S&P 500 Hits 7,000, AI Trade-Chips Rally, Fed Decision Day 1/28/26

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David Faber (0:57)

Market insight and analysis. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Good Wednesday morning.

Carl Quintanilla (1:04)

Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber, a post nine of the New York Stock Exchange. Futures are mixed as we come off Tuesday's S&P All Time High. Big day with the Fed decision, mega cap tech earnings tonight, dollars trying to stabilize after the worst one day sell off since the tariff rollout last spring. And gold at $5,300. Our road map begins with the state of the AI trade. As Texan, ASML all rally on the back of their latest earnings. And China reportedly giving the nod for its tech companies to buy those H200s.

David Faber (1:33)

Plus Meta, Microsoft and Tesla all getting ready to report earnings. That will be after the bell today. Of course, we'll try and get you ready for those. And it's also a Fed day, a decision on interest rates. Chair Powell's news conference as well. That's the first one since he took that unprecedented step in accusing the White House of trying to use legal threats to pressure him to slash rates.

Carl Quintanilla (1:55)

Let's begin with the markets, getting a lift from the AI trade today in this rally and semiconductors. S&P, of course, now within some striking distance of hitting 7K for the first time ever. But man, Jim, the news in the chip space today is incredible.

Jim Cramer (2:08)

Yeah, I mean, you've got outlets like Texas Instruments. We know this is a story company, but they have historically been both conservative and actually missed a lot of markets, always seemed to have a lot of inventory when everyone else was shy, but no more. They have this data center business that's broken out. There's this little fire. Their inventories are low for everything. Auto is even good, but industrial is amazing. It's an industrial renaissance. No doubt about it that the data center business is extraordinary. Seagate last night, they can't make them fast enough, but they're not adding a lot of capacity, which is going to make it so they continue to raise price and fix the gross margins, which aren't that good. ASML last night was, it's almost double the orders that we thought. What I think is happening here, David, is it's almost as if, I'm going to go back to NVIDIA for a second, that everyone got the new NVIDIA chips, which really a platform with software, and they realized, you know what, these things just generate a huge amount of data. Particularly people hearing about NVIDIA. Just a lot more data than we've seen. What's happened is that people are all catching up, and you're seeing an explosion in business for anything that involves storage because of how much storage you need from NVIDIA.

David Faber (3:19)

I mean, this kind of was a trade that was seemingly obvious, but months ago, I would think, and we talk about so many of these stocks that have had incredible moves, and obviously today we're even looking at Texas Instruments, which has not had the greatest period of time in terms of the stock, but Seagate, of course, but obviously the Sandis, the Microns, the AMDs. Wow, the Intels, until, of course-

Jim Cramer (3:45)

Did Microns break ground on a new plant today? They break ground every day.

David Faber (3:48)

They seem to break ground every day. But they're like ground breakers. They should have potentially announced it.

Jim Cramer (3:51)

Charging broach, it carries a shovel.

David Faber (3:52)

But my point, Jim, is that this was kind of there.

Jim Cramer (3:55)

It was all there, and you know what? The only guy who got nailed from not getting it right was Lipputan from Intel. And yet I think the Intel Foundry, I think would be surprised if they had both Apple and Nvidia as customers, Nvidia, by the way, very close to Intel. So everybody needs storage. But I would think, David, it's not so-