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Tesla reported Q2 earnings with a massive profit miss and significant margin deterioration. TSLA achieved solid delivery numbers, but only by sacrificing profitability. The high valuation is not justified given the deteriorating financial metrics revealed in this report.

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Robotaxi Mode Engaged: Tesla Starts Monetizing Its Florida FleetTesla NASDAQ: TSLA executives used the company’s second-quarter 2026 earnings webcast to highlight record quarterly deliveries, rising interest in Full Self-Driving, rapid energy storage growth and a major multiyear capital spending cycle tied to autonomy, robotics, semiconductor capacity and manufacturing expansion.

Elon Musk said Tesla had “a great quarter” and achieved record second-quarter deliveries. He said the Model Y continues to set records and described Full Self-Driving, or FSD, as a significant demand driver in markets where it is approved.

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Bank Earnings Are Roaring, But Wall Street Isn't Ready to Celebrate“For a lot of people, they’re actually buying Tesla Full Self-Driving with a car attached, as opposed to a car with FSD,” Musk said, adding that Tesla expects demand to increase as FSD gains approval in additional countries.

Vehicle Demand Rebounded Across Regions Vaibhav Taneja said the second quarter continued a demand recovery that began late in the first quarter. Tesla posted sequential delivery growth of 60% in the Americas, 27% in APAC and 12% in EMEA, he said. Model Y also set records in several markets, including the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

Tesla’s Delivery Surprise Was Big—Earnings Need to Be BiggerTaneja said Tesla exited the quarter with its largest order backlog since 2023 and is focused on increasing production across its factories. He cautioned that production growth will be limited by supply chain constraints, including batteries and electronic components.

FSD was a recurring focus of the call. Taneja said about 55% of North American deliveries had an FSD subscription enabled at the time of delivery in the second quarter. He said FSD attach rates reached nearly 1.5 million paid customers globally, with 55% coming from upfront purchases and 45% from subscriptions. Tesla expects future FSD monetization growth to come primarily from subscriptions, he said, as the company has removed the purchase option in most markets.

Margins Reflect Warranty, Tariff and Pricing Dynamics Automotive gross margin excluding regulatory credits declined sequentially to 16.3% from 19.2%. Taneja said the first quarter had benefited from a $230 million warranty true-down and tariff relief that did not repeat in the second quarter. Adjusting for those first-quarter benefits, automotive gross margin excluding credits would have been approximately flat, he said.

Taneja also said commodity price increases and interest rate changes continued to add costs. Higher interest rates raised the cost of subvention programs, which are recognized upfront as a revenue offset and negatively affected automotive margins.

Tesla’s energy business deployed 13.5 GWh of energy storage in the quarter, up 53% sequentially and the company’s second-largest quarter for the business. However, energy gross margin fell to 20.4% from 39.5%. Taneja attributed the decline to a roughly $240 million warranty true-up tied to vendor cell issues for legacy deployments, the absence of more than $200 million in tariff benefits recognized in the first quarter and lower average selling prices for industrial storage amid increasing competition.

Long term, Taneja said Tesla expects energy gross margins to normalize in the mid- to low-20% range. He described the energy order backlog as robust and said the company is building for existing demand as well as expected future demand from data centers and broader electrification.

Service and other gross margin improved to 14.1% from 9.2%, an all-time high, driven by higher volume and better cost management across used vehicles, Supercharging, service centers and insurance, Taneja said.

Robotaxi Expansion Centers on Safety and Reliability Musk said Tesla is scaling Robotaxi “as fast as humanly possible” while prioritizing safety. He said the company is trying to avoid any harm as it expands the service, noting that any injury involving Robotaxi would draw significant scrutiny from regulators and the public.

Ashok, Tesla’s vice president of AI, said the Robotaxi program has driven more than 380,000 miles of unsupervised operation across six cities in two states with “zero notable incidents.” He said the fleet is already running early versions of Tesla’s V15 FSD software, with about 40% of planned major improvement tracks merged into current builds.

Taneja said Tesla has expanded its Robotaxi fleet to seven U.S. markets and expects the ramp to accelerate through the rest of the year. Musk said the constraint on growth is the “march of nines” of reliability, describing the need for increasingly high safety and reliability levels before broader scaling.

Executives said Tesla plans to keep Robotaxi vertically integrated. Musk said he does not expect demand challenges and believes the service’s economics will make demand exceed Tesla’s ability to serve it.

Optimus, Cybercab and AI Chips Drive Investment Plans Musk said Optimus could be “the biggest product ever,” but emphasized that scaling manufacturing will be difficult because there is no established supply chain for many of the robot’s parts. He said Tesla has in-sourced a significant amount of production and is building an Optimus line in Fremont where Model S and Model X production had previously been located.

Ashok said Optimus training will use data from factory workers, dedicated demonstrations, internet video and eventually robots practicing tasks in an “Optimus Academy.” He said Tesla is applying the same end-to-end AI strategy used in FSD: “pixels in, controls out.”

Musk also discussed Tesla’s planned Terafab initiative and said the company expects to announce a location soon. He said Terafab is necessary to avoid AI chip constraints that would limit Optimus production. Tesla has placed equipment orders for a development fab in Austin intended to combine lithography mask production, logic, memory, packaging and chip testing under one roof.

On Cybercab, executives said the vehicle will use the same V15 models as other Tesla platforms. Musk said Tesla needs to accumulate driving data specific to the Cybercab chassis before putting large numbers on the road. He also said Starlink will be integrated into Cybercab and, in markets where available, Tesla vehicles generally, because Robotaxis need reliable connectivity.

CapEx to Rise as Tesla Pursues Manufacturing Build-Out Taneja said free cash flow was negative in the quarter, largely because capital expenditures more than doubled sequentially. Tesla continues to expect 2026 CapEx of more than $25 billion, with spending set to rise further in the second half of the year.

He said CapEx will grow for the next two or three years as Tesla expands its Robotaxi fleet, Optimus production capacity, semiconductor fab investments, solar manufacturing capacity, AI compute infrastructure and automotive manufacturing. Tesla is also pursuing debt facilities that could provide borrowing capacity of up to $30 billion to accelerate those investments.

Musk said he has asked Tesla’s team to spend on CapEx “as fast as we can without it being too wasteful,” balancing capital efficiency against speed. He described the current effort as one of the fastest industrial scale-ups in modern U.S. history.

Net income in the quarter was positively affected by a $1 billion mark-to-market gain on Tesla’s SpaceX holdings, offset by about $300 million in foreign exchange losses and roughly $100 million in Bitcoin losses, Taneja said.

About Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)Tesla, Inc NASDAQ: TSLA is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric vehicles, energy generation and energy storage products. Founded in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla grew into a vertically integrated mobility and clean‑energy company with Elon Musk serving as its chief executive officer. The company's stated mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy, reflected in its combined focus on electric drivetrains, battery technology, renewable energy products and software.

Tesla's automotive business includes a lineup of battery‑electric vehicles and related services.

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].

Should You Invest $1,000 in Tesla Right Now?Before you consider Tesla, you'll want to hear this.

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Uber Technologies (UBER - Free Report) ended the recent trading session at $70.33, demonstrating a -1.71% change from the preceding day's closing price. This move lagged the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.14%. At the same time, the Dow lost 0.01%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 0.57%.

Coming into today, shares of the ride-hailing company had gained 2.7% in the past month. In that same time, the Computer and Technology sector lost 4.82%, while the S&P 500 gained 0.25%.

The investment community will be closely monitoring the performance of Uber Technologies in its forthcoming earnings report. The company is scheduled to release its earnings on August 5, 2026. The company is expected to report EPS of $0.83, up 31.75% from the prior-year quarter. Alongside, our most recent consensus estimate is anticipating revenue of $14.2 billion, indicating a 12.25% upward movement from the same quarter last year.

Looking at the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates suggest analysts are expecting earnings of $2.98 per share and revenue of $57.89 billion. These totals would mark changes of -43.77% and +11.28%, respectively, from last year.

Any recent changes to analyst estimates for Uber Technologies should also be noted by investors. Recent revisions tend to reflect the latest near-term business trends. Therefore, positive revisions in estimates convey analysts' confidence in the business performance and profit potential.

Our research suggests that these changes in estimates have a direct relationship with upcoming stock price performance. We developed the Zacks Rank to capitalize on this phenomenon. Our system takes these estimate changes into account and delivers a clear, actionable rating model.

The Zacks Rank system, running from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), holds an admirable track record of superior performance, independently audited, with #1 stocks contributing an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has witnessed a 1.2% increase. Uber Technologies is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold).

Valuation is also important, so investors should note that Uber Technologies has a Forward P/E ratio of 23.98 right now. This signifies a premium in comparison to the average Forward P/E of 17.2 for its industry.

It's also important to note that UBER currently trades at a PEG ratio of 6.01. Comparable to the widely accepted P/E ratio, the PEG ratio also accounts for the company's projected earnings growth. The Internet - Services industry currently had an average PEG ratio of 1.84 as of yesterday's close.

The Internet - Services industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. This group has a Zacks Industry Rank of 105, putting it in the top 43% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank is ordered from best to worst in terms of the average Zacks Rank of the individual companies within each of these sectors. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Keep in mind to rely on Zacks.com to watch all these stock-impacting metrics, and more, in the succeeding trading sessions.

Falling 0.57% to 25,691, the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC -0.57%) led the market lower as rising oil prices pressured growth stocks, while the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.14%) slipped 0.13% to 7,499 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.01%) finished nearly flat, down 0.01% to 52,219.

Gold prices gained 1.49% to $4,137.10 as of U.S. market close and the 10-Year Treasury yield rose 0.03% to 4.63%, as the Utilities sector climbed while Communication Services and Healthcare shares finished lower.

