Nvidia shares jumped more than 14% in premarket trade on Thursday after the chip giant posted bumper earnings that beat Wall Street estimates.

The U.S. tech giant posted revenue of $22.10 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter, a rise of 265% year-on-year, while net income surged by 769%, as the company continues to see a boost from excitement over artificial intelligence.

Nvidia chips are used to train the huge AI models such as those developed by Microsoft and Meta.

Nvidia sees no signs of slowing. The company forecast its revenue in the current quarter will hit $24 billion, way ahead of estimates.

“Fundamentally, the conditions are excellent for continued growth” in 2025 and beyond, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told analysts on Wednesday, adding to the bullish sentiment around the stock.

Nvidia’s Data Center business, which includes the company’s H100 graphics cards that are used for AI training, posted sales of $18.4 billion in the fourth quarter, representing 409% year-on-year growth.

The positive outlook from Nvidia prompted a round of broker upgrades on Thursday. JPMorgan raised its price target on Nvidia’s stock from $650 to $850, while Bank of America Global Research hiked its target from $800 to $925.

Nvidia’s stock closed at $674.72 on Thursday. Shares were under pressure ahead of the earnings report as traders took profit and investors were concerned that Nvidia might not be able to hit lofty expectations.

But its market-beating numbers dispelled those fears and also pulled other global chip stocks higher.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Friday told investors what to watch for on Wall Street next week, highlighting JPMorgan‘s market-moving health-care conference in San Francisco. Taking place from Monday to Thursday, the conference is one of the year’s largest gatherings of major industry CEOs where they reveal earnings guidance and updates on clinical trial research.

“The new year has started with a redistribution of cash out of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and on to the sidelines,” Cramer said, pointing to health-care stocks as a particularly notable group that will likely be “propelled by what people expect to hear from the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.”

Cramer will interview several CEOs at the conference, starting with Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth on Monday. Cramer said he’s interested to hear how the company plans to get its groove back after cutting its dividend nearly in half this week. Cramer will also speak with leadership from Amgen and Medtronic, as well as the new CEO of Bristol Myers, Chris Boerner, whom he’ll ask about the company’s rigorous biotech acquisition plans.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Cramer will continue to interview the CEOs of major industry names, including Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks. Cramer said he’s particularly interested in the company’s diabetes and weight loss drug as well as its Alzheimer’s initiative. He’ll also speak with CVS Health CEO Karen S. Lynch to discuss the company’s ongoing transition from drug store to health-care provider. Cramer will also hear from the CEOs of Pfizer, Regeneron, Novartis, Abbott Labs and Cencora.

Thursday brings the consumer price index for December. Cramer said he thinks those hoping for soft figures will be disappointed. Cramer will also be tuning into CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, next week. The tech event will include commentary by leadership from Nvidia and Dell.

Earnings season kicks off Friday with reports from major banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. BlackRock will also report, and Cramer said he thinks the company’s earnings could give investors a solid overview of the financial industry. He’ll also be paying attention to Friday reports from UnitedHealth Group and Delta.

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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust holds shares of Eli Lilly.

In November, CNBC visited Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, to get a look inside one of the company’s many chip labs. CNBC also got a rare chance to talk with the senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, and Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, about the company’s push into the complex business of custom semiconductor development, which is also being pursued by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla.

Unlike traditional chipmakers such as Nvidia and Intel, Apple is not making silicon for other companies.

“Because we’re not really selling chips outside, we focus on the product,” Johny Srouji said. “That gives us freedom to optimize, and the scalable architecture lets us reuse pieces between different products.”

Watch the full interview to hear the executives speak about AI, its latest A17 Pro chip, working with manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and more.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Chairman Mark Liu plans to retire in 2024, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

“Chairman Dr. Mark Liu has decided not to seek the nomination of TSMC board membership for the next term and will retire from the company after the 2024 annual shareholders meeting,” said TSMC.

