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Stocks were higher Wednesday, boosted by sharp gains in CoreWeave and a rebound in Nvidia following back-to-back losing sessions for the chipmaker.
The Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.60% to end at 25,466.19, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.31% to 7,619.38. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 254.60 points, or 0.49%, and closed at 52,486.49.
Neocloud stock CoreWeave rallied nearly 25% after reporting third-quarter revenue that beat analyst expectations. CoreWeave also lifted operating income and revenue guidance for 2026.
Nvidia, meanwhile, climbed 2.9% after dropping nearly 10% to start the week when CEO Jensen Huang confirmed he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. The pullback in Nvidia weighed on the broader market Tuesday, with the major averages ending the session lower.
Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Tuesday said in an updated Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it will offer 825 million shares in an initial public offering planned for next week that could value the five-year-old company at as much as $1.4 trillion.
"The sentiment bump coming from CoreWeave results and Anthropic IPO demand is helping the broader ecosystem," Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird Private Wealth Management, told CNBC. "Markets are continuing to unwind last week's overshoot to the downside with cleaner positioning now a tailwind and an attractive near-term valuation/earnings story in a lot of the AI stocks."
Equities fell on Tuesday after stronger-than-expected October inflation data renewed expectations that the Federal Reserve will again raise interest rates at its final policy meeting of the year in December. The consumer price index increased by 0.4% month over month in October, topping economists' estimates.
Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee sounded the alarm over that latest CPI figure.
"It's another distressing report — borderline disturbing," Goolsbee said Tuesday in an interview with "PBS NewsHour."
Expectations for a quarter-point rate increase next month rose to about 90% following the Dept. of Labor release, according to the CME Group's FedWatch tool.
"Despite some technical uncertainty, higher than desired levels of inflation should keep the Fed in a stance of dissatisfaction with the degree of progress on inflation remaining lackluster, so hiking the Fed Funds policy rate in December is our and the market's base case," wrote Rick Rieder, CIO of global fixed income at BlackRock. "The question now is more of one of the extent of the hike."
Comments from Fed Governor Christopher Waller at a Bank of England conference in London Tuesday also led traders to price in a greater chance of a quarter-point move.
The U.S. bond market was closed on Wednesday for Veterans Day.
U.S. stocks finished Wednesday's session in positive territory.
The S&P 500 jumped 1.31% to end the day at 7,619.38, while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.6% to close at 25,466.19. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 254.60 points, or 0.49%, to finish at 52,486.49.
Stocks can continue to climb on a broad basis, even if technology names lost ground, according to Goldman Sachs.
"One of the questions that has been permeating investor conversations this year is 'can the market go up if Tech goes down,'" a Goldman Sachs analyst wrote in a recent note to clients. "While it's tempting to just say 'no,' November market price action provides a microcosm of the trade that suggests the answer may be 'yes.'"
The analyst noted that energy is the only sector in November that has underperformed info tech in the S&P 500. Nevertheless, the broad-market index is still up 0.6% month to date.
The observation comes after the Nasdaq Composite slipped earlier this week, as losses in Nvidia led tech stocks lower.
Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management, told CNBC's The Exchange on Wednesday that he doesn't think the market has hit the top of the AI trade, although he said he didn't know whether bear market conditions had materialized.
"I don't think it's the top for one simple reason: Agentic AI is very, very new," he said, touting the mass appeal of Meta's consumer AI product, Muse.
Asked about the possibility of a pullback in overall capex and equipment spending during the AI buildout, Niles said that such a scenario could present a problem for the market.
"If you're starting to pull back, then you've got an issue because now you're dealing with the other side of this, and in fact, it is March of 2000," he said, comparing the contingency he described to the popping of the dot-com bubble.
Even if the market enters a bear market, Niles said, it doesn't really matter for the way that he invests because investors can still play for strong positive rallies even as the overall trajectory is in decline.
Apple is set to close at another all-time high on Wednesday, two days after doing the same thing on Monday, when it finished the day at $350.69.
So far, the all-time intraday high of $355.38 reached last Thursday Nov. 5 remains unsurpassed.
