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Shares in CoreWeave Inc are sinking this morning after the company revealed its third-quarter 2025 results yesterday. While the New Jersey-based AI infrastructure firm more than doubled its revenue from the same quarter a year earlier, it also revised down its full fiscal 2025 forecast, sending its stock price tumbling. Heres what you need to know. Whats happened? Yesterday, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave announced financial results for its Q3 2025, which ended on September 30. There was some good news for the quarter, including revenue of nearly $1.4 billion (up 134% year over year) and a revenue backlog of $55.6 billion (up 271% YoY). Revenue backlog is a metric that includes future revenue that CoreWeave expects from existing client deals. CoreWeaves main business is leasing AI hardwaremainly servers powered by Nvidias AI GPUsto AI software companies. Some of CoreWeaves most prominent customers include OpenAI and Meta. However, that means CoreWeaves future growth depends on two primary factors: growing its client base and building massive data centers to house advanced AI servers to meet client demands. Its that latter factor that has caused CoreWeaves stock price problems today. Data center delay necessitates revised 2025 forecast Unfortunately for investors, when CoreWeave announced its strong Q3 2025 revenue numbers, the company also said that it was revising down its full 2025 fiscal year guidance. As noted by FXLeaders, CoreWeave said it now forecasts fiscal 2025 revenue of between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion. The company had previously forecast fiscal 2025 revenues of up to $5.35 billion. The reduced revenue forecast is due to a data center delay. During the company’s earnings call, CEO Mike Intrator revealed that the development of a third-party data center on which CoreWeave was counting is behind schedule. “There is a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are [41 data centers] in our portfolio,” Intrator said, adding that the overwhelming majority of the data center delay should be resolved within the companys first quarter of fiscal 2026, which correlates to January through March of next year. That data center delay will impact one of the companys clients. As reported by CNBC, CoreWeave did not name the client but said the client had agreed to keep the full value of the contract intact, meaning CoreWeave will not lose out on that revenue backlog; it will merely be delayed. In addition to revising down its full fiscal 2025 revenue forecast, CoreWeave said it expects to end 2025 with adjusted operating income of between $690 million and $720 million and capital expenditures of $12 billion to $14 billion. CoreWeave stock sinks nearly 10% Despite CoreWeaves assertion that the data center issue isnt a long-term problem, the delay and disappointing guidance are affecting CoreWeave’s stock (Nasdaq: CRWV),which sank in premarket trading on Tuesday. As of the time of this writing, CRWV shares are currently trading down almost 10% to $95.54 in premarket. Thats a low CRWV has not seen since September. CoreWeave went public in March of this year. Despite lowering its IPO price right before its Nasdaq debut, the companys stock has skyrocketed in 2025. In its March IPO, CRWV stock began trading at $40 per share. By June, shares had surged to $187. As of yesterdays market close, CRWV shares had risen more than 170% for the year. But CoreWeaves double-digit stock decline this morning highlights the fact that investors are increasingly on edge about the valuations and lofty stock prices of companies operating in the AI space. There are growing concerns about an AI bubble that could mirror the Dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. CoreWeaves data center delay isnt a sign of any such bubble in itself, but the companys stock price fall may indicate that investor nerves are high when AI companies dont meet expectations.
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E-Commerce
Darin Fisher is a little older than the fresh-faced, newly minted PhD types you see roaming the well-appointed floors at OpenAIs second location in San Franciscos Mission Bay district. Before arriving at the AI super-startup, he spent 25 years working on some of the most important web browsers in the history of the web: He worked on Netscape Navigator, which helped define the early consumer internet. He worked on the popular Firefox browser at Mozilla, then went to Google, where he was a member of the Chrome team. After Google, he wanted to explore alternative browsers; he did so first at Neeva (which offered an ad-free experience), then at the Browser Company, which built the influential Arc browser. The opportunity to come to OpenAI and infuse the AI model into all of this and to think about how that can really transform the experience was all kinds of super interesting to me, Fisher says. In OpenAIs new ChatGPT Atlas browser, all tasks start with a prompt to the AI models working in the background. As the user accesses the web, the chatbot, which rides along at the right of the screen, can see the content of each webpage, answer questions about it, or take actions on it. An agent mode allows the AI to perform complex, multi-step tasks like filling out forms or shopping on the user’s behalf. We asked Fisher about the choices, trade-offs, and innovations that went into designing OpenAI’s AI-first browser. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What’s the core philosophy behind Atlas? One of the most important features of Atlas is really that chat is at the heart of it. You should start your journey with ChatGPT. Not because we work at OpenAI, but because I actually realize so many times, I kick myself why didn’t I just ask the model first? It would save me time. It should be the thing that’s there on autocomplete in the browser. It should be there so conveniently, effortlessly. This is the feedback we hear from people who’ve gotten to try Atlas. How did you approach the design challenge of getting people to adopt new habits? There’s this dance of the familiar as well as moments when you can optimize some things. I worked on browsers that have tried much more radical takes on browser UI, for good reasons, because there’s frustrations with a traditional browser UI. When you have all these little tabs at the top, at some point that starts to break down and you’re like, “Well, I guess I have to clean up now.” We really tried to get the basics right because people live in this thing. Not only are they used to it, but you’re working. You don’t want to be frustrated by it. One of the big challenges of browser design is tab management. Can you explain Atlass scrolling tabs feature? We built a classic tabs mode which works just like Chrome, but we also have a scrolling tabs mode in Atlas. What it does is it makes the tabs stay a fixed width and they start to scroll. But importantly, for this to work, new tabs enter at the left, which can be very disorienting for people. But once you get used to it, it’s kind of neat because what it means is new tabs are always opening on the left, old tabs are going off to the right. Your area of focus and what you’re working on stays on the left and all the tabs are nice and visible. What’s really cool is once you get used to this, you start accumulating a bunch of tabs and you can use the tab search feature Command+Shift+A. It’ll find your tab, and then you can zoom it back to the left. How did you approach building on Chromium while maintaining design freedom? [Chromium is a Google-developed open-source browser project that provides the foundation of several major browsers, including Google Chrome itself.] When people build on top of Chrome, you’re sort of constrained in some ways to the shape that it takes and the structure that it has. Not because you couldn’t change a lot of stuff, but because the more you change, the harder it is to update Chrome. What we really wanted to do was have our cake and eat it too. We came up with this clever way of essentially running Chrome almost unmodified, projecting the contents of the web pages into a Swift app [Swift is an Apple-developed programming language for building apps for Apple devices.] So Atlas could just be a pure Swift app, a relatively small app actually. It means we had this blank canvas on which to make anything look like anything we want. We were very free from a design perspective to rethink how so many things work. The main constraint is what people think a browser is and how they think it should work. Can you walk me through the side chat feature? When you click on links inside of ChatGPT inside of Atlas, it does this transition of moving the chat into side chat and opening the web page. This side chat . . . is now connected to the site that you’re on. You can ask questions about the site. [While shopping for couches at a retail site, for example] it could be things like, “What is the price range of your couches?” or “Who else sells something like this?” The model can go and look at the internet and tell you about all that stuff and you can just ask it a very simple question. Sometimes these websites are so cluttered too. A good example is a recipe site. You might say, “Can you just tell me the recipe?” You just ask the model to do that for you. Even on the recipe, you can be like, “I actually want to make this for four people, not six. Adjust the amounts of each portion.” When you open a new tab, you dont immediately see the chat sidebar. You see a chat window right in the middle of the page. Why did you do it like that? We really went with this idea of one box. You should feel like it’s a simpler, cleaner experience. When we did this, we got a lot of feedback where people were like, “Where’s my URL bar?” We discovered that we could put one thereyou just have to hover and then it will be there. Or if you’re a keyboard user and you did Command+L, it would activate. One of the innovations with Chrome was one box where you can enter URLs or searches. But if you go to Chrome and you open a new tab, you’ll actually see there are two boxesone at the top and one in the middle. We’re like, “Well, can we have one instead of two?” It was remarkable that it didn’t have to actually be in your face for that to be true. Everybody was happy. Everybody has no problem finding it. Using agent mode, you might, for example, ask Atlas to go out and find the best deal on a plane ticket, or even go further toward a purchase. You’re definitely asking this thing to go do stuff on your behalf, but you want to feel in control too. There’s a stop button that’s very prominent. There’s a take control button. The model is tuned to understand that it should present you with results at a certain point and now you can take it to the next step, review its work, see what it’s doing. The model can open multiple web pages in the background to do its work. Also prominently, you can choose, “Do I want this to use my authentication, my cookies, or no?” [This might be your username and password at Google, and your preferences stored as cookies.] This is actually huge because aybe you just don’t trust it yet and you want to develop some trust. You want to see what it’s going to do and you want to try it out in a safe way. How do you think about ChatGPT search versus traditional search engines? Google, full stop, is amazing. It’s an amazing tool. But at the same time, it works the way it works. It works a certain way. People are used to it as the tool that it is. This AI stuff is different and it’s a different kind of interaction. What we’ve done to improve ChatGPT search capabilities inside of Atlas was not just because it was important for ChatGPT, but also because it’s kind of essential when you’re approaching it from a browser lens. Sometimes you’re typing in that box because you have high navigational intent. Like, “I want DNS for the web” or “I want to go look at a product on Amazon.” I don’t need anything else other than just get me there. Google’s outstanding at that, but ChatGPT with these capabilities does a great job at that, too. What did Sam Altman and the leadership team tell you about wanting to build a browser when they brought you in? The focus was squarely on bringing ChatGPT to more people more readily and having it be just core to that experiencerealizing that in a browser traditionally you’re