The board plans to have vice chairman and CEO C.C. Wei succeed Liu’s role, subject to shareholders’ approval.

Liu joined TSMC in 1993 and assumed the role of chairman after founder Morris Chang’s retirement in June 2018.

TSMC is the top producer of the world’s most advanced processors. The Taiwanese firm manufactures semiconductors for companies like Apple and Nvidia, often based on architecture from chip design firm Arm. 

TSMC currently manufactures 3-nanometer chips and plans to start 2-nanometer mass production in 2025. “Nanometer” in semiconductors refers to the size of individual transistors on a chip. The smaller the size of the transistor, the more of them can be packed onto a single semiconductor. As such, smaller nanometer sizes typically yield more powerful and efficient chips.

In October, TSMC reported a third-quarter profit of 211 billion Taiwan dollars ($6.69 billion), beating analyst expectations.

TSMC in September approved an investment in Arm of up to $100 million as the British firm went public.

BEIJING — U.S. chipmaking giant Nvidia has reportedly found a way to sell high-end chips to Chinese companies — while remaining compliant with U.S. rules aimed at curbing China’s access to the tech.

China accounts for 20% to 25% of Nvidia’s revenue in its data center business, its biggest unit.

Nvidia is set to deliver three new chips to domestic manufacturers in the coming days, Chinese financial media Cailian Press said Thursday, citing sources.

The chips — called HGX H20, L20 PCle and L2 PCle — are based on Nvidia’s H100 chip, the report said.

The H100 and A100 artificial intelligence chips were the first to be hit by new U.S. restrictions last year that aimed to curb sales to China. Nvidia said in a September 2022 filing the U.S. government would still allow it to develop the H100 in China.

Companies in China had then switched to Nvidia’s H800 and A800 chips, but the U.S. subsequently clamped down on those sales last month with new restrictions.

The H20’s computing power is only about 50% of that of the A100, said Bo Du, managing director at WestSummit Capital Management and a former engineer in the chip industry.

That’s “basically saying goodbye to physical simulation,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. While it’s possible to use clusters of lower-power chips to support large model calculations, he said there’s no ideal solution given the costs.

“In the near term, Chinese manufacturers have no better option and they will continue to buy Nvidia’s chips, while searching for replacements,” Du said, noting that some large internet companies have started to buy domestically-made AI chips at scale.

Demand for artificial intelligence computing power has only gone up as companies in China rush to develop local versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Financial Times also reported the news of Nvidia’s new chips for the China market, citing a document the chipmaker distributed to potential customers.

Nvidia declined to comment. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Industry and Security did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

All three of Nvidia’s new chips have operating metrics outside the threshold of the U.S. restrictions, research firm SemiAnalysis said in an online post Thursday. The company operates a Substack tech newsletter that claims to have more than 64,000 subscribers.

“Nvidia is perfectly straddling the line on peak performance and performance density with these new chips to get them through the new US regulations,” SemiAnalysis said.

Nomura analysts previously found Nvidia’s Drive AGX Orin chip also did not meet all the criteria warranting a U.S. restriction on sales to China, allowing electric car companies in the country to still use the chip.

The U.S. has said its focus is on limiting China’s development of advanced tech for military use. President Joe Biden’s administration has also emphasized the country is in competition with China.

Domestic players are trying to develop workarounds to the U.S. restrictions.

In late August, Huawei released a smartphone that reviews indicated offers download speeds associated with 5G, thanks to an advanced semiconductor chip.

It’s not clear whether older equipment or alternative procurement processes were involved with the latest chip production.

— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Spooky OctoberMajor U.S. indexes inched up Tuesday, but ended October in the red — giving them a three-month losing streak. Asia-Pacific markets mostly rose Wednesday, with Japan’s Nikkei jumping around 2.2% a day after the Bank of Japan relaxed its yield curve control policy. South Korea’s Kospi climbed about 1% as the country’s October exports rose 5.1% year on year, its first rise in 13 months.

