Nikesh Arora of the United States on the first hole during the third round of The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship at The Old Course on October 02, 2021 in St Andrews, Scotland.
David Cannon | David Cannon Collection | Getty Images
When Nikesh Arora was named CEO of Palo Alto Networks in June 2018, the cybersecurity company was valued at about $19 billion and was taking on large networking vendors like Cisco and Juniper, which were building security into their products.
Seven years later, Palo Alto’s market cap has expanded by sixfold, driven in part by an acquisition spree that’s seen Arora spearhead more than 20 deals in an effort to create a one-stop shop for all things cybersecurity.
Arora’s ambitions took a dramatic turn last week, when Palo Alto announced by far its biggest bet to date: the $25 billion purchase of Israeli identity security platform CyberArk.
Wall Street’s reaction so far has been downbeat, with multiple analysts downgrading the stock, and the shares dropping 16% since news of the deal first leaked out last Tuesday.
Not only does CyberArk represent Palo Alto’s heftiest deal in the 20 years since its founding, but it’s the second-biggest U.S. tech acquisition announced in 2025, after Alphabet’s $32 billion purchase of Wiz, another cloud security company from Israel.
Alphabet had become a more notable player in Palo Alto’s universe even before the calendar turned. In the company’s 2024 annual report published in October, Palo Alto named Alphabet as a competitor for the first time, listing it alongside Cisco and Microsoft as companies “that have acquired, or may acquire, security vendors and have the technical and financial resources to bring competitive solutions to the market.” In 2023, Cisco paid $28 billion for Splunk, which focuses on data protection.
The era of cybersecurity megadeals coincides with a surge in the number of sophisticated cybercrimes tied to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.
With CyberArk, Palo Alto is making a big splash in the identity management market, taking on the likes of Okta as well as Microsoft and IBM’s HashiCorp. It also puts the company into further competition with CrowdStrike, the other pure-play security company that’s topped $100 billion in market cap.
In an interview with CNBC soon after last week’s announcement, Arora said CyberArk fits squarely into his company’s focus on AI and, in this case, the complexities that come with granting permissions and access. Arora said that with M&A he looks for emerging trends, particularly when it involves technology that’s at a crossroads.
“Our entire acquisition strategy, our organic product growth strategy, our selling strategy, has always been based on that approach,” said Arora, 57, who’s seen his personal wealth top $1 billion with the big run-up in the stock.
In CyberArk’s earnings report last week, the company said revenue jumped 46% in the latest quarter to $328 million, equal to about 14% of Palo Alto revenue, based on the most recent report. Arora said in the conference call announcing the deal that he intends to work with CyberArk CEO Matt Cohen and Chairman Udi Mokady to “accelerate the pace of innovation.”
“We look for great products, a team that can execute in the product, and we let them run it,” Arora told CNBC. “This is going to be a different challenge, but we’ve done well 24 times, so I’m pretty confident that our team can handle this.”
Most of Arora’s acquisitions over the years have been of smaller startups. That includes a $400 million deal to buy Dig Security and the $625 million purchase of Talon Cyber Security in 2023. Last month, the company closed its takeover of Seattle-based startup Protect AI for an undisclosed amount.
Appetite for risk
Before joining Palo Alto, Arora spent a decade at Google, including his last three years there as chief business officer. Some analysts called him the “acting CEO,” due to his lengthy roster of responsibilities, such as strategic partnerships and navigating the needs of advertisers.
In 2014, Arora left Google to join SoftBank as head of its internet and media operations business and vice chairman of the overall company. At SoftBank, Arora had been tapped as the likely successor to visionary founder and CEO Masayoshi Son. But less than two years after taking the job, Arora resigned. As he explained it, Son told him he was going to keep running the show for another five to 10 years.
Roughly 10 months before leaving SoftBank, Arora said he was buying more than $480 million worth of stock in the Japanese conglomerate, which he said involved taking an “enormous risk” reflecting his confidence “about the future” of the company.
While that’s all firmly in the past, Arora said that over the years, he’s “scavenged” different leadership qualities from each of his mentors, including an appetite for risk from Son.
“It’s about finding role models for certain behaviors and wanting to understand what makes them really successful,” he said. “That’s my model.”
