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Luke Kawa

Intel spikes on Nvidia’s plan to invest $5 billion as part of a partnership to develop data center and PC products

Shares of Intel are mooning as the chipmaker has successfully hitched its wagon to the biggest star in the semiconductor space: Nvidia.

In a joint press release, the two companies announced “a collaboration to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets” that will also see Nvidia purchase $5 billion in Intel stock at a price of $23.28.

“We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the NVIDIA team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said.

Shares of Intel were up as much as 34% in premarket trading, which, if sustained, would be the biggest one-day gain for the stock ever, surpassing the 26.4% gain on October 29, 1987.

“The chip landscape remains NVDA’s world with everybody else paying rent as more sovereigns and enterprises wait in line for the most advanced chips in the world,” said Dan Ives, senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities. “Today’s announcement further strengthens the US lead in the AI Arms Race against China as Intel now goes from a laggard to a catalyst.”

This deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, would make the chip designer one of Intel’s largest shareholders, behind only index fund providers BlackRock and Vanguard, and also the US government.

Intel and Nvidia plan to codesign two products:

  • Custom-made CPUs for data centers that Nvidia would integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms, and

  • System-on-chips for PCs that integrate Nvidia’s RTX GPUs for better performance.

“This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

Advanced Micro Devices sank on this news, as the hits seemingly come on both sides: the PC-chip partnership threatens to see Intel reclaim market share from AMD in that space, while the deepening of Nvidia’s data center offerings may also further entrench its dominance in that market to AMD’s detriment.

“For Intel, the deal provides a lifeline for its struggling AI GPU efforts and a potential lift in AI PC share,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada wrote. “For Nvidia, it secures a path to remain central in AI compute regardless of whether x86, Arm or custom CPUs dominate, by embedding NVLink and CUDA deeper into the ecosystem.”

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Luke Kawa

Nvidia to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN in partnership that deploys as much as 5 gigawatts of its AI infrastructure

Another day, another massive Nvidia warrants deal in the AI ecosystem.

Shares of data center company IREN spiked 20% in postmarket trading after it reached a pact with the chip designer to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of its AI offerings across data centers.

This means that IREN will effectively be building out data centers designed by Nvidia to optimize for its hardware. And some of that hardware deployed will seemingly then be utilized by Nvidia: IREN also announced a $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with the giant on Thursday.

As part of the arrangement, IREN issued Nvidia warrants that expire in five years that enable the company to buy up to 30 million shares at $70 apiece. If fully exercised, that would amount to a $2.1 billion investment into IREN.

This announcement took the sting out of IREN’s Q3 results, which saw the firm report sales of $144.8 million (compared to analyst estimates of $216.6 million) and adjusted EBITDA of $59.5 million (estimate: $125 million).

On Wednesday, Nvidia announced an investment of $500 million in fiber-optics firm Corning to accelerate its manufacturing capacity.

markets
Paige Oamek

Applied Optoelectronics sinks after Q1 sales miss, underwhelming Q2 revenue guidance

Applied Optoelectronics tumbled after-hours after the connectivity company reported lower-than-expected Q1 sales and underwhelming revenue guidance.

Here are the numbers:

  • Revenue of $151.1 million (compared to analyst estimates of $157.5 million).

  • An adjusted loss per share of $0.07 (estimate: a $0.05 loss).

  • An adjusted gross margin of 29.1% (estimate: 30.37%).

The company helps servers in large-scale data centers relay information, partnering with companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Last month, the stock surged after news broke that a key hyperscale customer, following an initial order, had significantly increased its demand for AAOI’s offerings.

For second quarter of 2026, the company expects:

  • Revenue in the range of $180 million to $198 million (estimate: $196.83 million).

  • Adjusted gross margin in the range of 29% to 30% (estimate: 31.42%).

In the press release, AAOI Chief Financial and Strategy Officer Dr. Stefan Murry said:

“Our focus remains on ramping our capacity thoughtfully to meet the unprecedented demand and are confident in our ability to execute on our ambitious growth plans, while ensuring reliability, quality, and a dedication to excellence.”

Demand for photonics does not seem to be in question, but judging by Lumentum’s post-earnings call on Tuesday and Applied Optoelectronics’ commentary, the challenge lies in securing supply.