Watch Janet alongside JeromeThere’s virtually zero chance the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates at the conclusion of its meeting later today. But Chair Jerome Powell’s comments may still have the force to move markets. And market watchers might want to pay more attention to the U.S. Treasury Department’s announcement of the size, and the duration mix, of its upcoming Treasury auction.

China’s high-level meetingsChina concluded a high-level financial meeting Tuesday, where the country signaled support for property developers and resolving local government debt problems. The twice-a-decade financial conference tends to sketch out long-term policy. Separately, U.S. President Joe Biden will meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in the U.S., announced the White House.

Next year will be betterAMD reported third-quarter earnings and revenue that beat expectations. But the chipmaker’s fourth-quarter sales forecast came in at $6.1 billion, below the $6.37 billion analysts were looking for. Nonetheless, AMD thinks 2024 will prove a better year for its artificial intelligence chip business — the firm’s one of the few chipmakers capable of manufacturing the high-end chips that generative AI relies on.

[PRO] A 117-year-old AI companyThere’s an old technology company that was founded in 1906, and which has become a household name. But traders should “rethink” their preconceptions of it, according to one investor. The 117-year-old company is “becoming an AI company. They’re becoming a cloud company,” he said.

The last day of October was sweet for markets, but it was more trick than treat for the rest of the month.

Major indexes managed to finish the day in the green. The S&P 500 rose 0.65% — pulling it out of correction territory, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.38% and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.48% higher.

But this final sprint couldn’t help stocks outrun a dismal October, which was haunted by the 10-year Treasury yield breaching the 5% level for the first time in 16 years. On a monthly basis, the S&P fell 2.2%, the Dow 1.4% and the Nasdaq 2.8%. All three indexes declined for three consecutive months — the first time for the S&P and Dow since March 2020.

In fact, this is just the ninth time since 1928 the S&P has fallen consecutively from August to October, according to Bespoke Investment Group. But history presents a silver lining: The last two times the S&P fell during those months, it rallied 3.42% and 5.99% in the following November, the group said.

The Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates, expected Wednesday, might give stocks another boost. “If the Fed comes out and says they’re probably done for the year, gives hints that they’re feeling more dovish, that could be one thing that really helps,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird.

And stocks certainly do need help. Even the Magnificent Seven stocks that led most — if not all — the gains in the S&P this year have been struggling in October. Tesla, most significantly, is down 20.5% for the month, while Nvidia has dropped more than 7% and Alphabet’s 5.8% lower. Only Microsoft and Amazon have advanced for the month.

But nothing lasts forever: Even cold November rain may wash away the bitter taste of the past three months.

This report is from today’s CNBC Daily Open, our new, international markets newsletter. CNBC Daily Open brings investors up to speed on everything they need to know, no matter where they are. Like what you see? You can subscribe here.

Stocks sold offU.S. stocks experienced a sell-off and all major indexes closed in the red. Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury yields rose for the second consecutive day. Asia-Pacific markets followed Wall Street lower Thursday. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.29%, leading losses in the region, as trade data for the country came in worse than expected. Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.64% after eight straight days of gains.

China’s trade isn’t picking upChina’s trade activity fell again in August, though not as badly as feared. In U.S. dollar terms, exports fell by 8.8% from a year ago, compared with the 9.2% forecast. Imports dropped 7.3%, less than the 9% decline expected. However, that means imports have fallen every month this year, while exports have dropped monthly since April.

An Apple-Arm agreementApple has signed an agreement with Arm that “extends beyond 2040,” Arm said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. This suggests Apple has secured access to the Arm architecture, an instruction set that outlines how a chip’s central processor works, for the foreseeable future. That can only boost the excitement around Arm’s upcoming IPO that values it as high as $52 billion.

