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A Dell Technologies sign is seen in Round Rock, Texas, on June 2, 2023.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Despite beating on its top and bottom lines, shares of Dell Technologies fell more than 5% Thursday in extended trading after giving third-quarter earnings per share guidance that below Wall Street’s expectations.

Here’s how the systems integrator did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • EPS: $2.32, adjusted vs. $2.30 estimated
  • Revenue: $29.78 billion vs. $29.17 billion estimated

Dell raised its full year outlook for revenue to be $107 billion at its midpoint and diluted earnings per share to $9.55 at the midpoint, topping Wall Street estimates of $104.6 billion and $9.38 per share.

However, Dell’s guidance for third-quarter earnings per share of $2.45 came in short versus LSEG’s mark of $2.55, despite Dell’s guide for $27 billion in third-quarter revenue topping estimates of $26.1 billion.

Dell said that part of the reason its profit forecast is concentrated in the fourth quarter is due to seasonality, particularly in its storage business.

For the second quarter, overall revenue rose 19% on an annual basis. That was driven by the company’s Servers and Networking revenue, including AI servers, which came in at $12.9 billion, which was up 69% on an annual basis.

Dell is one of Nvidia’s key customers. Dell buys chips from the AI leader and builds computers around them, which it sells to end-users such as CoreWeave, a cloud service. Dell said it shipped $10 billion in AI servers in its past two quarters.

Dell said that it now plans to ship $20 billion of artificial intelligence servers in its fiscal 2026, double what it sold last year.

However, the company’s storage revenue declined 3% to $3.86 billion and missed a StreetAccount estimate of $4.1 billion in sales.

Revenue in the company’s client solutions group, which includes PC sales to enterprises, rose 1% on an annual basis to $12.5 billion. While it used to be Dell’s largest business group, in recent quarters it has grown much slowly than the company’s data center business.

Dell said it spent $1.3 billion on share repurchases and dividends during the quarter.

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Affirm’s stock soars 15% on earnings, revenue beat

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Affirm's stock soars 15% on earnings, revenue beat

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and chief executive officer of financial technology company Affirm, arrives at the Sun Valley Resort for the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

Affirm shares rose 15% in extended trading on Thursday after the provider of buy now, pay later loans reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • EPS: 20 cents vs. 11 cents estimated
  • Revenue: $876 million vs. $837 million estimated

Revenue climbed 33% in the period from $659 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Gross merchandise volume rose 43% to $10.4 billion from $7.2 billion a year ago.

Affirm reported net income of $69.2 million, or 20 cents a share, after recording a loss a year earlier of $45.1 million, or 14 cents a share.

 “This consistent execution led Affirm to achieve operating income profitability in FQ4’25 – right on the schedule we committed to a year ago,” the company said in its shareholder letter.

For the first quarter, Affirm said revenue will be between $855 million and $885 million, while gross merchandise volume will be $10.1 billion to 10.4 billion.

Shares of Affirm were up 31% this year before the after-hours pop, topping the Nasdaq’s 12% gain.

Affirm, which went public in 2021, faces growing competition in e-commerce. It has partnerships with Amazon and Shopify, but Walmart recently shifted to competitor Klarna, which is expected to go public in the near future. Last year, Affirm announced a deal with Apple.

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Tesla FSD turns off more U.S. consumers than its attracts, survey finds

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Tesla FSD turns off more U.S. consumers than its attracts, survey finds

Elon Musk reacts during a press event with U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured), at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 30, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

Elon Musk’s fervent promotion of Tesla‘s self-driving technology isn’t doing much to win over prospective buyers.

According to a new survey, more U.S. consumers say that Tesla’s FSD, or Full Self-Driving (Supervised) systems, would push them away from the brand rather than drawing them to it.

The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August, published by political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies, polled 8,000 Americans. Only 14% of those surveyed said FSD would make them more likely to buy a Tesla, while 35% said the technology would make them less likely to purchase one.

