Wall Street Breathes Easier after Soft Inflation Print — and Micron Lights up the Chip Trade

With input from CNBC, Investor’s Business Daily, Bloomberg, and Reuters.

Stocks moved higher Thursday after a cooler-than-expected inflation report gave traders something they haven’t had much of lately: a little breathing room.

The Dow was up about 202 points (0.4%), the S&P 500 gained 0.7%, and the Nasdaq Composite led the way with a 1% jump as investors drifted back toward growth and tech.

The November Consumer Price Index landed well below what economists were bracing for — and the market loved it.

• Headline inflation: 2.7% year over year;
• Core CPI (ex-food and energy): 2.6% year over year.

That’s versus Dow Jones estimates calling for 3.1% headline and 3.0% core.

But this wasn’t a normal CPI drop. The report was delayed and missing some usual details after the US government shutdown scrambled the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ workflow. October CPI never got published, and this release didn’t include month-to-month changes, because the agency couldn’t reconstruct all the survey data. BLS said it relied on “nonsurvey data sources” to build the index calculations.

Translation: the market’s taking the win — but not everyone’s ready to declare inflation “solved.”

The other big driver Thursday was Micron, which popped roughly 15% after the chipmaker beat Wall Street expectations on both earnings and revenue for its fiscal first quarter — and then topped it off with a strong forecast for the current period.

The results helped kick some life back into the AI trade, which has been limping in recent sessions after heavy selling in big semiconductor names.

Thursday’s bounce comes right after an ugly stretch: the S&P 500 and Dow were heading for a fourth straight down day earlier in the week, and the Nasdaq had been the biggest laggard — down nearly 2% in the previous session.

Part of that slump was fueled by renewed jitters around mega spending on data centers and the financing behind it. Oracle got hit hard Wednesday after reports that a major investor stepped away from backing a massive Michigan data-center project, spooking investors across the chip and AI ecosystem. Broadcom, Nvidia, and AMD all slid in sympathy.

Still, even with the recent wobble, tech is on pace to finish 2025 up around 20%, showing just how dominant the sector’s been this year — even when it’s out of favor for a week or two.

For now, Thursday’s story is simple: softer inflation + strong Micron = investors willing to take another swing at risk.