Driven by a massive wave of popularity for Meta Platforms' personal artificial intelligence (AI) agent, "Muse," Meta's stock surged on the 21st (local time), lifting semiconductor stocks along with it.

On this day, AMD crossed the $1 trillion (approx. 1.375 trillion won) market capitalization threshold for the first time in its history, joining the U.S. "$1 Trillion Club" as the 14th member.

Launched on the 8th, Muse recorded 730,000 downloads within five days according to market research firm Sensor Tower, outperforming ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. By the 18th, it surpassed ChatGPT to claim the number one spot on the free apps chart in the U.S. Apple App Store.

Industry analysts evaluate Muse as the first consumer-facing outcome of the "Personal Superintelligence" strategy long emphasized by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta’s stock skyrocketed 11.4% on the day, marking its largest single-day gain since April of last year.

Climbing 28.7% this month alone, the company is experiencing its best month in 13 years, prompting Wells Fargo to raise its price target to $796.

Although free to download, Muse has also introduced paid subscription tiers priced at $20 and $100 per month, raising expectations for a new revenue stream outside of advertising.

Semiconductor stocks also surged across the board. The success of Muse was interpreted as a signal of the mainstream adoption and expansion of agent-type AI.

Because agent-type AI autonomously executes multiple tasks in sequence, it generates a significantly larger volume of inference calculations than standard chatbots, thereby driving up demand for server central processing units (CPUs).

Wedbush analyst Matthew Bryson noted, "There are practically only two companies capable of handling this scale of computing: Intel and AMD."

Riding this momentum, AMD closed up 10.0% at $615.52, surpassing a $1 trillion market cap. With this milestone, AMD rose to 14th place in the U.S. and 16th globally, overtaking SK Hynix and JPMorgan Chase.

Meta is also AMD’s second-largest customer, accounting for 5.5% of its total revenue.

Meanwhile, Intel jumped 12.1% and Arm Holdings soared 17.2%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbed 4.3%, extending its winning streak to five consecutive sessions.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan recently stated that the company is currently meeting only about 50% of customer demand.

Bolstered by the strength in semiconductor stocks, the Nasdaq 100 Index rose 2.8% to close at its highest level since June, while the S&P 500 Index gained 1.5% to finish at its highest since early August.

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