U.S. equity futures traded near the unchanged line early Friday, with market participants parsing scant signs of progress on a U.S.-Iran peace accord alongside an active slate of corporate earnings. By 06:07 ET (10:07 GMT), the Dow futures contract had fallen 161 points, or 0.3%, S&P 500 futures were flat, and Nasdaq 100 futures had inched higher by 185 points, or 0.7%.
Several individual stocks moved sharply before the opening bell on news from corporate reports and guidance.
Intel led the pack of premarket winners, jumping more than 25% after the chipmaker projected a surge in revenue driven by artificial intelligence data-center spending. The company also reported that first-quarter demand from AI service providers was sufficiently strong that it sold ships it had previously written off. If the premarket gains persist when regular trading begins, Intel's shares would reach their highest ever closing level.
Peers and chip-related names also reacted to Intel's message. AMD and Arm climbed on hopes that expanding use of autonomous AI "agents" could rekindle demand for central processing units, which recently ceded prominence to graphics processing units used in AI model training. Nvidia, the large GPU maker, was only marginally higher in premarket trade.
SAP, the Germany-based software group listed in the U.S., advanced after reporting a 17% increase in first-quarter profit that beat analysts' estimates. The company attributed much of the improvement to strength in its cloud business.
Analysts at Vital Knowledge commented that SAP's results helped to ease some investor concerns that surfaced after lackluster returns from ServiceNow earlier in the week. ServiceNow shares were trading more than 2% higher in the premarket.
MaxLinear surged about 39% following better-than-expected first-quarter results and a stronger-than-forecast outlook for the second quarter.
Coursera was among the laggards, slipping after the online education company reported a first-quarter profit below Wall Street forecasts and issued current-quarter guidance that failed to impress investors.
Comfort Systems USA, an HVAC services company, rose after posting first-quarter income that exceeded estimates.
Overall, early trading was characterized by company-specific earnings and guidance driving substantial moves in individual equities, while broader index futures showed only modest directional bias amid geopolitical uncertainty and ongoing earnings flow.