Shares of flash storage vendor Sandisk popped 7% in extended trading on Monday after the company was added to S&P 500.

Sandisk’s addition to the benchmark comes nine months after the company was spun out of Western Digital. Sandisk will replace marketing company Interpublic, which is being acquired by Omnicom, S&P Global said in a statement.

It’s the latest tech company to join the S&P 500, which gets an increasing amount of its value from internet, software and semiconductor businesses. AppLovin, Datadog, DoorDash and Robinhood became members of the index earlier this year.

Stocks tend to rally when they’re added to the benchmark as fund managers who track the S&P 500 need to buy shares to reflect the changes.

Western Digital bought Sandisk in 2016 for $15.6 billion. In February, Western Digital spun out its flash business as Sandisk, which now has a market cap of about $33 billion.

Sandisk sells fast storage drives for gaming PCs, digital cameras and security cameras, and is also trying to land deals with large-scale data center builders. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 23% to $2.31 billion. The company reported a 31% increase in exabytes sold.

Omnicom announced plans to acquire Interpublic in December, and on Monday said the deal received antitrust approval from the European Commission.

WATCH: WDC CEO: SanDisk deal great for shareholders

Fast fashion is a major environmental offender, requiring massive water consumption, and producing high carbon emissions and pollution. It also leads to a surge in microplastic and textile waste.

One result has been a boom in thrifting. But recycling old clothing into new items presents a much bigger challenge.

The fashion industry accounts for anywhere from 4% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to various sources, yet less than 1% of clothing is recycled into new garments. That’s because most fabrics today are blends and need to be broken down into their original fibers in order to be remade.

One Virginia-based startup is taking a shot at fixing the problem, with the aim of turning fashion into a circular economy.

Circ, founded in 2011, developed technology that separates polycotton material into its original components, and regenerates them into new, virgin quality materials. Previous attempts to do that have destroyed one fiber or the other.

“It’s a chemical process,” said Circ CEO Peter Majeranowski. “It’s very much like unbaking a cake, where we break down the polyester to its building blocks, separate it from the cotton and put them back into the very beginning of the supply chain to be remade into new clothes,”

Polyester and cotton make up about 77% of the global textile market. Circ’s hydrothermal technology can recycle each fiber, as well as any blend ratio of the two, known as polycotton blends.

“We work with material that can’t be thrifted, can’t be repaired or resold,” Majeranowski said. “It’s really heading to the landfill or incineration.”

Circ gets the old clothing from various sources, either purchased or donated. After breaking down the fibers, it then sells them back into the clothing supply chain to yarn spinners, dye houses and fabric manufacturers. Allbirds, Zara and H&M use Circ-recycled textiles in some of their products.

There’s a small price premium, but it’s an attractive option for environmentally minded brands like Patagonia, which is also an investor in Circ.

“To go after a really important feedstock, like cotton poly blend…is always at the top of the heap for our decision making,” said Matthew Dwyer, vice president of global product footprint at Patagonia.

As for the higher price, Dwyer said that’s to be expected with any innovation that needs to scale to a major market.

“For us, it’s not just about getting to market, it’s about ensuring that our partners are set up to scale from there, because there’s no use and there’s no business saving the planet if you’re just building concept cars,” he said.

Circ has raised a total of $100 million from Patagonia along with Temasek, Taranis, Marubeni, Inditex and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

The startup is headquartered in Danville, Virginia which used to be home to the largest textile mill in the U.S. It’s now expanding globally, with its first industrial-sized textile-to-textile recycling plant in France.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Friday that the artificial intelligence startup has finally finished its first prototypes for hardware devices.

“Finally, we have the first prototypes,” Altman said in a video posted Monday by Emerson Collective, which invests in entrepreneurs. “I can’t believe how jaw dropping good the work is and how exciting it is.”

Altman was speaking in an on-stage discussion with former Apple design chief Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of the late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs and founder of Emerson Collective.

In May, OpenAI acquired Ive’s startup, called io, for $6.4 billion in equity and announced that it would make new AI devices. Ive took on design responsibilities on the hardware project. Since then, OpenAI and io have been relatively quiet about the project.

Ive said he expects to reveal the device in two years or less. He said that much of the development process for new hardware is unpredictable.

“Especially in large companies that value predictability, leaders get really uncomfortable with ambiguity,” Ive said.

Altman declined to answer a question about what exactly OpenAI is building, but said the company is targeting a calmer “vibe” with its hardware versus smartphones, which he compared to walking through Times Square.

“You can then go for a vibe that is not like walking through Times Square and getting bumped into and having all this stuff compete for your attention,” Altman said. “But, like, sitting in the most beautiful cabin by a lake and in the mountains and sort of just enjoying the peace and calm.”

He said a smart AI device will be able to do things for the user over long periods of time, filter things out and understand when something is important enough to notify the user. Altman added that the device will be able to “know everything you’ve ever thought about, read, said.”

OpenAI’s hardware plans are being closely watched by rivals and potential customers alike. Companies including Amazon, Google, and Meta have released AI-oriented devices like smart glasses and speakers, but none has been a big enough hit to reshape the hardware industry. Startups are also experimenting with new device sizes like pendants and ideas like giving AI bots a personality.

A major device launch from OpenAI, which has the most used chatbot with ChatGPT, could break the stalemate, and a successful product could eventually threaten Apple. The iPhone maker has yet to release an AI specific design, and the company has run into issues with rolling out improvements to Siri, its long-standing AI voice assistant. In March, Apple announced that it was delaying Siri improvements to 2026.

Last week, OpenAI said it entered into an agreement with Foxconn, which manufactures many consumer electronics, including for Apple. However, the OpenAI deal with Foxconn is focused on building AI infrastructure, and the companies didn’t mention device manufacturing.

WATCH: OpenAI taps Foxconn to build AI hardware in the U.S.