Key Takeaways Tesla faces an NHTSA probe into certification of nearly 1,000 Cybercabs for federal safety compliance.The Cybercab lacks a steering wheel, pedals and conventional mirrors, challenging existing vehicle standards.NHTSA is weighing rule changes as Tesla expands its robotaxi service beyond its initial Austin deployment. Tesla, Inc. (TSLA - Free Report) faces a regulatory probe after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into the certification of nearly 1,000 Cybercabs, raising questions about how the driverless vehicles meet federal safety standards.
The inquiry comes as Tesla begins commercial deployment of a limited number of two-seat Cybercabs in Austin, TX. The company plans to gradually expand the service by adding more vehicles and eventually bringing the robotaxis to other markets.
At the heart of the investigation is how Tesla certified a vehicle designed to operate without a human driver despite lacking conventional controls found in traditional road vehicles.
The Cybercab lacks a permanently attached steering wheel, brake pedal, accelerator pedal or conventional mirrors. NHTSA is reviewing the process and technical information Tesla used to certify the vehicles as compliant with federal motor vehicle safety standards. The agency will also examine how Tesla determined that certain standards did not apply to the Cybercab.
Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The investigation comes as Tesla seeks to make the Cybercab the foundation of a larger robotaxi business, while regulations governing vehicles without traditional human controls continue to evolve.
Under current rules, manufacturers generally self-certify compliance with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. However, the Cybercab's unconventional design creates additional challenges because many existing standards were developed for vehicles operated by a person seated behind a steering wheel.
NHTSA has been considering changes to accommodate autonomous vehicles. In June, the agency proposed eliminating the requirement for conventional manual brake pedals in certain self-driving vehicles and has been evaluating other regulatory changes that could enable autonomous vehicles to operate without equipment designed for human drivers.
The Cybercab probe is notable because regulators are working toward rules that could make vehicles with such designs easier to deploy, while Tesla has already applied its interpretation of the existing framework. TSLA carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) at present.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Updates on Autonomous Driving Efforts by Other AutomakersIn March, Lucid Group, Inc. (LCID - Free Report) unveiled its robotaxi concept, the Lucid Lunar, a two-seat vehicle designed without a steering wheel or pedals. The company is also nearing an agreement with Uber Technologies, Inc. UBER to develop a robotaxi based on an upcoming midsize Lucid model. Meanwhile, Lucid is partnering with autonomous driving firm Nuro to develop a self-driving version of its Gravity SUV, which is expected to join Uber’s network in the San Francisco area by the end of this year.
Rivian Automotive, Inc. (RIVN - Free Report) is also expanding its presence in the autonomous ride-hailing market through a partnership with Uber. In March, Uber announced plans to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian as part of an agreement to deploy as many as 50,000 Rivian robotaxis across multiple countries by 2031. The deal includes an initial $300 million investment, subject to regulatory approval. Rivian and Uber expect the R2-based robotaxis to operate exclusively through Uber’s ride-hailing and delivery platform across 25 cities in the United States, Canada and Europe, with San Francisco and Miami targeted as the first markets in 2028.
Tesla’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesTesla has underperformed the Zacks Automotive – Domestic industry in the last six months. Tesla has lost 11.2% compared with the industry’s decline of 5.8%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
From a valuation perspective, Tesla appears overvalued. Going by its price/sales ratio, the company is trading at a forward sales multiple of 12.24, higher than the industry’s 3.24.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 EPS has moved down 31 cents and 26 cents, respectively, in the past 60 days.
Key Takeaways Tesla registrations jumped 279% in France and 104% in Denmark during August.Registrations fell 79% in both Norway and Spain, while Sweden, Portugal and Italy also declined.Tesla's European sales recovery has benefited from easier comparisons, incentives and EV interest. Tesla’s (TSLA - Free Report) August vehicle registrations across key European markets delivered a mixed performance, with sharp increases in France and Denmark offset by steep declines in Norway, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and Italy.
New Tesla registrations, which are generally used as an indicator of sales, jumped 279% year over year in France and 104% in Denmark, per the data from France’s PFA and Denmark’s bilstatistik.dk.
However, registrations plunged 79% in both Norway and Spain, while Sweden, Portugal and Italy recorded declines of 41%, 37% and 36%, respectively, per the data from national automotive industry organizations OFV, Mobility Sweden, ANFAC and ACAP, and Italy's Transport Ministry.
In Norway, the steep decline may partly reflect a difficult comparison with last year, when buyers accelerated purchases ahead of a fiscal policy change scheduled for the end of 2025, per the European auto market analyst Matthias Schmidt.
Tesla’s European sales have generally recovered this year following two consecutive years of declines. The improvement has been supported by easier year-over-year comparisons, higher fuel prices, government incentives and increasing consumer interest in electric vehicles. Registration data from the United Kingdom and Germany, Europe’s two largest auto markets, is expected later this week. TSLA carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) at present.
You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Global Sales Data of Other AutomakersBYD Company Limited (BYDDY - Free Report) reported strong growth in August, selling 440,293 new energy vehicles (NEVs), up 17.8% year over year and 5.03% from July. The figure marked BYD’s highest monthly sales total of the year and extended its recovery with a fourth consecutive year-over-year increase. Passenger NEV sales rose 16.7% year over year to 433,384 units, while BYD’s commercial NEV sales jumped 225.1% to 6,909 units, despite declining from July.
Geely Automobile Holdings Limited (GELHY - Free Report) also recorded another increase in monthly sales, with August deliveries reaching 270,194 vehicles, which increased 8.01% year over year and marked its strongest monthly performance this year. Geely’s overseas shipments were particularly strong, surging 205.2% to 110,094 vehicles. Exports hit a record for the eighth consecutive month and represented about 41% of Geely’s total sales, helping offset continued weakness in its domestic market.
Tesla’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesTesla has underperformed the Zacks Automotive – Domestic industry in the last six months. Tesla has lost 11.2% compared with the industry’s decline of 5.8%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
From a valuation perspective, Tesla appears overvalued. Going by its price/sales ratio, the company is trading at a forward sales multiple of 12.24, higher than the industry’s 3.24.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 and 2027 EPS has moved down 31 cents and 26 cents, respectively, in the past 60 days.
Tesla Shares Jump as Cybercab Puts Autonomous Driving Back in Focus Summary
Tesla is betting that purpose-built autonomous vehicles can help scale its ride-hailing operation and create a new growth engine
Tesla ( TSLA ) shares gained about 2% as investors assessed the company's push beyond electric vehicles and into autonomous transportation, according to a Sept. 3 company update.
The latest step came with the introduction of the Cybercab in Austin. Tesla designed the vehicle specifically for autonomous ride-hailing, with seating for two and without conventional driver controls such as pedals or a steering wheel.
The new model could give Tesla a different cost structure for its robotaxi operations. A purpose-built vehicle may require fewer components than a standard passenger car, potentially helping the company manage expenses as it expands the service.
Tesla began operating robotaxis in Austin in June last year and has since added other U.S. locations. The service currently uses Model Y vehicles equipped with its Full Self-Driving system.
Investors are also watching whether Tesla can turn the robotaxi operation into a larger source of revenue and profit.
Achieving that would depend on fleet growth, software performance and vehicle utilization, while competition and regulatory hurdles remain important risks. The company is also developing humanoid robots as another potential growth business.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Anticipation had been building for weeks leading up to last Thursday, and rightly so. Tesla Inc. NASDAQ: TSLA was finally set to launch its Cybercab, the purpose-built robotaxi meant to propel it to the front of the self-driving race, and investors had been sending the shares higher, expecting a landmark moment.
Tesla Today
$368.16 +14.08 (+3.98%)
As of 09/8/2026 04:00 PM Eastern
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Instead, Thursday’s event landed with a thud. There was no livestream, no appearance from Elon Musk, and crucially, no detail on how Tesla intends to price, scale, or make money from the service. The market's reaction was swift, with the stock sliding nearly 8% from its intraday high into the long holiday weekend, snuffing out what had been shaping up as a promising rally.
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Tesla shares have steadied a little since, but the damage was done, and the stock remains stuck in its months-long downtrend.
Still, with the shares still up around 20% from July's low, it's worth asking whether this stumble marks a serious setback for Tesla's robotaxi ambitions, or whether the dip is actually a buying opportunity.
A Launch That Raised More Questions Than It AnsweredInvestors' core frustration seems to have been a lack of substance. Rather than the bold statement of intent they’d hoped for, the launch amounted to a limited rollout in a small, tightly defined zone of Austin, with barely any of the information the market needed to get excited about its progress.
There were no figures on fares, no targets for fleet growth, and no sense of the all-important economics: cost per mile, utilization rates, or the revenue each vehicle might generate. Without those numbers, it’s hard to tell if the service is really scaling toward a commercial business or merely inching from demonstration into cautious testing.
For a company whose valuation rests so heavily on the promise of autonomy, that absence of hard detail like this was always going to disappoint. The market wanted to see a business take flight; instead, it saw a carefully controlled experiment.
The Regulatory CloudIf the muted launch was the first blow, the second came less than a day later. On Friday, it emerged that federal safety regulators had opened an investigation into the Cybercab, and their focus fell on the vehicle's most radical feature, the one thing that makes its autonomy possible: its complete lack of a steering wheel and pedals.
That headline matters because the Cybercab was never intended to be a modified conventional car like some of its competitors. The fact that its stripped-back design is raising fresh safety concerns strikes at the very thing that was supposed to set it apart. Adding to the uncertainty, it appears some states may push back on Tesla's decision to rely on cameras alone for navigation, rather than using the additional radar and laser sensors favored by some rivals.
None of this is necessarily fatal in the long run, and other robotaxi operators have navigated similar reviews before winning approval. But it introduces a real risk of delay and reminds us that Tesla's path to a nationwide network of self-driving taxis will be bumpy.
Disciplined, or Falling Behind?The limited scale of last week's launch also caught many investors off guard, and it raises a simple question: Are Tesla's robotaxi ambitions definitely on track, or are they being left behind? Both camps make a fair case.
To the optimists, Tesla's narrow rollout is exactly the right call. By starting small in its home city, Tesla can gather data, refine its systems, and avoid the kind of high-profile early failure that could set the whole project back. Management has made this clear, stressing its desire to get things right before expanding into bigger markets, a sensible priority.
The opposing view is less charitable, however. It holds that the limited launch underlines how far behind Tesla remains. Its best-known rival, Alphabet’s Waymo, has already logged hundreds of millions of autonomous miles and is providing hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week across numerous markets, a scale that dwarfs Tesla's tiny Austin footprint.
Making Sense of It AllTesla Stock Forecast Today12-Month Stock Price Forecast:
$401.74
9.12% Upside
Hold
Based on 45 Analyst Ratings
Current Price$368.16High Forecast$600.00Average Forecast$401.74Low Forecast$25.28Tesla Stock Forecast Details
In truth, last Thursday's launch was neither the triumph the bulls wanted, nor the disaster the bears feared. It was an early milestone, proof that Tesla is edging from concept toward a real, deployable product, but not firm evidence it can build a business to rival the established leaders.
That being said, Tesla's longer-term vision for its Cybercab is still compelling. By building the vehicle, the software, and the charging network itself, it could one day run a robotaxi service far more cheaply than rivals reliant on expensive third-party hardware.
But that’s a bet on the future, and last week did little to bring it closer. The stock's negative reaction reflects that disappointment, and it’s perhaps no surprise that Tesla carries a MarketBeat consensus rating of Hold. For now, Tesla appears to have taken a promising first step, but it still has a lot of work to do to fully convince the market it can deliver on its Robotaxi ambitions.
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A viral video showed a man repeatedly causing a Tesla Cybercab to slam on its brakes by jumping into the middle of the road – raising concerns that pranksters could pose a serious problem for the new driverless vehicles.
The video, which has racked up 1.3 million views and counting on X, shows the unnamed, paunchy man hopping into the street in front of a moving Cybercab and then back onto the sidewalk.
The robotaxi repeatedly slams on the brakes before eventually sitting in the middle of the street with its hazard lights on while a standard car with a driver pulls around.
A man repeatedly jumped in front of a moving Tesla Cybercab, according to a video on social media. @WorldlyReviewer / X It’s one of the first hiccups to pop up since Elon Musk released gold-colored Cybercabs into the streets of Austin, Tex., last week – a generation of autonomous vehicles with no steering wheels, no brake pedals and no straightforward way for humans to take control in an emergency.
Jesse Cohen, senior financial analyst at Investing.com, re-posted the video online and warned that it could be “a big issue going forward with Tesla robotaxis.”
“Any attention seeking [sic] lunatic can continue to do this with zero accountability and delay peoples’ rides and cause accidents,” he wrote in a post on X.
Other concerned social media users worried that a rise in anti-Tesla ne’er-do-wells could cause a spate of traffic accidents.
Elon Musk released gold Tesla Cybercabs into the streets of Austin, Tex., last week. REUTERS “The types of people who do this are very dumb. Sadly, posting a video will likely give more dumb people ‘an idea,’” one person wrote in a social media post.
Another said: “There should be a reasonable penalty for this.”
Some called on the Austin Police Department to take action.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (above) has said Tesla will focus on artificial intelligence and robotics. REUTERS Musk’s automaker has been testing robotaxis in several markets around the country, all but the latest model equipped with traditional steering controls with a human driver on-board. The Austin launch marked the first fully autonomous rollout.
Immediately following the debut, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an audit into Tesla’s certification that its new Cybercab meets federal safety standards.
The Cybercab has been lauded as a key facet of the company’s long-term path to growth as it has struggled with slumping sales of its electric cars.
Musk has said the company will transform into a broader tech firm focusing on artificial intelligence and humanoid robots.
Andrew Sather says most investors only understand one of the two engines driving stock returns, and missing the second one is exactly why a name as familiar as Coca-Cola keeps catching people off guard.
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The least exciting name on your watchlist can outrun the flashiest one when the market has priced in nothing and the business quietly grows. Andrew Sather, co-host of The Investing for Beginners Podcast, argues that most investors understand only one of the two engines driving stock returns. Engine one is straightforward: the stock roughly tracks a growing business. Engine two pays better and confuses more people: you buy a stock whose growth the market refuses to acknowledge, and you collect the difference when sentiment catches up.
Sather says he is “starting to lean more towards” the second engine again because “there’s just more opportunities there.” His worked example is Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO | KO Price Prediction), a name so often dismissed as dead money that the framework has room to embarrass its critics. The wrinkle is that the market may already be recalibrating. Shares are up sharply this year, so the real question becomes whether the re-rating still has room to run.
Two Engines of Return Every stock return comes from either the business or the multiple. If earnings grow and the price/earnings ratio holds steady, the stock tracks earnings. If earnings hold steady and the multiple expands, the stock rises anyway.
Sather framed it this way: “it’s not always margin of safety, it’s not always high growth. It’s which combination of the two at any given point in time is going to lead to higher returns.” One factor without the other tends to disappoint.
What Margin of Safety Looks Like in Practice Margin of safety is the gap between what a business is likely worth and what the market is charging you today. You look for durable free cash flow, a share count that isn’t drifting higher, and a story most people find boring.
Coca-Cola’s free cash flow yield sits around 1.40%, and the forward dividend is $2.12. The safety comes from durability: 63 consecutive years of dividend increases and $8.8 billion paid in 2025.
Coca-Cola as the Worked Example Sather characterizes the dead-money bucket as businesses growing 4% to 6% a year, and Coca-Cola’s second quarter outran that. Revenue was $13.38 billion, up 6.7% year over year, and adjusted EPS of $0.97 against a $0.9323 consensus marked the fifth straight beat.
Guidance was raised: organic revenue growth of about 5%, comparable EPS growth of 9% to 10%, and free cash flow near $12.4 billion. The full detail sits in the Q2 2026 release filed with the SEC.
The stock has responded. Shares closed at $88.07 on September 4, up 27.67% year to date and 32.72% over the past year. Whatever dead money meant a few years ago, it does not describe the stock today.
Operating margin expanded to 34.9% from 34.1%, and net debt leverage sits at 1.4 times EBITDA. Trademark Coca-Cola volume grew 5% globally, the strongest in 17 years excluding COVID recovery, helped by a FIFA World Cup activation across 180+ markets.
