is only 60%, with a monthly capacity of just 60,000-70,000 units. SK Hynix's initial product reliability tests may struggle to reach 11Gbps. Industry experts predict that NVIDIA might procure products with slightly lower specifications, such as 10.6Gbps, and ease yield rate demands to stabilize its supply chain. Additionally, analysts emphasized that while major platforms are digesting expenditures, NVIDIA, TSMC, and Applied Digital will benefit from increased AI capital spending by hyperscale enterprises.
Tesla, the second most traded stock, closed up 0.09%, with a turnover of $21.245 billion. Recent reports suggest that following Elon Musk's announcement of SpaceX's acquisition of xAI to "merge into one," banks associated with him are exploring a potential financing plan to reduce the substantial interest costs he has accumulated in recent years. Data shows that Musk accumulated nearly $18 billion in debt from his previous acquisition of the social platform Twitter (now renamed "X") and the establishment of the artificial intelligence company xAI (which now holds X). Insiders revealed that banks are formulating a financing transaction expected to alleviate Musk's debt burden ahead of a potential SpaceX IPO later this year. It should be noted that this potential deal has not yet been finalized.
SanDisk, ranked third, closed down 0.59%, with a turnover of $14.632 billion. The stock gained 4.78% this week, marking its ninth consecutive weekly increase. The company recently launched an innovative open-source tool called SPRandom (Sandisk Pseudo-Random), which employs a pseudo-random pre-processing method and integrates deeply with the I/O benchmarking tool fio. This addresses the time-consuming pre-processing challenge in enterprise SSD benchmarking, reducing the pre-processing time for large-capacity SSDs from days or weeks to just hours. This redefines the industry paradigm for enterprise SSD testing and injects new momentum into technological upgrades across the sector.
Apple, ranked fourth, closed down 2.27%, with a turnover of $14.167 billion.
Google Class A shares, ranked eighth, closed down 1.06%, with a turnover of $11.692 billion.
Palantir, ranked tenth, closed up 1.77%, with a turnover of $6.441 billion. The stock fell 3.3% this week, recording its fifth consecutive weekly decline. Palantir recently announced it received a significant authorization from the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), while prominent investor Michael Burry expressed cautious views on the stock. A company announcement stated that DISA has approved extending the provisional authorization for its Federal Cloud Service Forward Level 5 and Impact Level 6 to on-premises and edge deployment scenarios. This means Palantir's technology stack—including several core products like its AI platform—can now operate locally and at the edge on any hardware. This move grants the U.S. government the freedom to choose "hardware-agnostic" options, enabling multi-vendor architectures for critical mission deployments. "Future combat requirements demand software capabilities everywhere—from enterprise data centers to the tactical edge," said Akash Jain, President and Chief Technology Officer of Palantir's U.S. Government business. "PFCS Forward delivers on this promise with a hardware-agnostic authorization, allowing critical mission capabilities to be deployed with the survivability and resilience required by warfighters."
Applied Materials, ranked thirteenth, closed up 8.08%, with a turnover of $5.657 billion. Although the company's fiscal 2026 first-quarter revenue declined slightly by 2% year-over-year to $7.01 billion, the decrease was significantly smaller than previously expected and substantially stronger than the Wall Street consensus estimate of approximately $6.86 billion. Non-GAAP first-quarter earnings per share were $2.38, surpassing the Wall Street average estimate of $2.21. Analysts noted that, importantly, Applied Materials provided an unexpectedly strong revenue forecast range, indicating that demand for AI and memory semiconductors is significantly driving leading chip manufacturers like TSMC to accelerate purchases of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Applied Materials expects fiscal 2026 second-quarter revenue to be approximately $7.65 billion, plus or minus about $500 million. In contrast, Wall Street analysts' average revenue expectation for the quarter (ending this April) was $7.03 billion. It is reported that as capacity expansion for 3nm and below advanced process AI chips, CoWoS/3D advanced packaging, and DRAM/NAND memory chips accelerates substantially, analysts have continuously raised their revenue expectations for Applied Materials since the beginning of the year.
Coinbase, ranked fourteenth, closed up 16.64%, with a turnover of $5.212 billion. Most U.S.-listed cryptocurrency-related stocks advanced on Friday. However, the stock fell 0.48% this week, marking its fourth consecutive weekly decline.
AppLovin, ranked eighteenth, closed up 6.44%, with a turnover of $3.422 billion. AppLovin reported strong fourth-quarter performance last year, with revenue surging 66% year-over-year to $1.66 billion, exceeding analyst expectations of $1.6 billion. Adjusted EBITDA increased 82% to $1.4 billion, with an EBITDA margin of 84%. Earnings per share were $3.24, beating the analyst consensus of $2.95. For the first quarter of this year, the company expects revenue to be between $1.745 billion and $1.775 billion, with the EBITDA margin remaining high at 84%. AppLovin co-founder and CEO Adam Foroughi strongly responded that market sentiment is disconnected from reality, emphasizing that the explosion of content driven by AI will make the company's traffic distribution capabilities even more scarce. He also pointed out that increased bidding density actually enhances platform revenue. Morgan Stanley maintained an "Overweight" rating but lowered its price target from $800 to $720.
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