Snowflake shares spiked 19% in extended trading on Wednesday after the data analytics software maker reported fiscal third-quarter earnings that beat estimates.
Here’s how the company did, compared to LSEG analysts’ expectations:
Earnings per share: 20 cents, adjusted vs. 15 cents expected
Revenue: $942 million vs. $897 million expected
Snowflake’s revenue rose 28% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Oct. 31, according to a statement. The company’s net loss of $324.3 million, or 98 cents per share, widened from $214.3 million, or 65 cents per share, in the same quarter a year earlier.
Product revenue represented around 96% of total sales. Snowflake called for $3.43 billion in fiscal 2025 product revenue, implying 29% growth. That’s up from the $3.36 billion forecast management gave three months ago.
The full-year view also includes an adjusted operating margin of 5%, up from the 3% guidance in August.
Snowflake is focusing more on saving money, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told analysts on a conference call.
“We’ve been creating centralized, more efficient teams for some areas and removing redundant management layers, which enables us to make decisions faster,” he said.
But the company is not doing a major round of layoffs, Chief Financial Officer Mike Scarpelli said.
Snowflake had 10,618 customers at the end of October, having added 369 in the latest quarter. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected 10,601 customers.
While the U.S. government is a very small part of Snowflake’s business today, Scarpelli said there are opportunities for growth.
“We feel good about what we’re doing, and we think there’s a lot of upside in the federal space over the next couple of years,” Scarpelli said. In September, Snowflake announced it had acquired Night Shift Development, a company that targeted the public sector in the U.S.
For years, Snowflake has competed with cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, but they also are key partners that provide the company with underlying computing resources.
“Through our collaboration with AWS, we have booked over $3.9 billion over the past four quarters,” Ramaswamy said.
Also on Wednesday, Snowflake announced a multiyear partnership with Anthropic, the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup and OpenAI competitor. It also said it had agreed to buy startup Datavolo for an undisclosed sum.
As of Wednesday’s close, Snowflake’s stock was down 35% so far in 2024, while the S&P 500 index was up 24%.
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Bitcoin breached the $95,000 level for the first time Wednesday evening as investors continued pricing in a second Donald Trump presidency.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 3% at $97,646.68, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it rose as high as $97,788.00.
Bitcoin has been regularly hitting fresh records this month on hopes that Trump will usher in a golden age of crypto, which would include more supportive regulation for the industry and a potential national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile.
It is widely expected to reach $100,000 this year and double by the end of 2025.
“Bitcoin’s price continues to be driven by a number of factors including improved liquidity conditions, increased institutional adoption, and a regulatory environment that has flipped from a headwind to a tailwind,” said Sam Callahan, an analyst at Swan Bitcoin.
Another Trump term also implies larger budget deficits, potentially more inflation and changes to the international role of the dollar – all things that would have a positive impact on the price of bitcoin.
Bitcoin has gained more than 127% in 2024.
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U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter speaks about the antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment during a press conference as Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco look on during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, U.S., May 23, 2024. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
The Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser, following a ruling in August that the company holds a monopoly in the search market.
Chrome, which Google launched in 2008, provides the search giant with data it then uses for targeting ads. The DOJ said in a filing on Wednesday that forcing the company to get rid of Chrome would create a more equal playing field for search competitors.
“To remedy these harms, the [Initial Proposed Final Judgment] requires Google to divest Chrome, which will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet,” the 23-page filing reads.
Additionally, the DOJ said that Google be prevented from entering into exclusionary agreements with third parties like Apple and Samsung. The DOJ also said that Google be prohibited from giving its search service preference within its other products.
The DOJ also said that remedies should prevent Google from eliminating “emerging competitive threats through acquisitions, minority investments, or partnerships.” The DOJ said that the “proposed remedies run for a period of 10 years.” The filing also says the search company should be required to provide a technical committee with a monthly report outlining any changes to its search text ads auction.
“The proposed remedies are designed to end Google’s unlawful practices and open up the market for rivals and new entrants to emerge,” the filing reads.
Search advertising accounted for $49.4 billion in revenue in parent company Alphabet’s third quarter, representing three-quarters of total ad sales in the period.
The DOJ’s request represents the agency’s most aggressive attempt to break up a tech company since its antitrust case against Microsoft, which reached a settlement in 2001.
