Category

Economy

Category

Procter & Gamble will cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its non-manufacturing workforce, as part of a two-year restructuring program.

The layoffs by the consumer goods giant come as President Donald Trump’s tariffs have led a range of companies to hike prices to offset higher costs. The trade tensions have raised concerns about the broader health of the U.S. economy and job market.

P&G CFO Andre Schulten announced the job cuts during a presentation at the Deutsche Bank Consumer Conference on Thursday morning. The company employs 108,000 people worldwide, as of June 30, according to regulatory filings.

P&G faces slowing growth in the U.S., the company’s largest market. In its fiscal third quarter, North American organic sales rose just 1%.

Trump’s tariffs have presented another challenge for P&G, which has said that it plans to raise prices in the next fiscal year, which starts in July. The company expects a 3 cent to 4 cent per share drag on its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings from levies, based on current rates, Schulten said. Looking ahead to fiscal 2026, P&G is projecting a headwind from tariffs of $600 million before taxes.

P&G, which owns Pampers, Tide and Swiffer, is planning a broader effort to reevaluate its portfolio, restructure its supply chain and slim down its corporate organization. Schulten said investors can expect more details, like specific brand and market exits, on the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call in July.

P&G is projecting that it will incur non-core costs of $1 billion to $1.6 billion before taxes due to the reorganization.

“This restructuring program is an important step toward ensuring our ability to deliver our long-term algorithm over the coming two to three years,” Schulten said. “It does not, however, remove the near-term challenges that we currently face.”

P&G follows other major U.S. employers, including Microsoft and Starbucks, in carrying out significant layoffs this year. As Trump’s tariffs take hold, investors are watching Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report for May for signs of whether the job market has started to slow. While the government reading for April was better than expected, a separate reading this week from ADP showed private sector hiring was weak in May.

Shares of P&G fell more than 1% in morning trading on the news. The stock has fallen 2% so far this year, outstripped by the S&P 500′s gains of more than 1%. P&G has a market cap of $407 billion.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Use of low-cost e-commerce giants Temu and Shein has slowed significantly in the key U.S. market amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports and the closure of the de minimis loophole, new data shows.

Temu’s U.S. daily active users (DAUs) dropped 52% in May versus March, before Trump’s tariffs were announced, while those at rival Shein were down 25%, according to data shared with CNBC by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

DAUs is a measure of the number of people who visit or interact with a platform every 24 hours. Monthly active users (MAUs), a measure of user engagement over a 30-day period, was also down at Temu (30%) and Shein (12%) in May versus March.

The declines were also reflected in both platforms’ Apple App Store rankings. Temu averaged a rank of 132 in May 2025, down from an average top 3 ranking a year ago, while Shein averaged a rank of 60 last month versus a top 10 ranking the year prior, the data showed.

Neither Temu nor Shein immediately responded to CNBC’s request for comment.

The user drop off comes as both Temu and Shein have pulled back on U.S. advertising spend over recent months since the Trump administration’s tariff announcements.

Trump in April announced sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports, including the end of the “de minimis” tariff exemption on May 2, which allowed companies to ship low-cost goods worth less than $800 to the U.S. tariff-free.

In May, Temu’s U.S. ad spend fell 95% year-on-year while Shein’s was down 70%.

“Temu and Shein’s decline in US ad spend was also noticeable in April, as spend decreased by 40% and 65% YoY, respectively,” Seema Shah, vice president of research and insights at Sensor Tower, said in emailed comments to CNBC.

Both Temu and Shein also altered their logistics models in the wake of tariffs, shifting away from a drop shipping model, which allowed them to send items directly from Chinese suppliers to U.S. consumers, and instead, particularly in Temu’s case, building up a network of U.S. warehouses.

Rui Ma, founder and analyst at Tech Buzz China, said such moves were also likely to have impacted the companies’ ad spend strategy and customer acquisition patterns.

“All these additional costs and regulatory hurdles are clearly hurting Chinese platforms’ U.S. growth prospects,” she wrote in emailed comments.

Tech Buzz China research from March showed that a 50% tariff would be the point at which Temu would lose most of its price advantages and find it difficult to operate. The tariff on former de minimis imports currently stands at 54%, having been lowered from 120% amid a 90-day tariff truce between the U.S. and China.

