Airbus said Thursday it expects to deliver 870 commercial aircraft in 2026, slightly fewer than the roughly 880 analysts had expected.

It comes as pressure is building for the European planemaker, with U.S. rival Boeing showing signs of recovery after years of crisis which has benefited Airbus, and mounting tensions with key suppliers.

“Global demand for commercial aircraft underpins our ongoing production ramp-up, which we are managing while facing significant Pratt & Whitney engine shortages,” said CEO Guillaume Faury.

Airbus has experienced delays on engines supplied by RTX subsidy Pratt & Whitney, which Faury said was “the single most important topic we are dealing with.”

Shares were last seen down 5.4%, bringing the stock to negative territory so far in 2026.

However, with better clarity on 2026 delivery targets and visibility on the production of its A320 family of planes, a key overhang is removed, said Barclays analyst Milene Kerner.

“Pratt & Whitney’s failure to commit to the number of engines ordered by Airbus is negatively impacting this year’s guidance and the ramp-up trajectory,” Airbus said in a statement. As a consequence, it expects its narrowbody output rate to be between 70 and 75 aircraft a month by the end of 2027, and stabilizing at 75 a month thereafter.

“The development is not surprising given the slower delivery progression observed through 2025,” Kerner said. Airbus had previously targeted 75 aircraft per month in 2027.

Pratt & Whitney parent RTX didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

The sentiment around Airbus has turned markedly more sour since the beginning of the year, UBS analyst Ian Douglas-Pennant said ahead of the full-year report published early Thursday.

Airbus delivered 793 commercial aircraft last year, slightly beating its revised target of 790. The company had cut its earlier goal of 820, citing supplier quality issues involving fuselage panels that affected deliveries of its A320 family.

Barclays analysts described the disruption as a “temporary execution setback” and said the “long-term ramp” remained “intact.”

Airbus has enjoyed a strong momentum over the past few years as rival Boeing has been battling a crisis over design and production issues for its best-selling narrowbody plane, the 737 Max. 

Last year was characterized by strong demand for all Airbus’ products, which also include its helicopters and defense and space units, Faury said Thursday.

Deliveries are a closely watched metric as planemakers receive the bulk of the payment for an aircraft when it’s handed over to the customer. 

Airbus delivered 193 more planes than Boeing in 2025 but Boeing received more orders for the first time since 2018.

That, along with Airbus’ recent quality issues, has led some to see the tide changing for Boeing under the leadership of CEO Kelly Ortberg.

Instacart‘s stock surged more than 14% after the company‘s robust results alleviated worries over mounting competitive pressures in the grocery delivery market.

During an earnings call with analysts, CEO Chris Rogers, who took the helm last year, called the concerns “overblown” and said the company monitors threats “extremely closely.”

“There is definitely a market for us here and we feel good about our points of differentiation,” he said.

Instacart is facing an increasingly competitive market as retailers like Amazon and food platforms such as Uber Eats and Doordash aggressively scale in grocery delivery. At the same time, the company is investing in new technology and artificial intelligence tools to drive more customers and businesses to its platform.

Wall Street analysts viewed Instacart’s results as a wave of confidence for those worried about the company’s moat. Analysts at Bernstein called the report a “solid rebuttal” to competitive pressures and AI threats.

“The clean beat-and-raise has been rare this internet earnings cycle and CART stands out from that perspective,” wrote analysts at Barclays.

The San Francisco-based company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue and said gross transaction value (GTV) grew 14%, representing its strongest quarterly growth in three years.

Orders totaled 89.5 million, topping a StreetAccount estimate of 87.8 million.

Instacart also issued an optimistic forecast, calling for GTV in the range of $10.13 billion and $10.28 billion, versus a $9.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

The company expects between $280 million and $290 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, versus $277 million expected.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi saw its shares pop over 2% in trading on Friday after it announced a stock buyback program worth up to HK$2.5 billion ($321 million). 

The repurchase plan comes as the electric vehicle and smartphone maker looks to reassure investors amid intensifying competition, rising component costs and recent product safety concerns. 

Despite Friday’s gains, Xiaomi’s shares are down over 8% so far this year, reflecting sustained pressure on its valuation.

The company has regularly repurchased shares in recent years, including 4 million shares for HK$152 million on Jan. 13.

Critics of stock buybacks argue that the practice can boost share prices without improving a company’s underlying business. They say buybacks divert cash from other investments, such as employee pay, factory expansion, job creation and innovation.

Xiaomi’s latest buyback begins Jan. 23 and will be executed on the open market, subject to market conditions and regulatory approvals, according to a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange late Thursday. 

The Beijing-based firm is one of China’s largest consumer technology companies, with businesses in smartphones, electric vehicles and smart home devices. 

Analysts say the stock has faced pressure recently as a looming memory chip shortage threatens to push up component costs for its consumer devices, particularly smartphones.

