Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

China's juggernaut electric vehicle (EV) maker, BYD (BYDDY 2.92%), has taken the world by storm over the past few years. Considering the automaker only stopped producing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in 2022, switching its entire product lineup to EVs and plug-in hybrids, overtaking Tesla (TSLA 1.55%) in EV sales for the full-year 2025 was impressive. Now BYD is taking it a step further and outdoing Tesla in another aspect, one that was critically important to the latter's initial surge.

What's going on with BYD and Tesla? One of the most valuable developments for the broader U.S. EV industry was Tesla's expanding Supercharger network. It was crucial as it helped reduce range anxiety, which was one of the biggest barriers to mainstream EV adoption. Building a reliable, expanding, and, maybe most importantly, fast-charging system quickly enabled early adopters to jump on board. It turned long-range EV travel into reality.

Image source: Tesla.

BYD is trying to take it a step further for its own expansion, and in some ways, the Chinese EV maker's charging network is making its rivals' networks appear slow. BYD has deployed 5,700 Flash Charging stations in China in just a few months and has also opened its first overseas charging stations in Europe. BYD isn't resting on its laurels either and is targeting 20,000 stations in China by the end of this year.

These charging stations can deliver up to 1,500 kW of power, roughly 3 times the output of Tesla's latest V4 Superchargers. BYD's partnership with Sinopec, China's largest fuel retail network boasting over 30,000 stations, could accelerate the network rollout even further. Electrek ran the numbers, and it won't take long for BYD to surpass Tesla's network: "If both companies continue at their current growth rates -- Tesla at roughly 18% annual growth, BYD at the pace implied by its 2026 targets -- BYD's network (measured in stall-equivalents) could surpass Tesla's globally between 2029 and 2030 -- in just roughly 4 years."

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What it all means for BYD There are a couple of factors for investors to consider as BYD's charging infrastructure expands. First, while BYD's network could rapidly catch Tesla's reach and numbers, that's not the only advantage the latter currently has. That's because Tesla has gained over a decade of valuable route planning data, proven 99% uptime reliability, and boasts the NACS standard that has essentially converted other automakers' vehicles into Tesla Supercharger network customers.

Secondly, while it's fun to compare the development progress of the two important networks, it's fair to note that tariffs and trade policy currently prevent BYD from competing in the U.S. market, thus giving Tesla's network control of the region. That said, in China specifically, BYD is on pace to match or surpass Tesla's local charging network within the next year to year and a half. Tesla has roughly 3,000 stations across the Asia-Pacific region.

Tesla's Supercharger network was instrumental in the broader EV revolution in the markets it competes in, and remains an advantage for the EV maker. BYD is replicating this advantage overseas, and it should only boost the EV maker's growing sales momentum globally. BYD remains a top automotive stock, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down in just about any metric.

Uber Technologies (UBER - Free Report) is one of the stocks most watched by Zacks.com visitors lately. So, it might be a good idea to review some of the factors that might affect the near-term performance of the stock.

Shares of this ride-hailing company have returned -3% over the past month versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's +2.1% change. The Zacks Internet - Services industry, to which Uber belongs, has lost 6.4% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term?

While media releases or rumors about a substantial change in a company's business prospects usually make its stock 'trending' and lead to an immediate price change, there are always some fundamental facts that eventually dominate the buy-and-hold decision-making.

Earnings Estimate RevisionsRather than focusing on anything else, we at Zacks prioritize evaluating the change in a company's earnings projection. This is because we believe the fair value for its stock is determined by the present value of its future stream of earnings.

We essentially look at how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to reflect the impact of the latest business trends. And if earnings estimates go up for a company, the fair value for its stock goes up. A higher fair value than the current market price drives investors' interest in buying the stock, leading to its price moving higher. This is why empirical research shows a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements.

Uber is expected to post earnings of $0.84 per share for the current quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +33.3%. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate remained unchanged.

The consensus earnings estimate of $2.95 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of -44.3%. This estimate has remained unchanged over the last 30 days.

For the next fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $4.42 indicates a change of +49.8% from what Uber is expected to report a year ago. Over the past month, the estimate has remained unchanged.

With an impressive externally audited track record, our proprietary stock rating tool -- the Zacks Rank -- is a more conclusive indicator of a stock's near-term price performance, as it effectively harnesses the power of earnings estimate revisions. The size of the recent change in the consensus estimate, along with three other factors related to earnings estimates, has resulted in a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for Uber.

The chart below shows the evolution of the company's forward 12-month consensus EPS estimate:

12 Month EPS

Revenue Growth ForecastEven though a company's earnings growth is arguably the best indicator of its financial health, nothing much happens if it cannot raise its revenues. It's almost impossible for a company to grow its earnings without growing its revenue for long periods. Therefore, knowing a company's potential revenue growth is crucial.

In the case of Uber, the consensus sales estimate of $14.16 billion for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +11.9%. The $57.72 billion and $66.61 billion estimates for the current and next fiscal years indicate changes of +11% and +15.4%, respectively.

Last Reported Results and Surprise HistoryUber reported revenues of $13.2 billion in the last reported quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +14.5%. EPS of $0.72 for the same period compares with $0.83 a year ago.

Compared to the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $13.28 billion, the reported revenues represent a surprise of -0.59%. The EPS surprise was +2.86%.

Over the last four quarters, Uber surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times. The company topped consensus revenue estimates three times over this period.

ValuationNo investment decision can be efficient without considering a stock's valuation. Whether a stock's current price rightly reflects the intrinsic value of the underlying business and the company's growth prospects is an essential determinant of its future price performance.

While comparing the current values of a company's valuation multiples, such as price-to-earnings (P/E), price-to-sales (P/S), and price-to-cash flow (P/CF), with its own historical values helps determine whether its stock is fairly valued, overvalued, or undervalued, comparing the company relative to its peers on these parameters gives a good sense of the reasonability of the stock's price.

As part of the Zacks Style Scores system, the Zacks Value Style Score (which evaluates both traditional and unconventional valuation metrics) organizes stocks into five groups ranging from A to F (A is better than B; B is better than C; and so on), making it helpful in identifying whether a stock is overvalued, rightly valued, or temporarily undervalued.

Uber is graded C on this front, indicating that it is trading at par with its peers. Click here to see the values of some of the valuation metrics that have driven this grade.

Bottom LineThe facts discussed here and much other information on Zacks.com might help determine whether or not it's worthwhile paying attention to the market buzz about Uber. However, its Zacks Rank #3 does suggest that it may perform in line with the broader market in the near term.

Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber Partner to Scale Robotaxis Globally

Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber are collaborating to develop and deploy L4 driverless mobility services By combining Stellantis’ world-class vehicle L4-Ready Platforms™, Wayve’s advanced AI Driver, and Uber’s leading mobility network, the companies seek to accelerate the global rollout of robotaxi services This strategic relationship builds on the companies’ existing collaborations together and reinforces a growing industry consensus that the most efficient way to scale autonomous mobility is through a powerful ecosystem AMSTERDAM, LONDON and SAN FRANCISCO, June 17, 2026 – Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber today announced they have entered a partnership to jointly explore the development and deployment of Level 4 (driverless) robotaxis at a global scale. The collaboration brings together Stellantis’ L4- Ready Platforms™, Wayve’s AI driving technology, and Uber’s global marketplace to power a new generation of fully autonomous vehicles. It also builds on the companies’ existing strategic relationships, including Stellantis and Wayve’s recent L2++ agreement, and Wayve and Uber’s partnership to deploy autonomous rides in London, Tokyo, and ten other cities around the world starting this year.