Inside the Magic Kingdom’s chaosWhat did a private bathroom, Oogie Boogie and a hippo have to do with the behind-the-scenes chaos between Bob Iger and Bob Chapek at Disney? CNBC’s Alex Sherman spoke with more than 25 people who worked closely with Iger and Chapek between 2020 and 2022, uncovering the inside story of a CEO succession plan gone awry.

[PRO] Taking bites out of AppleChina reportedly banned government officials from using Apple’s iPhone and other foreign-branded devices for work. The European Commission also designated Apple as a “gatekeeper” under its new act. Apple shares fell 3.6% yesterday — could the company face even more headwinds ahead? Listen to what the pros are saying about those developments.

The roaring flames of 9.1% inflation in June last year have been quenched, but the last few glowing embers are proving hard to extinguish completely.

Oil prices are still rising from yesterday’s news of supply cuts by Saudi Arabia and Russia, adding to inflationary pressures.

And today we found out the services and manufacturing sectors of the U.S. economy have been paying higher prices for inputs in August, according to the prices component of the ISM Services index and its manufacturing counterpart. Moreover, the report showed the services sector growing at a faster-than-expected clip for its eighth consecutive month of expansion and its highest reading since February.

For recession worriers, that sounds like good news. But markets have turned their focus from recession to stubborn inflation and the threat of higher interest rates.

Markets are “seemingly adopting a ‘bad news is good news’ view, rallying on weak growth data, and selling off on strong data — amid fears that too strong data will increase the risk of an additional rate hike,” Goldman Sachs’ Chris Hussey wrote in a Wednesday note.

Indeed, as Treasury yields jumped — the 2-year yield breached the 5% level once again — and bets of a rate hike in November increased, stocks were pressured. Rate-sensitive technology stocks were especially affected, with Nvidia and Apple losing more than 3% each. (Apple’s shares were also affected by a Wall Street Journal report that Chinese government agencies have banned staff from using iPhones at work.)

That caused the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite to sink 1.06% for its third straight day of losses. The S&P 500 retreated 0.7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.57%.

A roaring blaze is dangerous. But more often than not, it’s the embers smoldering in the underbush that cause the most damage — and ignite a wildfire again.

Car-sharing service Turo filed its IPO prospectus in January 2022. A month earlier, Reddit said it submitted a draft registration for a public offering. Instacart’s confidential paperwork was filed in May of last year.

None of them have hit the market yet.

Despite a bloated pipeline of companies waiting to go public and a rebound in tech stocks that pushed the Nasdaq up 30% in the first half of 2023, the IPO drought continues. There hasn’t been a notable venture-backed tech initial public offering in the U.S. since December 2021, when software vendor HashiCorp debuted on the Nasdaq.

Across all industries, only 10 companies raised $100 million or more in U.S. initial share sales in the first six months of the year, according to FactSet. During the same stretch in 2021, there were 517 such transactions, highlighted by billion-dollar-plus IPOs from companies including dating site Bumble, online lender Affirm, and software developers UiPath and SentinelOne.

As the second half of 2023 gets underway, investors and bankers aren’t expecting much champagne popping for the rest of the year.

Many once high-flying companies are still hanging onto their old valuations, failing to reconcile with a new reality after a brutal 2022. Additionally, muted economic growth has led businesses and consumers to cut costs and delay software purchases, which is making it particularly difficult for companies to comfortably forecast the next couple of quarters. Wall Street likes predictability.

So if you’re waiting on a splashy debut from design software maker Canva, ticket site StubHub or data management company Databricks, be patient.

“There’s a disconnect between valuations in 2021 and valuations today, and that’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Lise Buyer, founder of IPO consultancy Class V Group in Portola Valley, California. “There will be incremental activity after a period of absolute radio silence but it isn’t like companies are racing to get out the door.”

The public markets tell an uneven story. This year’s rally has brought the Nasdaq to within 15% of its record from late 2021, while an index of cloud stocks is still off by roughly 50%.

