NEW YORK, June 2 (Xinhua) -- U.S. major stock indexes Tuesday posted record closing highs, fueled by surprisingly strong labor market data and moves in major tech names.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 228.91 points, or 0.45 percent, to finish at 51,307.79. The S&P 500 added 9.82 points, or 0.13 percent, to 7,609.78, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index ticked up 7.09 points, or 0.03 percent, to 27,093.9.
Performance across the 11 primary S&P 500 sectors was largely positive, with seven ending in the green. Utilities and materials led the advancing groups, climbing 1.93 percent and 1.16 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, communication services and healthcare lagged, sliding 2.61 percent and 0.99 percent.
Market sentiment received a major boost from the semiconductor and connectivity spaces. Marvell Technology skyrocketed 32.52 percent after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explicitly named it a prime candidate to become the "next trillion-dollar company." "When you take a computing problem, and you disaggregate it into a lot of parts, and you distribute it across the entire data center, what's necessary is connectivity," Huang said. "That's the reason why Marvell is so essential."
Hewlett Packard Enterprise further cheered the sector, surging 19.47 percent after posting its largest quarterly earnings beat since 2018 and raising its full-year guidance on robust AI server demand.
The tech gains helped offset a nearly 4 percent decline in Alphabet. The Google parent company startled investors by announcing plans to raise 80 billion U.S. dollars through fresh equity issuance to aggressively fund its capital-intensive artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout. That includes a 10-billion-dollar investment from Berkshire Hathaway.
On the economic front, the Labor Department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that U.S. job vacancies unexpectedly jumped to over 7.6 million in April. The reading substantially cleared the 6.89 million openings projected by Wall Street economists, underscoring a highly resilient labor market despite ongoing geopolitical friction in the Middle East. The robust data kicked off a critical week of employment reporting that will culminate in Friday's official nonfarm payrolls report, which remains central to the Federal Reserve's interest rate considerations.
