Taco Bell was named the fastest drive-thru for the fifth year in a row, but its AI-powered drive-thrus developed with Nvidia may come with a catch, including glitchy behavior and inaccurate orders that have been so frustrating that customers are trolling the AI. Speed also seems to come at the cost of friendliness — the fast-food chain that was rated the friendliest was also the slowest. 

Despite trading sideways at the beginning of the session, yesterday the S&P 500 just barely eked out a new all-time closing high for the second consecutive day. This marks the longest winning streak for the benchmark index since July. The Nasdaq 100 also climbed to a new highest close, while the Russell 2000 outperformed.

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Hey, don’t look now, but storage stalwart Western Digital appears to be making the leap from interesting stock to retail darling. 

We’ve been covering the sudden sexiness of data storage as a market theme a lot recently, with Western Digital and Seagate Technology Holdings turning into top trades of 2025.

At the heart of the turnaround is the fact that the companies — which took a beating during the worst of the tariff-related wobbles earlier this year — have been able to show Wall Street that they would have no problem dealing with any increased costs of imports thanks to the surge of demand for data storage.

The superstars of the coming onslaught of data centers will be the Nvidia chips that constitute the brains of the operation, and Nvidia shareholders have been rewarded handsomely with windfalls from that positioning. But retail traders are not sleeping on the reality that all the bytes that those Nvidia chips crunch will have to reside somewhere, and that disk will probably be built by Western Digital or Seagate. 

As of 9/30/2025 the Nasdaq-100® has returned 17.5% year to date, topping the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points, continuing a trend of outperformance by the index.

Specifically, as of 9/30/25, the Nasdaq-100 delivered a 31.0% trailing 3-year annualized return compared to 23.1% for S&P 500. Similarly, the Nasdaq-100 delivered a 16.7% trailing 5-year annualized return compared to 14.7% for S&P 500.¹

The Nasdaq-100 Index® is a globally recognized index of 100 of the most innovative large cap companies listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market®.

From major players across the technology, healthcare, and consumer goods sectors, the index is home to some of the most dynamic companies in the world, including the Magnificent Seven.

Get to know the Nasdaq-100 and how it can be additive to your portfolio.

Nebius finished the day up nearly 9% after a Bloomberg report shed more light on its near $20 billion deal to supply computing power to Microsoft. 

What we already knew was that Nebius — which rose from the ashes of Russian tech giant Yandex — will provide Microsoft “access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity in tranches at its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey over a five-year term.”

Nebius’ arrangement with Microsoft will allow the tech giant to use its own compute to focus on fulfilling demand from customers.

Remember that the stock market’s intermediate peak in February was accelerated by a breakdown in AI-geared momentum stocks on concerns that Microsoft might have already had too much data center capacity, which came on the heels of the DeepSeek-induced freak-out for the industry. Such worries have since been washed away by a steady wave of spending commitments from leading private and public tech giants that total in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI has completed a secondary share sale valuing the company at $500 billion — more than Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As we’ve written before, investors are tripping over themselves to get in on AI startups, sending valuations sky-high and making so-called “hectocorns” more commonplace. OpenAI’s valuation has soared more than 200% in just one year.

The world’s most valuable startups, charted

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Sora is now the third-most-popular app among the iOS App Store free apps, despite being invitation-only.

Advertiser's disclosures:

1 Annualized index returns are calculated using the following annualization formula: [ [ending value of investment/beginning value of investment]^(1/number of years)]-1. Partial year returns use the holding period return formula: [ending value of investment/beginning value of investment]-1. 

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Index performance is for illustrative purposes only and does not reflect any management fees, transaction costs or expenses. Indexes are unmanaged and one cannot invest directly in an index. 

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