Today's biggest movesSuper Micro Computer rocketed 26% on a record backlog, while AT&T smashed EPS expectations, sending its stock 4% higher. Elsewhere, Rocket Lab stock opened higher, but sold off to end the day largely flat after announcing a $266 million contract with the U.S. government for 12 suborbital launches.

On the negative side, Reddit slipped 8% after a report suggested the company may limit Alphabet’s access to its massive trove of content for AI training. However, this is likely just posturing in hopes of negotiating a better licensing deal with the Magnificent Seven juggernaut.

What this means for investorsNow, the market’s attention is largely on Alphabet and Tesla after hours, as the two stocks just reported their second-quarter earnings. As of 5:45 p.m. ET, Alphabet stock was down 4%, and Tesla had dipped 5%.

While Alphabet delivered sales growth of 24%, headlined by its cloud department’s revenue soaring 81%, free cash flow turned negative as operating cash flow was outweighed by $45 billion in capital expenditures during the quarter.

As for Tesla, revenue rose 26%, but adjusted EPS was well below Wall Street expectations, pressuring shares. Tesla will likely remain volatile as it transitions production from mostly EVs to Cybercabs, Megapack 3, Tesla Semi, Optimus robots, and other new verticals.

Currently, Nasdaq futures are down 1%.

Josh Kohn-Lindquist has positions in Alphabet, Rocket Lab, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Reddit, Rocket Lab, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Alphabet Is Planning a New AI Chip. Here's Why It Matters Ahead of EarningsAlphabet NASDAQ: GOOG executives said the company’s second-quarter 2026 results were driven by broad demand for artificial intelligence across Search, YouTube and Google Cloud, while also signaling that heavy infrastructure spending will continue as capacity remains constrained.

Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said Alphabet revenue rose 24% year-over-year, citing “exciting momentum” across the company’s core businesses. Search and other revenue grew 17%, YouTube advertising revenue increased 13%, and Google Cloud revenue rose 82%, he said. Cloud backlog reached $514 billion.

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Oracle Is One Step From Junk—Can It Afford the AI Boom?“Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business,” Pichai said.

AI Adoption Drives Product Momentum Pichai said Alphabet is seeing strong usage growth for its Gemini model family, including newly announced Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite models. He described the Flash series as a “workhorse” product because of its balance of performance and cost. Alphabet also launched Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, which Pichai said can be paired with the CodeMender agent to identify and fix vulnerabilities.

Bank Earnings Are Roaring, But Wall Street Isn't Ready to CelebratePichai said more than 9 million developers are building each month with Alphabet’s models across APIs and developer products. The company’s model APIs are processing about 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion in the prior quarter.

The Gemini app reached 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling over the past year, Pichai said. He also said that since the company launched Omni at Google I/O in May, there has been a 40% increase in daily active users creating videos on the Gemini app.

In Search, Pichai said Alphabet brought AI Overviews and AI Mode together into one “seamless Search experience.” AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users since expanding globally last October, he said. Pichai added that AI features in Search are sending “billions of clicks to websites every week.”

Search and YouTube Advertising Grow Philipp Schindler, Alphabet’s chief business officer, said Google Services revenue was $95 billion for the quarter, up 15% year-over-year and primarily driven by Search. Search and Other revenue reached more than $63 billion, with retail and finance making the largest contributions. YouTube advertising revenue grew 13%, driven by direct response and brand advertising, while Network advertising revenue declined 1%.

Schindler said Alphabet is using Gemini across its advertising infrastructure to improve ad quality, advertiser tools and AI user experiences. He said Gemini has helped improve query understanding, particularly for longer searches that were previously harder to monetize. In shopping ads, Schindler said the company drove a 20% improvement in showing highly relevant ads.

He also highlighted AI Max, which is now out of beta and has been adopted by half a million advertisers. Advertisers using AI-powered campaigns such as AI Max or Performance Max see an average of 15% more conversions or value on Search at a similar return on ad spend, Schindler said.

YouTube also benefited from the FIFA World Cup 2026. Pichai said more than 1.7 billion unique viewers globally watched World Cup-related videos on YouTube. Schindler said more than 550 million watched those videos on televisions, making the tournament the most viewed World Cup in YouTube history.

Google Cloud Revenue Surges 82% Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi said Google Cloud revenue increased 82% to $24.8 billion, driven primarily by Google Cloud Platform, which grew faster than Cloud overall. She said core GCP, AI solutions and AI infrastructure were all important contributors. Alphabet also began recognizing revenue from TPU system sales delivered to customer data centers for the first time in the quarter.

Cloud operating income was $8.8 billion, more than tripling from the year-earlier period, while operating margin rose to 35.6% from 20.7%. Ashkenazi said Cloud backlog increased by more than $50 billion sequentially to $514 billion, driven by demand for enterprise AI offerings. Alphabet expects to recognize just over 50% of that backlog as revenue over the next 24 months.

Pichai said Gemini Enterprise has been adopted by nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies. He also said nearly 500 Cloud customers each processed more than 1 trillion tokens in the last year, and more than 2,000 enterprises consumed more than 100 billion tokens over the same period.

Security was another focus area. Pichai said 90% of Fortune 100 companies are Google Cloud security users, and nearly 90% of Wiz customers are using AI-powered security features. Alphabet reported a more than 45% quarter-over-quarter increase in AI workloads scanned and protected by its security platform.

CapEx Guidance Raised as Capacity Remains Tight Ashkenazi said consolidated revenue was $119.8 billion, up 24%, or 23% in constant currency. Operating income increased 30% to $40.8 billion, and operating margin was 34%. Alphabet generated $39.1 billion in operating cash flow during the quarter, but free cash flow was negative $5.9 billion due to capital expenditures.

Capital expenditures totaled $44.9 billion in the second quarter, with the “vast majority” going to technical infrastructure for AI. About 60% of technical infrastructure investment was in servers, while 40% was in data centers and networking equipment.

Ashkenazi raised Alphabet’s full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion, up from a previous estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion. She said the increase reflects accelerated capacity delivery to meet demand. Alphabet also expects capital expenditures to increase significantly in 2027.

“We’re still in a supply-constrained environment,” Ashkenazi said during the question-and-answer session, adding that Alphabet will continue investing as long as it sees attractive returns.

Ashkenazi also said Alphabet plans to expand its use of third-party capacity in the third quarter as a bridge while it builds more internal capacity. She said that strategy should help Alphabet continue growing its customer base, but it will create modest near-term margin pressure.

Executives Address Model Competition and Long-Term Bets Asked about returns on generative AI investments, Pichai said Alphabet is in the “very early innings” of a secular shift across consumer and enterprise markets. He said the company has become “more bullish” on the opportunities over the past year.

On model competition, Pichai said the frontier remains dynamic, but Alphabet is committed to competing at that level. He said the company is training Gemini 4 and is aiming to increase the pace of model releases, potentially moving toward a monthly cadence.

Executives also discussed Alphabet’s other bets. Pichai said Waymo introduced its newest vehicle, Oasis, to public riders, powered by the sixth-generation Waymo Driver. Wing has completed more than 1 million home deliveries and continues to grow through partnerships with Walmart, DoorDash and Papa John’s. In health and drug discovery, Isomorphic Labs raised more than $2 billion to support its AI drug design engine and drug candidate pipeline.

Ashkenazi said the board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.22 per share, payable in September. Alphabet ended the quarter with $242.5 billion in cash and marketable securities, including $87.1 billion of marketable equity securities, and $98.2 billion in long-term debt.

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].

Should You Invest $1,000 in Alphabet Right Now?Before you consider Alphabet, you'll want to hear this.

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While Alphabet currently has a Buy rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys.

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Alphabet Inc. (GOOG - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $9.11 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.88 per share. This compares to earnings of $2.31 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +216.32%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $2.64 per share when it actually produced earnings of $5.11, delivering a surprise of +93.56%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates four times.

Alphabet, which belongs to the Zacks Internet - Services industry, posted revenues of $103.62 billion for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.31%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $81.72 billion. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates four times over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

Alphabet shares have added about 10.3% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 9.7%.

What's Next for Alphabet?While Alphabet has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Alphabet was favorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to outperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $3.04 on $107.98 billion in revenues for the coming quarter and $14.34 on $423.73 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Internet - Services is currently in the top 43% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.

Another stock from the same industry, Dropbox (DBX - Free Report) , has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on August 6.

This online file-sharing company is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.74 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +4.2%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days.

Dropbox's revenues are expected to be $625.6 million, down 0% from the year-ago quarter.

Editor’s Note: The transcripts have been removed and were published in error.

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.

Benzinga APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ to learn more.

The full earnings call is available at https://abc.xyz/investor/events/event-details/2026/2026-Q2-Earnings-Call-2026-GgTAq7Is0z/default.aspx

SummaryAlphabet Inc reported its financial performance for the second quarter of 2026, highlighting strong revenue growth driven by its core services and new initiatives.

The company emphasized its strategic focus on AI technology, particularly through the development and implementation of AI-driven solutions like Gemini, which aims to solve complex problems across various sectors.

YouTube TV was highlighted as a key product with expanding service plans, reflecting the company’s commitment to diversifying its revenue streams beyond traditional advertising.

Alphabet Inc announced continued investment in its cloud services, aiming to leverage AI capabilities to enhance its offerings and maintain competitive advantage.

Management expressed optimism about the future, focusing on the potential of AI to drive growth and innovation, while also addressing the company’s mission to tackle solvable diseases with new technology.

