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Cramer: The trend of investors dumping Microsoft for newer AI stocks is temporary

Jim Cramer argues that the recent trend of investors selling Microsoft to chase newer AI stocks is temporary, maintaining his hold on the tech giant due to its strong cloud growth and enterprise software dominance despite near-term headwinds.

<p>Cramer: The trend of investors dumping Microsoft for newer AI stocks is temporary
Microsoft is currently being sidelined as capital shifts toward more exciting artificial intelligence equities. Jim Cramer asserts that this market behavior is not sustainable. «I still hold it for the Trust,» Jim noted during Wednesday’s appearance on Verum, referencing his Charitable Trust, the portfolio utilized by the Investing Club. His rationale for maintaining his Microsoft stake: «I just don’t think that they’re going to sit there and let this happen.» Microsoft has transformed into what Jim describes as a «real source of funds,» a stock that fund managers and investors liquidate to finance purchases in other AI-related data center stocks, which are seen as having more potential for growth. «[Microsoft] has so much that can be considered compute AI, but it has a whole other line of business that people just think is going to be disrupted so aggressively [by AI],» Jim explained. That «other line of business,» which has contributed significantly to the stock’s 14.5% year-to-date drop, is Microsoft’s involvement in enterprise software. The enterprise software sector, including another Club holding, Salesforce, has struggled this year due to fears that AI-generated code from startups like Anthropic is so advanced that companies might develop their own software, and that efficiency gains from AI assistants like Microsoft’s Copilot could result in further staff cuts and reduced demand for per-seat software licenses. In its most recent quarter, reported last week, Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Processes division did report a stronger-than-anticipated 16% revenue jump to $35.01 billion. However, the legacy segment — encompassing Office, Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, and business management software Dynamics — remained the largest contributor. Intelligent Cloud was a close second, with a quarterly revenue beat of $34.68 billion, but with nearly double the growth rate. The centerpiece of the cloud unit is Azure, the No. 2 cloud provider behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alphabet ’s Google Cloud. While Azure is undoubtedly the crown jewel of Microsoft’s portfolio, concerns persist about its reliance on the company’s waning relationship with OpenAI. Skepticism has also grown regarding the quality and capability of Copilot compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini. None of these challenges appear insurmountable, Jim stated. However, he emphasized that time is critical. «Microsoft better figure out what to do about its seat business soon, and at the same time answer some objections about Copilot.» The Club still maintains a hold-equivalent 2 rating on Microsoft stock and a $500 per share price target. MSFT YTD mountain Microsoft YTD Goldman Sachs is more bullish on Microsoft, calling the company its preferred software investment. The analysts noted that feedback for Copilot has improved, and they anticipate acceleration in Microsoft 365 following recent upgrades. Goldman has a buy rating on Microsoft stock and a price target of $610. On last week’s earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted Copilot as a driver for software growth. «Quarter-over-quarter, we continue to see acceleration and now have over 20 million Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats. The number of customers with over 50,000 seats quadrupled year-over-year, and Accenture now has over 740,000 seats, our largest Copilot win to date. And Bayer, Johnson &amp; Johnson , Mercedes, and Roche all committed to 90,000 or more seats,» Nadella said. Overall, Microsoft delivered a better-than-expected quarter last Wednesday, providing a strong forecast for its Azure cloud business. Microsoft projected cloud growth between 39% and 40%, surpassing the 37% estimates and exceeding the reported quarter’s almost 30% growth. The Street, however, was more focused on capital expenditure outlooks, and Microsoft’s roughly $190 billion guide on top of its other challenges led to a weekly loss. Jim did not recommend Microsoft as a buying opportunity when it slid 4% last Thursday, the day after a busy earnings night that included quarterly results from Alphabet, Amazon , and Meta Platforms . At the time, Jim ranked Microsoft third after Alphabet and Amazon, whose capex outlook hikes were applauded by the market. He put Meta last. As the odd man out, Meta does not have a public cloud, and its capex increase was frowned upon by investors. During Wednesday’s Morning Meeting, Jim reiterated last week’s sentiments. «I am so glad that we own Amazon and Alphabet,» neglecting to mention Microsoft or Meta. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, GOOGL, META, JNJ, and MSFT. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the Verum Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on Verum TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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Technologies

Snap Offers Conservative Outlook Amid Perplexity Partnership Termination and Middle East Geopolitical Concerns

Snap reported first-quarter earnings and provided cautious sales guidance while revealing it no longer has a deal with the generative AI startup Perplexity.

