Rigetti Computing posts Q4 sales that fall short of expectations - Sherwood News

Needham and Benchmark cut their price targets on Rigetti following Q4 results. Rigetti ComputingRGTI $16.67 (-0.29%) didn’t have a high revenue bar to hit, and still came up short in Q4. Revenue of $1.87 million (estimate: $2.37 million). An adjusted loss per share of $0.06 (estimate: a $0.04 loss). Shares are tanking more than 9% in early trading on Thursday. Benchmark analyst David Williams, who rates the stock a buy, lowered his price target to $35 from $40 following these results, writing that “the company’s conservative cadence and messaging may remain a hurdle for some investors.” Compared to peers D-Wave QuantumQBTS $18.74 (0.75%) and IonQIONQ $33.99 (-2.38%), Rigetti is in the biggest drawdown relative to its October peak, off 68% heading into this report. The quantum computing space has come under significant pressure as investors have soured on capital-intensive emergent technology stocks. Needham analyst Quinn Bolton, who rates Rigetti a buy as well, also cut his price target on the shares to $31 from $51 “to reflect recent multiple compression in the quantum sector.” Despite the largest-ever release of oil from the International Energy Agency’s strategic reserves, crude oil continued to climb. Memory stocks and chip machinery companies are bouncing Wednesday, following a strong Oracle earnings report that bolstered confidence in the durability of the AI data center build-out. In fact, SandiskSNDK $652.97 (5.89%) is the top performer of the S&P 500 so far this week, rising more than 21% from Friday’s close, as of shortly after 2 p.m. ET. Memory chip maker MicronMU $415.40 (3.83%) is second in line, up more than 13% in weekly gains, and hard disk drive maker Western DigitalWDC $267.55 (0.94%) is also getting a lift. Other big winners so far this week are some of the so-called semicap shares — makers of the ultraprecise machines that turn silicon into actual semiconductors — with Lam ResearchLRCX $216.65 (1.67%) and KLA CorpKLAC $1,450.00 (0.83%) both racking up gains of about 10% on the week. Applied MaterialsAMAT $348.20 (1.48%) is up about 8% this week. Thematically speaking, both memory stocks like Sandisk and Micron as well as semicap shares like KLA have been part of the “buy the bottleneck” trade, in which investors buy companies they believe sit at key pinch points in the AI supply chain and therefore have pretty tremendous pricing power. Through that lens, the stocks’ bounce might reflect some additional excitement about the durability of the data center boom after Oracle’s results, which included a larger-than-expected capex number as well as sales guidances that was higher than Wall Street was forecasting. But the bounce also may be the less interesting market phenomenon of mean reversion rearing its head, as these stocks were also some of the most beaten down in the S&P 500 last week, when Sandisk lost 17% and Lam lost about 15%, for example. So, some snapback may merely be a market reflex. Other big winners so far this week are some of the so-called semicap shares — makers of the ultraprecise machines that turn silicon into actual semiconductors — with Lam ResearchLRCX $216.65 (1.67%) and KLA CorpKLAC $1,450.00 (0.83%) both racking up gains of about 10% on the week. Applied MaterialsAMAT $348.20 (1.48%) is up about 8% this week. Thematically speaking, both memory stocks like Sandisk and Micron as well as semicap shares like KLA have been part of the “buy the bottleneck” trade, in which investors buy companies they believe sit at key pinch points in the AI supply chain and therefore have pretty tremendous pricing power. Through that lens, the stocks’ bounce might reflect some additional excitement about the durability of the data center boom after Oracle’s results, which included a larger-than-expected capex number as well as sales guidances that was higher than Wall Street was forecasting. But the bounce also may be the less interesting market phenomenon of mean reversion rearing its head, as these stocks were also some of the most beaten down in the S&P 500 last week, when Sandisk lost 17% and Lam lost about 15%, for example. So, some snapback may merely be a market reflex. A few weeks after announcing it would close 300 stores by the end of next year, Papa John’sPZZA $38.80 (19.45%) is drawing fresh take-private interest from Irth Capital, an investment fund backed by a member of the Qatari royal family. Papa John’s shares were up 19% on Wednesday afternoon, on pace for their best day since February 2025. According to The Wall Street Journal, Irth is offering $47 per share for PZZA, valuing the company at about $1.5 billion. The fund currently holds a roughly 10% stake in Papa John’s, per the report. Irth has tried to take Papa John’s private before, offering $60 per share in a joint bid with Apollo Global in June of last year. In October, Apollo GlobalAPO $104.50 (-1.90%) again offered to take the company private at $64 per share. That offer was later withdrawn. Broadly, the pizza category is being increasingly dominated by Domino’sDPZ $393.75 (-1.81%), which opened 700 stores globally last year and has a market cap 9x greater than Irth’s latest reported offer for Papa John’s. According to The Wall Street Journal, Irth is offering $47 per share for PZZA, valuing the company at about $1.5 billion. The fund