Block said Wednesday that it expects gross profit to increase in the mid-teens annually for the next three years, reaching about $15.8 billion in 2028.

At the payment company’s first investor day event since 2022, Block unveiled a three-year financial outlook. The announcements land as Wall Street has turned skeptical on Block’s prospects, pushing the stock down by more than 30% in 2025, while major indexes have notched solid gains.

Block shares were initially halted around the time of the announcement and then jumped 9% when trading resumed.

The fresh guidance also comes two weeks after Block reported quarterly results, missing revenue estimates for a sixth straight time. Block has been diversifying away from its point-of-sale business, which has become increasingly crowded, launching more services tied to Cash App and offering artificial intelligence tools to sellers.

Block said in its new outlook that adjusted operating income is projected to increase about 30% annually, topping $4.6 billion by 2028. Adjusted earnings per share will grow in the low 30% range, reaching $5.50 in three years.

Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja told CNBC ahead of the release that the company is entering a new phase of execution.

“Since 2022, our last investor day, we’re nearly double the size from a gross profit perspective,” Ahuja said, adding that earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization “more than tripled.”

Block also introduced a new non-GAAP cash flow metric, designed to reflect the capital required to grow its lending products, which it expects to reach more than $4 billion, or 25% of gross profit, by 2028.

For 2026, Block expects gross profit to rise 17% to $11.98 billion, with adjusted operating income and EPS both increasing more than 30%, to $2.7 billion and $3.20, respectively.

Ahuja said Block has adopted a “rule of 40” investment framework. That typically refers to revenue growth rate plus profit margin exceeding 40. She said the company expects to reach that metric this year and has reorganized around a single roadmap with a shared technical infrastructure.

“That transformation has resulted in us moving faster, with more connected decisions across our ecosystem,” Ahuja said.

On Wednesday, Block also expanded its share repurchase program by $5 billion, adding to the $1.1 billion in remaining authorization as of Sept. 30. The prior buyback plan was for up to $4 billion in purchases.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who co-founded the company as Square in 2009, was in attendance at the investor event. Dorsey has largely been out of public view in recent years.

WATCH: Block shares drop more than 8% on quarterly miss

Kraken confidentially filed to go public in the U.S., a person familiar with the matter told CNBC on Wednesday.

A Kraken spokesperson declined to comment on the timing of its plans.

Kraken is the latest crypto company to attempt to tap the public market since President Donald Trump came back to the White House. Crypto trading platforms Bullish and Gemini Space Station listed their shares on major stock exchanges in August and September, respectively. And in June, stablecoin issuer Circle raised just north of $1 billion in its blockbuster IPO.

The boom in crypto-linked listings comes as IPOs have seen a resurgence in the U.S. this year.  

Founded in 2011, Kraken is a U.S.-based platform that facilitates the trading of digital assets like bitcoin and ether. It also offers tokenized equities trading to clients in the European Union.

Kraken recently raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation, including $200 million from Citadel Securities, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The firm plans to use those funds to expand its footprint in foreign markets, in addition to building out its payment services.

Video generation startup Luma AI said it raised $900 million in a new funding round led by Humain, an artificial intelligence company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The financing, which included participation from Advanced Micro Devices’ venture arm and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners, was announced at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Wednesday.

The company is now valued upwards of $4 billion, CNBC has confirmed.

Luma develops multimodal “world models” that are able to learn from not only text, but also video, audio and images in order to simulate reality. CEO Amit Jain told CNBC in an interview that these models expand beyond large language models, which are solely trained on text, to be more effective in “helping in the real, physical world.”

“With this funding, we plan to scale our and accelerate our efforts in training and then deploying these world models today,” Jain said.

Luma released Ray3 in September, the first reasoning video model that can interpret prompts to create videos, images and audio. Jain said Ray3 currently benchmarks higher than OpenAI’s Sora 2 and around the same level as Google’s Veo 3.

Humain, which was launched in May, is aiming to deliver full-stack AI capabilities to bolster Saudi Arabia’s position as a global AI hub. The company is led by industry veteran Tareq Amin, who previously ran Aramco Digital and before that was CEO of Rakuten Mobile.

Luma and Humain will also partner to build a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster, dubbed Project Halo, in Saudi Arabia. The buildout will be one of the one of the largest deployments of graphic processing units (GPUs) in the world, Jain said.

Major tech companies have been investing in supercomputers across the globe to train massive AI models. In July, Meta announced plans to build a 1-gigawatt supercluster called Prometheus, and Microsoft deployed the first supercomputing cluster using the Nvidia GB300 NVL72 platform in October.

“Our investment in Luma AI, combined with HUMAIN’s 2GW supercluster, positions us to train, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier level,” Amin said in a release. “This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together.”

The collaboration also includes Humain Create, an initiative to create sovereign AI models trained on Arabic and regional data. Along with focusing on building the world’s first Arabic video model, Jain said Luma models and capabilities will be deployed to Middle Eastern businesses.

He added that since most models are trained by scraping data from the internet, countries outside the U.S. and Asia are often less represented in AI-generated content.

“It’s really important that we bring these cultures, their identities, their representation — visual and behavioral and everything — to our model,” Jain said.

AI-generated content tools have received significant backlash over the past year from entertainment studios over copyright concerns. Luma’s flagship text-to-video platform Dream Machine garnered some accusations of copying IP earlier this year, but Jain the company has installed safeguards to prevent unwanted usage.

“Even if you really try to trick it, we are constantly improving it,” he said. “We have built very robust systems that are actually using models we trained to detect them.”

WATCH: Humain CEO on building an Arabic rival to ChatGPT