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Google CEO Sundar Pichai waves as he arrives to attend the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, February 11, 2025.

Benoit Tessier | Reuters

Alphabet has a high bar to clear when it reports earnings Wednesday.

The company’s stock price soared 38% in the third quarter, its best quarterly performance in two decades. It’s continued to rally, climbing 11% so far in October, closing at a record on Monday.

With revenue growth stuck in the low teens of late, and expected to come in at 12% next year, investors have recalibrated their expectations after witnessing speedier growth in the years before the 2022 slowdown. Much of the recent optimism centers around Google’s improved position in the artificial intelligence race. 

However, the biggest catalyst for the stock in the third quarter had more to do with Google’s relative weakness in AI, compared with its standing in online ads. 

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Alphabet vs. Nasdaq

Alphabet shares soared in early September, when Google avoided the worst-case scenario in its search antitrust case. Following the government’s victory in its case against the company last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in the remedies decision last month that Google would not be forced to sell off its Chrome browser, but must share data with competitors. 

Mehta said that the rise in AI services from companies like OpenAI has created plenty of new competition in search. Backing up his point, OpenAI last week unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered browser that could directly challenge Chrome.

While investors immediately cheered Mehta’s ruling, Google now has to show that it’s a force in AI, which is serving as the growth engine for the tech sector. Google’s cloud unit benefits from the AI boom as companies count on the technology for running large language models and expanding workloads. And Google is heavily investing in Gemini, its family of AI models, products and services. 

Over the weekend, analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets raised their price target on Alphabet to $300 from $265, expecting that third-quarter results will “show that faster product velocity is driving momentum in Search, Cloud and Waymo,” its autonomous vehicle business.

The stock pop, the analysts wrote, is due to “a combination of the DOJ Search remedies trial being more favorable than expected and more signs of progress in AI across business units.”

Alphabet is scheduled to report results after the bell on Wednesday, alongside rivals Microsoft and Meta. Apple and Amazon report the following day. 

Wall Street is expecting to see revenue growth of 13% to $99.89 billion and earnings per share of $2.26, according to LSEG. 

‘The bite isn’t fatal’

When it comes to Google’s position in AI, some analysts see reasons for concern.

Bernstein analysts wrote last month after the remedies decision that Mehta’s comments about generative AI competing with search may be a red flag for investors. 

“The bite isn’t fatal but it still stings,” wrote the analysts, who have the equivalent of a hold rating on Alphabet.

Mehta dedicated roughly 30 pages of the 226-page filing to explaining generative AI and the market as it exists today. He described the space as “highly competitive” and wrote that there have been “numerous new market entrants” with access to “a lot of capital.”

ChatGPT accounts for about 81% of the global AI chatbot market, according to September data from StatCounter. Perplexity is second at 11%, followed by Microsoft Copilot at 4.1% and Gemini at 2.8%, the firm said. 

But Google is aggressively pushing Gemini as far more than just a ChatGPT competitor, and is taking advantage of its strength in various markets for distribution. 

Earlier this month, the company launched Gemini Enterprise, targeting corporate clients with agents that perform specific work tasks. In September, Google announced it was rolling out Gemini in Chrome to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. as well as to mobile devices, allowing users to ask Gemini for help understanding the contents of a particular web page, work across tabs, or do more within a single tab, such as schedule a meeting or search for a YouTube video.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this month at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that Gemini 3, the latest version of the company’s AI model, will be released this year. 

Google has to show it's protecting search this earnings season, says G Squared's Victoria Greene

Analysts at Mizuho said in a report about the internet market last week that “competitive risks from OpenAI across the internet landscape, particularly at Google, have been topic #1” in more than 100 recent conversations with investors. 

Still, they said that they see “competitive fears likely to recede as we refocus on fundamentals with earnings.” For Google, the “imminent roll-out of Gemini 3 could further tilt the sentiment for Alphabet shares toward AI-winner, at least near term,” they wrote. 

Even as the remedies resolution was generally welcomed by investors, the company will have to make some concessions, according to the judge’s ruling. Most notably, Google has to make available certain search data and user data to its “qualified competitors.”

Determining which companies fall into that category will be the job of a technical oversight committee at a date that hasn’t yet been announced. 

Services like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft Bing may be among the beneficiaries, potentially receiving improved access to some of Google’s search index data under specific licensing arrangements. 

Mehta wrote that the data-sharing remedies “can help to close the sizeable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.”

Baird analysts wrote that they expect a “modest” impact to Google, because the company doesn’t have to share its data with generative AI competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI. That would have been “more problematic,” the Baird analysts wrote.  

Google, which plans to appeal the ruling, declined to comment, but pointed to an earlier blog post on the judge’s decision. 

“We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely,” the company wrote. 

Abiel Garcia, a former deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, working in antitrust, said he doesn’t see the ruling having an impact on the way Google operates.

“Maybe some of the data will help competitors’ products at the periphery, but I don’t think this is going to really shift anything,” Garcia, who’s now a partner at Kesselman, Brantly & Stockinge, told CNBC. “It almost encourages Google’s roll-the-dice behavior.”

WATCH: Google’s search empire under fire

Google's search empire under fire

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CNBC Daily Open: It’s a boom, it’s a bubble, it’s still not enough for investors: It’s AI

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CNBC Daily Open: It's a boom, it's a bubble, it's still not enough for investors: It's AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (L) speaks with Microsoft Chief Technology Officer and Executive VP of Artificial Intelligence Kevin Scott during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024. 

