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Block’s guidance hike sends shares higher

It’s the company’s first earnings report as a member of the S&P 500, which it joined last month.

8/7/25 3:48PM

Block, the fintech firm run by Twitter founder and general tech eccentric Jack Dorsey, rose after the company boosted its guidance, overshadowing revenue that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Block — which sells credit card readers, payment software, and banking services to merchants through its well-known Cash App, as well as investing in bitcoin for its own account — reported:

Q2 adjusted earnings per share of $0.62 vs. the $0.47 the company reported in Q2 2024.
Revenues of $6.05 billion vs. the $6.29 billion analysts had forecast.
Transaction-based revenue of $1.82 billion vs. estimates for $1.81 billion.
Bitcoin segment revenue of $2.14 billion vs. Wall Street’s $2.48 billion estimate.
New full-year gross profit guidance of $10.17 billion, up from the guidance of $9.96 billion the company offered in May.

Thursday’s numbers are an important test for Block (previously known as Square until a late 2021 rebrand), which plunged last quarter after reporting worse-than-expected results. Through the close of trading on Thursday, the stock had been up 60% since then, as the resilience of the economy seemed to reassure the market about the health of Block’s payments business. The recovery of cryptocurrency prices — Block owns bitcoin that it both uses for its own bitcoin sales business and holds as an investment — over that period has also lifted the shares.

Luke Kawa9h

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 jumped in after-hours trading while Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices 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 supply 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 and AMD, which sell GPUs for use in data centers, fell about 2% in postmarket trading, while Google gained around 2%.

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 and therefore makes it easier for its 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.

Tasha Matsumoto

13h

Tech rally drives stocks higher as AI trade is back on

Stocks kicked off the holiday week with a tech-fueled rally, led by Broadcom.