 | May 15, 2025 | | | | Supported by  | | | | | Happy Thursday! CoreWeave shares fall on what investors consider "lumpy" AI cloud revenue projection. Tencent says the company has a strong stockpile of advanced chips despite tightening U.S. export ban. Trading app eToro surged 34% on its Nasdaq debut.
| | | | CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia AI chips to large firms such as Microsoft, said in its first earnings report as a public company that it generated $980 million in revenue in the three months ending in March, up more than five times from the same period a year earlier. But investors soured on the stock as its executives said revenue and capital expenditures might be "lumpy" this year because the company doesn't buy Nvidia AI chips and other equipment for its data centers before customers sign contracts to use them. CoreWeave projected full-year revenue growth of 190%—less than half the rate of growth in the first quarter. Shares of CoreWeave initially rose 9% in after-hours trading before swinging wildly in the other direction, eventually ending down 7%. Despite the drop, CoreWeave would still be 59% above its IPO price if the after-hours price holds through Thursday. The company has been one of the barometers of the unprecedented boom in AI-related spending, led by sales of Nvidia chips. Analysts on the call also seemed concerned that CoreWeave's revenue backlog has fallen since the end of last year. CoreWeave said remaining performance obligations—signed contracts that don't yet generate revenue—fell to $14.7 billion from $15.1 billion at the end of 2024. Executives explained that CoreWeave's new deal with OpenAI, announced in March, wasn't part of the backlog it reported because it hadn't finalized how to account for the deal in its financial statements. CoreWeave has said the deal is worth up to $11.9 billion. In April, The Information reported that it was in advanced talks to rent GPUs to Google. On the call, CEO Mike Intrator said CoreWeaved signed a deal with a new hyperscaler but did not name Google. He also said the company will report a $4 billion contract expansion with a "large AI enterprise" in a forthcoming filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. | | | | Stock and crypto trading app eToro jumped 34% when it debuted on Nasdaq on Wednesday, a bullish sign for future initial public offerings following the tariff-induced market selloff last month. The Israel-based company and its shareholders raised $620 million at the IPO price of $52 per share, higher than it earlier planned. BlackRock indicated interest in buying up to $100 million shares during the IPO, according to an earlier filing. The trading gives eToro a market value of $5.5 billion. It was the first major IPO since President Donald Trump backed off on harsh tariffs on China. Another fintech firm Chime, which offers digital banking, filed publicly for an IPO yesterday. | | | | A top executive of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said the company's existing stockpile of artificial intelligence chips should allow it to continue training a few more generations of AI models, despite tightening U.S. restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China "We have a pretty strong stockpile of chips we acquired previously," Tencent President Martin Lau said during a conference call with analysts Wednesday after the company reported its quarterly results. Lau also noted that, even with a relatively small cluster of chips, it is possible to achieve very good training results. Lau's comments come after the Trump administration last month banned the export of Nvidia's H20 chips to China in the latest step to further limit China's access to Nvidia's AI chips. Lau said there is a lot of software work that the company can do in order to improve the efficiency of AI inference, so the operation of AI models will require fewer chips. He also said that the company could potentially make use of other AI chips that aren't subject to the U.S. export restrictions, such as those made by Chinese chip developers. | | | | Waymo recalled software last December in more than of its 1,200 self-driving cars produced between spring of 2022 and last November after a bug caused collisions with chains, gates and other roadway barriers, according to a report made public Monday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Google-backed self-driving car company had previously identified barriers like these as "areas for improvement" and updated the software in all affected vehicles by last December. This is Waymo's third recall filed with the NHTSA in the past two years and the largest batch of vehicles affected. In a statement, a Waymo spokesperson note that the service provides more than 250,000 paid trips every week "in some of the most challenging driving environments in the U.S." | | | | Summer Mersinger, a pro-crypto Republican commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will resign at the end of this month to join trade group Blockchain Association as its new chief executive officer. Her term was set to end in 2028. Mersinger will start as CEO on June 2, taking over from Kristin Smith, said Blockchain Association, one