“[The shortage] has caused margin compression for smartphone manufacturers and a number of independent industry forecasters have lowered their outlook for smartphones,” said Dan Baker, senior equity analyst at Morningstar.

The memory shortage is only expected to worsen this year, as manufacturers continue to focus on the growing memory demands of the AI industry, diverting capacity from electronics manufacturers.

“2026 is going to be challenging not just for Xiaomi but for many Chinese [Original Equipment Manufacturers] as domestic Android players remain most vulnerable to chip shortages,” said Ivan Lam, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

Last year, Xiaomi’s shares had also faced pressure following reports of accidents involving its vehicles that went viral on social media. More broadly, the company has been affected by an ongoing price war in China’s EV market, which has weighed on margins across the sector.

Regarding its EV business, Kyna Wong, a China technology analyst at Citi Research, said that investors had also been disappointed by Xiaomi’s modest 550,000-unit vehicle delivery target for 2026. 

She added that margins on the company’s vehicle sales are likely to trend down due to changes to Beijing’s EV subsidy policies in 2026.

Meanwhile, Xiaomi has been investing heavily in longer-term initiatives, including an internal semiconductor division. Last year, the company committed at least 50 billion yuan over the next 10…

Alphabet shares started 2025 with investors questioning whether Google could keep up with ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the AI race. By year’s end, the stock had notched its best performance since 2009.

Google got its AI mojo back. Much of that was driven out of DeepMind, the British company Google acquired in 2014 for around £400 million.

In a wide-ranging interview for CNBC’s new podcast, The Tech Download, DeepMind’s founder and CEO Demis Hassabis called it “the engine room” of Google’s AI efforts, adding that changes had been made to enable the tech giant to rapidly roll out AI products amid a “ferocious competitive environment.”

Hassabis said he talks to Google CEO Sundar Pichai “every day,” underscoring how close the two executives are working to innovate quickly.

“All the AI technologies is done by this group … and then it’s diffused across all of these incredible products right across Google,” Hassabis told The Tech Download, which launched on Friday.

“And the last couple of years, we’ve been building that backbone, so not just the models, but also … architecting the entire infrastructure of Google so that … these things can ship incredibly quickly.”

This could be key for Google as it faces another year of competition from OpenAI as well as a plethora of other players from Amazon to Perplexity and Anthropic.

“It’s a ferocious competitive environment at the moment,” Hassabis said. He added “many” veterans who’d been in tech for “20, 30 years,” had told him this was “the most intense environment they’ve ever seen, perhaps ever in the technology industry.”

In 2023, Google made a key change to combine its Google Brain research division with DeepMind, a move that laid the foundation for its success with the company’s flagship AI assistant Gemini. Other key shifts, such as promoting executive Josh Woodward to run Gemini, played their part.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google was playing catch-up. Product missteps with its AI tools along the way, particularly in 2024, reinforced the industry’s impression that Google was struggling to compete.

Hassabis said the company’s issue wasn’t inventing tech. Transformers, a key architecture that underpins large language models, were created by Google researchers after all. The company’s issue was “maybe” that it was “a little bit slow to commercialize it and scale it,” Hassabis continued.

“That’s what OpenAI and others did very well,” he added.

“The last two, three years, I think we’ve had to come back to almost our startup or entrepreneurial roots and be scrappier, be faster, ship things really quickly and sort of make really rapid progress,” Hassabis said.

The DeepMind CEO said the…

Europe stands at a crossroads: compete meaningfully in the AI race or stick to its world-leading climate goals. 

“It’s like a fork in the road moment for Europe,” Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives told CNBC. The bloc can either “play in the future” or risk “missing a big part of this technology wave.”

The dilemma is compounded by the region’s mandates for green energy. 

Globally, energy is the biggest bottleneck for building out AI-related data center projects. While the U.S. fires up fossil-fuel plants to power its build-out, Europe requires developers to disclose energy and water efficiency measures, adding red tape that can slow project launches. 

The European Union is often celebrated for its suite of agenda-setting environmental policies and how it has made strides with new mechanisms, such as the forthcoming carbon border tax. However, some critics argue it gets in the way of business. The continent is seen as “anti-entrepreneur,” Ives said, which pushes European technology names and startups to move to the U.S., Middle East, or Asia in pursuit of more favorable policies. 

As Europe attempts to catch up in the AI race, the need for power-hungry infrastructure increases, demand for electricity surges — and that friction has become harder to ignore. Additional renewable energy capacity was intended to replace more polluting sources, but there are now concerns that this will play out differently.

“You can see in the U.K. that we’re already rowing back on some of our commitments,” Paul Jackson, regional Global Market Strategist at Invesco, told CNBC – and Europe will likely follow suit. 

“This is a fairly regular process that when times are good, it’s easy to persuade individuals, businesses, governments, to move in the right direction on things like climate change, and to take some of the cost associated with doing that,” Jackson said. However, pushing the climate agenda down the priority list is one of the easiest things legislators can do when faced with tougher times and competing interests, he added. 