Partnering to Accelerate Scale

The new initiative intends to combine the three complementary strengths needed to commercialize autonomy: vehicles, technology, and platform.

Vehicles & Integration: Stellantis will design, engineer and manufacture at scale vehicles built on advanced L4-Ready Platforms™ that have embedded sensor suites and are engineered with the operational requirements, the safety and redundancy required for high-utilization driverless operations.AI Technology: Wayve will provide the AI driving software that enables the vehicles to understand and navigate complex real-world environments fully autonomously. Built with Wayve’s end-to-end AI driving approach, the technology is designed to adapt across different regions and driving conditions without relying on city-by-city mapping or re-engineering, enabling faster and more cost-effective expansion. Mobility Platform: Uber will deploy these autonomous vehicles on its global mobility network, connecting riders to autonomous trips through the Uber app and helping scale operations across markets. For customers, this brings the benefits of autonomous driving technology to the vehicles and marketplace they already know and trust.

“This collaboration brings us closer to delivering a smarter, safer and more efficient mobility for our customers,” said Ned Curic, Chief Engineering and Technology Officer at Stellantis. “By combining our L4-Ready Platforms™, designed from the ground up for safe and efficient driverless operation, with Wayve’s adaptive AI and Uber’s global network, we are accelerating the deployment of autonomous vehicles that meet real customer needs and enable seamless mobility at scale in everyday life.”

“This partnership brings together three leaders, each with our own strengths: Stellantis’ vehicle expertise, Uber’s global mobility platform and Wayve’s embodied AI,” said Kaity Fischer, Wayve’s VP of Commercial & Operations. “This is just another strong signal that the industry is converging around Wayve’s technology as the way to scale AVs globally, and we’re excited to continue working with Stellantis and Uber to accelerate the promise of autonomy.”

“Successfully scaling autonomous mobility means bringing together the right vehicles, technology, and platform in a seamless way,” said Sarfraz Maredia, Global Head of Autonomous Mobility & Delivery at Uber. “Together with Stellantis and Wayve, we’re excited to bring safe, reliable autonomy to more riders around the world.”

Bringing Autonomous Mobility to More Riders

As part of this collaboration, the companies plan to work together on vehicle integration, testing, validation, and deployment with the goal of bringing safe, reliable and scalable autonomous mobility services to cities across Europe, North America and beyond.

The strategic relationship represents a significant step toward commercial robotaxi services at scale and reinforces the ecosystem approach needed to democratize AV technology and bring it to millions of vehicles and riders around the world.

About the Collaboration

The non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) establishes the framework for future agreements covering technology development, licensing, production, and vehicle procurement. Each company retains the flexibility to pursue additional collaborations in the autonomous driving space.

###

About Stellantis

Stellantis (NYSE: STLA / Euronext Milan: STLAM / Euronext Paris: STLAP) is a leading global automaker, dedicated to giving its customers the freedom to choose the way they move, embracing the latest technologies and creating value for all its stakeholders. Its unique portfolio of iconic and innovative brands includes Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS Automobiles, FIAT, Jeep®, Lancia, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, Vauxhall, Free2move and Leasys. For more information, visit www.stellantis.com.

About Wayve

Founded in 2017, Wayve is the leading developer of Embodied AI technology for automated driving. Its advanced AI software and foundation models for autonomy enable vehicles to perceive, understand, and navigate any environment, enhancing the usability and safety of autonomous driving systems. Wayve develops mapless and hardware-agnostic Embodied AI products for automakers and fleet owners, accelerating the path from assisted to automated driving. To learn more, please visit www.wayve.ai.

About Uber

Uber’s mission is to create opportunity through movement. We started in 2010 to solve a simple problem: how do you get access to a ride at the touch of a button? More than 75 billion trips later, we’re building products to get people closer to where they want to be. By changing how people, food, and things move through cities, Uber is a platform that opens up the world to new possibilities.

Stellantis Media Contact:

Massimo De Micheli + 39 335 40 15 30 - [email protected]

[email protected]

Wayve Media Contact:

[email protected]

Uber Media Contact:

[email protected]

Stellantis Forward-Looking Statements 

This communication contains forward-looking statements. In particular, statements regarding future events and anticipated results of operations, business strategies, the anticipated benefits of the proposed transaction, future financial and operating results, the anticipated closing date for the proposed transaction and other anticipated aspects of our operations or operating results are forward-looking statements. These statements may include terms such as “may”, “will”, “expect”, “could”, “should”, “intend”, “estimate”, “anticipate”, “believe”, “remain”, “on track”, “design”, “target”, “objective”, “goal”, “forecast”, “projection”, “outlook”, “prospects”, “plan”, or similar terms. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Rather, they are based on Stellantis’ current state of knowledge, future expectations and projections about future events and are by their nature, subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. They relate to events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur or exist in the future and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on them. There can be no assurance that the contemplated transactions will be completed or that the expected scope or timing will be achieved.

Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors, including: the ability of Stellantis to launch new products successfully and to maintain vehicle shipment volumes; changes in the global financial markets, general economic environment and changes in demand for automotive products, which is subject to cyclicality; Stellantis’ ability to successfully manage the industry-wide transition from internal combustion engines to full electrification; Stellantis’ ability to offer innovative, attractive products and to develop, manufacture and sell vehicles with advanced features including enhanced electrification, connectivity and autonomous-driving characteristics; Stellantis’ ability to produce or procure electric batteries with competitive performance, cost and at required volumes; Stellantis’ ability to successfully launch new businesses and integrate acquisitions; a significant malfunction, disruption or security breach compromising information technology systems or the electronic control systems contained in Stellantis’ vehicles; exchange rate fluctuations, interest rate changes, credit risk and other market risks; increases in costs, disruptions of supply or shortages of raw materials, parts, components and systems used in Stellantis’ vehicles; changes in local economic and political conditions; changes in trade policy, the imposition of global and regional tariffs or tariffs targeted to the automotive industry, the enactment of tax reforms or other changes in tax laws and regulations; the level of governmental economic incentives available to support the adoption of battery electric vehicles; the impact of increasingly stringent regulations regarding fuel efficiency requirements and reduced greenhouse gas and tailpipe emissions; various types of claims, lawsuits, governmental investigations and other contingencies, including product liability and warranty claims and environmental claims, investigations and lawsuits; material operating expenditures in relation to compliance with environmental, health and safety regulations; the level of competition in the automotive industry, which may increase due to consolidation and new entrants; Stellantis’ ability to attract and retain experienced management and employees; exposure to shortfalls in the funding of Stellantis’ defined benefit pension plans; Stellantis’ ability to provide or arrange for access to adequate financing for dealers and retail customers and associated risks related to the operations of financial services companies; Stellantis’ ability to access funding to execute its business plan; Stellantis’ ability to realize anticipated benefits from joint venture arrangements; disruptions arising from political, social and economic instability; risks associated with Stellantis’ relationships with employees, dealers and suppliers; Stellantis’ ability to maintain effective internal controls over financial reporting; developments in labor and industrial relations and developments in applicable labor laws; earthquakes or other disasters; risks and other items described in Stellantis’ Annual Report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2025 and Current Reports on Form 6-K and amendments thereto filed with the SEC; and other risks and uncertainties.

Any forward-looking statements contained in this communication speak only as of the date of this document and Stellantis disclaims any obligation to update or revise publicly forward-looking statements. Further information concerning Stellantis and its businesses, including factors that could materially affect Stellantis’ financial results, is included in Stellantis’ reports and filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and AFM.

