S&P 500 ends lower; chips tumble and Moderna rallies

STORY: U.S. stocks ended marginally lower on Friday, with the Dow and S&P 500 each shedding less than a tenth of a percent, and the Nasdaq losing about a quarter of a percent.AI-related chip stocks suffered steep declines as some investors worry that the massive spending to build AI data centers may take too long to pay off.Robert Conzo is CEO and managing director of The Wealth Alliance."The AI ship, although we love the technology, everyone loves the idea, it's like a cruise ship where the captain knows where they're going, the passengers don't know where this is going, passengers get nervous. The captain is the CEOs of these companies, putting billions and billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure into the AI. The market is the passengers saying, 'When are we going to be profitable here? At what point does profitability come to play?' Analysts are saying 2030, could be longer. And when prices go up, up, up, up higher, suddenly you start to question that value."A report that OpenAI was considering delaying its public debut until next year also weighed on risk sentiment related to AI stocks.:: AppleElsewhere in the market, shares of Apple rallied more than 3% and partly rebounded from a selloff a day earlier. The tech giant on Thursday raised iPad and MacBook prices, blaming soaring memory and storage chip costs.:: ArchiveShares of ON Semiconductor tumbled almost 24% after the company agreed to acquire chip maker Synaptics in an all-stock deal valued at about $7 billion. Shares of Synaptics dipped more than 3.5%.:: ModernaOn the flipside, shares of Moderna surged almost 13% to their highest level since 2024 after the drug developer hosted an investor event and showcased its pipeline.