Intel (INTC) stock rocketed 25% higher in early trading Friday after the company reported better-than-anticipated first quarter earnings and positive Q2 outlook on Thursday, sending shares soaring as much as 15%.

Intel’s Data Center segment powered the beats, as the company’s central processing units (CPUs) become an increasingly important part of the AI industry.

And while Intel noted it continues to deal with supply constraints, it still expects double-digit growth in the segment for the year. PC chip sales will slow in the back half of 2026.

Elsewhere, Meta (META) will layoff 10% of its workforce, amounting to some 8,000 people. The company also won’t fill 6,000 open positions.

The move comes that Microsoft (MSFT) said it will offer certain US employees voluntary buyouts. A person familiar with the matter said the company is targeting roughly 7% of the US workforce.

Tech companies are increasingly looking for ways to save cash, as they spend billions constructing data centers and developing AI models.

Meta Platforms (META) stock fell 10 percent in early Thursday trade after the company announced plans to increase its AI spending, partially as a result of higher input costs, which overshadowed another beat on the top and bottom line for the social media giant.

This loss put Meta stock on track for its biggest daily decline since October 2025, wiping out $170 million in market cap.

The company reported first quarter earnings on Wednesday that showed profits beat forecasts, with earnings per share (EPS) tallying $10.44 on revenue of $56.3 billion.

Wall Street analysts expected adjusted earnings of $8.15 per share on revenue of $55.5 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Meta said its 2026 capex spending will come in between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from its earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion. Overall expenses are expected to remain the same, reaching a range of $162 billion to $169 billion for the year.

Read more.

Hertz announced that its Oro Mobility unit and Uber will work together to manage fleets for the ride-hailing giant, particularly its upcoming robotaxi service.

Oro will support Uber’s autonomous robotaxi program of Lucid (LCID) vehicles equipped with Nuro AV technology, providing “vehicle asset management,” which includes charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning, and depot staffing.

Hertz stock jumped on the deal.

Hertz said services are expected to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year, with further expansion coming in 2027. Uber and Lucid are looking to operate around 30,000 robotaxis in the coming years.

Read more about this deal here.

Uber is expanding its business in the travel sector, partnering with booking site Expedia.

At its New York Go-Get product event, Uber announced a partnership with Expedia Group that allows Uber customers to book hotels directly in the Uber app.

Expedia stock climbed higher on the news.

Uber users in the US will get access to a list of properties that will eventually exceed 700,000 globally, with the partnership expanding beyond US Uber customers, though no timeline was given for international expansion. Vacation rentals from Expedia’s Vrbo will be added later this year.

“Uber is becoming an app for everything—helping people go, get, and now travel all in one place,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement.

Read more here on Uber’s Expedia deal and other travel related updates.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) will invest upwards of $40 billion dollars in Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), as part of the pair’s ongoing partnership.

According to Anthropic, Google will invest an initial $10 billion into the AI lab at its current $350 billion valuation, and an additional $30 billion as the company hits certain performance milestones.

The move builds on Google and Anthropic’s existing agreements, which include the recent announcement that Anthropic will use multiple gigawatts of Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) to power its AI services starting in 2027.

Earlier this week, Anthropic announced a deal with Amazon (AMZN) that will give the lab access to 5 gigawatts of Amazon’s Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips.

Anthropic is widely rumored to IPO at some time in the tail end of 2026.

Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian reports:

Tesla (TSLA) stock is on track to finish the week lower, reversing some of the prior week’s rally, as the company’s Q1 earnings report raised some concerns for investors.

Though Tesla beat on the top and bottom lines and confirmed some of its major projects are progressing toward production, investors were alarmed by Tesla’s rising capex spend toward its AI and robotics initiatives.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said the company’s 2026 estimate for capex will be “over $25 billion” and will result in negative free cash flow for the rest of the year.

Tesla has spent years building out its embodied AI, or physical AI, initiatives — from data centers and training clusters to train FSD to robotics infrastructure to build robots powered by Tesla software and, eventually, chips made in-house.

