S&P 500 Closes Above 7,800 on Soft Inflation, AI Deals
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- The S&P 500 closed at a record above 7,800 for the first time on Thursday, posting its third straight winning week, while the Dow bucked the trend and fell nearly 0.6%.
- July CPI rose 0.1% for the month with annual inflation easing to 3.4%, and PPI came in unchanged versus the 0.2% economists expected, prompting Jim Cramer to call the CPI report "very benign."
- Markets were pricing a 67% chance the Fed holds rates steady in September, up from 55% a week earlier, as Treasury yields moved lower on the soft inflation prints.
- Intel upsized a stock offering to $20 billion (from an initial $15 billion) after strong demand, with CEO Lip-Bu Tan and a family member committing $12 million of personal capital to the same deal; Intel shares ended the week up roughly 1%.
- Nvidia announced a $500 billion financing partnership with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, KKR, and Goldman Sachs to turn AI compute into an investable asset class, calling it a "monumentally positive change" on CNBC.
- CoreWeave's quarterly results reinforced Nvidia's thesis that older GPUs remain productive longer than skeptics assumed, strengthening the case that the chips can be financed against long-lived cash flows.
Why it matters: With markets now pricing a 67% chance of a Fed hold in September and Nvidia's $500 billion AI-financing consortium reframing GPUs as long-lived infrastructure, capital is rotating from rate-sensitive sectors toward chipmakers and the asset managers facilitating the buildout — a structural shift, not just a weekly trade.
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