AI companies could be the next big thing

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US stocks fall as Asian stocks rise
U.S. stocks were mostly lower on Wednesday. S&P 500 It fell 0.19% Dow Jones Industrial Average It fell 0.7% Nasdaq Composite Index Asian markets rose on Thursday, with Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea all rising more than 2%. Gains in semiconductor stocks, led by SK Hynix shares which surged about 8%, helped support the market.

OpenAI could benefit
OpenAI’s board of directors is considering a plan to restructure the company as a for-profit company, according to a source who requested anonymity. OpenAI will keep its non-profit arm as a separate entity, the source said. The news follows a series of high-profile departures from the company, including CTO Mira Murati and head of research Bob McGrew.

Semiconductor planning support
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to turn the country into a semiconductor powerhouse. He wants to expand the electronics sector from $155 billion today to $500 billion by 2030. Experts who spoke to CNBC were divided on whether that goal is achievable, but agreed that India can’t achieve it alone.

Turning VR into reality
Meta Meta has taken another step towards making virtual reality a part of everyday life. The company’s Reality Labs division announced its latest VR headset, the Quest 3S, which will be available starting at $299 on October 15th. Meta also showed off a prototype of augmented reality glasses called Orion, a next version of which the company hopes to sell to consumers.

(PRO) Let’s take a look at India’s “micro”
India’s economy and stock market have performed well over the past year, but it would be a mistake to invest based on that fact alone, says Blackstone Private Equity’s head of Asia. Investors should instead focus on “specific smaller companies” to make money.

The initial craze for generative artificial intelligence began when OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022. Institutions poured billions of dollars into OpenAI.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is privately held, but several companies are benefiting enormously from the generative AI boom it has sparked.

NVIDIA was gen AI’s first beneficiary. In 2023, a year after ChatGPT was released, the semiconductor company’s shares soared when it was revealed that its chips were the brains behind the chatbot.

Then big tech companies followed suit. Microsoft, Meta and Google’s parent company alphabet The company released its own version of a chatbot and AI-powered tools, and these features helped lift the stock price, though of course it’s difficult to pinpoint any one reason for the stock’s movement.

It looks like the AI ​​tailwinds are starting to propel a third wave of AI-related companies forward.

If chips are the brains of AI, then data centers are its body. Hewlett Packard Enterprise The stock rose more than 5% after Barclays upgraded the company, citing strong demand for AI data centers. And remember that Oracle’s surge this year has been driven in large part by AI cloud services that run in its data centers.

Energy companies are likely to be the next to benefit from AI.

Oracle Founder Larry Ellison said the new data center the company is designing will “utilize three modular nuclear reactors.”

Vistra Corporation, a Texas-based power company, saw its shares rise by about 6% on expectations that the company will use one of its nuclear plants to power an AI data center. Constellation Energy The company’s shares rose about 22% on Friday after it announced plans to restart nuclear plants and sell the power produced by them to Microsoft.

So the AI ​​tides will continue to sweep through the ocean for some time to come: Big tech companies and semiconductors are tempting prey, but if we cast our net wider, we might catch other prey too.

–CNBC’s Kiff Leswing, Jonathan Vanian, Jordan Novett, Brian Evans and Jesse Pound contributed to this story.