- Markets grow excited over a US trade deal with the UK.
- Alphabet denies a decline in search queries on Apple devices.
- ARM Holdings stock sinks 7% on lower guidance for next quarter.
- Nvidia stock rises on news that Trump administration will forgo AI Diffusion rule.
The NASDAQ Composite advanced at the start of Thursday trading as US President Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a trade deal with the United Kingdom (UK). The details are expected at an oval office speech later in the morning session.
The Telegraph newspaper is reporting that the US will lower its tariff on imports of UK-made autos to 10%
The NASDAQ (IXIC) gained 0.8% at the outset, while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) hovered closer to 0.5% higher.
The market also digested company news from a number of other major names, including ARM Holdings (ARM), Nvidia (NVDA), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Shopify (SHOP).
Stock market news on Thursday, May 8, 2025
The leader in AI chipsets Nvidia stock saw its fortunes continue to gain steam on Thursday after Bloomberg reported just before the close on Wednesday that the Trump administration was prepared to end the AI Diffusion rule that was scheduled to go into effect on May 15 and would limit what AI chips could be exported to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
The policy was enacted in the final days of the Biden administration, which had already halted exports of Nvidia’s H100 chip from being sold to China. The Trump administration has also placed restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, which it had designed for the Chinese market and to counteract the Biden administration’s earlier policy.
It is not clear how the Trump administration would replace the AI Diffusion rule, but the market has taken the news as a positive sign of things to come. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been adamant that the policy would hurt the industry, saying the AI Diffusion rule would “derail innovation and economic growth worldwide”.
Alphabet stock is bouncing back on Thursday after selling off 7.3% on Wednesday. That sell-off was due to Apple’s Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue, saying that user searches on its Safari browser had fallen in April for the first time in 20 years. The default search engine in Safari is Google. Owing to this trend, Cue said that Apple was considering adding an AI search option to the browser.
Alphabet shot back on Thursday, saying that Google queries on Apple devices were, in fact, up in April. This announcement sent GOOGL stock up 1.7% at the time of writing.
Arm Holdings stock fell some 7% on Thursday after the company announced less-than-stellar guidance for the coming quarter. Management expects to earn between $0.30 and $0.38 in adjusted earnings per share (EPS), a step below the $0.42 that Wall Street had been guiding for. Additionally, the chip designer said revenue would arrive between $1 billion and $1.1 billion rather than the $1.1 billion consensus from the Street.
Shopify stock sank more than 8% in the premarket after unveiling Q1 results that showed a larger-than-expected drop-off in QoQ segment revenues. While remaining up on an annual basis, Subscription revenues at Shopify fell 6.9% from Q4, while Merchant Solutions revenue fell 18.9% in that period. Both segments typically decline on a quarterly basis in Q1, but this pullback is larger than past experience. Shares, however, recovered somewhat in the regular session and are down 2.7% at the time of writing.
NASDAQ Composite index daily chart