EN-20260617-Stellantis-Wayve-Uber-Scale-Robotaxis-Globally

Although the AI buildout has minted trillions in fresh market value across Wall Street, Howard Marks thinks buyers of these stocks are kidding themselves about what they actually own. On a recent Prof G Markets appearance, Oaktree Capital co-founder Marks laid out a spectrum running from “analytical investing in prosaic, understandable companies” to “speculative investing in futuristic companies that can’t be described at all.” Most of today’s AI darlings, he argued, sit much closer to the speculative end than buyers want to admit.

Speculation, in his telling, is forecasting without honestly accounting for the probability that your forecast is wrong. Analysis is grounded in cash flow you can actually model. For more context on how this cycle compares with prior buildouts, see our earlier piece on the AI capex boom and its historical parallels.

What’s particularly notable is the valuation backdrop he is working against. Marks pointed out that the Shiller CAPE ratio is near 42, close to its dot-com peak of 44, while the standard S&P 500 PE sits around 23 versus an 80-year average of 16. The benchmark S&P 500 is not priced for disappointment, and the technology-packed Nasdaq Composite is leaning harder on a single thesis than at any moment since 1999.

Marks’s Risk Ladder, Applied Marks named names. The lower-risk way to own the AI theme runs through the hyperscalers. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have “established businesses with moats, enormous operating cash flow” that fund the buildout without betting the company. One layer up the risk ladder sit names like Anthropic and Nvidia, which Marks believes have “a high probability of still being successful 5 or 10 years from now.” At the top sit private AI startups, which Marks compared bluntly to lottery tickets: “most people who buy lottery tickets lose all their money. A few people become incredibly rich.”

The host’s pushback was fair. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic burn cash and still command enormous valuations because revenue is compounding. Does profitability even matter? Marks’s answer was a thought experiment: ask anyone to name Anthropic’s net earnings in 2036, and “I’ll bet them that they’re not within 50% of the truth.” If you cannot model the cash flows within a country mile, you are guessing.

That distinction matters because the numbers funding this thesis are real. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) just printed $81.6 billion in Q1 FY27 revenue, up 85% year over year, with data center networking alone growing 199%. CEO Jensen Huang called it “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Nvidia carries $119 billion in supply-related commitments against that thesis, which the company puts at a 31x trailing PE and 23x forward. The shares trade at $205.19, up 42% over the past year.

The Hyperscaler Bill Is Roughly $600 Billion The capex Marks is implicitly skeptical of has reached eye-watering scale. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) plans roughly $200 billion in 2026 capex, which has compressed trailing free cash flow to a thin trickle and pushed the stock to a forward PE near 31. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) guided $175 billion to $185 billion in 2026 capex, and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) raised its own range to $125 billion to $145 billion while absorbing a $4.03 billion Reality Labs operating loss in a single quarter. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is running an AI business at a $37 billion annual run rate, up 123% year over year, with a commercial RPO of $627 billion backing the thesis.

Combined hyperscaler 2026 AI spending sits north of $600 billion. The numbers are real. So is the moat. Disclosure: I own Alphabet, Meta, and Nvidia. I read Marks’s most recent filings with the same care I give his memos, and Google’s 16x earnings still looks like the cheapest seat in the cohort. Our prior coverage of Alphabet’s valuation gap walks through why that discount has persisted.

The Mirror From 1999 History tells us what happens when the cash-flow gap between leaders and aspirants gets ignored. Cisco peaked at roughly 150 times earnings in March 2000, and the Nasdaq Composite lost about 78% peak to trough by late 2002. The infrastructure thesis was correct. Fiber did transform the economy. The stocks still got cut in half, and then in half again, before the survivors compounded for the next twenty years.

The market is not asleep to this. The VIX has climbed to 19.44, the 75th percentile of its 12-month range, and the 10-year minus 2-year Treasury spread has compressed from 0.74% in February to 0.39%. Meta and Microsoft are down 18% over the past year, even as Alphabet has doubled. The herd is no longer moving as one.

The Takeaway Marks’s larger point is that uncertainty is not a reason to avoid investing. Long term, Wall Street still heads higher in the decades to come, and the hyperscalers may well earn back every dollar of this capex with interest. But buying Anthropic on a tweet, or sizing Nvidia like it is a Treasury bond, is a different activity than the one Benjamin Graham described. It is closer to speculating. Call it what it is, size it accordingly, and you can still play.

It happened at the University of Central Florida, where speaker Gloria Caulfield said the “rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” It happened at Middle Tennessee State University, where Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta claimed “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” And it happened at the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that AI “will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have.”

One might think the trend continued when current Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s speech at Stanford University was met with boos and even a walkout—but despite Pichai helming one of the foremost companies in the AI industry, Stanford’s graduates had an entirely different reason for protesting his speech.

During his commencement speech on Sunday, June 14, Pichai never brought up AI, instead focusing on his life story, experience as an immigrant, and career at Google. Still, around 200 graduates booed and walked out during Pichai’s speech, chanting “free, free Palestine” and sporting protest signs.

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Stanford grads walk out as Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage as commencement speaker. No mention of AI, unlike other uni speakers getting booed down this year. Story for @sfgate shortly pic.twitter.com/qvS2rJ91Ip

— Matt Brown (@maattttbrown) June 14, 2026Google’s deal with IsraelThe pro-Palestine demonstration at Stanford comes amid Google’s ongoing “Project Nimbus” deal with Israel. In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing infrastructure and AI among other technological services.

As Israel’s war on Gaza garnered heightened attention in 2024, controversy around Project Nimbus reached a fever pitch. Google employees protested the company’s ties to Israel via sit-in protests at Google offices in New York and California. Google called the police on those protesters, then fired more than 50 employees over the next few weeks. At the time, Google claimed that “every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings.”

At the time, Pichai wrote in a blog post that Google has “a culture of vibrant, open discussion,” followed by what some saw as a vague warning.

Explore TopicsgooglenewsStanfordSundar Pichai

Had you invested $1,000 in the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA +0.05%)(BRKB 0.11%) holding company when Warren Buffett became chief executive in 1965, it would have turned into a staggering $48 million by the time he stepped down at the end of 2025. The same investment in the S&P 500 index would have grown to just $399,700 over the same period.

Berkshire owns numerous subsidiaries, a $337 billion portfolio of publicly traded stocks, and a massive $397 billion pile of cash. Buffett's chosen successor, Greg Abel, took over as CEO at the start of 2026, and he has plenty of resources at his disposal to extend the conglomerate's incredible run of market-beating returns.

Abel is already swinging for the fences, having acquired around 65 million shares in Google parent Alphabet (GOOG +1.09%)(GOOGL +1.10%) since the start of the year, worth roughly $21.6 billion (by my estimate). He has effectively more than quadrupled Berkshire's position, and here's why it might be a winning move over the long term.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Artificial intelligence is transforming Google Search Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots offer a fast and convenient way to find information online, so investors were initially worried they would pose a threat to traditional internet search engines like Google Search. But Alphabet developed a series of new AI-powered features to create the ultimate hybrid search experience, and the company says they are driving growth in the platform overall.

AI Overviews combine text, images, and links to third-party sources to provide an AI-generated answer when users type a query into Google Search. These responses appear above the traditional search results, saving users from sifting through web pages to find answers. Then there is AI Mode, which opens a chatbot-style interface where users can expand on their original query by asking additional questions.

When users enter more queries into Google Search, they see more ads, and Alphabet makes more money. As a result, the platform generated a record $60.4 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2026, which was a 19% increase from the year-ago period. It was the fourth straight quarter of accelerating growth, so AI appears to be fueling significant momentum.

