Nasdaq hits all-time high as AI optimism overshadows geopolitical risks

The Nasdaq Composite closed at an all-time high on Tuesday, a milestone that arrived not despite the world's complications but seemingly because investors had decided to look past them. The index climbed 0.45 percent, extending its year-to-date gains to more than 17 percent. The narrower Nasdaq 100, which tracks the hundred largest companies on the exchange, rose more sharply—0.82 percent—while the broader S&P 500 essentially flatlined. The story was unmistakably one of technology and chips: Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, gained 0.7 percent; Apple edged up 0.2 percent; Micron Technology, one of the three largest memory chip makers globally, climbed 5 percent. Monolithic Power Systems, a Florida manufacturer of power circuits, surged 8.1 percent, and the Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify jumped 7.1 percent.

What animated this rally was a particular kind of optimism about artificial intelligence—specifically, the belief that a consumer application might finally justify the enormous sums investors have poured into AI infrastructure over the past several years. Meta Platforms had soared 11.4 percent the day before on enthusiasm surrounding Muse, its new AI assistant. Though Meta itself retreated 0.63 percent on Tuesday, the momentum from that announcement seemed to carry the broader sector forward. Jay Goldberg, a senior analyst at Seaport Research Partners in San Francisco, framed the moment plainly: investors had been searching for a clear consumer use case that could vindicate their multibillion-dollar bets. "Muse is just that product," he told Al Jazeera. He acknowledged that better products would likely follow soon, but characterized Muse as the kind of tool that gets investors excited about AI prospects again—useful enough to matter, visible enough to believe in.

The geopolitical backdrop made the market's composure noteworthy. The United States has been at war with Iran for nearly seven months. Oil prices had fallen more than 3 percent the day before, partly because flows out of the Gulf were improving and partly because of what traders read as signs of diplomatic movement. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump told reporters that US and Iranian officials had held a "very good" meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Hours earlier, in his address to the assembly, Trump had warned that he could "annihilate" Iran if Tehran did not agree to a deal. He said another round of talks would happen in the "very near future." Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, were trading at $99.18 a barrel as of 01:00 GMT—essentially flat on the day.

Across Asia, the picture was mixed. Japan's Nikkei 225 and South Korea's Kospi both opened higher on Wednesday morning, up about 1.4 percent and 0.1 percent respectively. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index opened lower, falling more than 0.7 percent. The divergence suggested that while tech enthusiasm was real, it was not uniformly distributed, and that regional factors—economic conditions, currency movements, local sentiment—still shaped how different markets absorbed the same global signals.

What Goldberg's comments captured was the particular psychology of this moment: investors had grown weary of waiting for AI to produce tangible consumer value. The infrastructure investments were real, the computing power was real, the money spent was real. What had been missing was the thing that ordinary people would actually want to use. Muse, in this reading, was not necessarily the final answer, but it was proof that the answer existed somewhere. That belief, combined with the possibility that the Iran conflict might not spiral further, was enough to push the Nasdaq to a new peak.