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The money big tech poured into artificial intelligence is starting to show results, but Wall Street remains nervous about the hundreds of billions being spent on chips and data centers, and not every company is winning.
Reddit’s stock (NYSE: RDDT) rose 16% before the market opened on Friday, after the company furnished investors with a higher-than-expected revenue outlook for the coming quarter.
The gains show how well Reddit’s AI-powered advertising solutions are doing.
The company developed a system that inserts advertising into relevant discussion threads (interest-based communities known as subreddits) and utilizes AI to help advertisers write copy, manage campaigns, and automatically crop images to match different ad placements.
Strong numbers set Reddit apart from tech rivals
The numbers backing this up are hard to ignore. Reddit’s daily active visitors grew 17% to 126.8 million in the quarter, and the average revenue it made per user worldwide jumped 44%.
That puts Reddit in a strong spot against much larger tech rivals like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. Unlike those companies, Reddit is also still bringing people on board.
“Reddit is still hiring and adding to our talent base,” Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong said.
That’s a contrast to what Meta, Snap, and Pinterest have been doing. All three have cut thousands of jobs in the past year to cut costs and redirect money toward AI.
Reddit’s content library has become valuable for another reason too. AI companies are competing to get their hands on text data to train their large language models, the systems behind tools like ChatGPT, and Reddit’s archive of discussions is a sought-after resource.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley said that how well Reddit executes across these areas will be key to showing its value “even in a future GenAI enabled and agentic landscape.”
Apple caught off guard as chip shortages bite
On the hardware side, things look different.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said demand for Mac minis and Mac Studios has outpaced what the company expected, largely because developers are using them to run an AI agent platform called OpenClaw.
The software lets users run AI agents locally on their own machines using their own data, and it caught on fast among developers.
“The Mac Mini and the Mac Studio, both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted,” Cook said on the company’s Q2 earnings call.
He added that reaching supply-demand balance for those products “may take several months.”
The base model M4 Mac mini is already sold out on Apple’s website.
On eBay, refurbished units are going for as much as $979. Demand has since spilled over to the Mac Studio, which is also sold out in several configurations.
The shortage is costing Apple real money, even if the problem is one that other companies might envy.
Cook also flagged a longer-term concern: memory chip costs. “Beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business,” he said.
Memory prices have risen sharply because so much of the global chip supply is being funneled into AI data centers.
Research firm IDC expects PC shipments overall to fall 11.3% in 2026 because of this shortage. Apple’s MacBook Neo has also been hit. A shortage of A18 Pro chips has made the $599 laptop hard to find.
The bigger picture is that the entire tech industry is feeling the pressure.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together spent $410 billion on infrastructure last year and are projected to spend more than $670 billion in 2026.
“We’re seeing constraints across the board. The hyperscalers who are trying to get into the gold mine, they’re having to wait, or spend more to get in,” said Brent Thill, a tech analyst at Jefferies. “It’s good for the picks and shovels, but it’s not good for the people who are assembling all the pieces.”
Overall, AI is creating clear winners in software while driving up costs and shortages across hardware.
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