Uber reported first-quarter results Wednesday that beat analysts’ expectations for earnings, but fell shy of anticipated revenue growth for the quarter. Shares fell about 5% following the report.

Here’s how Uber did versus analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: 83 cents vs. 50 cents expected.
• Revenue: $11.53 billion vs. $11.62 billion expected.

Revenue at the ride-sharing company grew about 14% in the first three months of 2025, up from $10.13 billion during the same period in 2024.

The company also reported net income of around $1.78 billion or 83 cents per share during the first three months of 2025, up from a net loss of $654 million, or a loss of 32-cent loss per share, during the first quarter of 2024.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and CFO ‭Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah said they expect gross bookings to reach between $45.75 billion and $47.25 billion during the current quarter, with EBITDA in the range of $2.02 billion to $2.12 billion for that period.

In April, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber and accused the company of “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” around its subscription service called Uber One.

“It’s a bit of a head-scratcher for us,” Khosrowshahi told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.

He said 60% of the company’s gross bookings in its Uber Eats business come from Uber One members, and that the subscription service is growing quickly.

“The suit alleges that some people don’t realize that they’re signing up or cancellations are difficult, but I’d encourage you to go experience it yourself,” Khosrowshahi said. “It’s very, very simple. You take a couple of steps to be able to cancel if you want.”

Uber’s largest business segments, which include its ride-hailing business and food and grocery delivery service, saw bookings increase year-over-year.

Here are the key segment numbers:

• Mobility (gross bookings): $21.18 billion, up 13% year over year
• Delivery (gross bookings): $20.38 billion, up 15% year over year

The company also said its “monthly active platform consumers,” had grown to 170 million, up 14% from the first quarter of last year. Users booked around 3.04 billion “trips” during the first quarter of 2025, up 18% from the first quarter of 2024.

Khosrowshahi also said the company views autonomous vehicles, or AV technology, as “the single greatest opportunity ahead for Uber.”

Uber allows app users to book robotaxi rides in some U.S. markets, or order food for delivery via autonomous vehicle in others.

Khosrowshahi said Uber reached an “annual run-rate” of 1.5 million autonomous vehicle trips.

In March, the company began to offer users in Austin, Texas the option to hail a robotaxi from its partner, Alphabet-owned Waymo exclusively via the Uber platform.

Khosrowshahi said the Waymo Austin launch “exceeded” Uber’s expectations and around 100 Waymo vehicles operating in Austin are now‬‭ “busier than over 99% of all drivers” in Austin as far as completed trips per day.

Besides its Waymo partnership, Uber has also agreed to work with Volkswagen, Avride, May Mobility, and the autonomous trucking company Aurora for autonomous ride-hailing and freight services in the U.S. Uber has additional partnerships with AV companies internationally including with WeRide, Pony.AI and Momenta.

“Supported by the consistent strength of our core business, we continue to build towards the future, including five new autonomous vehicle announcements in just the last week,” Khosrowshahi said in a release.

Executives are scheduled to discuss Uber’s first-quarter results and plans during an earnings call Wednesday at 8:00 a.m. EDT.

Uncertainty — that was the theme during earnings season for the world’s biggest semiconductor firms which are unclear on demand for their products as a result of changing U.S. tariff policy and export restrictions that have been place on China.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs took effect in April though they were paused shortly after. The White House also exempted certain tech products such as smartphones and chips. However, the U.S. is investigating imports of semiconductor technology which could come under new duties.

Meanwhile, Washington last month added more semiconductor products from Nvidia and AMD to a list of items that are restricted for export to China, building on Biden-era curbs.

The changing tariff and China policy has caused consternation among executives at the world’s largest chip companies with visible impacts on their busiensses already.

AMD on Tuesday said that it expects $1.5 billion in lost revenue thorugh the end of its fiscal year as a result of AI chip export curbs to China, despite topping earnings estimates for the first quarter.

Super Micro issued disappointing guidance on Tuesday citing tariff and macroeconomic uncertainty. The company said it would not provide guidance for its fiscal year 2026 until “visibility” becomes clearer. The stock fell 4% in premarket trade.

And Marvell said on Tuesday that it is postponing its previously scheduled investor day from June 10 to a “future date in calendar 2026.” Shares of the firm fell 4.4% in premarket trade.

“We have decided to postpone our investor day given the current uncertain macroeconomic environment,” Matt Murphy, CEO of Marvell, said in a statement.

Semiconductor stocks have been under pressure this year amid the growing macroeconomic uncertainty and trade policies from the U.S. There is also concern about the demand for AI products even as technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon continue to commit billions of dollars to build data centers.

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF, a basket of chip stocks, is down nearly 12% this year.

And it’s not just U.S. companies that are feeling the heat. Samsung said last month that “demand volatiltiy is expected to be quite high” as a result of tariff policy changes and macroeconomic uncertainty.

