A Xpeng P7 electric car is on display during the 18th Guangzhou International Automobile Exhibition at China Import and Export Fair Complex on November 20, 2020 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province of China.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Xpeng on Friday reported a wider-than-expected loss in the second quarter, sending the Chinese electric car maker’s shares down more than 7% in pre-market U.S. trade.
The net loss was wider than the 2.7 billion yuan loss reported in the second quarter of last year. It was also the highest quarterly loss that Xpeng has posted since going public in August 2020.
Despite the hit on profit, the Chinese company’s second-quarter revenue met expectations.
Here’s how Xpeng did against Refinitiv consensus estimates for the second quarter:
Net loss: 2.8 billion yuan loss vs. 2.13 billion yuan loss expected
Revenue: 5.06 billion Chinese yuan ($693.7 million) vs. 5.06 billion yuan expected, representing a 31% year-on-year fall.
Xpeng also said that its gross margin turned negative 3.9% compared with positive 10.9% during the same period of 2022.
The company is attempting to turn around the business this year, after a torrid 2022 during which its share price crashed by more than 80%.
Xpeng is operating in a weak Chinese economy with depressed consumer spending, while at the same time facing cut-throat competition in China from other upstarts like Nio and Li Auto, as well as giants BYD and Tesla.
Competition is still ramping up, as a price war develops in the world’s second-largest economy. Tesla this week cut the price of its Model Y and Model S cars and offered discounts on existing inventory of the Model S and Model X in China.
Xpeng said its vehicle margin was negative 8.6% in the second quarter, compared to positive 9.1% in the same period of last year. Xpeng blamed this decline on “inventory write-downs and losses on inventory purchase commitments” related to its G3i vehicle, as well as on increased sales promotions and on the expiry of Chinese electric vehicle subsidies.
Xpeng’s is hoping its latest car — the G6 Ultra Smart Coupe SUV — which was launched at the end of the second quarter, will boost margins.
“With the G6 and other new products accelerating sales growth, we expect gross margin to gradually recover while operating efficiency continues to improve and free cash flow to substantially improve,” Brian Gu, co-president of Xpeng, said in the Friday earnings press release.
That’s the sixth consecutive month of delivery growth, underscoring the early signs of a recovery, at least for deliveries.
Xpeng said that it expects vehicle deliveries to be between 39,000 and 41,000 in the third quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of approximately 31.9% to 38.7%. The figure would also sit higher than the deliveries recorded in the second quarter.
The company forecast its revenue will be between 8.5 billion yuan and 9 billion yuan in the third quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of around 24.6% to 31.9%.
Xpeng has also reorganized its management structure and experienced an overhaul over the past few months, in a bid to unlock growth.
Rising deliveries have given investors some confidence that a turnaround is underway, with the stock of Xpeng up by more than 50% this year.
The automaker has also got backing from German car giant Volkswagen, which invested $700 million in Xpeng last month, taking a 4.99% stake. The firms will jointly develop two electric vehicles for the Chinese market.
Neptune and OpenAI have collaborated on a metrics dashboard to help teams that are building foundation models. The companies will work “even more closely together” because of the acquisition, Neptune CEO Piotr Niedźwiedź said in a blog.
The startup will wind down its external services in the coming months, Niedźwiedź said. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“Neptune has built a fast, precise system that allows researchers to analyze complex training workflows,” OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a statement. “We plan to iterate with them to integrate their tools deep into our training stack to expand our visibility into how models learn.”
OpenAI has acquired several companies this year.
It purchased a small interface startup called Software Applications Incorporated for an undisclosed sum in October, product development startup Statsig for $1.1 billion in September and Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io for more than $6 billion in May.
Neptune had raised more than $18 million in funding from investors including Almaz Capital and TDJ Pitango Ventures, according to its website. Neptune’s deal with OpenAI is still subject to customary closing conditions.
“I am truly grateful to our customers, investors, co-founders, and colleagues who have made this journey possible,” Niedźwiedź said. “It was the ride of a lifetime already, yet still I believe this is only the beginning.”
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron said on Wednesday that it plans to stop selling memory to consumers to focus on meeting demand for high-powered artificial intelligence chips.
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron business chief, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”
Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is creating shortages for inputs like memory as a handful of companies commit to spend hundreds of billions in the next few years to build massive data centers. Memory, which is used by computers to store data for short periods of time, is facing a global shortage.
Micron shares are up about 175% this year, though they slipped 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.
AI chips, like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AdvancedMicro Devices, use large amounts of the most advanced memory. For example, the current-generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192GB of memory per graphics processor. Google’s latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, needs 192GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Memory is also used in phones and computers, but with lower specs, and much lower quantities — many laptops only come with 16GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that tinkerers could use to build their own PCs or upgrade their laptops. Crucial also sold solid-state hard drives.
Micron competes against SK Hynix and Samsung in the market for high-bandwidth memory, but it’s the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts have said that SK Hynix is Nvidia’s primary memory supplier.
Micron supplies AMD, which says its AI chips use more memory than others, providing them a performance advantage for running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, comes with 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Micron’s Crucial business was not broken out in company earnings. However, its cloud memory business unit showed 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.
Analysts at Goldman on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron’s stock to $205 from $180, though they maintained their hold recommendation. The analysts wrote in a note to clients that due to “continued pricing momentum” in memory, they “expect healthy upside to Street estimates” when Micron reports quarterly results in two weeks.
A Micron spokesperson declined to comment on whether the move would result in layoffs.
“Micron intends to reduce impact on team members due to this business decision through redeployment opportunities into existing open positions within the company,” the company said in its release.
Microsoft pushed back on a report Wednesday that the company lowered growth targets for artificial intelligence software sales after many of its salespeople missed those goals in the last fiscal year.
The company’s stock sank more than 2% on The Information report.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not lowered sales quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The sales lag occurred for Microsoft’s Foundry product, an Azure enterprise platform where companies can build and manage AI agents, according to The Information, which cited two salespeople in Azure’s cloud unit.
AI agents can carry out a series of actions for a user or organization autonomously.
Less than a fifth of salespeople in one U.S. Azure unit met the Foundry sales growth target of 50%, according to The Information.
In another unit, the quota was set to double Foundry sales, The Information reported. The quota was dropped to 50% after most salespeople didn’t meet it.
In a statement, the company said the news outlet inaccurately combined the concepts of growth and quotas.
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“Aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered, as we informed them prior to publication,” a Microsoft Spokesperson said.
The AI boom has presented opportunities for businesses to add efficiencies and streamline tasks, with the companies that build these agents touting the power of the tools to take on work and allow workers to do more.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, Amazon and others all have their own tools to create and manage these AI assistants.
But the adoption of these tools by traditional businesses hasn’t seen the same surge as other parts of the AI ecosystem.
The Information noted AI adoption struggles at private equity firm Carlyle last year, in which the tools wouldn’t reliably connect data from other places. The company later reduced how much it spent on the tools.