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks during the company’s annual general meeting in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday, June 27, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Investors weren’t completely sold on Arora when he joined Palo Alto in 2018, said Joseph Gallo, an analyst at Jefferies. He was a skilled and experienced businessman but some worried that he hadn’t created a notable product or founded a company like many of his industry peers, said Gallo, who recommends buying Palo Alto shares.
Arora made up for it with an ability to spot trends ahead of the curve, Gallo said. That included investing aggressively in a transition from on-premises technology to the cloud and then recognizing early the power of AI.
In his first few years at the company, Arora made numerous acquisitions for a total of about $3 billion, helping Palo Alto penetrate the cloud security space as more businesses were moving their workloads to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud.
“Every company wishes they were in Palo Alto shoes, where they could actually offer all these different products,” said Andrew Nowinski, an analyst at Wells Fargo who has a buy recommendation on the stock. “It’s very difficult. You’re not going to see many vendors like Palo Alto.”
With its expansion into identity management, Palo Alto is going big in a space that’s viewed by experts as a key spending area for IT in the coming years.
“You can’t slow down your spending because the hackers aren’t slowing down,” Nowinski said. “That’s your growth driver.”
Ofer Schreiber, senior partner and head of YL Ventures’ Israel office, said Palo Alto has helped take an extremely fragmented market, consisting of lots of point solutions, and created a centralized vendor for clients.
According to a joint report from IBM and Palo Alto published in January, the average organization uses 83 different security products from 29 separate companies.
“From the customer’s perspective, it’s much more convenient dealing with with one vendor with multiple products tightly integrated,” Schreiber said. “You can’t really be just a one-product company.”
Still, Arora is in untested waters with CyberArk.
Palo Alto’s shares dropped on all five days following the announcement of the deal. It’s the first time at Palo Alto that Arora has led a multibillion-dollar purchase, and he now faces the execution challenges of integrating thousands of new employees.
Analysts at KeyBanc lowered their rating to the equivalent of hold from buy, due partly to concerns about a lack of “meaningful synergies” in the product offerings and a view that customers would prefer an “independent vendor solely focused on identity.”
But TD Cowen’s Shaul Eyal still recommends buying the shares. He said that what’s made Arora successful is his “relentless focus on execution” and his strategy of betting on sizeable markets where Palo Alto can quickly scale and become the leader or runner-up.
That, and his ability to bundle.
“It’s all about upsell,” Eyal said. “Every other second, third, fourth module you’re selling to an existing customer flows straight to the bottom line.”
Super Micro Computer shares plunged 20% on Wednesday after the company posted weaker-than-expected fiscal fourth quarter results, dented in part by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
CEO Charles Liang told investors on a conference call that the company has “taken measures to reduce the impact” of the tariffs.
The company has in recent years benefited from surging demand for AI servers packed with Nvidia chips, but has growth has since slowed.
The server maker also offered guidance late Tuesday that fell short of consensus estimates. Super Micro said it expects 40 cents to 52 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $6 billion to $7 billion in revenue for the fiscal first quarter.
Wall Street had projected 59 cents per share and $6.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter.
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For the full year, Super Micro said it expects revenue to be at least $33 billion. That’s a step down from its forecast in February, where it projected as much as $40 billion in sales, but greater than the LSEG consensus of $29.94 billion.
Super Micro reported fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 41 cents, compared with expectations for 44 cents. Revenue came in at $5.76 billion, which was below analysts’ forecasts of $5.89 billion.
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YTD stock chart for Super Micro Computer.
CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed reporting to this story.
Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, talks about the AMD EPYC processor during a keynote address at the 2019 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., January 9, 2019.
The Santa Clara, California-based company reported adjusted earnings of 48 cents per share, falling short of the 49 cents per share expected by analysts polled by LSEG.
“AI business revenue declined year over year as U.S. export restrictions effectively eliminated MI308 sales to China, and we began transitioning to our next generation,” Su said.
For the current quarter, AMD forecasted $8.7 billion in revenue, plus or minus $300 million, versus $8.3 billion expected by analysts. The company said its guidance does not account for revenue from its MI308 AI chip designed for the China market to work around chip restrictions.
During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday, Su said the company has been working closely with the Trump administration on license requirements necessary to ship its chips to China, but took a “prudent” approach to its guide.