At a P/E of 29x, the multiple no longer looks apologetic. If Sather’s thesis was that the market underappreciated the growth, the market has partly caught up.
When the Framework Fails A cheap stock can stay cheap, and underappreciated often turns out to mean declining. Tell the difference by checking whether unit volumes are growing, and not simply revenue.
Coca-Cola’s global unit case volume rose 5%, led by India, China, the US, and Brazil. That confirms demand is real. When volumes shrink while price carries the top line, the runway is finite.
Applying the Two-Factor Check to Your Watchlist For any stock, ask two questions. Is the business actually growing on volume and cash flow, or only on headline revenue? Is the multiple you are paying reasonable against a bearish version of that growth?
If both answers are yes, you own both engines. If growth is present but the multiple is stretched, you are paying for delivery with zero room for error. If the multiple is cheap and growth is absent, you are hoping sentiment shifts before fundamentals confirm the story.
Is KO Stock a Buy? Coca-Cola today reads as a hold. The business is executing, guidance was raised, and the balance sheet is enviable, although the re-rating Sather’s framework anticipated is already visible in the stock. A 29 P/E on a mid-single-digit organic grower leaves a thinner margin of safety than the dead-money label suggests.
Against PepsiCo, which has wrestled with volume declines, Coca-Cola is the stronger operator right now. New capital at these prices needs patience; existing holders collect a 2.32% yield backed by 63 straight annual increases, the kind of streak we screened for in our free Dividend Kings guide.
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Coca-Cola just handed retirees their 64th consecutive dividend raise, but the share price surge this year quietly undercut part of that win. Whether this checks out as a buy, hold, or trim depends entirely on which side of the trade…
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If you own Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO | KO Price Prediction) for the income, the date that matters this week is September 15, 2026. That is the next ex-dividend cutoff, and it is the last chance to be on the books for the current payout at the newly raised rate. For a 67-year-old drawing supplemental income from a dividend stock, this is the kind of housekeeping date that quietly determines whether a check lands in October or not.
Coca-Cola declared the higher rate back on February 19, 2026, lifting the quarterly dividend from $0.51 to $0.53 per share. That works out to a forward annual payout of $2.12. It also extended one of the longest income streaks on the U.S. market: 63 consecutive years of dividend increases as of 2025, now 64 with this year’s raise.
Why the Raise Feels Smaller Than It Looks Here is the part that trips up retirees comparing statements from January to September. The payout went up, but the yield on new money went down, because the share price ran hard. Coca-Cola started the year at $69 and now trades near $88, a year-to-date gain of about 28%. Over one year the stock is up nearly 33%.
The current dividend yield sits around 2.3%. A buyer in January was locking in a materially higher yield on cost than a buyer today, even though the dollar payout is the same $2.12 either way. Two things are true at the same time. The company gave you a raise. The market took back part of the income appeal by bidding the shares up.
What Really Backs the Check A 2.3% yield is only useful if you trust it will keep growing. On that score, the coverage picture is comfortable. Coca-Cola paid $8.8 billion in dividends during 2025 against net income of $13.1 billion. Management guided to full-year 2026 free cash flow of roughly $12.4 billion, and the CFO flagged that “Our balance sheet remains strong with our net debt leverage of 1.4 times EBITDA, which is below our target range of 2 to 2.5 times.” Volume grew 5% in Q2, and comparable EPS is guided to 9% to 10% growth for the year.
Translation for a retiree: the dividend is well protected. Coverage is deep, cash generation is expanding, and the balance sheet has room. The BODYARMOR trademark impairment and the ongoing IRS tax case are real, but neither threatens the payout.
New Money Versus Old Money This is where the article earns its keep. The right move depends on which side of the trade you are on.
If you already own the shares: keep collecting. Your yield on cost is whatever it is, the payout just rose, and the tax treatment on qualified dividends stays favorable. For a retiree in the 12% or 22% federal bracket, qualified dividends generally get taxed at 0% or 15%, which is why holding a Dividend King in a taxable account has always been friendlier than pulling the same dollars from a traditional IRA.
If you are deploying new retirement cash today: understand you are buying a 26x earnings consumer staple at a 2.3% yield, with an analyst target of $95 that leaves modest room from here. Broad dividend ETFs currently offer higher starting yields with none of the single-stock concentration risk. At 67, with a portfolio you are meant to live on, one beverage company should not be the whole income engine no matter how long the streak.
Two Things to Do This Month Confirm your position size. If Coca-Cola is more than roughly 5% of your income-generating assets, the streak is doing you a disservice by encouraging concentration. Positions above that threshold leave a retirement income plan hostage to one beverage company’s execution. Mind the ex-dividend date. To collect the October payment at the raised $0.53 rate, you need to own the shares before September 15, 2026. Selling on or after that date still gets you the check. The common mistake here is treating a 64-year raise streak as a reason to add more at any price. The streak is a quality signal about durability, and it says nothing about the price you pay today. A position sized to enjoy the raises works; a position large enough to dominate a retirement income plan concentrates too much of the outcome in one beverage company.
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The market often misinterprets the structural evolution of logistics networks, pricing them on legacy models rather than future capabilities. This dynamic is currently playing out with Uber Technologies, Inc. NYSE: UBER. On Sept. 3, Uber initiated its first supervised autonomous ride-hailing service in London. By deploying all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles powered by Wayve's AI Driver, Uber is demonstrating a clear pivot in its business model.
Rather than absorbing the heavy capital expenditures required to manufacture proprietary autonomous vehicles, Uber is positioning itself as the commercialization and distribution layer for third-party technology. This asset-light approach allows Uber to bridge the gap toward long-term autonomous margins while avoiding the risks of automotive manufacturing. Investors assessing the current valuation might notice a disconnect between the traditional human-driven logistics multiple and the highly scalable, AI-integrated hybrid network being built.
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Steering Clear of ManufacturingUnderstanding the mechanics of the Wayve partnership reveals why this strategy appeals to institutional capital. Wayve utilizes an AV2.0 approach, relying on mapless, hardware-agnostic artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from complex environments rather than relying on traditional hand-coded rules. This adaptability is critical in a regulatory and geographical maze like London, where mapping every variable is nearly impossible.
The structural advantage for Uber rests on the deliberate avoidance of hardware development. Developing self-driving cars requires billions in research, development, and manufacturing overhead. By supplying the localized rider demand and the routing network, Uber allows partners like Wayve to focus on the intelligence while original equipment manufacturers like Ford NYSE: F and Nissan OTCMKTS: NSANY handle the hardware. Over 140,000 London riders have already opted in to the service, suggesting that consumer adoption barriers may be lower than previously anticipated.
This strategy extends well beyond a single city. Uber participated in Wayve's recent $1.5 billion funding round, aligning financial interests to secure global scaling rights across 12 planned markets. With upcoming integration plans for the Nissan LEAF and partnerships with over 30 external autonomous developers, Uber is on track to facilitate autonomous trips in up to 15 cities by the end of 2026. This allows Uber to scale its autonomous offerings globally without the traditional drag of severe capital expenditures.
Refueling With Free Cash FlowAn asset-light model relies heavily on network density and the ability to generate liquidity without internal cash burn. Recent financial disclosures highlight how this transition is already reflected in profitability metrics. During the second quarter of 2026, Uber generated about $2.8 billion in free cash flow and reported gross bookings of nearly $58.0 billion. This represents a 24% year-over-year increase in bookings, providing the exact liquidity framework required to fund external artificial intelligence integrations.
The ongoing shift toward third-party integration directly supports expansion of the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margin. Adjusted EBITDA grew 33% year-over-year to $2.8 billion for the quarter, pushing the margin to 4.9%, up from 4.5% a year prior. By letting venture capital and external partners absorb the research and development costs of autonomous driving, Uber preserves its cash flow to reinvest in market share and core platform density.
This density strategy is evident in concurrent corporate actions, such as the ongoing €41.50-per-share (approx. $46) takeover offer for Delivery Hero. Acquiring complementary logistics networks widens the multi-vertical distribution funnel. A denser network of food and freight delivery creates immediate, practical deployment routes for future autonomous fleets. This allows Uber to maximize vehicle utilization rates across a 24-hour cycle, routing autonomous cars for passenger transport during peak hours and logistics delivery during off-peak times.
Valuations Ready to AccelerateCapital flows often lead retail sentiment, and the structural support for Uber rests heavily on institutional accumulation. Institutional investors currently hold roughly 80% of the public float. Over the trailing 12 months, these buyers initiated inflows of nearly $39.12 billion, far outweighing outflows of roughly $10.36 billion. Entities like the Virginia Retirement Systems hold large positions, suggesting a long-term horizon aligned with the autonomous transition.
Current Price$73.06High Forecast$150.00Average Forecast$104.49Low Forecast$72.00Uber Technologies Stock Forecast Details
From a valuation perspective, Uber trades near $76 with a trailing price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio around 16.8. Compared with broader technology-sector platforms that often command multiples well above 30, the current pricing implies the market still views Uber as a human-reliant logistics business. As the percentage of autonomous trips increases, the marginal cost of routing a vehicle could fall substantially, shifting the business's unit economics.
Sell-side analysts appear to be factoring in this evolution in margins. Of 42 analysts covering Uber Technologies, Inc., 34 maintain a Buy rating, resulting in a consensus of Moderate Buy. A consensus price target near $104 suggests an anticipated upside of roughly 36% from current trading levels.
The recent London rollout serves as tangible proof of concept for the broader analyst community, validating the operational feasibility of replacing human drivers with software in highly congested urban environments.
Plotting the Next DestinationThe integration of Wayve's technology in the United Kingdom provides a clear template for how ride-hailing networks plan to achieve long-term profitability. Transitioning directly from human drivers to fully autonomous fleets carries severe regulatory and operational risks. By steadily phasing in third-party autonomous vehicles to operate alongside human drivers, Uber ensures consistent reliability while gradually lowering the overall cost per trip.
This hybrid approach de-risks the technological rollout while maintaining the supply density required to serve global demand. The combination of strong free cash flow, deep institutional backing, and an expanding global footprint of autonomous partners creates a compelling fundamental setup. Uber is positioning itself not as a car manufacturer, but as the essential operating system for global movement. Investors analyzing the shifting mobility sector might consider adding Uber to their watchlist as the market begins to factor in the long-term margin expansion associated with its software distribution capabilities.
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Uber's profits doubled and free cash flow surged past $10 billion, yet the stock keeps sliding while rivals circle the ride-hailing throne. The real question is whether Wall Street is seeing something bulls are missing, or pricing in a robotaxi…
Uber (NYSE: UBER | UBER Price Prediction) shares were last seen trading at $75.76, leaving the ride-hail and delivery platform down 7.3% year to date and off 17.6% over the trailing year. On the September 6 episode of The Investor’s Podcast (We Study Billionaires), titled “TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum: Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong?” hosts Shawn O’Malley and Daniel Mahncke argued the operating business moved sharply in the opposite direction of the tape.
Valuation Compression While Fundamentals Improved O’Malley framed the disconnect this way: “Uber’s fundamentals have dramatically improved: profits doubled, margins swung 55 percentage points, and free cash flow hit $10B, yet the stock is flat as its valuation multiple was cut in half.” Reported operating income climbed from $2.799 billion in fiscal 2024 to $5.565 billion in fiscal 2025, and Uber’s Q2 2026 filing logged net income of $2.39 billion, up 76.7% year over year, alongside free cash flow of $2.79 billion.
Against that backdrop, Uber has a market capitalization of roughly $154.7 billion and a trailing price-to-earnings ratio near 17. A multiple of operating profits simply measures how many years of current profit an investor is paying for. The hosts’ complaint is that the number contracted while the profit stream expanded.
Autonomy Scale Gap Is Wider Than Headlines Suggest The hosts spent most of the episode on autonomous vehicles (AV), because that is what the equity market appears to be pricing. Their point is that self-driving software and demand aggregation are separate problems. Demand aggregation is the work of matching millions of riders to available cars in real time across cities, weather, and payment systems. Waymo is scaling admirably, yet its weekly ride volume pales in comparison to Uber’s daily trip count, and total global autonomous trips per year are dwarfed by Uber’s annual trip growth alone. Uber reported 3.9 billion trips in Q2 2026 and 208 million monthly active platform consumers. Robotaxis still have to earn their way through rainstorms, blizzards, chaotic traffic, and developing-world roads, not just the pristine grids of San Francisco and Austin.
Mahncke sized the actual exposure directly: “If you decompose Uber’s profits and look at the top 20 US cities where robotaxis realistically operate at scale, that’s effectively 9% of Uber’s profits that are genuinely exposed to robotaxi competition in the near to medium term, maybe five to ten years.”
Bear Case the Hosts Actually Take Seriously The hosts do not wave away the threat. Waymo studied Uber’s consumer base and demand aggregation and chose to build its own app, and it is ending exclusive arrangements in Austin and Atlanta. Mahncke noted that Waymo “can afford to have terrible fleet utilization for years if that’s what it takes to displace Uber” given roughly $16 billion of fresh capital and Alphabet backing. Their real fear is a capital-burning subsidy war that produces a bleak picture for shareholder returns, and one host openly admitted he expects to keep questioning his own conviction as the story develops.
Uber’s Counter-Move on AV Partners Uber’s answer is to court every capable AV supplier. The company has grown its partner roster from 14 to more than 20 companies, including Rivian, Nuro, Nvidia, Baidu, and Pony AI, and committed more than $100 million to AV charging infrastructure. If self-driving software becomes a commodity input, meaning many providers offer roughly interchangeable capability at declining prices, the platform aggregating global demand becomes the scarce asset. Meanwhile, Uber returned capital aggressively, with $6.5 billion of buybacks in fiscal 2025 and a $20 billion repurchase authorization. Our coverage of the Q3 2025 reaction captured the same pattern of strong results meeting a skeptical tape.
What Would Falsify the Contrarian Bull Case The hosts call this their most strongly held contrarian opinion. Two developments would break the thesis: Waymo or another rival reaching Uber-scale ride volume globally would collapse the demand-aggregation moat, and a sustained price war that Uber must fund from its own cash flow would consume the buyback capacity that has supported per-share metrics. Absent those, the podcast’s argument is that the equity is priced for an autonomy apocalypse that is not arriving on the assumed schedule.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Tesla Inc‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Cybercab has finally moved from concept to commercial service, but its biggest competitor isn’t another automaker—it’s Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER).
While Tesla is building a vertically integrated robotaxi business from the ground up, Uber is assembling an autonomous fleet through partnerships, setting up two very different paths to the future of ride-hailing.
Tesla’s Cybercab StrategyTesla’s robotaxi ambitions center on owning the entire ecosystem. The company develops the vehicle, the autonomous driving software, and the ride-hailing platform, allowing it to capture more of the economics if the model scales successfully.
That vision is now being tested in Austin, where Tesla has launched limited public Cybercab rides using its purpose-built, steering wheel–free vehicle. The rollout is still small, but it marks Tesla’s first attempt to commercialize a robotaxi service built around a vehicle designed exclusively for autonomous ride-hailing.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that autonomy could eventually reduce ride costs to a fraction of today’s prices by eliminating the need for human drivers. The company’s long-term thesis depends on achieving enough scale for those lower operating costs to outweigh the substantial upfront investment in vehicles and AI.
Read Next
Uber’s Robotaxi NetworkUber is pursuing a fundamentally different strategy.
Rather than building autonomous vehicles, the ride-hailing giant has positioned itself as a marketplace for robotaxis. The company has announced partnerships with multiple autonomous driving developers, giving riders access to different autonomous fleets through a familiar app., including:
Alphabet Inc‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google’s Waymo Wayve Amazon.com Inc‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Zoox Baidu, Inc‘s (NASDAQ:BIDU) Apollo Go and Nebius Group N.V.‘s (NASDAQ:NBIS) Avride Trending
That approach allows Uber to benefit from advances in self-driving technology without bearing the cost and execution risk of developing its own vehicles.
The contrast is already visible in Austin, where Tesla’s Cybercab service has begun operating.
Early rider comparisons shared online show Cybercab fares on some routes costing more than equivalent Uber rides, although pricing remains highly dynamic and reflects Tesla’s limited fleet size during the initial rollout. Those snapshots offer only a point-in-time comparison, not a definitive measure of long-term economics.