“Due to the rapid changes in policies and geopolitical tensions among major countries, it’s difficult to accurately predict the business impact of tariffs and countermeasures,” a Samsung executive said on the earnings call.

“There are a lot of uncertainties ahead of us.”

Samsung is one of the world’s largest memory chipmakers.

“The semiconductor sector is grappling with a complex mix of demand signals and geopolitical headwinds,” Ben Barringer, global technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told CNBC by email.

Barringer said that Marvell’s decision to postpone its investor day “adds a layer of uncertainty at a time when clarity is in short supply,” while Super Micro’s weak outlook also “raised eyebrows.”

“With macro uncertainty and export restrictions still looming large, the path ahead for chipmakers remains bumpy, even as underlying demand holds up in certain areas,” Barringer added.

For the last few years, Washington under both Biden and Trump, have looked to use export restrictions to restrict China’s access to American technology in areas such as AI and semiconductors. This has prompted Chinese firms to ramp up focus on homegrown technology with companies like Huawei looking to create viable competing products to the likes of Nvidia.

Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Alibaba have also been able to launch high-performing AI models.

Nvidia’s Huang said there is competition in AI right now but American firms should be able to compete with China.

“The United States has to recognize that we are not the only country in that race, that we have competitors. We are confident people, we are a confident country we have confident companies, we are not afraid of a race. We look forward to a race. Just let us go race,” Huang told CNBC.

“And so I think that now is the time when the United States needs to realize that we need to put the pedal to the metal … we’ve just got to go for it. Waiting around, talking about it, trying to hold people back is not necessarily the best move. The best move is let American do American, let us go after it and win it.”

There’s a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany.

CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the “hand” of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs.

This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle. 

Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine.

Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots. 

When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, “not at all.”

“I don’t believe in 100% automation,” he said. “If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this.”

The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. Limiting workers to stowing on mid-height shelves, the so-called power zone, could lower the chance for worker injuries. Amazon has long struggled with injury rates far higher than those at other warehouses, though the company claims those rates have improved significantly. 

“We have a ladder that we have to step onto several dozen times a day during your ten hour shift. There is a lot of reaching. We have to lunge and squat. So it’s a lot of tough body mechanics,” said Kari Freitas Hardy, an Amazon worker in Spokane. “As a picker, if I had an innovation like this where I could have stayed within my power zone, my days would have been just so much easier.”

Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.

Experts agree that humans will work alongside robots in warehouses like Amazon’s for the foreseeable future.

“Whereas if you build a terribly complicated automated system and it breaks, then everything stops,” said Bill Ray, a researcher at Gartner. “Taking out the last human is so expensive. It’s so disruptive. It would be a huge investment and an enormous risk.”

Freitas Hardy recently transitioned from picking items to working with the robots. She’s one of the 350,000 workers Amazon said it’s spent $1.2 billion to upskill since 2019.

“It would be many decades off, to have them just come in and take over, so at this point it’s more exciting if you ask me, to see the growth potential because that is where it does increase jobs on the back side,” Freitas Hardy said.

Although Freitas Hardy said she isn’t making more money in her new role, Amazon said others who participate in its Mechatronics and Robotics Apprenticeship program typically receive pay increases of about 40%.

Amazon said the team that developed Vulcan has grown from a handful of people to more than 250 employees in the three years since the project began. Amazon wouldn’t disclose how much it cost to develop Vulcan, but Parness said it represents a big business opportunity.

“Vulcan can interact with the world in a more human-like manner, and that gives us a lot more process paths that we can use automation to bring down the cost that our customer pays, and the speed with which we can deliver those products to our customers,” Parness said.

Another big return on investment may come from robots making fewer mistakes than humans.

“Product returns are incredibly high and product returns are incredibly expensive,” Gartner’s Ray said.  “Some of them will be because the wrong thing was put in the box. And if you can reduce that, that’s a real cost saving straight away.”

Meanwhile, Amazon’s humanoid robot Digit has yet to bring operational efficiency. Amazon announced in 2023 that it was testing the Agility Robotics bipedal robot to help organize and move totes, but it’s yet to deploy Digit at scale.

When asked if Vulcan indicates that robots have moved from gimmick to real world application, Parness said, “It doesn’t matter if the robot has legs or wheels or it’s bolted to the floor. I think the thing that makes the robot useful is having that sense of touch so that it can interact in high contact and high clutter environments. That’s the tipping point for me, and I think we’re right there.”

For now, Vulcan is only in full operation at the Spokane warehouse. Another version of Vulcan that can pick specific items from inventory is being tested in Hamburg, Germany. Amazon said it plans to add Vulcan in more U.S. and German facilities in 2026.

Watch the video for an in-depth look at exactly how Vulcan works: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/05/06/meet-vulcan-the-first-amazon-robot-with-a-sense-of-touch.html