Google Cloud is producing explosive growth Google Cloud offers businesses all the necessary tools to develop and deploy AI software, from computing capacity to ready-made AI models. Its centralized data centers are fitted with thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) from top suppliers like Nvidia, but to provide customers with some variety, it also designed its own chips called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

Google Cloud recently unveiled its eighth-generation TPUs, the most powerful yet. The 8t delivers three times as much performance in AI training workloads compared to the previous generation, while the 8i provides an 80% improvement in performance-per-dollar in inference workloads. These TPUs are so good that some AI customers are actually buying them for their own data centers, creating an entirely new revenue stream for Alphabet.

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Google Cloud generated a record $20 billion in total revenue during the first quarter, which was a blistering 63% increase from the year-ago period. It grew much faster than cloud competitors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which saw revenue increases of 28% and 40%, respectively, in their most recent quarters.

But even faster growth could be around the corner for Google Cloud, because its order backlog nearly doubled sequentially to $462 billion during the first quarter, as customers line up around the block for more computing capacity.

Alphabet stock is still cheap Even though Alphabet stock doubled over the last 12 months, its price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is just 27.4. That is a notable discount to the Nasdaq-100 index, which trades at a P/E ratio of 34.6, suggesting Alphabet might still be undervalued compared to a basket of its big-tech peers.

Warren Buffett is a textbook value investor. He targeted companies he perceived as cheap, as long as they generated steady growth and reliable earnings, and had strong management. He was never afraid to be aggressive when he found an opportunity he liked; he put a whopping $38 billion into Apple between 2016 and 2023, and it paid off spectacularly because the position was worth north of $170 billion in early 2024.

Greg Abel worked with Buffett at Berkshire for over two decades before taking on the CEO role, so it's no surprise he's following in his predecessor's footsteps with the big investment in Alphabet. This probably won't be his last bold move, given Berkshire's enormous cash pile.

Two HSBC bank logos are displayed on an office building in Mexico City, Mexico, July 25, 2025. REUTERS/Henry Romero/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

LONDON, June 17 (Reuters) - HSBC (HSBA.L), opens new tab on Wednesday announced a multi-year partnership with Alphabet Inc-owned Google Cloud (GOOGL.O), opens new tab focused on building the British ​bank's artificial intelligence capabilities.

The tie-up marks the latest step ‌in HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery's drive to embrace the revenue-generating and cost-savings power of AI which can process vast amounts of data, automating ​tasks previously done by people.

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The partnership, which HSBC said ​will focus on areas such as advice for wealth ⁠management clients and financial crime risk management, shows how ​banks worldwide are accelerating their adoption of AI as they compete ​in a technology arms race with each other.

HSBC says partnership with Google cloud should enable 200 more tasks using AI over the next ​two years.

Announcement comes after Elhedery in May urged staff to embrace ​AI; warned the technology will "destroy certain jobs and create new jobs."

Bank says ‌Google ⁠Cloud and Google DeepMind engineering teams will help it identify priority projects that could each deliver more than $100 million in revenue gains or efficiency improvements.

HSBC will access Google's Gemini model; ​bank is already ​running 600 applications ⁠on Google Cloud.

Project will target three main areas: personalised wealth management support; financial crime risk ​management; and AI-empowered decision making for frontline staff ​to ⁠reduce time spent on administration and meeting preparation.

"A partnership like this one with Google Cloud helps us empower our colleagues with ⁠the ​tools they need to be future-ready, ​and supports our work in building a simple, agile, faster, and more personal ​HSBC,” CEO Elhedery said.

Reporting by Lawrence White; Editing by Susan Fenton

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

ToplineElon Musk’s fortune swelled above $1.4 trillion on Tuesday as SpaceX shares extended a rally in their second full trading day, ranking Musk’s rocket maker ahead of Amazon as the world’s fifth-largest company by market value.

Shares of Elon Musk’s rocket maker have soared by more than 30% since their trading debut.

Getty Images

Key FactsShares of SpaceX rallied by just over 12% shortly after trading opened on Tuesday, raising its market value to about $2.8 trillion and ranking it ahead of Amazon ($2.6 trillion) as the fifth-largest company.

A further boost to SpaceX’s stock marks a nearly 35% rally since its IPO on Friday, when shares closed up 19%, and a 19.5% surge on Monday.

The latest increase in SpaceX shares added $119.1 to Musk’s net worth, valued at about $1.4 trillion, ranking him more than $1 trillion ahead of Google cofounder Larry Page ($300.7 billion), who Forbes ranks as the world’s second-richest person.

Musk holds 4.8 billion SpaceX shares, bringing his stake to about 38%, with an additional 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share.

what to watch forSpaceX may soon challenge Microsoft as the fourth-largest company, falling behind the software giant’s market value of $2.92 trillion. Apple is the next largest with a market capitalization of $4.3 trillion, followed by Alphabet at $4.4 trillion. Both trail Nvidia at $5 trillion.

This is a developing story.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has overtaken Amazon as the world’s fifth-most valuable company days after its stock market debut.

The milestone came as it agreed to buy the startup behind the AI-powered coding app Cursor for $60bn (£44bn), in an attempt to capitalise on the technology’s success as a coding tool.

SpaceX is the parent of Musk’s AI business, xAI, which will be able to boost its capabilities in an area – AI systems writing code – that has proven to be a strong commercial success for Anthropic, the rival company behind the Claude chatbot.

The group also includes the SpaceX rocket company, social media platform X and the satellite maker and internet service provider Starlink, which is the only profitable part of the business.

The news of the Cursor acquisition was announced as SpaceX passed Amazon in market capitalisation, an important measure of value for a publicly listed company. SpaceX shares rose by 13% on opening on the Nasdaq index on Tuesday.

At one point, its valuation rose as high as $2.97tn, leaping over Amazon’s $2.65tn to become the world’s fifth most valuable company by market value. Its shares later eased back to about 5% up at the close and a valuation just ahead of the e-commerce company of $2.66tn.

SpaceX lost $4.9bn in 2025 on revenues of $18.7bn, while Amazon posted revenues of $717bn and net income – a US measure of profit – of $78bn.

SpaceX floated at $135 a share on Friday and its shares have risen by approximately 50% since. The float made Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, the world’s first trillionaire with a fortune of $1.1tn, according to Forbes. It reckons the 54-year-old is now worth $1.3tn.

The company had been circling Cursor, owned by the San Francisco-based Anysphere, for months. It said in April it had secured an option to ‌either buy Cursor for $60bn later this year or pay $10bn for a partnership.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the strong value of SpaceX’s stock was another boon for the company because it would require fewer company shares to pull off large acquisitions such as Anysphere. Photograph: Kristoffer Tripplaar/AlamyHarrison Rolfes, an analyst at the financial research firm PitchBook, said the deal would not “close the gap” between xAI’s models and those developed by Anthropic and OpenAI. However, he said it made sense to gain access to Cursor’s more than 1 million users.

“Owning the tool that professional developers already trust daily is a faster path to enterprise AI revenue than winning the model race,” he said.

Anysphere is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using AI to automate coding, making it an important rival to market leaders ⁠Anthropic and OpenAI. But a lack of access to computing power – something SpaceX can offer as a datacentre owner – has hampered Cursor’s growth.

“Cursor does not have the scale of OpenAI or Anthropic, but it has built ​some very impressive coding models relative to cost. That makes this a positive ‌move for SpaceX,” said Matt Britzman, a senior equity ‌analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

In its filing for an initial public offering, SpaceX had said Cursor’s access to developers’ data, including coding requests and design decisions, could help improve xAI’s Grok model.

Gil Luria, head of technology research at the US investment firm DA Davidson, said Cursor would “improve SpaceX’s position in the frontier model race with Anthropic and OpenAI”. He added that Grok “has to have a coding component that enterprise customers can utilise side by side with [AI coding models] Anthropic Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.”

