S&P 500 endures biggest drop of year

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.