Meta debuts new AI model, attempting to catch Google, OpenAI after spending billions


Meta is debuting its first major artificial intelligence model since the costly hiring of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang nine months ago, as the Facebook parent aims to carve out a niche in a market that’s being dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Dubbed Muse Spark and originally codenamed Avocado, the AI model announced Wednesday is the first from the company’s new Muse series developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI unit that Wang oversees. Wang joined Meta in June as part of the company’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, where he was CEO.

Meta is desperate to regain momentum in the fiercely competitive AI market following the disappointing debut of its latest open-source models last April. The release failed to captivate developers, leading CEO Mark Zuckerberg to pivot his strategy.

“Over the last nine months, Meta Superintelligence Labs rebuilt our AI stack from the ground up, moving faster than any development cycle we have run before,” Meta said in a blog post on Wednesday. “This initial model is small and fast by design, yet capable enough to reason through complex questions in science, math, and health. It is a powerful foundation, and the next generation is already in development.”

Meta isn’t positioning Muse Spark as a top-of-the-line model, but is instead highlighting its efficiency and “competitive performance” on various tasks.

The new Muse Spark will be proprietary, instead of open source, with the company saying there is “hope to open-source future versions of the model.” The company had been taking an open-source approach to AI with its Llama family of models.

Meta said in a technical blog about the new model that that improved AI training techniques along with rebuilt technology infrastructure has enabled the company to create smaller AI models that are as capable as its older midsize Llama 4 variant for “an order of magnitude less compute.”

“Muse Spark offers competitive performance in multimodal perception, reasoning, health, and agentic tasks,” Meta said in the post. “We continue to invest in areas with current performance gaps, specifically long-horizon agentic systems and coding workflows.”

Meta is also experimenting with a new AI model revenue stream by offering third-party developers access to Muse Spark’s underlying technology via an API. Currently, only unspecified “select partners” can access the AI model’s “private API preview,” but Meta said that it plans to eventually offer paid API access to a wider audience at a later date.

The new model now powers the company’s digital assistant in the standalone Meta AI app and desktop website. Muse Spark will debut in the coming weeks inside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as in the company’s Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Meta also plans for Muse Spark to eventually power the company’s Vibes AI video feature in the Meta AI app. That service currently uses AI models from third-parties like Black Forest Labs.

With Muse Spark, users of the standalone Meta AI app and related website will now be able to alternate between certain modes depending on the sophistication of their prompts. Users can get use one mode quick answers to simple questions, and another for more complicated queries related to tasks like analyzing legal documents or gleaning nutritional information from photos of grocery store products.

With Muse Spark, users of the standalone Meta AI app and related website will now be able to alternate between certain modes depending on the sophistication of their prompts. With Instant mode, users can get quick answers to simple questions whereas Thinking mode lets them input more complicated queries related to tasks like analyzing legal documents or gleaning nutritional information from photos of grocery store products.

Additionally, a Contemplating mode “will be rolling out gradually” in the Meta AI app and site for the most complicated queries and tasks, Meta said in the technical blog. In this mode, the Muse Spark model utilizes a squad of AI agents to help “reason in parallel,” thus helping it “compete with the extreme reasoning modes of frontier models such as Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro,” the technical blog said.

The revamped Meta AI with Muse Spark will also contain a Shopping mode that the company said will be able to help people buy clothes or decorate rooms.

“Shopping mode draws from the styling inspiration and brand storytelling already happening across our apps, surfacing ideas from the creators and communities people already follow,” Meta’s blog post said.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

WATCH: Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft all down as data center spending rises.


A fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire sparks market relief — but no clear path to lasting peace


WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 06: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe (L) and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (R) during a news conference in James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on April 06, 2026 in Washington, DC.

Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

A temporary U.S.-Iran ceasefire sparked a broad relief rally across assets on Wednesday, but experts warned that any deal concerning lasting peace will be complicated by a major trust deficit.

