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Amazon slides on light Q2 guidance, despite earnings beat

Amazon beat earnings expectations for Q1, but the tech giant forecast operating profit for the current quarter that undershot Wall Street’s expectations.

Shares fell 3.9% after-hours, as the company forecast Q2 sales of $159 billion to $164 billion (a midpoint of $161.5 billion) and operating income of $13 billion to $17.5 billion. Analysts are calling for sales of $161.21 billion and operating income of $17.62 billion, according to FactSet.

For the first quarter, Amazon blew past analysts’ revenue expectations with $155.7 billion of sales, up 9% year on year. The FactSet analyst consensus was $155.1 billion. Earnings per share came in at $1.59, topping estimates of $1.37.

Net income was $17.1 billion, up 64% year on year. Estimates were $14.58 billion.

Capital expenditures were $25 billion, in line with analyst expectations.

Ad revenue jumped 18% year on year to $13.9 billion.

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Iren Cipher Mining Data Center Crypto Miners

JPMorgan lifts Cipher Mining to “overweight,” hikes Iren price target

The crypto-miner-turned-AI-data-center trade is back on Monday.

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Broadcom soars as rave reviews for Gemini 3 boost appeal of its custom chips

When spectators saw Michael Jordan blossom as a basketball star, it made them want to buy Nike’s Air Jordans.

Mizuho reckons there’s a similar halo effect for Broadcom based on the rave reviews for Google’s latest GenAI model, which include this ringing endorsement from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

“Gemini 3 was trained and powered on Google homegrown TPU chips, which benefits partner AVGO,” wrote Daniel O’Regan, Mizuho’s managing director of equity trading.

Custom chips (ASICs) are Broadcom’s specialty, and as O’Regan noted, Google and Broadcom codesigned these building blocks for Gemini 3. Boosts to Google’s capex budget have tended to buoy shares of Broadcom, since it’s a big beneficiary of these outlays.

The early positive reception to Gemini 3 implies that: a) Google will want to continue this relationship (and need more chips for training and inference!), and b) other GenAI developers might be more willing to pursue the custom chip route for AI models and inference, perhaps eating into market share for Nvidia’s GPU-based solutions.

To this end, Broadcom announced a collaboration with OpenAI in mid-October to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that GPU-centric data center solutions are superior because of how ubiquitous the firm’s CUDA software is in high-performance computing.

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Citi ups Oklo price target as company executes “on all fronts”

Citi analysts lifted their price target for aspiring nuclear power provider Oklo Monday, after meeting with management last week.

They cited progress on the company’s reactor licensing strategy, its new radioactive fuel supply business — part of an acquisition that closed in March — as well as Oklo’s ability to borrow at lower-than-expected costs recently.

Analysts led by Vikram Bagri, who have a “neutral/high risk” rating on the stock, lifted their price target to $95 a share from $68. (It’s currently trading around $90.) They wrote:

“The company is executing on all fronts with new supply contracts for long lead time items, a dual-track licensing approach, diversification through its radioisotope business, and the exploration of new avenues for fuel procurement. We lift our target price as we incorporate radioisotope business.”

In particular, they spotlighted Oklo’s strategy of pursuing licensing for its reactors on parallel tracks with both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — the traditional decider on all things nuclear in the US — and the Department of Energy, which under the Trump administration has begun issuing faster authorizations for initial development of experimental reactors, without applicants having to wait for full commercial approval of reactor plans from the NRC, as was previously typical. We recently wrote about that approach here.

Oklo has no revenue and Wall Street analysts don’t expect it to have any significant sales until 2028, when they project it will still be seeing losses.

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