NEW YORK >> Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms helped lead most U.S. stocks higher on Thursday following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies.

The S&P 500 rose 0.5%, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 168 points, or 0.4%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 0.3%.

Meta Platforms helped push indexes higher after rising 1.6%.

That calmed some of the worries created by a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, 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 expected for AI chips, data centers and electricity is really needed and sent a shock through markets at the start of the week.

The AI boom has been a primary reason for the U.S. stock market’s run to repeated records in recent years, and the threat has hit stocks like Nvidia particularly hard. The chip company that’s become the symbol of the AI frenzy spent most of Thursday lower, but it ended with a gain of 1% and was one of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500.

Keeping indexes in check was Microsoft, which fell 6.2%. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant topped analysts’ expectations for profit in the latest quarter, but the focus was instead on the slower-than-expected growth in its cloud computing business, which is a centerpiece of its AI efforts.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also continued to talk up AI following 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.”

The pressure is on companies to keep delivering stronger profits. That would help them offset the downward force their stock prices have felt from climbing yields in the bond market recently. When bonds are paying more in interest, investors aren’t as willing to pay high prices for stocks.