Key keywords: Tech stocks 2024, AMD record high, Claude Opus release, Anthropic AI model, semiconductor stocks rally, generative AI market, Nasdaq tech performance, AI data center chips, enterprise AI spending, AI software stocks U.S. tech stocks delivered a standout performance in Thursday’s trading session, with semiconductor leader AMD closing at an all-time high of $227.35 per share, marking a 7.2% single-day gain and 98% year-to-date growth as of market close. The rally for AMD is driven by better-than-expected demand for its MI300 series AI accelerator chips, which are designed to power large language model training and inference workloads for enterprise clients. Multiple Wall Street firms raised their price targets for AMD on Thursday, with Goldman Sachs adjusting its target to $270 per share, citing data that shows AMD has captured 8% of the global high-end AI chip market in the first quarter of 2024, up from 3% in the final quarter of 2023. AMD is far from the only tech stock hitting new highs this session: fellow semiconductor firms NVIDIA, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Marvell Technology all closed at or near record levels, while software stocks tied to generative AI also posted strong gains, with C3.ai rising 4.9% and Palantir Technologies gaining 3.8%. The broader Nasdaq Composite index closed 2.1% higher, driven almost entirely by gains in AI-related tech sectors. Parallel to the semiconductor rally, AI startup Anthropic officially launched its latest flagship large language model, Claude 3 Opus, on Thursday morning. Independent benchmark tests show that Claude 3 Opus outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo across 92% of common reasoning, multimodal processing and long-context understanding tasks, with a maximum context window of 2 million tokens that allows users to process entire libraries of legal documents, research papers and code bases in a single prompt. The launch sent shares of Anthropic’s primary investors Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) 1.8% and 1.2% higher respectively, as analysts predict the new model will drive significant growth in Anthropic’s enterprise client base, which already includes major firms like Salesforce, Zoom and Slack. Market strategists note that the dual positive catalysts of AI hardware growth and AI software innovation are fueling the current tech sector rally, which has added more than $2.7 trillion in market value to U.S. listed tech stocks since the start of 2024. Federal Reserve signals of potential interest rate cuts starting in the second half of 2024 have also boosted investor confidence in high-growth tech stocks, as lower borrowing costs reduce the discount rate for future cash flows of innovative tech firms. While some analysts warn that certain unprofitable small-cap AI stocks are trading at unsustainable valuations, leaders in the semiconductor and enterprise AI software spaces continue to report strong revenue and earnings growth that supports their current price levels.