Connect with us

Published

on

Tech stocks on display at the Nasdaq.

Peter Kramer | CNBC

Alphabet and Tesla climbed to fresh records on Wednesday, closing at all-time highs alongside Amazon and Meta as the tech megacaps lifted the Nasdaq past 20,000 for the first time.

Tech’s seven trillion-dollar companies added roughly $416 billion in market cap for the day.

For Alphabet, the two-day 11% rally was driven by the company’s launch of its latest quantum computing chip, which it revealed on Monday and described as a “breakthrough” and “an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications” in drug discovery, battery design and other areas.

Alphabet closed at $195.40 on Wednesday, topping its prior high of $191.18, which it reached on July 10.

Tesla had been below its previous record for much longer. Shares of the electric vehicle maker jumped almost 6% on Wednesday to $424.77, climbing above their prior closing high of $409.97 on Nov. 4, 2021. The stock has soared 69% since Donald Trump’s election victory last month, on Wall Street’s optimism that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s cozy relationship with the incoming president will pay dividends.

Amazon, Apple and Meta have all been regularly reaching new highs, though Apple slipped 0.5% on Wednesday. Microsoft, meanwhile, is about 4% below its high reached in July, and chipmaker Nvidia is 6% off its record from last month.

The outsized weighting of tech’s megacaps has pushed the Nasdaq to a 33% gain for the year. The index rose 1.8% on Wednesday to close at an all-time high of 20,034.89.

The market has rallied since Trump’s victory on Nov. 4, partly on expectations that the new administration will dial down regulatory pressure on the tech industry and allow for more dealmaking.

On Tuesday, Trump named Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Lina Khan, who is best known for blocking the top tech companies’ acquisition efforts. Ferguson, currently one of the FTC’s five commissioners, “will be the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Tom Lee, managing partner at Fundstrat Global Advisors, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” that investors see more gains in tech with the expectation that a Federal Reserve rate cut is coming this month. The consumer price index showed a 12-month inflation rate of 2.7% in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday, further solidifying the market outlook for a cut.

“We know that when interest rates fall, the megacaps actually are very sensitive to that, and I think today was a day where the odds of a December cut increased,” Lee said. “That’s actually bullish for tech.”

WATCH: What Fundstrat’s Tom Lee expects from the markets in 2025

What Fundstrat's Tom Lee expects from the markets in 2025

Continue Reading

Technology

Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI as it considers strategic alternatives

Published

on

By

Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI as it considers strategic alternatives

Chegg seen at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 13, 2025. 

Danielle DeVries | CNBC

Chegg on Monday filed suit in federal district court against Google, claiming that artificial intelligence summaries of search results have hurt the online education company’s traffic and revenue.

The legal move come nearly two years after former CEO Dan Rosensweig said students engaging with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant were cutting into Chegg’s new customer growth.

Chegg is worth less than $200 million, and in after-hours trading Monday, the stock was trading just above $1 per share. Chegg has engaged Goldman Sachs and will look at strategic options, including getting acquired and going private, President and CEO Nathan Schultz told analysts on a Monday earnings call.

Chegg reported a $6.1 million net loss on $143.5 million in fourth-quarter revenue, a 24% decline year over year, according to a statement. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $142.1 million in revenue. Management called for first-quarter revenue between $114 million and $116 million, but analysts had been targeting $138.1 million. The stock was down 23% in extended trading.

Google forces companies like Chegg to “supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function,” said Schultz, adding that the search company uses its monopoly power, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.”

Despite the suit, Chegg has its own AI strategy. It has drawn on Meta’s open-source Llama, as well as models from privately held Anthropic and Mistral, Schultz said. Chegg has also partnered with OpenAI, which the education company views as a competitor, alongside Google. The company reported that 3.6 million students had subscriptions in the fourth quarter, down 21%. Subscriptions include access to AI-powered learning assistance. Chegg also rents and sells textbooks.

AI Overviews, as Google’s artificial intelligence summaries are called, are available in the company’s search engine in over 100 countries, with more than 1 billion users, the company said in October. They show up above links to other pages in search results.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the company will defend itself against Chegg’s suit.

“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” the Google spokesperson said.

Chegg claimed that Google drew on Chegg’s collection of 135 million questions and answers on a variety of subjects in its model training data sets.

After training its models, Google can generate content that competes with information that publishers have on offer in search results, Chegg argued in its complaint. The online learning company included a screenshot of a Google AI Overview that borrows details from Chegg’s website but does not attribute the information. However, the relevant Chegg page does show up lower down in search results.

Chegg cited a federal judge’s ruling last August that Google holds a monopoly in the search market. The decision came after the Department of Justice 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.

WATCH: Google unrolls AI Overviews in six more countries

Google unrolls AI Overviews in six more countries

Continue Reading

Technology

Hims & Hers shares tumble after company misses on margin, says may stop selling some weight loss drugs

Published

on

By

Hims & Hers shares tumble after company misses on margin, says may stop selling some weight loss drugs

Hims & Hers Health shares plunged 18% in extended trading on Monday after investors looked past better-than-expected revenue and earnings and focused instead on the disappointing gross margin.

