Andrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg during the New York Times DealBook Summit in the Appel Room at the Jazz At Lincoln Center on November 30, 2022 in New York City.
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Meta is no longer the runaway growth story it was in the past, but you wouldn’t know that based on the stock chart in recent months.
On Wednesday, Facebook’s parent reported meager revenue growth of 3% from a year earlier, which was better than analysts were expecting. Before that, Meta had reported three straight quarters of sales declines, underscoring the social media company’s challenges coping with a slowdown in digital ads.
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However, following a 15% rally on Thursday to over $241, Meta’s shares are up 170% since bottoming at under $89 in November.
For the most part, investors have been jumping on Meta’s cost-cutting story and two rounds of job reductions, which began in November and are continuing in the first half 2023. In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said this would be the company’s “year of efficiency,” a declaration that sent the stock up over 20%.
Even with the hot start to the year, Meta shares are still about 37% below their record high from September 2021. They lost two-thirds of their value last year, as the company reckoned with by far its toughest stretch since its IPO a decade earlier.
Now, Wall Street’s betting that Meta can slowly start to revive growth, with comparisons becoming easier after a weak year in 2022 and newer products beginning to show better traction.
The company continues pushing its TikTok-like Reels short-form video service, and finance chief Susan Li told analysts on Wednesday’s earnings call that the offering is “on track to becoming neutral to revenue by end of year, early next year.”
Reels currently monetizes at a slower pace than older and more established products like the news feed and Stories. Meta is figuring out how to better generate revenue from Reels and, at the same time, could be benefiting as TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, faces heavy scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, with many of them trying to ban the app.
Analysts at Mizuho Securities pointed to improved ad pricing as a significant catalyst for Meta, driven by Reels and messaging.
“With better monetization, additional room for cost efficiency, and increased scrutiny of TikTok, we continue to like the setup for FY23,” wrote the analysts, who recommend buying the stock.
Piper Sandler analysts, who also have a buy rating on the stock, said Meta is in a favorable revenue position for the rest of the year. They noted that “user growth remains strong” and said the business can keep expanding even with lower headcount.
“Meta successfully ‘passed the baton’ from cost cuts to revenue re-acceleration,” the analysts wrote.
As for Meta’s pivot to the nascent virtual world of the metaverse, the project continues to bleed cash. The Reality Labs division, responsible for developing software and hardware for the metaverse, lost $3.99 billion in the first quarter after losing $13.72 billion in 2022.
But there’s enthusiasm brewing for another growth market: artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasized his company’s investments in generative AI, which has been popularized by the text-generating ChatGPT tool developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Bank of America analysts said in a report that the buildout of an AI ecosystem could bolster Meta’s stock multiple.
“From a business perspective Meta outlined opportunities for AI enabled ad content creation and automated customer service using Meta’s messaging platforms,” wrote the analysts, who have a buy rating on the stock. “Multi-year AI driven platform retention could help multiple expansion, as terminal value uncertainty has weighed on valuation.”
Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AMD stock climbed 11% on Wednesday, continuing a massive run since OpenAI announced plans to buy billions of dollars of AI equipment from the chipmaker earlier this week.
On Monday, the ChatGPT maker entered into an agreement to potentially own 10% of AMD, based on its stock price and partnership milestones.
AMD now has a market cap of $380 billion after climbing 4% on Tuesday and 24% on Monday. Shares are up 43% so far this week, on pace for the best weekly gain since April 2016.
The partnership with OpenAI, which has historically been closely linked with Nvidia, has bolstered investor confidence that AMD will be a viable competitor to Nvidia in AI chips.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su told reporters on Monday that the deal was a “win-win” and that its AI chips were good enough to be used in “at-scale deployments,” or very large data centers like the kind OpenAI and cloud providers build.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday reacted to the deal on CNBC’s Squawk Box, saying it was “surprising.”
“It’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next-generation product,” Huang said. “I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. And so anyhow, it’s clever, I guess.”