Anysphere will be paid in stock under the deal, a regulatory filing showed, and the deal will not use proceeds from SpaceX’s IPO. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026.

The hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said the strong value of SpaceX’s stock was another boon for the company because it would require fewer of the company’s shares to pull off large acquisitions.

“One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is. The Cursor acquisition costs materially less in dilution because of SpaceX’s high valuation,” Ackman posted on X.

Anysphere is backed by prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists ⁠such as Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, as well as Nvidia and Google.

Reuters contributed to the report

Markets are digesting all the hyperscaler spending on the AI buildout, says Arun Sundaram, pointing to Amazon's (AMZN) $200 billion CapEx goal as something for investors to watch. However, the Mag 7 giant's fastest-growing tech businesses are also the most profitable.

I keep buying Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) and I am not going to apologize for it. The stock is down 6.86% over the past month while CNBC anchors argue about June inflation prints, and every time my brokerage screen flashes red I add a few more shares. This is a position I have been compounding into because the underlying business has decoupled from whatever the Fed says next month, and the receipts keep arriving every 90 days.

The thesis I keep coming back to is simple: Amazon now runs three growth machines stacked on top of a retail empire that still grew 15% in units last quarter, the strongest reading since the tail end of COVID lockdowns. Andy Jassy summed it up in the Q1 report: “AWS is growing 28% (our fastest growth in 15 quarters) on a very large base, our chips business topped a $20 billion revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year), Advertising grew to over $70 billion in TTM revenue.” Read that sentence twice. That is the whole investment case in 54 words.

The Three Compounding Engines Start with AWS. Revenue hit $37.59 billion last quarter at a 37.7% operating margin, and the customer list now includes OpenAI committing roughly 2 GW of Trainium capacity through 2027 and Anthropic securing up to 5 GW. That is a multi-year revenue runway already booked.

Then there is the advertising business that the title of this piece points to. Over $70 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue, growing 24% year over year, attached to the most valuable purchase-intent data on earth. Ads carry margins closer to software than to retail, and management is still pushing into Netflix, Spotify, and Roku inventory.

Third, the custom silicon stack. Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips crossed a $20 billion annual run rate with triple-digit year-over-year growth. Amazon is becoming a chipmaker that happens to own a cloud, which compresses cost per token and widens the moat.

The composite financials show it. Q1 revenue rose 16.61% to $181.52B, EPS came in at $2.78 against a $1.73 estimate, and operating cash flow climbed 52.99% to $26.03 billion. Interest coverage sits at 35.17. This is a balance sheet that can fund ambition.

The Risk I Acknowledge The honest part. Free cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis collapsed 95% to $1.2 billion because CapEx ran 76.68% higher year over year, and long-term debt climbed to $119.1 billion from $65.6 billion. Jassy has guided to roughly $200 billion in CapEx for 2026. If AI demand pauses, the depreciation bill arrives anyway. I have made peace with that risk because the customers signing multi-gigawatt contracts are the same companies setting AI roadmaps, and the spend is building owned infrastructure rather than rented capacity.

Why The Buy Button Stays Active Q2 guidance calls for 16% to 19% revenue growth, the stock has compounded 596.56% over ten years, and analyst consensus sits at $312.51 against today’s $246.02. June volatility gave me a discount on a business growing three engines at once. I will keep buying until the thesis breaks, and the thesis is not breaking.

SpaceX (SPCX) has surpassed Amazon's (AMZN) market cap in intraday trading Tuesday, marking a monumental moment for the company. Andrew Chanin talks about the recent buying frenzy in SpaceX since its IPO, along with new plans to acquire cursor in a $60 billion deal.

While many retail investors got allocations of Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +4.83%) when the stock IPO'd, others were left out. However, if you missed the IPO, I wouldn't be chasing the stock, as I think there are better companies to buy pursuing similar objectives.

SpaceX, as it is better known, operates three primary businesses. The first is its reusable rocket business, but this isn't why the company closed its first day of trading with a $2.1 trillion market cap. This is a solid business, but it's more of a launching pad (pun intended) for its other businesses. SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service is its profit center. Once again, this is a nice business, but certainly not a trillion-dollar one.

Image source: Getty Images.

The company's biggest opportunity is its artificial intelligence (AI) business, which it views as having a total addressable market of $26.5 trillion. Through its earlier acquisition of another Elon Musk-backed company, xAI, SpaceX acquired a large hyperscale operation and the Grok large language model (LLM). The big ambition for this business is to eventually build data centers in space, which could be powered by solar power from near-constant sunlight. However, there are technical issues to overcome, including cooling the infrastructure in the vacuum of space, the finite usefulness of chips, and protecting them from cosmic radiation, which can corrupt data.

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Right now, SpaceX stock is valued mostly on the hope and dreams of a CEO with a very mixed track record of delivering on his promises, including timelines for autonomous driving and a large hyperloop system. As such, I think there are better stocks to buy.

1. Amazon If you're looking for a hyperscaler with space ambitions, look no further than Amazon (AMZN +0.05%). The company is the largest cloud computing provider in the world and is seeing strong acceleration in revenue growth in this business. It also has an established custom chip business, including its Trainium AI accelerators and Graviton central processing units (CPUs), that help give it a cost advantage.

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At the same time, Amazon is building a satellite internet service called Amazon Leo to compete with Starlink. While SpaceX does have an advantage with its own rocket operations, and Amazon saw a setback with the Blue Origin explosion, it's notable that no one was hurt, and none of its satellites were damaged. It's also contracted with multiple providers, and its strategy remains unchanged. Meanwhile, its recent acquisition of Globalstar will bring it important spectrum, device-to-device capabilities, and a close partnership with Apple.

I'd also throw in that Amazon is one of the world's leading robotics companies and much further along than Musk and his robot ambitions at Tesla.

2. Alphabet

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Alphabet (GOOGL +1.10%) (GOOG +1.09%) is also a much better buy than SpaceX right now. While SpaceX is trying to become a leading AI company, Alphabet is already the most complete one. Its Gemini model is a top-tier foundation model, while its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) give it a significant advantage by reducing training and inference costs. Its ability to embed Gemini across its search and product ecosystem provides a much better monetization path.

Alphabet isn't ignoring space, either. It actually owns a large stake in SpaceX, and its Project Suncatcher is developing a constellation of solar-powered satellites powered by TPUs and free-space optical links to perform machine learning in space. It's actively working to improve TPUs' cosmic radiation tolerance and believes the cost of a space-based data center could become comparable to a land-based one in the mid-2030s.

I'd also note that Alphabet's Waymo is competing with Musk's Tesla in robotaxis and is much further ahead in deployments.

The verdict By investing in Amazon and Alphabet, you can get access to highly profitable leading companies pursuing many of the same strategies as the money-losing SpaceX at attractive valuations. Compare that to SpaceX, which trades largely on hype at the moment.

A box with a customer order passes through a laser scanner at Amazon's LCY3 fulfilment centre in Dartford, Britain, June 4, 2026. REUTERS/Toby Shepheard Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

CompaniesJune 16 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab may face a ​U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that could result ‌in civil penalties, following allegations that the e-commerce giant misled advertisers, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.

The FTC has a possible ​complaint against Amazon as part of an ongoing ​probe, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the ⁠matter. Several state attorneys general are also participating.

Jumpstart your morning with the latest legal news delivered straight to your inbox from The Daily Docket newsletter. Sign up here.

The agency ​has been investigating whether Amazon and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google misled advertisers ​that place ads on their websites, Reuters reported last year.

The investigations are being conducted by the FTC's consumer protection unit, and ​focus on whether Amazon and Alphabet properly disclosed ​terms and pricing for ads.

