1. Meta’s "Muse".

Meta’s personal AI agent Muse reached the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store, nearly two weeks after its Sept. 8 launch and investors carried the enthusiasm into chipmakers that could supply the CPUs needed to run AI agents.
Meta jumped 11.43%, AMD gained +10% and Intel rose +12.1%.
OpenAI and Anthropic were competing to see who could scare investors with data breaches, while arguably the largest player in app use in the world was building a better AI agent.
Downloads give Meta an early sign of interest in Muse, but the app has yet to prove how much people will pay to use it.

2. Chip sector earnings estimates keep going higher.

Earnings-per-share growth is expected to double again in the coming quarters, Bloomberg Intelligence data shows.

3. Total semiconductor inventories are running at historic lows.

There’s strong evidence from earnings and industry data that capacity remains severely constrained. After a blowout outlook from Nvidia, its go-to manufacturer TSMC’s monthly results last week reinforced that the company is still struggling to meet overwhelming demand.
The bottleneck for memory chips is exacerbating the shortages. There, the same gauge has collapsed to roughly a quarter of its decade average. Industry executives can’t even determine when the imbalance will close.
Blow: A measure of how long it takes a company to turn its inventory into sales is the lowest in data going back to 2000.

4. The AI boom = Asian exports/US imports.

“Korean customs data offer the earliest and cleanest reading on global technology demand, and the first ten days of September produced some of the largest numbers on record. Semiconductor shipments were worth $16.5 billion in that window, close to three and a half times their value a year earlier, and accounted for 47 per cent of all Korean exports."

5. The MAG7 strike back.

One development attracting growing attention on Wall Street is the return of Magnificent Seven leadership. While the mega-cap tech group has lagged the broader market for much of the year, recent performance suggests investors are once again gravitating toward these names.

Below: MAG7 in red versus S&P in blue.

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