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

Investors can’t get enough of artificial intelligence, despite worries over the sector’s excessively high valuations.

The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite rose Tuesday stateside, with all three notching new intraday highs. The major averages were juiced by gains in tech. Nvidia popped nearly 5%, while Microsoft climbed roughly 2%.

Both Apple and Microsoft reached a market capitalization of over $4 trillion after their shares rose. It was the first time Apple hit that milestone, though it closed just shy of that level.

Tech companies can’t get enough of each other, either.

Nvidia announced a $1 trillion investment in Nokia, which the Finnish company said will go toward developing its AI plans. For those, like me, who remember Nokia as a company that made the most desirable and bullet-proof phones: It primarily produces cellular equipment now.

Meanwhile, with its 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, Microsoft is potentially sitting on a goldmine — provided AI finds its footing as a sustainable, revenue-generating business in the long run. OpenAI on Tuesday announced it had completed its restructuring as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit arm.

It’s not just Microsoft. Investors who have poured money into tech could potentially gain big — as Cathie Wood of Ark Invest says, “If our expectations for AI … are correct, we are at the very beginning of a technology revolution.”

What you need to know today

And finally…

Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Fall meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Fed has a rate cut plus a bunch of other things on its plate this week. Here’s what to expect

Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%.

Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate, among other things, the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the reduction in the Fed’s asset portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.

— Jeff Cox

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Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix third-quarter profit jumps 62% to a record high on AI-fueled memory demand

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Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix third-quarter profit jumps 62% to a record high on AI-fueled memory demand

A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company’s Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.

Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images

South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday posted record quarterly revenue and profit, boosted by a strong demand for its high bandwidth memory used in generative AI chipsets.

Here are SK Hynix’s third-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

  • Revenue: 24.45 trillion won ($17.13 billion) vs. 24.73 trillion won
  • Operating profit: 11.38 trillion won vs. 11.39 trillion won

Revenue rose about 39% in the September quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 62%, year on year.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue was up 10%, while operating profit grew 24%.

SK Hynix makes memory chips that are used to store data and can be found in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops.

The company has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory or HBM chips used to power AI data center servers. 

“As demand across the memory segment has soared due to customers’ expanding investments in AI infrastructure, SK Hynix once again surpassed the record-high performance of the previous quarter due to increased sales of high value-added products,” SK Hynix said in its earnings release. 

HBM falls into the broader category of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — a type of semiconductor memory used to store data and program code that can be found in PCs, workstations and servers.

SK Hynix has set itself apart in the DRAM market by getting an early lead in HBM and establishing itself as the main supplier to the world’s leading AI chip designer, Nvidia

However, its main competitors, U.S.-based Micron and South Korean-based tech giant Samsung, have been working to catch up in the space.

“With the innovation of AI technology, the memory market has shifted to a new paradigm and demand has begun to spread to all product areas,” SK Hynix Chief Financial Officer Kim Woohyun said in the earnings release.

“We will continue to strengthen our AI memory leadership by responding to customer demand through market-leading products and differentiated technological capabilities,” he added.

The HBM market is expected to continue to boom over the next few years to around $43 billion by 2027, giving strong earnings leverage to memory manufacturers such as SK Hynix, MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“[F]or SK Hynix to continue generating profits, it’ll be important for the company to maintain and enhance its competitive edge,” he added.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month showed that SK Hynix held a leading 38% share of the DRAM market by revenue in the second quarter of the year, increasing its shares after having overtaken Samsung in the first quarter. 

The report added that the global HBM  market grew 178% year over year in the second quarter, and SK Hynix dominated the space with a 64% share.

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Celestica CEO explains the company’s role in the AI boom

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Celestica CEO explains the company's role in the AI boom

Celestica CEO Rob Mionis: If AI is a speeding freight train, we’re laying the tracks ahead of it

Celestica CEO Rob Mionis explained how his company designs and manufactures infrastructure that enables artificial intelligence in a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“If AI is a speeding freight train, we’re laying the tracks ahead of the freight train,” Mionis said.

He pushed back against the notion that the AI boom is a bubble, saying that the technology has gone from a “nice to have” to a “must have.”

Celestica reported earnings Monday after close, managing to beat estimates and raise its full-year outlook. The stock hit a 52-week high during Tuesday’s session and closed up more than 8%. Celestica has had a huge run over the past several months, and shares are currently up 253.68% year-to-date.

Mionis described some of Celestica’s business strategies, including how the Canadian outfit chose to move away from commodity markets and into design and manufacturing. He told Cramer that choice “has paid off in spades” for his company.

Celestica’s focus on design and manufacturing enables the company to “consistently execute at scale,” he added.

He detailed Celestica’s data center work, saying the company makes high-speed networking and storage system for hyperscalers, digital native companies and other enterprise names.

Mionis praised the company’s partnership with semiconductor maker Broadcom, saying Celestica uses Broadcom’s silicon in a lot of its designs.

“What it means for us is when they launch a new piece of silicon — so the Tomahawk 6 is their 1.6 terabyte silicon — when they launch that into the marketplace, they’ll work with us to develop products, and those products end up in the major hyperscalers.”

Celestica CEO Rob Mionis goes one-on-one with Jim Cramer

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