Apple, the largest company in the U.S. with a market capitalization of some $5.1 trillion, has so far reached three all-time closing highs in November alone. The iPhone maker has soared 30.5% so far in 2026, nearly three times the 11.6% gain in the S&P 500.
Mortgage rates fell for four straight weeks, but that ended Tuesday, after a monthly inflation report came in hotter than expected. The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage rose 12 basis points from Monday to 7.30%, according to Mortgage News Daily. It was the largest one-day jump in more than a month.
Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee called the latest inflation data "borderline disturbing."
"It's another distressing report — borderline disturbing," Goolsbee said in an interview with the PBS NewsHour Tuesday.
"We've got a real inflation issue on our hands that has been developing," Goolsbee said. "We're going to have to deal with that."
The consumer price index rose 0.4% on a seasonally adjusted basis in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Tuesday morning release. That was higher than economists had predicted, and the third straight month of outsized price increases.
CoreWeave shares jumped 20% Wednesday after the neocloud posted quarterly earnings that beat estimates and raised its guidance for the year.
"Demand for the infrastructure is and remains overwhelming." CEO Michael Intrator told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" Wednesday.
Berkshire Hathaway's "Buffett premium" is evaporating, according to CFRA, citing "eroding fundamentals" and uncertainty around the "significant management transition."
In a Tuesday note, analyst Catherine Seifert highlighted insurance as a "weak spot" in during the firm's third quarter, which reported a decline in operating earnings.
She also mentioned shares of Berkshire "merit caution in the near term." At current levels, the stock trades at about 25 times CFRA's 2026 operating earnings per share, above their three-year average forward multiple of 23 times.
Warren Buffett announced his retirement as CEO at the end of 2025. He remains the chairman emeritus and a Board Director at the firm.
Current CEO Greg Abel, a CPA and the former CEO of MidAmerican Energy, brings "strong operational skills" to this role. Although, he still has big shoes to fill.
Still, Seifert highlighted bright spots, including Berkshire's balance sheet which continues to reflect "solid financial strength" as well as buybacks.
In Q3, the conglomerate bought back $9.6 billion worth of Berkshire stock.
Analysts at JPMorgan upgraded Republic Services to overweight from neutral, raising its price target to $295, implying nearly 19% upside from Tuesday's close.
"We expect solid waste volume growth to inflect to positive in 2027 after three years of negative growth," JPMorgan analyst Tami Zakaria wrote in a Wednesday note.
Small and large container volumes each rose 0.5% in the third quarter this year, marking their first simultaneous growth in more than three years. Zakaria said the recovery will help companywide adjusted EBITDA margins expand at or above the high end of Republic's annual target of 30 to 50 basis points.
Free cash flow should increase in 2028 as Polymer Center construction wraps up, the analyst said. Republic also plans to begin full-scale deployment of its AI-enhanced routing platform in early 2027 to improve collection efficiency and reduce disposal costs.
The company remains on track to generate $100 million in annualized adjusted EBITDA from digital initiatives by the end of 2028, according to Zakaria.
The three major indexes moved higher shortly after the opening bell on Wednesday. The S&P 500 advanced 1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked up 45 points, or 0.1%. The Nasdaq Composite gained 1.6%.
Goldman Sachs now expects the Federal Reserve to hike in March as well as in December.
Hotter-than-expected October inflation will help to motivate an additional quarter-point interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve in March following the expected December hike, David Mericle at Goldman Sachs thinks.
Mericle sees the possibility of a January hike after the one in December but thinks March is a safer bet due to easing end-of-year inflation.
"A third hike could come earlier in January, but we think March is a bit more likely because we expect the November and December inflation reports to be softer but then expect larger start-of-the-year price increases amidst ongoing cost pressures to boost inflation in January," Mericle wrote in a Tuesday note to clients.
Inflation increased 0.4% in October. Economists had been expecting a 0.3% increase.
Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, CIO of the Americas at UBS, doesn't think a half-point rate hike will take place.