“From our standpoint, we think we have an extremely strong portfolio,” she said. “Tens of billions of dollars is the opportunity in a market that’s going to be, let’s call it 500 billion plus over the next few years.”
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Earlier this year, AMD said it would take a $800 million hit during the second quarter as a result of chip restrictions. AMD said in July it plans to soon resume those shipments as the Department of Commerce gets set to restart application review.
Some Wall Street analysts raised concerns over how soon those shipments may begin. Analysts at Morgan Stanley called the timing of the restart in China shipments “vague,” adding that the company requires a “near terms upside in GPU” to keep its premium.
“China upside sounds like it will take time to materialize (and it sounded like we shouldn’t count too much on it even if licenses are granted), pull-forward and inventory risks remain, and opex continues to march higher which is limiting earnings leverage,” wrote Bernstein analysts.
Investors also raised concerns about the company’s datacenter business, which grew 14% to $3.2 billion and includes its central processors and graphics processing units.
“We are more guarded on the company’s ability to drive significant scale in Datacenter GPUs over time, and think operating leverage is likely to be hampered by the significant OpEx we believe is needed for the company to support its software and systems efforts tied to datacenters,” wrote analysts at Goldman Sachs.
Su said Wednesday the company is seeing strong forecasts for compute from some of its largest customers and anticipates an “inflection point” into the third quarter.
“The data center business is actually the main driver of our growth, and we look at that as the opportunity in front of us,” she added.
Despite the post-earnings move, AMD’s revenues grew 32% from a year ago to $7.69 billion and topped a $7.42 billion estimate from analysts polled by LSEG. Net income jumped to $872 million, or 54 cents per share, up from $265 million, or 16 cents per share in the year-ago period.
The logo of Shopify is seen outside its headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, on Sept. 28, 2018.
Chris Wattie | Reuters
Shopify shares soared 20% Wednesday after the company topped analysts’ estimates for the second quarter, and gave rosy guidance for the third quarter.
Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 35 cents adj. vs. 29 cents
Revenue: $2.68 billion vs. $2.55 billion
Second-quarter sales surged 31% year over year to $2.68 billion, an acceleration from a year ago, when revenue expanded roughly 20%.
The Canadian e-commerce company also offered third-quarter guidance that surpassed expectations. Shopify said it expects revenue to grow at a “mid-to-high twenties percentage rate” year over year, which is higher than the 21.7% growth projected by analysts, according to StreetAccount.
The upbeat report and guidance suggested Shopify, which sells software for e-commerce businesses, is navigating President Donald Trump‘s trade war better than feared. Last quarter, the company noted there was macroeconomic “uncertainty ahead,” but that it wasn’t seeing significant price increases among its merchants due to the tariffs.
“We had factored into our guidance some potential impact from tariffs, which did not materialize,” Shopify CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said on a conference call with investors.
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Online retail peers Amazon and eBay last week reported strong revenue growth, indicating that consumers kept buying despite concerns of tariffs and rising prices.
The company hasn’t seen any “drops in U.S. demand, whether inbound, outbound or local” and instead saw the market accelerate in the second quarter, Hoffmeister said. Many Shopify merchants have raised prices, he added.
Shoppers don’t appear to be stocking up or pulling forward demand in anticipation of the tariffs, he said.
“So far we’re seeing no slowdown from the tariffs and that includes up until early August, where we are today,” Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “The millions of stores on Shopify are doing really, really well.”
Shopify’s gross merchandise sales, or the total volume of merchandise sold on the platform, also came in higher than expected. GMS grew 29% year over year to $87.8 billion, surpassing Wall Street’s projected $81.5 billion, according to StreetAccount.
The company said it expects operating expenses as a percentage of revenue to be 38% to 39%, compared to 39% to 40% in the previous quarter.
Shopify has been investing heavily in adding more artificial intelligence tools to its platform as a way to attract and retain merchants. In May, the company released an “AI store builder” that generates webstores based on a few keywords. Shopify on Tuesday launched a set of tools to support shopping via AI agents.
Company executives said these investments appear to be paying off.
“As we continue to expand our platforms capabilities, add new products, and build for where commerce is heading, Shopify is becoming even more compelling to a wider range of businesses than ever before,” Hoffmeister said.