When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI's Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn't kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth's circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia-not agricultural estates, but AI data centers.
Alphabet is best known for Google, which is the most dominant search engine on the planet. Google commands an approximate 90% market share in search, in large part due to the distribution advantages it has. The company owns both the world's leading web browser in Chrome and the No. 1 smartphone operating system in Android. Alphabet also has a search revenue-sharing deal with Apple to be the default search on all its devices.
Long-term investing offers many benefits, including tax advantages, compounded returns, and the ability to disregard short-term market fluctuations, which can cause stress and lead to panic selling. These advantages obviously work optimally when investors pick the right stocks to put their hard-earned money in. And with hundreds of choices, it can be challenging to separate those that are worth serious consideration and those that aren't.
The CEO of the Chinese tech giant, Eddie Wu, said on Alibaba's second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that the company "doesn't really see much of an issue in terms of a so-called AI bubble." "We're not even able to keep pace with the growth in customer demand," Wu said, adding that the pace at which Alibaba can deploy new servers is insufficient. "In the next three years to come, AI resources will continue to be under supply," he said.
Once upon a time, when you ran Windows on your desktop, it was your desktop. Oh, the IT department might have called the shots on how much you could do with it, but you could write what you needed to, and it was all kept nicely on your PC or your choice of network drive. Those days are long gone.
US research firm Gartner predicts that IT spending in Europe will increase by 11% to a total of $1.4 trillion in 2026. Growth is expected to be driven by AI, cloud computing and cybersecurity, despite limited IT budgets and few new hires. Spending on generative AI is expected to grow by 78%, while cloud investments will increase by 24% as companies increasingly move services to Europe for sovereignty reasons.
The big worry centers on GPUs, the chips needed to train and run AI models. As new GPUs come out, older ones get less valuable, through obsolescence and wear and tear. Cloud companies must use depreciation to reduce the value of these assets over a period that reflects reality. The faster the depreciation, the bigger the hit to earnings. Investors have begun to worry that GPUs only have useful lives of one or two years,
This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers, Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the critical partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.
Several public sector organizations in the region are moving to open source digital workplace apps. The German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft software with LibreOffice, Nextcloud, and Open-X-Change, while the city of Lyon in France, will replace Windows and Office with open-source alternatives. And the Austrian Armed Forces will reportedly deploy LibreOffice to 16,000 workstations.
Huawei announces the launch of a third Availability Zone in the Huawei Cloud region of Ireland. It will be operational in early 2026. Huawei claims the new zone will improve the reliability of storage and database services by 10x. Data center capacity will grow five times faster, enabling the platform to better cope with demand fluctuations. Versatile, Huawei Cloud's AI agent platform for businesses, will also be rolled out in the new zone.
Which raises a pressing question: Can online magazines survive when ads have plateaued and digital subscriptions still don't cover the cost of producing quality journalism? Maybe the answer is ... AI. Condé has content and data licensing deals with OpenAI, Perplexity and Amazon. But those deals could have steep half-lives, especially when a publisher's value is primarily tied to its library of content.
Netflix Inc. ( NASDAQ: NFLX) is the largest streaming media company in the world, with 300 million subscribers and an annual revenue run rate of almost $50 billion. Amazon.com Inc. ( NASDAQ: AMZN) has a subscriber count near 200 million. Netflix is in the business to make money from streaming. Amazon is in the business, in large part, to help it gain Prime members, which drives its e-commerce business more than anything else.
At the time the company's woes seemed intractable. How could it claw its way back in a world in which it lost out on the internet, social media, and mobile computing? Somehow, Nadella managed to do it. He ended Microsoft's ill-advised foray into building a mobile Windows OS, ended the corporate infighting and sniping, and recognized that Windows was no longer the company's future. Instead, he bet big on cloud computing - and the bet paid off.