Read Next
What Investors Should WatchThe robotaxi race may ultimately be less about who builds the best autonomous vehicle than who controls the customer relationship.
Tesla is betting that owning the vehicle, software and platform will create a durable competitive advantage as autonomous driving matures. Uber, meanwhile, is betting that riders will keep valuing a single marketplace that offers access to multiple robotaxi providers, regardless of who manufactures the vehicles.
For investors, the key metric is unlikely to be today’s fare comparison. Instead, it will be whether Tesla can scale Cybercab production quickly enough to lower costs, or whether Uber’s asset-light platform model proves more resilient in capitalizing on the autonomous transportation market.
Tesla's expanding robotaxi footprint is sending ripples through the rideshare market, and Uber shareholders are absorbing the hit even though Uber's own results gave them no reason to sell.
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A single robotaxi story is pulling two of the market’s biggest mobility names in opposite directions Tuesday afternoon. Uber Technologies (NYSE:UBER | UBER Price Prediction) is sliding as investors weigh the competitive threat from a manufacturer that could run its own purpose-built fleet. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is climbing 4% to $366.84 on regulatory progress in Europe and the debut of the Cybercab in Austin.
Uber stock is down 4% to $73.10 in afternoon trading, giving back ground even as large-cap tech holds firm. Meanwhile, Tesla stock is trading higher on the very catalyst weighing on the rideshare peer. For context, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is nearly unchanged on the session at $719.16, so this reads as a name-specific rotation inside large-cap tech.
Direct rideshare peer Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT) is also lower on the same read, even as its own autonomous-vehicle (AV) positioning leans on a Waymo partnership that began fleet operations in Nashville in June. Furthermore, the Global X Autonomous & Electric Vehicles ETF (NASDAQ:DRIV) is nearly unchanged for today’s session at $34.83, so there doesn’t appear to be a major sector-wide move in progress.
Slovenia Clearance and Cybercab Debut Drive the Split Slovenia’s traffic safety authority cleared Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, making it the sixth European market to approve the software after the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, and Belgium, according to Reuters. The clearance was characterized as a temporary type approval, and the system still requires an attentive driver responsible for the vehicle. That’s national permission rather than an EU-wide runway, and the distinction matters to the timeline math.
Separately, Tesla introduced the Cybercab in Austin, a vehicle built specifically for autonomous ride-hailing, seating two, with no steering wheel and no pedals. On its Q2 2026 earnings call, Tesla said its unsupervised Robotaxi fleet had accumulated “more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised Robotaxi, now across six cities” with “zero notable incidents”. Robotaxi operations already run unsupervised rides in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa across seven U.S. markets.
Tesla’s Q2 2026 report showed revenue of $28.24 billion, up 25.5% year over year, and record deliveries of 480,126 vehicles, so the FSD monetization runway sits on top of solid vehicle volume rather than propping it up. Active FSD subscriptions reached 1.48 million paid customers globally, up 56% year over year, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the call that Tesla is “going as fast as humanly possible in scaling Robotaxi” while trying to avoid harm.
Where the Rideshare Case Diverges The bear case for Uber stock today isn’t about the company’s results. Uber reported Q2 2026 revenue of $14.19 billion, up 12.2% year over year, with gross bookings of $58.02 billion and 3.9 billion trips across 208 million monthly active platform consumers. The company generated free cash flow of $2.79 billion and repurchased $518 million of its stock during the quarter.
The concern is structural. If a manufacturer can operate its own robotaxi network with vehicles designed for the job, the marketplace layer Uber monetizes loses some of its scarcity value. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has framed the response as an ambition to become “the world’s leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles.”
Uber has committed a $10 billion multi-year AV investment, and management noted AV trips today sit at “less than 0.5%” of Uber’s 300 million weekly rides. Lyft’s own numbers underscore how narrow the peer set is when the robotaxi question intensifies. Lyft posted Q2 2026 revenue of $1.84 billion, up 16.1% year over year, with 30.5 million active riders and gross bookings of $5.5 billion.
The QQQ contrast sharpens the read. Tesla makes up 3% of the fund’s net assets, so Tesla’s rally shows up in the underlying holding while the ETF itself is essentially flat, and the Uber pain is showing up in the stock rather than sector data.
What to Watch Next The tension in this trade is worth noting. Uber is being charged for an event driven outside its own results while itself expanding AV partnerships across Europe and the U.S., and Tesla is being rewarded for regulatory progress that still requires a driver at the wheel. Whether the split survives contact with actual fleet economics remains unresolved.
Traders can watch for signs that Tesla’s Cybercab timeline firms up with U.S. federal clearance, since NHTSA approval for full Cybercab scaling has not yet been granted. Investors weighing their exposure to Uber stock should calibrate their positions carefully given that Uber trades at a P/E of 15 with a $149.5 billion market cap and no earnings miss driving today’s decline.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Alphabet just posted blowout earnings and yet the stock has shed more than 10% from its peak, leaving investors caught between soaring Cloud growth and a balance sheet that suddenly looks very different from a year ago.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG | GOOG Price Prediction) trades at $338.86 after slipping 10.39% over the past month from its recent high of $404.23. Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Alphabet is $433.88, implying 28.19% upside over the next 12 months. The recommendation is buy at high confidence (90%). In plain terms, we view this dip as an entry opportunity.
Metric Value Current Price $338.86 24/7 Wall St. Price Target $433.88 Upside 28.19% Recommendation BUY Confidence Level 90% Why Alphabet Sold Off Despite a Blowout Quarter Alphabet is up 6.5% year to date and 57.9% over the last year, but the stock has cooled since summer. The pullback came despite strong results.
Q2 2026 revenue hit $119.80 billion, up 24.23% year over year, with EPS of $9.11 versus a $3.0427 estimate. Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8 billion and Cloud backlog reached $514 billion.
Investors focused on the cost side: capex was $44.92 billion, free cash flow turned negative $5.86 billion, long-term debt climbed to $98.2 billion, and management suspended the buyback while guiding 2026 capex of $175 billion to $185 billion.
That level of spend has to go somewhere, and the power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind these data centers are the subject of a free report on seven AI infrastructure names that aren’t chipmakers. That fear is why GOOG is on sale.
Why Bulls See a Breakout to $450 and Beyond The bull case rests on Cloud and Gemini. Cloud growth has accelerated four straight quarters, from 34% to 48% to 63% to 82%. CEO Sundar Pichai said Alphabet is “more bullish on the opportunities ahead” for generative AI than a year ago.
Gemini API traffic now runs at 22 billion tokens per minute, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise. Analyst coverage skews strongly positive at 57 Buy and 5 Hold ratings, and our bull-case scenario tops out at $450.80.
What Could Send GOOG Back to the Low $300s The bear case starts with the balance sheet. Long-term debt more than doubled to $98.2 billion, interest expense is up roughly 5x year over year, and free cash flow went negative in Q2.
Bulls will counter that Q2 free cash flow was distorted by inventory buildup for TPU deliveries, and management expects the vast majority of TPU revenue to land in 2027. Insider activity is another yellow flag, with 205 recent transactions net selling, though executive selling at mega-caps is routine. Our bear-case price is $364.77.
How Alphabet Compares to Microsoft and Meta Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the closest peer on cloud and enterprise AI. MSFT trades at $510.83 and commands a much richer multiple than GOOG. On the same forward P/E of 16, Alphabet looks cheap for a business where Cloud is growing 82% versus Azure’s slower comparable growth. That valuation gap is the core of our buy thesis.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) at $612.79 is the right digital-advertising comparable. Meta’s ad business is growing fast, but Alphabet pairs Search and YouTube ($11.06 billion in Q2) with a hyperscale cloud Meta cannot match. The peer set makes our $433.88 target look reasonable, arguably conservative.
Company Forward P/E Current Price Alphabet 16 $338.86 Microsoft n/a $510.83 Meta n/a $612.79 Verdict: A High-Confidence BUY Setup My verdict is buy with high confidence, and the 24/7 Wall St. price target of $433.88 reflects both the fundamentals and the factor overlay. The tipping factor is Cloud’s 82% growth against a forward multiple of 16.
The bullish scenario depends on Alphabet converting its $514 billion Cloud backlog into revenue on schedule. The bearish scenario is 2026 capex above $175 billion keeping free cash flow negative into 2027.
Looking further out, here is where our model projects Alphabet could trade, assuming Cloud continues scaling and AI monetization tracks the current trajectory.
Year 24/7 Wall St. Price Target 2026 $361.84 2027 $433.88 2028 $516.01 2029 $593.39 2030 $645.76 These projections assume Alphabet executes on Gemini adoption and Cloud backlog conversion. Significant upside could come from Waymo scaling; the largest downside risk is a regulatory forced separation of Search or ad tech.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Last October, Google said it would bring an Iowa nuclear power plant back from the dead. Now the facility’s owner, NextEra Energy, has received a $1.9 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to finance the refurbishment.
The sizable loan is the second of its kind, suggesting that the Trump administration views revived nuclear power as a key source of electricity for tech companies seeking to power their AI data centers. Last year, the Department of Energy extended a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island.
James Danly, Deputy Secretary of Energy, said that the Iowa power plant’s restart in 2029 will “drive down electricity costs,” though he did not explain how. Just 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative, NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call last year. That capacity would cover 18% of Iowa’s demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT was released.
Google is reportedly looking to build up to six data centers near the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which hasn’t operated since 2020 when an intense rainstorm damaged the power plant. Rather than repair it, NextEra decided to mothball it. At the time, cheap natural gas was flooding the market, making nuclear power economically unappealing.
A lot has changed in the last six years, though. After decades of little growth in demand, the sudden rise of AI coupled with broader electrification of the economy meant that utilities and power providers were suddenly scrambling to find new generating sources of electricity. New data centers are expected to nearly triple the sector’s electricity demand by 2035.
Shuttered nuclear power plants are becoming one of the tech industry’s favorite choices to quickly provide clean, firm power.
Microsoft signed a deal with Constellation Energy two years ago to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island that last operated in 2019. The reactor is scheduled to restart in 2028 and generate 835 megawatts.
Another facility in Illinois, Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, was in danger of closing down before its parent found a new customer in Meta, which is buying all of the clean energy attributes from the 1.1 gigawatt power plant. The arrangement will see Clinton sending its electrons to the local grid, while Meta will use the certificates to offset emissions it is producing elsewhere. The tech giant’s Hyperion AI data center, for example, will need 10 natural gas power plants to operate. If completed, the data center will consume more electricity than all of South Dakota.
Duane Arnold is smaller, but in the process of refurbishment, NextEra will squeeze an additional 14 megawatts from the facility, bringing the total to 615 megawatts.
Altogether, the three power plants represent the lowest hanging fruit in the U.S. There might be one or two more, according to a report from Utility Dive, though those candidates, including San Onofre in California, have been shuttered for longer and would require more work to bring back online.
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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
You can contact or verify outreach from Tim by emailing [email protected].
AWS and Google Cloud are both burning through tens of billions in capex every quarter, but only one is converting that spending into free cash flow at hyperscale margins right now. Which model actually wins when the 2027 capacity cliff…
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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) both reported Q2 FY2026 results that put the same question in front of investors: how fast does cloud capex turn into cash? AWS delivered its fastest growth in 18 quarters, while Google Cloud accelerated to 82% year-over-year growth. Both are spending like wartime generals. Only one is monetizing at hyperscale margins today.
AWS Prints Profit. Google Cloud Prints Growth. AWS revenue reached $42.2 billion with operating income of $16.6 billion and a 39% operating margin. Andy Jassy said the AWS backlog now sits at $496 billion, roughly two and a half times the level of Q3 2025. Trainium and Graviton are doing real work here: Graviton is used by 98% of Amazon’s top 1,000 EC2 customers, and the AI chips business already runs at more than $25 billion.
Google Cloud posted $24.77 billion in revenue, smaller than AWS but growing more than twice as fast. Sundar Pichai said nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 now use Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users. That is the full-stack pitch: models, TPUs, Search, and YouTube all reinforcing one another.
Business Driver AWS Google Cloud Q2 Revenue $42.2B $24.77B YoY Growth 36.7% 82% Segment Operating Margin 39% Not disclosed this quarter Capex Bills Come Due Differently Amazon spent $53.1 billion on cash capex in Q2 and expects to double its power capacity by the end of 2027 versus 2025. Alphabet’s capex hit $44.92 billion, up 100.1% year over year. Both companies ran negative free cash flow in the quarter.
The funding paths diverge sharply. Amazon covers its bills largely through operating cash flow of $45.4 billion plus debt. Alphabet raised approximately $70 billion in combined equity and debt, and suspended buybacks. Long-term debt jumped from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion.
AWS Wins on Pure Profit. Alphabet Wins on Speed. Jassy said server investments break even in a little less than three years, then generate cash across a 30-plus year data-center life. That is a long, patient conversion curve backed by proven margins. Alphabet’s speed advantage is different: 82% cloud growth paired with 34% companywide operating margin means demand is compounding faster than at AWS, even if segment profitability lags.
Watching the 2027 Capacity Cliff I want to see whether Amazon’s $496 billion backlog actually flows through to free cash flow as promised, and whether Alphabet’s Gemini enterprise footprint keeps pulling ahead of the growth curve into 2027. Memory and SSD inflation, flagged by Brian Olsavsky, could squeeze both.
Why I Split the Two for Different Investors If you want proven cloud economics and a slower, surer cash payoff, AWS inside Amazon looks cleaner to me. The 39.4% AWS margin is doing real work while retail scales. If you want faster top-line acceleration and full-stack AI optionality, Alphabet fits, especially with 46.21% one-year returns already earned. I would hesitate on both if capex keeps outrunning cash into 2027.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
At face value, Alphabet (GOOG +0.02%) (GOOGL -0.03%) stock looks undervalued at just 17 times trailing earnings, compared with the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.58%) at 25 times trailing earnings. However, that doesn't paint the full picture. Alphabet had some one-time effects that dropped the valuation to that level, and it isn't an accurate assessment of how the company is valued.
Let's take a look at alternative ways to value Alphabet's stock and see whether it truly is undervalued.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Using forward-looking projections can cut through one-time effects Alphabet took a position in Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX +3.73%) over a decade ago, which grew to become a massive investment win after SpaceX went public at around a $2 trillion valuation. Under accounting rules, Alphabet had to report those gains as profits on its income statement, thereby artificially boosting its earnings per share (EPS). Since June 30 (when Alphabet's quarter ended), SpaceX's stock has dropped, which requires Alphabet to report a loss in its third quarter (unless SpaceX reaches a new high before then). This effect will eventually wash out as SpaceX's stock reaches a growth rate similar to Alphabet's earnings growth.
Still, there could be another boost when Anthropic eventually goes public, as Alphabet is a major investor in that firm.
Premium Feature
Moneyball Superscore
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Today's Change
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-0.03
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It's safe to say that Alphabet's price-to-earnings ratio will be pretty useless over the next year or two, so investors need to find a different way to value the stock.
A valuation tool many investors often use is free cash flow, as it eliminates any of the one-time effects an investment gain may have. The problem with this metric is that free cash flow is calculated using capital expenditures, and Alphabet is spending around $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, so its free cash flow is nearly nonexistent. So, I think the best metric to value Alphabet's stock is one of the line items above on the income statement: operating profit or operating cash flow. Using both of these compared with historical figures gives investors an idea of how Alphabet is truly valued from a historical standpoint, without the noise of investment gains or hefty capital expenditures.
GOOG Operating PE Ratio data by YCharts
From this standpoint, aside from a dip from 2022 to 2026, Alphabet's valuation seems to be about average to above average. I think this definitely shows that Alphabet isn't undervalued like it was a few years ago, but also isn't horribly overpriced. I think that gives investors the thumbs-up to invest in the stock, but it isn't a general buying opportunity for the stock like it was in April 2025.
Google is reportedly warning that new regulatory changes in Europe will worsen the search experience for users. As Reuters reported, the tech giant on Tuesday (Sept.
3 Stocks to Buy and Hold for Higher Interest RatesGoogle Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Alphabet NASDAQ: GOOG is seeing accelerating enterprise demand for its cloud infrastructure, artificial-intelligence products and cybersecurity offerings, citing growth in customer additions, large contracts and cross-selling across its product portfolio.
