Lyft shares climbed 20% Friday after the ride-sharing company upped its share buyback plan and posted better-than-expected gross bookings.

During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” CEO David Risher said that Lyft isn’t seeing “anything to worry about” despite widespread concerns of a slowing consumer amid ongoing economic uncertainty.

“Our team is stronger than it’s ever been, and the consumer demand is absolutely there,” he said.

Gross bookings grew 13% from a year ago to $4.16 billion, slightly beating a $4.15 billion estimate from StreetAccount. The company said the quarter was its 16th straight period of gross bookings growth.

Rides increased 16% to 218.4 million, topping a FactSet estimate of 215.1 million.

Lyft’s revenues grew 14% during the first quarter from a year ago to $1.45 billion, but fell short of a $1.47 billion estimate from LSEG. The company reported net income of $2.57 million, or 1 cent per share. That’s up from a net loss of $31.54 million, or 8 cents per share, a year ago.

The board also authorized boosting Lyft’s share repurchase plan to $750 million from $500 million. The company said it aims to use $500 million over the next year.

Activist investor Engine Capital said Friday it would halt its campaign at Lyft and withdraw its nominations to the company’s board of directors, citing the share buyback news.

“Following a series of productive conversations, the Board has taken an important first step by committing to significant share repurchases in the coming quarters,” founder and portfolio manager Arnaud Ajdler said in a release.

Shares of ride-sharing competitor Uber declined earlier this week after posting mixed first-quarter results.

Goldman Sachs upgraded shares to a buy from a neutral rating following the report, citing rides and bookings growth and “strong execution in a stable industry backdrop.”

Another major player has entered the quantum-computing race: Amazon. 

The tech giant is the latest to make waves in the field with the February announcement of Ocelot, its own quantum chip. Amazon joins fierce competition from familiar rivals in cloud computing as Google, Microsoft and others race after what they say could be their next frontier. 

While Amazon is widely known as an e-commerce giant, its business took a pivotal and profitable turn in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS is now a more than $100 billion business and a key part of why Amazon is worth over $2 trillion. The company sees quantum as the next major growth area for its cloud services.

“There’s a … strong business case for AWS or Amazon to get involved with quantum computing,” Oskar Painter, director of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, told CNBC. “Quantum computing is very much in line with that sort of business model where you would have off-premise quantum computing resources that can be made accessible through the cloud.” 

Part of the hype with quantum computing is the perceived payoff down the line. While still years away from commercial applications, McKinsey projects quantum could be a $173 billion market by 2040. 

“The opportunity to build just a supercharged part of AWS that can crack incredibly difficult problems, whether it’s related to drug discovery or cybersecurity … that is an opportunity for them to charge a lot more,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management.

CNBC’s Kate Rooney got an exclusive look inside the AWS Center for Quantum Computing located at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Founded in 2019, Amazon’s partnership with the university is starting to yield results, as it showcased the Ocelot quantum processor. Amazon says the chip, which it designed and fabricated in-house, uses a scalable architecture that reduces error correction by up to 90 percent. That’s a key obstacle in developing these machines. Google’s Willow chip, which was unveiled in December, also demonstrated improvements in this area.

Ocelot uses “cat qubits,” named after the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. The company says the design intrinsically suppresses certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction.

“The heart of these quantum computing systems … it’s really this quantum processor” Painter said. “The details of how that happens is really what differentiates one hardware platform from another – and really is where the secret sauce is and where all the intellectual property is.”

Munster said quantum-computing should be thought of as a new vertical within the AWS cloud business. 

“In the end, it will probably be solved and monetized through one of these big cloud platforms,” Munster said. “And AWS has a great shot at being successful there.”

Watch the video as Kate Rooney goes behind-the-scenes at Amazon and learns how the company is taking on Google and Microsoft in the quantum computing race.

Shares of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest contract chip maker, fell nearly 7% Friday after its first-quarter earnings missed estimates.

After trading on Thursday, the company reported a first-quarter revenue of $2.24 billion, up about 28% from a year earlier. Meanwhile, profit attributable to shareholders surged 162% year on year to $188 million.

However, both figures missed LSEG mean estimates of $2.34 billion in revenue and $225.1 million in net income, as well as the company’s own forecasts.

During an earnings call Friday, an SMIC representative said the earnings missed original guidance due to “production fluctuations” which sent blended average selling prices falling. This impact is expected to extend into the second quarter, they added.

For the current quarter, the chipmaker forecasted revenue to fall 4% to 6% sequentially. Gross margin is also expected to fall within the range of 18% to 20%, compared to 22.5% in the first quarter.

Still, the first quarter saw SMIC’s wafer shipments increase by 15% from the previous quarter and by about 28% year-on-year.

In the earnings call, SMIC attributed that growth to customer shipment pull in, brought by changes in geopolitics and increased demand driven by government policies such as domestic trade-in programs and consumption subsidies.

In another positive sign for the company, its first-quarter capacity utilization— the percentage of total available manufacturing capacity that is being used at any given time— reached 89.6%, up 4.1% quarter on quarter.

“SMIC’s nearly 90% utilization rate reflects strong domestic demand for semiconductors, likely driven by smartphone and consumer electronics production,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based semiconductor and technology analyst, adding that the demand was also reflected in the company’s strong quarterly revenue growth.

Meanwhile, the company said in the earnings call that it is “currently in an important period of capacity construction, roll out, and continuously increasing market share.”

However, SMIC’s first-quarter research and development spending decreased to $148.9 million, down from $217 million in the previous quarter.

Amid increased demand, it will be crucial for SMIC to continue ramping up their capacity, Simon Chen, principal analyst of semiconductor manufacturing at Informa Tech told CNBC.

SMIC generates most of its revenue from older-generation semiconductors, often referred to as “mature-node” or “legacy” chips, which are commonly found in consumer electronics and industrial equipment.

The state-backed chipmaker is critical to Beijing’s ambitions to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain, with the government pumping billions into such efforts. Over 84% of its first-quarter revenue was derived from customers in China.

“The localization transformation of the supply chain has been strengthened, and more manufacturing demand has shifted back domestically,” a representative said Friday.

However, chip analysts say the chipmaker’s ability to increase capacity in advance chips — used in applications that demand higher levels of computing performance and efficiency at higher yields — is limited.

This is due to U.S.-led export controls, which prevent it from accessing some of the world’s most advanced chip-making equipment from the Netherlands-based ASML. 

Nevertheless, the chipmaker appears to be making some breakthroughs. Advanced chips manufactured by SMIC have reportedly appeared in various Huawei products, notably in the Mate 60 Pro smartphone and some AI processors.

In the earnings call, the company also said it would closely monitor the potential impacts of the U.S.-China trade war on its demand, noting a lack of visibility for the second half of the year.

Phelix Lee, an equity analyst for Morningstar focused on semiconductors, told CNBC that the impacts of U.S. tariffs on SMIC are limited due to most of its revenue coming from Chinese customers.

While U.S. customers make up about 8-15% of revenue on a quarterly basis, the chips usually remain and are consumed in Chinese products and end users, he said.

“There could be some disruption to chemical, gas, and equipment supply; but the firm is working on alternatives in China and other non-U.S. regions,” he added.

SMIC’s Hong Kong-listed shares have gained over 32.23% year-to-date.