The U.K.’s energy grid is free of coal, which is significantly dirtier than gas — Europe’s, however, is not.

“I’m worried that, at a certain stage, coal power plant closures might get actually postponed,” Jags Walia, head of global listed infrastructure at Van Lanschot Kempen, told CNBC.

Taking fossil fuels offline as renewables come online works when energy demand is flat, but that’s no longer the case, he said. Data centers also require constant connection, so the intermittency of wind and solar could prove tricky.

“Electricity wise, we might not be able to afford to close down coal power plants, which is going to be a real headache for the energy transition and energy security as well,” Walia said.

Over the course of the year, Europe has rolled back a number of environmental commitments. 

On Dec. 16, the EU watered down its effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035. On Dec. 9. it approved a one-year delay to the…

It’s been two days since news broke that Nvidia was spending $20 billion to acquire top talent from Groq in what the chip startup called a “non-exclusive licensing agreement.”

Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, hasn’t issued a press release or regulatory filing and, according to a spokesperson, is only confirming the contents of Groq’s 90-word blog post published after the close of holiday-shortened trading on Wednesday.

“They’re so big now that they can do a $20 billion deal on Christmas Eve with no press release and nobody bats an eye,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein, in a Friday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

While neither company confirmed the price tag, CNBC learned from Groq lead investor Alex Davis on Wednesday that Nvidia had agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash. Davis’ firm, Disruptive, has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq and led the startup’s latest financing round in September at a $6.9 billion valuation.

Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders “will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” the startup said in the post, adding that the it will continue as an “independent company,” led by finance chief Simon Edwards.

As an acquisition, Groq would mark by far Nvidia’s largest in its 32-year history. Its biggest prior purchase happened in 2019, when Nvidia bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox for close to $7 billion.

But Nvidia is instead following a playbook used by other tech giants over the last couple years, spending billions of dollars to hire top talent in AI and to get access to key technology through licensing agreements.

It’s a strategy that’s been employed by Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Nvidia itself has previously used the tactic, shelling out more than $900 million in September to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the AI hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC reported at the time.

By avoiding traditional acquisitions, tech companies have been able to skirt some level of antitrust scrutiny and quickly close deals to bring in the people they most covet.

“Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive license may keep the fiction of competition alive,” Rasgon wrote in a Thursday note to clients. His firm recommends buying Nvidia shares and has a $275 price target on the stock.

Shares of Nvidia rose about 2% on Friday to $192.40. The stock is up 43% this year and is up thirteenfold since the end of 2022, when generative AI started taking off following…

Zealand Pharma on Thursday outlined an ambitious five-year strategy for its anti-obesity portfolio Thursday, spotlighting how growing competition from smaller players is tightening the race for market leaders Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly as more of these medicines near market entry.

The new strategy, “Metabolic Frontier 2030,” comes as Zealand shares have dropped 29% year to date as investors are betting the market will fragment, with fewer singular winners than they were 18 months ago at the peak of the weight loss drug frenzy.

Ahead of its Capital Markets Day on Thursday, the Danish drugmaker said it now targets five drug launches, at least 10 clinical pipeline programs and industry-leading cycle times by 2030.

The strategy will combine strategic partnerships, accelerated drug development, and expanded research capabilities to build the world’s most valuable metabolic health pipeline, Zealand Pharma said in a statement. 

One of Zealand’s most promising drugs under development is petrelintide which targets the pancreatic amylin hormone — different from the GLP-1 gut hormone targeted by Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound. The drug, developed in partnership with Roche, has shown more moderate side effects than current injectables in early-stage clinical trials.

Mid-stage data on petrelintide are due early next year, while data on its dual GLP-1 agonist called survodutide will read out throughout 2026.

Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly currently dominate the market for weight loss drugs and have a head-start on their competition, having developed the only Food and Drug Administration approved anti-obesity drugs to date. But as the the market takes shape, more players are wanting in on the lucrative business which analysts predict could be worth as much as $150 billion annually by the start of next decade.

While Novo Nordisk shares are having their worst year ever in 2025, down 50% year to date, Eli Lilly has become an investor-favorite as the Indiana-based company’s Zepbound and Mounjaro has shown more pronounced weight loss than Novo’s Ozempic and Wegovy. Lilly has also taken the lead on U.S. new prescriptions.

On Thursday, Lilly released the first late-stage data on its next generation weight loss drug retatrutide. It works differently from existing injections and appears to be more effective as it targets three different appetite-regulating hormones, as opposed to one or two like Wegovy and Zepbound.

Lilly’s stock has held up better as investor see its pipeline as more likely to translate to financial returns, and the company also has a diverse porfolio that goes beyond diabetes and weight loss treatments.

Meanwhile, Zealand shares, like Novo’s peaked in mid-2024 but gains moderated as bets are also placed elsewhere. Only last month, it paused development of an GLP-1/GLP-2 dual agonist called dapiglutide, citing a crowded market for obesity drugs. Instead, Zealand indicated that it would focus…