Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaks while holding a new chip, called Gaudi 3, during an event called AI Everywhere in New York, Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023.
Seth Wenig | AP
Intel shares dropped in premarket trading on Friday after the chipmaker issued an outlook for the first quarter of 2024 that lagged analyst forecasts even as results for the latest quarter beat Wall Street estimates.
Here’s how Intel did versus LSEG (formerly Refinitiv) consensus expectations for the quarter ended in December:
Earnings per share: 54 cents adjusted, vs. 45 cents expected
Revenue: $15.4 billion vs. $15.15 billion expected
For the first quarter of fiscal 2024, Intel expects earnings per share of 13 cents on between $12.2 billion and $13.2 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 33 cents per share on $14.15 billion of revenue.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on a call with analysts that the core businesses — PC and server chips — would be at the low end of the the company’s seasonal range in the current quarter, but that overall sales would take a hit because of weakness in subsidiaries including Mobileye and its programmable chip unit, as well as revenue decreases from other businesses the company has spun off or sold.
“The core business we see as healthy,” Gelsinger said. “We see no areas for market share loss and the products are getting stronger.”
Intel posted net income of $2.7 billion, or 63 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $0.7 billion, or 16 cents per share, last year.
With Intel reporting sales growth in the fourth quarter of 10% from $14.04 billion a year earlier, the company breaks a streak of seven quarters with declining revenue. Intel’s gross margin was 40%, down 2.6 percentage points annually.
Intel shares are up over 74% over the past year. The company is the largest semiconductor maker by revenue, according to Gartner, a market research firm, even though its market cap puts it below Nvidia and AMD on Wall Street.
Cloud providers and large tech companies, the big spenders, have been focused on the AI boom, which explains Nvidia’s recent outperformance. In the past, the most important part in a server was the central processor made by Intel. Now, AI servers can have as many as eight Nvidia or AMD graphics processing units (GPUs) attached to one or two Intel CPUs.
“The data center has seen some wallet share shift between CPU and accelerators over the last several quarters,” said Intel CFO David Zinsner on a call with analysts on Thursday.
Intel also continues to focus on a five-year plan implemented by Gelsinger, who took over the chipmaker in 2021. Intel wants to catch up to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in its ability to offer manufacturing services to other companies, while also improving its own branded chips.
“The quarter capped a year of tremendous progress on Intel’s transformation,” Gelsinger said in a statement. Intel said on Thursday that it would restate past results under a new system where Intel has to account for costs related to internal manufacturing of its own chips.
Intel Foundry Services, its business making chips for other companies, remains nascent, with $291 million in revenue, a 63% annual increase.
Intel has been cutting costs through workforce reductions and offloading small parts of its business. In the past year, the company said it would spin off its programmable chip unit, after turning self-driving car subsidiary Mobileye into an independent company in 2022. Zinsner said that Intel had cut $3 billion in costs last year and the company spun off or sold five different business lines.
Intel’s largest division is its Client Computing group, which includes laptop and PC processor chips. The overall PC industry has been in a slump for two years, but recently started showing signs of growth again. Intel reported $8.8 billion in fourth-quarter sales, up 33%.
Gelsinger said that demand for PC chips had “normalized,” and that sales were strong in the gaming and commercial sectors. He added that Intel expects the total PC market to expand this year.
Intel’s second-biggest division, Data Center and AI, saw sales decline 10% to $4 billion. That unit includes server CPUs and GPUs. Intel’s Network and Edge department, which sells parts for carriers and networking, reported $1.5 billion in sales, down 24% from last year.
Zinsner said that Intel expected its Data Center business to decline “double-digit” percentages sequentially in the first quarter versus the fourth quarter.
Intel said it paid $3.1 billion in dividends in 2023.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.