Stocks rose higher on Wednesday as market sentiment was boosted by easing concerns over the banking sector and strong tech gains led the Nasdaq to rebound off its previous losing session. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed over 300 points, while the S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite added 1.4% and 1.8%, respectively.

Here's how the market settled on Wednesday:

S&P 500 Index (SPY  ): +1.43% or +56.61 points to 4,027.88

Dow Jones Industrial Average (DIA  ): +1.00% or +323.71 points to 32,717.96

Nasdaq Composite Index (QQQ  ): +1.79% or +210.16 points to 11,926.24

Micron Technology (MU  ) was a bright spot on Wednesday, with the chipmaker rising more than 5% following its second-quarter earnings report late Tuesday. The company signaled that the chip business may be improving following a recent industry rut, with CEO Sanjay Mehrotra saying during an earnings call that Micron is "close to a transition to sequential revenue growth in our quarterly results."

Mehrotra said recent positive investor sentiment towards artificial intelligence (AI) advancements has the potential to benefit the chip industry, telling investors AI provides "an exciting prelude to the transformational capabilities of large language models, or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, which require significant amounts of memory and storage to operate. We are only in the very early stages of widespread deployment of these AI technologies and potential exponential growth in their commercial use cases."

Shares of rival chipmakers Nvidia (NVDA  ) and AMD (AMD  ) popped over 1%. Other tech giants also rose, with Amazon (AMZN  ), Apple (APPL  ), Netflix (NFLX  ) and Meta Platforms (META  ) all climbing higher.

In bank sector news, House lawmakers held the second day of congressional hearings this week over the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank earlier this month.

In testimony on Wednesday, Fed Vice Chair Michael Barr said he expects regulators will need to make more stringent rules with "an emphasis on supervisors using the tools they have more promptly, and putting mitigations in place more promptly when they see problems at banks that they're supervising."

On the economic front, pending home sales rose for a third-straight month in February, according to the National Association of Realtors. Sales of U.S. homes under contract rose 0.8% month-to-month over January, but were 21.1% compared with February 2022.

"Mortgage rates have improved in recent weeks after the federal government guaranteed the status of most mortgages amidst uncertainty in the financial market," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR, in a statement. "While access to commercial mortgage loans could become increasingly difficult, residential mortgage loans are expected to be more readily available."

With the first quarter set to end on Friday, Wall Street is looking pretty positive despite recent weeks of volatility in the face of bank collapses and fear of contagion across the global banking system. The Nasdaq is currently up nearly 15% year-to-date, while the S&P 500 has risen over 5%. The Dow is the only major average in the negative, falling a little more than 1% year-to-date.