Top 20 U.S. Stocks by Trading Volume on February 14: Applied Materials Surges on Strong Revenue Forecast

On Friday, Nvidia, the number one stock by trading volume in the US stock market, closed down 2.23% with a trading volume of $29.369 billion. Reports indicate that Samsung and SK Hynix are facing capacity and yield issues with HBM4, which may prompt Nvidia to relax its requirements. Although Samsung was the first to mass-produce HBM4, its 1c DRAM yield is only 60%, with a monthly capacity of just 60,000–70,000 wafers; SK Hynix’s initial products may have difficulty achieving 11Gbps in reliability tests. Industry insiders expect that Nvidia may purchase products with sub-high specs such as 10.6Gbps and relax yield requirements to stabilize the supply chain.

Additionally, analysts emphasized that as major platforms absorb expenditures, Nvidia, TSMC, and Applied Digital will be the beneficiaries of hyperscale enterprises increasing their AI capital expenditures.

Tesla, ranked second, closed up 0.09% with a trading volume of $21.245 billion. The latest news shows that after Elon Musk announced the "merger" of SpaceX and xAI, the banks dealing with him are studying a potential financing plan to reduce the high interest costs he has accumulated in recent years.

Data shows that Musk accumulated nearly $18 billion in debt when he acquired the social platform Twitter (now renamed "X") and founded the AI company xAI (which now holds X).

Sources reveal that the banks are brewing a financing deal, expected to reduce Musk’s debt burden before a possible SpaceX IPO later this year. It should be noted that this potential deal has not yet been finalized.

Sandisk, ranked third, closed down 0.59% with a trading volume of $14.632 billion. The stock has risen 4.78% this week, marking its ninth consecutive week of gains. The company recently officially launched the innovative open-source tool SPRandom (SandiskPseudo-Random), which uses a pseudo-random pre-processing method and is deeply integrated with the I/O benchmark tool fio, helping solve the time-consuming pre-processing issue in enterprise SSD benchmarking. It compresses the pre-processing time for ultra-large capacity SSDs from days or weeks to just hours, redefining the industry paradigm for enterprise SSD testing and injecting new momentum into industry-wide technological upgrades.

Apple, ranked fourth, closed down 2.27% with a trading volume of $14.167 billion. Reports emerged on Friday,

Google Class A shares, ranked eighth, closed down 1.06% with a trading volume of $11.692 billion.

Palantir, ranked tenth, closed up 1.77% with a trading volume of $6.441 billion. The stock fell 3.3% this week, marking its fifth consecutive week of declines. Palantir recently announced that it received a significant authorization from the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Meanwhile, well-known investor Michael Burry expressed a cautious view on the stock.

The company announcement stated that DISA has approved the extension of its federal cloud service ForwardLevel5 and temporary authorization for ImpactLevel6 to local and edge deployment scenarios. This means that Palantir's technology stack—including several core products such as its AI platform—can now be deployed locally or at the edge on any hardware.

This move gives the US government “hardware-agnostic” selection freedom, enabling deployment of multi-vendor architectures for key missions.

“Future combat requires software capabilities to be ubiquitous—from enterprise data centers to tactical edges,” said Akash Jain, President of Palantir USG and CTO. “PFCSForward delivers on this promise with hardware-agnostic authorization, enabling mission-critical capabilities to be deployed with the survivability and resilience required by warfighters.”

Applied Materials, ranked thirteenth, closed up 8.08% with a trading volume of $5.657 billion. Although the company’s revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 fell slightly by 2% year-over-year to $7.01 billion, the decline was much smaller than previously expected and significantly outperformed Wall Street analysts’ average estimate of about $6.86 billion. Non-GAAP first-quarter earnings per share were $2.38, higher than Wall Street’s average estimate of $2.21.

Analysts pointed out that notably, Applied Materials offered an unexpectedly strong revenue forecast range, indicating that demand for AI and storage semiconductors is significantly driving chip manufacturing leaders like TSMC to accelerate procurement of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

Applied Materials expects second-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue to be about $7.65 billion, with a fluctuation range of about $500 million. By comparison, Wall Street analysts’ average revenue expectation for this quarter (ending April this year) is $7.03 billion. It is reported that with the expansion of advanced 3nm and below AI chip production, CoWoS/3D advanced packaging capacity, and DRAM/NAND storage chip capacity, Applied Materials’ revenue forecast has been continuously raised by analysts since the beginning of this year.

Coinbase, ranked fourteenth, closed up 16.64% with a trading volume of $5.212 billion. On Friday, most US crypto concept stocks rose. However, the stock was down 0.48% for the week, marking its fourth consecutive week of declines.

AppLovin, ranked eighteenth, closed up 6.44% with a trading volume of $3.422 billion. AppLovin’s fourth-quarter results last year were strong, with revenue up 66% year-over-year to $1.66 billion, higher than analysts’ expectations of $1.6 billion; adjusted EBITDA rose 82% to $1.4 billion, with an EBITDA margin of 84%; and earnings per share of $3.24, beating analysts’ expectations of $2.95. For the first quarter of this year, the company expects revenue to be between $1.745 billion and $1.775 billion, with the EBITDA margin remaining at the high level of 84%.

AppLovin co-founder and CEO Adam Foroughi responded strongly, stating that market sentiment is out of touch with reality, emphasizing that the content explosion brought by AI will make the company’s traffic distribution capability even more scarce, and noting that increased bidding density has instead boosted platform revenue.

Morgan Stanley maintained its “overweight” rating, but lowered its target price from $800 to $720.

Editor: Zhang Jun SF065