NEW YORK — U.S. stocks are mostly rising following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies.

The S&P 500 was up 0.6% in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 127 points, or 0.3%, as of 9:50 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher.

Meta Platforms Rallies on Strong Profit and AI Focus

Meta Platforms helped lift indexes and rallied 4.4% after delivering a better profit for the end of 2024 than analysts expected. Perhaps just as importantly for the market, the company behind Facebook and Instagram also talked up its artificial-intelligence efforts and said it will continue to invest in the space.

That calmed some worries that a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, had raised when it said it developed a large language model capable of competing with the world’s best, without having to use top-flight chips. That raised questions about whether all the investment underway for AI chips, data centers and electricity are really needed and sent a shock through markets at the start of the week.

The AI boom is one of the main drivers that’s sent the U.S. stock market ripping to repeated records in recent years, and the threat has hit stocks like Nvidia particularly hard. It slipped 0.4% Thursday.

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Tesla and Microsoft: Mixed Results

Tesla, meanwhile, rose 1.6% even though it reported a weaker profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Elon Musk said his company is on track to offer unsupervised “full self-driving” technology to its customers as a paid service starting in Austin in June.

On the losing end of Wall Street was Microsoft, which fell 4.7% even though it topped analysts’ expectations for profit in the latest quarter. The focus was on the slower-than-expected growth in its cloud computing business, which is a centerpiece of its AI efforts.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continued to talk up AI despite DeepSeek’s disruption.

“DeepSeek had some real innovations,” he said, and it is good to have efficiency gains and lower prices in AI development because it “means people can consume more and there’ll be more apps written.”

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Economic Factors and Market Pressures

The pressure is on companies to keep delivering stronger profits. That’s one of the few ways they can offset the downward force their stock prices have been feeling from climbing yields in the bond market recently. When bonds are paying more in interest, investors aren’t willing to pay such high prices for stocks as when bonds were weaker competitors for their dollars.

Treasury yields have been climbing amid fears inflation may remain stubbornly higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. A solid U.S. economy and worries about tariffs and other policies potentially coming from President Donald Trump have been some of the reasons behind the rise.

Treasury yields were edging lower Thursday after a report indicated the U.S. economy grew at a slower rate at the end of 2024 than economists expected. The 10-year Treasury yield edged down to 4.52% from 4.53% late Wednesday.

Yields were also feeling downward pressure after the European Central Bank cut its main interest rate in hopes of boosting the region’s stagnant economy. In Washington, the Federal Reserve had also been cutting its main rate since September, but it opted to hold steady on Wednesday, saying it likely needs to see either more evidence of a slowdown in inflation or in the economy to act further.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe after Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.3%. Several Asian remained closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.