Some signs of optimism popped up this month as Mediterranean restaurant chain Cava went public on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock more than doubled on its first day of trading, indicating high demand from retail investors. Buyer noted that institutions were also enthused about the deal.

Last Friday, Israeli beauty and tech company Oddity, which runs the Il Makiage and Spoiled Child brands, filed to go public on the Nasdaq.

That all comes after a big month for secondary offerings. According to data from Goldman Sachs, May was the busiest month for public stock sales since November 2021, driven by a jump in follow-on deals.

While investors are craving new names, they’re much more discerning when it comes to technology than they were at the tail end of the decade-long bull market.

Mega-cap stocks Apple and Nvidia have seen outsized gains this year and are back to trading near all-time highs, boosting the Nasdaq because of their hefty weightings in the index. But the advances are not evenly spread across the industry.

In particular, investors who bet on less mature businesses are still hurting. The companies that held the seven-biggest tech IPOs in the U.S. in 2021 have lost at least 40% of their value since their debut. Coinbase, which went public through a direct listing, is down more than 80%.

That year’s IPO class featured high-growth businesses with even higher cash burn, an equation that worked fine until recession concerns and rising interest rates pushed investors into assets better positioned to withstand an economic slowdown and increased capital costs.

Bankers and investors tell CNBC that optimism is picking up, but ongoing economic concerns and the valuation overhang from the pre-2022 era set the stage for a quiet second half for tech IPOs.

One added challenge is that fixed income alternatives are back. Following a lengthy stretch of near-zero interest rates, the Federal Reserve this year lifted its target rate to between 5% and 5.25%. Parking money in short-term Treasurys, certificates of deposit and high-yield savings offerings can now generate annual returns of 5% or more.

“Interest rates are not only about the cost of financing, but also getting investors to trade out of 5% risk-free returns,” said Jake Dollarhide, CEO of Longbow Asset Management. “You can make 15%-20% in the stock market but lose 15%-20%.”

Dollarhide, whose firm has invested in milestone tech offerings like Google and Facebook, says IPOs are important. They offer more opportunities for money managers, and they generate profits for the tech ecosystem that help fund the next generation of innovative companies.

But he understands why there’s skepticism about the window reopening. Perhaps the biggest recent bust in tech investing followed the boom in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), which brought scores of less mature companies to the public market through reverse mergers.

Names like Opendoor, Clover Health, 23andMe and Desktop Metal have lost more than 80% of their value since hitting the market via SPAC.

“It seems the foul odor of failure from the 2021 SPAC craze has spoiled the appetite from investors seeking IPOs,” Dollarhide said. “I think that’s done some harm to the traditional IPO market.”

Private markets have felt the impact. Venture funding slowed dramatically last year from record levels and has stayed relatively suppressed, outside of the red-hot area of artificial intelligence. Companies have been forced to cut staff and close offices in order to preserve cash and right-size their business

Pre-IPO companies like Stripe, Canva and Klarna have taken huge hits to their valuations, either through internal measures or markdowns from outside investors.

Few have been hit as hard as Instacart, which has repeatedly slashed its valuation, from a peak of $39 billion to as low as $10 billion in late 2022. Last year, the company confidentially registered for an IPO, but still hasn’t filed publicly and doesn’t have immediate plans to do so.

Similarly, Reddit said in December 2021 that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to go public. That was before the online ad market took a dive, with Facebook suffering through three straight quarters of declining revenue and Google’s ad sales also slipping.

Now Reddit is in the midst of a business model shift, moving its focus beyond ads and toward generating revenue from third-party developers for the use of its data. But that change sparked a protest this month across a wide swath of Reddit’s most popular communities, leaving the company with plenty to sort through before it can sell itself to the public.

A Reddit spokesperson declined to comment.

Turo was so close to an IPO that it went beyond a confidential filing and published its full S-1 registration statement in January 2022. When stocks sold off, the offering was indefinitely delayed. To avoid withdrawing its filing, the company has to continue updating its quarterly results.