In addition to its call for Google to divest Chrome, the DOJ said forcing the search company to divest its Android mobile operating system would also aid in restoring competition, “but Plaintiffs recognize that such divestiture may draw significant objections from Google or other market participants.”
Instead, the DOJ suggested that the other remedies should be enough to “blunt Google’s ability to use its control of the Android ecosystem to favor its general search services,” and if they “ultimately fail to achieve the high standards for meaningful relief in these critical markets, the Court could require return to” the Android divestiture suggestion.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Googleholds a monopoly in the search market. The ruling came after the government in 2020 filed its landmark case, alleging that Google controlled the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. The court found that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which outlaws monopolies.
Last month, the DOJ indicated it was considering a breakup of Google businesses, including potentially breaking up its Chrome, Play or Android divisions.
Additionally, the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and “other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products.” That would include Google’s search arrangements with Apple on the iPhone and Samsung on its mobiles devices, deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts.
Google has said it will appeal the monopoly ruling, which would draw out any final remedy decisions.
However, the most likely outcome, according to some legal experts, is that the court will ask Google to do away with certain exclusive agreements, like its deal with Apple. While a breakup is an unlikely outcome, the experts said, the court may ask Google to make it easier for users to access other search engines.
After a quarter where Nvidia’s sales nearly doubled, investors and analysts are wondering how long the chipmaker can keep this kind of growth going now that it has a $140 billion annual revenue run rate.
Those hopes fall on Blackwell, which is Nvidia’s name for a family of server products based around its next-generation AI chip.
CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress gave investors several new data points on how Blackwell’s launch is shaping up on a call with analysts on Wednesday. The duo emphasized that the rollout is on track, and they signaled that Blackwell sales over the next few quarters will be limited by how many chips and systems Nvidia can make, not how much it can sell.
“Blackwell production is in full steam,” Huang said. “We will deliver this quarter more Blackwells than we had previously estimated.”
The company’s positive comments on Blackwell are one reason why the stock is only down 1%, despite the company missing elevated expectations from bullish investors who anticipated Nvidia would significantly exceed its own forecasts.
Huang and Kress’s comments also addressed fears about shipment delays that were spurred by reports that said Nvidia was making ongoing engineering changes to its systems to address problems.
Some of Nvidia’s most important end-customers have already received some Blackwell chips, the company confirmed on Wednesday. Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI have posted pictures of Blackwell-based server racks on their social media accounts, and on Wednesday, the company said 13,000 Blackwell chips have already been shipped to customers.
“There’s still a lot of a lot of engineering that happens at this point,” Huang said. “But as you see from all of the systems that are being stood up, Blackwell is in great shape.”
Those sample chips aren’t the bulk of the shipments that the company is expecting to make. They’re early versions intended to allow customers to start testing and get their systems and software ready for the volume shipments, which will start in Nvidia’s current quarter.
“We will we’ll ship more Blackwells next quarter than this [quarter], and we’ll ship more Blackwells the quarter after that than than our first quarter,” Huang said.
In July, Nvidia said it expected “several billion dollars” of Blackwell revenue in its current quarter, and on Wednesday, the company said it expects the amount of Blackwell sales for this quarter to be higher than its original forecast. Huang also said that Microsoft will soon start to preview its Blackwell-based systems to cloud customers.
A limiting factor to producing more Blackwell systems is the amount of components that Nvidia’s suppliers can provide, Huang said. Additionally, it takes time to ramp up the velocity of a manufacturing process that has gone from zero shipments to billions of dollars of shipments in a few months.
“It is the case that demand exceeds our supply, and that’s expected as we’re in the beginnings of this generative AI revolution,” Huang said.
“Almost every company in the world seems to be involved in our supply chain,” Huang said.
Nvidia said that Blackwell’s gross margins will be lower in the coming months than the 73.5% it reported in the third quarter, but the company said that margin will increase as the product matures. Huang pointed out that Blackwell comes as just the chip itself or in configurations that include an entire rack and other components.
Nvidia’s overall message on Wednesday was that its new Blackwell chip is in short supply because companies like OpenAI need the fastest GPUs available as quickly as possible to develop next-generation AI models. As Blackwell rolls out, Nvidia’s current AI chips, which it calls Hopper, will be relegated to serving AI models, not creating new ones. Nvidia said that Blackwell sales will eventually exceed those of Hopper.
“You see now that at the tail end of the last generation of foundation models, we’re at at about 100,000 Hoppers,” Huang said. “The next generation starts at 100,000 Blackwells.”