Google is scrapping its diversity goals, becoming the latest tech giant to alter its approach to hiring and promotions following the election of President Donald Trump.
In its annual report published on Wednesday, Alphabet excluded language from prior years stating that, “we are committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.”
Fiona Cicconi, Alphabet’s chief people officer, told employees in a memo that the company has to make changes due to new requirements.
“Because we are a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes to our programs required to comply with recent court decisions and U.S. Executive Orders on this topic,” Cicconi wrote in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S. — and in many countries globally — but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.”
Cicconi noted that in 2020, the company set aspirational hiring goals and focused on growing offices outside California and New York to improve representation.
One of Trump’s first acts as president after taking office in January was to sign an executive order ending the government’s DEI programs and putting federal officials overseeing those initiatives on leave. And following a midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter above Washington, D.C., last week, Trump blasted former President Joe Biden and DEI policies claiming they “could have been” to blame for the deadliest plane crash in the U.S. since 2001.
Tech companies have shown an eagerness to appease the new administration following a rocky four years during Trump’s first tenure in the White House.
Amazon said earlier in January that it was halting some of its diversity and inclusion initiatives, and Meta announced plans to end a number of internal programs designed to increase the company’s hiring of diverse candidates. Beyond the tech industry, companies including Target, Walmart and McDonald’s have made similar changes.
Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
The company began making cuts to its DEI programs in 2023, CNBC reported at the time, getting rid of staffers who were in charge of recruiting underrepresented groups and letting go of DEI leaders who worked with Chief Diversity Officer Melonie Parker.
Parker, who took on her current role in 2019, will work closely on evaluating programs and trainings and update “those that raise risk, or that aren’t as impactful as we’d hoped,” Cicconi wrote in her memo.
She added that the Google’s employee resource groups will remain as will the company’s work with colleges and universities.
A Google spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company is “committed to creating a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the last year we’ve been reviewing our programs designed to help us get there.”
A package from Temu is seen in front of a screen with the Temu logo. (Photo by Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Chinese online retailer Temu has been surfacing more products on its app that can be shipped from warehouses in the U.S. following President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke a popular tax loophole.
The nearly century-old exception, known as de minimis, has been used by many e-commerce companies to send goods worth less than $800 into the U.S. duty-free. Trump on Saturday suspended the exemption as part of new tariffs that include an additional 10% tax on Chinese goods.
De minimis has helped propel Temu and Shein’s explosive growth in the U.S. by allowing the companies to bypass taxes on low-value shipments, and sustain their rock-bottom prices on everything from shoes and clothes to furniture and electronics.
With the tariff exemption gone, Temu has significantly ramped up its promotion of sellers who have inventory in U.S. warehouses, rather than items that are shipped direct from China. A scan of listings in Temu’s “Lightning deals” section shows that it’s almost entirely dominated by products with a green “local” badge.
By promoting local inventory, Temu’s products not only arrive faster to shoppers’ doorsteps, but the company also reduces its reliance on sellers who ship direct from China. Even though the products are stored in U.S. warehouses, many local listings state that the items are sold by businesses based in China.
Representatives from Temu didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Temu is surfacing more products shipped from local warehouses in its app in the wake of a popular trade loophole’s suspension.
Temu’s promotion of U.S.-based products also puts it in more direct competition with Amazon, eBay and Walmart, which have also signed up sellers in China who ship goods overseas to their warehouses. Amazon last year took notice of Temu and Shein’s dramatic growth in the U.S. when it launched its own budget storefront, called Haul.
Temu, which is owned by Chinese online retailer PDD Holdings, began onboarding sellers with inventory in U.S. warehouses in March. By July, roughly 20% of Temu’s U.S. sales came from those sellers, not merchants based in China, according to e-commerce market research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Temu, Shein and other Chinese e-commerce companies are trying to minimize the level of disruption to their services as they face new, more stringent customs requirements. They were thrown into further chaos on Tuesday night when the U.S. Postal Service abruptly announced it was suspending inbound packages from China and Hong Kong “until further notice.”
Less than 12 hours later, the USPS reversed its decision, and resumed accepting packages from those regions. The agency also said it would work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”
The uncertainty has created volatility for PDD’s stock price which fell 6% on Monday, rose 8% on Tuesday and fell more than 3% on Wednesday.