like Open tab, Go to ChatGPT.com. There’s just an extra clunkiness to that. The time’s right, you want a more streamlined experience, let’s go build it. Sam was super clear about that, which actually I really appreciate. This is a company that is rapidly putting out features. We’re often in the mode of “what can we do this month?” But this is an investment, because it’s not just what we’re going to do in Januaryit was what are we going to do in January to unlock what we could do in November? We spent all that time building a foundation and now we’re on a weekly cadence of putting out new features and new things and building on this foundation. How did you approach testing and getting feedback during development? We are an opinionated bunch, that’s for sure. But you want to validate your ideas. We had the internal population of OpenAI, which is not the most representative samplethese are really heavy tech folks. The kind of features that people are asking for internally would be things that we know from past experience might not be what everybody wants. We also brought in trusted testers. We brought in friends and family. There was this cohort of students and other cohortswe got feedback from different folks to help inform and understand just how people experience this. We had this guiding principle that people can only learn so many things differently. You’ve got to start out with the familiar. What’s been the feedback since launch? I think we’ve gotten an enormous amount of positive feedback. There’s general excitement around these agentic browsers. Maybe some degree of people wanting to just kick the tires and see what it’s all about and maybe some level of skepticism too, but also enthusiasm, generally . . . The feedback really hasn’t been surprising at all. For example, we know that it’s a lot to ask for people’s habits to change on anything. Bringing ChatGPT front and center in the experience is a big change actually. For many people, early tech adopters, this feels very natural and they actually remark at how comfortable it feels that they’re [the browser and the AI] side by side. But I think for most people, they’re still early on that journey to be honest. What features are you working on for the future? Every week we put out a new version addressing feedback. We’ve already addressed some of the top feedback that we got. There’s a lot of stuff that was in the hopper that we paired back because we didn’t want to just go outwe wanted to go out with as polished of an experience as we could. Adding a model picker in the side chat was onethey already added that. Vertical tabs is another feature that we’re getting a lot of requests for. What was the biggest design challenge in Atlas? Thematically, probably one of the biggest arguments was just, “Is this in or out? How do you keep it simple?” Pretty soon if you’re not careful, you have the kitchen sink, you have the Swiss Army knife. You’re trying to satisfy everybody, but you satisfy nobody. You don’t want to overwhelm at the start. You want it to be familiar, easy. They [users] can do things that maybe aren’t the most efficient, but that’s okay. Then they can start to learn how to leverage more efficient ways. As a user, it keeps you in control. When I want to use chat, it’s there for me. But if I don’t want to be using chat on a web page, I don’t have to. I think that’s very important. You should feel empowered. How do you design a product that has a deep set of features but still looks simple? There’s this idea of progressive disclosure in design. [We] have a new product that can do all these things and maybe you’re really eager to try to tell everybody about it, but if when they open the product the first time, it’s telling you about all the things you can do, suddenly you’re like, “I don’t know what to even do.” Progressive disclosure can mean that as you use the product it might advertise progressively different features, but I also think of it as there’s a bunch of Easter eggs for you to discover. What do they do? They give you superpowers and help you feel like you can do better, but they aren’t in your face so you still get a product that’s approachable. Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of Atlas? This is the beginning of a journey. It’s going to continue evolving. I think it’s also going to continue evolving as ChatGPT itself evolves. All these things are being built in tandem by different teams at OpenAI. A lot of ChatGPT’s best features, including things like deep research and study modeall of those are in Atlas too. There’s all these modesmodel picker, tools that you can invoke. At some level, those are powerful toolsbut do you want to try them out? But over time, the model absorbs some of that. There’s a natural tension there. You give people a palette of things, but you also want to keep it simple. Ultimately, it’s just meant to be ask the model to do stuff for you.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ikea’s new CEO Juvencio Maeztu is calling to tell me about the Ingka Group’s latest earnings (that’s the parent company behind Ikea). As it turns out, there are worse fates than a company making a little less money than it did last year. In August, Ingka Group announced that its long-time CEO Jesper Brodin would be stepping down, as Maeztu took the role. An economist by training, Maeztu has worked at the company for more than 25 years, and brings a powerful international perspective to the positionhaving started as a store manager in Madrid, before eventually taking over as CEO of Ikea India. For the past seven years, hes served as deputy CEO and CFO under Brodin. We spoke around the release of Ingkas 2025 financial earnings, which Maeztu characterizes to me as mostly flat. Revenue is down 0.9% (to 41.5 billion) as the company fights inflation to keep prices low. Tariffs have yet to fully enter the equation in these figuresbut Trumps 50% tariffs on furniture announced in September were significant enough that Ikea raised prices to help offset them. On the brighter side, store traffic was up 1.3%, online sales were up 4.6%, and overall item sales grew 1.6%. In our conversationrepresenting some of Maetzus first public comments since being