The FTC is seeking details about Amazon's ‌advertising ⁠auctions and whether it disclosed "reserve pricing" for some search ads. Reserve pricing refers to the minimum price advertisers must accept before they can buy an ad.

The agency ​may wrap up ​the probe ⁠either through a lawsuit or settlement as soon as this summer, according to ​Bloomberg.

The FTC declined to comment, while Amazon ​did not ⁠immediately respond when contacted by Reuters.

The e-commerce giant in September agreed to pay $2.5 billion in fines and reimbursements, opens new tab ⁠to ​Prime subscribers to settle FTC's allegations ​that it deceived its customers to generate subscriptions.

Reporting by Juby Babu in ​Mexico City; Editing by Joyjeet Das and Anil D'Silva

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

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SummaryAmazon remains a Strong Buy as fundamentals improve, despite recent underperformance versus the benchmark.Double-digit revenue growth across core segments and AWS's 28% YoY growth reinforce AMZN's diversified business model and moat.Operating cash flow surged 30% YoY, supporting Amazon's ambitious AI and capex initiatives, including major partnerships with Nvidia and Anthropic.Risks include slower growth, margin stagnation, macro headwinds, and opportunity cost, but no structural concerns undermine the bull thesis. Stefan Sutka/iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Sure enough, I anticipated a much better period for Amazon (AMZN). But the stock declined by 2% since my last piece. And has underperformed versus the benchmark.

While I have already highlighted that

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of AMZN, NVDA either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Shares of SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) are up 14% in early trading Tuesday, zooming to $219. This pushes the newly public rocket and connectivity giant’s market cap past $2.9 trillion, putting SPCX stock within striking distance of the world’s biggest tech names.

The trigger is a blockbuster acquisition announcement. SpaceX confirmed it will acquire Anysphere, the company behind the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory approvals.

The move puts SPCX stock roughly in line with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) stock, which carries around a $2.95 trillion market cap. Combined with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), CEO Elon Musk’s other publicly traded mega-cap, the pair would sit near Apple‘s (NASDAQ:AAPL) roughly $4.3 trillion market cap.

$60 Billion Cursor Deal Fuels the Rally The Cursor deal is an undeniable catalyst. SpaceX is exercising an option it secured in April giving it the right to either pay roughly $10 billion for a partnership with Cursor or acquire the company for $60 billion later in the year, and it chose the full buyout.

Cursor, founded in 2022, is an AI-powered code editor offering a chatbot assistant, code autocomplete, and autonomous AI coding agents. The startup has roughly $2.6 billion in annualized revenue with rising enterprise sales, and was recently in talks to raise funding at a roughly $50 billion valuation.

SpaceX is framing the acquisition as a push into enterprise AI software, layering developer tools onto its Space, Connectivity, and AI segments. The company generated $4.694 billion in consolidated revenue in the three months ended March 31, so the Cursor business would meaningfully change the top-line mix from day one.

Stacking Up Against Microsoft and Apple The comparison to Microsoft and Apple is where the caution case starts. Microsoft is solidly profitable, posting a 39% profit margin on $318 billion in trailing revenue. SpaceX, by contrast, is not yet profitable on a consolidated basis.

Apple isn’t a perfect comparison, either. The iPhone maker’s roughly $4.3 trillion market cap is supported by $451 billion in trailing revenue and a 27% profit margin. SpaceX’s enterprise AI ambitions also put it on a collision course with Alphabet‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google, whose Cloud unit grew 63% last quarter.

SPCX stock has gone vertical since its debut. priced at $135 on June 11, opened around $150 and closed near $161 on the June 12 debut, then rose 11% to $178 on Monday. Today’s rally further extends the post-IPO run.

Retail Frenzy Meets the Options Launch Retail demand has been a major engine of the move. SpaceX has been the most-bought stock by retail investors for two consecutive sessions, with around $100 million in net buying Monday, per Vanda Research.

Adding fuel today, stock options on SpaceX begin trading Tuesday, the first time investors can use derivatives on the newly public name. That tends to widen the buyer pool, attract hedging flows, and amplify intraday volatility.

Reddit chatter reflects the speculative tone. Posts framing SpaceX as a “guaranteed lottery ticket” have drawn thousands of upvotes, while skeptical threads questioning whether “price discovery is even real right now” are gaining traction in parallel.

What to Watch The bull case is straightforward. SpaceX is bolting a fast-growing AI developer tools franchise onto Starlink and its launch business, and retail demand is keeping bids firm into the options debut. Investors who buy the multi-platform thesis can frame today’s move as validation of an enterprise AI expansion rather than froth.

The caution case is just as clear. A $60 billion all-stock deal carries real execution and regulatory risk, SPCX stock is being priced alongside profitable trillion-dollar peers despite no consolidated profits yet, and the rally is powered by a brand-new listing with limited float. Investors may want to size their positions modestly and watch how the stock trades once options market makers and lockup mechanics start setting the tone.

Keep an eye on whether the premarket gains hold through the open, how aggressively the new options chain trades, and any regulatory commentary as the Cursor acquisition moves toward its targeted Q3 2026 close. Those signals will help separate durable enterprise-AI enthusiasm from post-IPO froth.

by John Cook on Jun 16, 2026 at 7:56 amJune 16, 2026 at 7:57 am

Elon Musk celebrates the SpaceX IPO last week. (Nasdaq Photo) Shares of SpaceX surged Tuesday morning, pushing the Elon Musk-led company above Amazon and into a neck-and-neck race with Microsoft for the title of the world’s fourth-most valuable public company, less than a week after its blockbuster $75 billion IPO.

The rocket maker, satellite internet provider, defense contractor, and AI company is now valued at more than the entire economy of Italy.

The jump came after SpaceX announced its $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, a San Francisco-based company that last November said it was generating more than $1 billion in annualized revenue.

“We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities,” SpaceX wrote in a message on X on Tuesday morning.

That helped propel SpaceX to stratospheric heights.

Its market capitalization stood at roughly $2.94 trillion at one point on Tuesday morning, well ahead of Amazon’s $2.66 trillion valuation. SpaceX also topped 51-year-old Microsoft in value for periods on Tuesday, going back and forth with the Redmond tech giant. Microsoft is valued at roughly $2.93 trillion.

Nvidia remains the most valuable company, with a stock market value just over $5 trillion, followed by Alphabet at $4.51 trillion and Apple at $4.37 trillion.

SpaceX’s achievement underscores how rapidly investor attention has shifted toward companies operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, space infrastructure, defense and communications networks. But it also speaks to the allure of Musk, with Vanda Research indicating that SpaceX accounted for about three-quarters of all single stock purchases by retail investors on Monday.

“The company that’s accustomed to defying gravity is now defying market physics,” CNN noted.

The Cursor acquisition signals Musk’s ambition to build a vertically integrated AI powerhouse spanning chips, data centers, software, communications networks and space infrastructure.

The stock surge also adds a new dimension to the story GeekWire explored last week, examining what the SpaceX IPO means for Seattle and the broader Pacific Northwest space industry. SpaceX maintains a significant engineering presence in Redmond, where employees develop Starlink satellite technology and related communications systems, making the region an important outpost what has become in a matter of days one of the world’s most valuable companies.

For Amazon and Microsoft, the comparison is largely symbolic. The Seattle area tech giants generate hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue and operate dominant businesses in cloud computing.

But Wall Street’s willingness to value SpaceX above Amazon and Microsoft highlights how investors increasingly view AI and space as the next major technology frontier. SpaceX also competes directly with Amazon’s Leo satellite broadband network business.

Whether SpaceX can sustain a valuation at these levels remains an open question. Some analysts and tech watchers have described the stock’s post-IPO run as highly speculative, noting that the company posted a loss following its merger with Musk’s xAI.

