Microsoft Corp. shares rallied for their best week in nearly eight years as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT drove investors to an established tech name with an interest in the next big thing.Microsoft MSFT, +1.17% shares ended Friday with a 12.4% gain for the week, their best weekly gain since April 24, 2015, when shares surged 15% over the week after the company predicted growth in its cloud business.The tech giant was not only a beneficiary of last Friday’s closing of Silicon Valley Bank, as investors sought safety in established tech names, but also benefited from its significant investment in privately held artificial-intelligence company Open AI, which is quickly becoming a household name as its ChatGPT AI model gains in popularity. Microsoft is already incorporating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and Office 365 Copilot, which combines large-language models with a user’s data to increase productivity. The Copilot system uses ChatGPT’s latest version, GPT-4, which OpenAI released this past week. While the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve took emergency measures to insure deposits over $250,000 at Silicon Valley Bank last weekend, continued turbulence in the regional banking sector, like First Republic Bank’s FRC, -32.80% $30 billion infusion from the banking sector, has pushed investors to the security of established names in the tech sector, as the Nasdaq gained 4.5% on the week compared with a 1.6% gain on the S&P 500 index. Over the past 12 months, Microsoft shares have declined 5.4%, while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF IGV, -0.38% is down 13.4%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.19% is off 7.6%, the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.10% is off 11.2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -0.74% is down 14.6%.
