US stocks cruise toward the finish of a record-setting week

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NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are adding to their records on Friday as Wall Street cruises toward the finish line of another winning week.

The S&P 500 rose 0.2% and is heading for its seventh winning week in the last nine. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 167 points, or 0.4%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% higher. All three indexes are coming off all-time highs set the day before.

Trading could get bumpier later in the morning after reports come out showing how businesses in U.S. services industries are doing. Ahead of them, Treasury yields in the bond market were also holding relatively steady.

Usually, the first Friday of each month has Wall Street focused on the monthly jobs update that the U.S. government publishes. It shows how many jobs employers created and destroyed, while also updating the unemployment rate.

Such data is particularly important now, given how much on Wall Street is riding on the expectation that the job market is continuing to slow by enough to get the Federal Reserve to keep cutting interest rates. But the shutdown of the U.S. government, now in its third day, is delaying the release.

So far, the U.S. stock market has looked past such delays, which also includes Thursday’s report on unemployment claims. Past shutdowns of the U.S. government have tended not to hurt the economy or stock market much, and the thinking is that this one could be similar, even if President Donald Trump has threatened large-scale firings of federal workers this time around.

Excitement around artificial intelligence and the massive spending underway because of it are a major reason the U.S. stock market has hit record after record, along with hopes for easier interest rates.

The industry got another boost after Japan’s Hitachi signed a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI related to powering AI. It followed a set of announcements by OpenAI with South Korean companies the day before.

Hitachi’s stock jumped 10.3% in Tokyo, and tech stocks in the United States drifted higher. Nvidia added 0.6%, and Broadcom rose 1.5%.

But AI stocks have become so dominant, and so much money has poured into the industry that worries are rising about a potential bubble that could eventually lead to disappointment for investors.

On the losing end of Wall Street was Applied Materials, which sank 2.5%. The company, whose equipment helps make semiconductor chips, said it will take a roughly $110 million hit to its revenue in the fourth quarter because of a new U.S. Commerce Department rule expanding export restrictions to certain customers based in China.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 was a big winner, and rose 1.9% thanks in part to Hitachi’s jump.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.09% from 4.10% late Thursday.

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AP Writers Teresa Cerojano and Matt Ott contributed.