11AM Hour: Former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Quantinuum CEO on Earnings & Google's New Pixel Lineup 8/12/26

**Sara Eisen** (0:00)
The board recommends approving.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
Regarding that seat on the committee, we're promoting.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:02)
To boost quarterly earnings.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:04)
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**Sara Eisen** (1:03)
Good Wednesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla live from post night of the New York Stock Exchange today. Inflation cooling last month, despite higher oil and gas prices, continued cost pressures and ongoing geopolitical risks. We'll discuss what it all means for the economy, the Fed's path forward with the former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:23)
The quantum computing trade shares a continuum surging following its first earnings release since the IPO. Revenue nearly quadrupling with a new deal with Oracle. We'll break it all down with the CEO this hour.

**Sara Eisen** (1:34)
Meta back in federal court today, challenged by a coalition of state attorneys general, and the biggest test yet over claims the social media platforms are addictive to children. We'll be all over it.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:45)
Also check out shares of Wendy's today, busy morning for restaurant stocks. This one jumping on a report out of the FT that Nelson Peltz at Tryon is preparing a take private for the chain. Tryon is already Wendy's largest shareholder with 16%.
Wendy's telling the FT it would, quote, thoroughly review any proposal submitted by Tryon consistent with its fiduciary duties. Follows an FT report from May saying Peltz was in talks to raise some funding for a bid. Stock was halted but has since reopened, as you can see, up gaining about 12%. Let's begin with two tech earnings movers this morning. There's CoreWeave and Supermicro. Christina parts with more on probably the two biggest stories of the day.

**Christina Partesides** (2:24)
Yeah, there's actually a few more. There's a wave of earnings driving the chip trade higher this morning. Foxconn overnight in Asia plus momentum, and then you mentioned CoreWeave, there was Nebius this morning and Supermicro, and they all delivered. It really just lands after a brutal July sell-off. The message was pretty consistent across all of those earnings. You can see them all in the green right now. The world remains short on compute, GP pricing keeps rising, and order visibility now stretches into 2027 and even 2028 Let's start with CoreWeave though because shares are popping 17, almost 18% after its best quarter as a public company. It raised its guidance on revenue, it increased its active power as well as CapEx. Backlog sits around $104 billion, which is up sequentially. That doesn't even count more than $25 billion in new deals signed in July.
What moved the stock is better operating margins as well as guidance, GPU rental prices keep climbing, even a six-year-old chip like the A100, and then roughly 25% they saw price hikes in July, which points to wider margins into year end. Nebius, similar, Neocloud told a similar story, beating on profit and that strength really ripples out to power cooling like Vistra and Vertiv. The one check specifically for CoreWeave and Nebius is debt. CoreWeave is funding the entire build out with borrowed money and ballooning interest bills is keeping it in a net loss even as its operating margins did improve to 5 percent. Then you have Supermicro. Margins came in more than double than the guide, driving a big earnings beat, though revenue landed near the low end. The standout was $60 billion of orders in a single quarter and record backlog. Again, this is an AI server assembler, and they had enterprises upgrading to newer systems, which obviously is strong for demand. One overhang remains the open investigation into its China GPU server shipments. There's been some drama there. But overall, just after a tough July, this earning stretch gave the AI trade its best argument in weeks. The demand is real, it's still growing, especially with these long-term contracts, and so is the bill for building it.