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Hyunsoo Rim2/28/25

SoundHound jumps as much as 15% after earnings beat, finding gains even after growth stocks got thumped

SoundHound, the AI voice tech company, surged in trading on Friday after crushing Q4 earnings and raising its 2025 outlook. Revenue doubled year over year to $34.5 million — its “strongest quarter on record,” per CEO Keyvan Mohajer — beating analyst estimates of $33.7 million. Adjusted EPS came in at a loss of $0.05 per share, topping Wall Street’s expected $0.08 per share loss, according to Barron’s. The surge came despite many other high-flying growth stocks coming under intense scrutiny after yesterday’s sell-off.

After going public in 2022, SoundHound AI spent nearly two years as a penny stock — until it got a major bump in February 2024, when AI darling Nvidia disclosed a stake in the company, catalyzing a staggering 800% run-up in its shares last year.

2025 started off rough, with shares sliding ~30% — but the bigger blow came two weeks ago when an SEC filing revealed that Nvidia had completely shed its stake in Q4, triggering a ~28% single-day drop. Mohajer brushed off the panic, calling it “a bit of an overreaction,” in an interview with Barron’s.

Specializing in voice AI for businesses, SoundHound currently automates customer orders at over 10,000 restaurants in the US, including Chipotle and Jersey Mike’s. In January, the company unveiled an in-car voice commerce platform that allows drivers to order and pay for takeout hands-free — though investors weren’t impressed, with shares dipping 10% after the announcement.

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Google and Blackstone to create new AI cloud firm, sending neoclouds like Coreweave and Nebius lower

Alphabet’s Google and Blackstone are creating a new US-based AI cloud company, backed by an initial $5 billion equity investment from Blackstone, the asset manager announced Monday — sending shares of rival AI cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius down nearly 4% in premarket trading Tuesday.

Blackstone Announces Joint Venture with Google to Create New TPU Cloud - Blackstone

Blackstone Announces Joint Venture with Google to Create New TPU Cloud - Blackstone

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Claire Yubin Oh1h

ServiceNow rises after Bank of America analysts reinstate as a Buy with a $130 price target

ServiceNow is up 4% in early trading on Tuesday, after Bank of America analysts reinstated coverage of the stock with a buy rating and a $130 price objective.

Now seeing the company as an “AI beneficiary given its entrenched workflow position,” Bank of America analysts, led by Tal Liani, wrote that “AI increases the need for governance, positioning ServiceNow at the center of workflow orchestration and control.” Replacing NOW with new AI tools, which has been the primary concern for many investors who have dumped the stock this year (the company's earnings being the latest example), will be “costly and complex,” considering the company’s “deeply embedded mission-critical position” within existing enterprise workflows, according to BofA's analysts.

The threat of AI agents, which can autonomously do tasks once set up, might actually lead to more demand for ServiceNow's products, with Liani writing that agentic AI deployments "would elevate the need for orchestration, permissions, approvals, policy enforcement and auditability, aligning directly with ServiceNow's core capabilities and making it the orchestration layer in an AI-driven cycle".

The team also highlighted how ServiceNow’s recent initiatives would benefit from AI, rather than being threatened:

“[W]e see the company capturing incremental value as AI adoption scales: AI Control Tower defines the strategic role; Action Fabric provides the connective layer into workflows; hybrid pricing creates the monetization model; and the Armis/Veza acquisitions strengthen the security and identity context.”

That’s a much-needed vote of confidence for NOW, which has seen its shares drop more than 40% in 2026 until the past week’s uptick. Other software peers like Workday, Atlassian, HubSpot, and Intuit are also in the green before the bell on Tuesday.

Tasha Matsumoto

Tech drags down stocks as semiconductors slip

Stocks fell as memory and semiconductor shares declined, along with five of the Magnificent 7 names.

Bears awaken from hibernation at the zoo in Thale

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Memory stocks tumble after Seagate warns on difficulty of meeting demand, bond yields edge higher

Memory stocks are cratering on Monday after media reports indicating that Seagate Technology Holdings CEO Dave Mosley warned that it would “just take too long” to boost capacity to meet AI-fueled demand.

Micron, Sandisk, and Western Digital are down in addition to Seagate.

Another place to look to help explain the group’s sudden travails (lumping together flash, storage, and high-bandwidth): memory stocks have displayed an elevated level of momentum, and momentum stocks have generally come under acute pressure during sudden bond market sell-offs.

Mosley’s answer, delivered at a JPMorgan conference, is worth reading in full, as the summarized media reports miss some of the nuance (emphasis added):

“What our customers are driving us for right now is more exabytes. And we believe that the way to get the most exabytes is to take our talented teams and really go through these technology transitions. We're targeting mid-20s percent growth, which is enormous CAGR. And the only way we're going to get there is to be able to go through those technology transitions, if you will, to take a 3 terabyte per platter product to a 4 terabyte per platter to a 5 terabyte per platter year over year over year. And so that's really the way we're driving it. If we took the teams off and started building new factories or bringing up new machines, it would just take too long. You would end up more capacity, if you will, but then you'd slow the rate of growth on that technology. So back to your question directly, the wildcard really is in unit capacity for disk drives, which we again could be fairly flexible with once we package those heads and media. That gets down to more customer diversification and edge and edge AI and all those use cases, which I think could come someday. So we would take the heads and media that we have planned and divert them somewhere else should those applications take hold.

To grossly oversimplify Mosley’s answer, he’s saying that in a resource-constrained environment, technology improvements are the better way to meet demand than building out more capacity.

Reasonable folks can quibble about how negative these remarks really are for the industry.

On one hand, not getting over their skis on capex is something that, all else equal, would protect profitability over time and avoid the boom-bust cycles that have plagued the industry.

On the other hand, that gives more time for competitors (especially those from China) to try to step in and meet the market’s appetite for memory. To that end, Changxin Memory Technologies is posting massive growth as it readies for an IPO.

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Lumentum, Coherent fall after hedge fund manager Aschenbrenner dumps his holdings

Shares of Lumentum and Coherent plunged Monday after Leopold Aschenbrenner, ex-OpenAI researcher turned investor, disclosed his Situational Awareness fund exited its holdings in those companies during the first quarter.

By the afternoon, Lumentum was down 11% and Coherent was down over 6%. The losses are relatively small compared to the over 120% and 80% gains the AI infrastructure companies had put up, respectively, since January.

The two companies are developers of phonetics and optical equipment, which help data centers and AI hyperscalers transmit data.

Aschenbrenner’s firm, Situational Awareness, is making major market ripples today, also sending shares of T1 Energy soaring on news he bought the stock.

He also made a bearish bet against Nvidia, which recently invested $4 billion ($2 billion each) into Lumentum and Coherent.

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