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

© 2026 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Bloomberg/Getty Images Imagine making nearly $100 billion extra and dedicating exactly one vague sentence to it. That's just what Google parent Alphabet did in its second quarter earnings report.

The tech giant reported that its "other income" totaled $98 billion in the second quarter, noting it came from unrealized gains on its investments.

Analysts didn't ask Alphabet executives about the gain on its earnings call. Instead, they focused on its rising capital expenditures and position in the AI race. The tech giant's stock closed down about 1.24%.

It's not the first time Alphabet has done this. In April 2025, the company disclosed a similar $8 billion paper gain. Google has no obligation to disclose exactly where those gains come from, and it doesn't.

The gains are almost certainly related to very savvy investments the company has made in companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks.

Google was an early SpaceX investor, buying about 7% of the company in 2015. SpaceX also uses Google Cloud for its Starlink service. SpaceX is currently worth about $1.5 trillion dollars since its IPO last month. Google invested in SpaceX when it was worth only about $12 billion — that's a 133x return.

Google is also heavily invested in Anthropic, owning about a 14% stake in the company as of last March, according to filings seen by the New York Times. The AI lab was valued at almost $1 trillion in a massive $65 billion funding round in May. Some investors think it's already worth $1.2 trillion.

Additionally, Google is an investor in Databricks, which was valued at $188 billion in a funding round earlier this month.

Google, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Databricks didn't respond to requests for comment.

Google's investing chops are certainly impressive. But investors are more concerned about Google's own prospects.

The tech giant hiked its capital expenditures to a maximum of $205 billion this year as it races to compete on AI. While Google has strong advantages in distribution and chipmaking, its efforts to build a leading AI model haven't paid off.

It keeps delaying its next big AI chatbot, which some rivals are mocking online.

Still, many analysts remain bullish on Google's fundamentals. Its revenue jumped by almost 25% compared to last year on the back of strong ads and cloud sales, which are also being boosted by AI.

"Another impressive quarter for Google," said Emarketer principal analyst Nate Elliott.

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Charles Rollet You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.

Charles Rollet is BI's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC. Charles is based in the Bay Area, where he enjoys hiking with his dogs. You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811.

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

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Boeing (BA - Free Report) closed the most recent trading day at $208.65, moving +1.88% from the previous trading session. The stock exceeded the S&P 500, which registered a loss of 0.14% for the day. Elsewhere, the Dow lost 0.01%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 0.57%.

Heading into today, shares of the airplane builder had lost 5.5% over the past month, outpacing the Aerospace sector's loss of 5.8% and lagging the S&P 500's gain of 0.25%.

The investment community will be paying close attention to the earnings performance of Boeing in its upcoming release. The company is slated to reveal its earnings on July 28, 2026. On that day, Boeing is projected to report earnings of -$0.34 per share, which would represent year-over-year growth of 72.58%. Meanwhile, our latest consensus estimate is calling for revenue of $24.05 billion, up 5.73% from the prior-year quarter.

For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates project earnings of -$0.33 per share and a revenue of $96.84 billion, demonstrating changes of +96.9% and +8.25%, respectively, from the preceding year.

Additionally, investors should keep an eye on any recent revisions to analyst forecasts for Boeing. These revisions typically reflect the latest short-term business trends, which can change frequently. Consequently, upward revisions in estimates express analysts' positivity towards the business operations and its ability to generate profits.

Our research demonstrates that these adjustments in estimates directly associate with imminent stock price performance. To take advantage of this, we've established the Zacks Rank, an exclusive model that considers these estimated changes and delivers an operational rating system.

The Zacks Rank system, spanning from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), boasts an impressive track record of outperformance, audited externally, with #1 ranked stocks yielding an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has moved 113.63% lower. At present, Boeing boasts a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold).

The Aerospace - Defense industry is part of the Aerospace sector. This industry currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 98, which puts it in the top 40% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank assesses the vigor of our specific industry groups by computing the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks incorporated in the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Make sure to utilize Zacks.com to follow all of these stock-moving metrics, and more, in the coming trading sessions.

Canopy Growth Corporation (CGC - Free Report) closed at $0.91 in the latest trading session, marking a -2.67% move from the prior day. The stock fell short of the S&P 500, which registered a loss of 0.14% for the day. Meanwhile, the Dow lost 0.01%, and the Nasdaq, a tech-heavy index, lost 0.57%.

The stock of company has fallen by 1.16% in the past month, lagging the Medical sector's gain of 5.8% and the S&P 500's gain of 0.25%.

Investors will be eagerly watching for the performance of Canopy Growth Corporation in its upcoming earnings disclosure. The company is expected to report EPS of -$0.04, up 71.43% from the prior-year quarter. Meanwhile, the latest consensus estimate predicts the revenue to be $58.52 million, indicating a 12.25% increase compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates project earnings of -$0.11 per share and a revenue of $243.57 million, demonstrating changes of +75.56% and +18.26%, respectively, from the preceding year.

Investors might also notice recent changes to analyst estimates for Canopy Growth Corporation. Recent revisions tend to reflect the latest near-term business trends. As a result, we can interpret positive estimate revisions as a good sign for the business outlook.

Based on our research, we believe these estimate revisions are directly related to near-term stock moves. To utilize this, we have created the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model that integrates these estimate changes and provides a functional rating system.

The Zacks Rank system, which ranges from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), has an impressive outside-audited track record of outperformance, with #1 stocks generating an average annual return of +25% since 1988. The Zacks Consensus EPS estimate remained stagnant within the past month. Canopy Growth Corporation is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold).

The Medical - Products industry is part of the Medical sector. At present, this industry carries a Zacks Industry Rank of 168, placing it within the bottom 32% of over 250 industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank is ordered from best to worst in terms of the average Zacks Rank of the individual companies within each of these sectors. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Keep in mind to rely on Zacks.com to watch all these stock-impacting metrics, and more, in the succeeding trading sessions.

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AT&T (T +3.50%), a nationwide wireless and broadband carrier, closed at $23.04, up 3.50%. Earnings and subscriber growth data beat estimates, even as revenue missed expectations.
Trading volume reached 177.6 million shares, coming in about triple its three-month average of 57.9 million shares.

How the markets moved todayThe S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.14%) fell 0.13% to 7,499, while the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC -0.57%) declined 0.57% to 25,691. Among U.S. wireless telecommunications services peers, Verizon Communications (VZ +1.17%) rose 1.16% to $44.29, while T-Mobile US (TMUS +0.19%) was little changed, edging down 0.09% to $190.94.

What this means for investorsInvestors cheered AT&T’s results despite a slight revenue miss. More important was strong subscriber growth, especially as investors eyed the upcoming initial quarterly report from Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX -6.70%).

SpaceX’s Starlink service could be a big disruptor for the existing wireless market, but today’s results indicate AT&T isn’t seeing it yet. Investors should continue to watch how space-based broadband develops, though. SpaceX isn’t the only player in the game. AST SpaceMobile (ASTS -2.18%) is also building a satellite network to provide broadband directly to smartphones anywhere on Earth.

For now, the focus was on AT&T's continued growth. The company gained 432,000 postpaid phone net subscribers during the quarter, surpassing Wall Street's expectations of 338,500 additions.

With competition coming from satellite-based solutions, though, AT&T investors should closely follow what SpaceX says about its existing Starlink business when it reports earnings on Aug. 4.

Howard Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends AST SpaceMobile. The Motley Fool recommends T-Mobile US and Verizon Communications. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Netflix remains a high-quality, profitable, global leader with strong margins and robust free cash flow. Revenue growth is decelerating, with Q2 at 13.4% and Q3 guidance pointing to 11.7%, tempering upside at current valuation. Management maintains a shareholder-friendly capital allocation, including $4.7B in Q2 buybacks and $12.5B full-year free cash flow guidance.

Intel (INTC -2.47%) CEO Lip-Bu Tan told CNBC in May that "multiple customers" were working with the company's foundry business, but that it was his personal policy not to name them. On Tuesday, Intel finally named one.

Cybersecurity specialist Fortinet will use Intel's foundry (the business that manufactures chips for other companies) to produce its next-generation security chip, called the SP6, the two companies announced. The chip will be built on the Intel 4 process, and Fortinet becomes the first named outside customer for the foundry since Tan took over in March 2025.

Investors saw plenty to like. Intel shares jumped more than 8% on Tuesday to close at $105.40, adding to a run that has lifted the stock more than 300% over the past year.

And the timing raises the stakes. Intel reports second-quarter results after the market closes on Thursday, July 23.

So what does the Fortinet deal actually prove -- and what should investors watch for in the report?

Image source: Intel.

A name matters more than the chip Intel's foundry effort has never lacked announcements. What it has lacked is named, committed customers. And Intel has yet to land a major one for its most advanced manufacturing processes, known as 14A and 18A.

That history is what makes the Fortinet deal both encouraging and limited.

On the positive side, a company has now publicly committed a next-generation product to Intel's manufacturing. That is the kind of outside validation the foundry strategy has been missing, and it arguably makes the next customer conversation easier. Fortinet is a credible name, too. The cybersecurity company's dedicated security chips serve a market where demand has been climbing for years.

However, the SP6 will be built on Intel 4. That's an older, less advanced process, introduced in 2023 for the compute tile in Intel's own Core Ultra PC chips -- not the leading-edge technology Intel's turnaround ultimately depends on. A named customer on Intel 4 is progress. It isn't the marquee win that would prove Intel can manufacture the industry's most advanced chips in large quantities.

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The economics are still tiny The deal's financial weight is the other reason to stay level-headed. In the first quarter, Intel Foundry generated $5.4 billion of revenue, up 16% year over year. But nearly all of that came from making Intel's own products. External foundry revenue (money from manufacturing chips for outside customers) was just $174 million in the quarter. That's a sliver for a company that posted $13.6 billion in total revenue.

