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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Marlene Awaad | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Other than Apple, it was a brutal earnings week for Big Tech.

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft combined lost over $350 billion in market cap after offering concerning commentary for the third quarter and the remainder of the year. Between slowing revenue growth — or declines in Meta’s case — and efforts to control costs, the tech giants have found themselves in an unfamiliar position after unbridled growth in the past decade.

Third-quarter results this week came against the backdrop of soaring inflation, rising interest rates and a looming recession. Apple bucked the trend after beating expectations for revenue and profit. The stock on Friday had its best day in over two years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was Meta, which has seen its stock price collapse in 2022. Facebook’s parent came up short on earnings, recorded its lowest average revenue per user in two years and said sales in the fourth quarter will likely decline for a third straight period.

“There are a lot of things going on right now in the business and in the world, and so it’s hard to have a simple ‘We’re going to do this one thing, and that’s going to solve all the issues,'” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday.

Meta’s stock had its worst week since the company’s IPO in 2012, plunging 24% over the past five days. Microsoft fell 2.6% for the week, due to a 7.7% decline on Wednesday after the company gave weak guidance for the year-end period and missed estimates for cloud revenue.

Things were also bleak at Amazon, which dropped 13%. A gloomy fourth-quarter forecast along with a dramatic slowdown in its cloud-computing unit were largely to blame for the sell-off.

While Amazon Web Services saw expansion slow to 27.5% from 33% in the prior period, Google’s cloud group, which is significantly smaller, sped up to almost 38% growth from around 36%. Google plans to keep spending in cloud even as it intends to rein in headcount overall growth in the next few quarters.

“We are excited about the opportunity, given that businesses and governments are still in the early days of public cloud adoption, and we continue to invest accordingly,” Ruth Porat, Alphabet CFO, said on a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. “We remain focused on the longer-term path to profitability.”

However, results from the rest of Google parent Alphabet were less impressive. The company’s core advertising business grew just slightly, and YouTube’s ad revenue dropped from the prior year. The reverse was true for Amazon, which is playing catchup to Google and Facebook in digital advertising. In Amazon’s ad business, revenue growth accelerated to 30% from 21%, topping analysts’ estimates.

“Advertisers are looking for effective advertising, and our advertising is at the point where consumers are ready to spend,” said Brian Olsavsky, the company’s finance chief. “We have a lot of advantages that we feel that will help both consumers and also our partners like sellers and advertisers.”

Analyst Aaron Kessler at Raymond James lowered his price target on Amazon stock to $130 from $164 after the results. But he maintained his equivalent of a buy rating on the stock and said the company’s “robust advertising growth” has the potential to help Amazon fatten up its margin.

As investors continue to rotate away from tech, they’re finding money-making opportunities in other parts of the market that had previously lagged behind software and internet names. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 3% this week, the fourth weekly gain in a row for the index. Prior to 2021, the Dow had underperformed the Nasdaq for five straight years.

WATCH: Wall Street set to open in the red as investors digest disappointing tech earnings

Wall Street set to open in the red as investors digest disapointing tech earnings

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

AI chipmaker Cerebras pulls IPO after raising $1 billion

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.

In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.

Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.

The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.

“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”

Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.

Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.

The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.

The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.

“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”

At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.

Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.

Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.

Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.

Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.

The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.

While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.

Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here’s what’s driving the big move

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here's what's driving the big move

Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.

CNBC

Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.

Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.

The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.

Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.

In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”

Investors have piled into quantum computing technology this year, as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have embraced the technology with a wave of new chip announcements, multi-million dollar investments and research plans.

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