Technology

Amazon increases average pay for warehouse workers and adds free Prime membership perk

Published

1 year ago

September 18, 2024

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An Amazon warehouse

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Amazon announced Wednesday it’s raising wages for its hourly warehouse workers, and adding a new employee perk that will give them a Prime subscription at no extra cost.

Starting this month, Amazon’s average starting pay for front-line employees in the U.S. will be bumped to an average of more than $22 an hour, up from roughly $20.50 an hour, the company said.

Amazon said it’s also making its Prime subscription service a part of employees’ benefit package beginning “early next year.” The service, which costs $140 a year, gives members access to speedy shipping and video streaming, among other perks.

Last week, Amazon also hiked wages for its contracted delivery drivers to roughly $22 an hour as part of a $2.1 billion investment this year into its third-party logistics program.

The wage hikes come as Amazon is preparing to enter the peak holiday shopping season, a period when retailers typically see a flurry of online shopping. Amazon said Tuesday it plans to host a second Prime Day-like deal bonanza on Oct. 8-9, the third year it’s held the discount event.

Technology

Meta stock climbs 4% on report of planned metaverse cuts

Published

2 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Meta stock climbs 4% on report of planned metaverse cuts

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repositioned the social media giant as an AI company.

Vincent Feuray | AFP | Getty Images

Meta Platforms shares popped about 4% higher on Thursday after Bloomberg reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was looking to make significant cuts to the company’s metaverse resources.

Bloomberg said that executives have considered budget cuts as high as 30% for the unit, citing people familiar with the talks.

The move would be notable for the Facebook parent company, which changed its name to Meta in October 2021 to signal its pivot beyond social media.

Zuckerberg said at the time that “the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started.”

The proposed cuts would likely include layoffs, according to Bloomberg, which said the cuts were part of budget planning for 2026. The cuts will likely hit the company’s virtual reality group.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has a cash problem — too much of it

Published

3 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Nvidia has a cash problem — too much of it

When Nvidia this week said it would take a $2 billion stake in chip design company Synopsys, it was just the latest in a string of massive investments announced by the chipmaker this year.

Nvidia has also said it would take a $1 billion stake in Nokia, invest $5 billion in Intel and $10 billion in Anthropic — $18 billion in investment commitments from those four deals, not counting smaller venture capital investments.

That doesn’t even include the biggest commitment of all: $100 billion to buy OpenAI shares over a number of years, although there is still no definitive agreement, Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said Tuesday.

It’s a lot of money and a lot of deals, but Nvidia’s got the cash to write big checks.

At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments. That’s up from $13.3 billion in January 2023, just after OpenAI released ChatGPT. That launch three years ago was key to making Nvidia’s chips the most valuable tech product.

As Nvidia has transformed from a maker of gaming technology into the most valuable U.S. company, its balance sheet has become a fortress, and investors are increasingly wondering what the company will do with its cash.

“No company has grown at the scale that we’re talking about,” said CEO Jensen Huang, when asked what the company plans to do with all its cash, on Nvidia’s earnings call last month.

Analysts polled by FactSet expect the company to generate $96.85 billion in free cash flow this year alone and $576 billion in free cash flow over the next three years.

Some analysts would like to see Nvidia spend more of its cash on share repurchases.

“Nvidia is set to generate over $600B in free cash flow over the next few years and it should have a lot left over for opportunistic buybacks,” wrote Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes in a note on Monday.

The company’s board increased its share repurchase authorization in August, adding $60 billion to its total. In the first three quarters of the year, it spent $37 billion on share repurchases and dividends.

“We’re going to continue to do stock buybacks,” Huang said.

Nvidia is doing the buybacks, but it’s not stopping there.

Huang said that Nvidia’s balance sheet strength gives its customers and suppliers confidence that orders in the future, which he called offtake, will be filled.

“Our reputation and our credibility is incredible,” Huang said. “It takes a really strong balance sheet to do that, to support the level of growth and the rate of growth and the magnitude associated with that.”

Kress, Nvidia’s CFO, on Tuesday said that the company’s “largest focus” is making sure it has enough cash to deliver its next-generation products on time. Most of Nvidia’s largest suppliers are equipment manufacturers like Foxconn and Dell, which can require that Nvidia provide working capital to manage inventory and build additional manufacturing capacity.

Huang called his company’s strategic investments “really important work” and said that if companies like OpenAI grow, it drives additional consumption of AI and Nvidia’s chips. Nvidia has said that it does not require any of its investments to use its products, but they all do anyway.

“All of the investments that we’ve done so far — all of it, period — is associated with expanding the reach of Cuda, expanding the ecosystem,” Huang said, referring to the company’s AI software.

In an October filing, Nvidia said it had has already made $8.2 billion in investments in private companies. For Nvidia, those investments have replaced acquisitions.

Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2020 is the largest the company has ever made, and it laid the groundwork for its current AI products, which aren’t single chips but entire server racks that sell for around an estimated $3 million.