Demand for Intel's own chips, at least, is trending the right way -- even as the company confirmed this week that it is trimming jobs in that same data center unit. First-quarter revenue in the company's data center and artificial intelligence (AI) segment rose 22% year over year, faster than the company's overall 7% growth rate.

"The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user," Tan said in the company's first-quarter earnings release, adding that the shift "is significantly increasing the need for Intel's CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings."

Even so, Intel's reported bottom line is still in the red while it builds out capacity. The company posted a net loss of $3.7 billion in the first quarter -- though $4.1 billion of restructuring and impairment charges, largely a writedown of Mobileye goodwill, more than accounted for it. On a non-GAAP basis, which strips out those and other items, Intel earned $1.5 billion.

That's what makes Thursday's report the more important event of the week. Investors should watch three things: the trajectory of external foundry revenue, the size of the net loss, and any sign that a significant leading-edge customer is getting closer.

And the stock's run complicates the setup. After rising more than 300% in a year, Intel trades at nearly 90 times forward earnings -- a multiple that assumes the turnaround works, not one that leaves room for it to stumble. For a company still in the red on a reported basis, that is a lot of confidence to carry into an earnings report. And Tuesday's move, which came amid a broad chip-sector rally, showed how eager the market is to reward any scrap of foundry progress.

The Fortinet announcement is the first outside proof point of the Tan era, and I don't want to diminish it. A foundry needs customers willing to say so publicly, and now Intel has one. But the deal contributes a signal -- Intel didn't disclose what it contributes in dollars. At this valuation, Intel needs to deliver both. I'd want to see Thursday's numbers (external foundry revenue in particular) before paying nearly 90 times forward earnings for a turnaround still finding its footing.

IBM (IBM - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $2.93 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate . This compares to earnings of $2.8 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

A quarter ago, it was expected that this technology and consulting company would post earnings of $1.81 per share when it actually produced earnings of $1.91, delivering a surprise of +5.52%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times.

IBM, which belongs to the Zacks Computer - Integrated Systems industry, posted revenues of $17.16 billion for the quarter ended June 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 0.03%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $16.98 billion. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

IBM shares have lost about 28.9% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 9.7%.

What's Next for IBM?While IBM has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for IBM was unfavorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to underperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $2.83 on $17.03 billion in revenues for the coming quarter and $12.13 on $70.75 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Computer - Integrated Systems is currently in the top 7% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.

Another stock from the same industry, NCR Voyix (VYX - Free Report) , has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026.

This maker of ATMs and other hardware and software to handle payments is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.16 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of -15.8%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days.

NCR Voyix's revenues are expected to be $517.5 million, down 22.3% from the year-ago quarter.

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Key Takeaways After a Flat-to-Lower Trading Day, Q2 Reports Hit the TapeGOOGL Reported Nearly 4x Earnings Growth Year over YearTesla Missed Earnings by -34% in Q2 Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026

We’ve come to that point in earnings season where after-market-close reports begin to outshine those reported ahead of the open. Market indexes were flat-to-down on the regular trading session, with the Nasdaq shedding -146 points, or -0.57%, while the small-cap Russell 2000 slipped -27 points, -0.92%.

After-Market Earnings Reports at a Glance: GOOGL, TSLA, IBM & More
Search leader and tech conglomerate Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) set a very high bar on its earnings beat this afternoon, posting a positive surprise of +216% — $9.11 per share versus a consensus estimate of $2.87, and nearly 4x the $2.31 per share it reported a year ago. Revenues reported at $119.80 billion do  not subtract traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which we here at Zacks do. Thus we see a $103.62 billion top-line, above the $101.28 billion forecast.

Cloud demonstrated +82% growth, $63.2 billion of which came from Search, +24.7% of which saw AI driving search query engagements. YouTube Ads brought in $11 billion for the first time in a quarter. However, this also marked the first quarter of negative free cash flow at Alphabet, -$5.8 billion, on capital expenditures totaling $44 billion. So while the AI trade continues its upward surge, it’s coming with a high price tag. As a result, shares are selling off -1% in late trading.

Tesla (TSLA - Free Report) , conversely, posted a big bottom-line miss in Q2: $0.33 per share versus $0.50 anticipated. Revenues improved nicely to $28.26 billion in the quarter, above the $25.81 million expected and +26% year over year. It also carries negative free cash flow as well, and shares are trading down -3% in after hours, adding to their -16.8% drop since the start of the year.

IBM (IBM - Free Report) managed to meet bottom-line expectations at $2.93 per share this afternoon, while revenues of $17.2 billion eked out a beat over the $17.17 billion Zacks consensus. Software gained +5% in the quarter, partly on Red Hat’s +11% gains.  The tech giant also said it is “investing aggressively” into quantum computing going forward. Shares are up +2% in today’s after-market.

ServiceNow (NOW - Free Report) posted a +19% beat on its bottom line in Q2 today, with earnings of $0.97 per share outpacing the $0.86 estimate. Revenues of $3.99 billion easily surpassed the $3.92 billion in the Zacks consensus, and the software company increased its subscriber revenue outlook for the full year. Shares are up +3.66% in late trading, filling in some of the -37% crater in stock price year to date.

Texas Instruments (TXN - Free Report) stuck the landing on its Q2 results this afternoon, putting up earnings of $2.14 per share versus expectations of $1.91 — up +52% year over year. Revenues of $5.46 billion outpaced the $5.22 billion forecast, up +23% year over year. The Texas tech giant still has $2.74 billion in free cash flow. Shares have added +1% in late trading to their impressive tally +69.5% year to date.

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Published in artificial-intelligence earnings software tech-stocks

Globe Life (GL - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $3.61 per share, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $3.67 per share. This compares to earnings of $3.27 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of -1.64%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this life and health insurance company would post earnings of $3.46 per share when it actually produced earnings of $3.43, delivering a surprise of -0.87%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once.

Globe Life, which belongs to the Zacks Insurance - Accident and Health industry, posted revenues of $1.59 billion for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 0.22%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $1.5 billion. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates just once over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

Globe Life shares have added about 31.8% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 9.7%.

What's Next for Globe Life?While Globe Life has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Globe Life was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $4.71 on $1.61 billion in revenues for the coming quarter and $15.64 on $6.4 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Insurance - Accident and Health is currently in the top 29% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.

Trupanion (TRUP - Free Report) , another stock in the same industry, has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on August 5.

This provider of medical insurance covering cats and dogs is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.11 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of -50%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days.

Trupanion's revenues are expected to be $389.65 million, up 10.2% from the year-ago quarter.

First Solar (FSLR - Free Report) ended the recent trading session at $208.86, demonstrating a +1.36% change from the preceding day's closing price. The stock's performance was ahead of the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.14%. At the same time, the Dow lost 0.01%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 0.57%.

Coming into today, shares of the largest U.S. solar company had lost 17.33% in the past month. In that same time, the Oils-Energy sector gained 5.65%, while the S&P 500 gained 0.25%.

Analysts and investors alike will be keeping a close eye on the performance of First Solar in its upcoming earnings disclosure. The company's earnings report is set to go public on July 30, 2026. In that report, analysts expect First Solar to post earnings of $2.74 per share. This would mark a year-over-year decline of 13.84%. Meanwhile, our latest consensus estimate is calling for revenue of $1.06 billion, down 3.31% from the prior-year quarter.

In terms of the entire fiscal year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates predict earnings of $17.54 per share and a revenue of $5.1 billion, indicating changes of +23.43% and -2.21%, respectively, from the former year.

Investors should also note any recent changes to analyst estimates for First Solar. Such recent modifications usually signify the changing landscape of near-term business trends. With this in mind, we can consider positive estimate revisions a sign of optimism about the business outlook.

Our research demonstrates that these adjustments in estimates directly associate with imminent stock price performance. To take advantage of this, we've established the Zacks Rank, an exclusive model that considers these estimated changes and delivers an operational rating system.

The Zacks Rank system, which varies between #1 (Strong Buy) and #5 (Strong Sell), carries an impressive track record of exceeding expectations, confirmed by external audits, with stocks at #1 delivering an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate has witnessed a 0.39% decrease. First Solar is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold).

In terms of valuation, First Solar is currently trading at a Forward P/E ratio of 11.75. This indicates a discount in contrast to its industry's Forward P/E of 19.04.

Meanwhile, FSLR's PEG ratio is currently 0.46. This metric is used similarly to the famous P/E ratio, but the PEG ratio also takes into account the stock's expected earnings growth rate. The Solar industry had an average PEG ratio of 0.9 as trading concluded yesterday.

The Solar industry is part of the Oils-Energy sector. This group has a Zacks Industry Rank of 53, putting it in the top 22% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank assesses the strength of our separate industry groups by calculating the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks contained within the groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Remember to apply Zacks.com to follow these and more stock-moving metrics during the upcoming trading sessions.

On July 22, 2026, RH (RH) shares fell 3.0%, closing at $175.09. The stock has seen a 52-week range between $106.30 and $257.00, reflecting significant volatilit

Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U) is drawing renewed optimism from Wall Street ahead of its second-quarter earnings.

Wedbush is raising its price target on the stock to $36 as Unity works through a significant business transition. The company's ironSource Ad Network is being sunset effective April 30, and its Supersonic unit is slated for divestiture, leaving Unity's business increasingly concentrated on its Vector advertising platform and core game engine.

Wedbush analysts said they had confidence in Unity's ability to recapture ad spend that had been flowing through the winding down ironSource network. According to the analysts, roughly 60% of ironSource spend has already migrated to Vector, and one advisor's firm now allocates about 20% of its budget to Vector, up sharply from around 5% before Unity overhauled its algorithm last year.