Critics of the de minimis provision say it’s provided an unfair advantage to Chinese e-commerce companies, and created an influx of packages that are “subject to minimal documentation and inspection,” raising concerns around counterfeit and unsafe goods.
Others have advocated for the de minimis exemption to remain in place, saying its removal would burden customs officials and lead to higher government costs.
“At some point there’s going to be 3 million of these goods piling up a day and customs can do their best, but they’re not equipped,” said Hugo Pakula, CEO of supply chain compliance company Tru Identity. “They have to do 10x more screenings this week than last week.”
CBP has said it processed more than 1.3 billion de minimis shipments in 2024. A 2023 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party found that Temu and Shein are “likely responsible” for more than 30% of de minimis shipments into the U.S.
Shein has also been courting U.S. buyers and sellers. The company opened distribution centers in states including Illinois and California in 2022, and a supply chain hub in Seattle last year. The company said the Seattle hub would enable it to “localize and support speedier delivery times for American consumers.”
Lisa Su, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., during the AMD Advancing AI event in San Jose, California, on Dec. 6, 2023.
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Advanced Micro Devices shares fell 7% on Wednesday after the chipmaker under-delivered on Wall Street’s estimates for its important data center business.
Shares traded at a 52-week low and were on pace for their worst session since October.
AMD reported better-than-expected results on the top and bottom lines, but it also reported data center sales of $3.86 billion. That reflected 69% growth from a year ago but fell short of the $4.14 billion in sales expected by analysts polled by LSEG.
The key unit, responsible for selling advanced chips for data centers, has benefited in recent years from growing demand for its graphics processing units, as megacap technology companies race to develop advanced artificial intelligence tools.
Data center revenue grew 94% for the full year to $12.6 billion, with $5 billion of those sales stemming from AMD’s AI-focused Instinct GPUs. The company is the second-largest producer for gaming after Nvidia, which has triumphed as the market leader in AI chips and ballooned in value to a nearly $3 trillion market value.
“We believe this places AMD on a steep long-term growth trajectory, led by the rapid scaling of our data center AI franchise from more than $5 billion of revenue in 2024 to tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue over the coming years,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call with analysts.
Several Wall Street firms trimmed their price targets on shares amid the disappointing data center results and expectations for a weak first half. Citi downgraded shares to neutral from a buy rating, while JPMorgan its target to $130 from $180. Bank of America’s Vivek Arya said the company has yet to “articulate how it can carve an important niche” relative to Nvidia.
Morgan Stanley highlighted AI expectations as the most significant pressure point, saying that “visibility likely needs to improve for the stock to find its footing.”
CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022.
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Alphabet shares dropped more than 7% on Wednesday after the search giant fell short of Wall Street’s fourth-quarter revenue expectations and announced big spending plans for its ongoing artificial intelligence buildout.
The stock headed for its worst session in more than a year.
The company topped earnings estimates by 2 cents per share. Revenue came in at $96.47 billion, behind the $96.56 billion expected by LSEG. Alphabet’s revenue grew 12% overall from a year ago, while its YouTube advertising business, search business and services segment slowed year over year.
Alphabet also said it plans to spend $75 billion on capital expenditures as it builds out its AI offerings and races against megacap rivals to build out data centers and new infrastructure. The figure was much higher than the $58.84 billion expected by Wall Street analysts, according to FactSet.
Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said the higher expenses will help “support the growth of our business across Google Services, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind.” She also said the spending will go toward “technical infrastructure, primarily for servers, followed by data centers and networking.”
Read more CNBC reporting on AI
The company expects capital expenditures to range between $16 billion and $18 billion. That was higher than the $14.3 billion estimate from FactSet.
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth highlighted costs, capex and cloud revenue as the “culprits” for the stock’s post-earnings performance. Bernstein’s Mark Shmulik also noted that this is the third quarter that the stock move connects to Google’s cloud segment.
“If digital ad growth is akin to a long drive competition, then Google would be sitting comfortably here with strong Search and YouTube bombs down the fairway,” Shmulik said.
“But as the game shifts to the AI putting green, there’s little room for error with a slight cloud miss, a whopping CAPEX guide up to $75B for 2025, and lack of actionable operating leverage commentary leaves Google 3- putting for bogey,” he added.