Speaking at a company conference, Kurian said Google Cloud has more than 17 product lines with annual revenue above $1 billion. He said new-customer acquisition has grown more than twofold year over year, while deals exceeding $100 million have increased more than twofold both quarter over quarter and year over year.
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Morgan Stanley Eyes Good Things Ahead for Meta After $18 Billion Legal SettlementKurian said customers that make commitments to Google Cloud typically spend more than 50% above their initial commitments, which he said reflects adoption and expansion within the existing customer base.
Integrated AI Stack Kurian emphasized Google Cloud’s strategy of offering first-party products across the technology stack, including its own tensor processing units, or TPUs; NVIDIA GPUs; Arm-based processors; Gemini models; data-management tools; security products; and enterprise applications such as Workspace.
3 Stocks Built for Higher Rates—And 2 That Could Break“Some people buy us for silicon, some people use our models, some people use our data platforms,” Kurian said, describing a business model designed to capture revenue through multiple channels as AI monetization evolves.
He said the company offers what it characterizes as 2.7 times better price performance for AI training, 80% better price performance for inference and 30% better price performance for CPUs. Kurian attributed the economics to Google Cloud’s ability to co-design technology across the stack.
Google Cloud’s accelerator business, including TPUs, is more than twice the size of the next-largest hyperscaler’s TPU business, Kurian said. He added that aggregate payback on AI servers is less than two years, while payback on Google’s own silicon is roughly half that period. Most infrastructure contracts are long-term commitments of about five years, he said.
Gemini Enterprise Adoption Kurian said Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise platform is used by more than 90% of the Fortune 100 and by thousands of smaller businesses. The platform is designed to help companies deploy AI agents that can analyze company data, execute workflows, generate content and assist with security tasks.
According to Kurian, 80% of Google Cloud customers use its AI products. Customers using AI use 1.8 times as many Google Cloud products as those that do not, he said, while the company estimates that the five-year lifetime value of a cloud customer using its Gemini portfolio is 1.5 times higher.
Kurian cited use cases including Signal Iduna’s claims and underwriting analysis, PepsiCo’s supply-and-demand planning, and Macy’s retail-commerce activities. He also described Citigroup’s work on a Gemini Enterprise-based wealth-adviser platform that combines an AI avatar, financial-data analysis, security tools and infrastructure designed for real-time streaming.
Google Cloud differentiates Gemini Enterprise by enabling customers to select different AI models for different tasks, rather than relying on a single model, Kurian said. He argued that using multiple models can be particularly important in cybersecurity, where different models may identify different vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Models Kurian said Google Cloud’s acquisition of Wiz was driven by the growing ability of AI systems to understand software code and system configurations, potentially making them more effective at finding vulnerabilities.
Wiz helps organizations identify applications, assess risk, prioritize systems for review and find vulnerabilities, he said. Google Cloud has also developed a product called CodeMender with Wiz to repair code and test whether vulnerabilities have been addressed.
“You can only defend a threat from an AI model by using a combination of a security platform and an AI system,” Kurian said. He said more than 90% of the Fortune 100 use Google Cloud’s cyber-defense tools.
On infrastructure deployment, Kurian said Google Cloud offers TPU systems through cloud subscriptions, capital purchases for customer data centers and neocloud offerings. He said the company has established a neocloud with Blackstone.
Providing systems in customer data centers can be important for high-performance computing and capital-markets customers that need infrastructure close to large existing data sets or trading venues, Kurian said. Hardware sales can also reduce Google Cloud’s need to fund data-center space and power for those deployments, he added.
Partner and Industry Focus Kurian said Google Cloud is using forward-deployed engineers to work with major customers on industry-specific AI applications, build reusable implementation tools, and develop training and certification programs for partners. He said the company recently announced an agreement with Accenture to build a Gemini Enterprise business group.
Going forward, Google Cloud is concentrating its partnership strategy on eight industries, systems integrators and AI specialists, and data providers. In financial markets, Kurian cited data providers including Bloomberg, FactSet and MSCI as examples of firms whose information is available on Google Cloud’s platform for AI-driven analysis.
About Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)Alphabet Inc NASDAQ: GOOG is a multinational technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Formed in 2015 through a corporate restructuring of Google, Alphabet serves as the parent to Google LLC and a portfolio of businesses collectively known as "Other Bets." Google was originally founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Alphabet is led by CEO Sundar Pichai, who oversees Google and the broader company while the founders remain prominent shareholders and influential figures in the company's history.
Alphabet's core business centers on internet search and advertising, with Google Search and the company's ad platforms (including Google Ads and AdSense) generating the majority of revenue by connecting advertisers with consumers worldwide.
This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected].
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Google's biggest competitive fear is not appearing in traffic data Summary
Bank of America says Google’s traffic remains stable despite explosive chatbot adoption, suggesting AI is expanding the search market rather than replacing its leader
Bank of America sees a reassuring Google parent Alphabet GOOGL stock signal: fast-growing AI rivals are not eroding the search giant's enormous traffic base.
According to Similarweb, Google's global daily web visits increased 3% year over year to 2.8 billion during August and were flat monthly.
ChatGPT's web traffic declined 5% year over year to 181 million, but rose 4% month over month. Google's Gemini traffic surged 261% annually, while Claude climbed 533%, Meta AI rose 175% and Grok gained 10%.
U.S. traffic was resilient. Google visits increased 3% to 534 million, while ChatGPT grew 13% to roughly 6% of Google's traffic. Gemini rose 177%, Claude 432%, Meta AI 109% and Grok 24%.
Mobile usage also preserves Google's scale advantage. Google's daily active users grew 12% to 2.3 billion. ChatGPT reached 469 million after increasing 37%, while Gemini jumped 284% to 126 million.
Why Bank of America's Data Matters for Google StockJustin Post said Google traffic remained “largely stable” as AI adoption expanded the search market. Consumers appear to be adding chatbots without abandoning Google.
Alphabet also owns fast-growing Gemini, giving it exposure to both traditional search and the behavioral shift toward conversational answers.
However, traffic alone does not settle the investment debate. ChatGPT now exceeds one billion users and its advertising business has reached a reported $1 billion annualized revenue run rate.
Bank of America does not expect a meaningful impact this year because the Western digital advertising market exceeds $600 billion. Still, September and October advertising checks should receive greater investor attention.
For Google shareholders, the key question is moving from traffic preservation to monetization. Investors should monitor search-query growth, advertising pricing, Gemini engagement and whether ChatGPT attracts valuable commercial searches.
For now, AI appears to be expanding discovery rather than replacing Google. That makes steady traffic more significant than the headline growth rates posted by much smaller rivals.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google will invest at least €13 billion ($15.1 billion) in artificial intelligence infrastructure in Finland over the next two years and has signed its first nuclear power contract outside the U.S., it said on Wednesday.
The Finnish deal includes a 22-year purchase agreement for up to 50% of the energy output of one of Finland's two nuclear plants, its operator Fortum (FORTUM.HE) said separately.
Nuclear power, as a source of large amounts of low-carbon energy, is one of the attractions Finland offers as companies including Microsoft (MSFT.O) and TikTok owner ByteDance as well as Google seek sites for data centres while containing energy costs and meeting climate goals.
"This is Google's first nuclear energy deal outside of the United States, and we think it's a really important cornerstone to everything that we are doing here," the U.S. company's Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat told reporters in Helsinki.
Fortum and Google will also explore the development of new nuclear and renewable energy in Finland, the companies said.
Fortum's share price rose 10% by 0825 GMT, outperforming a 1.4% increase in the Helsinki benchmark stock index.
BIGGEST DEAL SO FAR IN EUROPE
Alphabet this year increased its global investment to between $195 billion and $205 billion as it seeks to capture growing computing demand. Google said the AI investment deal in Finland is the biggest yet in Europe.
The investments will include data centres, electricity grid improvements and clean energy and battery projects driving services such as Gemini, Search, Maps and YouTube, Google said in a statement.
"The new digital infrastructure will serve as building blocks for Finnish and broader European digital readiness, innovation, and AI development," the company said.
The investment, to be undertaken in 2027 and 2028, will contribute some $3.6 billion to Finland's gross domestic product during the construction phase, and is projected to support some 7,000 jobs annually once operational, Google said.
Finland's Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said in a statement Google's decision was "a clear testament to our strengths".
"The value of the data economy extends far beyond direct investment into spurring innovation, research, and development," he added.
In its statement utility Fortum said the long-term purchase deal provided economic certainty for a lifetime extension and upgrade of the Loviisa power plant through 2050. The plant is situated near Google's Hamina data centre.
Apart from copious amounts of low-emission power, Finland's cold climate lowers costs because it reduces the amount of energy needed to cope with the heat produced by data centres.
Google on Wednesday said it would invest at least 13 billion euros ($15.1 billion) into AI infrastructure in Finland, marking the tech giant's largest single investment in Europe.
Finland has emerged as a key location for data centers amid the AI boom, with hyperscalers and developers eyeing its available land and power, which is in short supply throughout most of Europe.
Google will deploy the capital through 2028, including into data centers and other supporting investments like energy projects, the company said in a statement.
It added that it has signed a 22-year life extension power purchase agreement (PPA) with Finnish energy company Fortum — which saw its stock jump 11% on the news.
"Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company's largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland," Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement.
"This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives."
Finland's booming data center sectorSeveral data center projects with potential capacities of hundreds of megawatts have been announced in Finland in recent months.
Pure DC said in July it would invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.74 billion) to build a 110-megawatt campus in Finland, with the potential to scale beyond 550 megawatts. Arcem has plans for a site with up to 500 megawatts capacity. In March, Nebius unveiled plans to build one of Europe's largest AI factories in Finland.
"Finland is seeing huge demand for AI infrastructure right now, I've heard it called the 'Texas of Europe' at industry events," Matti Lajunen, partner of real estate at Finnish law firm Hannes Snellman, told CNBC. "What we're now seeing is weekly new inquiries for market entry into Finland from new players."
Texas has become one of the leading locations for AI data centers globally, with a number of huge projects announced by hyperscalers and AI labs, including Meta, Microsoft and Anthropic. Google in November said it would invest $40 billion in Texas through 2027.
Alongside Fortum, Google said it would "work to identify new business models to improve the commercial viability of potential new nuclear reactors" at its Loviisa site, a town in Southern Finland.
Finland has also been an attractive location for digital infrastructure supporting social media workloads, with TikTok planning on expanding its data center capacity in the country.
"The value of the data economy extends far beyond direct investment into spurring innovation, research, and development," said Finland's Prime Minister Petteri Orpo. "Deepening our collaboration with Google will deliver lasting benefits for both parties."
For the first time in well over half a century, the trillion-dollar conglomerate built by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA -0.20%)(BRKB -0.04%), entered the year in uncharted territory. The Oracle of Omaha's well-telegraphed retirement as CEO on Dec. 31 meant his understudy, Greg Abel, would take the reins and oversee Berkshire's $360 billion investment portfolio.
Abel didn't waste much time making his presence felt. During the first quarter, he jettisoned 16 stocks from the portfolio and more than tripled Berkshire's stake in Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL -0.03%)(GOOG +0.02%). During the June-ended quarter, Abel oversaw an additional $17 billion in Alphabet stock purchases, making it his company's No. 3 investment holding.
Warren Buffett retired as Berkshire's CEO on Dec. 31. Image source: The Motley Fool.
But Alphabet isn't the company Warren Buffett or Greg Abel has sunk their teeth into deepest. It's not iPhone maker Apple (AAPL -1.17%), either. Collectively, Berkshire's bosses have spent more than $82 billion buying a stock that's rallied more than 6,000,000%!
It's Abel's turn to pile into the Oracle of Omaha's favorite stockTypically, Berkshire Hathaway's quarterly Form 13F filing is highly anticipated by investors. A 13F provides a snapshot of which stocks Wall Street's savviest money managers purchased and sold in the latest quarter.
However, what's interesting about the stock Buffett and Abel have spent more than $82 billion buying is that you won't find it in Berkshire's quarterly 13Fs. Rather, you'll need to peruse the company's quarterly operating results. On the final page before the executive certifications, you'll find detailed buying activity of the stock Buffett held nearest and dearest to his heart...Berkshire Hathaway.
BERKSHIRE IS BUYING STOCKS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2022:
- Bought $25B of stock, sold $3.7B
- Bought Taylor Morrison Home for $6.8B
- Invested $10B in Alphabet $GOOGL during Q2, now a top 5 holding
- Even bought $4.5B of their own stock back
berkshire’s back
— amit (@amitisinvesting) August 8, 2026 Prior to mid-July 2018, Buffett could only repurchase his company's stock if shares fell to or below 120% of its book value. With shares not retracing to this mark, the Oracle of Omaha didn't spend a dime on share buybacks.
On July 17, 2018, Berkshire's board amended the buyback rules to give Buffett and now-late right-hand man Charlie Munger more freedom to execute share repurchases. The new rules allowed for unlimited buybacks as long as Berkshire had at least $30 billion in combined cash, cash equivalents, and U.S. Treasuries on its balance sheet, and Buffett perceived shares to be intrinsically cheap.
For 24 consecutive quarters (July 2018-June 2024), Berkshire's chief investor bought back his company's stock totaling around $78 billion.
Following a 21-month hiatus (June 2024-February 2026) in which no capital was allocated to buybacks, Abel has picked up where his predecessor left off. After repurchasing $234 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock in March, Abel green-lit $4.53 billion in buybacks in the June-ended quarter.
Since mid-July 2018, more than $82 billion has been spent to retire nearly 13% of the company's outstanding shares.
BRK.A Shares Outstanding (Quarterly) data by YCharts
The beauty of stock buybacks is twofold. First, they incentivize long-term investing. As Berkshire's share count declines over time, existing investors become incrementally larger stakeholders. Since Berkshire doesn't pay a dividend, buybacks are a logical way to reward its long-term shareholders.
Secondly, a steady diet of share buybacks by companies (e.g., Berkshire Hathaway) with neutral or growing net income can increase earnings per share and make them more fundamentally attractive to value-seeking investors.
As long as Berkshire Hathaway's shares remain below a 50% premium to book value, Abel will likely be a buyer of the stock Warren Buffett holds nearest and dearest to his heart.
Sergey Brin launched Google from a garage nearly three decades ago. Lionel Hahn/Getty Images; BI
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Google's AI destiny is being cooked up in a California kitchen.
On the second floor of Gradient Canopy, a tent-like structure that rises east of Google's Mountain View headquarters, is a microkitchen filled with many of the typical fixings: coffee beans, grinders, an espresso machine, a fridge. Less typical is the U-shaped formation of desks, used by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and a handful of mission-critical leaders who are steering Google through an AI race it can't afford to lose.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai visits the break-turned-war-room several times a week. Employees from other parts of the building sometimes saunter in for an extended snack break, hoping to overhear gossip that could reveal Google's next big move. There are whispers that cofounder Larry Page has been spotted there.
This unlikely nerve center has gained more influence in the weeks since Google shook up its AI leadership.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who was helping steer the company's AI efforts from London, relinquished his title and became Alphabet's chief scientist. Koray Kavukcuoglu, who moved from London to the US last year and now sits alongside Brin in the microkitchen, was appointed SVP of Google DeepMind, effectively replacing Hassabis. Jeff Dean, Google's longtime chief scientist, left the company after 27 years.
Brin's role in the new power structure went unmentioned.
However, the man who helped launch Google from a garage nearly three decades ago has become increasingly influential over Gemini, eight current and former employees told Business Insider, in part thanks to his unique ability to pull resources for critical work and cut through the tech giant's bureaucracy. The latest changes at the top, some of them said, could give Brin even more sway over Gemini.
It's a role seen by some inside Google as necessary after the 2023 merger of the company's two central AI labs led to friction over the direction of Gemini that slowed progress and prompted a stream of departures. Some of Mountain View's leaders became frustrated with Hassabis and other researchers in London, believing they weren't as pragmatic about making Gemini more competitive to rivals, two people familiar with the matter said.
Up against the corporate machinery of Google, the microkitchen has acted as something of a startup inside the larger company, allowing Brin, Kavukcuoglu, and other leaders to make decisions faster. "The promise of the kitchen is that it can help you cut through the politics," said one former employee familiar with the setup.
