NEW YORK, Feb 7, (AP): The US stock market roared back on Friday, as technology stocks recovered much of their losses from earlier in the week and bitcoin halted its plunge, at least for now. The S&P 500 rallied 2% for its best day since May. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 1,206 points, or 2.5%, and topped the 50,000 level for the first time, while the Nasdaq composite leaped 2.2%.

Chip companies helped drive the widespread rally, and Nvidia jumped 7.8% to trim its loss for the week, which came into the day at just over 10%. Broadcom climbed 7.1% and erased its drop for the week. They were the two strongest forces lifting the S&P 500, and they benefited from hopes for continued spending by customers diving into artificial-intelligence technology.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, for example, said late Thursday it expects to spend about $200 billion on investments this year to take advantage of "seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.” Such immense spending, similar to what Alphabet announced a day earlier, is creating concerns of its own, though.

The question is whether all those dollars will create big enough profits to make the investments worth it. With doubt remaining about that, Amazon’s stock dropped 5.6%. Even with Friday’s surge, the S&P 500 still fell to its third losing week in the last four. Besides worries about spending by Big Tech companies, which are Wall Street’s most influential stocks, concerns about AI potentially stealing customers from software companies also hurt the market.

Software stocks got hit particularly hard after AI firm Anthropic released free tools to automate things like legal services. Bitcoin, meanwhile, steadied following a weekslong plunge that had sent it more than halfway below its record price set in October. It climbed back above $70,000 after briefly dropping close to $60,000 late Thursday.

Prices in the metals market also calmed a bit following their own wild swings. Gold rose 1.8% to settle at $4,979.80 per ounce, while silver added 0.2%. Their prices suddenly ran out of momentum last week following jaw-dropping rallies, which were driven by investors clamoring for something safe to own amid worries about political turmoil, a U.S. stock market that critics called expensive and huge debt loads for governments worldwide.

By January, prices for gold and silver were surging so quickly that critics called it unsustainable. On Wall Street, the recovery for bitcoin helped stocks of companies enmeshed in the crypto economy. Robinhood Markets jumped 14% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500. Crypto trading platform Coinbase Global rose 13%. Strategy, the company that’s made a business of buying and holding bitcoin, soared 26.1%.