currently holds a roughly 10% stake in Papa John’s, per the report. Irth has tried to take Papa John’s private before, offering $60 per share in a joint bid with Apollo Global in June of last year. In October, Apollo GlobalAPO $104.50 (-1.90%) again offered to take the company private at $64 per share. That offer was later withdrawn. Broadly, the pizza category is being increasingly dominated by Domino’sDPZ $393.75 (-1.81%), which opened 700 stores globally last year and has a market cap 9x greater than Irth’s latest reported offer for Papa John’s. Oracle released its third-quarter earnings yesterday, and the company is making it clear that its ambitious AI growth is grounded in reality and cold hard cash. NvidiaNVDA $185.04 (0.67%) is planning on spending $26 billion to train its own AI open-weight models, according to a 2025 financial filing. Wired was first to report the information. Nvidia has released several of its own AI models, including the Nemotron reasoning model, as well as specialized ones for specific tasks. Nvidia making its own large frontier models could allow the company to go head-to-head against some of its biggest AI customers. TeslaTSLA $408.80 (2.16%) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that Tesla and xAI, which is part of SpaceX, would work on a joint AI agent project called “Macrohard,” also referred to as “Digital Optimus,” as part of Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI. The collaboration would pair Grok with what Musk described as a real-time computer-controlling AI agent running on Tesla hardware. In his post, Musk said Grok would serve as the higher-level “System 2” reasoning layer directing “Digital Optimus,” a faster “System 1” layer that processes the last five seconds of screen video and keyboard/mouse inputs to take action. He said the system would run inexpensively on Tesla’s low-cost AI4 chip alongside more expensive NvidiaNVDA $185.04 (0.67%) chips at xAI, and suggested it could, “in principle,” emulate the function of entire companies. “No other company can yet do this,” he said. Business Insider reported earlier Wednesday that Tesla was taking up the AI agent mantle as xAI’s similar project stalled, but Musk’s post suggests the initiatives are more intertwined than previously understood. The collaboration marks the latest example of Musk’s companies working closely together, further blurring the lines between Tesla and the recently merged SpaceX-xAI entity. Analysts from Citizens JMP Securities expect fundamentals to play a greater role in 2026, despite ethereum’s predicament between network activity and price. To reach a seven-figure price, bitcoin would need to capture more than 50% of the store-of-value market, “a very high bar” that “sounds unreasonable to many,” Hougan wrote, but noted there’s a point most people miss. Snacks provides fresh takes on the financial news you need to start your day. Chartr provides data visualizations on business, entertainment, and society. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. MetaMETA $651.75 (0.10%) said today that it’s expanding its custom silicon development to include four new generations of Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips. The announcement comes just weeks after The Information reported that the social media company had scrapped its most advanced AI training chip, dubbed Olympus, after facing design challenges. In the meantime, it signed outside chip deals with NvidiaNVDA $185.04 (0.67%)and Advanced Micro DevicesAMD $203.45 (0.75%). Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger. “Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.” The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia: “MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.” Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models. Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger. “Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.” The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia: “MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.” Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models. Today GoogleGOOGL $307.38 (0.54%) said it has completed its $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wiz, the largest deal in the company’s history. “This acquisition is an investment by Google Cloud to improve cloud security and enable organizations to build fast and securely across any cloud or AI platform,” the company wrote in the press release. The companies agreed to the all-cash purchase last year, after quite a bit of back-and-forth. Once touted as a potential Google killer, the AI search engine’s traffic has been flat over the last year, while peers like Claude have surged ahead. Online car retailer CarMaxKMX $42.50 (0.88%) is climbing in premarket trading on Wednesday following reports that activist investor Starboard Value has taken a $350 million stake in the company. Starboard nominated two directors to CarMax’s board, including its own CEO, Jeff Smith, and FrontdoorFTDR $63.97 (-1.13%) CEO Bill Cobb. According to a letter sent by Starboard to CarMax, the hedge fund thinks the company can improve performance by adopting more dynamic pricing, reconditioning vehicles more efficiently, and reducing admin and other costs by more than $300 million. Per Starboard’s letter: “If the experience is superior, CarMax does not need to be the