But the company faced regulatory issues when it tried to buy chip technology firm Arm for $40 billion in 2020.

Nvidia called off the deal before it could be completed after regulators in the U.S. and UK raised concerns about its effects on competition in the chip industry. Nvidia has purchased some smaller companies in recent years, to bolster its engineering teams, but it hasn’t completed a multi-billion acquisition since the Arm deal failed.

“It’s hard to think about very significant, large types of M&A,” Kress this week said, speaking at an investor conference. “I wish one would come available, but it’s not going to be very easy to do so.”

WATCH: Nvidia CEO says he supports export controls ahead of Senate Banking Committee meeting

Technology

Weak jobs data, Salesforce earnings, GM’s ‘Silicon Valley cowboy’ and more in Morning Squawk

Published

3 hours ago

December 4, 2025

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Weak jobs data, Salesforce earnings, GM's 'Silicon Valley cowboy' and more in Morning Squawk

A sign at a NYS Department Of Labor job fair at the Downtown Central Library in Buffalo, New York, US, on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025.

Lauren Petracca | Bloomberg | Getty Images

This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:

1. Silver linings playbook

Yesterday highlighted the relevance of a market adage: Bad news can actually be good news for investors. After private payroll data showed weakness in the labor market, stocks climbed as investors hoped the report would strengthen the case for an interest rate cut at the Federal Reserve’s meeting next week.

Here’s what to know:

The ADP reported a surprise decline of 32,000 jobs in November. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones were forecasting a gain of 40,000.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied more than 400 points in Wednesday’s session, pulling the 30-stock index into positive territory for the week.
Traders are now pricing in a roughly 89% likelihood of a rate cut, up from under 70% a month ago, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
Data released by Challenger, Gray & Christmas this morning also showed layoff announcements this year totaled the most since 2020, another sign of the labor market’s slowdown.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC yesterday that the poor ADP numbers were due to the government shutdown and mass deportations — not tariffs.
Speaking of tariffs, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the Trump administration can replicate the sweeping levies if the Supreme Court rules the president exceeded his authority to enact the duties.
Follow live markets updates here.

2. In full force

Sheldon Cooper | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Salesforce blew past earnings per share expectations for the third quarter, sending shares higher in today’s premarket. While the company’s quarterly revenue came in slightly under Wall Street’s consensus forecast, Salesforce offered stronger-than-anticipated revenue guidance for the current three-month period.

Salesforce also said annualized revenue from its Agentforce AI software jumped 330% year over year. The firm set a better-than-expected revenue target of $60 billion for fiscal 2030 for Agentforce.

3. Jensen’s jaunt

Nvidia President and CEO Jensen Huang speaks to the media as he arrives for a meeting with the Senate Banking Committee on Capitol Hill on December 3, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang returned to Washington, D.C. yesterday to meet with Trump and discuss chip export restrictions. Huang then went to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are weighing whether to approve a rule that would limit AI chip exports.

Huang said the Guaranteeing Access and Innovation for National Artificial Intelligence Act — known as the GAIN AI Act — “is even more detrimental to the United States than the AI Diffusion Act.” Huang also broke with some of his fellow AI executives by slamming state-by-state AI regulation. Such oversight would “drag this industry into a halt” and would “create a national security concern,” he said.

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4. Vaccination vote

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Retsef Levi speaks during an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Sept. 19, 2025.

Alyssa Pointer | Reuters

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hand-picked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is slated to vote today. On the docket: whether to change its longstanding recommendation that babies gets the hepatitis B vaccination within 24 hours of birth.

While it’s unclear how the committee will rule, any change to the recommendation would have major impacts within public health. Some experts caution that doing away with the decades-old recommendation could lead to a higher rate of chronic infections in children.

5. New terrain

GM Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson during the automaker’s “GM Forward” event on Oct. 22, 2025 in New York City.

Michael Wayland / CNBC

Meet Sterling Anderson, General Motors‘ new executive vice president and product chief. As CNBC’s Michael Wayland reports, the self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley cowboy” is taking the Detroit automaker by storm.

Anderson’s remit includes overseeing “the end-to-end product lifecycle” of GM’s vehicles, according to the company. He told CNBC that the he wants to see a faster rate of innovation and create a “unified approach” to product.

Also helping General Motors: Trump’s decision to cut tariffs on South Korea. The company is the second-largest new vehicle importer from the country, behind South Korea-based Hyundai Motor.

The Daily Dividend

Delta Air Lines detailed the impact of the government shutdown on its profit. Here’s what the air carrier said:

Approximate cost to pretax profit: $200 million
Current-quarter earnings per share impact: 25 cents

— CNBC’s Sean Conlon, Jeff Cox, Kevin Breuninger, Jordan Novet, Annie Palmer, Ashley Capoot, Annika Kim Constantino, Mike Wayland and Leslie Josephs contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.