BlockBeats reported on July 12 that U.S. stocks remained driven by the AI theme this week, but trading attention moved beyond pure compute demand toward monetization, funding pressure and regulatory progress. The S&P 500 gained about 1.2% for the week, the Nasdaq added about 1.7%, and the Dow slipped slightly, suggesting the move was concentrated rather than market-wide.
The stocks and products attracting the most attention were tied to AI models, cloud infrastructure, memory chips and crypto-finance compliance.
Five names in focus this week
SK Hynix: up 13.08% for the week
SK Hynix’s U.S. ADR began trading and rose about 13% above its offering price on debut. Ongoing demand for AI servers continued to support HBM demand, and capital rotated into memory names beyond Micron. At the same time, the company’s Korea-listed shares were still affected by a pullback from elevated levels, leaving the HBM trade active but more volatile.
Meta: up 14.81% for the week
After the release of Muse, Spark 1.1 and paid APIs, investors repriced Meta’s AI monetization potential. Interest around its in-house Iris chip, a 14GW compute plan and the possibility of a cloud business helped lift the stock and pull it out of its weak first-half performance.
Circle: up 8.90% for the week
Circle received approval to establish a U.S. national trust bank, moving USDC reserve management toward federal regulation. The news sent the stock up about 13% in premarket trading at one point, offsetting valuation pressure tied to stablecoin competition and pushing the institutional compliance narrative back into focus.
Amazon: up 2.17% for the week
Amazon issued at least $25 billion in bonds to support AI infrastructure expansion. Demand for machine learning computing capacity at Amazon Web Services remained strong, while investors also started weighing AI-related debt, capital spending and the timeline for returns at large technology companies.
DRAM ETF: down 1.70% for the week
The DRAM ETF tracked the sharp swings in memory stocks. It first came under pressure from profit-taking, then rebounded on SK Hynix’s ADR debut and expectations for HBM demand. Its holdings include GigaDevice, and together with the ChangXin Memory theme, it was also being watched as part of the domestic DRAM supply chain.