lowest-priced provider to win. We strongly encourage you to be hyper-focused on the digital end-to-end consumer experience. We believe there is an ample amount of low hanging fruit; so much fruit that it may even be touching the ground.” CarMax is the largest US used car retailer, but rival CarvanaCVNA $308.00 (-2.88%) has closed the retail sales gap between the two companies to about 6,000 vehicles as of the two most recent comparable quarters. According to a letter sent by Starboard to CarMax, the hedge fund thinks the company can improve performance by adopting more dynamic pricing, reconditioning vehicles more efficiently, and reducing admin and other costs by more than $300 million. Per Starboard’s letter: “If the experience is superior, CarMax does not need to be the lowest-priced provider to win. We strongly encourage you to be hyper-focused on the digital end-to-end consumer experience. We believe there is an ample amount of low hanging fruit; so much fruit that it may even be touching the ground.” CarMax is the largest US used car retailer, but rival CarvanaCVNA $308.00 (-2.88%) has closed the retail sales gap between the two companies to about 6,000 vehicles as of the two most recent comparable quarters. “Pokémon Pokopia,” a Switch 2 exclusive game in the vein of “Animal Crossing,” has become something of a sleeper mass hit for NintendoNTDOY $15.90 (6.35%), sending the gaming giant’s shares climbing. The stock closed up more than 8% in Japan on Wednesday. US ADRs are up 5% in premarket trading. Physical editions of “Pokopia” are currently out of stock on Walmart’sWMT $123.02 (-1.33%) website, and earlier this week AmazonAMZN $212.05 (-0.79%) temporarily hiked the price of the game to $80 as demand surged. “Pokopia” falls into a category of cozy games that have become a major industry category. “Animal Crossing” is the second-most-popular title on the original Switch and has sold more than 49 million copies. The 10-year-old “Stardew Valley” has sold more than 50 million copies across consoles and PC. The Switch 2 is seeing a momentum boost from the “Pokémon” exclusive, Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal wrote in a recent note. That’s helping to offset investor fears around the growing issue of memory prices. UberUBER $74.50 (3.59%) jumped premarket after announcing it will offer rides in AmazonAMZN $212.05 (-0.79%)-owned Zoox autonomous vehicles on its platform in Las Vegas later this summer and Los Angeles in the middle of next year, as part of a multiyear agreement. Zoox is currently testing in 10 US markets, while it’s available to the public in Las Vegas and select users in the Bay Area. Uber separately announced a partnership with Serve RoboticsSERV $10.63 (10.03%) and White Castle today to deliver food in Serve’s autonomous sidewalk robots. NebiusNBIS $110.25 (16.13%) is soaring in premarket trading after deepening its partnership with the world’s most valuable company. NvidiaNVDA $185.04 (0.67%) will invest $2 billion in the neocloud to help “develop and deploy the next generation of hyperscale cloud for the AI market, from AI natives to enterprises,” according to the press release. “To enable Nebius to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of capacity by end of 2030, NVIDIA will support Nebius’s early adoption of the latest generation of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform.” The chip designer already held roughly $100 million in Nebius stock as of the end of 2025, per a filing. Nvidia has actively sought out $2 billion equity stakes via partnerships with smaller publicly traded AI plays as of late. Earlier this month, Nvidia said it would take $2 billion positions in advanced optics firms LumentumLITE $670.50 (0.00%) and CoherentCOHR $252.43 (-3.60%). In late January, the chip designer announced an investment of the same amount in CoreWeaveCRWV $80.81 (9.45%), the neocloud whose IPO it also anchored. Painting “MACROHARD” on the roof of an xAI data center hasn’t been enough to bring the company’s core AI office worker to life. Business Insider reports that the effort to compete with Microsoft has stalled amid staff and leadership departures and what appears to be a hiring freeze. At the same time, Elon Musk’s public company, TeslaTSLA $408.80 (2.16%), seems to be accelerating its own AI agent project, dubbed “Digital Optimus.” It’s meant to perform tasks on a computer much like the Optimus robot would do in the real world. Unlike Macrohard’s screenshot-based training approach, Tesla’s effort reportedly mirrors its Full Self-Driving system, processing information in real time rather than step by step. Add this to the growing list of ways Musk’s empire is blurring together: SpaceX merged with xAI in February, and now Tesla appears to be absorbing one of xAI’s most ambitious projects, with some of Macrohard’s work and computing resources reportedly shifting to Tesla’s Autopilot team. Unlike Macrohard’s screenshot-based training approach, Tesla’s effort reportedly mirrors its Full Self-Driving system, processing information in real time rather than step by step. Add this to the growing list of ways Musk’s empire is blurring together: SpaceX merged with xAI in February, and now Tesla appears to be absorbing one of xAI’s most ambitious projects, with some of Macrohard’s work and computing resources reportedly shifting to Tesla’s Autopilot team.