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Luke Kawa

Alibaba gains as Q2 cloud revenues beat estimates on “robust AI demand”

China’s leading cloud giant is cashing in on the huge appetite for AI compute.

Alibaba ADRs are up big in premarket trading after the e-commerce and cloud giant reported second-quarter sales above analysts’ estimates.

Revenues in its Cloud Intelligence Group rose to 39.8 billion yuan (~$5.6 billion) for the three months ended September 30, ahead of estimates for roughly 38 billion yuan (~$5.35 billion).

“We have entered into an investment phase to build long-term strategic value in AI technologies and infrastructure and a consumption platform integrating daily life services and e-commerce,” said CEO Eddie Wu. “Robust AI demand further accelerated our Cloud Intelligence Group business, with revenue up 34% and AI-related product revenue achieving triple-digit year-over-year growth for the ninth consecutive quarter.”

For traders, the potential benefits from establishing a dominant cloud position in the region are outweighing Alibaba’s bottom-line figures. The positive reaction to these quarterly results comes despite adjusted net income falling 72% compared to the same quarter last year.

Management made it clear that profits are not the top near-term priority.

“We are re-investing our profits and free cash flow for the future while near-term profitability is expected to fluctuate,” Chief Financial Officer Toby Xu added in the press release. “Over the past four quarters, we have deployed approximately RMB120 billion in capital expenditure toward AI and cloud infrastructure.”

This continues the trend of Alibaba’s commitment to AI capex being received enthusiastically by the market. Ahead of earnings, the company announced that its Qwen AI app was downloaded more than 10 million times in the week following its relaunch.

Elsewhere, its domestic e-commerce business — still far and away the firm’s biggest revenue driver — beat sales estimates, while international digital commerce came up short.

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Luke Kawa

Lumentum soars 50% in November as Wall Street and retail traders gush over the Google supplier

The Google halo effect is the new Nvidia halo effect.

Shares of optical and photonics company Lumentum have been on a tear in November, up nearly 50%. Its components help information move around quickly in data centers using lasers and mirrors.

Unlike a lot of the more speculative, volatile AI-adjacent stocks that have come under pressure as of late, Lumentum has strong operating performance to help justify these gains.

The company reported Q1 2026 results near the start of the month that exceeded analysts’ expectations, with management also offering Q2 guidance well ahead of forecasts.

The company’s fiscal 2025 results (the year ended June 28, 2025) showed that Google was its second-biggest customer, accounting for 15.4% of net revenues. Networking equipment company Ciena Corp. came in slightly higher, at 16%.

Bloomberg currently estimates that as of its most recent quarter, 22% and 21% of Lumentum’s sales come from Ciena and Google, respectively.

Retail traders have stampeded into the stock this month, per JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain.

JPM Retail Lumentum

Wall Street has been singing the company’s praises as of late, too. Needham analyst Ryan Koontz boosted his price target to $290 from $235 on Monday, while Rosenblatt’s Mike Genovese recently called it “a must own AI stock.”

markets
Max Knoblauch

Chinese EV maker Nio climbs on narrower-than-expected Q3 loss

Nio was up as much as 3.1% in early trading on Tuesday after the Chinese EV maker dropped its third-quarter earnings. The company posted an adjusted loss of $0.15 per share, better than the $0.23 loss expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

The automaker also:

  • Booked $2.7 billion in vehicle sales, up 15% from the same period last year and slightly below Wall Street estimates. According to Nio, an increase in sales volume was partially offset by a lower average selling price, as the company introduced more affordable EVs.

  • Delivered 87,071 vehicles in Q3, up more than 41% from last year. The figure landed at the bottom of the company’s delivery projection range of between 87,000 and 91,000 vehicles.

  • Posted a vehicle margin of 14.7%, improving on the 13.1% in Q3 last year.

Looking ahead, the company said it expects to sell between 120,000 and 125,000 vehicles in Q4. Meeting even the low end of that target would bring the company’s 2025 total deliveries to more than 321,000 units, beating Wall Street’s expectation of about 316,000 vehicles.

Alongside Chinese rivals BYD and XPeng, Nio has helped fuel a fiercely competitive EV market in China, squeezing outside entrants like Tesla with low-priced vehicles similar to Tesla’s Model Y.

J. Edward Moreno
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Best Buy beats on earnings and revenue

The company reported earnings results on Tuesday.

Best Buy retail store, company logo on building exterior, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
markets
Hyunsoo Rim

Sandisk jumps on S&P 500 inclusion announcement

Sandisk was up as much as 6% in premarket trading after S&P Global announced that the flash memory card maker will join the S&P 500 Index on November 28, 2025, replacing advertising giant Interpublic Group, which is being acquired by Omnicom.

Sandisk’s inclusion comes nine months after it was spun off from its parent company, data storage giant Western Digital. Since listing on the Nasdaq, the stock has been on a tear, with its shares soaring more than 500% this year, pushing its market cap to ~$33 billion. That’s more than double what Western Digital originally paid for the company when it bought Sandisk back in 2016 for roughly $16 billion in a bid to expand into flash memory chips, as its traditional hard disk drive business faced mounting pressure.

The company sells high-speed flash memory for consumer electronics like phones and cameras, and is pushing deeper into the data center supply chain. Its latest quarterly earnings showed strong momentum, with a 23% year-over-year increase in sales and solid guidance that topped Wall Street estimates.

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markets
Luke Kawa

Google jumps, Nvidia and AMD fall on report that the search giant is in talks to sell “billions of dollars” of its custom AI chips to Meta

Google is climbing in premarket trading while Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have dropped on the heels of a report from The Information that has the search giant muscling in on the chip designers’ turf.

Per the report, Meta is in discussions with Google to spend “billions of dollars” to use its AI chips in the social media company’s data centers starting in 2027, and to begin renting access to Google chips from its cloud business next year.

Historically, Google has rented access to these chips through its cloud business rather than supplied them directly to third parties. The report suggests that insiders believe a more direct foray could allow the company to grab a market share in chips amounting to about 10% of Nvidia’s annual revenue.

Google’s AI chips — TPUs, or tensor processing units — are having a moment. These semiconductors were used to train its latest GenAI model, Gemini 3, which has received rave reviews, and are cheaper to use than Nvidia’s offerings. That’s sent the stock to record highs, surpassing Microsoft in market value along the way.

According to The Information, Meta is even mulling using TPUs for training, considered a much more demanding task, rather than just inference alone.

Shares of Nvidia have slumped more than 4% as of 8:30 a.m. ET. AMD, which sell GPUs for use in data centers, is down more than 5% by the same point. Google has moved 4% in the other direction, while Broadcom, the custom chip specialist that partnered with Google to design these TPUs, is also up about the same amount.

During Nvidia’s conference call last week, CEO Jensen Huang was asked about the competitive threat posed by custom chips. He responded by talking up the difficulty of inference (“How could thinking be easy?”). That’s a not-too-subtle nod to the idea that his company’s GPUs will be the more effective solution compared to more cost-effective options. He also touted the company’s CUDA software as a selling point because it’s more commonly used, therefore making it easier for buyers to go on and sell AI computing capacity.

Google has aimed to make its JAX software easier for developers over time by making its TPUs operable via open-source software tied to PyTorch (invented by Meta), overhauling how errors are reported and introducing an extension that makes it easier to write custom code, among others.

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