Market Report for Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Wall Street split the difference Wednesday, as AI rode a sovereign wave and small caps got swept out to sea. The S&P tiptoed higher, the Nasdaq extended its winning streak, and Nvidia put on its Sunday best for the Saudi crown.
Level Change 5/14/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.2 Dow
+0.7 Nasdaq
+0.6 Nasdaq 100
+0.1 S&P 500
-0.3 S&P 400
-1.1 S&P 600
The market split like a dinner party: AI aristocracy enjoying tea in the parlor with petro-royalty, small caps out back with the caterers. The Dow drooped, the S&P wobbled, and the Nasdaq sauntered higher on the shoulders of its datacenter demigods.
At the center of the fanfare was sovereign AI, the new global prestige project. Think building a national airline, only with more GPUs and fewer peanuts. In Riyadh, President Trump, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and a caravan of Silicon Valley titans unveiled a mega-deal with Humain, the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s AI darling. The blueprint: a 500-megawatt petaflop playground stacked with Nvidia’s next-gen GB300 chips. That’s a lot of thinking in a place where even the sand needs shade.
Nvidia (NVDA +4.2%) rode the headlines like a sultan on a stallion, robes billowing and valuation rising. Advanced Micro (AMD +4.7%) trotted close behind, chipper enough to tack another $6B onto its buyback plan, bringing the total to $10B. Bank of America pegs the long-term payoff for Nvidia’s global AI empire at $500B. That’s “B,” as in “buy every dip.”
The sovereign AI push isn’t just a sales opportunity, it’s geopolitical insulation. Countries want language models that speak their language, reflect their worldviews, and in the Saudi case, their selective historical memory. Humain’s new LLM, “ALLAM,” is trained in Arabic and English, but won’t say a word about Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist the CIA says was murdered and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad in 2018. The model’s response? No comment, no memory, no trace. Even artificial intelligence can be taught which sand not to kick.
Elsewhere, a modest recession reprieve gave bulls reason to squint at the horizon. Back on April 19, Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok panicked over tariffs and slapped a 90% recession chance on 2025. Today, with tariffs on timeout, he dropped the odds to 30% and declared “tail risk has been removed.” If you ever doubted your own ability to flip a coin and spout off with the overpaid, under-correct crowd of macro mystics, here’s your cue. Nobody knows nuttin’.
Despite the collective exhale, Main Street’s not exactly uncorking the elderflower tonic. The Russell 2000 slumped 1.1%, suggesting sovereign AI deals don’t reach the hardware store in Dubuque. Gold tumbled 1.8% to below $3200/oz, its worst showing in a month, as traders shifted from shiny rock to silicon gods. Sorry, goldbugs: Armageddon missed its window.
The market’s mood remains directionally confused but semantically thrilled. If you’ve got export clearance and an AI roadmap, you’re golden. If you’re just trying to sell soda and lumber through a tariff maze, may fortune smile upon you. AI is the new oil. If you’re not in the room with the sheikhs and servers, you’re not just behind the curve, you’re in the wrong century.
— Jason Kelly
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