That data point is driving Wedbush to lift its longer term estimates, with the firm now projecting Unity's adjusted EBITDA will reach $915 million by fiscal 2028.

Unity is scheduled to report second quarter results before the market opens on August 6.

© Bigc Studio / Shutterstock.com

Famed technology investor Gavin Baker just made the case that cheaper AI models could be the biggest gift possible to the picks-and-shovels crowd. In a post on X, Baker argued that if market share shifts from frontier labs with 90%-plus inference margins toward cheaper open-source models, “margin dollars would effectively get redistributed from the frontier labs to AI infrastructure providers.”

That would put the benefit squarely in the lane of NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU), and SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK), the companies selling the chips, memory, and storage behind the AI buildout. Hyperscalers like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)  could also benefit if cheaper intelligence lowers the cost of serving customers and expands demand.

NVIDIA is up 13.71% year to date to $212.77. A path to $300 in 2027 hinges on the bull case laid out below.

Wall Street Is Already Bullish, but the Bar Can Go Higher NVIDIA just posted $81.61 billion in Q1 FY2027 revenue, up 85.2% year over year, with Data Center revenue climbing 92% YoY. Non-GAAP EPS of $1.87 topped estimates, extending the company’s earnings beat streak to five straight quarters. Management guided Q2 revenue to $91.0 billion and disclosed $119 billion in supply commitments, pointing to demand visibility and a supply chain buildout unlike anything in company history.

Baker’s Thesis: Cheap Tokens = More GPUs and Memory Baker’s key point is that cheaper models drive incremental token demand. As inference costs collapse (the cost of inference has dropped a thousand-fold in three years), volume explodes. That volume runs on NVIDIA silicon paired with High Bandwidth Memory.

Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.

Micron’s Cloud Memory segment hit $13.77 billion in Q3 FY2026 revenue with gross margins of 84.6%. SanDisk’s Datacenter segment exploded 645% year over year to $1.47 billion. Hyperscaler capex validates the demand: Amazon is planning roughly $200 billion in 2026 capex, and Microsoft’s Q3 FY26 capex hit $30.88 billion, up 84%.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s point lands in the same place as Baker’s: “Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.”

The Math on $300 At $212.77, NVIDIA trades around 41x trailing earnings. FY2026 non-GAAP EPS came in at $4.77, and current momentum, with revenue growth above 70% for consecutive quarters, gives Wall Street room to keep raising forward estimates. Shares hitting $300 would require roughly 41% upside from here. Historically, NVDA has cleared that hurdle many times in prior cycles.

The Bottom Line on $300 Baker’s framework flips the “cheap AI kills the bull case” fear on its head. If open source wins, infrastructure providers capture the margin. With a 100% beat rate over five quarters, a next earnings date of August 26, 2026, and hyperscaler capex still accelerating, $300 in 2027 remains ambitious, but the blueprint is there.

Don't wait: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just revealed his top 10 AI stocks. See the full list FREE now.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Texas Instruments (TXN - Free Report) came out with quarterly earnings of $2.14 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.91 per share. This compares to earnings of $1.41 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items.

This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of +12.04%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this chipmaker would post earnings of $1.37 per share when it actually produced earnings of $1.68, delivering a surprise of +22.63%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates three times.

Texas Instruments, which belongs to the Zacks Semiconductor - General industry, posted revenues of $5.46 billion for the quarter ended June 2026, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 4.57%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $4.45 billion. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters.

The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call.

Texas Instruments shares have added about 67.9% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 9.7%.

What's Next for Texas Instruments?While Texas Instruments has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock?

There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately.

Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions.

Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Texas Instruments was favorable. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to outperform the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and the current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $2.08 on $5.44 billion in revenues for the coming quarter and $7.69 on $20.6 billion in revenues for the current fiscal year.

Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Semiconductor - General is currently in the top 3% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1.

Another stock from the same industry, Intel (INTC - Free Report) , has yet to report results for the quarter ended June 2026. The results are expected to be released on July 23.

This world's largest chipmaker is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.21 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +310%. The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 2.8% higher over the last 30 days to the current level.

Intel's revenues are expected to be $14.41 billion, up 12.1% from the year-ago quarter.

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Gas on AztecGas on Aztec is known as Fee Juice and is used to pay for transaction costs. This is the same as $ETH on Ethereum. Some apps will handle transaction costs for you under the hood, but if you are using a browser extension wallet, you will not be able to send transactions without it. Fee Juice can be obtained by bridging the $AZTEC token on Ethereum to the Aztec Network L2. This means that under the hood, all activity that happens on Aztec is underpinned by the $AZTEC token bridged into the network. Some bridges like Shield (by human.tech) handle this for you, allowing you to allocate a portion of your bridged transaction to convert into Fee Juice and land in your wallet automatically.

Public vs Private AssetsAssets and transactions on the Aztec Network can be either public or private. If you bridge publicly, your tokens will arrive as public, traceable tokens visible to all. Privately bridging, on the other hand, will give you private assets that are visible only to you. These assets can then be sent privately to another user or wallet without ever revealing who you are, what tokens were sent, how many, or who the recipient is.

Public vs Private GasLike tokens on the Aztec Network, Fee Juice (gas) can also be public or private. The reason for this is that even if what you are sending is private, the gas you spend to execute that transaction could still be visible if you are using public Fee Juice, potentially revealing transaction patterns and activity. Private Fee Juice keeps your entire transaction footprint hidden. When you send a private transaction, you can use private Fee Juice, and when you send a public transaction, you can use public Fee Juice, which means your transaction costs are always aligned with the type of transaction you're making.

Fee Juice in AppsAztec has native fee abstraction, which means apps could let you pay for transactions in any token you want, or cover your fees entirely. Apps like Nyx may choose to cover part or all of a user's transaction costs, or allow you to pay in tokens that are convenient for you. This means you will most likely never see Fee Juice in an app; instead, you'll pay in whatever makes sense for what you're doing, on your terms. Similarly, you might never even see an Aztec wallet at all, because the app itself becomes your interface that you connect to using your MetaMask wallet.

Fee Juice in Browser WalletsIf you're using a browser extension like Azguard, you'll manage Fee Juice directly in your wallet alongside your private and public balances, converting between tokens as needed to cover transaction costs.

When you bridge tokens in, you'll need enough Fee Juice to cover the cost of your first transaction, then you'll need to monitor how much Fee Juice you have available to make transactions. Browser wallets will allow you to send either publicly or privately to other users and will default to using either public or private Fee Juice depending on the type of transaction. Both private Fee Juice and public Fee Juice will appear by default in your token list.

Wrapping upHow you handle Fee Juice depends on where you're transacting: apps can abstract it away entirely and let you pay in any token, while a browser wallet like Azguard puts it in your hands to manage across public and private balances. Match your gas to your transaction, keep private activity private down to the fee, and you move on your terms.

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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

21 Jul

•

xx min read

Introducing Alpha V5The Aztec Network today activated Alpha V5, a major protocol upgrade passed by token-holder governance and executed onchain. Alpha V5 reduces private-transaction proving times by more than 2x compared to the previous version, lowers the cost of a fully private transaction by roughly 50%, resolves the critical issues found in V4, and sees the first wave of apps go live. Users can now send private transactions and earn yield on Aave simply by connecting their Ethereum wallets on Nyx, bridge from Ethereum to Aztec using Shield or TRAIN, privately collect NFTs on RavenHouse, or play Dark Forest Aztec, a hidden-information strategy game in a universe that lives entirely onchain. 

"Alpha V5 continues Aztec's work at the frontier of client-side proving, with cryptographic breakthroughs that cut proving times by more than half this release," said Zac Williamson, Co-founder, Aztec Foundation. "We believe Aztec is now the fastest system in the world for proving a fully private transaction entirely on a user's own device, and every release moves the industry closer to private transactions at public transaction speeds."

As the only decentralized privacy L2, Aztec is the credibly neutral privacy layer for Ethereum. Aztec allows anyone to write smart contracts that include both private and public aspects – every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so no operator, sequencer, or intermediary can see the data. The Alpha V5 proving improvements come from cryptographic advances that make this client-side proving faster than any prior release. The network remains in alpha, but with V5 it is ready for teams to begin building and deploying applications.

Performance - 2.5 second fully private transactions Making private transactions practical comes down to how quickly a proof can be generated on a user's own device, without offloading that work to a server that would learn what the user is doing. On Alpha V5, proving a private token transfer natively now takes approximately 2.5 seconds on a consumer laptop, down from 5.2 seconds on V4, and about 6.8 seconds in a browser, down from 12.5 seconds. Across every measured transaction flow, client-side proving times improved by approximately 2x compared with V4.

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Bench machine: an M2 MacBook (12 cores, throttled to 8). "Native" runs Aztec's C++ proving binary; "WASM" runs the same prover in a browser engine (Node on V8).‍

Alpha V5 lowers ECDSA signature-verification cost by approximately 2x, speeds up Poseidon2 hashing by approximately 3x, and reduces the protocol circuit gate count by approximately 50% (gate count is the number of individual operations a proving circuit must perform, and it is the main driver of how long a proof takes to generate). Each of these lowers the amount of work a device performs to prove a transaction, and the reduction in gate count in particular compounds across every proof the network generates.

Apps - send, receive, and earn privately on EthereumAlpha V5 launches the first wave of apps on a network where privacy is built into the protocol rather than managed by an operator. On other networks that claim privacy, transactions still pass through an operator or node that reads them in plaintext, or depend on a viewing key that a third party holds, so users rely on someone else to protect their data and to decide when it gets disclosed. On Aztec, every private transaction is proven on the user's own device, so the app, the sequencer, and any operator never need to see the underlying data. Nyx is one of these apps, allowing users to privately send transactions and privately earn yield on Aave. 