The ceasefire came following hastened diplomatic efforts led by Pakistan and just hours before Trump’s threatened deadline for wiping out the entire Iranian civilization, briefly pulling the region back from the brink of a massive military bombardment.

Oil prices cooled to below $100 per barrel following the ceasefire announcement, but remain far above the pre-war levels of around $70 per barrel.

While U.S. President Donald Trump said the two-week ceasefire was contingent on the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian officials stated that safe passage through the strait would be “possible,” subject to coordination with its armed forces and “technical limitations” — caveats that may give Iran some room to define compliance on its own terms.

“This is a problem that could derail the ceasefire later this year,” said Matt Gertken, chief geopolitical strategist at BCA Research, warning that the coordination requirement remains a risky ambiguity in both sides’ statements so far.

Trump may temporarily accept Iran as a gatekeeper — with U.S. midterm elections approaching and gasoline prices sharply higher than before the war — but after the election, the U.S. national security establishment will start to demand a more permanent solution,” said Gertken. “Fighting will ignite later this year, if not later this month.”

A protester waves an Iranian flag and shouts slogans during a demonstration against US military action in Iran near the White House in Washington, DC, on April 7, 2026.

Mandel Ngan | Afp | Getty Images

Tehran also said that its armed forces will cease defensive operations if attacks against Iran are halted. After the ceasefire came into effect at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, missiles were still launched from Iran towards Israel and several Gulf states.

The reprieve on Tuesday would allow some time for the two sides to reach a longer agreement to end the six-week-old war, which has killed thousands of people and sparked a global energy crisis, with their delegations expected to meet in Islamabad on Friday.

Iran is reportedly finalizing a joint maritime protocol with Oman to institutionalize coordinated management of tanker traffic through the strait, which could embed Iranian authority over the crucial energy artery into a standing bilateral agreement.

Fragile truce

The ceasefire, holding together a group of parties with sharply diverging interests, also leaves questions open over whether resumed peace talks will yield meaningful results without renewing tensions.

Pratibha Thaker, regional director, Africa and the Middle East at the Economist Intelligence Unit, described the ceasefire agreement as “a huge relief” but warned that a significant lack of trust on both sides will complicate upcoming negotiations.

“What are we are seeing right now, I would really like to stress is a pause in the conflict, rather than any kind of lasting resolution,” Thaker told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Wednesday.

“But, and this is a big but, it is a very fragile arrangement. The ceasefire hinges on Iran suspending its military activity [and] fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping,” Thaker said.

“Crucially, there is a deep trust deficit on both sides. From Washington’s perspective, longstanding concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. From Tehran’s side, deep skepticisim about U.S. intentions, especially given past withdrawals from agreements and continued military presence and pressure as well.”

A fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire sparks market relief — but no clear path to lasting peace

Israel agreed to suspend strikes but urged Washington to press for deeper Iranian concessions, including the surrender of enriched uranium stockpiles. In its 10-point terms, Iran requested Washington to accept its uranium enrichment program and the lifting of all sanctions.

The ceasefire will likely hold in the near term, given the economic costs accruing to the global economy from six weeks of conflict, said Michael Langham, emerging markets economist at Aberdeen Investments. “Parties with vested interest in stopping the conflict and reopening the strait will double down on efforts to find a compromise,” he said.

If the truce holds and the strait reopens, the global economic damage should prove manageable, Langham added. Central banks could broadly resume their pre-conflict paths — and attention may shift from inflation to growth, if commodity prices normalize quickly, he added.

The market calculation

The ceasefire sparked a relief rally in markets amid repricing for a de-escalation in the conflict, but investors will watch for something more durable than a two-week pause, Geoff Yu, senior market strategist at BNY, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.

“What the market is going to start pricing ahead is a first step towards further de-escalation and perhaps something more permanent,” he said, flagging that the disruption has extended beyond crude oil to commodities such as helium, critical to semiconductor manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan.

Stocks surged across regions, with Asian benchmarks and U.S. futures climbing, amid rising optimism for a potential turning point in a conflict that has rattled markets for weeks.

