Tech stocks rose on Wednesday morning as markets staged a comeback to end the first quarter on a high note after a brutal March.

Shares of Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Nvidia (NVDA), and Microsoft (MSFT) were modestly higher despite a warning from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that it would target the companies’ operations.

Oh, and happy birthday, Apple, which turned 50 on Wednesday.

In other tech news, Anthropic raced to remove copies of leaked source code for its Claude AI agent app after the company accidentally exposed Claude Code’s underlying instructions, giving competitors and hackers new information about the model.

Anticipation continues to build around an Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) IPO, expected as early as this year, as well as the public debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPAX.PVT).

On Thursday, Tesla (TSLA) will release its first quarter delivery numbers, offering a glimpse at the changing electric vehicle landscape.

Read more about today's market action.

April 1 marks 50 years since Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (who quickly left the company) founded Apple (AAPL), then called Apple Computers.

The company that exists today is a far cry from its humble beginnings in the Jobs’ family garage, where a small team of technology buffs formed one of the most important businesses in modern history.

Apple has repeatedly reinvented itself over the years, going from desktop computer maker to portable music player maker to a smartphone giant, and now to a music and video streaming provider.

That ability to repeatedly transform itself throughout the years is the key to Apple’s perseverance over the last half-century. Despite facing near bankruptcy in the late 1990s, the company managed to rebuild and now stands as the second-most-valuable publicly traded business in the world.

But as AI continues to dominate the tech industry, Apple is widely seen as falling behind its peers. Its AI-enhanced version of Siri is still behind schedule, and the company has been losing AI experts to competing firms.

Now Apple will need to once again harness its capacity for change to ensure it’s around for another 50 years.

Read more here.

In a Telegram post on Tuesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to strike 18 companies for their involvement in military operations and tracking targets in the Middle East.

The companies listed skewed toward Big Tech giants. They were Cisco (CSCO), HP (HP), Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Meta (META), IBM (IBM), Dell (DELL), Palantir (PLTR), Nvidia (NVDA), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Tesla (TSLA), General Electric (GE), Boeing (BA), Spire Solutions, and AI firm G42.

The IRGC advised these companies’ employees to leave their workplaces immediately.

The US tech sector has increasingly intertwined itself with the Gulf region as the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar spend billions to establish an AI hub in the region.

Microsoft and OpenAI have pursued data center projects in the region, as has Amazon Web Services, which already experienced disruptions to service due to airstrikes.

Tesla has also expanded in the Middle East, launching the Cybertruck and Model Y Performance cars in regional markets while setting up showrooms in Dubai.

Anthropic accidentally exposed nearly 2,000 files and 500,000 lines of code that run its Claude Code AI agent app, in the company’s second major leak in a little over a year.

The leak, found on Anthropic’s public database by Chaofan Shou, revealed the set of instructions that programmers wrote to build Claude Code’s features. According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic representatives sought to remove 8,000 copies and adaptations of the data.

Anthropic told the Wall Street Journal that the leak was caused by “human error” and didn’t expose any customer data or sensitive information about its models’ weights.

Still, it opens up one of Anthropic’s key products to competitors, who can more easily reverse engineer features with this information. Hackers can also use the source code to learn more about Claude and potentially exploit vulnerabilities down the line.

OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) on Tuesday announced it closed its latest funding round, raising $122 billion in commitments at a valuation of $852 billion. That’s more than the $110 billion the company said it raised in February when it was valued at $730 billion.

In a statement, OpenAI said it is now generating $2 billion in revenue per month, up from $1 billion per quarter in 2024, and that, at its current stage, its revenue is growing four times faster than the likes of Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL, GOOG) and Meta (META) did.

The latest funding round comes ahead of an anticipated IPO this year and was led by heavyweights including Amazon (AMZN), which committed $50 billion in February, and Nvidia (NVDA) and SoftBank (9984.T), which each committed $30 billion. OpenAI said Microsoft (MSFT) also participated.

Additional investors included Altimeter, Appaloosa Management, ARK Invest, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among others.

OpenAI also said it allowed individual investors to join the raise via banking channels, bringing in more than $3 billion.

Read more here.