AAOI was up nearly 300% since the beginning of the year before this print.

markets
Paige Oamek

Airbnb beats on Q1 revenue, increases guidance for current quarter

Shares of Airbnb whipsawed in after-hours trading Thursday after the company beat Wall Street estimates on revenue and raised guidance for the year, but missed on earnings per share, citing “macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty.”

Airbnb reported: 

  • Q1 revenue of $2.7 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $2.6 billion).

  • Adjusted EBITDA of $519 million (estimate: $483.2 million).

  • Adjusted diluted EPS of $0.26 (estimate: $0.29).

  • Q2 revenue sales guidance of $3.54 billion to $3.60 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 14% to 16% (estimate: $3.4 billion).

Investors were watching for initial impacts of the Iran war, gas prices, jet fuel costs, and cost-of-living increases on the company’s finances and projections.

Despite the difficult terrain, the company said that it’s confident going forward. For 2026, Airbnb raised its guidance, stating that it expects year-over-year revenue growth to accelerate to low to mid-teens and an adjusted EBITDA margin of at least 35%.

“The upward revision to our revenue outlook reflects meaningful progress across our growth initiatives and improvements to monetization through a simplified fee structure and our insurance programs, which are expected to lift our full-year take rate. We remain optimistic about our continued momentum, even as we face tougher comparisons in the back half of this year against the rollout of Reserve Now, Pay Later in 2025 and current headwinds from the Middle East conflict.”

Perhaps Wall Street is less certain about customers’ willingness to splurge on vacations given the state of things. According to the company, in Q1, roughly 20% of global booking value came from Reserve Now, Pay Later bookings.

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Matt Phillips

DraftKings rises after reporting better-than-expected Q1 numbers

Sports betting company DraftKings rose in aftermarket trading Thursday after it reported better-than-expected Q1 sales and earnings. Here’s a rough outline of the results:

  • Q1 revenue of $1.65 billion vs. Wall Street’s $1.63 billion expectation, according to FactSet.

  • Q1 earnings per share of $0.03 vs. the consensus estimate of $0.01.

  • Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $167.9 million vs. the $152.6 million expectation.

  • Maintained previous full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance of $700 million to $900 million, compared with estimates of $791.4 million.

  • Maintained previous full-year sales guidance of between $6.5 billion and $6.9 billion (midpoint $6.70 billion), compared with analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion, according to FactSet.

Shares of traditional online sports gambling platforms like DraftKings have struggled as prediction markets have emerged as a center of industry excitement.

The shift to such markets has been tricky for both DraftKings and rival FanDuel, the US leader in online sports betting, which have to manage preexisting relationships with state gaming commissions that stand to be disrupted by prediction markets, which are regulated on the federal level by the CFTC.

DraftKings is down roughly 25% in 2026, while FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment, which reported earnings yesterday, is down more than 50%.

markets
Luke Kawa

CoreWeave sinks after offering weak Q2 sales guidance

CoreWeave tumbled in postmarket trading after management unveiled soft Q2 guidance that failed to justify the stock’s 86% rally since late March.

In Q1, the neocloud firm reported:

  • Revenue of $2.1 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $2 billion).

  • Adjusted EBITDA of $1.2 billion (estimate: $1.1 billion).

While its revenue beat was only a little north of 5%, the figure surpassed all of the 32 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

During the conference call, management offered Q2 sales guidance of $2.45 billion to 2.6 billion, below the expected $2.7 billion. The outlook for adjusted operating income of $30 million to $90 million was also short of the consensus call for $153.9 million.

As of March 31, CoreWeave’s revenue backlog was a whopping $99.4 billion, up from $66.8 billion in the prior quarter.

“We surpassed 1 GW of active power and believe we are well on our way to more than 8 GW by 2030, having positioned our capital structure to scale with the opportunity ahead,” said CEO, cofounder, and Chairman Michael Intrator in a press release. “AI natives and enterprise customers are choosing CoreWeave because we sit between the models and the silicon, delivering the infrastructure, software, and expertise required to build and run AI at scale.”

At the end of the quarter, the company managed to close a unique debt deal backed by GPUs and what Meta is slated to pay for AI compute.

Since then, CoreWeave and its peers have been buoyed by a scramble for compute catalyzed by a seeming shortage for Anthropic, as the Claude developer aims to beef up its footprint amid complaints around usage limits.

CoreWeave reached a multiyear deal with Anthropic to help power Claude, and also expanded its AI compute sales pact with Meta by $21 billion.

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