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Meta shares surge on better-than-expected revenue

Meta shares popped in extended trading on Wednesday after the company reported fourth-quarter revenue that topped estimates and announced a $40 billion stock buyback. Here are the results.

  • Earnings: $1.76 per share
  • Revenue:  $32.17 billion vs $31.53 billion expected, according to Refinitiv

The company also reported restructuring charges for its Family of Apps segment and Reality Labs unit of $3.76 billion and $440 million, respectively during the fourth quarter of 2022. Because of those charges, it’s difficult to compare the company’s earnings per share to analyst estimates of $2.22 per share.

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Here are some other key numbers:

  • Daily Active Users (DAUs): 2 billion vs 1.99 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Monthly Active Users (MAUs):  2.96 billion vs 2.98 billion expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Average Revenue per User (ARPU): $10.86 vs $10.63 expected, according to StreetAccount

Revenue in the fourth quarter fell 4% from a year earlier, marking a third straight quarter of declining sales. The company’s cost and expenses ballooned 22% year-over-year to $25.8 billion.

Anwar Almojarkesh (L) and Alan Chalabi (R) from England take a photo at Meta (formerly Facebook) corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022.

Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

Meta said it expects revenue in the first quarter of between $26 billion and $28.5 billion.  Analysts were expecting sales of $27.1 billion, according to Refinitv. Sales in the first quarter of 2021 came in at $27.9 billion. Should Meta reach the high end of its guidance range, the company could end its streak of year-over-year declines.

“Our community continues to grow and I’m pleased with the strong engagement across our apps,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”

Meta said that its headcount increased 20% year-over-year to 86,482 as of December 31, 2022. That number includes a large chunk of the over 11,000 workers that Meta said it would lay off last November.

The company expects that its total expenses in 2023 will be in the range of $89 billion to $95 billion, which is lower than its prior outlook of $94 billion to $100 billion for the year. Meta attributed the adjustment to “slower anticipated growth in payroll expenses and cost of revenue.”

Meta also said that it’s lowering its capital expenditure estimates for the year to be in the range of $30 billion to $33 billion, down from $34 billion to $37 billion. That’s partly due to the company spending less money on data center construction. Instead, Meta said it’s shifting to a different kind of data center architecture intended to be more cost efficient while acting as the backbone of its various artificial intelligence projects.

Meta said on Wednesday that it authorized a $40 billion increase to its stock repurchase plan. The company bought back $27.9 billion worth of its shares last year.

Earlier this week, Snap reported fourth quarter earnings that missed on sales, sending its shares tumbling. While much smaller than Meta, Snap faces some of the same challenges, including a slowdown in online advertising spend, increased competition from TikTok and a weakened targeting advertising system due to Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update.

Alphabet and Amazon will wrap up earnings reports from the major online ad platforms on Thursday, followed by Pinterest next week.

Meta shares plummeted by over 60% last year, as Zuckerberg struggled to sell Wall Street on his plan to pivot the company towards the yet-to-be-developed world of the metaverse. Zuckerberg has said the metaverse, which would include virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, could represent the next major way people interact.

The big bet has frustrated investors, who worry the company is putting too much focus on a futuristic endeavor while its core ad business struggles to revive growth. Meta’s Reality Labs unit, home to the metaverse ambitions, lost $4.28 billion in the fourth quarter, bringing its total operating loss for the year to $13.72 billion.

Meta said last year that “Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year.”

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Nvidia looking to halt H20 chip production after China cracks down on purchases, reports say

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Nvidia looking to halt H20 chip production after China cracks down on purchases, reports say

An Nvidia chip is seen through a magnifying glass in Beijing, China, on August 1, 2025.

Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images

Nvidia has asked some of its component suppliers to stop production related to its made-for-China H20 general processing units, as Beijing cracks down on the American chip darling, The Information reported Friday. 

The directive comes weeks after the Chinese government told local tech companies to stop buying the chips due to alleged security concerns, the report said, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Nvidia reportedly has asked Arizona-based Amkor Technology, which handles the advanced packaging of the company’s H20 chips, and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, which supplies memory for them, to halt production. Samsung and Amkor did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. 

A separate report from Reuters, citing sources, said that Nvidia had asked Foxconn to suspend work related to the H20s. Foxconn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In response to an inquiry from CNBC, an Nvidia spokesperson said “We constantly manage our supply chain to address market conditions.”

The news further throws the return of the H20s to the China market in doubt, after Washington said it would issue export licenses, allowing the chip’s exports to China — whose shipment had effectively been banned in April.  

Last month, the Cyberspace Administration of China had summoned Nvidia regarding national security concerns with the H20s and had asked the company to provide information on the chips. 

Beijing has raised concerns that the chips could be have certain tracking technology or “backdoors,” allowing them to be operated remotely. U.S. lawmakers have proposed legislation that would require AI chips under export regulations to be equipped with location-tracking systems to avoid their illegal shipments.

