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Arm makes the CPU architecture for chips found in nearly all smartphones. An Arm chip is shown here in San Jose, California, on October 12, 2023.

Sydney Boyo

Arm reported fiscal third-quarter earnings Wednesday that beat estimates and gave a strong profit forecast for the current quarter. The shares soared as much as 41% in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did for the quarter ending December versus consensus estimates from LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv:

  • Earnings per share: 29 cents adjusted vs. 25 cents expected
  • Revenue: $824 million vs. $761 million expected

Arm, whose chip design technology is in nearly every smartphone and many PCs, said it expects earnings per share for the fiscal fourth quarter of between 28 cents and 32 cents on sales of $850 million to $900 million. Analysts expect earnings of 21 cents per share on sales of $780 million.

The company reported net income of $87 million, or 8 cents per share. Total revenue in the quarter increased 14% from a year earlier.

Arm makes money through royalties, when companies pay for access to build Arm-compatible chips, usually amounting to a small percentage of the final chip price.

Arm said its customers shipped 7.7 billion Arm chips during the September quarter, the most recent period for which figures are available.

The stock rose as high as $108.89 in after-hours trading, but later slipped below $100. It close on Wednesday at $77.01.

Royalty revenue increased 11% on an annual basis to $470 million. The company said the jump was partially because of a recovery in the smartphone market, as well as increasing sales to automotive companies and cloud providers. Arm said it expects growth to be driven by royalty revenue.

In recent years, Arm has emphasized its licensing business, selling access to more complete designs that semiconductor companies can plug into their planned chips. That process saves chipmakers time and effort, and it’s more lucrative for Arm than simply collecting royalties.

Arm’s license and other revenue was $354 million, up 18% year over year. Arm said more companies were choosing to license its CPU designs to run artificial intelligence, and that the company charges higher licensing fees for advanced designs.

Arm, which had been owned by SoftBank, went public in September. The company was founded in 1990 to develop technology for low-power chips, but became more important to the overall technology industry when the Apple iPhone and competing Android devices standardized on Arm-based chips.

Arm says companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia use its technology.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a ‘snapback’ for chipmaker

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a 'snapback' for chipmaker

AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.

Courtesy: AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.

The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries. 

Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note. 

Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.

The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.

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