Many of Google's top AI researchers work in the Gradient Canopy building. Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group Such decisions are more crucial than ever. Google has fallen behind the frontier, which is putting more pressure on it to make its next model, Gemini 4, a blockbuster event. The company has lost top talent in recent months, including star computer scientists John Jumper and Noam Shazeer. Against this backdrop, Brin has urged employees to double their efforts on Gemini.
"Demis is obviously very talented, but he's moving farther away, not closer, to the operational part. This glimmer of hope is this notion that Sergey will get more involved," said Gil Luria, head of technology research at the investment bank D.A. Davidson. "They need a big change that will cut through that bureaucracy."
Google declined to comment on this story, and declined to make Brin and other leaders available for interviews.
Letting Brin cookBrin's position is highly unusual.
He no longer holds an executive title at Google, yet he and Page have decisive influence over the company's board due to a special controlling stock.
After he and Page stepped back from running Alphabet in 2019, Brin spent his time building airships, partying at Burning Man, and writing about physics. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and Google was suddenly playing catch-up, Brin said the temptation to return to the trenches was just too much. "As a computer scientist I've never seen anything as exciting as all of the AI progress that's happened in the last few years," he said during the All-In Summit in Los Angeles in 2024.
Brin's unique perch inside Google makes him a powerful ally for any Googler who wants to accrue more support for their project or idea. Getting access to Google's chips, even for the Gemini team, can be difficult. The official route is to submit a formal document and get buy-in from higher-ups. Another route is to strike a deal with a different team inside Google to use their chips in exchange for, say, building Gemini features for their products, two people familiar with such arrangements said.
The other, less official route is to go to Brin.
"Koray has more explicit power in the hierarchy, but Sergey is the founder of Google," said a former senior employee. "He's able to cut through bureaucracy and clear red tape in a way no one else can." People who have worked at Google DeepMind said Kavukcuoglu and Brin have a good rapport, and that when Brin wants something done, he will often do it through Kavukcuoglu. However, Brin usually gets his way, three people said.
Koray Kavukcuoglu became SVP of Google DeepMind in the August reshuffle. Lester Cohen/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize Over the past two years, the microkitchen's gravitational pull has grown stronger. Kavukcuoglu moved from London to Mountain View last year and now sits close to Brin. Sebastian Borgeaud, a research engineer, also moved across the Atlantic last year and was appointed to lead work on improving Gemini's coding abilities, two people familiar with the move said. A huddle of desks was set up for the coding strike team inside the microkitchen, close to Brin and Kavukcuoglu, a person familiar with the matter said.
"Sergey wants to run Gemini like a startup," said a former employee with direct knowledge of the arrangement. "If you want to be part of the startup, you have to be in the microkitchen."
Emanuel Taropa, a Google fellow and a legendary name in the AI research community, often sits in the kitchen, two people said. So does Enrique Piqueras, a senior research engineer on Gemini, who insiders described as an especially close ally of Brin's. Another oft-spotted face in the kitchen is Rahul Arya, a physics Olympiad who has played a central role in improving Google's AI chips. Insiders say that Google has made a concerted effort not to publicize some of its most important stars for fear of them being poached.
If you can't handle the heatBrin has largely involved himself in the technical aspects of Gemini, weighing in on discussions about model sizes, release windows, and paths to artificial general intelligence, according to current and former employees. He also got involved in some internal disagreements last year over how Gemini should be integrated into Google products, two people said.
One idea Brin pushed earlier this year was to use software to monitor some Google employees as they coded, believing it could be a useful reinforcement learning technique to improve Gemini's coding abilities, a person familiar with the project said.
At times, Brin has made calls that have frustrated some staff. In 2025, Dean, Google's now-former chief scientist, was leading efforts to build a chip that would embed a version of the Gemini model architecture directly onto the silicon, a project internally codenamed Frozen. The project was unpopular among some Gemini leaders, two former employees said. Brin made the call to cut the project — a decision that frustrated Dean, who told some colleagues around that time he was considering leaving the company, said one of the people who heard the remarks.
The project was later revived as Frozen v2; however, some of its resources were stripped away from it earlier this year, the person added. Dean left Google in August to launch his own startup. He declined to comment on this story.
Jeff Dean left Google in August after 27 years to launch his own startup. Bloomberg/Getty Images Some employees bristled at a post Brin made in an internal Google DeepMind work channel in 2025, stating that working about 60 hours a week is the "sweet spot" for productivity, which was first reported by The New York Times. One former manager said that they told their employees to ignore Brin's memo.
Earlier this year, during a Q&A session at San Francisco's AGI House, Brin was asked how he was splitting his responsibilities with Kavukcuoglu and Hassabis. Brin said he worked closely with Kavukcuoglu and would often "poke and prod" the teams when he was unhappy with their direction, describing himself as "sometimes a little bit disruptive."
"I'll be honest, I'm a little bit of a rabble-rouser," he said.
Brain trustWhen Google announced in 2023 that it would combine DeepMind with its core Brain AI team, it capped a near-decade journey for Hassabis. Since selling DeepMind to Google in 2014, the Nobel laureate had fought to keep his lab independent, determined to pursue research free of Google's bureaucracy and untethered from products he considered irrelevant to his north star: building artificial general intelligence.
The 2023 merger was evidence to some inside DeepMind that any hopes of exercising independence under Google were misplaced. It was also around this time that Brin began showing up to work on Gemini. While Google said nothing publicly about Brin's return, there were clues. A March 2023 post on LinkedIn showed Luxembourg Deputy Prime Minister Xavier Bettel meeting Pichai, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker, and — wearing sweatpants — Brin.
Google was in wartime mode, but there was also a battle brewing within. Brain and DeepMind had different cultures, three people who worked there at the time said. Brain typically worked more closely on improving Google's products, and teams in DeepMind had focused more on longer-term research that often didn't have near-term commercial viability. "There was tension in the DNA of what DeepMind wanted to be," said a former employee. "Do they want to be a 10-year research bet working on things that make humanity incredible, or are they going to win this 3-6 month horizon race between the labs?"
Demis Hassabis is now Alphabet's chief scientist. Karl Mondon / AFP via Getty Images In 2023, Kavukcuoglu chose to build Gemini using some of the people and infrastructure behind Chinchilla, a prior language model developed by the London DeepMind team, rather than on Google's PaLM 2. The decision was unpopular with some researchers in Mountain View, who saw it as favoritism toward the London group, two people said.
After Brin returned to the trenches in 2023, he began working in the microkitchen. Taropa, the Google fellow, was also a core founding member of the kitchen office. Over time, more desks were added, and the space became the de facto command center, often referred to by staff as "Sergey's microkitchen." At one point, an overflow space was added because many employees wanted to be closer to what had quickly become the power center of Gemini.
'AGI-pilled'Brin has spent less time in the kitchen in recent months, sometimes showing up on alternating weeks, according to two people who have seen him there. Ahead of a possible new billionaire's tax, the Google cofounder moved some of his personal assets out of California last December and purchased homes in Florida and Nevada.
The measure, if it passes on a November ballot, would impose a one-time tax on California residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion. Brin, who has mounted a large-scale opposition effort against the tax, could be liable to pay $14 billion if he were considered a resident.
Ahead of the recent leadership shuffle, Brin appeared frustrated with the pace at which Google is moving on Gemini and has pushed employees for more focus on recursive self-improvement (RSI), the point where systems can improve themselves, current and former employees said. "He's very invested in RSI. He's very AGI-pilled," said one former employee. Reuters previously reported on some of Brin's remarks around RSI.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Google out of a suburban Silicon Valley garage in 1998. JOKER/Martin Magunia/ullstein bild via Getty Images Insiders described the August reorg as a win for the more technical side of the company and the further erosion of DeepMind's independence, underscoring the commercial reality of the AI race. In recent weeks, the company has shown signs of positive progress. It recently rehired Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Labs cofounder, in what some insiders said could be a big win for Google. The company has said its latest Gemini model shows "significant" improvements in coding.
Will it be enough? Google is still bleeding talent. The AI coding software market has fast become crowded, which could make it harder for Google to break in meaningfully, said Luria, the analyst. What Google needs, he said, is a major breakthrough that will vault its models to the state of the art. "Short of that, everything is tactical, and they'll continue to need to catch up," he said.
The September release of ChatGPT's Astra model appears to have pushed the frontier forward again, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested even smarter models are waiting in the wings.
Google needs momentum, and with Brin more involved than ever, some employees are hopeful it will find it. From a garage to a kitchen, Google's most consequential work has a habit of happening in unlikely rooms.
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Hugh is a senior correspondent at Business Insider where he writes about Google, tech, and wealth. His work has been cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.Get an alert whenever I publish a story.Got a tip? You can reach him using the secure messaging app Signal (hughlangley.01) or email ([email protected]). We can keep sources anonymous.
Amazon (AMZN) offers a near-free call option on its Leo satellite business, with significant long-term upside embedded in its core valuation. Starlink currently dominates LEO satellite internet, but AMZN's Leo is gaining traction with strategic partnerships, competitive pricing, and advanced terminal offerings. Bank of America raised AMZN's price target to $310, citing Leo's potential $7–10B annual recurring revenue by 2030, with broader ecosystem benefits.
AWS just posted its fastest growth in 18 quarters, yet Amazon shares are lagging the S&P 500 and sliding further. Here is why that disconnect could set up one of the boldest stock plays of the decade.
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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) just posted its fastest AWS growth in 18 quarters, yet the stock is up only 10.88% year to date, trailing the S&P 500’s 12.53%.
That’s a strange result for a business where AWS is now running at a $169 billion annualized run rate and CEO Andy Jassy is publicly guiding investors toward a potential trillion dollar annual revenue business for AWS alone. Which brings me to the question I want to answer: can Amazon shares realistically hit $500 by 2030?
Why Amazon Shares Are Stuck Despite a Booming AWS Shares have gone the wrong way lately. AMZN is down 3.94% over the past week and 6.13% over the past month, with a one-year return of just 8.6% against the S&P’s 18.22%.
The disconnect is capex. Amazon spent $54.208 billion in a single quarter, plans roughly $200 billion in 2026, and trailing free cash flow flipped to negative $7.6 billion. Q3 guidance also implies growth decelerates to 9% to 12%. Add a beta of 1.44, and you get exactly what we’re seeing: a nervous market punishing near-term cash burn even while the demand story gets bigger.
Wall Street Sees 27% Upside. Our Model Says 38% The Street is heavily bullish. The consensus target sits at $328.17, with 15 Strong Buys, 44 Buys, 2 Holds, and zero Sells. Our own model goes further, projecting a one-year base case of $356.16, an upside of 37.77%, with a bull case at $407.01 and confidence rated high (0.9). I think the consensus is too conservative.
With 97% of analysts bullish and earnings growth contributing meaningfully to our 247Factor via strong earnings acceleration, the setup argues for multiple expansion once capex intensity peaks. Analysts often lag the pivot from “investment mode” to “harvest mode.” That’s the window Amazon is walking into.
Charting a Path to $500 Per Share by 2030 Reaching $500 from today’s price of $258.51 would require a gain of 93.4%. With forward EPS of $14.42, a price of $500 implies a forward P/E of 35x. Our base case of $356.16 already implies 21x, meaning the bold target requires 14x of additional multiple expansion.
That is a real stretch, but it is achievable if EPS compounds meaningfully by 2030 and the market rewards the AWS earnings mix. The 247Factor adjustment of 1.097 already reflects strong analyst consensus and earnings acceleration.
Jassy told investors AWS “added over $4.6 billion in revenue quarter over quarter” with a $496 billion backlog, and that the chips business now has an annual revenue run rate of over $25 billion, growing triple-digit percentages year over year.
Ads at $19.809 billion quarterly (up 26%) is the profit accelerant Wall Street still underestimates. The primary risk is that AI capex overshoots demand and depresses returns on invested capital for years.
Where Amazon Trades Today vs Its Earnings Power At $258.51 against forward EPS of $14.42, Amazon trades at roughly 18x forward earnings. That looks reasonable for a business compounding AWS at 37% and ads at 26%.
Shares sit between a 52-week low of $196 and a high of $287.20, and the 10-year return of 548.88% more than doubles the S&P’s 250.34%. That long-term track record is exactly what supports paying up for the earnings power still building underneath the capex wave.
Is $500 Realistic? Here’s My Take Reaching $500 by 2030 requires a 93.4% gain from here. My verdict: a stretch, but a credible one.
Three things need to go right. AWS has to keep compounding above 30% into 2027 as capacity contracted for 2027 and 2028 comes online. Free cash flow has to inflect sharply once data-center spend normalizes. And advertising plus custom silicon need to keep pushing operating margin higher.
The derailer would be AI demand slowing before that $200 billion 2026 capex program earns its return. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how Amazon could reach $500 in 2030.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Billionaires have been buying sports teams for decades, but something in the ownership calculus quietly shifted, and the leagues, clubs, and fans who thought they understood the game are now operating under a different set of rules.
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The Altrata Billionaire Census 2026, published in August 2026 and reporting on the billionaire class as of calendar year 2025, puts a hard number on a story that has been building for a decade: 201 billionaires held a direct stake in a sports team or franchise. Set against a global billionaire population of 3,795 in 2025, that is a small but rapidly consequential slice of the world’s richest people writing checks into leagues, clubs and franchises, according to Altrata.
What the 201 Figure Actually Counts The census is specific about the definition, and the definition matters. Altrata counts billionaires with a direct stake in a sports team or franchise, where a stake can be a controlling or minority share, or via a consortium. Stakes that have since been sold are excluded. That framing bundles very different kinds of ownership into a single count. A sole controlling owner of an NFL franchise sits in the same 201 as a billionaire holding a small minority interest inside a syndicate deal. The report measures the number of ultra-wealthy individuals who have a live, unsold ownership interest of any size in a professional team, regardless of voting power or economic control.
That distinction is where most casual reads of the number go wrong. A minority stake inside a consortium and outright team control are counted identically here.
Trend Line: From Trophy to Strategic Position The census frames the shift plainly. Older ownership stories were passion buys: Jerry Jones acquiring the Dallas Cowboys in 1989, Robert Kraft purchasing the New England Patriots in 1994, Steve Ballmer acquiring the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, Malcolm Glazer buying Manchester United in 2005 (with Sir Jim Ratcliffe acquiring a 27.7% stake in 2024), John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group acquiring Liverpool in 2010, and Stan Kroenke becoming majority owner of the Rams in 2010 and Arsenal in 2011. The newer wave reads differently. Altrata describes a continuing shift from passion-driven engagement to a more investment-led portfolio allocation, driven by expanding sports media rights, streaming platforms, sports betting and sponsorship revenue, and the increased monetization potential of global fan bases.
Cricket is the clearest new front. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries acquired the Mumbai franchise at the Indian Premier League’s launch in 2008, and Lakshmi Mittal’s family has since agreed to a majority stake in the Rajasthan Royals in a partnership deal, subject to regulatory approval. Then, in August 2026, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) founder Jeff Bezos was part of a consortium of prominent billionaires, including Lakshmi Mittal, that acquired a large minority stake, per the same census.
Scale the intent against the balance sheet, though. Altrata says the defined category of real estate and luxury assets, which includes direct sports team ownership, accounts for under 2% of a typical billionaire’s total wealth holdings. Direct sports ownership sits inside that already thin slice. The shift in strategic intent is real, even as the report shows only a modest allocation of billionaire capital into sports.
Why Investors Outside the Tier Should Care Rising franchise valuations are the mechanism. As billionaires signal that teams are portfolio assets rather than trophies, institutional capital and private equity sponsors have followed them in, expanding the buyer pool and repricing minority stakes. For fans, that changes what a club optimizes for: media distribution, betting integrations and international fan monetization become the levers, because those are what an investment-led owner underwrites. For leagues, it changes governance, because consortium structures scatter economic interest across many holders who are counted individually in Altrata’s 201 but who negotiate collectively.
For public-market investors, the read-through is narrower and cleaner: the same revenue streams pulling billionaires into franchises, media rights, streaming, sponsorship and regulated betting, are the streams that show up in listed sports, media and gaming equities.
