US job growth surprises to upside in April, with the unemployment rate steady at 4.3%
South Korea surges past Canada to become the seventh-largest stock market in the world amidst AI boom
Wedbush’s Dan Ives raises Apple price target to $400 on $15 billion AI services opportunity
Akamai’s billion-dollar AI infrastructure customer is Anthropic, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The cloud services company extended gains to trade up over 25% following the news.
On Thursday, the company announced a seven-year, $1.8 billion commitment from a “leading frontier model provider.”
Anthropic has been on a mad scramble to boost compute capacity after facing widespread complaints about Claude usage limits and seeing OpenAI position its accumulation of computing power as a competitive advantage.
In a little over a month, Anthropic has struck or expanded deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, Broadcom, as well as xAI (through SpaceX).
As part of that xAI pact, Anthropic announced that it would be increasing usage limits for paying customers.
Anthropic has been on a mad scramble to boost compute capacity after facing widespread complaints about Claude usage limits and seeing OpenAI position its accumulation of computing power as a competitive advantage.
In a little over a month, Anthropic has struck or expanded deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, Broadcom, as well as xAI (through SpaceX).
As part of that xAI pact, Anthropic announced that it would be increasing usage limits for paying customers.
One of the most reliable market sentiment signals comes from options trading, where the balance between put and call activity reflects investors’ expectations about where the market may go next. We take a look at how the Nasdaq Options Pulse dataset translates this data into actionable insights that can give traders a competitive edge.
Intel soared more than 14% on a Wall Street Journal report saying the company has reached a preliminary agreement with Apple to manufacture chips for the iPhone maker. Intel, already on a tear as of late, jumped earlier this week when Bloomberg first reported the two companies were in talks. It’s still unclear which chips Intel would manufacture for Apple, which has been facing supply constraints for its iPhone as well other products.
In any case, the deal could help Apple ease supply constraints that have hit some of its products and reduce its reliance on longtime partner TSMC, as it aims to bring more chip manufacturing stateside.
In any case, the deal could help Apple ease supply constraints that have hit some of its products and reduce its reliance on longtime partner TSMC, as it aims to bring more chip manufacturing stateside.
OpenAI wanted further Azure computing discounts, but Microsoft didn’t think it was on the verge of a breakthrough.
NuScale shares are dropping in the early trading session after it released Q1 earnings yesterday after the bell that are failing to rejuvenate any excitement in the once high-flying, early-stage nuclear energy company.
The company announced Q1 revenue of just $560,000, well below the $10.5 million estimate, with sales down materially year over year thanks to old licensing and design deals that have since been completed.
The lack of financial progress has made NuScale Power more of a momentum-driven way to play the intersection of clean energy and AI infrastructure, particularly as hyperscalers and data center operators search for long-term power sources.
“The demand for reliable, carbon-free power has never been greater, and NuScale is the only SMR technology provider with a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved design, an established supply chain and NPM components currently in production for commercial use to meet this essential need,” said John Hopkins, NuScale president and CEO. “We are building the infrastructure that this pivotal moment requires.”
Analysts at Goldman Sachs trimmed their price target to $9 from $10 in the wake of this report.
The company ended this quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and short- and long-term investments of $1.0 billion. The stock has dropped more than 25% year to date.
TeraWulf, the bitcoin mining company transitioning into data center development, posted Q1 results that were essentially on par with expectations, but investors seemed to like the future transition from volatile bitcoin mining to a “more stable, contracted revenue model” revenue stream driven by “higher-value HPC workloads.”
TeraWulf reported:
Revenue of $34 million, just missing analyst expectations of $34.7 million.
An adjusted loss per share of $0.09, exactly meeting the consensus estimate from analysts polled by FactSet.
Around 62% of the firm’s Q1 revenue stemmed from high-performance computing lease revenue, “representing the initial ramp of long-term customer agreements,” TeraWulf CFO Patrick Fleury said.
“As we continue to scale, we expect the business to be increasingly driven by recurring, contracted revenue, reducing exposure to the volatility historically associated with bitcoin mining,” Fleury continued.
Fleury noted TeraWulf had $3.1 billion of cash to support its continued transition.
Gaming giant Nintendo reported the results for its fourth quarter, which ended in March, on Friday morning. Its US-traded ADR fell nearly 4% in premarket trading.
Most notably, Nintendo announced it will raise the price of its Switch 2 console in the US by $50 to $499.99 in September. Investors have been waiting for Nintendo to join its rivals Sony and Microsoft in boosting the price of its flagship console, but the company had thus far been unwilling to do so this early in the Switch 2’s life cycle.
Nintendo shares have fallen about 45% over the past 12 months, as the company has been hit by tariffs and costs have increased due to AI’s memory demand and higher global shipping rates amid the war in Iran.
For its fiscal 2026, Nintendo reported:
2.313 trillion yen ($14.8 billion) in total revenue, compared to estimates of 2.31 trillion yen ($14.78 billion) from Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet.
19.86 million Switch 2 sales, compared to its 19 million forecast.
