Huge AI Deals Keep Markets at Record Highs

Monday, September 22, 2025

We started out this opening trading session for the week looking one way — pending reports on home sales, services PMI, durable goods, etc. — and ended it looking quite the other: tech, AI investment and iPhone sales growth. The more things change, the more they stay the same…

The Dow grew a modest +66 points, +0.14% today, bested by the S&P 500’s +29 points, +0.44%, the Nasdaq +155 points, +0.69%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 +14 points, +0.59%. All four are at new record closing highs. Bond yields continue to creep slowly higher (even with the specter of lower interest rates on the horizon), +2 basis points (bps) on the 10-year to 4.15% and +3 bps on the 2-year to 3.61%.
 

NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang Announces “Largest Computing Project in History”

The biggest news of the days revolves around a familiar theme: NVIDIA’s NVDA partnership with a smaller AI company for the continued buildout of the reach and scope of future artificial intelligence. Today, NVIDIA announced up to a $100 billion investment in Sam Altman’s OpenAI to build out data centers in a 10-Gigawatt project. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it, “The largest computing project in history.”

OpenAI is the parent company of ChatGPT, the widely utilized AI service. The company remains private at this time, but was seeking a secondary share sale worth $500 billion last month. Today’s announcement brings this valuation far higher, and another orbit from where analysts had considered it, around $147 billion back in October of last year.

For NVIDIA, this follows major deals with AI service providers like CoreWeave CRWV, Nebius NBIS and Lambda, though this $100 billion enterprise is a big step beyond, even for NVIDIA. The GPU giant looks to have gained $145 billion in market capitalization TODAY, pushing the stock up +4% to an overall record-high market cap of $4.5 TRILLION.
 

iPhone 17 Powers Apple, Rather Unexpectedly

When the new iPhone 17 was unveiled just 10 days ago, it was largely met with yawns and complaints that its advances had little “wow factor.” However, the sleek design along with pent-up demand for iPhone upgrades have found the sweet spot for the phone, which is tracking 10-15% above the iPhone 16 at this point of the last cycle.

This has helped Apple AAPL shares cross into the green in year-to-date trading today, +4.3% for the session. But the stock has had to rally in order to get here: AAPL is up +12.4% in the past month of trading, and +49% from its trough in early April, following a week of “Liberation Day” tariff initiatives.
 

What to Expect from the Stock Market Tomorrow

Barring any additional 12-figure deals from NVIDIA Tuesday, the news we’ll be looking at ahead of the opening bell will be flash S&P Services and Manufacturing PMI. The Services sector, which has been long driving the U.S. economy, has happily stayed at or above the 50 level which indicates growth versus loss. That said, we are seeing a bit of a wane here: forecast to tick down from 54.5 in August to 53.8 in September (and the year-to-date high was 55.7 in July).

For Manufacturing, which continues to seek out green shoots in the U.S. economy, we saw S&P Manufacturing PMI a month ago ramp up to 53.0 from 49.8 in July. Analysts expect this to taper down to 51.5 for September — still above the 50-threshold, but still perhaps showing signs of strain. No amount of AI mergers in the world will be able to bolster these numbers up in the near-term.

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