Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, speaks during an interview with CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, October 20, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares slid 19% in extended trading on Thursday as the data center equipment maker issued quarterly and full-year guidance that came in below consensus.
Here’s how the company did in the fiscal first quarter in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: 49 cents adjusted vs. 49 cents expected
Revenue: $7.85 billion vs. $7.82 billion expected
HPE’s revenue rose 16% year over year in the quarter ending on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company was left with profit of $598 million, or 44 cents per share, up from $387 million, or 29 cents per share, in the same quarter a year earlier. The adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation.
“We could have executed better,” CEO Antonio Neri said on a conference call with analysts. The company had higher than normal inventory for artificial intelligence servers because of a shift to next-generation Blackwell graphics processing units from Nvidia.
The backlog for AI systems rose 29% quarter over quarter to $3.1 billion. Total server revenue totaled $4.29 billion.
HPE dealt with extensive discounting in the market while selling traditional servers during the quarter, finance chief Marie Myers said. As the quarter progressed, HPE moved to limit travel and discretionary spending, she said.
“We expect pricing adjustments may negatively impact top-line growth in the near term,” Myers said.
The company said it would implement a cost-cutting program involving layoffs over the next 18 months that will lead to $350 million in gross savings by the 2027 fiscal year. Around 2,500 employees will be affected, a spokesperson said, representing about 5% of the workforce when also factoring in expected attrition. At the end of October, HPE employed 61,000 people, according to its most recent annual report.
In January, the U.S. Justice Department filed in a federal district court to stop HPE from acquiring Juniper Networks. HPE announced the proposed $14 billion deal in January 2024. The court expects a trial to begin in July, according to the statement. The deal should close by October 2025, HPE said. In December, the company had said the transaction would be done in early 2025.
HPE called for 28 cents to 34 cents in adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal second quarter, with revenue coming in between $7.2 billion and $7.6 billion. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had looked for 50 cents per share on $7.93 billion in revenue.
For the 2025 fiscal year, HPE sees $1.70 to $1.90 in adjusted earnings per share. Analysts polled by LSEG had predicted $2.13 per share.
HPE expects to update its prices to reflect higher expenses from U.S. tariffs, Neri said, adding that he has not perceived any business deterioration from President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
As of Thursday’s close, HPE shares were up about 2% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index was down 2%.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer suggested Wall Street is too fixated the on large valuations of certain tech and speculative stocks, chalking up Tuesday’s market-wide decline in part to Palantir‘s nearly 8% loss despite strong earnings results.
“The larger issue is that we’re at the moment where money managers, when asked if the market’s too expensive, immediately think of the high-flying speculative stocks or those in the high-growth artificial intelligence column, and so they warn you away from the entire asset class,” he said. “These guys don’t think of the other 334 stocks in the S&P 500 that sell for less than 23 times earnings — those aren’t outrageous.”
Declines in Palantir and other artificial intelligence companies helped bring stocks down on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 losing 1.17%,the Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 0.53% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sinking 2.04%. Palantir managed to beat the estimates and offer solid guidance, citing growth in the artificial intelligence business. But investors worried broadly about the huge valuations of tech giants that have been leading the market to new heights.
Investors who saw Palantir as their “north star” were alarmed by its big pullback after a great quarter, according to Cramer. The fears triggered “a raft of selling” as these investors questioned the market as a whole, he continued.
Palantir can be a tough stock to classify, Cramer suggested, saying it straddles two different market segments — one centered around tech and artificial intelligence, and another focused on speculative stocks. He noted that the data-driven software company is very lucrative and fast growing, and it “defies easy description.” He listed off a number of its business arms — including its work as a defense contractor and as a consultant for companies looking to modernize and improve profitability.
To Cramer, it’s reasonable to consider that there’s nothing wrong with Palantir, and it just needs “to cool off in order to grow into its market capitalization.”
“Sure, there are indeed some stocks that are visibly overvalued, and when you pull them apart, many of these valuations can be justified, some can’t,” he said. “I think the Magnificent Seven can be justified on the pace of the growth that’s ahead of them. Same, ultimately, with Palantir.”
