Indexes end down after chip designers ease late; Nvidia jumps after the bell

NEW YORK – US stock indexes closed lower on Wednesday as investors digested minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting and shares of chip designers fell in late trading.

After the closing bell, shares of Nvidia rose 5% as the artificial intelligence leader reported
quarterly sales that beat analyst expectations. However, the chipmaker forecast second-quarter revenue below estimates.

Nvidia shares had ended the regular session down 0.5%.

Late in regular trading, shares of Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys dropped after the Financial Times reported that President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups. The FT report cited people familiar with the move.

Cadence ended down 10.7%.

According to the minutes of the Fed’s May 6-7 session, US central bank officials acknowledged they could face “difficult tradeoffs” in coming months in the form of rising inflation alongside rising unemployment.

“The Fed minutes really didn’t reveal anything new,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities in New York. “They basically indicate the Fed is in a wait-and-see mode and staying the line, trying to get more clarifications on trade.”

On Tuesday, stocks rose sharply after Trump backed down over the weekend from his threat of 50% tariffs on imports from the European Union.

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 244.95 points, or 0.58%, to 42,098.70, the S&P 500 lost 32.99 points, or 0.56%, to 5,888.55, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 98.23 points, or 0.51%, to 19,100.94.

Also rising after the bell were shares of Broadcom, up 3.2%, and Advanced Micro Devices, up 1.5%.

The S&P 500 is up 0.1% for the year to date but remains down from its record closing high, reached on February 19. It fell as much as 18.9% below that level in the wake of Trump’s erratic tariff announcements that have whipsawed markets for much of his second term.

A poll of strategists and analysts conducted by Reuters showed that many market participants expected the benchmark index to finish the year near current levels.

Shares of sportswear retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods ended up 1.7% after its first-quarter results beat estimates.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 2.79-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. There were 103 new highs and 34 new lows on the NYSE.

On the Nasdaq, 1,448 stocks rose and 2,960 fell as declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 2.04-to-1 ratio.

Volume on US exchanges was 15.60 billion shares, compared with the 17.7 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; additional reporting by Shashwat Chauhan and Kanchana Chakravarty in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and David Gregorio)