Like Instacart, Turo operates in the sharing economy, a dark spot for investors last year. Airbnb, Uber and DoorDash have all bounced back in 2023, but they’ve also instituted significant job cuts. Turo has gone in the opposite direction, more than doubling its full-time head count to 868 at the end of March from 429 at the time of its original IPO filing in 2021, according to its latest filing. The company reportedly laid off about 30% of its staff in 2020, during the Covid pandemic.

Turo and Instacart could still go public by year-end if market conditions continue to improve, according to sources familiar with the companies who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Byron Deeter, a cloud software investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, doesn’t expect any notable activity this year, and says the next crop of companies to debut will most likely wait until after showing their first-quarter results in 2024.

“The companies that were on file or were considering going out a little over a year ago, they’ve pulled, stopped updating, and overwhelmingly have no plans to refile this calendar year,” said Deeter, whose investments include Twilio and HashiCorp. “We’re 10 months from the real activity picking up,” Deeter said, adding that uncertainty around next year’s presidential election could lead to further delays.

In the absence of IPOs, startups have to consider the fate of their employees, many of whom have a large amount of their net worth tied up in their company’s equity, and have been waiting years for a chance to sell some of it.

Stripe addressed the issue in March, announcing that investors would buy $6.5 billion worth of employee shares. The move lowered the payment company’s valuation to about $50 billion from a high of $95 billion. Deeter said many late-stage companies are looking at similar transactions, which typically involve allowing employees to sell around 20% of their vested stock.

He said his inbox fills up daily with brokers trying to “schlep little blocks of shares” from employees at late-stage startups.

“The Stripe problem is real and the general liquidity problem is real,” Deeter said. “Employees are agitating for some path to liquidity. With the public market still pretty closed, they’re asking for alternatives.”

G Squared is one of the venture firms active in buying up employee equity. Larry Aschebrook, the firm’s founder, said about 60% of G Squared’s capital goes to secondary purchases, helping companies provide some level of liquidity to staffers.

Aschebrook said in an interview that transactions started to pick up in the second quarter of last year and continued to increase to the point where “now it’s overwhelming.” Companies and their employees have gotten more realistic about the market reset, so significant chunks of equity can now be purchased for 50% to 70% below valuations from 2021 financing rounds, he said.

Because of nondisclosure agreements, Aschebrook said he couldn’t name any private company shares he’s purchased of late, but he said his firm previously bought pre-IPO secondary stock in Pinterest, Coursera, Spotify and Airbnb.

“Right now there’s a significant need for that release of pressure,” Aschebrook said. “We’re assisting companies with elongating their private lifecycle and solving problems presented by staying private longer.”

WATCH: The private market index is trading up for the first time in two years

The Nasdaq just wrapped up its fifth straight week of gains, jumping 3.3% over the last five days. It’s the longest weekly winning streak for the tech-laden index since a stretch that ended in Nov. 2021. Coming off its worst year since 2008, the Nasdaq is up 15% to start 2023.

The last time tech stocks enjoyed a rally this long, investors were gearing up for electric carmaker Rivian’s blockbuster IPO, the U.S. economy was closing out its strongest year for growth since 1984 and the Nasdaq was trading at a record.

This time around, there’s far less champagne popping. Cost cuts have replaced growth on Wall Street’s checklist, and tech executives are being celebrated for efficiency over innovation. The IPO market is dead. Layoffs are abundant.

Earnings reports were the story of the week, with results landing from many of the world’s most valuable tech companies. But the numbers, for the most part, weren’t good.

Apple missed estimates for the first time since 2016, Facebook parent Meta recorded a third straight quarter of declining revenue, Google‘s core advertising business shrank and Amazon closed out its weakest year for growth in its 25-year history as a public company.

While investors had mixed reactions to the individual reports, all four stocks closed the week with solid gains, as did Microsoft, which reported earnings the prior week and issued lackluster guidance in projecting revenue growth this quarter of only about 3%.

Meta was the top performer among the group this week, with the stock soaring 23%, its third-best week ever. In its earnings report on Wednesday, revenue came in slightly above estimates, even with sales down year over year, and the first-quarter forecast was roughly inline with expectations.

The key to the rally was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncement in the earnings statement that 2023 would be the “Year of Efficiency” and his promise that “we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.”

“That was really the game-changer,” said Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, in an interview on Friday with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“The quarter itself was OK but it was the cost-cutting that they finally got religion on, and that’s why I think Meta really took off.”

Zuckerberg acknowledged that the times are changing. From the year of its IPO in 2012 through 2021, the company grew between 22% and 58% a year. But in 2022 revenue fell 1%, and analysts expect growth of only 5% in 2023, according to Refinitiv.

On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said he doesn’t expect declines to continue, “but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to the way it was before.” Meta announced in November the elimination of 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.

Link said the reason Meta’s stock got such a big bounce after earnings was because “expectations were so low and the valuation was so compelling.” The stock lost almost two-thirds of its value last year, far more than its mega-cap peers.

Apple, which slid 27% last year, gained 6.2% this week despite reporting its steepest drop in revenue in seven years. CEO Tim Cook said results were hurt by a strong dollar, production issues in China affecting the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the overall macroeconomic environment. 

“Apple is navigating what is of course a very difficult environment quite well overall,” Dan Flax, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, told “Squawk Box” on Friday. “As we move through the coming months and quarters, we’ll see a return to growth and the market will begin to discount that. We continue to like the name even in the face of these macro challenges.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded Jeff Bezos in mid-2021, took the unusual step of joining the earnings call with analysts on Thursday after his company issued a weaker-than-expected forecast for the first quarter. In January, Amazon began layoffs, which are expected to result in the loss of over 18,000 jobs.

“Given this last quarter was the end of my first full year in this role and given some of the unusual parts in the economy and our business, I thought this might be a good one to join,” Jassy said on the call.

Managing expenses has become a big theme for Amazon, which expanded rapidly during the pandemic and subsequently admitted that it hired too many people during that period.

“We’re working really hard to streamline our costs,” Jassy said.

Alphabet is also in downsizing mode. The company announced last month that it’s slashing 12,000 jobs. Its revenue miss for the fourth quarter included disappointing sales at YouTube from a pullback in ad spending and weakness in the cloud division as businesses tighten their belts.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s finance chief, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the company is meaningfully slowing the pace of hiring in an effort to deliver long-term profitable growth.

Alphabet shares ended the week up 5.4% even after giving up some of its gains during Friday’s selloff. The stock is now up 19% for the year.

Should the Nasdaq continue its upward trend and notch a sixth week of gains, it would match the longest rally since a stretch that ended in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic hit the U.S.

Investors will now turn to earnings reports from smaller companies. Some of the names they’ll hear from next week include Pinterest, Robinhood, Affirm and Cloudflare.

Another area in tech that flourished this week was the semiconductor space. Similar to the consumer tech companies, there wasn’t much by way of growth to excite Wall Street.

AMD on Tuesday beat on sales and profit but guided analysts to a 10% year-over-year decline in revenue for the current quarter. Intel, AMD’s primary competitor, reported a disastrous quarter last week and projected a 40% decline in sales in the March quarter.

Still, AMD jumped 14% for the week and Intel rose almost 8%. Texas Instruments and Nvidia also notched nice gains.

The semiconductor industry is dealing with a glut of extra parts at PC and server makers and falling prices for components like memory and central processors. But after a miserable year in 2022, the stocks are rebounding on signs that an easing of Federal Reserve rate increases and lightening inflation numbers will give the companies a boost later this year.

WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Truist’s Youssef Squali