appointed to the positionhe detailed his biggest priorities for the company, while addressing the challenges of operating a budget-friendly furniture business in a volatile global economy. Now that youre officially CEO, what is your immediate focus for Ikea? The announcement was made mid-August, and the last three months I have been traveling around many countries to learn about the reality from the shop floor, and then talking with consumers and colleagues and coworkers. And that has cemented three things that are quite important to deliver to the care vision (that caring for people and the planet is core to Ikea’s purpose). Because we will not change the care vision. We will not change the business idea. I will keep putting a lot of focus on growth; not growth only in mature markets or more European-based growth, but many markets, U.S. included, and India and China. Growth is a way to be more present in homes. So growth is not connected with profit to the shareholder, its connected with affordability for the many people. You could say we can never achieve our vision if we don’t grow. So we have to substantially grow. The second thing is to double down . . . on the need for cost transformation . . . and the need to keep costs low. Because the best frame of low price is a low cost. You cannot be a low-price company if you are not a low-cost company. And I will double down on the resilience of the company. And then the third one is simplicity. So normally, big companies like us start to be bureaucratic, and from the leadership perspective, we have to learn how to lead the company in a more agile way, faster decision making, less layers, and at the same time, more agility in the decision making. We have a good brand, we have a good omni channel capabilities today. We have amazing cultural values with high coworker engagement, super high right now. And then at the same time, we have a strong balance sheet. So you could say we have a lot of assets that allow us to really double down in the growth, in the cost transformation, and the simplicity. Looking over your earnings, where is that revenue dip coming from? We are selling more quantities at a lower price. If I take one step back, we measure performance in four dimensions. So one of the four is a financial dimension, and I will comment on that. But the other three are the climate dimension (we call it better planet for all), the social dimension (better life for people), and the consumer dimension (better homes for the customer). Today, as we release the financial result. Its almost flat revenue0.9% lower, almost flat, which is 41.5 billion (approximately $47.9 billion). However, whats happening is exactly what we wanted to happen, because our physical visitation is growing, our online visitation is growing, and our [sold] quantities are growing. So basically, [revenue is down] because we have kept low prices. But then we are very happy [about] the underlying business. For us, growth is not a mechanism to pay more dividends to the shareholder. Because we are owned by a foundation. So 85% of the profit remains in the company, and 15% is the dividend to support the charitable activities. . . . We normally say profit gives us resources to keep investing in the future and low price. How are general inflation and other factors affecting your supply chain? The overall supply chain is quite stabilized now. We came from many disruptions in the last year, and that disruption is still happening at the end of this fiscal year, but now it’s quite stable. So we are not increasing prices in general. We constantly hear that physical retail is challenged, or on the brink of collapse. But I noticed Ingka centersyour malls, basicallyhad an influx of new foot traffic this year. I’m curious about your take on large-scale retail right now. People still have the need to socialize. People still have the need to go out. That’s why it’s important that we call it a meeting placenot necessarily a shopping centerand when you visit our meeting place its a way to connect with the communities . . . to create traffic with engagement and food and events. So in a world that is omnichannel and online, people still have the need to socialize. So that’s why we keep seeing more visitors in the shopping center and more visitors in the Ikea physical store. Then what is really important is that the visitor still finds a good value for money. That’s why we dont have too much in discount activity on Black Friday. We are more trying to have everyday low prices. And that’s why we keep investing in that. So somehow customers recognize that, you offer them a fun day out in the meeting place, shopping center, the Ikea store, and then you keep prices low. You know, cost of living is increasing, not only in U.S., but anywhere in the world. The cost of housing is increasing all over the world, so [our] care visionbetter life at home by providing more affordable home furnishingsits not only timeless. Its even more relevant today than some years ago. Now that theyve stabilized a bit, how do you see the impact of tariffs affecting Ikea? I think the entry point is not only tariffs. The entry point is that companies who operate globally, like us, are living in a more complex world, in a more volatile world. Sometimes because of tariffs, sometimes because of currencies, sometimes because of the limitation in global trade or geopolitics. But we need to learn as a company, how can we build the resilience to keep navigating the circumstances? And that’s why we distinguish what is the short term and the long term. And for us, the long term is to build the resilience in the company, and the low cost in the company, that can keep us in the low price agenda. And then, of course, we always try to mitigate the impactnot necessarily when we have to increase prices because of tariffsnormally . . . we try to absorb the impact. But I would say it&8217;s not only tariffs in U.S. There are many reasons why global trade is a bit volatile, but in the long term, we will keep growing. In Europe, in the U.S., in China and India, all over the world. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Category:
E-Commerce
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