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google is continuing to put restrictions on remote work, this time with a popular policy called “Work from Anywhere” that was established during the Covid pandemic.
The policy has allowed employees to work from a location outside of their main office for up to four weeks per calendar year. According to internal documents viewed by CNBC, working remotely for even a single day will now count for a full week.
“Whether you log 1 WFA day or 5 WFA days in a given standard work week, 1 WFA week will be deducted from your WFA weekly balance,” according to a document that was circulated over the summer, shortly before the change went into effect.
Google isn’t altering its current hybrid schedule, which was also put in place during the pandemic, allowing employees to work from home two days a week. WFA days are distinct from that policy, giving staffers the flexibility to work remotely, but not at home.
“WFA weeks cannot be used to work from home or nearby,” the document says.
Google didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
Tech companies are increasingly forcing employees to spend more time in the office, with the peak of Covid now about five years in the past. Microsoft said last month that employees will be expected to work in an office three days a week starting next year, switching from a policy that allowed most of them to work from home 50% of the time or more with manager approval. Amazon went further, instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office.
Google began offering some U.S. full-time employees voluntary buyouts at the beginning of 2025, and has notified remote workers from several units their jobs would be considered for layoffs if they didn’t return to offices to work a hybrid schedule.
According to the latest changes, employees can’t work from a Google office in a separate state or country during their WFA time due to “legal and financial implications of cross border work.” If in a different location, employees may be required to work during the business hours that align with that time zone, the rules state.
The WFA update doesn’t apply to all Google staffers and may exclude data center workers, and those who are required to be in physical offices. Violations of the policy will result in disciplinary action or termination, the document says.
The issue came up at a recent all-hands meeting.
A top-rated question that was submitted on Google’s internal system described the update as “confusing.”
“Why does even one day of WFA count as a whole week, and can we reconsider the restriction on using WFA weeks to work from home?” the question said.
John Casey, Google’s vice president of performance and rewards, said at the meeting that WFA “was meant to meet Googlers where they were during the pandemic,” according to audio obtained by CNBC.
“The policy was always intended to be taken in increments of a week and not be used as a substitute for working from home in a regular hybrid work week,” Casey said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that his family’s immigration to the U.S. “would not have been possible” with the Trump administration’s current policy.
President Donald Trump announced in September that employers would have to pay a $100,000 fee for each H-1B visa, a temporary worker visa granted to foreign professionals with specialized skills.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan and later moved Thailand, immigrated to the U.S. at nine years old with his brother. His parents joined them around two years later.
“I don’t think that my family would have been able to afford the $100,000 and and so the opportunity for my, my family and for me to be here … would not have been possible,” Huang told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Trump’s sudden price hike was a shock to the tech sector, which relies heavily on foreign talent, especially from India and China.
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Amazon was the top employer for H-1B holders in fiscal year 2025, sponsoring over 10,000 applicants according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Tech juggernauts Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google were also among the top H-1B employers, with over 4,000 approvals each.
“Immigration is the foundation of the American dream,” Huang said, “this ideal that anyone can come to America and through hard work and some talent, be able to build a better future for yourself.”
Huang added that his own parents came to the U.S. so that his family could “enjoy the opportunities” and “this incredible country.”
The CEO confirmed that Nvidia, which currently sponsors 1,400 visas, would continue covering H-1B fees for immigrant employees. Huang said that he hopes to see some “enhancements” to the policy so that there’s “still some opportunities for serendipity to happen.”
While his own family’s journey would have been blocked by Trump’s immigration policy, Huang said Trump’s changes will still allow the U.S. “to continue to attract the world’s best talent.”
And other tech executives have expressed support for the changes, with Netflix‘s Reed Hastings calling the fee “a great solution” in a post on X.
“It will mean H1-B is used just for very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed, and more certainty for those jobs,” Hastings wrote.
In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC’s Jon Fortt that he also backed Trump’s changes.
“We need to get the smartest people in the country, and streamlining that process and also sort of outlining financial incentives seems good to me,” Altman said.