An Indian Oil Corp. gas station in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, on Wednesday, April 8, 2026.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Josh Rubin, portfolio manager at Thornburg Investments, cautioned against reading the early market reaction as a definitive verdict. “There’s still low visibility [and] limited predictability” on whether the truce will hold, Rubin said, warning that tail risks remain if the strait remains closed for another two to four months.

Energy and commodity markets are likely to remain on a structurally higher floor regardless of the ceasefire outcome, said BCA Research’s Gertken, as governments hoard and restock in anticipation of renewed conflict, keeping oil and gas prices elevated well above pre-war levels even in a scenario where shipping resumes.

‘A wake-up call for everybody’

Mehran Kamrava, professor of government at Georgetown University of Qatar, said the two-week ceasefire shows that there is “tremendous willpower” from both Washington and Tehran to bring this war to an end.

“Probably the one party that did not want the war to end is Israel and we see that Israel has refused to say that this ceasefire applies to Lebanon. So yes, I think the ceasefire will hold because neither the Trump administration nor the Iranians really want this war to continue,” Kamrava told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday.

'Tremendous' willpower to end Iran war: professor

When asked how the last 24 to 48 hours may have influenced the way the U.S. is viewed by its allies and adversaries across the globe, Kamrava said the world had been “put on notice” by some of Trump’s comments.

“One of the things we have seen here in the region is that close alliance with the United States does not necessarily bring you security. If anything, it creates adversaries and it creates problems,” Kamrava said.

“So, what we have seen in the past 48 to 24 hours, particularly given President Trump’s extremely incendiary and violent language on social media is kind of a wake up call for everybody, both allies and adversaries, that this is a very unreliable and really unpredictable actor in the White House,” he added.

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Broadcom agrees to expanded chip deals with Google, Anthropic


Broadcom CEO Hock Tan speaks at the digital X event in Cologne, Germany, on September 13, 2022.

Ying Tang | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Broadcom said Monday that it’s agreed to produce future versions of artificial intelligence chips for Google, and signed an expanded deal with Anthropic that will give the AI startup access to about 3.5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity drawing on Google’s AI processors.

Shares of Broadcom rose 3% in extended trading.

The disclosure in a securities filing underscores the surging demand for infrastructure that can run generative AI models. Anthropic’s popularity has soared this year, with its Claude app becoming the top free U.S. app listed in Apple’s App Store in February after a dispute between the company and the Pentagon became public.

On an earnings call last month, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said that “for Anthropic, we are off to a very good start in 2026” in providing 1 gigawatt of compute from Google’s homegrown tensor processing units (TPUs). Broadcom helps Google make its TPUs.

“For 2027, this demand is expected to surge in excess of 3 gigawatts of compute,” he said.

In a note following the earnings call, analysts at Mizuho led by Vijay Rakesh estimated that Broadcom would pick up $21 billion in AI revenue from Anthropic in 2026 and $42 billion in 2027. The filing on Monday did not contain a dollar amount.

Meanwhile, Broadcom is also collaborating with Anthropic rival OpenAI on custom silicon for AI. Both model builders currently rely heavily on graphics processing units from Nvidia through cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. OpenAI has also committed to drawing on six gigawatts of AMD’s GPUs, with the first gigawatt set to come in the second half of this year.

WATCH: Final Trades: Broadcom, Spotify, Applovin and Uber

Broadcom agrees to expanded chip deals with Google, Anthropic
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The Tech Download: Agentic tools and chips take center stage at Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI’


This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Nvidia’s yearly showcase event — dubbed the ‘Super Bowl of AI’ by some — kicked off at the start of the week to much fanfare across the tech sector. The event sees tens of thousands of attendees gather in California to get the latest on the world’s most valuable company’s plans for the future.

Didn’t manage to snag a ticket? No problem. I caught up with CNBC’s Katie Tarasov, who was on the ground at the event, to get a sense of what went down.

Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Kai: What were the key announcements this year?

