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.