Meta Surges 12% to Best Non-Earnings Session Since IPO Year as Muse AI Agent Tops Charts and Wells Fargo Hikes Target to $796

Meta Platforms stock rocketed roughly 12% on Monday, September 21, its best non-earnings session relative to the S&P 500 since its IPO year, adding more than $200 billion in market value and pushing shares to an intraday high of $749.49 from a previous close of $665.75. The rally was fueled by surging consumer traction for the company's newly launched Muse personal AI agent, a well-received analyst upgrade, and rising anticipation ahead of the annual Connect developer conference scheduled for September 23.

Wells Fargo raised its Meta price target to $796 from $640, maintaining an Overweight rating and citing recent model launches and early Muse adoption. Citi analyst Ronald Josey separately placed Meta on a 90-day upside catalyst watch with an $800 target, pointing to the Connect event and the company's product roadmap as near-term drivers. Options volume ran at roughly 4.5 times its normal pace on the day.

Muse, which launched September 8, reached 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days across both major app stores, according to data from Appfigures and Sensor Tower, outpacing ChatGPT's comparable post-launch figures on every measured metric. Muse hit 642,000 U.S. mobile daily active users by day 12, versus 231,000 for ChatGPT at the same point after launch. The app took the top spot on the U.S. Apple App Store free chart within 10 days. Sensor Tower recorded more than 902,000 downloads in the six days immediately after launch, exceeding the 773,000 its predecessor Meta AI app drew in the same window.

Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its retail site after the agent failed to identify itself, with Amazon citing violations of its conditions of use. Shopify took the opposite stance, with CEO Tobi Lutke announcing a partnership that enables agentic checkout through Shop Pay across all Shopify stores. The contrasting moves crystallized a forming battle between major platforms over how AI shopping agents are allowed to operate.

The Muse enthusiasm spilled into chip stocks, as investors repriced CPU demand expectations. Arm Holdings gained 13%, Intel jumped 12%, and AMD climbed 9%. AMD briefly surpassed a $1 trillion market capitalization during the session. The broader market also advanced strongly, with the Nasdaq 100 rising 2.8%, the S&P 500 gaining 1.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite closing at a record high for the first time since June, while falling oil prices and lower Treasury yields provided additional support.

Meta also announced the Petal subsea cable on Monday, a roughly 7,000-kilometer transatlantic system connecting the United States to France that is designed to carry 1 petabit per second, approximately double the capacity of today's most advanced transoceanic cables. The cable will use 24 fiber pairs with two cores each, via multi-core fiber technology developed with NEC and Sumitomo Electric, with Orange managing the French landing infrastructure. Petal is expected to enter commercial service in 2029 and would carry about 5.5 times the capacity of Marea, Meta's first transatlantic cable investment. Separately, Capital Power noted that Meta's previously announced plan to build a C$13 billion data center in Alberta has strengthened that province's appeal to other hyperscalers.

Earlier in the day, Facebook and Instagram experienced a brief outage affecting thousands of U.S. users before recovering. Meta also declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.525 per share with an ex-date of September 21. One note of caution in the background: a Seeking Alpha analysis flagged that a $10 billion Q3 legal charge tied to an $18 billion settlement is expected to weigh on upcoming earnings, though the author maintained a Strong Buy view on the core business.