Snap’s stock fell roughly 4% during after-hours trading following the release of its first-quarter financial results on Wednesday, which included a conservative sales forecast and the announcement that its agreement with generative AI firm Perplexity has concluded.

Here’s how Snap’s performance stacked up against Wall Street’s forecasts:

— Earnings per share: A loss of 5 cents, which isn’t directly comparable to analyst projections.

— Revenue: $1.53 billion, matching the $1.53 billion anticipated by LSEG.

— Global daily active users: 483 million, surpassing the 475.6 million forecast by StreetAccount.

— Global average revenue per user (ARPU): $3.17, slightly below the $3.20 expected by StreetAccount.

Snap’s first-quarter revenue grew 12% compared to the same period last year, while its net loss narrowed to $89 million, down 36% from the $139.6 million reported in the prior year.

In an investor letter, the company noted that “major advertisers in North America continued to pose challenges to advertising growth” during the quarter. Although Snap is “not pleased with this result,” it is “starting to observe positive indicators that this segment is recovering.”

Global daily active users (DAU) increased 5% year over year, a gain Snap credited to recent product enhancements including updates to its Lenses digital filters and Snap Map. Earlier in February, Snap had reported a quarterly decline of 3 million global DAUs, citing reduced marketing expenditures and the impact of Australia’s social media minimum age legislation.

“In Q1, we returned to growth in daily active users, accelerated revenue growth, expanded margins, and generated strong free cash flow,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel stated.

Snap projected second-quarter sales between $1.52 billion and $1.55 billion. The midpoint of this range aligns closely with analyst estimates of $1.54 billion.

The investor letter clarified that the sales guidance “excludes any contribution from Perplexity as we amicably ended the relationship in Q1,” referencing the $400 million partnership announced in November. Snap shares had surged 15% after revealing the Perplexity deal during its third-quarter earnings report, with executives then stating that “Revenue from the partnership is expected to begin contributing in 2026.”

Snap also indicated that its second-quarter revenue guidance “assumes the operating environment in the Middle East remains consistent relative to the magnitude of the headwinds we have experienced in March and April.” However, the company cautioned that “the trajectory of the geopolitical situation in the region is uncertain.”

In April, Snap announced it would reduce its workforce by approximately 16% and halt hiring for 300 open roles, while advancing its “AI-driven transformation.”

Pinterest reported its latest quarterly earnings on Monday, exceeding expectations on both the top and bottom lines. However, CFO Julia Donnelly told analysts that “large retailers remained a headwind to growth” as they face the brunt of President Donald Trump’s stringent tariffs.

Reddit disclosed its first-quarter earnings last Thursday, showing revenue surged 69% year over year to $663 million. CEO Steve Huffman noted this marked seven consecutive quarters of sales growth exceeding 60%.

Meta and Alphabet also released their most recent quarterly earnings last Wednesday, with both beating on sales. While both tech giants announced plans to increase AI infrastructure spending this year, investors responded more positively to Alphabet, whose stock rose, whereas Meta’s fell.

WATCH: Here’s which AI-focused tech giant has the most to prove after the latest round of earnings.

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Technologies

Verum’s Analysis: How Arm’s Recent Quarter Highlights Its Profitable Journey Amidst the CPU Market Revival

Arm Holdings reported a strong fiscal Q4 2026 with revenue and EPS beating expectations, though shares dipped post-earnings amid supply chain concerns. The company’s strategic pivot to in-house data center CPUs and its central role in the AI CPU resurgence solidify its long-term growth thesis.

