Forget all that chatter about AI killing us all. We’re back to looking at what really matters—the revenue! Oracle demonstrated on Thursday that demand for AI computing capacity remains pretty darn robust. Larry Ellison’s software and cloud firm reported 30% top-line growth for the quarter ending Aug. 31, a tad better than the company projected in June, sending its battered stock up 4.4% in after-hours trading.

The quarterly update demonstrated how much Oracle is benefiting from customers so desperate for capacity that they're paying up-front—what the company calls prepayments—for computing rental deals. Oracle brought in $11.4 billion in such customer prepayments in the quarter, doubling the amount of cash its operations generated. These payments help Oracle finance data center construction without dipping as much into its own pocket. While it spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditures in the August quarter, Oracle only burned $5 billion of its own money.

Oracle reported 30% growth in revenue of $19.3 billion for the quarter ending Aug. 31, a slightly better growth rate than the company projected in June, even as it burned $5 billion to expand the data centers that are driving its accelerating topline growth.

The software and cloud firm said ...

Italian digital conglomerate Bending Spoons is buying whiteboarding software firm Miro at a valuation of $1.355 billion, the latest in a series of purchases the Italian firm has done at knock-down prices.

The price for Miro is a huge discount to its peak valuation of $17.5 billion, dating ...

Are we sleepwalking our way into AI-caused extinction? It feels a little like that, given an Anthropic researcher’s X post on Tuesday night that there’s a greater than 10% chance that “AI could kill all humans” within the next decade! Despite that rather gruesome note, for tech executives posting on X today, it was business as usual. (See our detailed report on the episode here).

Plenty of dark humor circulated about the researcher’s post, however—this one joking about a Wall Street analyst asking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the “extinction number” on an earnings call is possibly the best. That joke also highlighted the reality that Anthropic will shortly be marketing its IPO. How will its executives handle the warning on the Wall Street investor road show? 

Anthropic’s IPO paperwork is expected to become public sometime soon. But it was OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar who drew a standing-room-only crowd Tuesday at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, as Goldman Sachs kicked off its annual Communacopia + Technology conference with a Q&A with Friar. In her talk, Friar made clear how important price has become for determining model popularity—a potential problem for Anthropic, widely seen as the high-end AI provider.

Friar described how a price cut on OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Luna model led to a tenfold increase in use, my colleague Anita Ramaswamy reported, giving OpenAI the highest market share on OpenRouter, a service developers use to access different models. We wrote in mid-August that Luna had generated more than twice the token usage of Anthropic’s Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 models on OpenRouter. Judging from Friar’s comments Tuesday, the increase in usage was enough to offset the price cut.

If at first people don’t pay attention to what you say, say it again. That appears to be Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s philosophy. About two weeks after publishing a roughly 1,000-word opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined “The AI Future Is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word version of the same piece on Meta.com on Monday. (Today’s essay carried a nearly-identifical headline, while the first half-dozen paragraphs were almost word for word what ran in the WSJ opinion piece.) Hint to Zuckerberg: Shorter is better.

Zuckerberg’s opus was part of a growing number of lengthy essays, published under the bylines of AI leaders, that discuss AI and society. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is a frequent contributor to the genre, with his most recent publication “Policy on the AI Exponential.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has his own blog, supplemented by weighty posts from his company like this one. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posts on X. For the most part, these essays are long and dry. In other words, they’re perfect for an AI chatbot to summarize. It makes you wonder if they’re meant to prove to consumers the value of AI!

Enterprise software firm Monday.com reported a 22% lift in second quarter revenue, but projected a slowdown in third quarter revenue growth to between 16% and 17%, partly because of the impact of a big layoff it undertook last month. Monday shares fell 9%.

At the same time, Monday.com said it ...

Intel is raising $15 billion in a public offering of its stock, taking advantage of the enormous improvement in investor sentiment it has enjoyed in the past year to raise money. Intel stock is up 175% over the past 12 months. Intel shares fell 4% Monday.

The iconic chip maker, which has ...

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for changes to U.S. policy to reduce the “friction” that American AI labs have to deal with in developing open-source models, compared to foreign counterparts, as a way of ensuring the U.S. leads in open-source AI. At the same time, Meta unveiled its ...

After last week’s earnings onslaught, things will likely quiet down this week. Aside from neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius, no major tech earnings announcements are scheduled, which gives us a chance to assess what we learned in the past week. One big takeaway is that the enterprise software sector has bifurcated between those firms that are getting something out of AI and those that are not. 

It’s no secret Palantir is a winner—its revenue leapt 89% in the first half of this year. As we wrote, Palantir has succeeded in winning lots of business with AI agents and human consultants that help clients make AI work for them. Then there’s Shopify, whose software powers online storefronts for merchants. The company last week reported 34% revenue growth for the quarter, in line with the first quarter—but an improvement on last year’s growth rate, which in turn was faster than 2024’s. Shopify is benefiting from AI chatbots that are giving shoppers recommendations on what to buy, pulling in many cases from its catalog of merchant products. 

If you’re one of those executives at Alphabet, Meta Platforms or Amazon who deals with investors, here’s an idea: Put a large photo of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son on the wall of your office. Next time a visiting investor complains about your AI spending, point to the photo. That should end the discussion.

As much as big tech firms are spending on AI, at least they’re financing much, if not most, of it through internally generated cash. SoftBank in contrast has so far spent $54.6 billion on OpenAI shares by raising money through a combination of various kinds of loans and asset sales. And it’s now gone even further: On Thursday, SoftBank revealed that this week it had borrowed $10 billion using its OpenAI stake as collateral. As SoftBank has committed to put a further $10 billion into OpenAI in October, there’s a good chance it will make that payment using money borrowed against other OpenAI shares. 

Amazon has completed its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, putting in the remaining $35 billion in two stages in recent months, the commerce-and-cloud firm revealed in a securities filing on Friday.

Amazon agreed in late February to invest $50 billion into the ChatGPT creator, but it only put in ...

There’s no doubt about it: AI gave the big cloud firms a lift in business in the June quarter. We’ve already heard that from Google and Microsoft, and on Thursday, Amazon, the biggest cloud firm, followed suit by posting 37% growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud unit for the quarter. That’s 9 percentage points faster than it reported for the March quarter, and more than double the growth rate for the same period last year. 

Just as strikingly, AWS’ operating profit margin also rose, to 39.4%, the highest since the start of last year. To lift its operating margin while grappling with rising depreciation expenses on new chips and servers is an accomplishment. Amazon stock jumped 9% in response, suggesting investors were more focused on AWS’ accelerating growth than on the huge capital investments it is making to drive future growth. As a reminder of the size of those investments, Amazon burned $7.6 billion in cash in the quarter and raised its 2026 capital expenditures projection by $20 billion to $220 billion.