‘AI may eat software,’ but several tech names just wrapped a huge week

Published

3 months ago

August 29, 2025

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A banner for Snowflake Inc. is displayed at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the company’s initial public offering on Sept. 16, 2020.

Brendan McDermid | Reuters

MongoDB’s stock just closed out its best week on record, leading a rally in enterprise technology companies that are seeing tailwinds from the artificial intelligence boom.

In addition to MongoDB’s 44% rally, Pure Storage soared 33%, its second-sharpest gain ever, while Snowflake jumped 21%. Autodesk rose 8.4%.

Since generative AI started taking off in late 2022 following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the big winners have been Nvidia, for its graphics processing units, as well as the cloud vendors like Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and companies packaging and selling GPUs, such as Dell and Super Micro Computer.

For many cloud software vendors and other enterprise tech companies, Wall Street has been waiting to see if AI will be a boon to their business, or if it might displace it.

Quarterly results this week and commentary from company executives may have eased some of those concerns, showing that the financial benefits of AI are making their way downstream.

MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that enterprise rollouts of AI services are happening, but slowly.

“You start to see deployments of agents to automate back office, maybe automate sales and marketing, but it’s still not yet kind of full force in the enterprise,” Ittycheria said. “People want to see some wins before they deploy more investment.”

Revenue at MongoDB, which sells cloud database services, rose 24% from a year earlier to $591 million, sailing past the $556 million average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Earnings also exceeded expectations, as did the company’s full-year forecast for profit and revenue.

MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria on Q2 results: The opportunity in front of us is massive

MongoDB said in its earnings report that it’s added more than 5,000 customers year-to-date, “the highest ever in the first half of the year.”

“We think that’s a good sign of future growth because a lot of these companies are AI native companies who are coming to MongoDB to run their business,” Ittycheria said.

Pure Storage enjoyed a record pop on Thursday, when the stock jumped 32% to an all-time high.

The data storage management vendor reported quarterly results that topped estimates and lifted its guidance for the year. But what’s exciting investors the most is early returns from Pure’s recent contract with Meta. Pure will help the social media company manage its massive storage needs efficiently with the demands of AI.

Pure said it started recognizing revenue from its Meta deployments in the second quarter, and finance chief Tarek Robbiati said on the earnings call that the company is seeing “increased interest from other hyperscalers” looking to replace their traditional storage with Pure’s technology.

‘Banger of a report’

Reports from MongoDB and Pure landed the same week that Nvidia announced quarterly earnings, and said revenue soared 56% from a year earlier, marking a ninth-straight quarter of growth in excess of 50%.

Nvidia has emerged as the world’s most-valuable company by selling advanced AI processors to all of the infrastructure providers and model developers.

While growth at Nvidia has slowed from its triple-digit rate in 2023 and 2024, it’s still expanding at a much faster pace than its megacap peers, indicating that there’s no end in sight when it comes to the expansive AI buildouts.

“It was a banger of a report,” said Brad Gerstner CEO of Altimeter Capital, in an interview with CNBC’s “Halftime Report” on Thursday. “This company is accelerating at scale.”

CNBC Daily Open: Some hope after last week’s U.S. market rout

Published

3 hours ago

November 24, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: Some hope after last week's U.S. market rout

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Nov. 21, 2025 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Last week on Wall Street, two forces dragged stocks lower: a set of high-stakes numbers from Nvidia and the U.S. jobs report that landed with more heat than expected. But the leaves that remained after hot tea scalded investors seemed to augur good tidings.

Even though Nvidia’s third-quarter results easily breezed past Wall Street’s estimates, they couldn’t quell worries about lofty valuations and an unsustainable bubble inflating in the artificial intelligence sector. The “Magnificent Seven” cohort — save Alphabet — had a losing week.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics added to the pressure. September payrolls rose far more than economists expected, prompting investors to pare back their bets of a December interest rate cut. The timing didn’t help matters, as the report had been delayed and hit just as markets were already on edge.

By Friday’s close, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average lost roughly 2% for the week, while the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.7%.

Still, a flicker of hope appeared on the horizon.

On Friday, New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said that he sees “room” for the central bank to lower interest rates, describing current policy as “modestly restrictive.” His comments caused traders to increase their bets on a December cut to around 70%, up from 44.4% a week ago, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

And despite a broad sell-off in AI stocks last week, Alphabet shares bucked the trend. Investors seemed impressed by its new AI model, Gemini 3, and hopeful that its development of custom chips could rival Nvidia’s in the long run.

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly’s ascent into the $1 trillion valuation club served as a reminder that market leadership doesn’t belong to tech alone. In a market defined by narrow concentration, any sign of broadening strength is a welcome change.

Diversification, even within AI’s sprawling ecosystem, might be exactly what this market needs now.

What you need to know today

And finally…

The Beijing music venue DDC was one of the latest to have to cancel a performance by a Japanese artist on Nov. 20, 2025, in the wake of escalating bilateral tensions.

Screenshot

Japanese concerts in China are getting abruptly canceled as tensions simmer

China’s escalating dispute with Japan reinforces Beijing’s growing economic influence — and penchant for abrupt actions that can create uncertainty for businesses.

Hours before Japanese jazz quintet The Blend was due to perform in Beijing on Thursday, a plainclothesman walked into the DDC music club during a sound check. Then, “the owner of the live house came to me and said: ‘The police has told me tonight is canceled,'” said Christian Petersen-Clausen, a music agent.

— Evelyn Cheng

Correction: This report has been updated to correct the spelling of Eli Lilly.

Technology

Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges

Published

3 hours ago

November 24, 2025

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Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed that people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to a legal filing that was released on Friday.

The social media giant was alleged to have initiated the study, dubbed Project Mercury, in late 2019 as a way to help it “explore the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions,” according to the legal brief, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The filing contains newly unredacted information pertaining to Meta.

The newly released legal brief is related to high-profile multidistrict litigation from a variety of plaintiffs, such as school districts, parents and state attorneys general against social media companies like Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snap and TikTok.

The plaintiffs claim that these businesses were aware that their respective platforms caused various mental health-related harms to children and young adults, but failed to take action and instead misled educators and authorities, among several allegations.

“We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. “The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that “These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and the allegations are simply not true.”

“YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends,” the Google spokesperson said. “We’ve also developed dedicated tools for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control.”

Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 2019 Meta research was based on a random sample of consumers who stopped their Facebook and Instagram usage for a month, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged that Meta was disappointed that the initial tests of the study showed that people who stopped using Facebook “for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.”

Meta allegedly chose not to “sound the alarm,” but instead stopped the research, the lawsuit said.

“The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study,” according to the suit. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.”

The lawsuit cites an unnamed Meta employee who allegedly said, “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”

Stone, in a series of social media posts, pushed back on the lawsuit’s implication that Meta shuttered the internal research after it allegedly showed a causal relationship between its apps and adverse mental-health effects.

Stone characterized the 2019 study as flawed and said it was the reason that the company expressed disappointment. The study, Stone said, merely found that “people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it.”

“This is a confirmation of other public research (“deactivation studies”) out there that demonstrates the same effect,” Stone said in a separate post. “It makes intuitive sense but it doesn’t show anything about the actual effect of using the platform.”

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed reporting.

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