Shares of Microsoft Corp rallied to their best week in nearly eight years as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT fueled investors' interest in the next big thing with an established tech name.
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Shares ended Friday with a 12.4% gain for the week, their best weekly gain since April 24, 2015, when shares rose 15% on the week after the company predicted growth in its cloud business.
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The tech giant was not only the beneficiary of Silicon Valley Bank's closing last Friday as investors sought safety in established tech names, but it also benefited from its significant investment in privately held artificial-intelligence company Open AI, which Quickly becoming a household name. Because its ChatGPT AI model is gaining popularity.
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Microsoft is already incorporating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine office 365 copilot, which combines big-language models with user data to increase productivity. The Copilot system uses the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4, which OpenAI released last week.
While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve took emergency measures late last week to insure deposits of more than $250,000 at a Silicon Valley bank, regional banking sector turmoil like First Republic Bank's FRC continued.
A $30 billion outflow from the banking sector has prompted investors to seek the safety of established names in the tech sector, as the Nasdaq rose 4.5% for the week, compared with a 1.6% gain on the S&P 500 index.
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Over the past 12 months, Microsoft shares are down 5.4%, while iShares expanded the tech-software ETF IGV.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA is down 13.4%,
is off 7.6%, the S&P 500 Index SPX,
off 11.2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index Comp,
is down 14.6%.