The remaining 51% said the availability of FSD would make no difference to them in terms of their car buying decisions. Nearly half of consumers surveyed by Slingshot said they think FSD technology should be illegal.

For Tesla, the troubling results land in the middle of a sales slump resulting from an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition from rivals. There’s also reputational damage in response to Musk, his incendiary political rhetoric, work with the Trump administration and support of Germany’s far-right AfD party.

Sales of Tesla cars in Europe plunged 40% in July from a year earlier, the seventh consecutive month of declines.

In the robotaxi market, Tesla is lagging Alphabet-owned Waymo, and Baidu’s Apollo Go. It’s now in the early stages of testing a ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, with hopes to reach more cities this year. Cars in Austin have human supervisors on board, while those in San Francisco have drivers at the wheel.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has said the future of Tesla hangs on its ability to deliver autonomous vehicles and related services. He recently said a new variant of the Model Y, which launched in China, won’t “start production in the U.S. until the end of next year,” and “might not ever, given the advent of self-driving in America.”

Tesla sales fall 40% in Europe as Chinese EV rival BYD's triple

For now, Tesla still relies on EV sales for the vast majority of its revenue, though Musk has touted FSD as one of the company’s big advantages over competitors.

Last month, executives suggested that Tesla has a market education problem when it comes to driving adoption of FSD.

“The vast majority of people don’t know it exists,” Musk said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “And it’s still like half of Tesla owners who could use it, haven’t tried it even once.”

Musk said he would start telling customers about FSD when they bring their cars in for service, and would begin reaching out to drivers, sending them videos of how it works.

Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja said on the July earnings call that people who subscribe to the premium FSD option get something like a “personal chauffeur” for about $3.33 a day.

The version of FSD Supervised that Tesla sells today is available to owners for $99 per month or an up-front purchase. The system gives users a limited set of self-driving capabilities on residential and city streets.

On Thursday, Tesla sent out a promotion offering 0% APR financing for customers ordering a new Model 3 by Sept. 1, as long as they add FSD Supervised to their order, or transfer it from their previously owned Tesla.

‘Holding AV manufacturers responsible’

Musk has said in posts on X that FSD can “can operate in all conditions,” will “save lives” and will be a “life-changing product” for many people. He’s also shared user-generated videos showing Tesla owners using FSD without their hands on the wheel.

However, in owners manuals, Tesla lists many conditions in which FSD Supervised may not be reliable, and warns users to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times, and be ready to take over steering or braking.

Among the subset of survey respondents actively looking to buy a fully electric vehicle, only 20% said they were more likely to buy a Tesla because of FSD, while 33% said they were less likely. Evan Roth Smith, Slingshot’s head of research, said a lack of clarity and honesty in the company’s marketing could be a factor.

Most consumers polled by the firm want clear and strong regulations in the U.S. governing autonomous vehicles, whether they’re fully or partially automated.

“There is strong support for holding AV manufacturers responsible for accidents and requiring stricter regulatory and advertising guardrails around features such as FSD,” the Slingshot report said.

Smith said the data shows that beyond its FSD woes, Tesla has “the worst reputation of any EV maker in the U.S.”

“The drop in the company’s brand reputation this year is remarkable,” he said, adding that recent product liability lawsuits and verdicts may be playing a role.

In early August, a jury found Tesla partially liable for a fatal crash where the driver was relying on its autopilot systems. Tesla, which plans to appeal the decision, must pay around $243 million in damages to victims and a survivor.

In the past two months, the number of consumers who view Tesla cars as unsafe has increased to 36% from 34%, the Slingshot report found, while those viewing Tesla as very safe fell to 13% from 17%.

Honda, Toyota and Chevrolet were seen as safest among the greatest number of respondents.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment. Slingshot said it sent the survey results to the company but also didn’t hear back from the automaker.

Tesla may find that owners in other markets embrace its brand, and FSD, with greater enthusiasm. The company just started offering FSD Supervised in Australia this week.