Last week, Temu’s parent company PDD Holdings reported first-quarter earnings below estimates and pointed to tariffs as a significant pressure on sellers.

Temu’s popularity has nevertheless picked up outside the U.S., with non-U.S. users rising to account for 90% of the platform’s 405 million global MAUs in the second quarter, according to HSBC.

Writing in a note last week, HSBC analysts said that was “supported by growth in Europe, Latin America, and South America.” They added that the swiftest of that growth occurred in “less affluent markets.”

“Many (Chinese platforms) are now actively redirecting their efforts toward other markets such as Europe,” Ma said.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it now has 3 million paying business users, up from the 2 million it reported in February.

The San Francisco-based startup rocketed into the mainstream in late 2022 with its consumer-facing artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, and began launching workplace-specific versions of the product the following year.

The 3 million users include ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Edu customers, OpenAI said.

“There’s this really tight interconnect between the growth of ChatGPT as a consumer tool and its adoption in the enterprise and in businesses,” OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC in an interview. The company supported 400 million weekly active users as of February.

OpenAI expects revenue of $12.7 billion this year, a source confirmed to CNBC. In September of last year, the company expected to see an annual loss of $5 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be named because the financials are confidential.

Lightcap said OpenAI is seeing its business tools adopted across industries, including highly regulated sectors like financial services and health care. Companies including Lowe’s, Morgan Stanley and Uber are users, OpenAI said.

The company also announced new updates to its business offerings on Wednesday.

ChatGPT Team and ChatGPT Enterprise users can now access “connectors,” which will allow workers to pull data from third-party tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Box and OneDrive without leaving ChatGPT. Additional deep research connectors are available in beta.

OpenAI launched another capability called “record mode” in ChatGPT, which allows users to record and transcribe their meetings. It’s initially available with audio only.

Record mode can assist with follow up after a meeting and integrates with internal information like documents and files, the company said. Users can also turn their recordings into documents through the company’s Canvas tool.

Lightcap said enterprise customers have been asking for updates like these, and that they will help make OpenAI’s workplace offerings more useful.

“It’s got to be able to do tasks for you, and to do that, it’s got to really have knowledge of everything going on around you and your work,” Lightcap said. “It can’t be the intern locked in a closet. It’s got to be able to see what you see.”

OpenAI said it has been signing up nine enterprises a week, and Lightcap said the company will try to sustain that pace over time.

“People are starting to really figure out that this is a part of the modern tool stack in the knowledge economy that we live in,” he said.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

A nationwide coordinated crackdown on retail crime — what authorities are calling the first of its kind — led to hundreds of arrests in 28 states last week.

The blitz, led by Illinois’ Cook County regional organized crime task force, involved more than 100 jurisdictions and over 30 retailers including Home Depot, Macy’s, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walgreens, Kroger and Meijer.

“When you give specific focus to a crime, it reverberates,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told CNBC. “When they see it is being prosecuted and taken seriously, it deters conduct. They don’t want to get caught.”

Organized retail crime — a type of shoplifting where groups of thieves work together in targeted operations to turn stolen goods into cash — has grown in scale and scope in recent years. CNBC previously reported on the extensive law enforcement efforts to take down retail crime organizations.

While aggregate numbers for retail theft are difficult to quantify, retailers reported 93% more shoplifting incidents on average in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a survey conducted by the National Retail Federation. Those surveyed also reported a 90% increase in the associated dollar losses over that same time period.

Some critics point to a lack of enforcement and felony thresholds for allowing criminals to continue committing theft. It’s something Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has been focused on since taking office in December.

On her first day in office, O’Neill Burke said prosecutors would pursue felony retail theft charges in accordance with state law, when the value of the goods exceeds $300 or when the suspect already has a felony shoplifting conviction.

Before her taking office, retail theft felonies were charged only if the value of the stolen goods was $1,000 or more or if the suspect had 10 or more prior convictions.

Since Dec. 1, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has filed charges in 1,450 felony retail theft cases, the office said.

The goals of the coordinated operation, O’Neill Burke told CNBC, is “to have one day where we focus and concentrate on [retail theft] and we share intelligence about it — about what we learned about the network, so that gives us more tools on how to take this network down.”

It was the coordination between law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys that got a number of the involved retailers to participate in the blitz.

