Wall St ends mixed as tech megacap losses outweigh upbeat chip outlook

STORY: U.S. stocks ended mixed on Thursday, with the Dow ticking up more than a tenth of a percent, while the S&P 500 closed flat and the Nasdaq dropped nearly half a percent.Technology shares reversed early gains to move lower, as investors worried about hyperscaler spending on AI and who foots the bill.:: MicronThose fears outweighed upbeat signals on AI demand from Micron, which gained nearly 16%, while shares of Sandisk soared 22%.Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management, notes that it's memory chip makers that are now leading the charge. "What's different about Micron, SanDisk, Western Digital, those types of names that are doing so well is that they're memory chips. And you have to have memory, specifically DRAM or H-band memory, if you're going to have enough computing power to do all the computations. That is nothing if you don't have memory to transfer it from one place to another. So one of the reasons that these stocks have done so well and the growth at Micron is so solid is because a recent redesign in the server technology means we go from eight memory chips per server to 96. That's 12 times growth in demand for this one simple component."The surging prices of memory and storage chips prompted Apple on Thursday to hike prices for its iPads and MacBooks. That weighed on the stock, sending it down more than 6%. Shares of Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet also dropped.:: ArchiveAmong other movers, shares of Bio-Techne jumped after Merck agreed to acquire the biotech firm for $73 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of about $11.3 billion.:: ArchiveMeanwhile, U.S. Department of Commerce data on Thursday showed the annual inflation rate through May rose above 4% for the first time in three years, but oil prices this week fell to below pre-war levels.