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Luke Kawa

Micron soars after reporting huge Q1 beat, with Q2 guidance ahead of every Wall Street analyst’s estimates

Micron has soaring double digits after the memory chip specialist posted stellar results for its fiscal Q1 2026 and a much better outlook for the current quarter than Wall Street anticipated after the close on Wednesday.

For Q1, the company reported:

  • Revenues: $13.64 billion (estimate: $12.95 billion)

  • Adjusted earnings per share: $4.78 (estimate: $3.95)

And the Street’s consensus was well ahead of even the upper ranges of the guidance provided by management for the quarter for sales of $12.5 billion (plus or minus $300 million) and $3.75 (plus or minus $0.15).

For Q2, management provided an outlook for adjusted revenues of $18.3 billion to $19.1 billion, and adjusted EPS of $8.22 to $8.62. Wall Street had penciled in revenues of $14.38 billion with adjusted EPS of $4.71.

Even the bottom end of the ranges management provided is well above the top analyst’s estimate for the quarter.

“We are in a very interesting environment where the aggregate demand for both DRAM and NAND is substantially higher than the ability to supply to it not just from a Micron perspective but even that aggregate industry level,” said Micron chief business officer and executive vice president Sumit Sadana. “So we are not really able to meet the demand for customers across any segment.”

These results may help spark a revival in semi stocks, which have gotten trounced in recent sessions. Hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital are also rising on Thursday, as is flash memory seller Sandisk.

Micron has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 since last Thursday’s record close, down double digits from then until Wednesday close as investors broadly dumped AI names. Prior to that, shares had been on fire amid a bevy of Wall Street price target hikes and surging memory chip prices as demand runs ahead of supply. The AI boom has fueled a spike of immense appetite not only for GPUs and custom chips but also memory chips as well, as data centers also need a boatload of these to store information and feed it to those processors. Micron and its major competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung, have already sold out production for their most advanced high-bandwidth memory offerings for calendar year 2026.

Micron recently announced that it would be exiting its consumer chip business to focus on serving its AI customers.

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Nvidia poised to invest $20 billion in OpenAI, per report

Nvidia is close to investing $20 billion in OpenAI’s funding round, per Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter.

That would make its OpenAI stake more than the market value of chip designer’s entire portfolio of publicly traded stocks (a little over $15 billion, assuming no changes since their most recent filings).

Media reports have suggested that Amazon and SoftBank would be contributing even more to this oft-discussed funding round, in which the Sam Altman-led venture is aiming to raise $100 billion.

It’s a fairly happy ending after the two sides traded barbs in the press over the past few days, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had privately questioned the “lack of discipline” in the ChatGPT maker’s business approach, while sources told Reuters that OpenAI was “unsatisfied” by the performance of Nvidia’s AI chips and seeking alternatives.

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Chipotle beats Q4 estimates, but sinks on underwhelming full-year guidance

Chipotle reported earnings results that beat Wall Street estimates, but gave underwhelming full-year guidance.

For the last three months of 2025, Chipotle reported:

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $0.25, compared to the $0.24 analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.

  • Revenue of $3 billion, a bit higher than the $2.9 billion the Street was penciling in.

  • A comparable-store sales decline of 2.5%, less than the 2.9% decline the Street was expecting.

For the full year in 2026, Chipotle expects:

  • Comparable-store sales to be flat, compared to the 1.7% growth analysts were expecting.

Chipotle has struggled to spark sales over the past year and has previously cited strained consumers as a major headwind. The company fell more than 9% in after-hours trading shortly after the report was released.

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Take-Two raises its net bookings outlook, reaffirms November release for “Grand Theft Auto 6”

“Grand Theft Auto” and “NBA 2K” maker Take-Two reported results for its fiscal third quarter on Tuesday. Its shares climbed about 4% in after-hours trading.

The company posted net bookings, or the amount customers spent on its products, of $1.76 billion, up 28% from the same quarter last year. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet expected $1.58 billion. In November, Take-Two guided for Q3 net bookings of between $1.55 billion and $1.6 billion.

Take-Two hiked its full-year bookings outlook to between $6.65 billion and $6.7 billion, up from a range of $6.4 billion to $6.5 billion. The new outlook compares to Wall Street’s $6.47 billion estimate. The gaming giant trimmed its full-year net loss guidance to between $369 million and $338 million (prior guidance: between $414 million and $349 million).

In its last quarter, Take-Two pushed back the planned release date of “Grand Theft Auto 6” from May 2026 to November 19, 2026. The company reaffirmed that date in Tuesday’s report. The game’s last trailer came in May 2025.

Shares of Take-Two and other major gaming companies have been sinking since late last week as investors react to early showcases of Google’s Project Genie, which allows users to generate interactive, “playable” worlds with a text or image prompt. As of Tuesday’s close, Take-Two has shed nearly $6 billion in market cap since Project Genie was released.

Analysts have called the market reaction unjustified, saying that the tool doesn’t allow for meaningful interactivity or replay-ability. According to mBank analyst Piotr Poniatowski, Project Genie is — at the moment — essentially a “one-minute-long walking simulator generator.”

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