“Collaboration is key to making a meaningful impact,” Ulta Beauty Senior Vice President of Loss Prevention Dan Petrousek told CNBC. “That’s why we were proud to participate in the National ORC Blitz alongside dedicated law enforcement and prosecutorial partners.”

Ulta Beauty had teams participating across nine states in last week’s operation, providing law enforcement with information on incidents of retail crime.

“Organized retail crime remains one of the most significant challenges in our industry,” said Marty Maloney, Walgreens director of media relations. “In this most recent operation we worked closely with law enforcement partners across nearly 20 cities and at over 40 locations to help curb this trend.”

A representative for Home Depot told CNBC that while overall theft is down, investigated incidents of organized retail crime are still up double digits year over year.

Now that the operation has concluded, the group is pulling together each jurisdictions’ observations and sharing data to continue to help crack down on retail theft.

Other participating retailers reached for comment by CNBC, including Macy’s, T.J. Maxx and Target, said they’re committed to partnering with law enforcement and pushing for stronger laws to combat retail crime.

California Highway Patrol arrests retail crime suspect in Long Beach, CA.Courtesy: California Highway Patrol.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Peloton on Tuesday launched its own marketplace for reselling used equipment and gear as the company looks to capitalize on the many bikes and treadmills collecting dust in people’s homes.

The platform, dubbed Repowered, will allow members to post listings for their used Peloton equipment and gear and set a price with help from a generative AI tool, the company said.

Sellers have the final say on how much to list the item for, but the AI tool will suggest a price based on information about the product, such as its age, Peloton said.

It said sellers will get 70% of the sales price, while the rest will be shared between Peloton and its platform provider, Archive. Sellers will get a discount toward new equipment, while buyers will see the activation fee for a used product drop from $95 to $45, the company said.

Buyers will be able to see the equipment’s history on the listing and have the option to get the item delivered for an extra fee, Peloton said.

The resale market for used bikes and treadmills is booming. The company said it wants to streamline the sale process for members and offer a safe and comfortable way for prospective customers to buy equipment. It’s also an opportunity for Peloton to reach a wider array of new users as it plots a pathway back to growth.

Last summer, Peloton said it had started to see a meaningful increase in the number of new members who bought used Bikes or Treads from peer-to-peer markets such as Facebook Marketplace. At the time, it said paid connected fitness subscribers who bought hardware on the secondary market had grown 16% year over year, and it believed those subscribers exhibited a lower net churn rate — or membership cancellation — than rental subscribers.

Peloton has plenty of enthusiastic fans who use the company’s equipment every day, but some people have likened it to glorified clothes racks because so many people stop using them. While those owners paid for their exercise machines when they bought them, many have canceled their monthly subscription, which is how Peloton makes the bulk of its money, according to the company’s financial records.

Peloton is already reaping the subscription revenue from people who bought hardware on the secondary market, but now it will get a cut of that market with little upfront cost.

Repowered is a direct challenger to not just Facebook Marketplace but also the burgeoning startup Trade My Stuff, formerly known as Trade My Spin, which sells used Peloton equipment.

Trade My Stuff founder Ari Kimmelfeld told CNBC he previously met with Peloton to discuss ways to collaborate.

But Peloton said Repowered isn’t connected with Trade My Stuff.

Repowered is launching first in beta in New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C., with plans to go nationwide in the coming months, Peloton said. The platform will launch first to sellers, and once there’s enough inventory available, it’ll go live to buyers, the company said.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Shares of Dollar General jumped nearly 16% on Tuesday after the discounter raised its outlook, saying it drew more middle- and higher-income shoppers amid fears that higher tariffs would hurt consumer spending.

The Tennessee-based retailer beat quarterly expectations for revenue and earnings. The company said it now anticipates net sales will grow about 3.7% to 4.7%, compared to its previous expectation of about 3.4% to 4.4%. It expects diluted earnings per share to range from $5.20 to $5.80, compared to its prior outlook of approximately $5.10 to $5.80. Dollar General anticipates same-store sales will increase 1.5% to 2.5%, higher than its previous guidance of about 1.2% to 2.2%.

Here’s how the retailer did for the fiscal first quarter compared with Wall Street’s estimates, according to a survey of analysts by LSEG:

In the three-month period that ended May 2, Dollar General reported net income of $391.93 million, or $1.78 per share, compared with $363.32 million, or $1.65, in the year-ago quarter.

