Welcome to Closing Bell. I'm Mike Santoli in for Scott Wapner.

This make-a-break hour begins with record highs in sight.

The S&P 500 and Dow Industrial's rebounding with a chance to eclipse their recent peak levels,

as investors have aggressively bought the recent pullbacks in AI hardware and big banks,

that in response to some reassuring earnings reports. Here's your scorecard with 60 minutes left in regulation.

Has been a fairly broad rally spanning the mega caps down to smaller stocks.

So the upside has actually faded in the last hour or so. Still positive across the board.

The S&P, I put it up one-third of one percent. We were up three-quarters of a percent, not that long ago. The Dow up 315. The NASDAQ composite had been outperforming.

It's up also just under 0.4 percent. Russell 2000 up more than 1 percent, though. Some policy

pressure has eased with possible de-escalation with Iran driving a drop in oil prices,

while threats to fed independence have gone

more quiet. The volatility index reacting with a quick retreat from yesterday's one month high

near 17, and we're down below 16. But the key shift today is the strong bounce in Nvidia, Broadcom,

AMD, and the rest of the chip complex, which takes us to our talk of the tape.

What have we learned about the state of the AI buildout in the last 24 hours?

And will this theme start to dominate the market narrative once again?

That's where we begin.

With that breaking news, Taiwan will invest $250 billion in U.S. chip making under a new trade agreement.

Christine the Parchnevallis is here with me at Post 9 for more on that.

And we just had a great interview in the last hour with Howard Lutnik, joining CNBC just

some moments ago to break down the details.

In his words, semiconductor manufacturing is coming home.

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