Tech stocks still haven’t fully rebounded from a miserable 2022, but they’re rewarding investors who saw the selloff as too extreme.
The Nasdaq Composite gained 2% this week, wrapping up the sixth straight weekly rally for the tech-heavy index. It’s the longest such stretch since January 2020, before the Covid pandemic hit the U.S.
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Stocks across the board got a big boost on Friday after a strong jobs report for May and the Senate’s passage of a debt ceiling bill Thursday night, which allowed the U.S. to avert default. President Biden still has to sign the bill.
While last week’s gains were spurred by Nvidia’s earnings report and a surge in optimism around demand for technologies powering artificial intelligence workloads, this week didn’t see any notable news in the mega-cap group. But there was continued upward momentum.
Among the most-valuable Nasdaq companies, Tesla led the way, with an 11% increase for the week. Shares of the electric vehicle maker are now up 74% for the year after losing roughly two-thirds of their value in 2022.
Tesla and Nvidia, which has climbed 169% this year, have helped pull the Nasdaq up 27% in 2023, far outpacing the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. After peaking in late 2021, the Nasdaq plummeted 33% last year, its steepest drop since the financial crisis, on concerns surrounding inflation and rising interest rates. The index is still about 18% off its all-time high.
“I’m focusing on mega-cap tech here and semiconductors as well,” said Danielle Shay, vice president of options at Simpler Trading, in an interview on CNBC’s “The Exchange” on Friday. “The A.I. trade has been absolutely phenomenal.”
In the cloud software corner of tech, some earnings reports are still providing a boost.
MongoDB, the developer of a cloud-based database, jumped 33% for the week. The company on Thursday reported earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ estimates and raised its guidance for fiscal 2024.
On MongoDB’s earnings call, CEO Dev Ittycheria said his company’s products are seeing increased usage as clients look for efficiencies and cut costs.
“It’s clear customers continue to scrutinize their technology investments and must decide which technologies are a must-have, versus merely nice to have,” he said.
Cybersecurity vendor SentinelOne and software developer PagerDuty experienced the flipside of the equation.
SentinelOne plunged 35% for the week after the company lowered its guidance and announced layoffs. Finance Chief David Bernhardt said on SentinelOne’s earnings call that large customers have been using the technology less and that, due to the “current macro environment, we expect these lower usage and consumption trends to persist.”
PagerDuty dropped 14% this week. The provider of technology that helps IT departments respond to incidents slashed its forecast for the year “in anticipation of continued pressure” at small and medium-sized businesses, CFO Howard Wilson said on the call.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
During an earnings call with analysts, Micron, which makes memory storage used for computers and artificial intelligence servers, said data center needs have fueled greater demand for its products.
Micron said it expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to hit $100 billion by 2028, growing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. Management also upped its capital expenditures guidance to $20 billion from $18 billion.
“We are more than sold out,” said business chief Sumit Sadana. “We have a significant amount of unmet demand in our models and this is just consistent with an environment where the demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future.
Micron topped Wall Street estimates for the fiscal first quarter and issued blowout guidance.
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The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.78 per share on $13.64 billion in revenue, surpassing LSEG estimates for earnings of $3.95 per share and $12.84 billion in sales.
Revenues in the current quarter are expected to hit about $18.70 billion, blowing past the $14.20 billion expected by LSEG. Adjusted earnings are forecast to reach $8.42, versus expectations of $4.78 per share.
JPMorgan upped its price target on the stock following the results, citing the favorable pricing setup, while Bank of America upgraded shares to a buy rating.
Morgan Stanley called the results the best revenue and net income upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” outside of Nvidia.
“If AI keeps growing as we expect, we believe that the next 12 months are going to have broader coat tails to the AI trade than just the processor names and memory would be the biggest beneficiary,” analysts wrote.