Traders work on the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 18, 2026.
NYSE
U.S. equities rose on Tuesday, led by positive aspects in Advanced Micro Devices and software stocks, as buyers’ fears around artificial intelligence disruption to sure industries eased.
The S&P 500 superior 0.77% to shut at 6,890.07, whereas the Nasdaq Composite rose 1.04% and settled at 22,863.68. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 370.44 factors, or 0.76%, and ended at 49,174.50. The 30-stock index was supported by a virtually 2% rise in Home Depot shares after the corporate’s earnings beat expectations for the first time in a year. IBM shares, which tumbled in the prior trading day on account of aforementioned AI fears, additionally added to the Dow’s positive aspects.
Shares of AMD jumped 8.8% after Meta Platforms introduced a multiyear deal with the semiconductor company. The new partnership entails deploying as much as 6 gigawatts of AMD’s graphics processing items for AI knowledge facilities. Meta will even put money into AMD via a performance-based warrant for as much as 160 million shares of the chipmaker.
The transfer comes per week after Meta said it’s using millions of Nvidia’s chips in its knowledge heart buildout. Shares of the AI chip darling rose 0.7%.
Docusign was additionally a winner, growing greater than 2% after Anthropic stated that its Claude Cowork is now able to be connected to Docusign in addition to organizations’ different present instruments like Google Drive and Gmail. The transfer supplied some optimism to buyers that AI may have the ability to complement software program firms reasonably than take their place.
That prolonged to different areas of the software program house. Shares of Salesforce — which has been working with Anthropic as effectively — and ServiceNow had been up 4% and greater than 1%, respectively. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) was larger by near 2%, although it nonetheless stays greater than 30% beneath its 52-week excessive.
“It seemed to me that that the market itself was in a sell-first, ask-questions-later mentality. It has been for some time, and that’s why you saw some of even the enterprise software guys take a rather large hit,” Anshul Sharma, chief funding officer at Savvy Wealth, stated to CNBC. He added that the day’s strikes are “a classic relief rally after that selling.”
Sharma additionally stated that he is not fairly satisfied of the narrative that has been lately been circulating on Wall Street that AI is coming to switch a number of enterprise software program immediately.
“It’s unbelievably risky from a liability perspective for very large companies to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to now move away from enterprise software — which has been tried and true, which has been tested and which aligns with our risk parameters — and then build it in house, and this is all going to happen in the next couple of months, next couple of quarters,'” he stated. “The drawdown in software was a very immediate reaction.”
Major averages fell Monday on renewed AI disruption considerations. President Donald Trump’s threat to hike global tariffs to 15% and tensions between the U.S. and Iran additionally stored merchants on edge. A world 10% U.S. tariff took impact Tuesday.
