Jeff Smith, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Starboard Value LP.
Chris Goodney | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce shares jumped 98% in 2023 in part after the business software maker increased its adjusted operating margin after Starboard Value and other activist investors raised concerns about the company’s financial performance. Starboard now sees more room for improvement.
“They’ve been doing a great job executing, improving their margins, moving up in the Rule of 40 or Rule of 50 for their for their industry, and we think there’s a lot more to go,” Starboard CEO Jeff Smith told CNBC’s David Faber at the 13D Monitor Active-Passive Investor Summit in New York on Tuesday.
The Rule of 40 refers to the idea that a company’s revenue growth rate and profit margin should add up to at least 40%. It became a more widely favored measurement in 2022 among software executives as share prices drifted lower, with investors worrying about central banks pushing up interest rates. For many years, many software companies prioritized fast growth at the expense of profitability.
Starboard argued in 2022 that, even as Salesforce ruled the market for customer relationship management software, it delivered a lower operating margin than some of its peers. Starboard revealed a holding in the stock and Salesforce responded by cutting thousands of employees and moving up its timeline for widening its adjusted operating margin.
Starboard had a $432 million Salesforce stake as of June 30, according to a regulatory filing.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder, chair and CEO, has said he “enjoyed getting to know” the activist investors who invested. Mason Morfit, co-CEO of ValueAct Capital, joined Salesforce’s board in March 2023. And by June 2023, most of the stock’s seven activists had moved on, Amy Weaver, Salesforce’s finance chief, said at a UBS event.
On Tuesday, Starboard said in a presentation that Salesforce “can continue to become more efficient and more profitable.” Other large software companies spend less on sales and marketing and general and administrative costs as a percentage of revenue, and Salesforce can catch up, according to the presentation. Starboard used an aggregate of Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday for comparison.
And Starboard said Salesforce should commit to adhering to the Rule of 50 by the 2028 fiscal year. The activist firm laid out two scenarios, both of which involved Salesforce’s revenue growth accelerating and its adjusted operating margin widening.
The Agentforce technology for automating customer interactions, which Salesforce discussed at its Dreamforce conference in September, has the potential to boost revenue growth, Starboard said.
Salesforce shares were down 1% during Tuesday’s trading session.
“We appreciate feedback and dialogue with our investor base. Starboard continues to be a constructive shareholder in our conversations,” a Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Tuesday that the company’s overall revenue growth would expand to about 35% per year over the next three to five years, driven by “insatiable” demand for artificial intelligence chips.
Su said that much of that would be captured by the company’s AI data center business, which it expects to grow at about 80% per year over the same time period, on track to hit tens of billions of dollars of sales by 2027.
“This is what we see as our potential given the customer traction, both with the announced customers, as well as customers that are currently working very closely with us,” Su told analysts.
Ultimately, Su said that AMD could be able to achieve “double-digit” share in the data center AI chip market over the next three to five years.
AMD shares fell 3% in extended trading.
The AI chip market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which has over 90% of the market share, according to some estimates, and which has given the company a market cap of over $4.6 trillion, versus AMD’s roughly $387 billion valuation.
AMD is holding its first financial analyst day since 2022, as the company has found itself at the center of a boom in data center spending for AI.
While companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in total on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to build and power artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they are also looking for alternatives to increase capacity and control costs. AMD is the only other major developer of GPUs aside from Nvidia.
In October, AMD announced a partnership with OpenAI in which it would sell the AI startup billions of dollars in its Instinct AI chips over multiple years, starting with enough chips in 2026 to use 1 gigawatt of power.
As part of the deal, OpenAI could end up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Su also highlighted long-term deals with Oracle and Meta on Tuesday.
AMD shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025.
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OpenAI is also helping AMD set up its next-generation systems based around its Instinct MI400X AI chips, which ship next year.
AMD has said that its chips will be able to be assembled into a “rack-scale” system where 72 of its chips work together as one, which is essential for running the largest AI models.
If AMD succeeds at its rack, it will catch up with Nvidia’s AI chips, which have been offered in rack-scale systems for three product generations.
Su said that the company now sees the total market for AI data center parts and systems hitting $1 trillion per year in 2030, representing 40% annual growth per year. AMD reported $5 billion in AI chip sales in its fiscal 2024.
That’s up from the company’s previous forecast of a $500 billion market in 2028 for AI chips. But the updated AMD figure also includes central processors (CPU), an important kind of chip that sits at the heart of a computer, but isn’t a pure AI accelerator like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD.