"On Ethereum, everything you do is public. That's why we built Nyx: a private account governed by your Ethereum wallet", said Nikhil, Co-founder of Nyx. "Now you can send, receive and earn in private. Nyx was the first app live on the Aztec Alpha, and we're excited to expand participation to more users with the added stability of Alpha V5."

Other apps on Alpha V5 include Azguard and Nethermind (wallets), Shield, TRAIN, and RavenHouse (bridges), and the Aztecscan block explorers. Also launching is Dark Forest Aztec, a game where users explore a universe, control planets, manage planetary energy, expand territory, and launch attacks through strategic play with private state and hidden actions.

Dark Forest Aztec private universe-building gameplayLower costs, higher security Transaction fees on Aztec come from two main sources: the cost of proving a transaction and the cost of verifying the rollup proof on Ethereum. Alpha V5 reduces both. It lowers the network's proving-cost parameter by 50%, and it reduces the L1 gas required to verify a rollup proof by approximately 40%. Because rollup proofs are verified on Ethereum and that cost is shared across all transactions in a batch, the L1 reduction lowers fees for every user, while the lower proving-cost parameter reduces the per-transaction proving fee directly. Together, these bring the average cost of a fully private token transfer to under a $0.05 transaction cost.

Alpha V5 also hardens the network on several fronts. It resolves critical vulnerabilities found in Alpha V4 along with additional bugs discovered since launch. Aztec's bug bounty program on Cantina also drew more than 234 security researchers to participate. The network remains in alpha, and further bugs may surface as usage grows, but each release has closed the issues found in the last and strengthened the protocol against new ones. With the critical V4 issues resolved and these safeguards in place, Alpha V5 is stable enough for teams to begin building and deploying applications.

AvailabilityAlpha V5 is live now, view the Alpha V5 landing page for a full list of features, performance updates, and live apps to explore. 

About AztecAztec is the only decentralized, privacy-first Layer 2 on Ethereum. Developers write private and public logic in the same smart contract, and private functions are executed and proven on the user's own device, so no operator sees the underlying data. The protocol is upgraded through onchain governance, and the network settles to Ethereum. For more information, visit aztec.network.

Aztec Network

Aztec Network

30 Jun

•

xx min read

Inside an Aztec TransactionOn Ethereum today, each transaction reveals everything publicly. The token you moved, the size, the timing, the wallet it came from, every action you take. Given the limitations of this type of transparent network, the industry is now focusing on bringing privacy onchain as a top priority. The response to this has mostly been to enable private transactions that shield transfers in various ways. But when we look at how privacy works on Web2, it’s clear that users and developers need granular privacy controls: the ability to decide what is public or private and who is able to see different types of data.

Aztec was built so that one transaction can carry two halves. A private half that runs on your own device and never leaves it, and a public half that the network runs in the open. Apps can choose which aspects are private or public, and users can choose what they want to reveal and when.

This article will follow an example transaction on Aztec: a vote in an onchain election built on Aztec, where who you are and which candidate you chose stay private, while the running tally for each candidate stays public for anyone to verify.

Public and private in one movePicture the vote you cast in our example as two aspects that seamlessly weave together. In the first step, you act in private: an app records your vote on your device and hands the network a proof that the vote is valid without revealing it. In the second, the network acts in public: it checks that proof, then adds one to the chosen candidate's public tally. It is one transaction: one part stays with you, one part goes to the network. Both parts end up recorded onchain, in two separate state trees, one private and one public. The walkthrough below follows how these two aspects work together and what this means for how your transaction lands onchain. 

It starts on your deviceYou open the voting app and connect an Aztec wallet. That first step looks like any onchain app. The difference is inside the wallet. An Aztec wallet carries a private execution environment, the PXE, pronounced "pixie", which runs on your phone or in your browser. The PXE is where the private half of your transaction executes, and where the proof of that work gets made, on your hardware, under your exclusive control.

Every account on Aztec is a smart contract rather than a bare key. That design, account abstraction, allows a wallet to authorize a transaction however its owner chooses without writing an identity onto the network for everyone to read. The wallet is the front door, and on Aztec you can decide if the door is open or closed, who you share your information with. 

The private half runs on your deviceThe voting app is a smart contract with two kinds of functions. The private functions run first, and they run inside your PXE. Your identity and the candidate you picked are the private inputs, and they stay on your device.

The only thing to leave your device is a proof confirming the legitimacy of your vote. Aztec's client-side proving system, Chonk, takes the private execution and produces a zero-knowledge proof: a compact cryptographic receipt that your vote followed the rules, that you are eligible, and have not voted before, while revealing nothing about who you are or who you voted for. Think of it as a sealed ballot the network can confirm is valid without opening it. The network learns only that a legitimate vote happened. It does not learn how you voted, or even which account voted. 

This is the part that used to be too slow to be practical. Generating a proof on a phone was the bottleneck every privacy app hit. Aztec’s Chonk is purpose-built for fast proving on low-memory devices, both natively and in the browser, so the private half runs on the device in your hand instead of on someone else's server.

The public half runs in the openSome elements of a vote should be public. The tally is shared infrastructure, the number everyone relies on to trust the result. Thanks to programmable privacy on Aztec, the app marks that part public. Public functions live on the network and run in the open, the way functions do on Ethereum.

On Aztec, private and public logic live in the same contract, and the developer decides which is which, function by function and variable by variable. Programmable privacy is a dimmer, not a switch. The voting app turns it up on the individual ballot and turns it down on the running tally. That boundary is a design decision written into the contract, and it is the thing no transparent chain and no fixed-privacy chain can offer.

The network checks the proof and runs the public partYour vote leaves your device as a bundle: the zero-knowledge proof of the private half, plus the call to the public function that updates the count. It goes to Aztec's sequencers, a decentralized set of thousands of independent operators, with more than 3,500 of them running the network today.

The sequencers do two jobs at once. They verify the proof of your private vote, confirming it is valid and eligible without seeing the choice behind it, and they run the public function that adds one to the chosen candidate and updates the public tally. Your ballot stays sealed. The count goes up by one for everyone to see. The same proof guarantees you cannot vote twice, even though no one learns which ballot is yours.

Two state trees, both onchainAztec has two main state trees, and both live onchain. One holds private state, the other holds public state, so the full record of what happened sits on the network rather than on any one person's laptop. The two trees store each record in two different ways depending on if it needs to be private or public. 

The private tree uses a UTXO model, the same note-based design used by Zcash. In this model, state is written as commitments: each entry is a sealed record that a valid vote was cast, with the voter and the choice kept private. Just like with Zcash or Bitcoin, you do not edit a private entry in place. You write a new one, and the design stops the same vote from being cast twice (old state is nullified). The vote stays private, and the record of a legitimate vote happening is onchain for the network to check.

The public tree uses an account-based model, the same shape Ethereum uses: values that update in place, readable by anyone. This is where each candidate's tally lives.

One transaction wrote information to both trees. The private tree recorded that you voted, sealed. The public tree recorded the new totals, in the open. Everything is onchain. The difference between the two trees is how much each one reveals.

Every private app on Aztec writes into that same private tree. A vote, a payment, and a payroll run all land in one shared record of activity, so each user's privacy grows stronger as the network grows, instead of splitting into a separate pool for every app.

A block is proposed, and Ethereum records itAztec is an L2 on Ethereum, so everything settles to Ethereum L1. A sequencer on Aztec gathers transactions into a proposed block. Other sequencers validate it before it goes to Ethereum's pending chain. At that point the block sits on Ethereum, ordered and recorded, waiting for its proof. The network has agreed on what happened and the proposed block is just waiting a final proof. 

Anyone can prove itProving a block is its own job, and on Aztec, it belongs to no one in particular. A decentralized, permissionless set of provers competes to take a full epoch, a 32-block stretch of the chain, and compresses it into a single zero-knowledge proof of the entire epoch. Anyone with the hardware can run a prover and bid for the work. There is no privileged operator, no committee you have to trust, no outside network holding a key.

That openness is the whole point of a privacy layer. A system that protects your data but routes it through one trusted server has only moved the exposure rather than removed it. Aztec keeps proving permissionless and your private inputs on your device, thereby avoiding any exposure.

The economics land in the voter's favor too. As an L2 network, Aztec spreads the cost of that one L1 proof across thousands of transactions in the rollup, so a vote costs pennies, not the millions of gas a private proof would cost verified alone on Ethereum.

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Settled on Ethereum, verifiable by anyoneA prover then posts the epoch proof to Ethereum's proven chain, and the Aztec state is final. Ethereum verifies one proof and inherits the correctness of everything inside it. Aztec extends Ethereum and settles to Ethereum, so your hybrid transaction carries Ethereum's security without carrying Ethereum's enforced transparency.

Anyone can now verify that the result is valid and that every counted vote was legitimate. No one can see how any individual voted. The tally is on the shared ledger where it belongs, and your ballot stayed yours the whole way through.

What this unlocksFor the voter, their ballot was never a broadcast. The candidate you chose stayed yours, with no record tying your wallet to a name for anyone to read later, and you can still check that your vote was counted and the result is honest. You took part without your choice becoming data for systems built to act on it.

For a founder, the election app in this walkthrough is easy to implement without needing to build extensive custom code. Secret ballots with a public, verifiable count, in one contract, is a product category that opens up only because the boundary is programmable. You can build governance, elections, and polls where people vote without fear and the result still proves itself. And of course you can build anything that requires both public and private state to work seamlessly together. 

