Meta's Muse AI agent sparks tech rally as chips surge

Meta Platforms launched Muse, an autonomous personal AI agent that shot to the top of the Apple App Store within a week, and the agentic AI shift is driving gains for Arm Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices. In March, Meta and Arm announced a large-scale partnership to co-develop Arm AGI CPU and multiple generations of specialized silicon for Meta's data centers, and Arm CEO Rene Haas said Arm already has $2 billion of customer demand for its new AGI CPU. SoftBank, which owns roughly 90% of Arm's shares outstanding, said it would raise Arm's loan facility to $25 billion from $20 billion, and Arm shares rose more than 10% in early trading. Meta partnered with AMD to optimize Muse Glimmer, an open-source model designed to run locally on computers, and demand for agentic AI has pushed prices for AMD server chips up about 40%. AMD CEO Lisa Su said the server CPU market could exceed $120 billion by the end of the decade, a 35% CAGR, and AMD shares broke out to all-time highs as the company crossed the $1 trillion market cap landmark for the first time.

Snap Inc. announced partnerships with Nvidia Corp, Salesforce, Inc. and Amazon Web Services on Wednesday to bring its $2,195 SPECS glasses into enterprise environments, pitching the device as a new computer rather than another pair of smart glasses. Under the deal, Nvidia will bring agents built on its XR AI stack to the glasses, allowing them to interpret a worker's surroundings and provide real-time guidance, while Salesforce's Agentforce can help workers identify objects, retrieve information and update workflows and AWS is connecting its AI assistant to tasks such as checking inventory. Trifork and Hololight are developing applications for remote technical support and spatial workstations. Snap has priced SPECS at $2,195, with shipping expected later this fall in the U.S., U.K. and France, and is also introducing SPECS Intelligence, an anticipatory AI service designed to understand users' goals, routines and priorities across iPhone, Mac and the glasses. CEO Evan Spiegel has described SPECS as a computer that puts computing into the world rather than asking people to look down at a screen, and for Nvidia the key question is whether AR glasses become another endpoint where AI agents need continuous visual understanding and inference.