Meta AI agent ‘Muse’ triggers massive tech rally as chips and Wall Street soar

Investing.com -- Technology stocks roared back on Monday, propelled by a powerful rally in Meta Platforms and semiconductor leaders as Wall Street recognized that consumer "agentic" AI may have finally reached a mainstream tipping point.

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) rallied 6.5% on Monday, leading a broader market advance that lifted the Nasdaq 100 by 2.15%. The frenzy extended deep into the semiconductor sector, with CPU-linked chipmakers staging explosive gains: Arm Holdings (NASDAQ: ARM) surged 15%, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) jumped 13%, and AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) climbed 9%.

At the center of the surge is growing market optimism surrounding Meta’s recently launched consumer AI assistant, Muse. Unlike conventional conversational chatbots, agentic assistants like Muse execute autonomous, multi-step tasks—such as booking travel, managing calendars, and making e-commerce purchases—in the background on behalf of users.

The outsized jump in traditional chip stocks isn’t a coincidence. Market intelligence firm Vital Knowledge highlighted to clients that the fundamental architecture required for AI is expanding. While early generative AI workloads relied primarily on heavy GPU acceleration for isolated text and image generation, autonomous agents run continuous background routines, logic loops, and local data orchestration. That makes agentic AI far more CPU-intensive, creating a wildly bullish scenario for companies like AMD, Arm, and Intel as this technology breaks into the mainstream.

Adding fuel to the hardware rally is the growing sense of an industry arms race. Following reports from The Information that OpenAI is scrambling to develop its own Muse-like consumer agent, investors are pricing in a massive, industry-wide rush to bring autonomous capabilities to the consumer market.

All of this sets a highly anticipated stage for Wednesday night, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to deliver his keynote address at the annual Meta Connect conference.

The market’s enthusiasm is also being validated by underlying user adoption metrics. In a note to clients on Monday, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target on Meta from $640 to $796, maintaining an Overweight rating and bumping his 2027 earnings multiple assumption following encouraging signs of a major new product cycle.

Citing data from SensorTower, Gawrelski pointed to an unprecedented download and active user trajectory for the standalone Muse app during its first 12 days in the U.S.:

Record Downloads: The app set a single-day record of 264,000 U.S. downloads on September 19, marking its third consecutive day above the 200,000 threshold.

Daily Active Users (DAUs): Muse hit a new peak of 448,000 DAUs on September 18—just 10 days post-launch.

Historical Comparison: By comparison, OpenAI’s ChatGPT required nearly one full year to cross 200,000 daily U.S. downloads, and 49 days to hit 450,000 DAUs.

"Believe Muse assistant and Instinct mark the transition to consumer AI assistants from chatbots," Gawrelski wrote, adding that time-to-market is critical because AI assistants grow more productive the more they are used.

Unlike last year’s Connect conference, which focused heavily on smart glasses, analysts expect this year’s event to feature heavy product demos of Muse and the underlying "Muse Spark" models. Wells Fargo anticipates Meta will share early commentary on popular consumer use cases, and potentially unveil its much-rumored next-generation large language model, code-named "Watermelon."

On the hardware front, the market is also expecting updates on Meta’s wearables division. Press reports suggest the potential release of smart glasses without camera functionality, alongside building anticipation for AI-powered "hearables" (smart headphones) that could further integrate Muse into users’ daily lives.