For the fiscal year ahead (which will end in March 2027), Nintendo forecast 16.5 million Switch 2 sales. The company is guiding for 2.050 trillion yen ($13.1 billion) in sales for the full year, compared to Wall Street estimates of 2.5 trillion yen ($16.1 billion).
If you’ve already made plans for a Mother’s Day gift in advance of this Sunday, congratulations. But if alarm bells are suddenly ringing, consider this a gentle reminder that, like a sizable share of the US population this time of year often does, you can still scrape together some last-minute flowers for the woman who carried you for nine months.
Data from Google Trends reveals that searches for “same day flower delivery” spike in the US in May every year, when Mother’s Day takes place. As we noted last February, the same query also gains traction around Valentine’s Day.
This year, however, it appears that searches for last-minute flowers have remained elevated in the last two months after the usual peak in February — with the search interest this April actually exceeding that seen around Cupid’s Day.
Honestly, we’re not sure why searches are spiking a little early. One explanation might be that Passover and Easter have overlapped at the start of April, and Americans wanted to celebrate with some flowers. Maybe it’s a host of Claude bots that are now running errands for AI-obsessed execs — or perhaps Americans are just impulse-buying some seasonal spring blooms after an unusually warm March, without a particular occasion.
Apple may not have a frontier AI model or a fully functional AI assistant, but that won’t stop the company from throwing its weight around in the “AI revolution,” according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. That’s enough for Ives to raise his price target for Apple shares to $400 from $350.
Underpinning that jump is what Ives sees as a $15 billion annual revenue opportunity for Apple in AI services from monetizing other companies’ models by distributing them to its 2.5 billion iOS users. Ives estimates that in the coming years, roughly 20% of the world’s population will access AI through an Apple device, calling it the “consumer hub of AI.”
That new era, Ives expects, will officially kick off at Apple’s developer conference in June, where he expects Apple to “finally unveil its AI strategy.”
Fluence Energy is building on Thursday’s massive gains in the premarket on Friday amid optimism about data center demand for its energy storage solutions.
Though the company delivered underwhelming Q2 results after the close on Wednesday, management announced the signing of new master supply agreements with two major hyperscalers and expects to convert its first order soon. During the conference call, CEO Julian Nebreda indicated that the company has a 12-gigawatt pipeline tied to data center projects.
Analysts at JPMorgan, Canaccord, Jefferies, Goldman Sachs, and Roth Capital raised their price targets on Fluence in the wake of this news.
“The sentiment on FLNC was negative going into the quarter and the hyperscaler announcement came sooner than expected,” noted Citi analyst Vikram Bagri, per Bloomberg.
Innodata is surging in premarket trading after announcing better-than-expected quarterly results and raising its full-year sales guidance.
The data engineering company is seemingly benefiting from demand for its expertise to help improve the capabilities of AI tools.
The key numbers for Q1:
Revenue of $90.1 million (compared to analyst estimates of $76.5 million).
Adjusted EBITDA of $25.0 million (estimate: $10.4 million).
Innodata raised its full-year revenue growth guidance to around 40% or more, up from the ~35% or more guidance it gave out 10 weeks ago.
CEO Jack Abuhoff described this outlook as “prudent,” adding that several potentially large programs have not yet been included in this forecast.
To that end, he noted a new set of engagements with a large technology company that, if solidified, would generate approximately $51 million of revenue in 2026. Management is currently in discussions with an additional 15 companies and two hyperscalers about its new platform for agentic systems, Abuhoff added.
Earlier this year, this company announced a pact to provide data and data engineering services to Palantir to help improve AI tools that analyzed rodeos.
The robust quarter and outlook are bringing shares of Innodata back into the green on the year after having been down 10% heading into this report.
The country’s two chip giants have seen their shares more than double this year.
Akamai is up 26% in premarket trading Friday after the company announced a major cloud infrastructure deal tied to AI, helping investors look past modestly better-than-expected Q1 results and a weaker-than-expected Q2 outlook.
In a press release Thursday after the bell, the cloud and cybersecurity company said it had secured a $1.8 billion, seven-year commitment from a “leading frontier model provider” for Akamai’s cloud infrastructure services, a deal CEO Tom Leighton said strengthened the company’s position as a “key infrastructure provider in the AI economy.”
The announcement came alongside Akamai’s Q1 earnings, which were only modestly ahead of Wall Street expectations. Adjusted earnings came in at $1.61 per share, slightly above analysts’ estimate of $1.60 per share, as compiled by FactSet. Revenue rose 6% year on year to $1.074 billion, broadly in line with Wall Street’s forecasts.
The company said growth was led by its cloud infrastructure services, where revenue jumped 40% year on year. Security revenue grew 11%, while delivery and other cloud applications revenue dropped 7%.
For the current quarter, the company forecast adjusted earnings per share of $1.45 to $1.65, with the midpoint falling short of the $1.68 expected, and revenue of $1.075 billion to $1.1 billion, also below the $1.104 billion estimate at the midpoint, according to FactSet.