Shopify shares fall 9% as Q3 revenue and GMV miss, cloud spending hits $168B

Shopify reported third-quarter revenue of $3.74 billion, just below the $3.75 billion consensus tracked by LSEG, according to CNBC. Gross merchandise volume came in at $119.15 billion against an estimate of $120.03 billion from StreetAccount. Subscription gross profit of $661 million missed by nearly $20 million. Adjusted earnings of 49 cents per share topped the 46 cent estimate. The stock dropped 9% in early trading on Tuesday.

The miss is narrow. The reaction is not.

Subscription revenue of $836 million also fell short of FactSet's $848.1 million estimate, while merchant revenue beat. For the fourth quarter, Shopify said it expects revenue growth in the "low thirties" range year over year, below LSEG's 32.1% estimate. That guidance, more than the quarter itself, is what investors are pricing. They see a company still growing fast, but no longer fast enough to clear the bar analysts had set.

AI capex is the backdrop

The wider context matters here. Cloud infrastructure spending reached $168 billion worldwide in the third quarter of 2026, up 55% from a year earlier, according to a Synergy Research Group report cited by Data Center Knowledge. The market has doubled in eight quarters. AI-specific services now account for roughly one-third of total revenue. Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale told the publication that "a lot of the additional capacity that is coming online is specifically targeting more valuable, higher-priced AI services." Amazon held 26% of cloud infrastructure revenue, Microsoft 19% and Google 16%.

That spending is not free. Anthropic's Monday IPO filing disclosed nearly $900 billion in compute and infrastructure commitments, with estimated payments that could push the total past $1 trillion, The Register reported. The filing says Anthropic's revenue for the nine months to 30 September was $33.2 billion, up 1,206% year over year, but warns that pace will not continue. The Decoder, citing Bloomberg and The Information, put third-quarter revenue at nearly $17 billion and the quarterly net loss at $23.3 billion. Operating costs of $17.5 billion outpaced revenue.

Two numbers, same direction: growth is real, and so is the bill.

Software earnings split

The clearest counterexample came from Palantir, which reported after the bell on Monday. Revenue blew past $2 billion for the first time and nearly doubled from a year earlier, CNBC reported. Net income more than doubled to $1.13 billion, or 44 cents per share, from about $476 million. U.S. commercial revenue jumped 148% to $984 million. It overtook U.S. government revenue of $953 million, which rose 96%, for the first time. Palantir lifted its full-year U.S. commercial guidance to "in excess of" $3.56 billion, up from $3.42 billion last quarter, and projected about $2.65 billion in fourth-quarter revenue.

CEO Alex Karp, in an interview with CNBC's Seema Mody, said: "I don't believe anyone's had consistent results like this in the history of software AI, ever." He also repeated his call to nationalize AI labs, calling it the "only realistic way" to manage liability.

Hardware is tightening in parallel. SK hynix expects memory supply constraints to persist through 2030, with DRAM and HBM volumes effectively sold out through 2029. Samsung said its 2027 HBM supply is already sold out, according to Semiconductor Engineering's week in review. The same roundup notes TSMC is reportedly weighing a 20% price increase for CoWoS packaging, while Marvell agreed to buy Lumentum in an all-stock deal.

Elsewhere in the results pile

Rivian's third-quarter revenue rose 38% year over year to $2.155 billion, beating the roughly $2.02 billion analysts expected, Electrek reported on 29 October. The R2 became its best-selling vehicle in its first full quarter of deliveries. Automotive gross margin still went the wrong way: an $80 million gross loss, or -5%, worse than the -3% in the second quarter. Rivian attributed that to about $120 million in extra R2 ramp costs. Software and services brought in $605 million in revenue at a 42% margin, including $354 million from the Volkswagen joint venture.

Unitree Robotics, in its first earnings report since listing, posted a 69.93% year-on-year rise in third-quarter revenue to 665 million yuan (about $99.7 million), the South China Morning Post reported. Net profit excluding non-recurring items fell 17.42% to 105 million yuan as R&D spending jumped 249.58%.

Not every revenue number in the pile is a tech number, and not every tech number is a win. Shopify's quarter is the one that set the tone on Tuesday. It was a beat on the bottom line, a miss on the top, and a fourth-quarter outlook that gives investors less than they had banked on.