The former memestock BlackBerry surged on blowout earnings this week — and the bull case has nothing to do with phones. 

• Q1 Revenue: $152.9 million, up 26% from a year ago 

• EPS: 4 cents, the fourth time in five quarters that BlackBerry posted a net profit

• Shares of the stock are up nearly 180 percent over the past year. 

• Cars on QNX: 275 million, nearly every maker except Tesla

When you think of Blackberry, you probably picture the clunky QWERTY keyboard and yearn for the pre-AI slop era. But for many traders, that nostalgic memory could have been getting in the way of evaluating a rising star. 

In its first quarter earnings on Thursday, the cell-phone-turned-B2B-enterprise-software-company blew past estimates with revenue up 26% and a 44% EPS beat after back-to-back 30%+ beats before that. The company hiked its full-year profit forecast to 16 cents to 20 cents per share with revenue between $594 million and $621 million. 

“The market still misdefines BlackBerry,” analyst Suthan Sukumar of Stifel said Tuesday in a note to clients. “This is…a mission-critical software layer in the physical AI stack and a dominant partner to silicon leaders like NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and AMD powering the build-out from cloud to edge, across cars, robots, factories, and medical devices.” 

QNX, BlackBerry’s real-time operating system — runs inside of 275 million cars worldwide. “There's more software going into a car these days than ever before, CEO John Giamatteo told Bloomberg on Friday. “That's really where we shine as a company.” 

Modern autos generate terabytes of daily data, from tire pressure to monitoring driving behavior, and QNX is the foundation beneath all of it. The system is safety-certified, that’s engineer talk for does what it's told, every time, whereas AI systems make predictions based on probabilities. 

“As intelligent machines become increasingly autonomous and operate around people, the requirements for safety, security, reliability, and real-time determinism become even more important,” said Giamatteo on Thursday’s earnings call. “Unlike probabilistic AI systems, QNX technology is deterministic and safety-certified, which is exactly why it is so hard to replicate and why customers trust it for systems where failure is not an option.”

About 20% of QNX revenue now comes from non-car segments. Use in robotics, medical devices, drones, and industrial automation are growing. In June, NVIDIA announced Halos for Robotics and QNX is in the stack. Per QNX’s own research, 85% of robotics engineers expect software’s role in their field to increase over the next three to five years. 

Similarly, analysts say the global military drone sector is expected to surpass $25 billion in 2026 and more than double by 2032. QNX is already deployed in unmanned aerial systems as well as used in military-grade encrypted communications.

What does the Street think now? 

• Raised from $4.75 to $9.50 at Raymond James

• Raised from $10 to $13 at CIBC 

• Coverage initiated with Buy at $12 at Stifel 

On Friday, when Bloomberg asked if consumers could swap out iPhones for the nostalgic keyboard again, Giamatteo said “I don't think you'll see us get back into the phone game anytime soon.”

BlackBerry shed its consumer identity years ago. What’s left is a profitable B2B software company that’s already embedded in tech infrastructure from cars to robots to drones. As physical AI scales, the demand for trusted safety-certified software is likely to grow.

Well, it’s that time of year again: many have made their wish lists, people are scraping together the money they’ve saved to pick out a perfect gift, some are presumably leaving out refreshments for the weary delivery drivers and, more and more, drones.

It’s Amazon Prime Day — meaning that it’s the second day of the four-day promotional event that Amazon still calls Prime Day — of course, and it’s even come early this year, with the company bringing the period into late June from July, when it’s been traditionally held for the last five years.

The Prime Age

Alongside the eyes and endless clicks that the arbitrary stream of listicles on “The Best Prime Day Deals” that almost every media outlet pours into, Amazon will also be cheering the fact that there’s now more Prime users than ever before to devour the retailer and its sellers’ sometimes-contested “discounts.” Indeed, according to the latest annual estimates from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), there were just over 200 million American shoppers using Amazon’s massive subscription service at the end of 2025.

From flipping burgers to being flipped by retail traders:

It seems Wendy’s may now be a meme stock?

Shares are up over 30% in early trading, with the ticker being the most mentioned on the WallStreetBets subreddit over the past 12 hours, per SwaggyStocks.

As of 9:03 a.m. ET, more money had changed hands trading Wendy’s stock in the premarket than Microsoft, Palantir, Apple, Amazon, or Meta.

(I’m no doctor, but I think pairing this with a short-lived meme stock of 2025, Krispy Kreme, could result in negative health outcomes.)

User u/ElegantCombination43 recently tried to stir up support by posting in r/wallstreetbets that redditors “need to save Wendy’s before it’s too late,” adding that “we’ll all be out of a job” if it goes bankrupt.

On Tuesday morning, the fast food chain announced a C-Suite shuffle, hiring Steve Cirulis from Potbelly to serve as chief financial officer and chief strategy officer.

Wendy’s could certainly use a shot in the arm to bolster its operations: trailing 12-month sales and adjusted earnings per share for Wendy’s are flat and lower, respectively, since the end of 2023.