“We view this investment cycle as necessary to establish a durable leadership position in autonomy and physical AI, and remain confident in Tesla’s long-term trajectory,” Morgan Stanley’s Andrew Percoco wrote in a note to clients this week.

Read more here.

Meta (META) has entered into a multiyear agreement to deploy Amazon’s (AMZN) Graviton chips to power its AI capabilities.

Amazon’s Graviton is a central processing unit (CPU) rather than a graphics processing unit (GPU), the type of chip typically associated with AI workloads.

While companies still train and run their AI models on GPUs, CPUs have come back into vogue in data centers thanks to the rise of AI agents, or agentic AI, semi- or fully autonomous bots that can take actions on your behalf.

AI agents can pull data from your emails, scour the web for information and serve it up to you automatically, and even make purchases in certain situations. All of those tasks run more efficiently on CPUs rather than GPUs.

That’s giving CPU sales a boost after the chips fell out of favor in the early waves of the AI boom.

Read more here.

Intel (INTC) is soaring after earnings. The stock is up 26% in premarket trading, pushing above the dot-com-era ceiling it set in 2000.

The move comes amid Intel’s best month in at least 50 years. The stock had already been pressing into the same zone that capped it in 2020 and 2021, just below its 2000 peak.

On a long-term chart, that means Intel has effectively been stuck in a giant trading range since the mid-1990s. Big bases can take time to resolve. Large-cap energy (XLE) spent two decades backing and filling before finally breaking out this year.

But the move for Intel going into earnings was already enormous.

Just prior to the report, Intel was up over 60% from its March 30 low and had added nearly $130 billion in market value during its blistering run, making it one of the biggest gainers in semis over that stretch. Among megacap chip names above $100 billion in market value, only Marvell (MRVL) has done better.

Read more here.

Intel (INTC) announced its first quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, beating analysts’ expectations on the top and bottom lines and providing better-than-anticipated Q2 guidance on strong data center sales. The stock surged in after-hours trade.

Intel said it expects revenue of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion for the second quarter; Wall Street was anticipating $13.03 billion.

For Q1, Intel saw adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.29 on revenue of $13.6 billion. Wall Street was anticipating EPS of $0.01 and revenue of $12.36 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus data.

The company saw EPS of $0.13 and revenue of $12.67 billion in the same quarter last year.

“The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a statement.

Read more here.

Intel’s (INTC) has landed a major customer for its next-generation 14A chip process: Tesla (TSLA). The automaker’s CEO, Elon Musk, announced his company’s Terafab manufacturing facility will produce chips using Intel’s technology.

Terafab is intended to be the world's largest chip plant and will produce chips for Musk’s SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) and Tesla. It’s a big win for Intel, which announced that it was joining Musk’s Terafab effort earlier this month.

The move is a major part of Intel’s effort to expand its chip-making capabilities to third-party customers. The company previously said that it inked deals with Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) for those companies to produce chips using its 18A technology.

But Intel’s 14A is still in the works, and Terafab won’t start pumping out chips until mid-2028, according to Morgan Stanley's projections.

Still, it’s a strong indication that Intel’s turnaround and broadening chip foundry efforts are moving forward.

Meta (META) is expected to cut as much as 10% of its workforce as it looks for ways to reduce spending amid its massive AI buildout.

The company will lay off roughly 8,000 employees and won’t fill 6,000 positions, as it continues a broader efficiency push CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pursuing since declaring 2023 Meta’s year of efficiency.

Meta is pouring billions on its AI efforts. It previously spent $14.3 billion on a deal to hire Scale.AI employees including CEO Alexandr Wang, now the company’s chief AI officer, and is standing up data centers to develop and run AI models.

The Meta news comes after CNBC reported that Microsoft (MSFT) will offer voluntary buyouts to upwards of 7% of its US workers.