For an infrastructure provider, the same machinery serves clients who need a result they can stand behind without exposing the people who produced it. Selective disclosure lets a client prove exactly what a counterparty needs to see, the count and the integrity of the process, and protect everything else, on their own terms. That is a guarantee a transparent chain cannot make.

A real vote needs two things at once: a secret ballot and a count anyone can check. A transparent chain makes you give up the first to get the second. On Aztec, you get both. The tally settled on Ethereum for anyone to verify, and how you voted stayed yours. The infrastructure is in place, what will you create with it? 
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->Review the Aztec Basics ->Head to the docs and start building today
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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

23 Jun

•

xx min read

The Devil's Bargain - Privacy Without Credible Neutrality Crypto is in a long night. It is no secret that the industry is facing challenging circumstances and there has been a clear consolidation of the industry. Right now we are seeing a focus on real traction, demonstrable value projects shipping practical solutions that will meaningfully reach users. 

Some of that discipline is overdue. However, in times like these the properties that made crypto structurally different begin to look expendable. Decentralization slows you down. It makes upgrades harder. It makes institutional sales harder. It removes the control surfaces that the existing financial world knows how to buy.

We used to accept those costs as the price of building something durable. But, in a famine, they look like unaffordable affectations. Discarding them wholesale, however, is like selling the land out from under our feet.

Permissionless, uncensorable transaction networks with rich composability - this is the clay from which our industry was grown. The long term commercial health of our industry depends on preserving these properties in an age of privacy and institutional adoption.

These trade-offs become more challenging and pernicious when privacy is involved. Privacy is the narrative for crypto in 2026, and for good reason. It’s the missing piece that will deliver the traction and real use-cases that the industry so desperately needs. 

The challenges of decentralization multiply under the constraints of privacy and what we are seeing in the industry is not a pivot, but a complete capitulation of all of the differentiable value that made crypto valuable.

I have spent nearly a decade building a network that marries programmable privacy with decentralization. A network where users keep their data, where applications are composable with one another, where transactions can settle without a privileged party learning everyone’s business or deciding which products are allowed to exist. That required new cryptography, new programming models, new state architecture, new wallets, and a fairly insane number of tradeoffs that are invisible until you try to build the thing yourself. There are easier products to ship. 

A centralized privacy service can give institutions something legible quickly, replicating how the existing financial sector works: a responsible operator, a viewing key, a way to block transactions, a way to explain the whole thing to a risk committee. Some of these products will be useful. Some will be good businesses. But they are not the thing we came here to build.

The Devil’s BargainInstitutional and enterprise adoption is one of the core growth areas in this crypto-winter and the playbook is simple: use the language of crypto as a skin-suit to sell products and services that pattern match onto existing financial rails, with their need for complete visibility, censorship, centralized network operators and all of the liabilities this incurs.

This is a tempting bargain because it shortens the path to adoption. It gives buyers and regulators a shape they understand. A company. A contract. A switch. But the moment you accept that bargain, the system changes character. It may still be encrypted. It may still contain proofs. It may still call itself private. But, it now behaves like and is an operated service. 

There is a party with privileged knowledge and privileged control. Builders must shape themselves around it. Institutions negotiate with it. Regulators may pressure it. Attackers target it. Users ultimately depend on it. By a backdoor I mean something specific: a network or protocol-level viewing key where the product developer does not control who can see their users’ data, especially when paired with network-level controls that can block transactions or ban smart contracts entirely. I do not mean application-level controls. I do not mean user-authorised disclosure. I do not mean a dapp deciding that users must prove something before using it. Regulated applications will need rules. The issue is that the disclosure boundary of your application belongs to somebody else, and the same layer that sees can also decide whether your users are allowed to transact. In short, users lack a platform that has credible neutrality.

The Platform RiskPrivacy on top of centralized rails is fatal. If one party can see everything and stop anything, that party may be treated as responsible for seeing and stopping.

This compounds into substantial platform risk. If an entity builds on top of such a system they must surrender visibility and control to the network operator to satisfy their liabilities without consideration for yours. Decentralization and ultimately credible neutrality is the difference between whether you own durable infrastructure or are renting a service whose rules can change on a whim. Worse, you cannot “just build things”. For novel transaction flows approval must be sought and granted. Tell me, would Ethereum have grown if every smart contract deployment required approval from the Ethereum Foundation?

Privacy needs the same freedom. A private credit market, for example, touches identity, collateral, repayment history, payment flows, liquidation logic, lender disclosures, auditor access and borrower privacy. If every component lives inside a different permissioned service, each with its own operator and viewing assumptions, that is a bureaucratic friction that negates blockchain’s core value proposition; composability.

A decentralized and credibly neutral privacy network prevents the settlement layer from becoming the single place where all surveillance and censorship obligations naturally accumulate. It allows product developers to scope their code to satisfy their own narrow requirements without consideration for the obligations of a centralized operator.

Building for credible neutralityA lot of today’s privacy narrative treats architecture as if it were a detail. It is not. You cannot take a transparent ledger, staple confidentiality onto the edge, add a viewing key for comfort, and expect to get programmable private infrastructure.

If the state model is not private from the ground up you get wrappers, third party tools, data custodians, ad hoc disclosure paths and a pile of assumptions that every application drags into the next. Developers do not get a normal programming model where private contracts can call private contracts and users keep state on their own devices. They do not get composability.

The difference matters. In a real private execution environment, users generate transactions locally. They do not outsource their intent to a third party who learns what they are doing. Private contracts interact through a state model designed for privacy. The network settles proofs without becoming the party that knows everyone’s business. Privacy is part of the architecture.

This is why Aztec has taken so long. We built something that makes programmable private state and decentralised settlement live inside the same system. That means proving systems that run on consumer hardware, a transaction architecture built around local private execution, and a programming model where privacy is idiomatic and just works out of the box.

A centralized service can skip much of this. It can hold the key, run the prover, approve the flow and call the result privacy. It gets to market faster because it is not trying to arrive at the same place.

The edgeAdding decentralization does not make obligations disappear. Applications, issuers, frontends, custodians and regulated businesses will continue to exist in a web of obligations and responsibilities. Anyone pretending otherwise is unserious.

The question is where those obligations live. If they are pushed into the settlement layer, the settlement layer is no longer credibly neutral. It needs visibility into everyone and controls over everyone. 

The better answer is selective disclosure. Users and applications should prove specific facts to specific parties for specific purposes. A regulated application may need to know that a user passed a check, that a transaction satisfies a policy, or that an auditor can inspect a particular flow. None of that requires the base network to hold a permanent key into everyone’s activity.

This will be harder to explain to the existing world. New infrastructure always fails to fit the categories built for the old infrastructure. Bitcoin did not arrive as a neatly regulated bank product. Ethereum did not wait for every lawyer to understand smart contracts. Stablecoins and DeFi forced institutions, regulators and users to develop new language around rails that kept existing.

If the standard for privacy infrastructure is to plug into the old world without changing anything, the answer will always be a service with a backdoor. And the result will be to catch crumbs falling from the tables of the old world.

The market worth buildingThe market we should be building is, well, a market. A private financial system that compounds: assets, liquidity, identity, credentials, credit and applications interacting through a shared settlement layer without forcing users to surrender their data to whoever sits in the middle. 

Traditional finance is built out of vertically integrated information silos. Those silos are its moat. Banks, exchanges, custodians, payment processors and data brokers all benefit from controlling the information that flows through them. A global private settlement layer attacks that advantage directly. It lets liquidity and credentials move while outsourcing information custody to neutral cryptographic infrastructure. 

A company wants a moat. A settlement layer wants surface area. A permissioned privacy provider can ration access, raise fees, exclude applications, shape disclosure rules and define acceptable use around its own risk tolerance. These are products pretending to be networks, and not durable financial infrastructure. What bothers me is this compounding category confusion. Networks adding protocol-level viewing keys and transaction controls are using the same language as decentralised programmable privacy, and commentators are treating them as variations of the same thing. They are not.

We have spent nine years walking the hard road. Now, just as we are close, the market has lost faith. Everyone is reaching for whatever lifeline looks immediate. Some of those lifelines will be real. Some will make money. But if crypto responds to its long night by rebuilding financial privacy as permissioned services, then we will have survived by surrendering the property that made the industry worth building.

Markets can grow when the platform is removed from the position where it can dictate the rules. It would be perverse to forget that lesson while building privacy, the domain where control over information matters most.

The land we tillCrypto is in a famine. The land is struggling. We could sell our land for a pittance and survive the season. But the famine will pass, and when it does the land will blossom again. Without the land we are nothing.

We have struggled immensely to create a permissionless network that can marry privacy with decentralisation: an indestructible network whose users cannot be surveilled and whose transactions cannot be censored. This is the soil we have to grow our crops. To surrender a backdoor or a centralized operator for temporary relief is to sell our land for the price of a stablecoin. And we cannot sell the land.

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Aztec Network

Aztec Network

2 Jun

•

xx min read

Who controls your privacy off-switch?Privacy has become a baseline requirement for L1s and L2s who care about bringing real-world users onchain. Users don't want their activity broadcast to competitors or the general public, but applications operating at scale also need some form of auditability, whether for regulators, compliance requirements, or tax reporting. Selective disclosure resolves that tension: privacy by default, with the ability to prove specific facts when required. What separates these networks is not whether they offer that switch, but who gets to hold it.

Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync all offer some form of privacy with selective disclosure, but under the hood they make fundamentally different architectural decisions about who can see your data and who can turn your privacy off. Those decisions determine whether your privacy stays under your own control or sits behind a switch that someone else operates.