Bitcoin‘s fall below $100,000, its lowest level since June, has sparked fears that the worst is yet to come, another so-called crypto winter (a prolonged bear market in cryptocurrencies) that the market wrestles with every time digital currencies sell off hard in a short period of time.
But Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan says that while the retail investor is in “max desperation” mode, he sees that as a reason to bet that a bottoming in crypto prices may materialize sooner rather than later. With Wall Street institutional investor and financial advisor support for bitcoin, and growth in crypto ETFs, he is even willing to go out on a limb and say that amid the heavy selling a new record high for bitcoin before the end of the year isn’t unreasonable.
“It’s almost a tale of two markets,” he said on CNBC’s “Crypto World” on Tuesday. “Crypto retail is in max desperation. We’ve seen leverage blowouts. … the market for sort of crypto native retail is just more depressed than I’ve ever seen it,” he said.
But Hougan believes more crypto trading will continue to shift into an institutionally driven market, “and interestingly, that market is still bullish,” he said.
“When I go out and speak to institutions or financial advisors, they’re still excited to allocate to an asset class that if you pan back and look over the course of a year, is still delivering very strong returns. So my view of the market is we have to get through this retail flush out. We have to hit bottom from a sentiment perspective. I think we’re very close to that,” he added.
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Price of bitcoin and ether over the past year.
The boom in crypto exchange-traded fund launches, including iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is changing the investor composition, and while week-to-week flows into these ETFs have slowed since the second quarter of the year, “we continue to see strong inflows into bitcoin,” Hougan said.
Bitwise’s own Solana staking ETF (BSOL) brought in over $400 million in flows in its first week, he said, though it has sold off sharply in the recent crypto downturn, with a near 20% loss since its Oct. 28 debut.
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This chart is showing BSOL 5 days
Last week, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor told CNBC he thinks bitcoin could reach $150,000 by the end of the year, one among several recent bullish calls on crypto that for now at least look ill-timed. But Hougan said he doesn’t think it’s an outlandish call even as bitcoin hovers near a six-month low.
“I think bitcoin could easily end the year at new all-time highs,” Hougan said. “So that means getting north of about $125,000 up to $130,000. Whether we’ll get all the way to $150,000, we’ll have to see.”
“I do think the sellers are nearing exhaustion and the buyers are still relatively hungry. And when those two things sort of cross paths, again, I think we could end the year close to or at new all-time highs. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to Saylor’s target as well,” he said.
Institutional investors, whom Hougan described as “more maybe even keeled about what’s going on at a fundamental level in crypto” will start to drive the market forward. “But we do have to finish this washout of retail sentiment … I think we’re closer to the end of that than the beginning, but … there always could be a little bit more downside.”
Jared Isaacman, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to be administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2025.
Ken Cedeno | Reuters
President Donald Trump has renominated Jared Isaacman to run NASA after pulling his prior nomination months ago due to what the president called a “thorough review of prior associations.”
“Jared’s passion for Space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new Space economy, make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new Era,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Isaacman, who is friends with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was originally picked to lead NASA in December, before Trump had even taken office. Isaacman is a billionaire who founded payments company Shift4 and has led two private spaceflights.
But Trump pulled the nomination in late May after a spat between the president and Musk, who had been leading a White House effort to slash the size of the federal government. Trump said at the time that he was withdrawing the pick because of Isaacman’s past associations, though he didn’t specify what those were. Some reports have suggested that it was a reference to Isaacman’s prior donations to Democrats.
Days after the withdrawal, Isaacman told Shift4 investors in a letter that his “brief stint in politics was a thrilling experience.” He also said that he was resigning as CEO of Shift4, which he founded in 1999 at age 16, and would assume the role of executive chairman. He had been planning to leave the company if his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. But it never got that far.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been running NASA as interim head since July.
Isaacman still must go through the Senate confirmation process. The federal government has been shut down since the beginning of October, but the Senate is still able to confirm presidential nominees.