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Hyunsoo Rim2/27/26

Block soars after announcing 40% workforce cut amid AI push

Block, the payments and fintech firm led by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, is up almost 20% in premarket trading after announcing plans yesterday to cut 40% of its 10,000-person workforce.

Alongside the layoff announcement, Block reported $6.25 billion in Q4 revenue, slightly ahead of expectations, while gross profit for the quarter grew 24% year on year. The company also raised its full-year guidance for both gross profit and operating income.

In a post on X, Dorsey said the decision wasn’t made because the company is in “trouble,” instead framing the move as a structural shift. Indeed, Block has invested heavily in internal AI tools, including launching its own system called Goose in early 2025. In a letter to shareholders, Dorsey said “a significantly smaller team” using these tools “can do more and do it better.”

Most of the layoffs will occur in Q1 and will be “substantially” completed by the end of Q2, with expected restructuring charges of approximately $450 million to $500 million, according to an SEC filing.

Block is the latest company to tie job cuts to AI in Corporate America. Outplacement firm Challenger estimates roughly 55,000 US layoffs were attributed to the technology in 2025, almost 13x the level two years ago. Dorsey predicted that most companies “will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes” within the next year.

The company had more than tripled its headcount from the end of 2019 through 2022, with its number of employees rising from 3,845 to 12,428. When presented with this tidbit, Dorsey acknowledged on X that “yes we over-hired during covid because i incorrectly built 2 separate company structures.” Last year, Block spent roughly $68 million on an event for employees, which reportedly featured performances from T-Pain and Soulja Boy.

Despite the rally, Block remains more than 75% below its 2021 peak.

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Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks close week with new records powered by tech gains and ceasefire optimism

The S&P 500 gained for the ninth straight week, its longest winning run since 2023.

Michael Jordan #23, Shooting Guard and Small Forward for the Chicago Bulls wearing a warm up jacket looks on during player introductions before the NBA Midwest Division basketball game against the Denver Nuggets

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BlackBerry is on one of its hottest rallies of all time

History suggests that BlackBerry does extremely well when 1) it’s considered to be pioneering a transformative technology, or 2) there’s widespread retail enthusiasm for stocks.

If you squint (or dream), you could argue that both are going on right now.

Shares of the once-upon-a-time smartphone giant are up more than 160% over the past three months. The only times the shares have had a hotter run of form than this are at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, and in early 2021 when was it part of the meme stock craze headlined by GameStop.

Let’s start with the easy part first — here’s Scott Rubner, head of equity and equity derivatives strategy at Citadel, on retail’s significant footprint in the shares’ rally:

“Retail traders are the new price setters in the market. May volumes across our retail cash equities and options platforms are currently tracking at record levels. Daily volumes on our cash platform are setting new highs and are on pace to finish nearly ~10% above the previous record established during the January 2021 meme-stock era.”

And then there’s the harder part, part of the story that the traders bidding up BlackBerry now are dreaming about: the QNX division, which offers software that the company is positioning as an operating system for robots.

QNX’s software has early uptake in the field of autonomous driving, with BlackBerry eyeing a much more widespread role: in April, it announced a partnership to deploy this technology on Nvidia’s robotics platform. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, for his part, has long been calling for agentic AI adoption to be followed by physical AI (i.e., robots).

In a QNX press release unveiling a report this week, the company argued that software, not hardware, is the real problem in terms of making sure robotics works.

I supposed it would be poetic, in a way, if the company at the leading edge of the smartphone revolution also plays a big role in the proliferation of robotics.

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Micron and Sandisk rally on new Street-high price targets from Susquehanna

Micron and Sandisk both hit fresh all-time highs in early trading after Susquehanna bestowed new Wall Street-high price targets on the two memory stocks.

Analyst Mehdi Hosseini upped his view on the former to $1,750 from $600, and to $3,250 from $2,000 for the latter.

“Supply is now expected to remain tight through 2027, sustaining elevated margins and thus warranting valuation re-rating,” he wrote, per Bloomberg.

It’s the fifth time in the past year that the average price target on Micron has gone up by more than 10% in a week. UBS’s Tim Arcuri more than tripled his price target on Micron earlier this week, and has already lost the title of “most bullish.”

But even as analysts are tripping over themselves to raise their price targets on these stocks, the ferocity of the rally in Micron has outpaced their best efforts.

The high-bandwidth memory specialist traded at a record premium to the consensus Wall Street price target this week, based on data going back to 2008.

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Okta soars on Q1 earnings beat, raised outlook driven by AI security demand

Okta shares are surging in early trading Friday after the identity security provider posted Q1 fiscal 2027 financial results that exceeded Wall Street estimates. The strong results are fueled by accelerating corporate demand for cybersecurity software, as well as the deployment of autonomous AI systems.

Key numbers:

Adjusted earnings per share of $0.91 compared to analysts’ estimate of $0.85.
Revenue of $765 million compared to an estimate of $752.7 million.

The company generated subscription revenue of $750 million, up 11% year over year. Okta also has $271 million in free cash flow, up from $238 million in the prior year’s quarter.

While standard cybersecurity software protects human workers, the latest catalyst sparking Okta’s strong corporate performance is the rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents that can access sensitive corporate databases and interact with privileged executive accounts.

“AI agents are rapidly becoming a new workforce inside every organization, creating a wave of identities that must be secured and governed alongside human users,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO and cofounder of Okta. “We’re expanding our opportunity as the world’s leading independent and neutral identity provider and helping customers make identity the unified control plane for their secure agentic enterprise.”

Okta raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to between $3.185 billion and $3.205 billion, roughly in line with estimates of $3.18 billion. The company formally dropped its long-term projected non-GAAP tax rate from 26% down to 21%. This adjustment is a direct byproduct of the federal corporate tax frameworks under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Shares of Okta have risen around 9% since the beginning of this year.

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Helena Cheng10h

HPE, SMCI surge after Dell’s Q1 beat on strong AI server demand

HP Enterprise and Super Micro Computer shares are surging in premarket trading, getting a big boost from rival Dell’s strong Q1 results.

Dell’s $16.1 billion in AI-optimized server sales for the quarter alone proved that enterprise data center demand is accelerating faster than Wall Street had anticipated. The company posted revenue of $43.8 billion, exceeding Street estimates of $35.5 billion. Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion, well above the $142 billion expected by analysts.

The read-through is particularly relevant for Super Micro, one of the largest suppliers of Nvidia-powered AI server systems, and HPE, which has been expanding its AI infrastructure and liquid-cooling offerings through its partnership with Nvidia.

The moves suggest investors view AI infrastructure as a broad spending cycle that benefits server makers across the entire ecosystem.

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