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Max Knoblauch4h

Rental car companies drop amid volatile demand following an “unacceptable” Q4 from Avis

Rental car company Avis shed roughly $1 billion in market cap on Thursday as its stock fell more than 23% following the company’s Q4 results, which CEO Brian Choi called “unacceptable.”

Avis’ adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization came in at $5 million on the quarter, a massive miss compared to the $145.4 million expected by Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet.

Avis said commercial rental days fell 11% in November, as thousands of flights were canceled amid the government shutdown. That led Avis to reduce its fleet size in Q4, “the most difficult period to sell used vehicles.” The company also took a $500 million write-down on its EV fleet at year-end.

“When operational performance speaks for itself, we earn the right to focus on the bigger picture. This quarter, we didn’t earn that right. We fell significantly short of guidance. That’s unacceptable, and I have no excuses to offer,” Choi said on the company’s earnings call.

Avis said it expects lower earnings in the first quarter of 2026, as January was also impacted by weather-related flight cancellations. Rival Hertz was dragged down in the sell-off, dropping more than 14%.

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AMD to “effectively guarantee” a loan to AI startup Crusoe that will be used to purchase its chips, The Information reports

Advanced Micro Devices will “effectively guarantee” a $300 million loan to data center company Crusoe from Goldman Sachs, according to The Information.

That is, Crusoe is taking out a loan to purchase AMD’s chips, and the chips that it’s purchasing are being used as collateral for that loan.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this sounds an awful lot like a very common form of borrowing done by American families: borrowing money to buy a house, and having the home be collateral for the mortgage.

One big difference, of course, is that your home is expected to appreciate in value, while AI chips are expected to depreciate in value as they’re used. (The silver lining, however, is that so far these processors haven’t lost value too quickly.)

Another difference is that AMD, per the report, has agreed to rent these chips from Crusoe if it can’t find customers for this compute, which helped reduced the interest rate Crusoe will pay on this loan.

Similarly, in September, Nvidia agreed to buy any of CoreWeave’s unused cloud computing capacity through April 13, 2032, for $6.3 billion.

Rather than get overly hung up on “circular financing” elements, I’d probably frame the issue here like this: everyone wants AI chips. AMD sells AI chips. And yet, in both this deal and the most high-profile one we know about (AMD’s pact with OpenAI), the chip designer seems to be having to go the extra mile to get companies to use its AI chips. You might recall that as part of the OpenAI agreement, AMD issued warrants that enable the ChatGPT developer to receive 160 million shares, or about 10% of the company, if certain operational and stock price targets are hit over time.

Why is it so tough to get buyers on normal terms? My guess would be that this either says something negative about the financing environment for AI startups or the perception of AMD’s AI chips.

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AppLovin gains amid report on its plans to launch a social networking platform

Ad tech company AppLovin has designs on starting a social networking platform of its own after it was unable to get its hands on TikTok’s US operations.

Shares are up today on the heels of a massive gain on Wednesday, though it’s unclear whether this has much to do with this potential foray or if traders are aiming to call a bottom in the stock after last week’s post-earnings tumble took shares below $360 for the first time since July.

These social plans were discussed in a podcast days ago, and the company has had a job posting for a software engineer to build this platform, though a Bloomberg headline on the subject was only shared this morning.

“We aim to build a completely new next-generation social media platform,” Chief Product and Engineering Officer Giovanni Ge said on the “Valley 101” podcast.

He described the course the company is charting as the opposite of Meta’s, which started by gathering eyeballs and then built advertising around it.

Presumably, such a venture would give AppLovin more digital real estate to run ads, and any data it collects from its users may be useful in offering better targeted ads on other apps.

Last April, CNBC’s Marc Faber reported that the ad tech firm had made an offer for TikTok, and that the Trump administration had been “fully aware” of its interest.

AppLovin’s post-earnings swoon last week, despite solid Q4 results and a better-than-expected Q1 outlook, came as investors have worried about competitive threats to its business from new AI entrants as well as Meta.

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