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Reddit reported first-quarter revenue on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and issued better-than-expected guidance.

The stock initially soared by as much as 19% in after-hours trading, but receded to around 5% when executives discussed the shaky economy and Google search-related challenges.

Here’s how the company did compared with LSEG estimates:

  • Earnings per share: 13 cents vs. 2 cents expected
  • Revenue: $392 million vs. $370 million expected

Revenue rose 61% from $243 million a year earlier. Net income was $26.2 million, or 13 cents a share, compared to a year ago when the company recorded a net loss of $575.1 million, or $8.19 a share, due to costs associated with its IPO.

Reddit said second-quarter sales should be in the range of $410 million to $430 million, ahead of Wall Street expectations of $396 million. About the ongoing trade dispute between the U.S. and China, Reddit said in a letter to investors that it is “well-positioned to meet this moment.”

“Ever-shifting macro environments like these create both challenges and opportunities,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman wrote. “We’ve grown through challenging times before — people need connection and information just as much in uncertain times.”

Reddit operating chief Jen Wong acknowledged the sluggish economy on the company’s earnings call, saying that while “there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market,” it has been “mostly business as usual.”

“We’re staying close to our customers to help them through the volatility by sharing insights on consumer trends that inform their strategy based on things that we’re seeing on Reddit,” Wong said.

The company’s global daily active uniques, or DAUq, jumped 31% year over year to 108.1 million in the first quarter. Analysts were expecting 107.3 million.

Reddit has been a big beneficiary from Google search changes and internal site improvements, which has led to an influx of new and returning users, or logged-out users. The company has focused on site updates and features intended to convince logged-out users to create accounts and become logged-in users, which are more valuable to advertisers.

The company’s first-quarter global logged-in DAUq rose 23% year over year to 48.7 million, while its global logged-out DAUq jumped 38% to 59.4 million.

In February, Reddit said that a Google search algorithm change temporarily impacted the company’s user growth during the fourth quarter. Search-driven traffic soon recovered in the first quarter, the company said at the time.

Huffman said on the earnings call that Reddit’s search-derived traffic “could be more bumpy than usual” in the near term, because “the search ecosystem is under heavy construction.”

He said that search-related “short-term bumps don’t affect our long-term strategy or opportunity,” and that the company is “in control of our own destiny.”

Huffman later added that the online search market is being impacted by large language models, or LLMs, that companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are using to gather and then summarize web data based on written prompts. Reddit’s own AI-powered ChatGPT-like service, dubbed Reddit Answers, now has 1 million weekly active uniques, or WAUq, the company said.

Although people may want to use LLM-powered tools to see “annotated sterile answers from AI,” Huffman said that Reddit’s unique user-created content involving “subjective, authentic, messy, multiple viewpoints” will help the company stand out.

Across the online ad sphere, companies are highlighting the potential impact of economic shifts.

Meta shares rose Thursday after the company reported first-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom. However, the company’s advertising sales in the Asia-Pacific region missed estimates.

Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said that “Asia-based e-commerce exporters” have reduced their digital ad spending likely due to the de minimis trade loophole ending Friday.

Snap said in its earnings report this week that the company “experienced headwinds to start the current quarter,” and declined to provide guidance because of macroeconomic uncertainties.

Alphabet reported first-quarter earnings last week, and said that Google Advertising sales jumped 8.5% year over year to $66.89 billion while YouTube ad sales rose 10% to $8.93 billion.

Pinterest reports earnings on May 8.

WATCH: Top chip analyst on navigating the tech trade as tariff uncertainty grows.

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OpenAI’s Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

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OpenAI's Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.

Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.

Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.

“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.

Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.

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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”

“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.

During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.

“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”

WATCH: Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI’s new Sora video model

Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI's new Sora video model

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.

The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.

The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.

“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.

In August, the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the company in an effort to beef up U.S. manufacturing capabilities. Intel has also received investments from SoftBank and AI chipmaking giant Nvidia.

Since taking the helm of Intel in March, Tan has faced massive pressure to deliver.

This summer, President Donald Trump called Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and demanded his resignation, but later changed his tone.

Intel shares have bounced 87% this year.

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Intel year-to-date stock chart.

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AI worries have climbed but demand is off the charts, says Bernstein's Rasgon

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.

Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images

Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.

Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.

Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.

Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.

The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.

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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.

Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.

Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.

Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.

“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”

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Box CEO on AI monetization: Agents offer new monetization for existing software companies

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