The 201 figure is a snapshot of 2025, not a live tally, according to Altrata. Read it as a threshold crossed. Sports ownership at the top of the wealth pyramid is being underwritten as an investment, and the money following the billionaires in is what will set valuations from here.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
The multigeneration partnership expands AWS's silicon bench, but disclosed economics stop at bandwidth--not revenue, pricing or deployment dates. Summary
AWS gains another chip designer while Qualcomm becomes a larger cloud customer.
Amazon AMZN, the e-commerce and cloud-computing powerhouse, expanded its custom-chip ambitions Tuesday by bringing Qualcomm into a multigeneration partnership. The alliance targets AI inference silicon and optical networking capable of reaching 1.6 terabits per second. Amazon shares fell approximately 1.3% to $255.13 in early trading.
AWS delivered $42.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 37%, while operating income reached $16.6 billion. Amazon said both its chip franchise and broader AI business had crossed annual revenue run rates of $25 billion. Qualcomm will deepen the relationship from both directions, helping design Amazon hardware while using more AWS infrastructure and AI services to develop its own semiconductors.
The real prize is cheaper inference, not another headline-grabbing chip specification. AWS posted an operating margin of roughly 39.3%, so every efficiency gain could protect the profit engine financing Amazon's AI buildout. The chart shows the stock trading only 2.96% above its $247.80 GF Value, leaving limited valuation cushion as infrastructure spending keeps trailing free cash flow negative. Qualcomm may strengthen Amazon's chip arsenal and expand its customer base, but the companies disclosed no pricing, purchase commitments or deployment timetable.
Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.
The class-action, led by four ex-warehouse workers, alleges that Amazon deducted their bank of unpaid time off or flagged them for “time off-task” for medically necessary breaks or absences.
Amazon was sued on Tuesday in a proposed nationwide class action accusing the retailer of systematically discriminating against thousands of pregnant employees, including by firing some it claimed took too much time off.
According to a complaint filed by four former warehouse employees, Amazon routinely violates federal and New York worker-protection laws by denying pregnant workers basic accommodations such as chairs, bathroom and water breaks, and time off for prenatal appointments.
The complaint said Amazon threatens and regularly fires pregnant employees who miss too much work, and illegally demands medical documentation from those seeking accommodations. It said these actions violate the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and New York labor law.
According to a complaint filed by four former warehouse employees, Amazon routinely violates federal and New York worker-protection laws by denying pregnant workers basic accommodations such as chairs, bathroom and water breaks, and time off for prenatal appointments. Getty Images “Amazon is one of this country’s largest employers, [and] it is no surprise that many of its workers become pregnant,” according to the complaint filed in the Brooklyn, New York, federal court. “Yet Amazon violates the law at every turn.”
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said the retailer provides pregnancy-related accommodations to tens of thousands of employees annually, and approved more than 99.9% of requests in the last year. “Ensuring the health and well-being of our employees is one of our greatest responsibilities,” she said.
The lawsuit seeks lost pay and benefits, punitive damages, and an injunction against discrimination against pregnant employees.
Amazon has long faced complaints in court about its treatment of employees, including those seeking to unionize.
The Seattle-based retailer is the second-largest US private employer, trailing Walmart, with 1.58 million full-time and part-time employees at the end of 2025. AP Photo/Michael Sohn The Seattle-based retailer is the second-largest US private employer, trailing Walmart, with 1.58 million full-time and part-time employees at the end of 2025.
Hospitalization led to dismissal, lawsuit says Tuesday’s lawsuit was filed by A Better Balance, a nonprofit that advocates for workers’ rights.
It came 11 months after New Jersey sued Amazon, accusing it of widespread discrimination against warehouse employees who had disabilities or were pregnant. New York filed a similar case in 2022.
Amazon has long faced complaints in court about its treatment of employees, including those seeking to unionize. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect One plaintiff, Willamina Barclay, said Amazon gave her a termination warning on June 17, 2025, one day after she was taken in a wheelchair out of its Rochester, NY, warehouse and hospitalized with a pregnancy-related emergency.
Barclay said she was suffering severe abdominal pain from lifting heavy objects, but Amazon claimed the hospital visit pushed her over her limit for unpaid time off, and docked her because she “worked partially that day.”
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She was fired five days later, the complaint said.
Nantel said the four plaintiffs’ accounts “contain inaccuracies and omit important details.”
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plans in November to propose changes to regulations underlying the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
That agency has aligned itself with President Trump’s policies, and EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said in 2024 that the regulations for pregnant employees are too broad.
The EEOC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The office of New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, whose predecessor filed that state’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to similar requests.
Amazon's expanded relationship with Qualcomm is reigniting debate over “circular financing” in the AI boom. Advisors Capital Management Partner and Portfolio Manager JoAnne Feeney discusses how the deal gives Amazon another source of custom chips and could reduce its reliance on Nvidia, while giving Qualcomm greater confidence to invest in capacity.
It's hard to remember that Amazon (AMZN -0.60%) started as an online bookseller in 1994. Thanks to co-founder and then-CEO Jeff Bezos' vision, it quickly grew to sell virtually everything imaginable online. Today, it has added physical stores, devices, a streaming service, advertising services, and a cloud-computing platform.
Bezos remains Amazon's largest shareholder, which should give investors confidence. Still, looking closer at the holdings and the company, should you follow his lead and make the stock part of your core long-term holdings?
Jeff Bezos, Amazon executive chairman. Image source: Amazon.com
The co-founder retains a large ownership Bezos' vast fortune has been estimated at $280 billion. His Amazon shares make up the vast majority of his net worth.
The founder owned 950.4 million shares at the end of February, according to Amazon's annual proxy filing. That works out to a $245.7 billion value for his stake, based on the current share price.
Aside from accounting for the largest portion of his net worth, Bezos owned 8.8% of Amazon's outstanding shares, as of the end of February. Vanguard Group and BlackRock are the next-largest shareholders, at 7.2% and 5.9%, respectively.
Should you follow suit? While not running the day-to-day operations as CEO, Bezos clearly believes in the company's future. After all, what better way to express confidence than with your wallet? He also retains a role with Amazon as executive chair.
While the shares have handsomely rewarded shareholders over the years, they have trailed the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.58%) this year. Year to date, through Sept. 4, Amazon's stock gained 12%, while the index, including dividends, returned 13.7%.
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However, Amazon's long-term future looks bright. Some investors have been put off by management's decision to invest heavily, particularly in areas like data centers, to meet growing demand for generative artificial intelligence. However, given the vast growth potential and Amazon's No. 1 market position in cloud computing via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, it looks like an astute investment.
AWS is already growing quickly, with a 36.8% year-over-year gain in second-quarter sales to $42.2 billion. It's also the company's largest profit generator, accounting for 60.5% of operating income.
Looking at the entire company, Amazon's second-quarter sales grew 20% year over year to $200.6 billion. Operating income increased by more than 43% to $27.5 billion.
You shouldn't invest solely based on someone's holdings, even someone as astute as Bezos. However, given management's commitment to long-term growth and patient investing, Amazon belongs in your portfolio. It may not make you a billionaire, but it should allow you to grow your wealth over time.
Amazon (AMZN.O) started selling sterling bonds for the first time on Wednesday, according to the banks managing the deal, as hyperscalers rush to diversify their funding sources to finance the AI boom.
The deal is the latest example of how hyperscalers are increasingly selling bonds across markets outside of the U.S. this year, from euros to Swiss francs and the yen, as they make sure they can raise capital wherever they can, given their huge funding needs.
They have already issued more than $200 billion of debt this year, more than doubling from the whole of 2025, according to LSEG data.
Initial price guidance on the Amazon deal was set at around 70 basis points over British government bonds on a three-year bond, around 90 basis points over for a six-year bond, around 105 basis points over for a 12-year bond and around 110 basis points over for a 19-year bond, according to a memo sent by three of the banks seen by Reuters.
The deal will price later on Wednesday, the memo said.
The pound is the latest currency Amazon has added to its funding programme after tapping the euro and Swiss franc bond markets.
The European Central Bank warned earlier in September that hyperscalers' push into the euro zone bond market could potentially crowd out other borrowers and push up their financing costs.
Google-parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O), which has led the way in selling non-U.S. dollar bonds, was the first hyperscaler to tap the sterling market in February, when it raised £5.5 billion from a five-part deal, including a rare 100-year bond. It has also raised Japanese yen, Canadian and Australian dollar debt this year.
It is Amazon's first bond sale since July, according to LSEG data, when it received weaker demand than in the past for a $25 billion offering, in one of several signs that the heavy pace of hyperscaler borrowing started to test the limits of investor demand.
When Vita Shafiro, 51, and her daughter Mikhaela, 15, recently walked back to their downtown San Francisco hotel after sightseeing, an odd vehicle caught their eye.
A boxy turquoise car with no driver’s seat or steering wheel idled outside the Zoox Rider Lounge, an Art Nouveau-style storefront. Zoox, a driverless car company owned by Amazon, opened the lounge in May so that people could pose for photos in front of its self-driving cars and take a free ride in one.
“I said, ‘Oh, look at that fun-looking vehicle,’ and I wanted to take a picture,” said Ms. Shafiro, who had heard of Waymo, the driverless car leader, but not Zoox. She and her daughter returned the next day and rode a Zoox to the Ferry Building, a landmark on the San Francisco waterfront.
“Surprisingly, I felt really good,” said Ms. Shafiro, who later took another Zoox ride to the Castro neighborhood, adding that she wanted to invest in the company.
The history of technology is full of rivalries — Amazon and eBay, Google and Yahoo, Uber and Lyft, OpenAI and Anthropic. Now a new matchup is taking shape in the nation’s tech capital between Zoox and Waymo, which kicked off the autonomous car industry and is owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet.
Vita Shafiro took several Zoox rides during her visit to San Francisco. — Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Waymo, founded in 2009 as Google’s experimental self-driving car project, is by far the leader in the field. It began commercial driverless rides in 2018 and now has nearly 4,000 vehicles in 15 cities, including San Francisco and Phoenix, with over a dozen more towns to come. Its brand is widely known, and it recently raised $16 billion in new funding.
In contrast, Zoox, which was founded in 2014, has about 100 autonomous vehicles in its fleet. It cannot yet charge for a ride in San Francisco as it awaits state regulatory approval.
So Zoox is competing by betting that novelty, community good will and the rider experience inside its odd-looking cars — sometimes called “toasters on wheels” — can win over a city that has become the center for autonomous vehicle experiments. While Waymo’s retrofitted vehicles are an ordinary sight in San Francisco, Zoox’s carriage-like pods with no driver controls still draw stares and phone cameras.
“From the beginning, we wanted to take a community-first approach,” said Carly Wyatt, Zoox’s vice president of communications and marketing.
Since May, the company has hosted more than half a dozen events at its Rider Lounge, including a recent happy hour where the women-focused brand Une Femme handed out free cans of wine. Zoox has also sponsored local festivals like the Stern Grove Festival, North Beach Festival and Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park. And it has become a sponsor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, often bringing a vehicle to events so people can sit inside.
Zoox has also forged deals with social media influencers and introduced advertising campaigns with slogans like “a robotaxi from the future.” In June, it began offering free rides from its Rider Lounge to eight restaurants and a handful of San Francisco landmarks like the Painted Ladies, the postcard-perfect Victorian houses.
Zoox opened the Rider Lounge in May for people to learn about the vehicles and take free rides. — Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Ms. Wyatt said Zoox tried to operate like a small business “thinking of food, all the amazing restaurants, the areas that people know and love — and then how do we bring the Zoox experience to life.”
Unlike Waymo, which retrofitted cars, Zoox chose to build its driverless vehicles from the ground up at a plant in Hayward, Calif., without traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals. The company has leaned into the design, treating it as an edge over rivals, Ms. Wyatt said.
Zoox is working to begin widely deploying a commercial service. In July, federal regulators granted it a temporary exemption from certain safety standard requirements that include having windshield wipers and rearview mirrors, so it could place up to 5,000 vehicles on the road over the next two years and start collecting fares.
Last month, Zoox began charging for rides in Las Vegas, its first paid service anywhere, at prices that were slightly higher than standard rides with Uber and Lyft.
But to charge for rides in California, Zoox needs a deployment permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles and authorization from the state’s Public Utilities Commission. Zoox said it had applied, but the utilities commission’s public permit list does not show the company holding a driverless deployment permit.
“We are trying to get it as quickly as we can, but it is a couple-month process,” Ms. Wyatt said of the authorization. “We own the fact that we’re taking these baby steps.”
The driverless car industry is still in its infancy. — Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
For now, Zoox offers only free demonstration rides in San Francisco, which began in November. The company completes about 10,000 rides a week in the United States, compared with Waymo’s more than 500,000 rides a week.
Waymo declined to comment.
San Francisco has seen driverless cars come and go before. Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, pulled its autonomous vehicles off the road in 2023 after a series of mishaps, including one car’s running over and dragging a pedestrian. Waymo has faced its own embarrassing episodes, such as when one of its cars hit and killed a beloved bodega cat last year.
Still, the autonomous vehicle race is heating up. Tesla said on Thursday that it would begin offering rides in its driverless Cybercab, which has no steering wheel. (The vehicle will probably not be broadly available for some time.) In London, driverless cars operated by Uber and the British autonomous vehicle start-up Wayve are available for ride-hailing this week.
Driverless cars remain in their infancy, which means the onus is less on companies to one-up their rivals than on spreading awareness of their services in the first place, said Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Driverless car companies are still selling the very concept of a driverless taxi, he said.
“While one brand may be larger in the category and more prominent in the category, many people don’t know anything about the category,” he said.
Unlike the driverless cars of Waymo, the industry leader, Zoox’s vehicles do not have steering wheels or pedals. — Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
Back in San Francisco, Carrie Blease — who with her husband runs Wolfsbane, a Michelin-starred restaurant — joined a partnership with Zoox in June. The company reached out to her through a hospitality agency to feature Wolfsbane as a destination for Zoox riders, she said.
Ms. Blease agreed to work with Zoox despite not being a “huge fan” of driverless cars, she said. Waymos are so common around her Russian Hill neighborhood that she often gets stuck behind one, she added.
Still, Zoox felt different and “a little bit more local,” she said, adding that “they look more interesting” than Waymos. Ms. Blease said she was excited when a few diners arrived at Wolfsbane via a Zoox last month.
Ms. Blease herself has never ridden in one. “I’ve just never done it,” she said. “I like the chatter of someone in the car.”
BTC Capital Management Inc. grew its holdings in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 14.1% in the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The institutional investor owned 172,761 shares of the software giant’s stock after purchasing an additional 21,395 shares during the period. Microsoft comprises about 3.9% of BTC Capital Management Inc.’s investment portfolio, making the stock its 6th biggest holding. BTC Capital Management Inc.’s holdings in Microsoft were worth $64,512,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
Several other hedge funds have also recently modified their holdings of the business. WFA Asset Management Corp increased its stake in Microsoft by 27.0% in the 1st quarter. WFA Asset Management Corp now owns 1,016 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $427,000 after acquiring an additional 216 shares during the last quarter. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. grew its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 0.3% in the second quarter. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. now owns 12,658 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $5,658,000 after purchasing an additional 38 shares in the last quarter. Discipline Wealth Solutions LLC increased its position in Microsoft by 410.4% in the third quarter. Discipline Wealth Solutions LLC now owns 2,659 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $1,144,000 after purchasing an additional 2,138 shares during the last quarter. Wealth Group Ltd. grew its stake in shares of Microsoft by 1.2% in the 4th quarter. Wealth Group Ltd. now owns 2,374 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $1,000,000 after buying an additional 28 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Eagle Capital Management LLC increased its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 0.4% in the 4th quarter. Eagle Capital Management LLC now owns 23,097 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $9,735,000 after buying an additional 96 shares during the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 71.13% of the company’s stock.
Insider Buying and Selling at Microsoft In related news, EVP Takeshi Numoto sold 4,810 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, August 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $496.48, for a total value of $2,388,068.80. Following the completion of the sale, the executive vice president directly owned 42,677 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $21,188,276.96. This represents a 10.13% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Judson Althoff sold 10,000 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, August 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $487.89, for a total transaction of $4,878,900.00. Following the transaction, the chief executive officer owned 100,447 shares in the company, valued at approximately $49,007,086.83. This represents a 9.05% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale is available in the SEC filing. Insiders sold a total of 105,835 shares of company stock valued at $52,468,575 in the last ninety days. Corporate insiders own 0.03% of the company’s stock.
Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades A number of brokerages have issued reports on MSFT. Barclays decreased their price objective on Microsoft from $545.00 to $512.00 and set an “overweight” rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, July 30th. DA Davidson restated a “buy” rating and set a $550.00 price target on shares of Microsoft in a report on Thursday, July 30th. Citigroup restated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Monday, August 31st. Morgan Stanley reaffirmed an “overweight” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research note on Thursday, July 30th. Finally, Stifel Nicolaus boosted their price objective on shares of Microsoft from $450.00 to $530.00 and gave the company a “hold” rating in a research report on Friday. Forty-two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have assigned a Hold rating to the company’s stock. According to MarketBeat, Microsoft presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average price target of $564.27. Read Our Latest Research Report on Microsoft
Microsoft Stock Performance MSFT stock opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. Microsoft Corporation has a twelve month low of $349.20 and a twelve month high of $553.72. The firm has a market cap of $3.71 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 27.82, a PEG ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. The business’s fifty day simple moving average is $447.15 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $416.63. The company has a quick ratio of 1.22, a current ratio of 1.23 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.24 by $0.50. Microsoft had a net margin of 40.31% and a return on equity of 31.98%. The firm had revenue of $90.01 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $87.62 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm earned $3.65 earnings per share. The business’s revenue was up 17.7% on a year-over-year basis. Analysts predict that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 earnings per share for the current year.
Microsoft Announces Dividend The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be issued a dividend of $0.91 per share. This represents a $3.64 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, August 20th. Microsoft’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is presently 20.27%.
Trending Headlines about Microsoft Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Microsoft Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
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ARS Wealth Advisors Group LLC raised its stake in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 3.5% during the second quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The firm owned 88,084 shares of the software giant’s stock after acquiring an additional 2,991 shares during the period. Microsoft comprises about 2.6% of ARS Wealth Advisors Group LLC’s investment portfolio, making the stock its 10th largest position. ARS Wealth Advisors Group LLC’s holdings in Microsoft were worth $32,857,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently made changes to their positions in MSFT. Norges Bank acquired a new position in Microsoft in the fourth quarter valued at about $50,664,631,000. Auto Owners Insurance Co increased its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 56,160.8% during the fourth quarter. Auto Owners Insurance Co now owns 60,116,384 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $29,073,486,000 after buying an additional 60,009,531 shares in the last quarter. Nuveen LLC bought a new position in shares of Microsoft in the first quarter valued at approximately $18,733,827,000. UBS AM A Distinct Business Unit of UBS Asset Management Americas LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 500.0% in the 3rd quarter. UBS AM A Distinct Business Unit of UBS Asset Management Americas LLC now owns 59,543,261 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $30,840,432,000 after acquiring an additional 49,618,571 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Laurel Wealth Advisors LLC boosted its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 49,640.3% in the 2nd quarter. Laurel Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 29,967,038 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $14,905,904,000 after acquiring an additional 29,906,791 shares in the last quarter. 71.13% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.
Key Microsoft News Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Insider Buying and Selling at Microsoft In other news, EVP Takeshi Numoto sold 4,810 shares of the stock in a transaction on Tuesday, August 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $496.48, for a total value of $2,388,068.80. Following the transaction, the executive vice president owned 42,677 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $21,188,276.96. This represents a 10.13% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. Also, CEO Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares of Microsoft stock in a transaction on Tuesday, September 1st. The stock was sold at an average price of $501.46, for a total value of $43,388,826.50. Following the sale, the chief executive officer directly owned 486,763 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $244,092,173.98. This trade represents a 15.09% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale is available in the SEC filing. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. In the last 90 days, insiders sold 105,835 shares of company stock worth $52,468,575. Insiders own 0.03% of the company’s stock. Analyst Ratings Changes A number of research firms recently weighed in on MSFT. Wells Fargo & Company raised their price target on Microsoft from $650.00 to $700.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a report on Wednesday, August 12th. Piper Sandler lifted their price target on Microsoft from $540.00 to $550.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a report on Tuesday, July 28th. Evercore set a $528.00 price target on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Thursday, July 30th. Truist Financial reissued a “buy” rating and set a $575.00 price objective on shares of Microsoft in a report on Wednesday, July 22nd. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft restated a “buy” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Monday, July 20th. Forty-two analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have assigned a Hold rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $564.27.
Read Our Latest Report on Microsoft
Microsoft Stock Performance Shares of NASDAQ:MSFT opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. The company has a current ratio of 1.23, a quick ratio of 1.22 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07. Microsoft Corporation has a 1-year low of $349.20 and a 1-year high of $553.72. The stock has a market capitalization of $3.71 trillion, a P/E ratio of 27.82, a P/E/G ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. The business has a 50-day moving average price of $447.15 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $416.63.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.24 by $0.50. Microsoft had a net margin of 40.31% and a return on equity of 31.98%. The business had revenue of $90.01 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $87.62 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $3.65 earnings per share. Microsoft’s revenue for the quarter was up 17.7% compared to the same quarter last year. Equities analysts predict that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 earnings per share for the current year.
Microsoft Dividend Announcement The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be given a dividend of $0.91 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, August 20th. This represents a $3.64 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.7%. Microsoft’s payout ratio is presently 20.27%.
Microsoft Company Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
Featured Stories Five stocks we like better than Microsoft 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane
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Canoe Financial LP lessened its holdings in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 9.2% in the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The fund owned 465,891 shares of the software giant’s stock after selling 47,440 shares during the quarter. Microsoft makes up approximately 2.2% of Canoe Financial LP’s investment portfolio, making the stock its 14th largest position. Canoe Financial LP’s holdings in Microsoft were worth $173,787,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
Other hedge funds have also added to or reduced their stakes in the company. Empirical Financial Services LLC d.b.a. Empirical Wealth Management boosted its position in shares of Microsoft by 4.0% during the 2nd quarter. Empirical Financial Services LLC d.b.a. Empirical Wealth Management now owns 229,490 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $85,604,000 after purchasing an additional 8,773 shares in the last quarter. Markel Group Inc. increased its holdings in Microsoft by 0.4% in the first quarter. Markel Group Inc. now owns 537,630 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $199,014,000 after purchasing an additional 1,950 shares in the last quarter. Bessemer Group Inc. increased its holdings in Microsoft by 8.4% in the first quarter. Bessemer Group Inc. now owns 6,921,677 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $2,562,197,000 after purchasing an additional 537,634 shares in the last quarter. Taylor Securities Services Inc. acquired a new position in Microsoft in the fourth quarter valued at approximately $2,616,000. Finally, Werba Rubin Papier Wealth Management lifted its stake in Microsoft by 15.7% in the fourth quarter. Werba Rubin Papier Wealth Management now owns 12,492 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $6,041,000 after buying an additional 1,698 shares during the period. 71.13% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Microsoft Stock Performance Shares of MSFT stock opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. The firm has a market capitalization of $3.71 trillion, a PE ratio of 27.82, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. The firm has a fifty day simple moving average of $447.15 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $416.63. The company has a current ratio of 1.23, a quick ratio of 1.22 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07. Microsoft Corporation has a 12 month low of $349.20 and a 12 month high of $553.72.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 earnings per share for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.24 by $0.50. The firm had revenue of $90.01 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $87.62 billion. Microsoft had a net margin of 40.31% and a return on equity of 31.98%. The business’s quarterly revenue was up 17.7% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period last year, the firm earned $3.65 earnings per share. Analysts forecast that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 EPS for the current fiscal year. Microsoft Announces Dividend The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be issued a dividend of $0.91 per share. This represents a $3.64 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, August 20th. Microsoft’s payout ratio is currently 20.27%.
Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth Several analysts have recently commented on MSFT shares. Bank of America raised their price objective on shares of Microsoft from $500.00 to $600.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Tuesday, September 1st. Oppenheimer restated an “outperform” rating and issued a $515.00 price target on shares of Microsoft in a report on Wednesday, July 22nd. CLSA reaffirmed an “outperform” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research note on Thursday, July 30th. Citizens Jmp reiterated a “market outperform” rating and set a $550.00 price objective on shares of Microsoft in a report on Tuesday, July 28th. Finally, Sanford C. Bernstein set a $660.00 price objective on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Monday, August 10th. Forty-two investment analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have given a Hold rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Microsoft presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $564.27.
Read Our Latest Research Report on Microsoft
Insider Transactions at Microsoft In other Microsoft news, EVP Takeshi Numoto sold 4,810 shares of Microsoft stock in a transaction on Tuesday, August 4th. The shares were sold at an average price of $496.48, for a total transaction of $2,388,068.80. Following the transaction, the executive vice president directly owned 42,677 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $21,188,276.96. The trade was a 10.13% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, CEO Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, September 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $501.46, for a total transaction of $43,388,826.50. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer owned 486,763 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $244,092,173.98. This represents a 15.09% decrease in their position. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Insiders sold a total of 105,835 shares of company stock valued at $52,468,575 over the last ninety days. 0.03% of the stock is currently owned by insiders.
Microsoft News Summary Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Microsoft Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
Read More Five stocks we like better than Microsoft 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane
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Mid American Wealth Advisory Group Inc. raised its position in Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 133.4% during the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent disclosure with the Securities & Exchange Commission. The firm owned 2,192 shares of the software giant’s stock after purchasing an additional 1,253 shares during the quarter. Microsoft accounts for approximately 0.3% of Mid American Wealth Advisory Group Inc.’s portfolio, making the stock its 24th largest position. Mid American Wealth Advisory Group Inc.’s holdings in Microsoft were worth $818,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period.
A number of other large investors also recently added to or reduced their stakes in MSFT. Longfellow Investment Management Co. LLC increased its stake in Microsoft by 51.3% during the second quarter. Longfellow Investment Management Co. LLC now owns 59 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $29,000 after purchasing an additional 20 shares during the period. Bernzott Capital Advisors acquired a new position in shares of Microsoft in the fourth quarter valued at approximately $34,000. Frankly Finances LLC acquired a new position in shares of Microsoft in the second quarter valued at approximately $35,000. Timmons Wealth Management LLC purchased a new stake in Microsoft during the 4th quarter worth approximately $36,000. Finally, Fairway Wealth LLC lifted its holdings in Microsoft by 287.0% during the 4th quarter. Fairway Wealth LLC now owns 89 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $43,000 after buying an additional 66 shares in the last quarter. 71.13% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Insiders Place Their Bets In other news, CEO Judson Althoff sold 10,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Wednesday, August 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $487.89, for a total transaction of $4,878,900.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer owned 100,447 shares in the company, valued at approximately $49,007,086.83. The trade was a 9.05% decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which can be accessed through this link. Also, CEO Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Tuesday, September 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $501.46, for a total transaction of $43,388,826.50. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer owned 486,763 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $244,092,173.98. The trade was a 15.09% decrease in their position. The disclosure for this sale is available in the SEC filing. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Over the last quarter, insiders have sold 105,835 shares of company stock valued at $52,468,575. 0.03% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.
Microsoft Price Performance Shares of NASDAQ MSFT opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. The business has a 50-day moving average of $447.15 and a two-hundred day moving average of $416.63. The company has a market capitalization of $3.71 trillion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 27.82, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. Microsoft Corporation has a 1 year low of $349.20 and a 1 year high of $553.72. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07, a current ratio of 1.23 and a quick ratio of 1.22. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.24 by $0.50. Microsoft had a return on equity of 31.98% and a net margin of 40.31%.The business had revenue of $90.01 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $87.62 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business posted $3.65 EPS. The business’s revenue for the quarter was up 17.7% on a year-over-year basis. On average, analysts forecast that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.
Microsoft Dividend Announcement The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be paid a $0.91 dividend. This represents a $3.64 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, August 20th. Microsoft’s dividend payout ratio is currently 20.27%.
Analysts Set New Price Targets MSFT has been the subject of several research reports. Cantor Fitzgerald boosted their price target on shares of Microsoft from $502.00 to $522.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research note on Monday, July 27th. The Goldman Sachs Group reiterated a “buy” rating and issued a $640.00 target price on shares of Microsoft in a report on Thursday, July 30th. Royal Bank Of Canada restated an “outperform” rating and set a $640.00 price target on shares of Microsoft in a report on Thursday, July 30th. CLSA reiterated an “outperform” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research note on Thursday, July 30th. Finally, Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft reissued a “buy” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Monday, July 20th. Forty-two research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have given a Hold rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, Microsoft has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $564.27.
Read Our Latest Stock Report on Microsoft
Key Stories Impacting Microsoft Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Microsoft Company Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
Read More Five stocks we like better than Microsoft 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane Want to see what other hedge funds are holding MSFT? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report).
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PFG Advisors trimmed its holdings in shares of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 5.7% in the second quarter, according to the company in its most recent filing with the SEC. The institutional investor owned 68,913 shares of the software giant’s stock after selling 4,171 shares during the quarter. Microsoft accounts for 1.3% of PFG Advisors’ holdings, making the stock its 14th biggest position. PFG Advisors’ holdings in Microsoft were worth $25,706,000 as of its most recent SEC filing.
Other hedge funds have also recently bought and sold shares of the company. WFA Asset Management Corp raised its holdings in shares of Microsoft by 27.0% during the first quarter. WFA Asset Management Corp now owns 1,016 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $427,000 after acquiring an additional 216 shares during the period. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. boosted its stake in Microsoft by 0.3% in the 2nd quarter. Ironwood Wealth Management LLC. now owns 12,658 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $5,658,000 after purchasing an additional 38 shares during the period. Discipline Wealth Solutions LLC increased its holdings in Microsoft by 410.4% during the 3rd quarter. Discipline Wealth Solutions LLC now owns 2,659 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $1,144,000 after purchasing an additional 2,138 shares in the last quarter. Wealth Group Ltd. increased its holdings in Microsoft by 1.2% during the 4th quarter. Wealth Group Ltd. now owns 2,374 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $1,000,000 after purchasing an additional 28 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Eagle Capital Management LLC raised its stake in shares of Microsoft by 0.4% in the 4th quarter. Eagle Capital Management LLC now owns 23,097 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $9,735,000 after purchasing an additional 96 shares during the period. 71.13% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Insider Activity at Microsoft In other Microsoft news, CEO Judson Althoff sold 10,000 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Wednesday, August 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $487.89, for a total transaction of $4,878,900.00. Following the sale, the chief executive officer directly owned 100,447 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $49,007,086.83. This represents a 9.05% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this hyperlink. Also, CEO Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares of Microsoft stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, September 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $501.46, for a total transaction of $43,388,826.50. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer directly owned 486,763 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $244,092,173.98. This trade represents a 15.09% decrease in their position. Additional details regarding this sale are available in the official SEC disclosure. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Over the last three months, insiders sold 105,835 shares of company stock valued at $52,468,575. 0.03% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.
Microsoft Price Performance NASDAQ:MSFT opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. Microsoft Corporation has a 52-week low of $349.20 and a 52-week high of $553.72. The company has a market cap of $3.71 trillion, a P/E ratio of 27.82, a P/E/G ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07, a quick ratio of 1.22 and a current ratio of 1.23. The stock’s 50-day simple moving average is $447.15 and its 200 day simple moving average is $416.63. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 EPS for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $4.24 by $0.50. The firm had revenue of $90.01 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $87.62 billion. Microsoft had a return on equity of 31.98% and a net margin of 40.31%.The business’s quarterly revenue was up 17.7% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the firm posted $3.65 earnings per share. As a group, sell-side analysts forecast that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 EPS for the current fiscal year.
Microsoft Announces Dividend The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Stockholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be issued a $0.91 dividend. This represents a $3.64 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, August 20th. Microsoft’s dividend payout ratio is presently 20.27%.
Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth Several research analysts have recently weighed in on MSFT shares. Royal Bank Of Canada reaffirmed an “outperform” rating and set a $640.00 price objective on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Thursday, July 30th. Morgan Stanley reissued an “overweight” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Thursday, July 30th. The Goldman Sachs Group restated a “buy” rating and issued a $640.00 target price on shares of Microsoft in a research note on Thursday, July 30th. Scotiabank reaffirmed an “outperform” rating and set a $510.00 price target on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Thursday, July 30th. Finally, Benchmark reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Microsoft in a report on Friday, July 24th. Forty-two analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have issued a Hold rating to the company’s stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Microsoft has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus price target of $564.27.
