Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S. September 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to continue his company’s artificial intelligence spending blitz well into the next year as rival tech giants do the same.
Zuckerberg told analysts Wednesday during a second-quarter earnings call that AI’s rapid pace of progress has informed much of Meta’s recent business decisions, including the company’s $14.3 billion June investment into the data-annotating startup Scale AI as part of a revamped AI strategy involving a wave of high-profile hires.
AI’s swift advancement warrants that Meta have “the absolute best and most elite talent-dense team” that can access the resources they need from a “leading compute fleet,” Zuckerberg said about the AI Superintelligence team he assembled for his company this summer. Whatever these top-tier AI researchers build can then be implemented throughout Facebook, Instagram and the rest of the company’s family of apps, he said.
“When we take a technology, we’re good at driving that through all of our apps and our ad systems,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s no other company that is as good as us at kind of taking something and getting it in front of billions of people.”
Those AI endeavors, however, come at a cost.
Meta on Wednesday said it expects its total expenses for 2025 to come in the range of $114 billion and $118 billion, raising the low end of its previous outlook of between $113 billion and $118 billion. And while Meta is still planning out next year, the company said its AI initiatives will “result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth.”
Other tech giants are also spending heavy on AI projects and talent.
Alphabet said last week during its earnings report that it is raising its 2025 capital expenditures forecast to $85 billion, which is $10 billion higher from its prior forecast. Microsoft said Wednesday that its fiscal first-quarter capital expenditures will be $30 billion, ahead of analyst expectations of $24.23 billion.
For now, investors are OK with Meta’s big AI investments, with the company’s shares up nearly 12% in after-hour trading on Wednesday. It helps that Meta reported strong second-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom while providing third-quarter sales guidance that topped Wall Street expectations.
It also helps that Zuckerberg said AI drove “greater efficiency and gains across our ad system,” likely reassuring worried investors that Meta’s big AI spending is leading to some immediate results.
And while the company’s Reality Labs unit continues bleeding money, posting an operating loss of $4.53 billion in the second quarter, the surprise hit of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses seems to have quelled investor discontent for the time being.
“I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI, because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, talk to you,” Zuckerberg said. “Once you get a display in there, whether it’s the kind of wide holographic field of view, like we showed with Orion, or just a smaller display that might be good for displaying some information, that’s going to unlock a lot of value, where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day.”
Coinbase shares fell Thursday as second-quarter revenue came in shy of analysts’ estimates. Gains in the cryptocurrency exchange’s subscription revenue failed to offset weaker trading volumes during the quarter.
In the quarter ended June 30, Coinbase net income rose to $1.43 billion, or $5.14 per share, from $36.13 million, or 14 cents per share, a year ago. Earnings in the latest period benefited from a gain $1.5 billion related its Circle investment and $362 million from its crypto investment portfolio.
On an adjusted basis, Coinbase earned $1.96 per share, topping estimates of $1.26 reported by LSEG.
Revenue rose slightly to $1.5 billion from $1.45 billion in the same quarter last year, coming in just under analysts’ expectations of $1.6 billion. Revenue tied to transactions came in at $764 million, missing StreetAccount estimates of $787 million.
Shares fell 6% in extended trading.
Analysts were anticipating a weaker second quarter in the wake of the market’s exuberance in the first quarter, when traders positioned themselves for the upside of the Trump administration’s promises to create more favorable regulatory conditions for the crypto industry.
As Washington’s focus shifted to tariffs in the second quarter, speculative trading by retail investors slowed across centralized crypto exchanges, while crypto ETF inflows and buying by crypto treasury companies supported prices.
Retail engagement and stablecoins
Coinbase reported that retail trading volume, which is typically more profitable than institutional volume, grew 16% year-over-year to $43 billion, but missed the $48.05 billion expected by analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.
Subscriptions and services offerings – which include stablecoins, staking, interest income and custody – grew 9% from the same period a year ago to $655.8 million, short of analysts’ projection of $705.9 million.
Revenue from stablecoins, which became a dominant theme and major driver of crypto market action in the second quarter, came in at $332.5 million, about in line with estimates of $333.2 million, per StreetAccount. That was a 38% increase from the same period a year ago and a 12% increase from the first quarter.
Coinbase has benefited from a surge in interest in stablecoins after the wildly successful June IPO of Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin. Coinbase has a significant revenue sharing agreement with Circle, wherein it keeps 100% of the revenue generated on all USDC held on Coinbase platforms, plus about 50% of all other USDC revenue generated on other platforms.
On Thursday the company said it will soon expand beyond crypto to offer tokenized real-world assets, derivatives, prediction markets, and early-stage token sales within the Coinbase app. The rollout will focus on U.S. users initially.
Coinbase shares remain higher by more than 50% year-to-date, outperforming the benchmark S&P 500, which the stock joined in May.
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Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman speaks at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Dec. 4, 2024.
Noah Berger | Reuters
Amazon’s cloud group grew recorded revenue growth of 18% in the second quarter, slightly ahead of analysts’ estimates.
Amazon Web Services continues to lead the cloud infrastructure market, but is facing intensifying pressure from Microsoft and Google, as all three companies ramp up investments in artificial intelligence to take advantage of booming demand.
Microsoft and Google reported better-than-expected cloud results for the latest quarter, with higher growth rates than Amazon.
On Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said revenue from Azure and other cloud services exceeded $75 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30, with growth in the quarter of 39%. It’s the first time Microsoft has provided a dollar figure for the business. Last week, Alphabet reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing business, a 32% increase from a year ago.
AWS’ revenue for the second quarter totaled $30.87 billion, Amazon said on Thursday. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $30.8 billion. AWS now represents 18% of Amazon’s revenue.
The cloud remains a profit center for Amazon. AWS generated $10.2 billion in second-quarter operating income, trailing the average analyst estimate of $10.9 billion, according to StreetAccount. Amazon’s total operating income was $19.2 billion.
During the quarter, AWS said it would open a data center region in Chile before 2027, and PepsiCo announced a multi-year agreement that involves moving workloads to the Amazon cloud.
Coinbase is planning to expand its core trading app beyond crypto, the company said Thursday.
The newly imagined “everything exchange” will include tokenized real-world assets, stocks, derivatives, prediction markets and early-stage token sales. The new offerings will roll out in the next few months, first to U.S. users, followed by a “gradual international rollout based on jurisdictional approvals,” Max Branzburg, vice president of product at Coinbase, told CNBC.
“We’re building an exchange for everything,” he said. “Everything you want to trade, in a one-stop shop, on-chain. … We’re bringing all assets onchain — stocks, prediction markets, and more. We’re building the foundations for a faster, more accessible, more global economy.”
The expansion puts Coinbase in even closer competition with Robinhood, Gemini and Kraken, all of whom have recently opened tokenized equity offerings to users outside the U.S. CEO Brian Armstrong has said he has a goal of making Coinbase the top financial services app within the next decade.
Coinbase’s announcement comes hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to “modernize” securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading activity.
Tokenization of stocks and other traditional, non-crypto native assets, has surged in popularity this year as the Trump administration has worked to roll back restrictive crypto policies from the previous U.S. leadership.
While trading for retail and institutional investors is Coinbase’s core business, the company is in the midst of a big push to amplify consumer engagement through new services, taking advantage of the new pro-crypto policies out of Washington. Two weeks ago, it unveiled the “Base App,” which it aims to make the West’s answer to a WeChat-style super app.
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