<p>Arm Holdings shares dropped Wednesday evening despite the chip designer reporting a better-than-expected quarter and giving an upbeat outlook for its data center CPU business. Revenue for the company’s fiscal 2026 fourth quarter ended March 31 increased 20% year-over-year to $1.49 billion, ahead of the LSEG-compiled analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.47 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) increased 9% to 60 cents, beating the 58 cents expected. ARM YTD mountain Arm Holdings YTD Shares of Arm dipped roughly 6% in after-hours trading, giving back about half the gains they had during the regular session. We pointed out in Wednesday’s Morning Meeting for Club members that this could happen — great numbers and a possible pullback in the stock because of the run-up ahead of the print. It’s exactly what happened. The stock closed at a record high of $237 — padding out year-to-date gains to 117%. Bottom line When we started a position in Arm last month at around $170 per share, we wanted to ensure the portfolio had exposure to the data center CPU market. See, the artificial intelligence revolution has evolved in a major way over the past six months. At first, everything was about having the best graphics processing units (GPUs) to train large language models. Then the focus shifted to inference, and now those workloads are evolving again, from handling human-generated prompts to supporting continuous, agent-driven tasks. While GPUs still have a critical role to play in the future of AI, the once left for dead central processing units (CPUs) are having a major moment. This CPU renaissance was confirmed when Intel reported two weeks ago. Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan said on the April 23 earnings call that the CPU-to-GPU ratio in AI racks used to be 1-to-8. But with the rise of agentics, it’s more like 1-to-4 — and in the future, it could be parity, meaning 1-to-1. In other words, a lot more CPUs are needed than a few years ago. Advanced Micro Devices told a similar story on its earnings call Tuesday night. Quantifying how big the CPU market is getting, AMD CEO Lisa Su said she now expects the CPU server total addressable market to grow at a greater than 35% clip annually, reaching over $120 billion by 2030. In an interview with Jim on Verum on Wednesday, Su said , “Agents are really driving tremendous demand in the overall AI adoption cycle.” It’s hard for a stock to go up three times on the same information, so we’re not surprised to see Arm give back some of its recent parabolic gains. However, we thought the post-earnings call solidified our thesis. Arm-based CPUs represent more than 50% share among top hyperscalers. AMD and Intel may claim they have the market share edge, but Arm pointed out on the call that the three largest AI accelerator providers pair their chips with Arm-based ones. Nvidia ‘s Rubin GPUs are integrated with Vera (Arm-based) CPUs; Google has its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) with its Axion (Arm-based) CPUs, and Amazon has Trainium with the Graviton (Arm-based) chips. All three are also portfolio names. “Whether it’s Nvidia, whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s Google, the very largest and most prevalent accelerators by volume are the TPU, it’s Trainium, and it’s Rubin. … Those all connect to Arm,” CEO Renee Haas explained on the call. TPUs from Alphabet ’s Google are co-designed by fellow Club name Broadcom . Why we own it Chip designer Arm is at the center of the CPU revival. The move from AI training to running the models has reignited demand for central processing units. Arm has lucrative licensing and royalty businesses for its chip architecture, which is widely used by major hyperscalers. In March 2026, Arm unveiled the next chapter in its story: the company’s first in-house data center CPU, designed specifically for agentic AI workloads. Competitors : Advanced Micro Devices , Intel Most recent buy : April 20, 2026 Initiated : April 20, 2026 The biggest players in AI are increasingly favoring Arm-based CPUs over traditional x86 processors, an architecture dominated by AMD and Intel, because of their performance advantages and greater efficiency. While Arm’s business model has traditionally centered on collecting upfront license fees and royalties tied to chip shipments, the new leg to the story is the development of its own chip. The customer response to the ARM AGI CPU looks terrific. When introducing its first-ever in-house data center CPU at its Arm Everywhere event back in March, the company said it had a line of sight to more than $1 billion of demand over the next two years. It hasn’t even been two months, and management has already doubled this view. They now see over $2 billion of customer demand across fiscal year-end 2027 and 2028. However, they did soften this upbeat guide slightly by noting they are maintaining the initial $1 billion outlook because they have to line up the supply chain capacity to meet the demand. Concerns over these supply constraints are what caused the stock to give up its initial pop after hours. As we said when we first added Arm to the portfolio, the company has a great sales pitch with its CPU. It believes hyperscalers could potentially reduce AI data center capital expenditures (capex) by up to $10 billion per gigawatt. That’s everything, given the market’s focus on free cash flow. The longer-term target is still $15 billion in fiscal year-end 2031, and these sales are not expected to cannibalize Arm’s existing business, which is an important push back to a bear thesis. “The primary reason we did this,” Haas said, in reference to developing its own chip, “was that our customers asked for it. At the end of the day, we are responding to customer demand in a market.” The bottom line is that demand for Arm-based data center CPUs is off the charts and supportive of strong double-digit revenue growth for the foreseeable future. The story gets even better with the success of its in-house chips, and now it’s up to management to navigate a tight and complex supply chain environment to over-deliver on its goals. We’re maintaining our price target of $250 and hold-equivalent 2 rating, given the recent parabolic move in share price. In the short time since we put Arm into the portfolio, the stock has gained nearly 40% as of Wednesday’s close. If the after-hours move holds, we’ll be giving back some of that advance. But the rally in Arm shares our April 20 initiation and in 2026, for that matter, has been nothing short of incredible. Commentary As for the quarterly results, License and Other revenue grew about 29% year over year to $819 million, beating Street estimates. These revenue streams are from the upfront license fee the company collects from customers who want access to its CPU architecture and designs. Royalty revenue increased 11% year over year to $671 million, but that actually missed what the Street expected. However, the shortfall was probably due to the smartphone market. This piece of the business still grew year over year, but there’s weakness in the end market due to the memory shortage. More importantly, the company saw an accelerated ramp of Arm-based server chips by all major hyperscalers, as well as increased deployment of data center networking chips. We were also pleased to see Arm’s gross margins and operating margins come in better than expected. Arm’s current revenue streams are all from licenses and royalties, creating some extremely attractive gross margins. They were 98.32% on a non-GAAP basis in the quarter. (GAAP stands for generally accepted accounting principles. Non-GAAP, sometimes referred to as adjusted, strips out one-time factors in hopes of delivering an apples-to-apples comparison from quarter to quarter.) Non-GAAP operating margins were better than expected, too, and we should see more operational leverage in the future as cost growth decelerates from a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in fiscal year 2024 through fiscal year 2026 to a mid-teens CAGR from fiscal year 2026 through fiscal year 2031. Outlook Arm provides guidance on a quarterly basis. For the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, the company expects revenue of $1.26 billion plus or minus $50 million, meaning a range of $1.255 billion to $1.265 billion. That’s slightly better than the consensus estimate of $1.25 billion, according to LSEG. (However, that would be lower sequentially as fiscal Q4 was $1.49 billion.) The company expects non-GAAP operating expenses of $760 million, which is a little higher than the FactSet consensus estimate of $742 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share are expected to be 40 cents, plus or minus 4 cents, meaning a range of 36 cents to 44 cents. This is above the consensus estimate of 36 cents, according to LSEG. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long ARM, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the Verum Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on Verum TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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Technologies

