Nasdaq Hits Record Close as AI Rally Collides With Meta’s New ‘Muse’ Assistant
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The Nasdaq Composite closed at a record high of 27,244.28 on 22 September, up 0.45% on the day, as a rally in artificial-intelligence-linked chip stocks offset a bout of nerves elsewhere in the technology sector, according to a market summary carried by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
The S&P 500 ended the session little changed at 7,764.64, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.36% to 51,863.69. Memory-chip makers were among the day’s biggest gainers: Micron Technology rose 5%, and SanDisk added 6.9%.
Meta’s “Muse” Assistant Splits the Market
Much of the day’s cross-currents traced back to Muse, the AI assistant Meta Platforms launched earlier in September. Muse is designed to handle tasks such as sending emails and completing transactions on a user’s behalf, and its reception has helped fuel recent gains in AI-linked chip stocks.
But the same assistant unsettled investors in companies whose business Muse could plausibly automate or disintermediate. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its platform the previous Monday, and shares in ride-hailing and travel-booking firms fell on the day: Uber and Lyft each lost more than 1%, Airbnb dropped 3%, and Charles Schwab fell 6.1%.
“There are a lot of tech stocks that are down today on Muse-related fears of one sort or another,” Jed Ellerbroek of Argent Capital Management told the Star-Advertiser.
Oil and Bond Yields in the Background
The rally in chip stocks also came against a backdrop of easing oil prices, trading near $100 a barrel, and a 10-year US Treasury yield hovering around 4.94% — a level that has kept a lid on some rate-sensitive parts of the market even as the AI trade continues to run.
The session illustrates a pattern that has repeated through September: enthusiasm for the infrastructure being built to run AI models — chips, memory, data centres — continuing to outrun uncertainty about which existing businesses that same AI will end up disrupting.
