Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms helped lead most U.S. stocks higher on Thursday following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies. The S&P 500 rose 0.5%, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed.

Wall Street's main indexes rose on Thursday, driven by post-earnings advances in Meta and Tesla, although Microsoft's weak cloud forecast and downbeat results from Cigna dampened investor enthusiasm. Microsoft MSFT.O dropped 4.7% after forecasting disappointing growth in its cloud computing business.

Tesla said it sold 1.79 million vehicles in 2024, the first drop in more than a dozen years despite offers of 0% financing, free charging and low-priced leases

Leaders at Microsoft and Meta told investors that China’s DeepSeek doesn’t harm their businesses and that they will still spend billions on AI data centers.

Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) is one of the hottest artificial intelligence (AI) stocks out there. Compared to today's stock price of around $75, that represents a 40% downside. It's not often that a stock is priced this much over analysts' targets.

Liang Wenfeng's firm, DeepSeek, emerged from the setbacks of his previous hedge fund, leveraging limited resources and local talent to disrupt the global AI supply chain. Despite constraints, DeepSeek's rapid rise has raised questions about AI innovation costs and China’s competitive momentum.