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Nia Warfield

Spotify tanks after posting surprise Q2 loss, weaker-than-expected Q3 outlook

Spotify shares fell over 7% in premarket trading Tuesday after the audio streamer swung to a loss for the second quarter and gave a lighter-than-expected Q3 outlook.

The company reported a loss of 0.42 euros (~$0.49) per share, while Wall Street had expected profit of 1.97 euros (~$2.27) per share. Revenue came in at 4.19 billion euros ($4.8 billion), missing analysts’ estimates of around 4.27 billion euros ($4.9 billion). 

Monthly active users climbed 11% to 696 million, the second-highest Q2 MAU count in the company’s history and beating expectations. Premium subscribers also grew 12% to 276 million, topping Wall Street’s expected 273.4 million and prior company guidance of 273 million. The combination of higher-than-expected users and lower-than-expected sales pushed average revenue per user among premium subscribers lower for the second straight quarter.

That trend seems poised to continue: for Q3, Spotify expects total MAUs to hit 710 million, ahead of the 707 million analysts anticipated. But it’s guiding for revenue of 4.2 billion euros, coming in short of the 4.48 billion euros expected by the Street. Foreign exchange fluctuations — notably, the strength of the euro versus the US dollar to date in 2025, even after yesterday’s massive bout of weakness following the US-EU trade deal — are a big factor behind Spotify’s lackluster revenue outlook.

Spotify has been focused on improving margins and moving toward consistent profitability, but the company took on higher payroll taxes than expected during Q2 as well as a change in its revenue mix.

Spotify shares were up 53% year to date ahead of the report.

“Currency headwinds and underwhelming 3Q gross margin guidance may be disappointing for Spotify, but we believe they are short-term noise that shouldn’t overshadow the tailwinds,” Bloomberg Intelligence senior industry analyst Geetha Ranganathan wrote.

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Toby Bochan, Luke Kawa
10m
Markets end the week in the red as Broadcom and Oracle concerns drag the entire AI trade down

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 were all negative on Friday.

The lunchbox
markets
Matt Phillips

Data center trade deep in the red

The data center trade is seeing its steepest sell-off since the market rout that was ignited by President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement back in April.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of AI data center shares was down more than 6% at around 12 p.m. ET, putting it on track for its worst day since the tariff announcement.

Losses hammered seemingly every form of input needed for the sprawling concrete server warehouses at the heart of the investment boom.

Hardware makers including data storage companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings, as well as DRAM maker Micron — some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year — were taking a licking, as were networking stocks Cisco and Arista Networks and data center builders such as Vertiv Holdings and electrical and mechanical contractor Emcor.

Optimism for all things AI has seemed to evaporate throughout the week, as the stock market greeted lackluster quarterly numbers from Oracle and Broadcom with jittery sell-offs and concern about growing debts that could crater cash flows.

Those worries seem to be spreading to ancillary beneficiaries of the AI boom on Friday, gouging a chunk out of charts that retail dip buyers have not — at least so far — stepped in to buy as we head into the weekend.

markets
Luke Kawa

Oracle denies Bloomberg report that it’s delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027

Getting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar backlog for cloud computing revenues from data center projects is easy. Building them is hard.

Oracle extended declines to as much as -6.5% on the day on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the cloud giant has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it’s building for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, citing people familiar with the work. Oracle denied this report, telling Reuters that there have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments and that all milestones remain on track.

Shares had fully pared their report-induced drop ahead of Oracle’s reply, but remain in the red for the day.

Bloomberg said the reported postponement was attributed to labor and material shortages.

Oracle has been spending more on capex than Wall Street had anticipated, leading to higher-than-expected cash burn. Management boosted its full-year capital spending plans by $15 billion after reporting Q2 results earlier this week.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales came in short of estimates in its fiscal 2026 Q2, a signal that markets already had reason to doubt its ability to quickly turn its humungous RPO (that is, remaining purchase obligations) into revenues.

Traders also seem to be of the mind that potential delays to data center completions are going to limit sales for what goes into them.

Some of the bigger losers since the Bloomberg headline hit the wires include:

markets
Luke Kawa

Broadcom’s post-earnings tumble is weighing on Google’s entire AI ecosystem

Broadcom’s post-earnings plunge is prompting a sharp pullback in Google-linked AI stocks, which had been on fire thanks to the warm reception to Gemini 3.

The stocks getting hit hard:

A basket of these Google-linked AI stocks compiled by Morgan Stanley is suffering one of its worst losses of the year. This brisk retreat also follows the release of GPT-5.2 by OpenAI.

markets
Matt Phillips

Citi initiates coverage of Planet Labs with “buy” rating

Planet Labs was up after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.

The stock is up more than 40% this week, after a strong earnings result that spotlighted the company’s growing opportunity in linking its core business of capturing daily images of the planet with AI technologies.

Citi analysts noted the potential for a positive flywheel effect for Planet Labs as it deepens its focus on integrating AI into its offerings:

“AI is accelerating the conversion of pixels to decisions, where Planet’s daily scan and deep archive offer a uniquely large training corpus and broad-area foundation for automation. AI-enabled solutions (MDA/GMS/AMS) are gaining traction with customers such as NATO and the U.S. DoW, validating the approach of integrating AI into broad-area monitoring products... These AI moves create a compounding advantage: more coverage generates more training data, which improves models, which in turn increases product utility and addressable demand.”

The stock has also caught the attention of some of the retail trading crowd, with call options activity spiking on Thursday as traders rode the market reaction to the results.

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