Anyhow, Wendy’s fries are superb and second to none. Don’t @ me.

Google is investing roughly $75 million in independent film studio A24 as part of an AI partnership, according the Wall Street Journal. The investment marks Google’s first direct stake in a film studio.

Under the agreement, A24 will work with Google DeepMind to develop and test AI tools for filmmaking and production workflows, the Journal reports.

The deal comes as A24 continues to expand its business beyond indie films into television, music, and live events. Since its 2013 launch, the studio has produced Oscar-winning films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once. Its revenue has more than doubled over the past two years, according to the Journal, and the company was last valued at $3.5 billion in a Thrive Capital-led funding round in 2024.

Google’s investment comes as major technology companies increasingly deepen ties with media companies as generative AI tools become more integrated into creative industries. For Google, the partnership also expands DeepMind’s reach into entertainment and film production.

The firm and TV industry is pushing to develop AI tools that can be integrated into the time-consuming and expensive production process. In a sign of the potential value of such tools, in March, Netflix announced it would acquire Ben Affleck's startup InterPositive, which is building AI film-making tools, for $600 million.

Getty Images is surging in early trading after the company announced a multi-year licensing and product partnership with OpenAI.

Under the agreement, OpenAI will license Getty’s library of images, videos, and metadata for use in training and improving its AI models, while Getty will integrate OpenAI’s generative AI tools into its own products and services.

The deal comes as Getty faces growing pressure from generative AI tools that can create stock image-like images in seconds, threatening parts of its traditional licensing business. Getty posted revenue of $226.6 million in Q1, down 2.5% year over year on a currency-neutral basis.

Getty was one of the earliest major content companies to challenge AI firms in court, suing Stability AI in 2023 for allegedly scraping millions of copyrighted images without permission to train image-generation models.

The OpenAI deal follows Getty’s 2025 licensing agreement with Perplexity, which gave the AI search company access to Getty’s library and required image credits with links to original sources.

Before the announcement, Getty shares had been trading below $1 for months. The stock surged by 124% in early trading, erasing its year-to-date losses as investors are waiting to see if Getty can turn its licensed content library into a more valuable AI asset.

Intel is soaring in early trading after President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Apple has agreed to work with the semiconductor giant to design and manufacture its chips domestically.

President Trump positioned the agreement as the latest victory for his administration’s industrial policy after the federal government acquired a 9.9% equity stake in Intel last year.

"Stupid Presidents took our Economy for granted, and let Taiwan and others steal our Semiconductor Factories," Trump wrote in the post. "We design everything, but we need to BUILD it here, NOW! So I decided to help Intel because we need to design and build our Chips right here in America... and, finally, Apple has agreed to work with Intel to design and build its Chips in America."

Intel reportedly reached a preliminary agreement back in May to manufacture chips for the Apple, which has been facing supply constraints for its iPhone as well other products. The deal could help Apple reduce its reliance on longtime partner TSMC by bringing more of its chip manufacturing stateside.

"This partnership helps Apple with chip development and manufacturing on US soil with greater focus on reducing dependence on Asian manufacturing facilities." Wedbush's Dan Ives commented in a company report. He has a $400 price target for Apple this year.

The timing aligns with Intel's technical roadmap. Earlier this week, Intel confirmed that its advanced, performance-boosted 18A-P process node officially entered its risk production phase. This move serves as a blueprint for both Intel chips and processors the company plans to build for foundry customers.

“The current capacity crunch is probably emboldening customers to give Intel a harder look at this stage than perhaps they might ordinarily be inclined to do as the prospect of more advanced capacity will take on higher value in a constrained environment,” wrote Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. “We are sure that Trump’s encouragement is at least not going to hurt though.”

Momentum was built around Intel Foundry services as surging global AI demand continuously outpaced capacity. Earlier this month, Google reportedly placed an order with Intel to manufacture more than 3 million of its increasingly popular tensor processing unit chips in 2028. According to the report, Nvidia is also testing to see if Intel could manufacture its next-gen Feynman chips.

Stocks rose Thursday morning after President Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war, in another sign that a months-long war that caused energy prices to spike could be coming to an end.

Trump signed the MOU before a dinner in Versailles, France on Wednesday evening. The president previously announced that a deal had been reached on Sunday evening, saying that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would resume and that the US naval blockade would be lifted.

The deal comes after both sides exchanged attacks last week, escalating tensions to some of the highest levels since the US and Israel struck Iran in late February.

The price of Brent Crude ticked even lower after dropping on Sunday, sitting at about $76 a barrel. Oil giants like Shell, Chevron and Exxon fell on the news, as average gas prices in the US dropped below $4 for the first time in months.

Futures for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rose 0.9% and 1.5%, respectively. Last week, inflation readings for May showed both wholesale inflation and consumer prices rose in large part because of higher energy costs.

Signs of the peace deal have also lead to buying of momentum stocks this week. iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETFrose another 1.46% in premarket trading.