As of Tuesday’s close, shares of Dollar General have risen about 48% so far this year. That far exceeds the roughly 1% gains of the S&P 500 during the same period. Shares of the retailer closed at $112.57 on Tuesday, bringing Dollar General’s market value to $24.76 billion.

Dollar General’s first-quarter results — and its stock performance — stand out in a retail industry that is already taking a hit from President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Companies including Best Buy, Macy’s and Abercrombie & Fitch have cut their profit outlooks due to tariffs.

On an earnings call Tuesday, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said the company has worked to reduce its exposure to China — and limit price hikes for shoppers. He said the retailer has worked with vendors to cut costs, moved manufacturing to other countries and made changes to its products or swapped them out for other merchandise.

He said direct imports make up about a mid- to high single-digit percentage of its overall purchases and indirect imports are about double that.

“While the tariff landscape remains dynamic and uncertain, we expect tariffs to result in some price increases as a last resort, though, we intend to work to minimize them as much as possible,” he said.

CFO Kelly Dilts said on the company’s earnings call that full-year guidance assumes that Dollar General will be able to offset “a significant portion of the anticipated tariff impact on our gross margin, but also allows for some incremental pressure on consumer spending.”

Customer traffic dipped by 0.3% in the first quarter compared to the year-ago period, but shoppers spent more when they visited. The average transaction amount rose 2.7%, as sales in the food, seasonal, home and apparel categories all grew.

Vasos added tariffs have also increased U.S. consumers’ desire to find deep discounts. Vasos said the company’s first-quarter results reflect Dollar General’s gains from “customers across multiple income bands seeking value.”

He said store traffic and the company’s market research indicates that more middle- and higher-income customers have come to its stores more frequently and spent more when they visited.

“We are pleased to see this growth with a wide range of customers and are excited about our ongoing opportunity to grow [market] share with them,” he said.

Those gains have helped as Dollar General’s core customer “remains financially constrained,” Vasos said. According to a survey by the company, he said 25% of customers reported having less income than they did a year ago and almost 60% of core customers said “they felt the need to sacrifice on necessities in the coming year.”

Dollar General’s sales largely come from U.S. consumers who are on a tight budget. About 60% of the retailer’s sales come from households with an annual income of less than $30,000 per year, Vasos said last fall at a Goldman Sachs’ retail conference.

In addition to wooing value-conscious shoppers, Dollar General has tried to tackle company-specific problems that drew government scrutiny and tested customer loyalty. The discounter, which has more than 20,000 stores across the country, has paid steep fines to the Labor Department for workplace safety violations due to blocked fire exits and dangerous levels of clutter.

Vasos highlighted some of the ways that Dollar General has tried to improve the customer experience. Among them, it’s worked to reduce employee turnover, and it took about 1,000 individual items off its shelves so it can keep top-selling items in stock, he said.

Dollar General has launched its own home delivery service, which is now available at more than 3,000 stores. Its deliveries through DoorDash have grown, too, with sales up more than 50% year over year in the quarter.

Dollar General has also bulked up its merchandise categories outside of the food and snack aisles, adding more discretionary items like seasonal decor and home items.

Vasos said sales in those categories have also gotten a boost from middle- and higher-income customers shopping its stores.

Its newer store chain, Popshelf, sells mostly discretionary items and caters to consumers with higher household incomes than Dollar General’s typical shoppers. Vasos did not share a specific metric for the chain, but said Popshelf’s same-store sales delivered strong growth in the quarter. The company recently changed the store layout to emphasize toys, beauty and party candy.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Byron Allen is putting his broadcast TV stations up for sale.

Allen Media Group said on Monday it has retained investment bank Moelis & Co. to sell its group of 28 owned and operated broadcast TV stations, which are affiliated with ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox in 21 markets across the U.S.

In a news release, Allen said the company has invested more than $1 billion into acquiring the stations over the past six years and after receiving “numerous inquiries and written offers” for most of the stations, has decided to explore a sale.

The Allen Media Group stations join others that have recently hit the sale block. Last year, CNBC reported that Sinclair was exploring the sale of more than 30% of its stations. Apollo Global Management is also reportedly exploring a sale of its Cox Media Group portfolio of TV and radio stations.