Read Slingshot’s full Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August 2025 here.

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Nvidia’s top two mystery customers made up 39% of the chipmaker’s Q2 revenue

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Nvidia's top two mystery customers made up 39% of the chipmaker's Q2 revenue

Two Nvidia customers made up 39% of Nvidia’s revenue in its July quarter, the company revealed in a financial filing on Wednesday, raising concerns about the concentration of the chipmaker’s clientele.

“Customer A” made up 23% of total revenue, and “Customer B” comprised 16% of total revenue, according to the company’s second-quarter filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s higher than the same quarter a year ago when Nvidia’s top two customers made up 14% and 11% of sales, according to the filing.

The company regularly publishes information on a quarterly basis about its top customers, but the disclosure this week is fueling a renewed debate about whether Nvidia’s explosive growth is being driven by a handful of large cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle.

Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said in a Wednesday statement that “large cloud service providers” made up about 50% of the company’s data center revenue. That’s important as the data center business made up 88% of Nvidia’s overall revenue in the second quarter.

“We have experienced periods where we receive a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers, and this trend may continue,” Nvidia wrote in the filing.

Increasingly, analysts are looking to those cloud capital expenditure spending commitments to model the future growth of Nvidia.

“We see limited room for further earnings upside revision or share price catalyst in the near-term unless we have increasing clarity over upside in 2026 [cloud service provider] capex expectations,” wrote HSBC analyst Frank Lee in a note on Thursday. He has a hold rating on the stock.

But Nvidia’s Customer A and Customer B are not necessarily cloud providers. It’s a bit of a mystery, and an Nvidia representative declined to share the identities of Customer A and Customer B.

In its filing, Nvidia says it has both “direct customers” and “indirect customers.” Customer A and Customer B are listed as “direct customers.”

Direct customers are not the end users of Nvidia’s chips. They’re companies that buy the chips to build into complete systems or circuit boards that they then sell to data centers, cloud providers and end-users. Some of these direct customers are original design manufacturers or original equipment manufacturers like Foxconn or Quanta. Others are distributors or system integrators like Dell.

Indirect customers, meanwhile, include cloud service providers, internet companies and enterprises, which typically buy systems from Nvidia’s direct customers. Nvidia says it can only estimate revenue to indirect customers based on purchase orders and internal sales data.

Deciphering if any of those cloud providers are Nvidia’s mystery customers is difficult, in part because the chipmaker has wiggle room in the definitions of its direct and indirect customers.

Nvidia, for example, wrote in the filing that some direct customers buy chips to build systems for their own use.

Additionally, Nvidia noted that two of its indirect customers each accounted for over 10% of its total revenue, primarily buying systems through Customers A and B.

Contributing further to the mystery of it all, Nvidia said that an “AI research and development company” contributed a “meaningful” amount of revenue through both direct and indirect customers.

Nvidia told investors on Wednesday that demand for the company’s AI systems remains high, not just among cloud providers, but among other kinds of customers, including enterprises buying systems for AI and “neoclouds,” which are companies that are taking on the biggest providers with services more tuned for AI. Nvidia also listed foreign governments, saying it would record $20 billion in revenue this year for “sovereign AI.” All of these product categories are contributing to Nvidia’s revenue growth, Kress told analysts on an earnings call.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also said that the company has a new forecast of $3 to $4 trillion in AI infrastructure by the end of the decade. It said that it could take about 70% of the total cost of a $50 billion AI-focused data center, not just for its graphics processing units but for other chips it sells, too.

Huang told investors it was a sensible target for the next five years because of how much hyperscalers were spending and committing to spend — $600 billion this year, according to Huang. He also said new kinds of customers, such as enterprises or overseas cloud providers, were joining the build-out.

“As you know, the capex of just the top four hyperscalers has doubled in two years as the AI revolution went into full steam,” Huang said.

WATCH: Nvidia’s concentration dependence risk

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