Microsoft reported strong earnings for the quarter, but investors expressed concerns about the company's spending on cloud infrastructure. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defended the investments, emphasizing the usage of Microsoft's Copilot AI, according to TechCrunch. The company reported $81.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, a 17% increase, and net income profits of $38.3 billion, up 21%. Microsoft cloud revenue reached a record-breaking $50 billion.
Nadella spent considerable time on the earnings call trying to assure investors that the company's capital expenditures would pay off. Microsoft spent $88.2 billion on capital expenditures last year and has almost matched that amount in the first half of its current fiscal year, according to TechCrunch.
In other AI news, Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest $50 billion in OpenAI, according to TechCrunch, citing The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI, already valued at $500 billion, is seeking an additional $100 billion in investment, which could raise its valuation to $830 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is leading the negotiations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI has also reportedly been in discussions with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Nvidia, according to The New York Times.
Microsoft also announced the deployment of its first homegrown AI chips, named Maia 200, in one of its data centers, with plans for further rollout in the coming months, according to TechCrunch. The chip is designed for AI inference and Microsoft claims it outperforms Amazon's Trainium chips and Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPU). Despite developing its own AI chips, Microsoft will continue to purchase AI chips from Nvidia and AMD, Nadella said, according to TechCrunch.
Meanwhile, publishing platform Medium gave its employees Friday off to participate in a nationwide general strike protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to TechCrunch. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine informed staff in a Slack message that they were free to participate in the strike, which calls for no work, no school, and no shopping amid a push to defund ICE.
In other news, fintech firm Marquis blamed a hack at its firewall provider SonicWall for a data breach that compromised its customers' personal and financial data, according to TechCrunch. Marquis said in a memo to customers that the August 2025 ransomware attack occurred because SonicWall had its own data breach that exposed critical security information about its customers' firewalls. Marquis plans to seek compensation from SonicWall. A third-party investigation determined that hackers obtained information about Marquis' firewall during the SonicWall breach, according to the memo seen by TechCrunch.
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