"Before the inflation print, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said a core CPI reading of around 0.3% or higher could warrant considering a 50-basis-point hike in December," Hoffmann-Burchardi wrote. "But, we still think FOMC support for a 50bps hike is limited because it could signal a need for more aggressive monetary policy recalibration. For now, our base case remains for 25bps Fed hikes in December and March, with the latest developments bolstering the case for higher rates and raising the risk of more or faster tightening than currently expected."
European chipmakers moved higher on Wednesday.
German semiconductor mainstay Infineon advanced 6.3%, while Dutch chipmaker ASMI was up 5.5%, as Switzerland's ST Microelectronics gained 4%. ASML rose about 3%.
CoreWeave shares jumped 15% in premarket trading Wednesday after the neocloud posted quarterly earnings that beat estimates and raised its guidance for the year.
The three months to Sept. 30 marked a "breakout quarter" for CoreWeave, CEO Michael Intrator said, adding that growth was supported by multiple sources of funding, including financing backed by customer contracts and around $9 billion in customer prepayments and deposits.
Other neclouds were also higher in premarket trading, with Nebius up 11.4% and Iren up 7.9%.
Shares in German energy giant RWE rose 1.4% after the company's third-quarter revenues reached 4.7 billion euros ($5.24 billion), a 46% year-on-year rise.
Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization came in at 1.6 billion euros for the quarter, up 20% year-on-year. Nine-month core earnings were 4.6 billion euros, beating the 4.4 billion euros forecast by analysts in a company-compiled consensus forecast.
Michael Müller, CFO of RWE, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that the data center build-out and Europe's shift away from fossil fuels are "two big drivers" of electrification which offer a "very positive outlook" for the business.
Shares in Vestas Wind Systems tumbled 9.2% in early dealmaking after the Danish renewable energy staple missed third-quarter revenue and profit estimates.
Revenues were 5.7 billion euros ($6.4 billion) in the three months, up 6% year on year, but below the 6 billion euros analysts expected in their consensus. Net profits also rose 6.3% to 323 million euros, but fell short of the 380 million euros forecast.
In its third-quarter earnings update, Vestas flagged higher costs at a European offshore project, which it said weighed on results. The wind turbine maker narrowed its 2026 revenue forecast to 20.5 billion to 21.5 billion euros, down from 20-22 billion euros.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 rose 0.69% shortly after Wednesday's market open, with the continent's main sectors and major bourses all moving higher.
Basic resources led early gains, rising 2.1%, and technology stocks rose 1.8%, as industrial goods advanced 1.4%. Oil and gas names also moved 1.4% higher. Banks were up 0.9%.
Germany's DAX was up more than 1% in Frankfurt. In Milan, the Italian FTSE MIB was up 0.80%, followed by the U.K.'s FTSE 100, which advanced 0.74% in London. In Paris, the French CAC 40 rose 0.72%.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said he has "no doubt" there will be more data centers built in the U.S., despite concerns surrounding a potential slowdown in the AI build-out following the Democrats' victory in the U.S. midterm elections last week.
The German energy technology company generated its highest quarterly revenue ever at 12.83 billion euros ($14.3 billion) in its fiscal fourth quarter, a 21.5% rise.
This beat consensus estimates of 12.56 billion euros, as record revenues in both gas services and grid technology helped drive performance.
Speaking with CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" Wednesday, Bruch expressed confidence in the continued renewables buildout in the U.S., but said the big electricity generation driver remains gas.
He noted that many U.S. communities still support data centers.
"My judgment is we will still see an enormous build-out of electricity infrastructure," Bruch said. "It's a healthy discussion. But I have no doubt that we will see more data centers in the U.S. going forward."
Siemens Energy reported net income of 1.36 billion euros for the period, above the 1.25 billion euros expected by analysts in a company-compiled consensus. Orders increased 5.2% year-on-year to 14.8 billion euros, as pre-tax profit reached 1.76 billion euros.
The company proposed a dividend of 2.30 euros per share and announced plans for additional share buybacks of up to 9 billion euros through its 2030 financial year.
Asia-Pacific markets closed in the green on Wednesday.
Japan's Nikkei 225 was up 1.31%, ending at 61,248.59, while the Topix rose 0.92% to 3,929.39.
South Korea's Kospi jumped 2.6% to 5,375.36, while the small-cap Kosdaq was up 5.62% at 705.1.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.27% to 9,153.2.
China's CSI 300 inched 0.4% higher to 4,075.71.
ABN Amro's third-quarter net profit soared 52% year-on-year to 940 million euros ($1.05 billion), comfortably beating a company-compiled consensus estimate of 782 million.
That brought the Dutch lender's year-to-date return on equity to 12.5%, boosted by its acquisition in August of Netherlands peer NIBC.
The Amsterdam-headquartered bank's net interest income was 1.8 billion euros, a 15% annual rise. Its common equity tier (CET) 1 capital ratio — a measure of a bank's solvency — was 15.3%, down from 15.9% the previous quarter, in part due to its NIBC takeover.
CEO Marguerite Bérard said commercial net interest income rose 7% in the quarter to 1.77 billion euros, which helped lift full-year guidance to more than 6.9 billion euros.
"ABN AMRO delivered another strong quarter, characterized by solid commercial momentum, net impairment releases and further progress on our strategic priorities," Bérard said.
Stoxx 50 futures were seen 0.78% higher ahead of Wednesday's market open, with Europe's major bourses all set to start the session in positive territory.
The FTSE MIB is expected to lead gains, with the Italian index up 0.81% prior to the opening bell.
The French CAC 40 is seen rising 0.65%, with Germany's DAX up 0.66%. In the U.K., futures tied to the FTSE 100 were 0.40% higher.
Anthropic, the creator of AI chatbot Claude, opened its Australian retail initial public offering on Wednesday, allowing individual investors to buy shares.
Applications opened at 10 a.m. Australian Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday and are expected to close at 5 p.m. on Nov. 17, according to the timetable published by participating broker Stake.
Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $64.4 billion in its IPO, with a separate $26 billion private placement, bringing the combined total to as much as $90.4 billion. Shares are expected to be priced between $70 and $78 each.
The Australian retail offering is expected to consist of newly issued Class A common shares under a prospectus to be filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Anthropic said on its website.
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. rose 2.19% on Wednesday after the chipmaker's board approved investments of up to $1 billion in artificial intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI.
The world's largest contract chipmaker said Tuesday that its board approved investments of up to $500 million in Anthropic shares at the company's IPO price, as well as up to $500 million in OpenAI preferred stock, according to a company statement.
Shares of SoftBank fell 3%, a day after it reported a fiscal second-quarter net loss of 1.12 trillion yen ($7 billion), as losses tied to U.S. AI data center equipment procurement and Intel share declines weighed on earnings.
The Japanese investment giant also recorded a 597.2 billion ($3.7 billion) yen loss in the six months ending Sept. 30 due to changes in procurement plans for power generation equipment for AI data center projects in the U.S.
Power is increasingly becoming a key constraint for the AI data center buildout as power grids become overwhelmed with applications from large energy users.
SoftBank said it had made advance investments to secure power generation equipment for its AI data center projects in the U.S. amid concerns over potential shortages and long procurement lead times.
Asia-Pacific markets opened mixed on Wednesday.
Japan's Nikkei 225 inched 0.1% higher, while the Topix was up 0.65%. South Korea's Kospi lost 0.22%, and the small-cap Kosdaq declined 2.1%.
Asia-Pacific markets were set to open lower Wednesday, tracking Wall Street losses overnight as hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation data fuels fears of Federal Reserve rate hikes, while a sell-off in Nvidia shares weighed on technology stocks.
Futures for Japan's Nikkei 225 in Chicago were at 60,335 while in Osaka they were last at 60,060, compared with the index's previous close of 60,459.58.
Futures for Hong Kong's Hang Seng index last traded at 24,346 compared with the index's close of 24,557.04.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was slightly down in early trade.
Stocks fell broadly on Tuesday, with declines in Nvidia and increasing expectations of a Fed rate hike next month dragging investor sentiment. Below are some of the key stats from the session:
The Dow fell 0.3% to close at 52,231.89 for its third negative session in four.
The S&P 500 fell 0.38% to close at 7,520.93 for its first negative session in three.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.74% to close at 25,065.87, its first negative session in three.