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Brian Chesky, co-founder and chief executive officer of Airbnb Inc., during a news conference in Los Angeles, California, US, on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.

Eric Thayer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Airbnb shares surged 14% and headed for their best day ever after the company reported stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings.

The stock debuted on the Nasdaq in December 2020, and its sharpest rally to this point came in February 2023. The shares are up 22% this year.

The online rental platform posted earnings of 73 cents per share on $2.48 billion in revenue. That topped analyst estimates of 58 cents per share of earnings and $2.42 billion in revenue, according to LSEG. Revenue increased 12% from a year ago.

“Airbnb is a fundamentally stronger company today than it was several years ago,” the company said in a letter to shareholders. “We’re continuing to build on this momentum in 2025, executing a multi-year strategy to perfect the core service, accelerate growth in global markets, and launch and scale new offerings.”

The company also swung to a profit, reporting net income of $461 million, or 73 cents per share. In the year-ago quarter, Airbnb reported a loss of $349 million, or 55 cents a share. Adjusted profit totaled $765 million, reflecting 4% year over year growth.

Gross booking value, which measures host earnings, taxes, and service and cleaning fees, rose to $17.6 billion and topped a StreetAccount forecast of $17.2 billion. Airbnb also reported 111 million nights and experience booked for the period, representing 12% year-over-year growth. That was above the 108.7 million StreetAccount estimate.

During an earnings call with investors, finance chief Ellie Mertz said Airbnb will invest $200 million to $250 million to scale new business opportunities it plans to announce in May.

“We want the Airbnb app — kind of similar to Amazon — to be one place to go for all of your traveling and living needs,” CEO Brian Chesky said on the call. He also said that each business the company plans to roll out could take three to five years to scale but should strengthen its core business.

“A great business could get to $1 billion of revenue,” he said. “And you should be able to expect one or a couple of businesses to launch every single year for the next five years.”

Despite the strong fourth-quarter results, Airbnb offered light guidance for the current quarter of $2.23 billion to $2.27 billion in revenue. That trailed a $2.3 billion estimate from LSEG. The company said the first quarter of 2024 benefitted from Easter and an extra day in February.

Airbnb also commented on the recent wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area last month, saying that its nonprofit Airbnb.org housed over 19,000 people and 2,300 pets and has received $27 million in donations. That includes $18 million from its founders.

— Ashley Capoot contributed reporting

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a ‘generation ahead’ of Google’s AI chips

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Nvidia says its GPUs are a 'generation ahead' of Google's AI chips

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.

Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images

Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.

“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”

The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.

In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.

“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.

Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.

Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.

Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.

“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.

He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.

WATCH: Meta reportedly in talks to use Google’s AI chips

Meta reportedly in talks to use Google's AI chips

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What Dick’s Sporting Goods’ earnings report tells us about Nike’s turnaround

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What Dick's Sporting Goods' earnings report tells us about Nike's turnaround

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Musk’s xAI to close $15 billion funding round in December: sources

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Musk's xAI to close  billion funding round in December: sources

Elon Musk attends the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 19, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is expected to close a $15 billion round at a $230 billion pre-money valuation next month, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC’s David Faber.

The deadline for allocation is the end of day on Tuesday, with the round expected to close on Dec. 19, the sources said.

This confirms earlier CNBC reporting that the company was raising $15 billion. The Tesla CEO later called the report on the round “False” in a post on the social media platform X.

At the time, sources told CNBC that xAI would use a large portion of the money for funding graphics processing units responsible for powering large language models.

CNBC had previously reported in September that the startup was looking to raise $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.

The funding round is yet another sign of the insatiable demand for AI tools. Companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have raised billions and reached sky-high valuations as investors pour more money into companies building foundational AI models.

Sam Altman‘s OpenAI finalized a $6.6 billion-share sale at a $500 billion valuation last month, and Reuters recently reported that the ChatGPT maker was eying a $1 trillion initial public offering.

Anthropic closed a $13 billion funding round in September that roughly tripled its valuation from March.

Musk’s xAI is responsible for creating the Grok chatbot that has come under fire for disseminating hate speech, including antisemitic content. The company recently debuted Grokipedia, an AI-powered competitor to Wikipedia.

In March, Musk announced the merger of xAI with X in a deal valuing the social media platform at $33 billion.

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