Three questions reveal where these networks actually diverge:

Who sees your data?Who can prove the network followed its own rules?Who controls when something gets disclosed?The answers determine whether your privacy off-switch is held by a policy, by an operator's good behavior, or by you alone through a cryptographic proof. As you'll see in this post, there are legitimate reasons to use each one with different tradeoffs. Aztec is the only network, however, where that switch stays in the user's hands, answering all three questions without putting a permissioned set of operators or a standing viewing key in control of your privacy. That gives developers the flexibility to build apps that comply with applicable laws while still keeping full privacy under the user's control.

This article will compare the privacy approaches of Aztec, Canton, Starknet, Tempo, and zkSync to give developers insight into the privacy tradeoffs of each network.

TL;DRHere’s how each network handles the selective disclosure privacy off-switch, and who has control over your privacy: 

Aztec: Only you can see your data, client-side proofs settled to Ethereum let anyone verify every transaction without trusting an operator, and the off-switch stays in your hands, allowing you selectively share information.Canton: Participant nodes read your data in plaintext, no outside party can verify the global ledger, and your off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since disclosure depends on them staying honest.Starknet: No operator ever sees your plaintext because proofs are generated client-side, and those proofs verify the rules, but your off-switch is a standing viewing key that a designated auditor can use to decrypt and trace your entire history on request.Tempo: The zone operator sees every transaction in plaintext, mainnet validity proofs let anyone verify the zone ran correctly, and the operator holds the off-switch, so you are private from the public but not from the operator.‍ zkSync: The operator reads every transaction in plaintext while a validity proof on Ethereum proves it cannot forge state, and the operator holds the off-switch over who sees what, giving you privacy from the outside world but not from the operator.The Comparison In One View

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Comparing your privacy off-switch Each of these networks offers privacy with selective disclosure, but each rests on a different network design with its own tradeoffs. We have ordered them by who holds your privacy off-switch, starting with designs where a third party controls access to your data and ending with designs where that control stays with you. At the top, the switch sits behind a policy promise and an honest operator, and further down it is replaced by proofs that the user generates and controls.

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CantonCanton keeps data private by controlling viewing permissions for the various actors on its network. A transaction splits into per-participant views, so each party receives only the sub-transactions that name it, and the parts it is not entitled to never reach it. The sequencer and mediator move those views without reading them, which is real privacy against those roles.

However, the data is still read in plaintext by the participant nodes that host the relevant parties, and in the common regulated-asset pattern where the issuer is a signatory on its own token, the issuer's node sees every transfer. The harder gap is verification, because no third party can reconstruct the global ledger, so correctness rests on the confirming nodes staying honest and their keys staying safe. In practice the off-switch sits with those nodes rather than with you, since you cannot see when your data is read and cannot stop it.

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TempoTempo is designed for payments and uses validity proofs to verify that each zone is executing correctly, while still giving the zone operator full plaintext visibility into every transaction within that zone. Privacy comes from Tempo Zones, which are parallel execution environments connected to the Tempo mainnet.

By design, the zone operator has visibility into all transactions within the zone, while users see only their own and the public sees only a proof that the zone is valid. Token issuers set compliance controls, allowlists, blocklists, and freezes, enforced across zones. The mainnet checks each zone's validity, so execution is verified, while the operator still reads every transaction in plaintext and holds the off-switch over what is revealed. Your privacy is from the public, not from the operator.

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zkSync PrividiumzkSync Prividium adds the verifiability piece that Canton lacks. Every batch produces a validity proof settled to Ethereum, so a compromised operator cannot forge state or mint tokens from nothing without also forging a proof, which it cannot do. The tradeoff is that the operator processes every transaction in plaintext and decides who sees what, which means the off-switch stays with the operator and your privacy is from the outside world rather than from the operator itself.

This tradeoff has legitimate uses in high-trust institutional environments. If Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo are transacting on a shared network, a zone where BofA's infrastructure processes BofA-originated transactions satisfies internal control requirements while still delivering genuine ZK privacy from the other banks and the rest of the world. Where this model breaks down is in lower-trust environments where giving an operator full plaintext access and the switch that comes with it holds back product design possibilities. 

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Starknet STRK20Starknet's STRK20 breaks from relying on an operator for privacy. It shields ERC-20 balances and transfers in a privacy pool, and every private transaction carries a zero-knowledge proof generated client-side, so no operator sees your plaintext in order to build it.

Disclosure is where STRK20 diverges from Aztec. To join the Starknet Privacy Pool, you register an encrypted viewing key onchain, and it sits there for the life of your participation. On a regulatory request, a designated auditing entity can decrypt that key and trace your complete transaction history, forwards and backwards. StarkWare calls this ‘not a backdoor’ but a carefully scoped access mechanism, and the safeguard is a policy promise that the auditor decrypts only when required. The privacy is cryptographic, but the off-switch is a standing key that someone else holds and can flip whether or not you are watching.

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AztecOn Aztec your private state lives as encrypted private data that only you can decrypt. The contract developer can choose what state is public and what is private, and whether your encrypted private data is emitted onchain as a private log or shared off-chain instead.

Your transactions get proven client-side on your own device, so no sequencer or operator sees your unencrypted private data. Those proofs settle to Ethereum, which gives the same integrity anchor marketed by Prividium, with every transaction verified and no forged state, but without a single operator who reads your data. The base protocol decentralizes sequencing, proving, and governance, so there is no operator to choose and trust in the first place.

Disclosure is your choice too: you decide who learns your private data, and whether they learn it in encrypted or decrypted form. To grant discovery without readability, you share an app-specific tagging secret that lets an auditor find your data in encrypted form without being able to decrypt and read it. This is enough to prove things calculated from that data, such as a tax basis or a profit and loss figure. Granting permission to actually read the data works differently. There's no per-contract read key you can hand out, because decryption uses your master viewing key, which would unlock all your data across every contract. So instead of sharing a key, you share the data itself, plus a proof that your plaintext is what encrypts to the on-chain ciphertext.

Aztec has true selective disclosure in that you can selectively share it, and nothing else you don’t need to. This is app specific, meaning that private data discoverability access on one app does not grant access on another. Most importantly, the off-switch stays in your hands, and you never need to trust the network to handle access to any of your private data and activity.

This is not just conceptual: here is a working proof-of-concept of this model on Aztec. PrivPNL takes you from private DEX trades through a tagging-key disclosure to a browser-generated ZK proof of your PnL. The auditor verifies a proof while the prover only has to reveal the amount they owe, and your portfolio stays private.

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Users need to hold their own off-switch, not a promise to look awayCanton keeps the switch with the participant nodes that read your data in plaintext, so disclosure rests on those nodes staying honest rather than on anything you control. Tempo similarly gives the off-switch to a zone-based node operator, but allows you to verify the correctness of transactions using validity proofs. Prividium hardens that promise with a proof settled to Ethereum, a real improvement, but the operator still reads every transaction and still decides who sees what. This can work well for large institutions, but small to medium sized enterprises are left with the same privacy as their current banks unless they run their own Prividium nodes. STRK20 moves the switch into a standing viewing key and asks you to trust that a designated auditor reaches for it only when needed. In each of these models the real question is not whether your privacy can be switched off, but who gets to do the switching, and whether you would even know it happened.

Aztec takes the operator and the standing key out of the question entirely. You keep the data, you generate the proof, and you disclose the result, one fact at a time and only when you choose to. The off-switch never leaves your hands, and no operator, auditor, or node can reach it on your behalf. This is one of the benefits of a network that offers fully programmable, privacy-preserving smart contracts that put you in control. 

Selective disclosure is how privacy survives contact with a regulator, and the model you pick decides who can open your history when you are not looking. On Aztec, that answer is no one but you.‍

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Let's BuildDive into the technical details: Try a live demo of selective disclosure on Aztec and read the technical article on how it was built. 

‍Integrate with Aztec: Reach out if you are interested in integrating privacy into your project.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said on Wednesday that the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is strengthening the company's competitive position.

His comments come just one day after OpenAI disclosed that one of its advanced AI agents escaped a controlled testing environment during a cybersecurity evaluation and compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face before it was detected and contained.

"We have a kill switch that stops AI agents that go rogue, so those things don't need to happen, and they wouldn't happen when companies run ServiceNow," McDermott said on CNBC's "Mad Money."

ServiceNow offers a suite of software applications and tools used by companies to manage and automate workflows across IT, human resources, and customer service operations. It's also expanded its cybersecurity presence, in part through the acquisitions of Veza and Armis. Both deals closed this year.

Agentic systems are an increasingly popular corner of AI, going beyond a more simplistic chatbot that answers queries with a written response. These advanced systems are capable of executing multi-step tasks with little to no human intervention.

McDermott said ServiceNow's AI Control Tower is its system that gives companies a central place to monitor, manage, and secure the growing number of AI agents, helping businesses move "from AI chaos to AI discipline."

Shares of ServiceNow rose in extended trading after the company reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue. Even after the jump, however, the stock remains down more than 30% this year after software shares sold off during what investors dubbed the "SaaSpocalypse" amid concerns that advances in AI would disrupt the industry's traditional seat-based business model.

McDermott dismissed concerns that growing AI competition could pressure ServiceNow's profits or cause customers to shorten contract terms.

"If you look at the terms of our contracts, they've actually gotten longer," McDermott said.

Instead, he argued that broader AI adoption should increase demand for ServiceNow's software.

"There's going to be more AI. There's going to be more incidents, and all these things drive more and more volume to ServiceNow," he said. "That's why we increased the full-year guide."

OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment but said earlier that AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities, which means model security and safety need to keep up.

"We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development," the ChatGPT maker said.