Still, the message from the market is clear: at least for now, investors see it as one of the defining technology companies of the decade.

Many investors have been kicking Microsoft (MSFT 1.43%) to the curb. It's down by almost 20% year to date as fellow tech stocks continue to rally. The State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF's 28% year-to-date rally truly captures how much Microsoft has fallen in the eyes of many investors.

However, it may be too early to count Microsoft out, especially since its strong fundamentals remain intact.

Image source: Getty Images.

Microsoft is still gaining market share thanks to AI Perhaps some growth investors have given up on Microsoft because it's not doubling revenue year over year like some of the top-performing AI stocks. However, it's still gaining ground on its peers thanks to AI, which has translated into steady financial growth.

Revenue inched up by 18% year over year in Microsoft's fiscal 2026 third quarter. CEO Satya Nadella said the company's AI business reached an annual revenue run rate of $37 billion, a 123% year-over-year increase. Microsoft Cloud once again remained the main growth driver, and it was up by 29% year over year.

Microsoft is also ahead of the curve in agentic AI, with Copilot and AI agents integrated into many Microsoft products. The company's AI investments have translated directly into rising revenue and profits. Microsoft's net income grew 23% year over year, demonstrating it can expand profit margins while gaining market share.

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The valuation is extremely low A stock's valuation influences whether it is a good deal. Microsoft's growth numbers wouldn't be impressive if the stock carried a 100 P/E ratio. That's a much higher valuation than some of the fastest-growing companies. However, Microsoft only trades at a 23.3 P/E ratio. The company's P/E ratio sat in the mid-30s for most of 2025.

Tech investors have been spoiled with mind-boggling revenue and net income growth rates. It makes Microsoft's numbers feel pedestrian, but that's the exact setup that creates deep value opportunities.

Grandview Research projects a 16% CAGR for the cloud computing market from now until 2033. Microsoft is outpacing that growth rate, and as cloud continues to grow, it will continue to make up an outsize percentage of Microsoft's total business. As that happens, some of Microsoft's underperforming segments won't drag the company down as much, translating into higher growth numbers moving forward.

Many "Magnificent Seven" stocks have lower P/E ratios than they had a few years ago. Microsoft is the second cheapest stock among these options, only being edged out by Meta Platforms' 20.6 P/E ratio, another stock that has been surprisingly discarded by many investors despite strong fundamentals.

Value isn't always recognized right away, and that gives Microsoft investors the opportunity to buy shares at bargain prices before the next rally.

Two artificial intelligence companies are likely going to ask public markets to buy into them at valuations in the vicinity of $1 trillion this fall. Both are unprofitable. Both are spending money at a rate that would terrify CFOs at any other company on earth. And yet the race between Anthropic and OpenAI to go public sets up one of the most consequential investment decisions individual investors will face in the next 12 months, because despite their similarities, the two companies are not the same bet.

Here's why: Anthropic filed its S-1 confidentially on June 1 following a $65 billion Series H round that valued the company at $965 billion. This briefly made it the most valuable start-up in the world, ahead of OpenAI. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate hit $47 billion in May, up from $4 billion just 14 months earlier. More importantly, Anthropic management has offered guidance predicting that it's headed for its first profitable quarter.

Image source: Getty Images.

OpenAI is valued at approximately $852 billion, with an annualized revenue run rate of roughly $30 billion. That sounds similar. But OpenAI's internal documents project it will book a loss of $14 billion in 2026 -- roughly three times its 2025 loss -- driven by compute costs, research hiring, and infrastructure expansion. The company's internal forecast is for cumulative losses of $44 billion through 2028, with profitability not arriving until 2029.

These are not small differences. One company is approaching its first profitable quarter. The other is on pace to burn $14 billion this year.

How Anthropic won already without anyone noticing The story that matters most isn't valuation -- it's where the money is coming from and why it keeps accelerating.

Anthropic's Claude Code -- a terminal-based artificial intelligence coding tool -- now holds 54% of the enterprise AI coding market. OpenAI holds 21%. That's not a close race. Coding accounts for 51% of all enterprise AI spending, and Anthropic collects the majority of it. Claude Code crossed $2.5 billion in annualized revenue as a stand-alone product. That single product line is larger than most public SaaS companies.

This matters for IPO investors because enterprise software is sticky in a way that consumer products are not. When a company's engineering team builds its entire development workflow around Claude Code, they aren't going to change tools because a competitor runs a campaign. Switching costs are real, and Anthropic is accumulating them at scale.

None of this means OpenAI is a bad investment. ChatGPT remains the most recognized AI brand in the world, with a far wider consumer footprint than Anthropic's. OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft (MSFT 1.43%) -- which through a complex structure holds a significant stake in OpenAI -- gives it a distribution channel that reaches virtually every enterprise on earth through Microsoft 365 and Azure. When OpenAI goes public, it will do so with brand recognition in the consumer market that Anthropic lacks, and a commercial relationship with Microsoft that keeps enterprise doors open regardless of what Claude Code is doing.

The problem is that brand recognition alone won't reduce its losses. OpenAI introduced ads into its free ChatGPT tier this year. This is a clear sign that the path to monetizing its consumer base is proving harder than the early growth suggested.

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Which one could deliver bigger returns? This is the honest answer: Neither is guaranteed to deliver gains, and anyone who tells you otherwise isn't reading the same S-1s you are.

But if I had to pick one heading into an IPO, I think Anthropic is the far more interesting investment right now. It grew its revenue run rate from $4 billion to $47 billion in 14 months, has captured the majority of the market for the highest-value AI use case, and is approaching profitability, which OpenAI isn't.

OpenAI may still win. It has more capital, a powerful brand, and its Microsoft relationship as a structural backstop. But Anthropic is winning the enterprise battle where it counts, in the tools engineers reach for every day.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)---- $MSFT #Hardware--Robbins LLP informs stockholders that a class action was filed on behalf of all investors who purchased or otherwise acquired Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) securities between May 1, 2025 and January 28, 2026. Microsoft is one of the largest technology conglomerates in the world. For more information, submit a form, email attorney Aaron Dumas, Jr., or give us a call at (800) 350-6003. The Allegations: Robbins LLP is Investigating Allegations that Microsoft Corp.

Credit: Angel Bena from Pexels Microsoft is changing how it charges for its software for the first time in two decades, moving to bill customers with a pay-as-you-go model each time they use its new AI agent.

The change, prompted by the soaring cost of artificial intelligence, came Tuesday as the company launched Copilot Cowork—an AI "agent" that can independently carry out office tasks like drafting documents, building spreadsheets and sending emails.

The tool still requires a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, but now every task it runs is billed separately, based on how much computing power it consumes.

Copilot Cowork is Microsoft's take on so-called "agentic" AI, a wave that has gripped Silicon Valley and turned the simple chatbot into an assistant capable of acting on a user's behalf.

Like rival tools on Google's and Amazon's enterprise platforms, it can be handed an assignment and run with it on its own, sometimes for several hours.

Microsoft says one customer used it to compare nearly 4,000 documents in a matter of hours, and that the assistant can prepare complex meetings by synthesizing emails, internal documentation and calendars.

The reason for the new pricing comes down to cost: Running these AI systems demands vastly more computing power than a search engine or a chatbot, and usage can vary widely from one user to the next.

The new plan will be "like you're filling up your gas tank at the pump," Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot and agents, told AFP.

Under the old system, "there's not one overarching user license that makes sense," he said, given that different users consume widely varying levels of computing power.

The turn is a notable one for Microsoft, whose office software has relied for some two decades on fixed, predictable subscription fees.