Oracle (ORCL) is the latest tech company to begin cutting jobs as the industry continues a broader push to reduce headcount amid heavy AI investments.

According to Business Insider, Oracle employees began receiving notices that they were being let go on Tuesday. CNBC, meanwhile, reported that thousands of workers will be impacted by the layoffs.

Oracle declined to comment on the reports. The company’s stock rose more than 4% on the news.

Oracle is investing billions as part of its massive AI data center build-out, which includes its work with OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) as part of the joint Stargate Project effort. That has spooked some investors over the last year, as they questioned whether Oracle could recoup its massive capital outlay.

Shares of Oracle have declined 49% over the last six months and rose 1.75% over the past year. The stock topped out at $345 in September 2025, before pulling back significantly, and as of Tuesday was trading at $142.

Oracle received a brief reprieve from traders following its most recent earnings announcement on March 10, when it reported better-than-expected third quarter results and revised its fiscal 2027 revenue higher to $90 billion.

At the time, the company said it also had $523 billion in remaining performance obligations, up $29 billion from the prior quarter. That means it has contracts for $523 billion that it must complete before it can get paid out by its customers.

Amazon (AMZN) announced on Tuesday that it will provide internet service to Delta Air Lines (DAL) flights via its Amazon Leo satellites beginning in 2028.

Like SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Leo, which stands for Low Earth Orbit, service, relies on a constellation of satellites orbiting the planet to beam internet connectivity to stationary base stations on the ground or, in the case of Delta, to aircraft flying through the sky.

The retail and cloud computing giant says that at 370 miles above the Earth, its Leo satellites are 50 times closer to the planet than the geostationary satellite systems that power older, laggy in-flight Wi-Fi services.

When up and running, Amazon says that Delta’s planes will feature antennas that can support download speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second and uploads of 400 megabits per second. That could make it possible to take video calls and stream movies from Netflix while flying.

Leo, however, is still playing catch up to Starlink. Amazon says the company currently has more than 200 satellites in orbit with plans for 20 additional satellite launches this year.

But Starlink has 10,000 satellites already in orbit and continues to expand that lead thanks to SpaceX’s rocket capabilities.

Starlink is also already available on competing airlines including Southwest (LUV) and United Airlines (UAL).

Tesla (TSLA) will release first quarter deliveries on Thursday, with another slip in sales expected in a challenging EV landscape.

Tesla is expected to deliver 364,645 vehicles globally in Q1, per Bloomberg consensus, up nearly 9% year over year, though the company’s total from last year was down due to the changeover to the new Model Y, which impacted sales.

Tesla’s expected total for Q1 2026 is up only marginally compared to a poor quarter for the company last year. In addition, backlash a year ago against CEO Elon Musk’s role in the White House reached its peak, with protests at Tesla dealerships around the globe.

Read more here.

Memory chip maker Micron (MU) stock slid in the early trading Tuesday, as the memory industry continues to grapple with the fallout from Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) TurboQuant compression algorithm, which claims to improve AI model efficiency.

The fear among investors is that more efficient AI will lead to a drop in demand for high-bandwidth memory, a key component in AI data centers that has become increasingly important as AI models have continued to balloon in size.

Micron stock is down more than 27% since it reported blow-out second quarter results on March 18. At the time, the company posted earnings per share (EPS) of $12.20 on revenue of $23.86 billion.

That amounted to an EPS increase of 682% year-over-year and a revenue jump of 196%. Wall Street was anticipating EPS of $9.00 on revenue of $19.7 billion year over year.

Micron also said it expects Q3 revenue above analysts’ forecasts.

Read more here.

Marvell Technology (MRVL) stock jumped 8% in premarket trading after the data center infrastructure company announced it was joining Nvidia’s (NVDA) web of partners.

Nvidia will invest $2 billion in Marvell as the companies collaborate on building AI factories and silicon photonics technology. Marvell will build custom accelerator chips (XPUs) compatible with Nvidia’s rack-scale infrastructure platforms to scale-up networking.

“The inference inflection has arrived. Token generation demand is surging, and the world is racing to build AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Together with Marvell, we are enabling customers to leverage NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure ecosystem and scale to build specialized AI compute.”

Nvidia stock rose 1.5% half an hour before the opening bell.

