Wall Street's Nasdaq hits all-time high as AI frenzy gathers pace Share Wall Street's Nasdaq hits all-time high as AI frenzy gathers pace on social media Wall Street's Nasdaq stock exchange has hit an all-time high, shrugging off concerns about AI safety risks, sky-high tech valuations and the energy shock caused by the United States' war on Iran. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is dominated by US tech giants such as Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft, rose 0.45 percent on Tuesday, taking its gains to date this year to more than 17 percent. The S&P 500, the most popular measure of the overall US stock market, closed essentially flat. Monolithic Power Systems, a Florida-based manufacturer of power circuits, and Canadian e-commerce company Shopify led the gains, surging 8.1 percent and 7.1 percent, respectively. Micron Technology, one of the world's top three memory chip makers along with South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, rose 5 percent.

The longtime tech journalist says she's seen Silicon Valley make the same mistakes again and again. As the AI industry likes to tell it, superintelligent bots could one day cure cancer and end poverty. Or in the worst-case scenario, they might wipe out all humans from the face of the Earth. In recent weeks, Silicon Valley's existential concerns about the technology it is racing to build have blown up. The tech journalist Kara Swisher sees it differently. "We have to stop thinking AI is going to kill humanity," she told executive editor Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic Festival. If the AI future goes sideways, bots won't be to blame. "These are people at the helm of these things." In the several decades that Swisher has covered Silicon Valley--formerly as a reporter at, now as the host of two podcasts--she says that she's seen tech whizzes make the same mistakes again and again: failing to take proper precautions against the products they are building. "One of the things about tech people is they're the smartest people in the world, in case you need to know, because they like to tell you," she said. In her interview with LaFrance, Swisher also discussed the economic implications of the AI race, who is likely to win, and how Americans can respond to this dizzying and worrying AI moment. You have been paying attention to the tech world and AI for basically ever. And now it seems like within the past, say, two weeks, the rest of the world is suddenly paying much closer attention. So I wanted to start just by talking about where you think we are, in this moment.

OpenAI announced this week it has paused training of some frontier AI models. OpenAI announced this week it has paused training of some frontier AI models. 'We are hitting a different chapter': OpenAI leader warns of threat of'persistent' AI cyber-attacks Chris Lehane tells Guardian of need to implement new safety standards as critics say AI firms acting'recklessly' A senior leader at OpenAI has said people should prepare to defend against "ongoing, persistent" cyber-attacks from AIs, as cutting-edge artificial intelligence models gain advanced capabilities to plan and launch offensives. The leading AI company this week announced a pause in development of its most advanced internal models amid rising safety fears, and Chris Lehane, its chief global affairs officer, said: "We are hitting a different chapter, a different moment within AI, in terms of what the capabilities of this technology can do." He spoke to the Guardian after cutting-edge AI agents-in-training unexpectedly broke out of a supposedly secure "sandbox" environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another company, Hugging Face in late July.

South Korean chip giant SK Hynix has raised a record-breaking $26.5bn ahead of its Wall Street debut amid soaring demand for semiconductors used in AI. SK Hynix said on Friday that it had sold 177.9 million American depositary shares (ADS) at $149 each ahead of its listing on the New York-based Nasdaq stock exchange. SK Hynix's 177.9 million ADSs are equivalent to 18 million ordinary shares. SK Hynix's initial public offering (IPO) marks the largest-ever listing by a foreign company in the US, surpassing Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's $25bn debut in 2014. The listing also ranks as the second-largest globally, after SpaceX's record-breaking $85.7bn Nasdaq listing in June.

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Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on 22 June 2026. Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on 22 June 2026. A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed 2.2% lower on Tuesday. The S&P 500 was also down by Tuesday afternoon, dropping 1.43% while the Dow remained steady.

Elon Musk becomes world's first trillionaire as SpaceX soars in stock market debut Elon Musk on Friday became the world's first trillionaire after shares in his SpaceX rocket company soared during the biggest-ever stock market debut. The Tesla and SpaceX founder comfortably cemented his status as the world's richest man, with his total net worth standing at $1.11tn (£828bn) according to the Bloomberg rich list. It came as the rocket, telecommunications and artificial intelligence (AI) company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange with a value of $2.2tn. The company said its shares would be offered at $135 each, but trading opened at $150 and briefly reached $176.50 in a show of investor enthusiasm for potential business related to space and companies associated with Musk. SpaceX shares closed on Friday at about $161.

Elon Musk's SpaceX valued at nearly $1.8tn ahead of record share sale SpaceX has raised $75bn (£56bn) from financial firms ahead of it becoming a publicly traded company on Friday, in what is expected to be the highest-value stock listing in history. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the space exploration and artificial intelligence (AI) company said it had sold $75bn in shares priced at $135 each. The share price matches the estimate SpaceX gave last week, leaving the firm's expected initial stock market value to be nearly $1.8tn. At that value, chief executive Elon Musk - already the richest man in the world - is set to become the world's first trillionaire. Once shares start trading, their value could rise or fall depending on how many shares are made available for sale, and how strong the demand is for those shares.

Taiwan's economy is booming thanks to AI. For Li, an engineer at Taiwanese computer giant ASUS, the AI boom sweeping Taiwan has made it an exciting time to work in tech. Taiwan is a semiconductor powerhouse, producing about 90 percent of the most advanced chips used to power leading AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude. Still, Li worries that the spoils of Taiwan's AI windfall are not being shared equally. "Most industries unrelated to tech don't seem to be feeling the benefits, so it doesn't feel evenly distributed at the moment," Li said, explaining that many of his former classmates working outside of tech do not appear to be doing as well.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has revealed its plans to go public in the US, allowing people to trade shares in the firm on the stock market. SpaceX makes rockets, offers a satellite internet service called Starlink, and also owns Musk's controversial artificial intelligence (AI) firm xAI. The initial public offering (IPO) on the US stock market is set to be the largest in Wall Street history and could start next month under the ticker symbol SPCX. Because of the shares he will own in SpaceX, the IPO could make billionaire Musk, who is already the world's richest person, a trillionaire. SpaceX values itself at $1.25tn, and Musk's majority ownership of the company means his share could be worth more than $600bn.