of the biggest crypto trade groups. Smith is leaving to join a new trade group Solana Policy Institute as its president. CFTC could play a bigger role regulating the crypto industry if legislation on crypto market structure passes. The Commission, which regulates derivatives markets, is awaiting the confirmation of its new chair Brian Quintenz, a former CFTC commissioner who most recently served as Andreessen Horowitz's digital asset arm a16z crypto's head of policy. Other former CFTC commissioners who later worked in the crypto industry include Heath Tarbert, now president of stablecoin issuer Circle, and J.Christopher Giancarlo, a director of Paxos and adviser to Polymarket and CoinFund. | | | | Microsoft is shutting down its ad buying platform, the company said today, withdrawing from a sector of the ad market that it has failed to make a dent in. Marketers use ad buying platforms to buy ad space on independent web sites, an ad technology business dominated by Google and smaller firms like The Trade Desk. Microsoft acquired the ad buying technology through its acquisition of Xandr in 2022 from AT&T. Despite spending the money for the acquisition, Microsoft's buying platform never became a serious competitor. In a blog post, Microsoft said ad buying platforms didn't fit with the "more private and personalized advertising experiences" it was committed to offering through artificial intelligence-powered agents. Despite this proclamation, Amazon has been investing recently in ad-buying technology to become a powerbroker in Internet ads, as The Information has reported. Microsoft still has a large ad business, thanks to ad space it sells on its own properties such as Bing, LinkedIn and Xbox. On the company's earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said the company's advertising revenue surpassed $20 billion in the past 12 months. | | | | Shares of Nebius, which runs data centers for artificial intelligence, have risen 30% since Friday, when The Information reported that database startup ClickHouse was in talks to raise money at a price that would triple its valuation. Nebius owns a 28% stake in ClickHouse. Nebius was formerly known as Yandex N.V., which was the Dutch holding company for Russian search giant Yandex. When sanctions hit Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, the holding company divested itself of Russian assets and renamed itself Nebius. It relisted on the Nasdaq Stock Market in October. ClickHouse, which spun out of Yandex N.V., is in talks with investors including Khosla Ventures to raise at a $6 billion valuation, The Information reported. D.A. Davidson increased the price target for Nebius shares from $30.00 to $35.00 on Monday. | | | | Warner Bros. Discovery is renaming its streaming service HBO Max, reversing a decision made two years ago to drop HBO from the name, reflecting its emphasis on quality programming over volume. In a statement, WBD said it was "deprioritizing" genres of programming that didn't get much engagement or drive subscriber growth and was "refocusing" its strategy on "programming that is working best like HBO, recent box office movies" as well as documentary series and some reality series. When WBD dropped HBO from its name, executives said they were concerned the HBO brand would turn off some viewers because HBO was associated with edgy programming. | | | | Databricks confirmed its acquisition of database startup Neon for around $1 billion, pitching it as a way for customers to build AI agents that need speedy and cost-effective access to cloud databases. With the deal, Databricks is betting that agents will become a major part of corporate AI spending budgets in the coming years. It could also give Databricks a leg up on Snowflake, one of its chief rivals, which doesn't directly offer a product like Neon. Snowflake is expected to expand access to its AI agent-building product, which is currently in private preview, at its customer conference next month. Neon is Databricks' third billion-dollar acquisition, following its $1.3 billion purchase of AI model developer MosaicML in 2023 and last year's acquisition of data management startup Tabular, for which Databricks reportedly shelled out nearly $2 billion. | | | | Perplexity is adding PayPal and Venmo checkout buttons in its subscription AI chatbot, the companies said on Wednesday, adding a new way for Perplexity users to pay for goods and services they find using AI tools. Perplexity has already struck a deal with Shopify to add checkouts in Perplexity's chats for merchants that use Shopify's e-commerce software. It also works with the startup Firmly to help other merchants' products show up in results and allow users to make purchases. The PayPal and Venmo checkouts will be available in Perplexity's Pro subscription service, which offers automated tools that can find products and book travel and live event tickets, for U.S. users starting this summer. In recent weeks, payments giants including PayPal, Mastercard and Visa have been touting fraud prevention and other features for payments initiated by AI tools. | | | | | Popular articles
By Aaron Holmes and Jessica E. Lessin
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