Read Our Latest Research Report on MSFT
Key Headlines Impacting Microsoft Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Microsoft Company Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
Featured Stories Five stocks we like better than Microsoft 3 Under-the-Radar Defense Stocks With Record Backlogs This Korea ETF Has Soared, But the Rally May Not Be Over Why Guidewire’s Post-Earnings Plunge May Not Last Ride-Share Reckoning: Tesla Drives Into Uber’s Lane Want to see what other hedge funds are holding MSFT? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report).
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Cambridge Advisors Inc. lowered its position in shares of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT – Free Report) by 7.8% during the second quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund owned 25,493 shares of the software giant’s stock after selling 2,144 shares during the quarter. Microsoft comprises 1.6% of Cambridge Advisors Inc.’s investment portfolio, making the stock its 15th biggest holding. Cambridge Advisors Inc.’s holdings in Microsoft were worth $9,510,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors also recently made changes to their positions in the business. Longfellow Investment Management Co. LLC lifted its position in shares of Microsoft by 51.3% during the second quarter. Longfellow Investment Management Co. LLC now owns 59 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $29,000 after acquiring an additional 20 shares in the last quarter. Shepherd Kaplan Krochuk LLC grew its position in shares of Microsoft by 4.9% in the third quarter. Shepherd Kaplan Krochuk LLC now owns 431 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $223,000 after purchasing an additional 20 shares in the last quarter. Better Money Decisions LLC raised its stake in shares of Microsoft by 0.6% during the 2nd quarter. Better Money Decisions LLC now owns 3,498 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $1,740,000 after purchasing an additional 21 shares during the period. Endowment Wealth Management Inc. raised its stake in shares of Microsoft by 0.4% during the 3rd quarter. Endowment Wealth Management Inc. now owns 5,251 shares of the software giant’s stock valued at $2,720,000 after purchasing an additional 21 shares during the period. Finally, Pollock Investment Advisors LLC lifted its holdings in Microsoft by 0.8% during the 3rd quarter. Pollock Investment Advisors LLC now owns 2,805 shares of the software giant’s stock worth $1,453,000 after purchasing an additional 21 shares in the last quarter. 71.13% of the stock is owned by institutional investors and hedge funds.
Trending Headlines about Microsoft Here are the key news stories impacting Microsoft this week:
Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s Azure business reportedly crossed a significant revenue milestone, while its large backlog points to continued demand for cloud and AI services. This is strengthening the long-term bull case and fueling speculation that the stock could approach $600. Microsoft Stock Is Building a Trillion-Dollar AI Opportunity Positive Sentiment: Microsoft and Nvidia are described as major beneficiaries of a potential $7 trillion AI infrastructure buildout. Rising data-center construction and demand for computing capacity could support sustained growth across Azure, software, and AI products. Nvidia, Microsoft at Center of $7 Trillion AI Boom Positive Sentiment: Investment commentary continues to favor Microsoft as a long-term holding because of its diversified software ecosystem, recurring revenue, cloud position, and favorable earnings outlook. Its latest reported quarter also showed revenue growth and earnings well above expectations. Why Microsoft Is a Top Stock for the Long-Term Positive Sentiment: Microsoft’s partnerships and investments in Gulf data-center infrastructure highlight its efforts to expand global AI capacity. Separately, company representatives said AI could create new employment opportunities rather than only eliminate jobs, supporting broader adoption narratives. Microsoft and Schneider Electric Bet Big on the Gulf Neutral Sentiment: Analysts are focused on a key cash-flow line item, likely reflecting the impact of elevated AI-related capital expenditures. Strong investment may expand future growth but could constrain free cash flow and delay a breakout to a new high. Microsoft Is Close to a New All-Time High Negative Sentiment: Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, could face a pricing challenge if advanced hardware pushes the console toward $1,000. A high price could limit adoption and pressure the gaming business, although Microsoft is considering affordability measures. Microsoft Has a $1,000 Problem With Its Next Xbox Negative Sentiment: Recent Outlook and Exchange Online outages, alongside a separate ChatGPT Work disruption, raise concerns about reliability for Microsoft’s productivity and cloud services. The incidents have not materially undermined reported results but remain a reputational and retention risk. Microsoft’s Outlook and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Work Both Broke the Same Day Insider Transactions at Microsoft In other news, CEO Satya Nadella sold 86,525 shares of Microsoft stock in a transaction on Tuesday, September 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $501.46, for a total transaction of $43,388,826.50. Following the completion of the sale, the chief executive officer directly owned 486,763 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $244,092,173.98. The trade was a 15.09% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Also, EVP Takeshi Numoto sold 4,810 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Tuesday, August 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $496.48, for a total transaction of $2,388,068.80. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president owned 42,677 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $21,188,276.96. This trade represents a 10.13% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale is available in the SEC filing. Insiders have sold 105,835 shares of company stock valued at $52,468,575 in the last quarter. Insiders own 0.03% of the company’s stock. Microsoft Stock Performance NASDAQ:MSFT opened at $499.70 on Tuesday. The business’s 50-day moving average price is $447.15 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $416.63. Microsoft Corporation has a twelve month low of $349.20 and a twelve month high of $553.72. The stock has a market cap of $3.71 trillion, a P/E ratio of 27.82, a PEG ratio of 1.61 and a beta of 1.11. The company has a quick ratio of 1.22, a current ratio of 1.23 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.07.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – Get Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, July 29th. The software giant reported $4.74 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.24 by $0.50. The firm had revenue of $90.01 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $87.62 billion. Microsoft had a return on equity of 31.98% and a net margin of 40.31%.The company’s revenue for the quarter was up 17.7% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $3.65 EPS. As a group, equities analysts predict that Microsoft Corporation will post 19.59 EPS for the current fiscal year.
Microsoft Announces Dividend The business also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, September 10th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, August 20th will be paid a $0.91 dividend. This represents a $3.64 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 0.7%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, August 20th. Microsoft’s payout ratio is currently 20.27%.
Wall Street Analyst Weigh In Several brokerages have commented on MSFT. The Goldman Sachs Group restated a “buy” rating and issued a $640.00 target price on shares of Microsoft in a research note on Thursday, July 30th. Bank of America increased their price target on shares of Microsoft from $500.00 to $600.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a report on Tuesday, September 1st. Citigroup restated a “market outperform” rating on shares of Microsoft in a research report on Monday, August 31st. Piper Sandler boosted their price objective on shares of Microsoft from $540.00 to $550.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research note on Tuesday, July 28th. Finally, DA Davidson reaffirmed a “buy” rating and set a $550.00 target price on shares of Microsoft in a report on Thursday, July 30th. Forty-two research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating and five have given a Hold rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the company presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average price target of $564.27.
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Microsoft Company Profile (Free Report)
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft develops, licenses and supports a broad range of software products, services and devices for consumers, enterprises and governments worldwide. Its operations span personal computing, productivity software, cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, developer tools and gaming.
Microsoft’s product portfolio includes the Windows operating system and the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools (Office apps, Outlook, Teams).
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Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. is now primarily an AI infrastructure company, with Data Center revenue representing 58% and growing 107% year-over-year. I am initiating AMD at Strong Buy, citing confirmed large-scale orders from Anthropic and Microsoft, and a forward P/E of 31x 2027 consensus earnings. AMD's forward growth is underpinned by robust guidance, third-party validation from Dell, and accelerating demand for inference workloads over training.
AMD just announced a workstation that could pull sensitive AI workloads out of the cloud entirely, and the buyers it has in mind reveal exactly who stands to lose the most.
AMD is talking up a new workstation-class system built around data-center-grade accelerators, pitched as capable of running very large AI models on a desk rather than in a hyperscaler cloud. Secondary coverage has run with a “trillion parameter” framing, but that specific claim is not confirmed in AMD’s primary communications, and pricing has not been publicly verified either.
On the August 4, 2026 earnings call, CEO Lisa Su said the next-generation Ryzen AI Halo platform, powered by the new Gorgon Halo processor, features 192 gigabytes of unified memory and can run models with up to 300 billion parameters. That extends the earlier Ryzen AI Max+ and Ryzen AI Halo developer platform, previously scoped for models up to 200 billion parameters locally.
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD | AMD Price Prediction) closed Friday, September 4, 2026 at $477.57, up 4.69% in that session. US markets were shut Monday for Labor Day, so the first full trading response is still ahead. The stock is already up 123% year to date and 195.18% over one year, so a lot of AI optimism is already priced in.
What Investors Should Do About It The real story is compute moving on-premise for buyers who will not send sensitive workloads to a cloud: defense contractors, hospitals, banks, and sovereign research labs where latency, cost, and data privacy outweigh cloud convenience. Treat it as a strategic signal for AMD’s client roadmap; the near-term revenue impact looks immaterial next to the data-center business. AMD posted Data Center revenue of $6.72 billion in Q2, 58% of total revenue and up 107% year over year, with Q3 guidance of roughly $13 billion, up about 41%. That is where the AI money is actually being made.
All of that data-center buildout still has to be powered, cooled, and networked by someone other than the chipmaker itself, which is the angle we took in a free report on seven suppliers riding the same wave: 7 Stocks Powering the AI Boom (That Aren’t Chipmakers).
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Chris Lange
Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics. Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications. A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.
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Focus List Spotlight: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD - Free Report) Advanced Micro Devices has strengthened its position in the semiconductor market on the back of its strong product portfolio. Santa Clara, CA-based AMD generated revenues of $34.64 billion in 2025. The company reports operations under three segments – Data Center, Client and Gaming, and Embedded – which accounted for 48%, 42%, and 10% of revenues, respectively.
Since being added to the Focus List on May 19, 2025 at $117.17 per share, shares of AMD have increased 307.59% to $477.57. The stock is currently a #3 (Hold) on the Zacks Rank.
16 analysts revised their earnings estimate higher in the last 60 days for fiscal 2026, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate has increased $0.24 to $7.49. AMD also boasts an average earnings surprise of 6.7%.
Earnings for AMD are forecasted to see growth of 79.6% for the current fiscal year as well.
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AMD just posted its biggest AI revenue surge in years and already has a massive GPU deal with OpenAI, yet the stock has been sliding for a month. The path to $700 exists, but it depends on three very specific…
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AMD (NASDAQ:AMD | AMD Price Prediction) has done something almost no one on Wall Street expected two years ago. It has turned into a credible second source for the AI compute buildout, with Data Center revenue up 107% year-over-year and a 6GW GPU deal with OpenAI on the books.
Shares are already up 113.42% year to date. So the question I keep getting is simple. Can this run keep going, and specifically, can AMD hit $700 in 2027?
Why AMD Shares Have Stalled Since August Here is the read. AMD is down 4.96% over the past week and 5.69% over the past month, even after a blowout Q2. Some of that is profit taking after a 181.58% one-year gain. Some of it is valuation anxiety. And some of it is the Gaming segment, which declined 31% year over year to $779 million and continues to weigh on the story.
With a beta of 2.489, this stock moves violently in both directions. Add in export controls on AI accelerators, memory supply constraints, and tariff risk, and it is not surprising that shares needed to digest after doubling. The thesis remains intact; the market simply wants proof.
Wall Street Sees 34% Upside. Our Model Sees More The Street is unusually aligned here. Five strong buys, 36 buys, 10 holds, zero sells, and an average target of $613.84. That is 80% bullish coverage. Our own model lands at a base case of $622.36, an optimistic case of $645.23, and a bear case of $475.94, with high confidence.
I think the consensus is still slightly behind the earnings curve. The FY27 EPS estimate has climbed from $12.959 ninety days ago to $15.450 today, with 33 upward revisions in the last 30 days and only two down. That is the kind of revision pattern that precedes target hikes, not target cuts.
Path to $700 Per Share Now the math. Reaching $700 from today’s price of $458.08 would require a gain of 52.8%. With forward EPS of $8.64, a price of $700 implies a forward P/E of 81x.
Our base case of $622.36 already implies 79x, meaning the bold target requires only 1.6x of additional multiple expansion on top of the base case. That is achievable if FY27 estimates keep grinding higher, which they are.
Add specific catalysts: the Anthropic partnership for up to 2GW of MI450 deployments in Helios racks, Microsoft Azure Helios racks, and the Oracle 50,000-GPU Helios supercluster.
CEO Lisa Su put it plainly on the Q2 call: “We now expect revenue to grow substantially above our prior target of greater than 35%, and we expect to significantly exceed our $20 annual EPS target within our strategic timeframe.”
The primary risk is Helios execution, since management itself flagged yield improvements over the first few quarters of the ramp.
Where AMD Trades Today vs Its Earnings Power At $458.08 against forward EPS of $8.64, AMD trades at roughly 53x forward earnings. That is not cheap. It is also not absurd for a company that just posted 50% revenue growth and 82% comparable EPS growth.
Shares sit between the 52-week high of $584.73 and low of $149.22, closer to the high. Zoom out and the 10-year return is 5,986.02%. If FY27 EPS lands near the current consensus, the current multiple compresses meaningfully into next year, and $700 stops requiring heroics.
Is $700 Realistic? My Verdict Reaching $700 in 2027 requires a 52.8% gain from here. Is it a stretch? Yes. Is it a long shot? No.
Three things need to go right. Helios has to ramp cleanly through Q4 and Q1. FY27 EPS estimates need to keep drifting toward the high end near $19.96. And the Data Center segment needs to more than double year over year in 2027 as management guided.
A serious slip in Instinct execution or an export-control expansion would derail it. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how AMD could reach $700 in 2027.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
AMD stock surged 6% on Tuesday after Advanced Micro Devices said its total addressable market could reach $3 trillion by 2030, up from its previous estimate of roughly $2 trillion.
Shares rose 6.45% to $508.38, bringing their gains for the year to more than 120%.
The revised market opportunity reflects rising demand for graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs) and AI-enabled PCs, according to Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu.
AMD had estimated in July that its total addressable market could reach approximately $2 trillion by 2030.
Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, Hu said the figure could potentially reach as high as $3 trillion.
“This AI super investment cycle is at the very beginning, and over time, we're going to continue to see strong demand for AMD's product,” Hu said.
A key part of AMD’s outlook is the shift in AI workloads from model training toward inference, where AI models execute tasks after training.
According to a Citi summary of the event, AMD management said, “In the past twelve months, Inference has become the majority driver of AI computing,” with workloads also moving beyond basic chatbots toward more autonomous AI systems.
AMD expects its data center business to more than double next year.
The company plans to launch its next-generation MI450 GPU this quarter, with production expected to ramp up during the fourth quarter and into 2027.
The company is also benefiting from stronger demand for server CPUs.
Hu said AMD has increased supply in the constrained CPU market, supporting expected growth of more than 80% in the business during the second half of this year compared with the same period in 2025.
Server CPU growth is expected to exceed 70% next year.
AMD is also seeing strong demand for its rack-scale Helios systems.
Meta Platforms and two unnamed AI labs are anchor customers, and all three have provided demand forecasts above their initial purchase agreements.
Helios volume expectations for 2027 have already exceeded initial projections, while AMD is seeing additional demand from newer “neo-cloud” providers.
Data center GPUs currently generate profit margins below AMD’s corporate average.
However, growth in higher-margin server and embedded businesses has helped offset that pressure, with strong double-digit growth expected in the second and third quarters.
AMD is also developing its future AI accelerator pipeline.
Management said it is engaged with its three leading customers on next-generation MI500 and MI600 chips. The company has also disclosed a partnership with Cerebras and indicated plans to target the low-latency inference market.
AMD’s shares have gained more than 230% over the past year, although the stock has fallen nearly 5% over the past week and about 6% over the past month.
The decline has followed strong gains and comes as investors weigh valuation alongside risks including AI accelerator export controls, memory supply constraints and tariffs.
The company’s Gaming segment also remains a drag, with revenue down 31% year over year to $779 million.
Despite those risks, AMD has become a credible second source for AI computing, supported by 107% year-over-year growth in Data Center revenue and a 6GW GPU agreement with OpenAI.
The stock has five strong-buy ratings, 36 buys and 10 holds, with no sell ratings and an average price target of $613.84.
