Top Stories — Wednesday, April 22, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- United Airlines slashes 2026 forecast as fuel costs surge, but demand remains strong — CNBC
- Google unveils chips for AI training and inference in latest shot at Nvidia — CNBC
- Mortgage rates sink again, and homebuyers jump back in — CNBC
United Airlines slashes 2026 forecast as fuel costs surge, but demand remains strong
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 6:03:44 PM
United Airlines slashed its 2026 earnings outlook Tuesday as it grapples with a surge in jet fuel prices due to the Iran war, but CEO Scott Kirby said demand remains strong.
United said it could earn between $7 and $11 a share on an adjusted basis this year, down from its previous forecast of between $12 and $14 a share that it released in January, more than a month before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.
Wall Street had already been adjusting its expectations for the year because of higher fuel. Analysts polled by LSEG had forecast that United's adjusted, full-year earnings would be $9.58 a share.
The carrier, like others, is trimming some of its planned flying this year to reduce costs. Lower capacity can drive up airfare, with fewer seats on the market.
For the second quarter, United forecast adjusted earnings of between $1 and $2 a share. Analysts had expected $2.08 a share for the quarter. United estimated its fuel price would average $4.30 a gallon in the second quarter.
The carrier said it expects its revenue to cover between 40% to 50% of the fuel price increase in the second quarter, as much as 80% in the third and between 85% and 100% by the end of the year.
United reiterated that it is tweaking its schedules to adjust to higher fuel, with capacity in the second half of the year expected to be flat to up about 2% on the year. It grew 3.4% in the first quarter.
Here is what United Airlines reported for the quarter that ended March 31 compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on estimates compiled by LSEG:
Revenue overall rose more than 10%, to $14.61 billion, up from the $13.21 billion from a year before.
For the first quarter, United's net income rose 80% to $699 million, or $2.14 cents a share, compared with net income of $387 million, or $1.16 cents a share, a year earlier. Adjusted for one-time items, United posted earnings per share of $1.19 a share.
Unit revenue was up in every reported segment, including for domestic U.S. flights, where it rose 7.9% to $7.9 billion from a year earlier, signaling strong pricing power in the quarter.
Jet fuel in the U.S. was going for $3.51 a gallon on Monday, down from the high on April 2 of $4.78, but far above the $2.39 on Feb. 27, the day before the first attacks on Iran, according to prices assessed by Platts.
Airline executives have said demand has remained robust even while they have increased fares and checked bag fees as they pass along higher fuel prices to customers.
"Bookings are strong," Kirby told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday.
United and the rest of the industry have become more reliant on travelers who are willing to shell out more for flights and bigger seats, and who are less affected by price increases.
Alaska Airlines pulled its 2026 forecast on Monday because of higher fuel prices. It has raised fares about $25, CEO Ben Minicucci told analysts Tuesday.
Kirby is likely to face questions on the company's 10:30 a.m. ET earnings call on Wednesday about his ambitions for a merger with another airline.
Kirby floated a potential merger with American Airlines to a Trump administration official earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter, but President Donald Trump said he was against the idea.
"I don't like having them merge," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday morning. He said he would like someone to buy struggling discount carrier Spirit but he also suggested that the federal government could "help that one out."
American also rejected the idea of a merger with United last week.
When asked about floating the merger, Kirby declined to confirm the meeting to CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday but said: "We want to create a truly global airline."
Kirby reiterated his view that the U.S. is at a deficit in international air travel as customers fly on international competitors, some of which are state owned.
Google unveils chips for AI training and inference in latest shot at Nvidia
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 5:58:38 PM
After years of producing chips that can both train artificial intelligence models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors, its latest effort to take on Nvidia in AI hardware.
Google said Wednesday that it's making the change for the eighth generation of its tensor processing unit, or TPU. Both chips will become available later this year.
"With the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving," Amin Vahdat, a Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post.
In March, Nvidia talked up forthcoming silicon that can enable models to rapidly respond to users' questions, thanks to technology obtained in its $20 billion deal with chip startup Groq. Google is a large Nvidia customer, but offers TPUs as an alternative for companies that use its cloud services.
Most of the world's top technology companies are pursuing custom semiconductor development for artificial intelligence to maximize efficiency and so they can build for specialized use cases. Apple has included neural engine AI components in its in-house iPhone chips for years. Microsoft announced a second-generation AI chip in January. Last week, Meta said it's working with Broadcom to develop multiple versions of AI processors.
Google was early to the trend. In 2015, the company started using processors it had designed for running AI models, and began renting them to cloud clients in 2018. Amazon Web Services announced the Inferentia chip for handling AI requests in 2018, and unveiled the Trainium processor for training AI models in 2020.
DA Davidson analysts estimated in September that the TPU business, coupled with the Google DeepMind AI group, would be worth about $900 billion.
None of the tech giants are displacing Nvidia, and Google isn't even comparing the performance of its new chips with those from the AI chip leader. Google did say the training chip enables 2.8 times the performance of the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, announced in November, for the same price, while performance is 80% better for the inference processor.
Nvidia said its upcoming Groq 3 LPU hardware will draw on large quantities of static random-access memory, or SRAM, which is used by Cerebras, an AI chipmaker that filed to go public earlier this month. Google's new inference chip, dubbed TPU 8i, also relies on SRAM. Each chip contains 384 megabytes of SRAM, triple the amount in Ironwood.
The architecture is designed "to deliver the massive throughput and low latency needed to concurrently run millions of agents cost-effectively," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.
Adoption of Google's AI chips is ramping up. Citadel Securities built quantitative research software that draws on Google's TPUs, and all 17 U.S. Energy Department national laboratories use AI co-scientist software built on the chips, Google said. Anthropic has committed to using multiple gigawatts worth of Google TPUs.
Mortgage rates sink again, and homebuyers jump back in
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/22/2026, 5:56:33 PM
Mortgage rates dropped for the third straight week, boosting demand from both homeowners and homebuyers. The spring housing market had been looking like a letdown, but there appears to now be new life.
Total mortgage application volume rose 7.9% last week compared with the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's seasonally adjusted index.
The average contract interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances, $832,750 or less, decreased to 6.35% from 6.42%, with points falling to 0.61 from 0.62, including the origination fee, for loans with a 20% down payment.
"Mortgage rates declined last week as financial markets responded positively to the Middle East ceasefire and the lower trend in oil prices," said Mike Fratantoni, MBA senior vice president and chief economist, in a release.
Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home rose 10% for the week and were 14% higher than the same week one year ago. This, after buyer demand had briefly sunk below year-ago levels. The increase was led by conventional purchase loans, up 11% over the week.
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"Despite the geopolitical uncertainty, housing demand is being supported by a still resilient job market, and homebuyers are experiencing a buyer's market in most of the country given the higher levels of inventory relative to last year," said Fratantoni.
Refinance demand, which is most sensitive to weekly rate moves, rose 6% for the week and was 52% higher than the same week one year ago. Last year at this time, the 30-year fixed was 55 basis points higher.
Mortgage rates rose slightly to start this week, according to a separate survey from Mortgage News Daily, but continue to be volatile amid mixed signals from President Donald Trump on the war with Iran.
"There was some upward pressure on rates from stronger employment data in the morning [Tuesday], but the market was even more focused on the uncertain status of US/Iran peace talks," wrote Matthew Graham, chief operating officer at Mortgage News Daily.
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