Katie: I’m always watching for the biggest hardware announcements because it’s Nvidia chips that are filling AI data centers and powering almost every major company’s AI ambitions. We saw two big new chip announcements during CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote on Monday.

First was an entirely new type of chip called a Language Processing Unit, or LPU. It’s the first chip Nvidia’s unveiling using technology it acquired from chip startup Groq in December. That $20 billion deal was Nvidia’s biggest purchase ever. While Nvidia’s star graphics processing units have thousands of cores that perform many operations simultaneously, the Groq 3 LPU is built with a single core optimized for speeding up those GPUs.

The other big chip announcement was the unveiling of a rack filled entirely with Nvidia’s newest Vera central processing units, or CPUs. I wrote a piece last week explaining how the CPU is having a renaissance as Nvidia sees it as a coming bottleneck for agentic AI, which requires more data transfer and general-purpose compute typically handled by the CPU.

And one software mention that stood out: Nvidia announced NemoClaw, an enterprise-level version of OpenClaw that layers Nvidia’s software stack on top of the autonomous AI agent platform.

Kai: What stood out about the Nvidia GTC 2026 conference? 

Kai: Why has Nvidia’s stock dropped slightly in the past few days?

Kai: What did we learn about Nvidia’s plans for the future from the conference?

Katie: Overall, I think we’re seeing Nvidia shift its strategy to align with changing compute needs as agentic AI takes off. Instead of putting all its eggs in the GPU basket, Nvidia’s taking a more “soup-to-nuts” strategy, as Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin put it to me.

But Huang also showed a sneak peak of what’s next for its most buzz-worthy line: the Kyber rack-scale architecture. It will integrate 144 GPUs in compute trays that sit vertically instead of horizontally in order to boost density and lower latency. The Kyber design will be available in Vera Rubin Ultra, Nvidia’s next rack-scale system, expected to ship in 2027.

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The Tech Download: Agentic tools and chips take center stage at Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI’

Chipmaker Micron stock movement since Wednesday 18 March.

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Micron revenue almost triples, tops estimates as demand for memory soars


Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra speaks at a groundbreaking ceremony for the company’s semiconductor manufacturing facility in Clay, New York, on Jan. 16, 2026.

Heather Ainsworth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Micron’s revenue almost tripled in the latest quarter as results topped analysts’ estimates and guidance sailed past expectations. The stock, which is up more than 350% in the past year, slipped in extended trading.

Here’s how the company did relative to LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $12.20 adjusted vs. $9.31 expected
  • Revenue: $23.86 billion vs. $20.07 billion expected

Micron is benefiting from soaring demand for Nvidia graphics processing units that run generative artificial intelligence models. Each generation of Nvidia chip packs in more memory, creating a supply crunch. Micron has been working to add capacity, as have competitors Samsung and SK Hynix.

Revenue in the fiscal second quarter increased from $8.05 billion a year earlier, according to a statement.

For the current period, the company expects about $33.5 billion in revenue, up from $9.3 billion a year ago, implying growth of over 200%. Adjusted earnings per share will be about $19.15, Micron said. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected $12.05 in adjusted earnings per share on $24.3 billion in revenue.

“The step-up in our results and outlook are the outcome of an increase in memory demand driven by AI, structural supply constraints and Micron’s strong execution across the board,” CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in prepared remarks the company issued at the time of the release.

Micron’s stock has been on a tear. The shares tripled in 2025 and have jumped another 62% year to date as of Wednesday’s close. Among the 10 most valuable U.S. tech companies, Micron is the only one that’s up. Oracle is the leading decliner, down 22%, and Microsoft and Tesla have also seen double-digit percentage drops.

“Looking at how the shares were trading going into this earnings report, I thought the biggest risk was high investor expectations,” said Hendi Susanto, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, in an email. “However, fiscal third-quarter guidance is strong, well above analysts’ and my own expectations.”