AMD’s Epyc CPUs are still the company’s most important product by sales. It primarily competes with Intel and some smaller Arm-based processors in the CPU market. AMD also makes chips for game consoles, networking parts, and other devices.
On Tuesday, although AMD focused much of its focus on its growing AI business, it told shareholders that its older businesses were growing too.
“The other message that we want to leave you with today is every other part of our business is firing on all cylinders, and that’s actually a very nice place to be,” Su said.
CoreWeave shares sank 13% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays at a third-party data center developer that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.
“Quite frankly, every single part of this quarter went exactly as we planned, except for one delay at a singular data center,” Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.
He then clarified that a “singular data center provider” is more accurate.
“Some people might think it’s one complex, but when I go over the numbers, we’re talking about multiple places,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said. “And it just so happens that the places are all connected to an outfit called Core Scientific that you tried to buy.”
Cramer noted delays at complexes in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Intrator said the companies have been working together on infrastructure for a long time a would continue work to bring it online. He did not directly confirm that Core Scientific is the third-party provider.
CoreWeave tried to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion earlier this year. Core Scientific shareholders voted against the proposed deal. Core Scientific shares sank 7% Tuesday.
During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Murphy asked if the delay was related to Core Scientific, but Intrator declined to name the company. At another point in the call, the CEO suggested that just one data center, not multiple sites, were affected.
“There was a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio,” Intrator said.
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At a different point in the call, CoreWeave’s CFO Nitin Agrawal said the delays stem from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”
When reached for comment about how many sites were affected, CoreWeave did not provide a number and pointed to Intrator’s statements on the earnings call and during his “Squawk on the Street” interview.
CoreWeave, which provides infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies, reported third-quarter results on Monday that showed $1.36 billion in revenue for the period, up 134% from $583.9 million a year ago. But CoreWeave now sees 2025 revenue coming in between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.
Intrator told CNBC on Tuesday that CoreWeave has teams of employees working with contractors and Core Scientific at those sites “every single day” to get things back on track.
“It became apparent to us in Q3 that there were delays at the facility,” Intrator said. “CoreWeave responded by deploying our own boots on the ground to ensure that everything was being done in order to move those facilities along as quickly as possible.”
Intrator told analysts on Monday that the delays would not affect its backlog or get the full value from contracts.
Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz as big tech companies and AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure.
The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.
Every weekday the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer holds a “Morning Meeting” livestream at 10:20 a.m. ET. Here’s a recap of Tuesday’s key moments. 1. The S & P 500 and Nasdaq were down Tuesday as Big Tech was pressured following CoreWeave’s quarterly results Monday evening. The AI infrastructure provider disappointed investors after lowering its revenue outlook. Shares of CoreWeave plunged around 14%. Regarding the broader AI trade, Jim said, “I’m getting antsy about the fact that there’s too much borrowed money now starting to go into the data center.” However, Jim is not currently advocating changes to the portfolio. Wall Street also focused on soft labor market data after ADP’s payroll tracker showed a weekly decline of 11,250 jobs on average for the four weeks ending Oct. 25. 2. Linde shares were up over 1% Tuesday after UBS upgraded the industrial gas giant to a buy from a hold-equivalent rating. The analysts, who cut their price target to $500 from $507, said that earnings-per-share growth in 2026 will be a positive catalyst for Linde. This is a reassuring call for the recently lagging Club holding. After all, Linde’s pricing power has allowed the company to deliver earnings beats quarter after quarter despite the macroeconomic backdrop. 3. Nvidia stock shed around 3% on Tuesday after SoftBank announced that it sold its entire stake in the chipmaker. Weakness among AI-related names didn’t help investor sentiment, either. The sale of Nvidia stock is a source of cash that will be used to fund SoftBank’s whopping $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, CNBC reported Tuesday. The news doesn’t make us concerned about Nvidia. We maintain our “own, don’t trade” thesis on shares. Instead, it adds to our aforementioned caution around mounting debt from the AI data center boom. 4. Stocks covered in Tuesday’s rapid fire at the end of the video were: CoreWeave, Paramount Skydance , Amgen , Dutch Bros , and Coterra Energy. On Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET, Jim will be signing copies of his new book, “How to Make Money in Any Market,” at the Atlantic Avenue Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA, LIN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.