Tech stocks today: Tesla, Apple lead 'Magnificent 7' stocks lower, TSMC sends bullish signal on AI demand

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Tech stocks pulled back on Thursday after stocks hit record highs the day before.

The hostilities in the Middle East have weighed on tech stocks for weeks, clouding the picture of whether investors are pulling back because of the war or because of sentiment toward Big Tech more generally.

On Thursday, Tesla (TSLA) stock fell, reversing some of its 8% gain from Wednesday’s session after shares were buoyed by CEO Elon Musk teasing the company’s AI5 chip.

Speaking of AI chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) released its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday. A sizable 58% increase in first quarter profits and comments by the company’s CEO sent a strong signal that AI demand remains robust.

Other news in the artificial intelligence industry took a dark turn over the past weekend, as OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman’s home was targeted in two apparent attacks, an attempted shooting and a Molotov cocktail attack that caused a fire. No one was injured in either attack.

Altman addressed the Molotov cocktail attack in a blog post on Friday evening, saying, “we should de-escalate the rhetoric” around AI amid rising uncertainty about the technology’s power.

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Tesla (TSLA) stock slipped in early trade but is poised to finish the week higher and snap a current eight-week losing streak. News on the chipmaking front may be boosting the stock.

Tesla stock jumped 7.6% on Wednesday before dipping on Thursday. Though the news flow was light on the Tesla front, some traders and analysts attributed the move to CEO Elon Musk’s claim early Wednesday that Tesla was “taping out,” or had completed the final stage of the chip design process for its upcoming AI5 chip, destined for future EVs, massive training clusters, and Optimus robots.

“I believe 80% of the [Wednesday’s stock] move is related to Elon’s nocturnal post on X announcing the tape out for Hardware 5 is complete,” Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster said on Wednesday. “That’s an important update given in the world where cars are computers on wheels, a 5x improvement in chip performance helps unlock FSD and Robotaxi.”

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Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

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Vertical Aerospace (EVTL) stock jumped on Thursday after the company revealed a new milestone for its Valo air taxi.

The company said it became only the second company globally to complete a “two-way piloted transition” flight in its eVTOL (electric vertical take off and landing) aircraft, and the first to do so under civil aviation Design Organization Approval regulatory oversight.

Vertical said the two-way piloted transition means the Valo aircraft transitioned from “vertical take-off to wingborne cruise and back to vertical landing — all in one continuous flight.” In other words, its movable propellers move from helicopter to flight mode and back again while in flight.

Read more from Vertical’s news release here.
Yahoo’s Francisco Velasquez reports.
Tech stocks were leading markets higher on Wednesday, and among the Magnificent Seven stocks, one stock was a notable outperformer — Tesla (TSLA).

Shares of the EV maker rose as much as 8% on Wednesday, rallying relentlessly from the market open.

The move comes a day after the stock caught an upgrade at UBS, with the firm raising its rating on shares to Hold from Sell and putting a $360 price target on the stock.

Overnight, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also posted an image on his social media platform X of Tesla AI’s new AI5 chip, teasing that it is just one of several new high-powered chips being developed by the company.

In early afternoon trade on Wednesday, Tesla stock was trading closer to $400. The stock is still down about 12% this year.

Tesla is expected to report earnings after the market close on April 22.
Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the company has already spent its AI budget for the year, and it’s only April.

“I’m back to the drawing board because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Neppalli Naga said in an interview.

He said the bulk of the spend has gone to AI coding tools, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and Anysphere’s Cursor. The rideshare company uses the AI software models to write code that helps pair riders and drivers, determine pricing, and improve navigation.

Neppalli Naga didn’t reveal Uber’s software budget, but The Information noted that the company’s R&D costs, which typically include AI spend, “rose 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025 from the previous year, and the firm said in a recent securities filing it expects that cost will continue rising on an absolute dollar basis.”
Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

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Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:
Yahoo Finance’s As AI compute needs multiply, one quantum computing firm says it has the edge over Nvidia (NVDA).

“If I was Nvidia, I’d be shaking in my boots,” D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) CEO Alan Baratz told Yahoo Finance at the Semafor World Economy Summit.

Baratz’s company, which develops the hardware and software for quantum systems, claims the AI chip giant is building processors that would be increasingly difficult to power.

“Our quantum computer takes about ten kilowatts of power to run,” Baratz noted, comparing the draw to roughly five or ten GPUs. He pointed to a problem solved in minutes that he claimed would take a massive GPU system nearly a million years and “the world’s power” to complete.

The timing is calculated. April 14 is World Quantum Day, and the sector is surging. Shares of D-Wave jumped nearly 16% on Tuesday, while IonQ (IONQ) soared 18% after scaling its commercial systems beyond a single processor. reports:

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JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon called out cybersecurity as the “largest risk” the bank faces in the company’s earnings call this morning.

Dimon said the bank is testing Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model, which has raised alarms on Wall Street and across the tech sector. Anthropic delayed the release of Mythos, deeming it too dangerous for the public after the model detected thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in existing software.

While Dimon assured shareholders that JPMorgan is well protected against cyber threats, he noted that AI has made these risks “worse” and harder to defend against.

“It does create additional vulnerabilities and, maybe down the road, better ways to strengthen itself too,” Dimon said of the Mythos model. “While we’re trying to get the benefits AI, we also are very cognizant of the risk of cyber. I think the government is aware of it too.”
Yahoo Finance’s Jake Conley reports:

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The competition between OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) and Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) doesn’t appear to be cooling off.