This program will mark a first for Microsoft, which also laid off thousands of workers in 2025. Microsoft’s peers have made similar moves over the last year. Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta, and Oracle (ORCL) have also laid off employees at various points.

All four companies are also spending billions to construct data centers and develop AI models. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft alone will spend some $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.

The layoffs also follow years of job cuts at tech companies after they dramatically expanded their workforces during the pandemic.

Microsoft stock, which fell about 5% on Thursday, is down about 15% this year, a laggard among the “Magnificent Seven” tech leaders.

Microsoft (MSFT) will offer voluntary buyouts to some employees, as the company joins many of its Big Tech peers in looking for ways to control costs amid their AI spending spree.

According to a source familiar with the matter, roughly 7% of Microsoft’s US employees, senior director or below, can take part in the buyouts if the amount of time they’ve been at the company and their age add up to at least 70.

This program will mark a first for Microsoft, which also laid off thousands of workers in 2025. Microsoft’s peers have made similar moves over the last year. Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL) have also laid off employees at various points.

All four companies are also spending billions to construct data centers and develop AI models. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft alone will spend some $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.

The layoffs also follow years of job cuts at tech companies after they dramatically expanded their workforces during the pandemic.

Microsoft stock, which fell about 5% on Thursday, is down about 15% this year, a laggard among the “Magnificent Seven” tech leaders.

Tesla’s (TSLA) and CEO Elon Musk’s Optimus robot dreams may soon be a reality.

Tesla said in its Q1 earnings report that preparations for the company's first large-scale Optimus factory “will begin shortly in Q2.”

The first-generation production line will be located at Tesla’s Fremont plant, where the Model S and Model X assembly lines will be converted for Optimus production. Tesla says this line could potentially produce 1 million robots per year, which seems like the kind of lofty target Musk is known for making.

Gigafactory Texas will eventually house a second-generation Optimus line, with an even more audacious long-term target of 10 million robots a year.

Read more here.

Intel (INTC) will report its first quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday as AI continues to drive increasing demand for the company’s chips.

Intel missed out on the initial AI boom due to its lack of chips capable of running AI models, as well as those from Nvidia (NVDA).

And while Nvidia took full advantage of its AI chip lead, transforming itself into a nearly $5 trillion company, Intel is finally on the cusp of grabbing its own piece of the AI bonanza.

That’s because as AI agents, semi- or fully autonomous AI bots that can perform tasks on users’ behalf, continue to become more popular, central processing units (CPUs) like the ones Intel makes are becoming increasingly important to data center companies and hyperscalers.

The reason? While AI models still largely run on GPUs or similar offerings from Amazon (AMZN) or Google (GOOG, GOOGL), the tasks that AI agents perform, such as browsing websites or searching for data in spreadsheets, rely on CPUs.

And that’s making the humble chip far more popular.

Read more here.

Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland reports:

Tesla stock rose late Wednesday after the company reported profits and sales that topped forecasts.

Elsewhere in its earnings presentation, the company offered a slew of key updates across its manufacturing, autonomous driving, AI, and energy initiatives.

Here are some of the highlights:

Robotaxi miles ‘nearly doubled’ from the prior quarter

“In Q1, paid Robotaxi miles nearly doubled sequentially. Once in production, we expect that Cybercab will begin to replace the existing Model Y fleet and will be the largest volume vehicle in the fleet over time.”

Tesla and SpaceX plan to build the largest chip plant ever

“Coinciding with Robotaxi and Optimus ramps, we are expanding our scope of manufacturing to include semiconductor fabrication, an important step to ensure sufficient and resilient chip supply. Our partnership with SpaceX aims to build the largest chip fab ever.”

Subscription Full Self-Driving

“We began moving FSD (Supervised) to subscription-only. Adoption (attachment to new purchases) and penetration (total users among the eligible fleet) both continued to grow, with record net new subscriptions in Q1.”

