US benchmark equity indexes are on track to close lower on Thursday after US job cuts reached the highest monthly total in February since July 2020.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1% to 42,577.4, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.5% to 18,090.3. The S&P 500 was down 1.7% to 5,740.7. Energy was the only sector that posted gains while consumer discretionary and technology had the steepest declines.

Oracle (ORCL) shares were down nearly 7% after Bloomberg reported that the company and Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI plan to fill their new data center in Texas with tens of thousands of artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia (NVDA) in the coming months.

Amazon (AMZN) was down over 4% after Amazon Web Services said it has launched GameLift Streams, a new capability that allows developers to stream games on "virtually any device with a browser."

Plus Therapeutics (PSTV) shares surged over 297% after the US Food and Drug Administration granted orphan drug designation to its Rhenium obisbemeda radiotherapy for treating leptomeningeal metastases in lung cancer patients.

The 10-year US Treasury yield gained 0.2 basis points to 4.3%, while the two-year rate was down 3.7 basis points to about 4%.

April West Texas Intermediate crude oil was up 0.1% at $66.34 a barrel.