Allen Media Group said a sale of the stations would significantly reduce its debt load. Earlier this year, the company refinanced a $100 million debt facility. While S&P Global Ratings said it expected the company to maintain sufficient liquidity over the next 12 months, it noted that Allen Media Group still maintained a junk rating and faced future debt risks.

Last year, CNBC reported that Allen Media Group had been consistently late in making payments to its network owners, in some cases as much as 90 days past due, with the payments totaling tens of millions of dollars throughout the year. The reason for the lateness had been unclear, and representatives for Allen Media Group declined to address the details of CNBC’s reporting.

The stations have also reportedly undergone layoffs.

Allen, a former comedian, founded Entertainment Studios, now known as Allen Media Group, in the early 1990s. He later formed Allen Media Group Broadcasting in 2019 and has built up his profile and business ever since with a string of smaller deals.

He has also become known for expressing interest in buying various media assets to bulk up his media empire. In recent years, he has made a $30 billion bid for Paramount Global when it was up for sale in 2024, as well as a $10 billion offer for ABC and other Disney networks, and he reportedly offered $3.5 billion for Paramount’s BET Media Group.

Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC and broadcast network NBC.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

While U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs play out in U.S. courts, another one of his proposed laws could weaponize the American tax system.

Investment banks and law firms warn this step could prove to be as significant as the impact of duties on investors.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which passed through the U.S. House of Representatives last week, includes the most sweeping changes to the tax treatment of foreign capital in the U.S. in decades under a provision known as Section 899. The bill must still gain the Senate’s approval.

“We see this legislation as creating the scope for the US administration to transform a trade war into a capital war if it so wishes,” said George Saravelos, global head of FX research at Deutsche Bank on Thursday.

“Section 899 challenges the open nature of US capital markets by explicitly using taxation on foreign holdings of US assets as leverage to further US economic goals,” Saravelos added in the note to clients, under the subtitle “weaponization of US capital markets in to law.”

Section 899 says it will hit entities from “discriminatory foreign countries” — those that impose levies such as the digital services taxes that disproportionately affect U.S. companies.

France, for instance, has a 3% tax on revenues from online platforms, which primarily targets big technology firms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Germany is reportedly considering a similar tax of 10%.

Under the new tax bill, the U.S. would hit investors from such countries by increasing taxes on U.S. income by 5 percentage points each year, potentially taking the rate up to 20%.

Emmanuel Cau, head of European Equity Strategy at Barclays, suggested that the mere passage of the tax legislation could make dollar assets less valuable for foreign investors.

“In our view, this is a risk for those companies generating US revenues, and domiciled in countries that have enacted Digital Services Taxes (DST) or are implementing the OECD’s Under Taxed Payment Rule (UTPR),” Cau said in a Friday note to clients.

He highlighted companies such as London-listed Compass Group, which provides catering services to U.S. schools, and InterContinental Hotels, which owns at least 25 luxury hotels in the U.S., are likely to be affected by the proposed law.

“Given US net international investment position is sharply negative, there is indeed scope for capital outflows if indeed S899 passes through the Senate in its current form,” he added.

The impact of the bill won’t be limited to European companies or individuals from those states.

The bill “could significantly increase tax rates applicable to certain non-U.S. individuals and business, governmental, and other entities,” said Max Levine, head of U.S. tax at the law firm Linklaters.

This means it could also ensnare governments and central banks, which are large investors of U.S. Treasuries. France and Germany, for instance, held a combined $475 billion worth of U.S. government bonds as of March.

The proposed tax would lower returns on U.S. Treasuries for those investors as “the de facto yield on US Treasuries would drop by nearly 100bps,” Deutsche Bank’s Saravelos added. “The adverse impact on demand for USTs and funding the US twin deficit at a time when this is most needed is clear”.

“It’s very bad,” said Beat Wittmann, chairman of Switzerland-based Porta Advisors. “This is huge — this is just one piece in the overall plan and it’s completely consistent with what this administration is all about.”

“The ultimate judge for this is not our opinions, it’s the bond market,” Wittmann added. “The U.S. bond market is discounting these developments, and we have seen in the last few weeks, that if there was a safe haven move, investors clearly prefer German bunds.”