Micron revenue almost triples, tops estimates as demand for memory soars

Mehrotra said that AI and conventional servers are facing a “lack of adequate DRAM and NAND supply.” That refers to the company’s traditional memory products that have long been used in data centers and devices.

Memory companies have been shifting production capacity largely to high-bandwidth memory, which is embedded onto Nvidia’s latest GPUs and many other chips powering AI. Those products have higher margins.

The company’s GAAP gross margin, the profit left after accounting for the cost of goods sold, more than doubled in the past year to 74.4% from 36.8%, and increased from 56% in the prior quarter.

Net income climbed to $13.8 billion, or $12.07 per share, from $1.58 billion, or $1.41 per share, in the same quarter last year.

Micron said revenue in its cloud memory business rose more than 160% to $7.75 billion. The mobile and client unit saw even steeper growth, with revenue jumping to $7.71 billion from $2.24 billion a year ago.

Memory is typically a commodity business, which comes with lower margins than other silicon products and short-term contracts. In the past few months, memory companies have signed longer-term contracts as semiconductor makers work to ensure future capacity.

“As AI evolves, we expect compute architectures to become more memory-intensive,” the company said in an earnings presentation. “This is why we strongly believe that Micron is one of the biggest beneficiaries and enablers of AI.”

Mehrotra said on the earnings call that volume production of HBM4 for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin started in the fiscal first quarter, and next-generation HBM4e products will ramp in 2027. Nvidia has said it will utilize custom HBM in its next-generation Feynman GPU coming in 2028.

Mehrotra added that capital expenditures will “step up meaningfully” in fiscal 2027, with construction-related costs increasing by over $10 billion.

Micron is building two giant new campuses of fabrication plants in Idaho and New York to increase its memory manufacturing capacity in the U.S. Mehrotra said on the call that initial production at the Idaho site is expected by mid-2027. Micron broke ground in January on the massive $100 billion New York campus, and expects wafer output by the second half of 2028.

WATCH: How Micron is building the biggest-ever U.S. chip fab, despite China ban

Micron is building the biggest-ever U.S. chip fab, despite China ban
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CNBC Daily Open: Risk-off trade back on for oil


Hello, this is Leonie Kidd writing to you from London. Welcome to another edition of CNBC’s Daily Open.

U.S. President Donald Trump continues to dominate the news cycle, and his latest round with reporters in the Oval Office has yielded more headlines and market moves this morning. It’s only Tuesday and already it’s been a volatile week for oil, which remains the epicenter of trading action.

Market participants — as well as us journalists — will need to stay on their toes to keep up with developments.

What you need to know today

Oil prices jumped over 2% on Tuesday as uncertainty lingered over a U.S.-led coalition to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. President Donald Trump suggested Monday that the coalition was not fully in place as he urged other countries to get involved.

He voiced his frustrations by saying “some are very enthusiastic, and some are less than enthusiastic … and I assume some will not do it.”

Washington, meanwhile, is looking to postpone a meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping amid the conflict with Iran. During a press conference in the Oval Office, he said, “There’s no tricks to it either. It’s very simple. We’ve got a war going on. I think it’s important that I be here.”

Back in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates reopened its airspace on Tuesday after a brief shutdown, as Iran continued missile and drone attacks. The UAE’s Defense Ministry said that air defenses have intercepted more than 300 ballistic missiles and 1,600 drones so far.

The volatility has led to a hike in interest rates from the Reserve Bank of Australia. The central bank raised its benchmark policy rate for a second consecutive time, citing concerns over the inflation risk posed by the war in Iran.

In stock markets, Asia-Pacific equities rose Tuesday as auto and tech stocks gained after Nvidia announced robust revenue forecast for its key chips, and partnerships with carmakers from the region. European and U.S. futures are lacking direction in early trade.

— Leonie Kidd

And finally…

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Nebius jumps 14% after inking $27 billion infrastructure deal with Meta


In an aerial view, a billboard advertising an artificial intelligence (AI) company is posted on Sept. 16, 2025 in San Francisco, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Meta has signed a new long-term agreement to spend up to $27 billion on Dutch cloud provider Nebius‘ AI infrastructure, the company announced on Monday.

Nebius’ shares surged 14% in premarket trading.

Over the next five years, Nebius will provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity across a number of locations, including on what the company says will be one of the first large-scale deployments of Nvidia’s latest AI-specialist Vera Rubin chips.

Meta has also committed to purchase additional available compute capacity from Nebius, worth up to a total of $15 billion over five years.

Netherlands-based Nebius has emerged as a leading European player in the rapidly developing AI cloud computing space. The company has seen its share price increase more than 400% since listing in New York in 2024.

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The Tech Download: Agentic tools and chips take center stage at Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI’

Nebius shares year-to-date

“We are pleased to expand our significant partnership with Meta as part of securing more large, long-term capacity contracts to accelerate the build-out and growth of our core AI cloud business,” Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, said in a statement.

Citi said Monday it was initiating coverage of Nebius with a buy/high risk rating, which it noted was supported by a “differentiated view on AI datacenter [total addressable market] growth, margin improvement and NBIS’s capital-efficient scaling.”

Meta is part of a group of hyperscalers planning huge spending as they race to build out infrastructure to power the AI boom.

The company said its AI-related capital expenditure would hit between $115 billion and $135 billion this year, as part of a combined $700 billion in spending by hyperscalers including Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.

It comes as investors pile into the AI cloud computing sector. U.K.-based AI data center startup Nscale announced it had raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation last week, from investors including Nvidia.

The chip giant also announced it would invest $2 billion in Nebius last week, which saw the Dutch company’s stock pop 16%.

Nebius was founded in 2022 after a restructuring of Russian company Yandex’s operations based outside of its home market and listed in New York in 2024. Its share price rose more than 200% in 2025 and has increased by 35% so far in 2026.

The company also inked a deal to deliver computing resources to Microsoft, worth up to $19.4 billion over five years, in September.

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AI chipmaker Cerebras namedropped by Oracle, alongside Nvidia and AMD


As AI chipmaker Cerebras angles for an eventual IPO, the company appears to have landed a significant cloud-computing customer: Oracle.

On a conference call with analysts on Tuesday following Oracle’s quarterly earnings, Clay Magouyrk, one of the software vendor’s two CEOs, indicated that his company’s infrastructure includes Cerebras chips, alongside graphics processing units (GPUs) from market leader Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices.

“We build infrastructure which is flexible, fungible, and can support the smallest workloads up to the largest,” Magouyrk said. “We continually offer the latest in accelerators, from the most recent Nvidia and AMD options to emerging designs from companies like Cerebras and Positron,” another AI hardware startup.

Cerebras offers cloud services that employ its large-scale WSE-3 chips. The company filed paperwork for an IPO in 2024 but withdrew the filing last October. Days later, it announced a $1.1 billion funding round at a valuation of $8.1 billion, and CEO Andrew Feldman said Cerebras still intends to go public.

For prospective investors, one of the most glaring concerns from Cerebras’ original prospectus was its reliance on a single customer based in the Middle East. G42, backed by Microsoft, is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and in the first half of 2024, it accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue.

Bolstering its client roster with a name like Oracle could be a big boon for Cerebras, and it would follow another significant announcement earlier this year. In January, Cerebras said it had received a $10 billion commitment from OpenAI, which relies on Oracle, and other companies, for cloud services. The next month, OpenAI said it was collaborating with Cerebras on a research preview of Codex-Spark, a fast-acting AI model geared toward software development, for ChatGPT Pro customers.

Oracle didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and its price list does not mention a Cerebras option. Cerebras didn’t immediately provide a comment.

Oracle’s earnings call came after the company reported better-than-expected results, lifted its fiscal 2027 guidance and said remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled to $553 billion from a year earlier.

“Altogether, we are confident that the investments we make now in data centers, compute capacity and customer relationships will only grow more valuable over time,” Magouyrk said, after naming Cerebras and other chipmakers.

While Cerebras is trying to compete as an upstart against the world’s most valuable company, it’s playing in a market with seemingly insatiable demand for computing power as AI model developers scale to quickly respond to the needs of users.

Nvidia is using its mammoth cash pile to expand into new product areas. In December, the company bought key assets from AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion. Nvidia plans to announce a new architecture drawing on Groq at its GTC developer conference in California next week, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Magouyrk said on the call that GTC will feature some “key announcements.” He also said that speed in responding to incoming requests requires innovative technology in addition to strategically located data centers.

“It’s the type of hardware that’s being deployed, and that’s why you’re seeing so much innovation going on around these AI accelerators,” he said. “If you look at what Groq does, or Cerebras or Positron, all of these different types of customers are saying, well, not only how do we reduce the cost of inferencing, but also, how can we significantly reduce the latency of it?”

WATCH: OpenAI unveils first AI model running on Cerebras chips


Oracle stock jumps 9% on earnings beat and increased guidance as cloud revenue climbs 44%


Oracle shares rose as much as 10% in extended trading on Tuesday after the software vendor reported quarterly results that surpassed Wall Street projections and boosted its revenue guidance for fiscal 2027.

Oracle sees $1.92 and $1.96 in adjusted earnings per share for the fiscal fourth quarter, with revenue growth between 19% and 20%. LSEG’s consensus included $1.70 per share and 20% revenue growth.

Here’s how the company did in the quarter relative to LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $1.79 adjusted vs. $1.70 expected
  • Revenue: $17.19 billion vs. $16.91 billion expected

Oracle’s overall revenue increased 22% year over year in the fiscal third quarter, which ended on Feb. 28, according to a statement. Net income rose to $3.72 billion, or $1.27 a share, from $2.94 billion, or $1.02 a share, in the same quarter a year earlier. Adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation expense.

The company reported $8.9 billion in total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software as a service, or SaaS. The number was up 44% and more than the $8.85 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.

Management pushed up the company’s fiscal 2027 revenue forecast by $1 billion to $90 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG had anticipated $86.6 billion.

Oracle said it generated $4.9 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue, up 84%, a faster pace than the 68% growth in the prior quarter. The company touted cloud business from Air France-KLM, Lockheed Martin, SoftBank Corp. and Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard video game subsidiary.

Shares of Oracle have plummeted over 50% from their September highs, falling along with other software vendors on broader artificial intelligence concerns as well as Wall Street’s specific fears about the company’s hefty debt load that’s funding its AI buildout.

Thank God we have these coding tools now that allow us to build a comprehensive set of software, agent-based software, to implement, to automate a complete ecosystem like healthcare or financial services,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, technology chief and executive chairman, said on a conference call with analysts. “That’s what we’re doing at Oracle. That’s why we think we’re a disruptor. That’s why we think the SaaS apocalypse applies to others but not to us.”

As of Tuesday’s close, the stock had declined 23% in 2026, while the S&P 500 is down less than 1% in the same period.

Oracle has won large contracts to deliver cloud infrastructure to AI companies such as OpenAI, but has less cash on hand than larger competitors such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Renting out Nvidia graphics chips ekes out a smaller profit margin than selling software licenses, and Oracle reported $13.18 billion in negative free cash flow for the past 12 months.

During the quarter, Oracle announced plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in the fiscal year to expand its cloud infrastructure capacity. The company is planning for over 10 gigawatts worth of computing power coming online in the next three years, Clay Magouyrk, its other CEO, said on the call.

The across-the-board beat may help settle a nervous investor base, at least for the time being, as Oracle’s results and backlog point to a continuing surge in demand for AI infrastructure. Remaining performance obligations more than quadrupled to $553 billion from a year earlier — although it was slightly lower than StreetAccount’s $556 billion consensus — and the company said it has the capital to support that growth.

“Most of the increase in RPO in Q3 related to large scale AI contracts where Oracle does not expect to have to raise any incremental funds to support these contracts as most of the equipment needed is either funded upfront via customer prepayments so Oracle can purchase the GPUs, or the customer buys the GPUs and supplies them to Oracle,” the company said in the statement.

In Abilene, Texas, where Oracle and Crusoe are constructing a data center project for OpenAI, “two buildings are completely operational and the rest of the campus is on track,” Oracle said in a Sunday X post. The statement came after Bloomberg reported that Oracle and OpenAI had dropped plans to expand the site, though Oracle said media reports regarding Abilene were incorrect.

At the end of February, Oracle announced a $110 funding round, with backing from Amazon and Nvidia, among others.

“Some of the largest consumers of AI Cloud capacity have recently strengthened their financial positions quite substantially,” Oracle said in its Tuesday statement.

Bloomberg reported last week that Oracle was planning layoffs.

“AI models for generating computer code have become so efficient that we have been restructuring our product development teams into smaller, more agile and productive groups,” Oracle said in the statement. “This new AI Code Generation technology is enabling us to build more software in less time with fewer people. Oracle is now building more SaaS applications for more industries at a lower cost.”

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

WATCH: Inside Oracle’s risky AI bet


Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sees AI chip revenue ‘significantly’ above $100 billion next year


Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.

Lucas Jackson | Reuters

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sees the artificial intelligence boom gaining so much steam that he’s projecting AI chip revenue next year “significantly in excess of $100 billion.”

After the chipmaker reported better-than-expected results for the fiscal first quarter and issued a strong forecast for the current period, Tan said on his company’s earnings call that demand is picking up from large customers that are increasingly in need of Broadcom’s help in designing custom silicon.

“We have also secured the supply chain required to achieve this,” Tan said, regarding the 2027 sales target.

AI revenue in the first quarter more than doubled from a year earlier to $8.4 billion, while total sales increased 29% to $19.3 billion. The company expects AI semiconductor revenue of $10.2 billion this quarter.

Broadcom shares popped more than 5% in extended trading on Thursday after Tan’s comments.

Chip companies like Broadcom have faced a number of headwinds in recent months, including a shortage of the high bandwidth memory crucial for custom accelerators, and capacity constraints at the most advanced levels of chip manufacturing and packaging.

Broadcom helps its customers translate their chip designs into silicon, providing back-end support before the processors are sent off to be manufactured at huge fabrication plants by companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sees AI chip revenue ‘significantly’ above 0 billion next year

It’s a role that’s fueled Broadcom’s growth as more tech giants design in-house accelerators for AI. Tan said custom AI deployment is entering its “next phase” and is expected to speed up, as the company helps six key customers design their chips. Chief among those are Google, Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI, with Fujitsu and ByteDance likely as the final two.

Google was the first to the in-house chip game in 2015, with its tensor processing units designed alongside Broadcom. Google has made its chips available to cloud customers since 2018, with key customers now including Apple and Anthropic. Broadcom expects even stronger demand from next-generation Google chips in 2027.

Meta is also reportedly in talks to use Google’s TPUs, and Broadcom assists the social media company with developing its own MTIA accelerator. Analysts have cast doubt on the future of Meta’s custom silicon program, but the “MTIA roadmap is alive and well,” Tan said on the earnings call.

During the question and answer portion of the call, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon pushed Tan on the specific sources of the projected $100 billion in AI chip revenue. He counted 3 gigawatts of capacity at Anthropic, 3 gigawatts at Google, at least 2 gigawatts with Meta, and 1 gigawatt from OpenAI, among others. Tan said the dollars per gigawatt “vary, sometimes quite dramatically,” but that his estimates were “not far” off.

While Tan said that the AI revenue boost would come from “just chips,” Broadcom makes much more than just AI accelerators. Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies said it includes digital signal processors, data processing units and networking switches.

It’s “everything in that bucket,” Bajarin said.

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

WATCH: Broadcom CEO on Ai revenue

Broadcom CEO: AI revenue from chips could exceed $100 billion in 2027