Speaking to reporters in Taiwan on Friday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged that China had asked questions about security “backdoors,” and that the company had made it clear they do not exist.

“Hopefully the response that we’ve given to the Chinese government will be sufficient. We’re in discussions with them,” he said, adding that Nvidia had been “surprised” by the queries.

“As you know, [Beijing] requested and urged us to secure licenses for the H20s, for some time and I’ve worked quite hard to help them secure the licenses, and so hopefully this will be resolved,” he said.

Nvidia in a statement on Friday said “The market can use the H20 with confidence.”

It added: “As both governments recognize, the H20 is not a military product or for government infrastructure. China won’t rely on American chips for government operations, just like the U.S. government would not rely on chips from China. However, allowing U.S. chips for beneficial commercial business use is good for everyone.”

Last month, Nvidia had reportedly sent notices to major tech companies and AI developers urging them against the use of the H20s, in what first had appeared as a soft mandate. The Information later reported that Beijing had told some firms, including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent,  to halt orders of the chips altogether, until the completion of a national security review. 

It had been seen as a major win for Nvidia when Huang announced last month that the U.S. government would allow sales of the company’s H20 chips to China.

However, the national security scrutiny the H20s are now facing from the Chinese side, highlights the difficulties of navigating Nvidia’s business through increasing tensions and shifting trade policy between Washington and Beijing. 

Chip industry analysts have also said Beijing’s actions appear to reinforce its commitment to its own chip self-sufficiency campaigns and its intention to resist the Trump administration’s plan to keep American AI hardware dominant in China.

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Google scores six-year Meta cloud deal worth over $10 billion

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Google scores six-year Meta cloud deal worth over  billion

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta has agreed to spend more than $10 billion on Google cloud services, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The agreement spans six years, said the people, who asked not to be named because the terms are confidential. The deal was reported earlier by The Information.

Google is aiming to land big cloud contracts as it chases larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in cloud infrastructure. Earlier this year Google won cloud business from OpenAI, which had earlier been deeply dependent on Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure.

Alphabet said in July that the Google Cloud unit, which contains productivity software subscriptions in addition to infrastructure, produced $2.83 billion in operating income on $13.6 billion in revenue during the second quarter. Revenue growth of 32% outpaced expansion of 13.8% for the company as a whole.

Meta’s deal with Google is mainly around artificial intelligence infrastructure, said one of the people. Meta said in its earnings report last month that it expects total expenses for 2025 to come in the range of $114 billion and $118 billion. It’s investing heavily in AI infrastructure and talent, building out its Llama family of models and adding AI across its portfolio of services.  

Meta and Google have long been rivals in online ads. But Meta needs all the cloud infrastructure it can access. The company operates data centers and has made commitments to use cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft.

Google declined to comment.

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Workday beats estimates but CEO warns of challenges in education and government

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Workday beats estimates but CEO warns of challenges in education and government

CEO of Workday Carl M. Eschenbach and Ana Eschenbach attend the Allen and Company Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at The Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 10, 2025.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Workday reported an earnings beat on Thursday, but issued guidance that was inline with estimates and warned of pressure in some areas. The shares slipped in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did relative to LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $2.21 adjusted vs. $2.11 expected
  • Revenue: $2.35 billion vs. $2.34 billion expected

Revenue increased 13% from a year earlier in the fiscal second quarter, which ended on July 31, according to a statement. The company’s net income rose to $228 million, or 84 cents per share, from $132 million, or 49 cents per share, in the same quarter last year.

For the current quarter, Workday called for $2.24 billion in subscription revenue and $180 million in professional services, which implies $2.42 billion in total revenue. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected a total of $2.42 billion. The company sees an adjusted operating margin of 28.0%, just below the 28.1% consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.

Workday, which provides software for finance and human resources departments, now sees $8.82 billion in subscription revenue for the full year, and $700 million in professional services revenue, implying a total of $9.52 billion. The LSEG consensus was $9.51 billion.

The part of Workday that works with state and local governments faced challenges during the quarter, CEO Carl Eschenbach said on the earnings call.

“I think we’ll continue to see that as people are trying to figure out what the funding slowdown is going to look like, all the way to the state level,” he said.

Meanwhile, higher education in the U.S. is facing pressure from President Donald Trump, who signed an executive order in March to shut down the Department of Education.

“If it’s a higher ed university that includes a healthcare system, they too are getting a little pullback in funding,” Eschenbach said. “So it’s something we’re keeping our eye on.”

Also on Thursday Workday said it’s acquiring Paradox, a company with conversational artificial intelligence software for recruiting, for undisclosed terms. During the quarter, Workday announced AI agents for extracting accounting details from documents and reporting absent days.

As of Thursday’s market close, Workday shares were down about 12% this year, while the Nasdaq is up about 9%.

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