In a memo to staff published by The Verge, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer Denise Dresser outlined a number of priorities for the company’s sales org this quarter, saying enterprise AI is “entering a more mature phase,” and that its biggest customers “want a system they can trust and build on.”

The most notable headline to emerge from Dresser’s memo, however, came from the concluding thoughts on the competitive landscape, namely, OpenAI’s biggest competitor, Anthropic.

“Their stated run rate is inflated,” Dresser wrote.

“They use accounting treatment that makes revenue look bigger than it is, including grossing up rev share with Amazon and Google. Our analysis shows that this overstates their run rate by roughly $8 billion (at the current $30 [billion] stated). We report Microsoft revshare net, which is more inline with standards we would be held to as a public company.”

Last week, Anthropic disclosed the $30 billion run rate figure, which signaled its growth rate had roughly tripled since the end of 2025.

Dresser’s memo also criticized Anthropic for telling a story “built on fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI.”

The memo also said Anthropic made a “strategic misstep” in not acquiring enough compute to meet user needs and that its focus on coding, “gave them an early wedge. But you do not want to be a single-product company in a platform war. As AI spreads beyond developers into every team, workflow, and industry, that narrowness can become a real liability.”

Dresser also said OpenAI’s relationship has been “foundational” to its success, but that it “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are.”

In February, OpenAI announced an expanded deal with AWS, which included a $50 billion investment from Amazon and an exclusive cloud deal with AWS to distribute OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise platform.
Globalstar (GSAT) shares jumped over 8% on Tuesday after Amazon (AMZN) signed an $11.57 billion deal to purchase the satellite provider.

The deal positions Amazon to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink, seen as an important piece of the highly anticipated SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) IPO.

Globalstar shareholders will receive either $90 in cash or ⁠0.3210 shares of Amazon stock for each share of Globalstar they own, the companies said.

Amazon has been building out its network of low Earth orbit satellites, with a goal of deploying 3,200 satellites by 2029. In comparison, SpaceX’s Starlink currently has about 10,000 satellites in orbit, according to Reuters.

With this acquisition, Amazon will acquire Globalstar’s two dozen satellites, adding to its portfolio of 200 satellites in orbit. Amazon is also preparing to launch satellite internet services later this year.

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EV maker Lucid (LCID) made a flurry of major announcements on Tuesday, naming a new CEO and securing much-needed investment, as the company sets itself up for its next evolution.

Lucid named Silvio Napoli as its next chief exec, replacing interim CEO Marc Winterhoff, who will return to his role as COO. Napoli, who most recently served as CEO of the industrial company Schindler Group, will join Lucid as an executive director and board member, beginning April 15, 2026.

Separately, Lucid also revealed it will receive $750 million in new investment. Ayar Third Investment Company, an affiliate of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), will purchase $550 million of Lucid preferred stock, with Uber (UBER) subsidiary SMB Holding Corporation investing $200 million via common stock.

Lucid stock was trading higher in early trade, though shares are down a whopping 60% in the past year.

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Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports:

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OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) is partnering with Wegovy maker Novo Nordisk (NVO) to deploy artificial intelligence across Novo Nordisk’s business and help streamline drug discovery and manufacturing.

Reuters reports:

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Dell (DELL) and HP (HP) stock popped on Monday after a rumor that Nvidia was in talks to acquire a personal computer company.

Nvidia denied the claim. “The media report is false; Nvidia is not engaged in discussions to acquire any PC maker,” a spokesperson told Yahoo Finance.

Dell stock rose 6.74%, and HP climbed 5.3% to $19.23.
Meta (META) employees may start receiving feedback from an AI version of their CEO.

According to the Financial Times, Meta is creating a photorealistic artificial intelligence avatar for Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with users and give feedback to employees in his stead.

Zuckerberg has been personally involved in training his AI character to adopt his mannerisms and tone. The idea is that the AI character could help employees feel more connected to the founder and better understand his thinking about company strategies.

Separately, Zuckerberg and the company have been engaged in building a “CEO agent” that can quickly retrieve information to help the CEO at work.

Meta has long been focused on creating AI personalities as part of its multibillion-dollar spending on the technology, dating back to Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision that never quite panned out.

In 2023, Meta rolled out celebrity AI chatbots trained to emulate figures like Tom Brady, but it scrapped those plans a year later after little uptake from users. Later, the company created “AI Studio,” which lets users create their own AI chatbots.

AI Zuckerberg is expected to be one of several new AI characters that Meta’s Superintelligence Lab is expecting to roll out.

Read more from the FT.
Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports:

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The spread of artificial intelligence may make finding a great growth stock challenging in the near future.

“We expect investor uncertainty around AI disruption and long-term growth estimates will persist for quarters if not years, requiring investors to be selective within the universe of secular growth stocks,” Goldman Sachs strategist Ben Snider warned in a new note.

“For secular growth stocks facing AI disruption risk, resolving this uncertainty will likely require evidence that AI is not displacing existing business models.”

Growth stocks have been hit from all sides this year, from AI disruption fears to high AI spending to higher-for-longer interest rates amid the US conflict with Iran.

The “Magnificent Seven” stocks sport valuations near fresh lows relative to the S&P 500 (^GSPC), JPMorgan strategist Mislav Matejka pointed out in a note last week.

“Mag 7 relative [to S&P 500] is not acting as a safe haven,” Matejka said.

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Tech stocks today: Tesla, Apple lead ‘Magnificent 7’ stocks lower, TSMC sends bullish signal on AI demand