Here’s how the company did, compared to analysts’ consensus estimates from LSEG:

  • Earnings per share: 11 cents vs. 10 cents expected
  • Revenue: $481 million vs. $470 million expected

Revenue at the telehealth company increased 95% in the fourth quarter from $246.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release.

However, the company’s gross margin, or the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, was 77%, while analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting 78.4%.

It is the second big stock drop for Hims & Hers in a matter of days. The shares tumbled 26% on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that the shortage of semaglutide injection products has been resolved.

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster GLP-1 medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The company was a breakout star within the digital health sector in 2024, in part because of the success of its popular new weight loss offering.

The company said its GLP-1 offering generated more than $225 million in revenue in 2024. The stock climbed about 200% for the year.

Compounded drugs are custom-made alternatives to brand-name drugs designed to meet a specific patient’s needs, and compounders are allowed to produce them when brand-name treatments are in shortage. The FDA said Friday that it will start taking action against compounders for violations in the next 60 to 90 days.

Hims & Hers said on the earnings call that as a result, compounded semaglutide will likely not be offered on the platform after the first quarter.

“We will have to start notifying customers in the coming month or two that they will need to start looking for alternative options on the commercial dosing,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum said on the call. “I would suspect, just being very direct, that a lot of those patients will try to go into the open market and try to secure a branded option in some form factor.”

Some patients might still be able to access compounded semaglutide if it is clinically necessary, the company added.

The company’s weight loss offerings will primarily be composed of its oral medications and the generic medication liraglutide, which it plans to introduce on its platform this year. Excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide, Hims & Hers said it expects it weight loss offering will generate at least $725 million in revenue in 2025.

Hims & Hers also offers treatments for skin care, mental health, sexual health and hair care.

Revenue for non-GLP-1 products increased 43% to $1.2 billion for the full year, “meeting our previous 2025 revenue target a year early,” Chief Financial Officer Yemi Okupe said in a release.

“The success we are experiencing is a direct reflection of our improving ability to democratize access to high quality, personalized care across each of our specialties,” Okupe said.

Net income climbed to $26.01 million, or 11 cents per share, from $1.25 million, or 1 cent per share, a year prior. The company reported adjusted earnings of $54.1 million, meeting analysts’ estimates, according to StreetAccount.

For the first quarter, Hims & Hers expects to report revenue of $520 million to $540 million, while analysts were expecting $497 million. Adjusted earnings will be between $55 million and $65 million for the period, the company said.  

Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5:00 p.m. ET.

— CNBC’s Brandon Gomez contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Technology

How AI is speeding the mining of valuable metals needed to power the clean economy

Published

on

By

How AI is speeding the mining of valuable metals needed to power the clean economy

As the clean energy economy expands, finding the minerals and metals that power it becomes increasingly critical. The answer might lie with artificial intelligence.

Electric cars, solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells all have one thing in common: the need for precious metals.

Historically, that’s required going through the arduous process of finding the metals and then getting them out of the ground. But new technologies from a slew of companies might be changing the game.

Kobold Metals, VerAI and a startup called Earth AI are in a race to get the metals to market as soon as possible. Earth AI combines AI-powered mineral discovery software with proprietary drilling technology. Its data goes back 50 years.

“We train our AI to learn from failures and successes of decades of hundreds of geologists that explored in the past to make much better predictions for where to look for metals in the future,” said Roman Teslyuk, CEO of Earth AI.

When the system finds what it thinks are metal deposits, Earth AI can drill down to verify it in just a tennis ball-sized hole. Teslyuk said that using this mining process takes half the cost and a fraction of the amount of time that was previously required. Individual annual mine revenues can range from $50 million to $3 billion, according to Mining Data Online.

“We drill down to 2,000 feet and grab a sample of rock that has never seen light, and the metals in that rock, they can build hundreds of millions of electric cars,” Teslyuk said. “They can turn our grid renewable. This rock can get us off hydrocarbons.”

Earth AI doesn’t explore around existing mines, but finds new areas and then sells that information to mining companies.

“The market for these minerals is massive,” said Jamie Lee, managing partner at Tamarack Global, an investor in Earth AI. “The way that they have approached this really caught our attention because there’s a there is a significant moat in their business model and the way that they’ve trained their large language model.”

Other investors include Y Combinator, Cantos Ventures, Scrum Ventures, Alpaca, Sparkwave Capital and Overmatch. The company has raised a total of $38 million.

Earth AI explores on its own, as well as with partners to find deposits faster. The company recently discovered one of the largest verified deposits of palladium in Australia using AI as part of a joint venture with Legacy Minerals.

CNBC Producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

Continue Reading

Trending