Meta (META) is testing a subscription model for Instagram called Instagram Plus that will let users secretly view stories, TechCrunch reported on Monday.

The premium features will allow subscribers to view stories — short posts that disappear within 24 hours — without the poster knowing. Subscribers will also be able to see how many people rewatched their stories, create unlimited audience lists, extend stories beyond 24 hours, and choose a spotlight story to increase a story’s visibility.

Reports on social media suggest that Instagram Plus is being tested in Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines for around $2 per month, though Meta did not confirm where it’s testing the subscription or how much it plans to charge.

In January, the social media company confirmed it would begin rolling out premium offerings for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

The news comes as social media stocks face a reckoning after Meta and Google’s (GOOG) YouTube were found liable for damages to a young user stemming from the designs of their apps.

BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky says people should be taking note of Nvidia’s stock right now. His reasoning? “It just broke lower from a nine-month trading range, meaning there are a lot of trapped buyers.”

That, combined with having “risk towards $150,” means the largest stock in the world has the “most important chart in the world” right now, according to Krinsky.

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi writes that if Nvidia stock is a great proxy for the broader stock market, then this AI leader may be leading the rest of the market even lower from its recent doldrums.

Sozzi listed Nvidia’s 15% drop from its recent peak, a “sell the news” reaction from investors, and questions about how quickly the company can translate sales of its Blackwell Ultra chips into earnings beats, as well as the US-Israel military action in Iran that continues to drive a massive rotation out of Big Tech stocks, as reasons to keep an eye on the stock’s movement.

Read more here.

Micron (MU) led semiconductor stocks lower in afternoon trading after modest dip-buying in the morning was short-lived.

Shares of the memory chip maker fell 9%, while Sandisk (SNDK) shed 8%, Intel (INTC) dropped 4%, AMD (AMD) fell 2.8%, and Nvidia (NVDA) declined by about 1%.

The rout on Monday showed continued weakness in the industry following an algorithm breakthrough Google (GOOG, GOOGL) announced last week that makes it more efficient to run artificial intelligence models by cutting the amount of memory required.

That led to a sell-off in chip names last week that resumed on Monday as investors questioned whether Google's TurboQuant algorithm could ease the chip shortage and push prices lower.

On the other side of that debate, RBC Capital Markets analyst Srini Pajjuri wrote in a note that memory chip pricing could remain strong through 2027.

"AI data center component demand continues to be strong with no signs of a slowdown on the horizon," Pajjuri said, as reported by Investor's Business Daily. "Tight supply conditions are extending visibility through the year and are leading to price inflation in many cases."

Two “Magnificent Seven” stocks that have suffered a painful drawdown in recent weeks are among the few Big Tech names in the green during Monday’s trading.

Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) rose 0.8% and 2.1%, respectively, on Monday as most of the tech sector resumed a sell-off. Amazon (AMZN) was the only other Magnificent Seven megacap stock to trade higher during midday trading.

Despite a modest recovery on Monday, Microsoft and Meta still have a long way to go to overcome the recent negative sentiment.

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

Microsoft (MSFT) is aiming to have two AI models critique each other in its Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Appropriately called Critique, the capability is part of the company’s Researcher AI agent and will let users perform deep, multi-step research with one AI model, and then refine the results with the second one.

The idea is to have a model from, say, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) perform research on a topic and then have another model like Anthropic’s (ANTH.PVT) Claude double check the work to ensure you get the best results. Microsoft says the setup provides better research quality than using a single model alone.

In addition to Critique, the Windows developer also announced Council, which allows you to perform research and then get a side-by-side comparison of the results from two models.

A “dedicated judge model” then looks at the reports from the models and tells you where they agree and where they don’t.

Critique and Council are part of Microsoft’s Frontier program, which provides users with early access to certain features before they hit the broader Copilot app.

French artificial intelligence startup Mistral raised $830 million from a consortium of banks, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, in a debt-financing round that will fund the startup’s Nvidia-powered (NVDA) data center.

The funding will help Mistral operate a data center near Paris that is expected to begin training AI models in the second quarter. The data center will run on 13,800 of Nvidia’s advanced GB300 AI chips, the Journal reported, as it seeks to compete with US rivals such as Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).