"This is a big evolution for us ... which has been a user subscription-based business for so long, for really like two decades," Lamanna acknowledged, calling the new approach "the only way to make the model work."

To guard against runaway bills, the service is disabled by default, and companies can cap spending per employee, per team or per department.

Microsoft is not alone in taking this route. Its programming subsidiary GitHub moved to usage-based billing in early June, sparking anger among developers, some of whom saw their bills shoot up.

Anthropic, one of the United States' AI flagships, announced in early June that its newest cutting-edge models would soon be billed by usage rather than included in subscriptions, even premium ones.

Another way to ease the bill: Users will be able to choose which model is used, more or less powerful and therefore more or less expensive.

At general availability, Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic models, including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, while customers on the "Frontier" tier can use the state-of-the-art GPT 5.5.

A "significantly cheaper" model, named Cowork 1, is coming soon for everyday tasks.

Who's behind this story?

Andrew Zinin Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

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NEW YORK, June 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of common stock of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) between May 1, 2025 and January 28, 2026, inclusive (the “Class Period”). A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 11, 2026.

SO WHAT: If you purchased Microsoft common stock during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Microsoft class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/microsoft-corporation/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 11, 2026. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved, at that time, the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs’ Bar. Many of the firm’s attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, throughout the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Microsoft’s Copilot family of products had experienced significant brand positioning, user experience, usage, data siloing, computational capacity, organizational, and interoperability problems; (2) Microsoft’s flagship proprietary AI model ranked well below competitors on a number of benchmark tests; (3) Microsoft needed to increase by billions of dollars its capital expenditures and divert graphics processing unit (“GPU”) and central processing unit (“CPU”) capacity away from fulfilling demand for its profitable Azure services in order to improve the competitive positioning of its critical Copilot family of products and increase its AI-related research and development (“R&D”); and (4) as a result, Microsoft had failed to convert a significant percentage of its commercial Microsoft 365 users to paid Copilot subscriptions and Microsoft’s Copilot offerings had lost market share to rival products, a trend that was increasing. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the Microsoft class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/microsoft-corporation/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor’s ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

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Contact Information:

        Laurence Rosen, Esq.
        Phillip Kim, Esq.
        The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
        275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor
        New York, NY 10016
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        www.rosenlegal.com

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SAN ANTONIO, June 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Rackspace Technology® (NASDAQ: RXT), a global enterprise AI infrastructure and solutions provider, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement for the phased deployment of an initial 30 MW footprint dedicated to AMD-based compute deployments across Rackspace's global data centers beginning in late 2026 through 2028. The agreement operationalizes the Memorandum of Understanding announced May 7, 2026, and establishes AMD as a strategic technology partner at the silicon layer of Rackspace's governed AI stack.

At full deployment, 30 MW of dedicated AMD compute across Rackspace's footprint will represent meaningful capacity to serve regulated enterprise workloads, including healthcare providers who have expressed early interest in accelerated compute for clinical AI and inference at scale. This collaboration incorporates both AMD Instinct™ GPUs (including MI355X, MI350P, and future successor solutions) and AMD EPYC™ CPUs inside an integrated Enterprise AI Cloud architecture, enabling Rackspace to route each workload to the right compute with full accountability for performance and outcomes end to end.

“Enterprises in regulated industries need AI infrastructure that is governed from the ground up, with one operator accountable for business outcomes, not a collection of vendors each owning a piece," said Gajen Kandiah, CEO, Rackspace Technology. "This collaboration combines the right compute with the right operating model and delivers something the market hasn't offered before: a governed AI stack with one accountable partner from silicon to outcomes."

“As enterprise AI evolves, customers need infrastructure that can deliver the right mix of accelerated and general-purpose compute for each workload,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Compute and Enterprise AI, AMD. “By bringing together leadership AMD AI compute solutions and Rackspace’s governed cloud operating model, we are helping regulated enterprises deploy high-performance AI infrastructure with the openness, scalability and accountability needed to run AI at enterprise scale.”

Both companies expect to dedicate sales and marketing resources to identify and engage enterprise customers for AMD compute-powered infrastructure, with each company committing personnel to jointly develop and pursue customer opportunities across regulated industries.

This agreement will accelerate delivery of the four integrated capabilities announced with the MOU: Enterprise AI Cloud, Enterprise Inference Engine, Inference as a Service, and Bare Metal AMD Instinct, offering a complete, governed stack from bare metal compute through fully operated inference. Together, the companies aim to establish a new category of managed enterprise AI infrastructure that offers enterprises an alternative to the bare metal model. The shift from AI experiments to agentic workflows running inside core enterprise systems is accelerating demand for exactly the kind of governed, accountable infrastructure this collaboration is built to deliver.

An investor call has been scheduled for June 16th at 8:30 am ET to provide further remarks by Rackspace Technology's CEO and CFO and to take questions:

Rackspace Investor Call:
Date: 06/16/2026
Start time: 8:30 am EDT

To listen to the live webcast or access the replay following the webcast, please visit: https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/jux5yi7s.

To obtain a dial-in number, please pre-register at the following link: https://register-conf.media-server.com/register/BI3bfaa99f000b4fefa9f6c101e4bd7fc8

Registrants will receive dial-in information and a PIN allowing them to access the live call.

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology® (NASDAQ: RXT) is the operator of the full enterprise AI stack from governed private cloud to AI inference and agents in production. With an Outcomes-as-a-Service model built on secure infrastructure, data foundations, and forward-deployed engineering, Rackspace delivers business results for regulated and mission-critical industries where governance, sovereignty, and uptime are non-negotiable. Learn more at www.rackspace.com.

About AMD

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimized CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at http://www.amd.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning Rackspace Technology and AMD, including without limitation, the ability to deploy 30 MW of AMD AI compute contemplated by the agreement, which may not be achieved in full or at all, or may be achieved on a timeline materially different from that described herein; the anticipated benefits and performance of GPU and CPU compute deployments; the expected delivery of Enterprise AI Cloud, Enterprise Inference Engine, Inference as a Service, and Bare Metal AMD Instinct capabilities; anticipated end-customer demand; the expected commercial and financial benefits of the collaboration to each company; and the parties' respective outlooks on the AI industry. While the parties have executed a definitive agreement establishing a commercial framework for the collaboration, individual deployment authorizations are subject to separate execution and certain commercial terms, including pricing and financial parameters, remain subject to further agreement between the parties. Any third-party financing required to implement planned deployments is subject to availability on terms acceptable to Rackspace in its sole discretion. There can be no assurance that deployments will occur on the anticipated timeline, that financing will be obtained, or that the anticipated benefits of the collaboration will be realized. Forward-looking statements are commonly identified by words such as "aim," "anticipate," "believe," "build," "create," "enable," "envision," "establish," "expect," "explore," "may," "intend," "plan," "position," "project," "to be," "will," "working toward," "would," and other terms with similar meaning and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates, and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a description of these and other risks and uncertainties, please refer to Rackspace Technology's and AMD's respective filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release. Neither company undertakes any obligation to update or revise these statements except as required by law.

Media Contacts

Rackspace Technology:
Will Link
[email protected]

AMD:

Aaron Grabein
AMD Communications
+1 512-602-8950
[email protected]

Rackspace Technology strikes a deal with Advanced Micro Devices to use AMD chips in its AI data centers.

AMD acquired MEXT to address AI memory constraints, potentially expanding effective memory capacity by 2x-4x without new hardware. Management doubled server CPU TAM from $60 billion to over $120 billion as agentic AI increases memory-intensive workloads. AMD is building a photonics ecosystem through Enosemi, Ayar Labs, and GlobalFoundries to secure future CW laser supply.