Technology stocks surged Monday as Meta Platforms rallied 6.5% and the Nasdaq 100 gained 2.15%, while Arm Holdings rose 15%, Intel climbed 13% and AMD advanced 9%. The rally reflected growing optimism that agentic AI—software that performs multi-step tasks autonomously—has reached a mainstream consumer inflection point. Meta’s recently launched Muse assistant can book travel, manage calendars and complete e-commerce purchases in the background, unlike conventional conversational chatbots. Vital Knowledge said the shift toward continuous routines, logic loops and local data orchestration could expand AI’s reliance on CPUs beyond the GPU-heavy workloads associated with early generative AI. Reports that OpenAI is developing a competing consumer agent added to expectations of an industry-wide race. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to speak Wednesday night at the annual Meta Connect conference, where analysts expect Muse demonstrations, discussion of consumer use cases and possible disclosure of the Watermelon large language model. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised Meta’s price target from $640 to $796, maintained an Overweight rating and increased his 2027 earnings multiple assumption. SensorTower data showed Muse reached 264,000 U.S. downloads on September 19 and 448,000 daily active users on September 18, outperforming ChatGPT’s earlier adoption pace. Analysts also expect potential announcements involving camera-free smart glasses and AI-powered hearables.