The backers comprised HSBC Holdings, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole CIB, Natixis CIB, La Banque Postale, and Bpifrance.

Mistral counts companies such as Accenture (ACN), International Business Machines (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), Stellantis (STLA), and ASML (ASML) as its clients. The startup has been moving to expand its infrastructure in Europe to meet the growing demand for AI services.

Read more here.

Last week was a brutal one for tech stocks, as the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) index entered correction territory and the “Magnificent Seven” megacap stocks collectively erased more than $850 billion in market capitalization.

But the tech wreck may be sending “oversold” signals, some Wall Street strategists say, as compressed valuations make the sector more attractive to investors.

Bloomberg reports:

Read more here.

Meta (META) stock fell more than 4% on Friday, as Wall Street continued to grapple with the company’s loss in a landmark social media lawsuit on Wednesday.

A Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube parent Google (GOOG, GOOGL) negligent for failing to protect young users on their platforms. That sent shares of the companies tumbling on Thursday, with declines as much as 8% on the day.

The suit, which revolved around whether the companies designed their apps to keep young users hooked and if they knew doing so was dangerous, is seen as a potential bellwether for a raft of similar suits that schools, states, and parents have filed against the firms.

Shares of other social media platforms like Reddit (RDDT) and Snap (SNAP) were also trading lower on Friday in response to the ruling, falling more than 5% and 3%, respectively.

Read more here.

Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) inadvertently leaked details about its latest model release, Fortune reported, after an error with its content management system made private data public on parts of its website.

The data included information about an invite-only CEO retreat and product announcements. But the biggest scoop centered on Anthropic’s upcoming model, called Claude Mythos.

In the documents, the company described the model as its most capable yet, with significant improvements in “reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity.” Anthopic confirmed that it is testing the new model but downplayed some of the other information released.

Cybersecurity stocks took a hit on the news due to fears that Anthropic’s powerful new model could allow actors to exploit vulnerabilities in software faster than companies can patch them.

This wasn’t the first time Anthropic has warned that frontier AI models could heighten cybersecurity risks.

Shares of Palo Alto Networks (PANW) dropped 6% on Friday, while CrowdStrike (CRWD) fell 5% and Fortinet (FTNT) slid by more than 3%. Year to date, the iShares Expanded-Tech Software ETF (IGV) is down 27%.

Sony’s (SONY) PlayStation 5 is getting yet another price increase. The digital edition, which doesn’t include a disc drive, now starts at $599. The standard version, with a built-in disc drive, now costs $649, while the PS5 Pro will cost you a whopping $899.

The PS5 debuted in 2020 at just $399 for the digital edition and $499 for the standard version. Sony debuted the more powerful PS5 Pro in Nov. 2024 at $699.

Friday’s announcement is just the latest price hike for Sony’s prized console.

The company released second-generation “Slim” versions of the PS5 in Oct. 2023, inceasing the price of the digital edition to $450, while leaving the standard “Slim” eidition at $499.

In August, Sony instituted a $50 price increase across its consoles, with the digital edition climbing to $499, the standard to $549, and the more powerful Pro to $749.

Sony isn’t the only video game giant impacted by the tariffs and memory shortage. Microsoft (MSFT) has also raised prices on its Xbox line of consoles, while Nintendo (NTDOY) has raised the price of its first-generation Switch, which it launched in 2007, but not the newer Switch 2.

Read more here.

A federal judge stopped the US government from labeling Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) as a “supply chain risk” on Thursday, giving the AI startup an early win in its legal battle with the Defense Department.

US District Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said Anthropic could continue its contracts with the government for now, arguing that Anthropic was punished for its criticism of the contract in the press and calling the branding of a US company as an adversary “Orwellian.”

The judge stated that the move by the government would cripple Anthropic by stripping it of billions of dollars in federal contracts and subcontracts as well as cutting it off from having any commercial relationship with any company that might want to do business with the Department of Defense.

However, the decision was not final, and the case is ongoing.

Anthropic’s Claude model was effectively banned earlier this month after a public dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic. Anthropic sought to impose limits on how its models could be used under its approximately $200 million contract, but negotiations broke down, and the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company as posing national security concerns.