Large Australian pension funds with U.S. investments have also been reportedly concerned by the bill, since Australia operates a medicines subsidy scheme that is opposed by large U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

Legal experts at the Mayer Brown law firm suggest that “significant changes” could be made to the bill as it passes through the U.S. Senate before it’s enshrined into law by Trump.

“As such, there may be questions about whether the provisions of the proposal that override tax treaties could be included in the US Senate’s version of the tax bill,” Mayer Brown’s experts said.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Amazon’s devices unit has a new team tasked with inventing “breakthrough” consumer products that’s being led by a former Microsoft executive who helped create the Xbox.

The ZeroOne team is spread across Seattle, San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California, and is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to job postings from the past month. The name is a nod to its mission of developing emerging product ideas from conception to launch, or “zero to one.”

Amazon has a checkered history in hardware, with hits including the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and Fire streaming sticks, as well as flops like the Fire Phone, Halo fitness tracker and Glow kids teleconferencing device.

Many of the products emerged from Lab126, Amazon’s hardware research and development unit, which is based in Silicon Valley.

The new group is being led by J Allard, who spent 19 years at Microsoft, most recently as technology chief of consumer products, a role he left in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was a key architect of the Xbox game console, as well as the Zune, a failed iPod competitor.

Allard joined Amazon in September, and the company confirmed at the time that he would be part of the devices and services team under Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023 to lead the group.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Allard oversees ZeroOne but declined to comment further on the group’s work.

The job postings provide few specific details about what ZeroOne is building, though one listing references working on “conceiving, designing, and bringing to market computer vision techniques for a new smart-home product.”

Another post for a senior customer insights manager in San Francisco says the job entails owning “the methodology and execution of concept testing and early feedback for ZeroOne programs.”

“You’ll be part of a team that embraces design thinking, rapid experimentation, and building to learn,” the description says. “If you’re excited about working in small, nimble teams to create entirely new product categories and thrive in the ambiguity of breakthrough innovation, we want to talk to you.”

Amazon has pulled in staffers from other business units that have experience developing innovative technologies, including its Alexa voice assistant, Luna cloud gaming service and Halo sleep tracker, according to Linkedin profiles of ZeroOne employees. The head of a projection mapping startup called Lightform that Amazon acquired is helping lead the group.

While Amazon is expanding this particular corner of its devices group, the company is scaling back other areas of the sprawling devices and services division.

Earlier this month, Amazon laid off about 100 of the group’s employees. The job cuts included staffers working on Alexa and Amazon Kids, which develops services for children, as well as Lab126, according to public filings and people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. More than 50 employees were laid off at Amazon’s Lab126 facilities in Sunnyvale, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings in California.

Amazon said the job cuts affected a fraction of a percent of the devices and services organization, which has tens of thousands of employees.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Nvidia shares jumped on Thursday after posting a positive set of earnings, sparking a rally in global semiconductor stocks.

Shares of Nvidia were 6% higher after the company posted better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Wednesday, even as it took a hit from U.S. semiconductor export restrictions to China.

Nvidia has been seen by investors as a bellwether for the broader semiconductor industry and artificial intelligence-related stocks, with its latest strong numbers sparking a rally among global semiconductor names.

Nvidia’s earnings helped boost other chip names, with Taiwan Semiconductor, AMD and Qualcomm all up about 1%.

In Japan, Tokyo Electron closed more than 4% higher, while SK Hynix, which is a supplier of high bandwidth memory to Nvidia, was nearly 2% up at the close of markets in South Korea.

In Europe, ASM International, BE Semiconductor Industries and ASML were all in positive territory.

The semiconductor industry has faced a number of headwinds from uncertainty around tariff policy in the U.S. and chip export restrictions to China.

Companies such as ASML, which makes machines that are critical for manufacturing the most advanced chips, have seen billions wiped off their value as a result.

Nvidia on Wednesday said it wrote off $4.5 billion of H20 chip inventory that it couldn’t ship to China because of export curbs, saying it also calculated $2.5 billion of lost revenue as well.

The restrictions on China do not seem to be going away.

The U.S. has ordered a number of companies, including those producing chemicals and design software for semiconductors, to stop shipping goods to China without a license, according to a Reuters report on Thursday.

Despite this, Nvidia still managed to post financial results for the April quarter that beat market expectations, allaying fears that demand for its graphics processing units, which have become key for training huge AI models, is dwindling.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS