Check out the companies making the biggest moves at noon: Akamai Technologies — Shares rose 5% after the cloud computing company announced a seven-year deal and $11.6 billion deal with Anthropic on Thursday. Akamai also issued warrants giving Anthropic the right to purchase up to approximately 5% of the company’s stock at an exercise price of $111.33 per share. Atlas Energy Solutions — Oilfield and Energy Logistics shares rose 17% after the company announced that two of its subsidiaries “entered into separate cost reimbursement agreements with a leading Frontier AI Institute.” Genius Sports — The sports data and technology stock soared 13% after JPMorgan initiated coverage with an Overweight rating. The bank highlighted Genius’ “unusual combination of above-market diversified growth, strong execution, improving profitability/(free cash flow) and attractive valuation.” Twilio — Shares of the marketing-focused cloud platform provider fell about 6%. HSBC lowered its rating to the equivalent of “sell.” “We maintain a premium for Twilio’s AI options, but we see negative risk reward after the recent rally,” said analyst Sameer Ram, adding that the stock looks expensive compared to “higher quality alternatives” like Microsoft and Salesforce. People Inc. — Barry Diller’s company also owns Food & Wine and Southern Living magazines — saw its stock rise 10%. Late Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that MGM Resorts is considering a potential takeover of the publishing giant. The news comes after People withdrew its offer to buy the casino operator. MGM last traded down 2%. Scholastic — Shares of the children’s book publisher fell 9% after the company reported a loss in its fiscal first quarter. Scholastic reported an adjusted loss of $3.63 per share, compared to a loss of $2.52 per share in the year-ago period. Revenues were $216.8 million, down 4% from the previous year. Costco Wholesale — Shares rose 2.7% after the company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results. Costco had adjusted earnings per share of $95.72 billion, or profit of $6.60. Analyst estimates compiled by LSEG were for sales of $94.86 billion and earnings per share of $6.53. Microsoft — Shares rose 3% after the software giant rolled out a revamped Copilot app to take on Anthropic’s Claude and get more business customers to pay for the tool. Metaplatform — Shares of the Facebook and WhatsApp owner fell more than 3% as traders took advantage of recent stock gains. The company’s stock price is on track to rise 12% in the week as the popularity of its consumer artificial intelligence product, Muse, soars. —CNBC’s Nick Wells and Darla Mercado contributed reporting.