Tesla’s Supercharger network grew 19% in the first quarter

“We continue to build out our supporting infrastructure for our vehicle and mobility businesses, including Robotaxi expansion, across established and growth markets around the world. In Q1, we added over 2,200 net new Supercharging stalls, growing the network 19% year-over-year.

Read more here.

Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian reports:

Tesla (TSLA) reported first quarter earnings that topped estimates after the bell on Wednesday, with Wall Street focused on the company’s slow-to-evolve Robotaxi rollout and capital expenditures, which are expected to balloon due to the company’s AI ventures.

Tesla reported revenue of $22.39 vs. $22.08 billion per Bloomberg consensus, down 9% year over year. Tesla posted adjusted EPS of $0.41 vs. $0.35. Tesla’s gross margin also hit 21.7%, vs. 17.7% estimated.

Tesla stock jumped 4% in after-hours trade.

Read more here.

Rivian (RIVN) started production of its highly anticipated R2 SUVs, with customer deliveries expected later this spring.

Though the R2 production start was expected, it is a pivotal moment for Rivian as the EV maker ‌bets on a lower-cost, volume model to increase demand and eventually turn a profit.

"We've been encouraged by the reservations that we've been receiving for the R2 product overall," CFO Claire McDonough told Reuters. "We'll start to invite customers to begin ‌to configure their vehicles in the ⁠June time frame. So, we'll have better visibility at that point."

Rivian stock was up nearly 5% in midday trade.

Read more here.

OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) has provided information about its latest Cyber AI model to the US government and its allies, according to Axios. Called GPT-5.4-Cyber, the model is designed to be more permissive with requests related to finding bugs and holes in software.

The idea is to help governments and companies test their existing applications and services against GPT-5.4-Cyber to identify any flaws and ensure they’re better protected against potential malware attacks.

OpenAI is reportedly speaking with the US goverment and its allies about its latest cybersecurity model.

OpenAI only provides access to GPT-5.4-Cyber to members of its Trusted Access for Cyber program.

But AI models cut both ways when it comes to cybersecurity.

Experts have been warning about the danger of AI models being used for nefarious purposes for some time. More recently, Anthropic announced that it would delay the release of its Claude Mythos Preview because it found that it was too good at finding holes in third-party software during internal testing.

SpaceX on Tuesday posted on X that AI coding tool maker Cursor has given the company the option to purchase it later this year for $60 billion.

“SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models. Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together,” the post said.

The deal is part of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s plan to transform the rocket company into an AI behemoth ahead of its upcoming IPO. Musk merged SpaceX with his xAI startup in February.

The SpaceX IPO, targeted for June, is aiming for a $1.75 billion to $1.8 trillion valuation, potentially making it the largest in history.

Google (GOOG, GOOGL) debuted two AI processors during its Google Cloud Next 2026 conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

The new chips, called the TPU 8t and TPU 8i, push Google further into competition with partners Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD). Earlier this month, the company announced an expanded deal with Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) to provide “multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity” to the AI lab.

Google is also working to provide Anthropic rival OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) with TPU capacity to power that company’s own AI offerings.

And in February, The Information reported that Meta signed its own multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal for access to Google’s TPUs.

The TPU 8t, Google said, is optimized for training AI models and can “reduce the frontier model development cycle from months to weeks.

Read more here.

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook will leave the position he’s held since 2011 and turn the keys over to senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus on Sept. 1.

The move elevates the 50-year-old Ternus into one of the most important chief executive roles in Silicon Valley at a time when AI continues to roil the broader tech industry.

He’s a contrast from Cook, who joined Apple in 1998 and served as the company’s COO before becoming CEO in 2011. Cook is an operations expert, which helped him turn Apple into the $4 trillion behemoth it is today. It also allowed the company to navigate the pandemic and subsequent supply chain crunch, as well as President Trump’s tariffs.

Now the company will be led by a product-centric executive with experience working on everything from the iPhone to AirPods. And the decision could provide a glimpse into where Apple is heading at a crucial time in its history.

Read more here.