The broad index of large-cap companies in the S&P 500 closed flat, but the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 0.55%. Tech stocks were led by Nvidia, which was up 3%, and now has a market cap of more than $5 trillion. (Its stock is down 0.7% premarket this morning, suggesting that some traders are taking their overnight gains.) To put that in perspective, Nvidia's market cap is bigger than the GDP of every G7 country except the U.S. and Japan.
Big Tech's AI gold rush isn't slowing down- it's getting more expensive. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all opened their wallets wider than ever this quarter, logging record-breaking capital expenditures on AI chips, servers, and data centers. Microsoft was the top spender at nearly $35 billion, narrowly beating Amazon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company could increase itslong-term asset spending, or capital expenditure (capex), by as much as 24% next year. Each company said it planned to spend even more on capex going forward.
Is the UK truly becoming an AI hub as US tech giants pour in billions? A multibillion-dollar deal is being hailed as proof that Britain is becoming a global hub for artificial intelligence, with major United States tech companies investing heavily. But the reality is a little less straightforward. On today's show, we ask: how much power, and how much of your personal data, are you willing to hand over to tech companies?
Rishi Sunak has been appointed as a senior adviser by the US technology companies Microsoft and Anthropic. The former British prime minister's pair of new jobs emerged on Thursday in letters published by Westminster's office of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba). They add to his roles as a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs International, the investment bank, and speechmaker to investment firms including Bain Capital and Makena Capital in the US, which have netted him over 150,000 a talk.
Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that the bank spends about $2 billion a year on AI and is seeing about the same amount in direct benefits. "We have shown that for $2 billion of expense, we have about $2 billion of benefit," Dimon said. "We did this, we reduced headcount, we saved this time and money."
The deals are so vast that they defy comprehension - the Financial Times put the company's recent commitments at north of $1 trillion - and they're making public companies' stock prices jump. Stock analysts dub some of these agreements "circular," because investment money is flowing between companies that also buy from or sell to one another. The worry then is that such deals might prop up or overhype a bad business.
As the Washington Post observed in newreporting on the AI bubble, speculative investment into AI development is now the dominant force driving the US economy. By the numbers, the US GDP has grown at a rate of 1.6 percent so far this year, on pace to hit the 2.8 percent growth it achieved in 2024. That's all well and good on paper, except for the troubling fact that two-thirds of that growth came from AI, per WaPo 's analysis.
The deluge of speculative tech investments unleashed by artificial intelligence is unparalleled in history. Never before has a technology which promises so much - but currentlydoes so little - managed to capture enough funding to threaten the US economy should it fail. With that kind of cash on the line, one would assume thattech startups have done their homework on the complicated reality of AI development before courting untold millions of dollars from overzealous investors - that's sort of their job, after all.
Meta Platforms financial results have been impressive in the first half of the year. Its strong growth has been fueled by robust advertising demand and an engaged user base across its social media apps. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is making significant investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and innovative ad formats -- all while revenue and earnings are soaring. No wonder the Street has been buying up the stock.
In 2021, global femtech investment peaked at before plunging to just €1.1bn the next year, amid a tech funding apocalypse and capital making a headlong dash towards AI. Several factors contributed to this decline - broader market conditions, withering investor risk appetite, and natural sector maturation. But the surge in AI funding coinciding with a plunge in femtech investment highlights serious issues with capital allocation.