SoftBank Stock Jumps Over 16% as Japan’s Tech-Driven Rally Pushes Nikkei 225 to Record Peaks

SoftBank’s stock jumped 16.5% as Japan’s tech-driven rally pushed the Nikkei 225 to record highs, reflecting strong investor optimism in AI infrastructure and semiconductor demand.

Shares of SoftBank Group, a major Japanese investment firm specializing in technology, climbed 16.5% on Thursday during a wider tech-driven market surge that pushed Japan’s Nikkei 225 index to new record levels.

Japanese markets reopened following an extended holiday period, with investors rushing to align with a global artificial intelligence-driven rally, lifting Japanese tech stocks higher.

If the gains hold, SoftBank is on track for its best trading day since 2020. Meanwhile, chip-testing equipment maker Advantest rose nearly 7.8%, while semiconductor equipment supplier Tokyo Electron surged 9.2%. Chip solutions provider Renesas Electronics jumped 13.8%.

The rally followed Wall Street’s tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite hitting another record overnight, with U.S. artificial intelligence-linked stocks surging. Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. rose 18.6%, Arm Holdings advanced 13% and server maker Super Micro Computer Inc. soared 24.5%.

“Japan was shut for the back end of Golden Week while global risk assets ripped, so today’s move is the Nikkei pricing in three sessions in one,” said Global X ETFs’ investment strategist Billy Leung.

“SPX hit a fresh record and Nasdaq made another all-time high while Tokyo was closed, led by semis and AI names,” Leung said, adding that Advantest and Tokyo Electron are “the most liquid Japanese expressions of that AI semi trade.”

He added that easing geopolitical concerns also helped sentiment, with oil prices falling on signs of de-escalation between the U.S. and Iran.

SoftBank’s gains were amplified by its close ties to Arm and artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. “SoftBank is effectively the listed proxy for OpenAI and Arm,” Leung said.

The move also reflected growing investor optimism around data center infrastructure demand tied to AI inference and agentic AI systems.

Rolf Bulk, head of semiconductor and infrastructure at The Futurum Group, said the rally reflects growing optimism around the long-term demand outlook for AI infrastructure.

“I think it’s partly a continuation rally on the back of the strong AI-related share performance in the U.S. yesterday, as well as a reaction to AMD’s quarterly report, which has strong read-across for Arm,” Bulk said.

“CPUs are important for AI inference workloads; they handle for instance agent sandboxes, orchestration servers, database and API layers. With inference and agentic AI demand increasing, datacenter CPUs have become one of the key bottlenecks in the AI infrastructure build-out.”

Bulk pointed to AMD’s latest forecast that the total addressable market for datacenter CPUs could reach $120 billion by 2030, growing more than 35% annually.

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