Connect with us

Published

on

Snap stock soars following beat on revenue, earnings and daily active users

Snap reported first-quarter results on Thursday that beat analysts’ estimates and showed a return to double-digit revenue growth. Shares soared more than 25% in extended trading.  

Here’s how the company did: 

  • Earnings per share: 3 cents adjusted vs. a loss of 5 cents expected by LSEG
  • Revenue: $1.19 billion vs. $1.12 billion expected by LSEG
  • Global daily active users: 422 million vs. 420 million expected, according to StreetAccount
  • Average revenue per user: $2.83 vs. $2.67 expected, according to StreetAccount

Revenue for Snap’s first quarter increased 21% from $989 million in the same period last year. The company is growing at an accelerated clip, after it had previously reported six straight quarters of single-digit growth or sales declines.

Snap has been working to rebuild its ad business after the digital ad market stumbled in 2022, and it’s starting to pay off. In its investor letter, Snap said its revenue growth was primarily driven by improvements in the company’s advertising platform, as well as demand for its direct-response advertising solutions. 

Advertising revenue came in at $1.11 billion in the first quarter. Snap’s “Other Revenue” category, which is primarily driven by Snapchat+ subscribers, reached $87 million, an increase of 194% year over year. Snap reported more than 9 million Snapchat+ subscribers for the period.

Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $46 million, far surpassing the $68 million loss expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. In its investor letter, Snap said adjusted EBITDA “exceeded our expectations” and was primarily driven by operating expense discipline, as well as accelerating revenue growth.

“Given the progress we have made with our ad platform, the leadership team we have built, and the strategic priorities we have set, we believe we are well positioned to continue to improve our business performance,” Snap wrote in the letter. 

Though Snap’s growth accelerated, it still fell behind that of Meta, which reported 27% growth in its better-than-expected first-quarter results on Wednesday. Meta shares plunged anyway after the company issued a light forecast and spooked investors with talk of its long-term investments.

Snap’s net loss for the quarter narrowed to $305.1 million, or a 19 cent loss per share, from $328.7 million, or a 21 cent loss per share, the year prior. 

For its second quarter, Snap expects to report revenue between $1.23 billion and $1.26 billion, up from the $1.22 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. Snap said adjusted EBITDA will fall between $15 million and $45 million, compared to Wall Street’s expectations of $15.5 million. 

Snap reported 422 million daily active users (DAUs) in the first quarter, up 10% year over year. The company expects to report around 431 million DAUs in its second quarter, up from the 430 million expected by StreetAccount. 

The company also provided a forecast for its full-year 2024 cost structure. Snap said quarterly infrastructure costs per DAU will fall between 83 cents and 85 cents for the rest of the year.

“We will continue to assess our infrastructure investment levels based on what is in the best long-term interest of our business,” Snap said. 

Snap said the amount of time users spent watching content grew year over year, primarily due to engagement with Spotlight and Creator Stories. The company said time spent watching Spotlight, which aggregates content from users, increased 125% year over year.

In February, Snap announced it would lay off 10% of its global workforce, or around 500 employees. The company said Thursday that headcount and personnel costs will “grow modestly” through the rest of the year. 

Snap will hold its quarterly call with investors at 5:30 p.m. ET Thursday. 

Continue Reading

Technology

Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

Published

on

By

Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

Continue Reading

Technology

Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

Published

on

By

Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

Stock Chart IconStock chart icon

hide content

Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

Continue Reading

Technology

Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Published

on

By

Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Continue Reading

Trending