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Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Brandon Smith during the game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Jacksonville Jaguars
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Amazon is in talks to acquire the rights for the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” package and is seen as the front-runner by others involved in talks with the league, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amazon has a serious interest in the multiyear package of out-of-market games, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Amazon in May agreed to pay about $1 billion per year to become the exclusive provider of Thursday Night Football games beginning next year. That deal made Amazon Prime Video the first-ever streaming service to own an exclusive NFL broadcast package.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on “Sunday Ticket” discussions.

The NFL is expected to ask for $2 billion to $2.5 billion per year for the package and wants to wrap up discussions before the season ends in February, two of the people said. “Sunday Ticket” has been owned by DirecTV for the past 27 years. Talks are progressing with interested parties, suggesting the league is getting closer to choosing a new provider, said the people.

DirecTV, which AT&T spun out as a new company last month, renewed “Sunday Ticket” in 2014 for eight years. The current contract ends after the 2022-23 season.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC on Wednesday the out-of-market Sunday game package “maybe will be more attractive on a digital platform” as streaming platforms continue to add subscribers at the expense of traditional pay-television. Goodell also suggested to CNBC that the league is looking for one strategic partner to acquire not only “Sunday Ticket” rights but to also invest in NFL Network, which airs NFL content all year, and NFL RedZone, which shows live footage of game action when teams are close to scoring touchdowns. The NFL currently owns both NFL Network and NFL RedZone.

Amazon has competition for the Sunday game rights. ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro told Bloomberg this week that “Sunday Ticket” is “an incredibly valuable product” and acknowledged that Disney has had exploratory conversations with the league. The Information news site reported that Apple has also expressed interest in the package. NBCUniversal’s Peacock is not expected to bid for the rights, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Several media executives involved in the discussions told CNBC they viewed Amazon as the favorite to win the rights to the package. NBC News reported Amazon and ESPN’s early interest in the package in July.

DirecTV’s tenure

DirecTV is still considering its options but may not have the balance sheet to compete with Amazon or Apple, whose market valuations are close to or above $2 trillion, two of the people said.

DirecTV has paid about $1.5 billion per year for “Sunday Ticket” for the past seven seasons and currently charges about $300 for the package as an add-on. The satellite TV provider also now offers “Sunday Ticket” as a component of its “Choice,” “Ultimate,” and “Premier” pay-TV packages.

DirecTV has lost money on “Sunday Ticket” for many years. At its current $300 price point, DirecTV would need 5 million subscribers to break even. DirecTV has averaged closer to 2 million “Sunday Ticket” subscribers for many years, according to a person familiar with the matter. Executives at DirecTV and its majority owner AT&T have argued that “Sunday Ticket” has become increasingly diluted over the years as the NFL removes Sunday games and adds Thursday, Saturday and Monday Night games.

Still, DirecTV was willing to use “Sunday Ticket” as a loss leader if it turned subscribers into year-long satellite-TV customers. That way, the company could recoup some of its losses by collecting monthly pay-TV fees during the NFL season and its seven-month-long offseason.

Why Amazon makes sense

The NFL may be able to significantly expand the audience for “Sunday Ticket” by separating the product from DirecTV. The satellite-TV provider allows customers to stream “Sunday Ticket” without becoming a DirecTV customer only if they live in areas where they don’t have access to DirecTV. A streaming service would allow anyone access to “Sunday Ticket” without the additional restriction of having to switch one’s pay-TV provider to DirecTV. That could unlock the product to millions of Americans who buy cable TV service bundled with broadband. DirecTV doesn’t offer high-speed Internet service.

Amazon also has an ancillary business it wants to push to “Sunday Ticket” subscribers: an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon’s video strategy has long revolved around getting people hooked on Prime. In its efforts to be “The Everything Store,” Amazon can use live sports to make a direct connection to fans who are also interested in buying sports merchandise. Amazon has reached agreements with Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees and Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders in the past year as it tries to make an audience connection with Prime Video and live sports.

Amazon also hopes to extend Prime Video’s business with its pending $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM and its “Thursday Night Football” purchase to build a burgeoning advertising business, which grew 87% year over year in the second quarter to more than $7.9 billion. While Amazon still trails digital advertising behemoths Facebook and Google in U.S. market share, the company grabbed 10.3% of U.S. digital ad dollars last year, up from 7.8% in 2019, according to a report from research firm eMarketer.

Amazon Web Services has also been the NFL’s technology provider in the development of Next Gen Stats, which has analyzed and stored data on every NFL player and play since 2017. The NFL has a history of working with broadcast partners with which it has established relationships. The league re-upped broadcast deals with all of its existing media partners earlier this year. While Apple’s spending power rivals Amazon’s, Apple doesn’t share the same relationship history with the NFL.

Buying live sports rights also allows Amazon to expand its business while regulators crackdown on big technology acquisitions. Amazon has previously been able to grow into new businesses by acquiring companies Whole Foods, Ring and Zappos. That avenue may be temporarily restricted as new FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has been critical of Amazon’s growing market power and influence on the economy, examines Amazon’s deals. How regulators view Amazon’s pending MGM deal will be a window into Khan’s thinking.

— CNBC’s Jabari Young assisted with this story.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

WATCH: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Verizon partnership, “Sunday Ticket”

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Google’s $85 billion capital spend spurred by cloud, AI demand

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Google's  billion capital spend spurred by cloud, AI demand

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc., during Stanford’s 2024 Business, Government, and Society forum in Stanford, California, April 3, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Google is going to spend $10 billion more this year than it previously expected due to the growing demand for cloud services, which has created a backlog, executives said Wednesday.

As part of its second quarter earnings, the company increased its forecast for capital expenditures in 2025 to $85 billion due to “strong and growing demand for our Cloud products and services” as it continues to expand infrastructure to power more AI services that use its cloud technology. That’s up from the $75 billion projection that Google provided in February, which was already above the $58.84 billion that Wall Street expected at the time.

The increased forecast comes as demand for cloud services surges across the tech industry as AI services increase in popularity. As a result, companies are doubling down on infrastructure to keep pace with demand and are planning multi‑year buildouts of data centers.

In its second quarter earnings, Google reported that cloud revenues increased by 32% to $13.6 billion in the period. The demand is so high for Google’s cloud services that it now amounts to a $106 billion backlog, Alphabet finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said during the company’s post-earnings conference call.

“It’s a tight supply environment,” she said.

The vast majority of Alphabet’s capital spend was invested in technical infrastructure during the second quarter, with approximately two-thirds of investments going to servers and one-third in data center and networking equipment, Ashkenazi said.

She added that the updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and “an acceleration in the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet Cloud customer demand.”

Ashkenazi said that despite the company’s “improved” pace of getting servers up and running, investors should expect further increase in capital spend in 2026 “due to the demand as well as growth opportunities across the company.” She didn’t specify what those opportunities are but said the company will provide more details on a future earnings call.

“We’re increasing capacity with every quarter that goes by,” Ashkenazi said. 

Due to the increased spend, Google will have to record more expenses over time, which will make profits look smaller, she said.

“Obviously, we’re working hard to bring more capacity online,” Ashkenazi said.

WATCH: Alphabet shares Q2 shares sink despite revenue and earnings beat

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Nvidia supplier SK Hynix second-quarter profit and revenue hit record highs, topping estimates

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Nvidia supplier SK Hynix second-quarter profit and revenue hit record highs, topping estimates

The SK Hynix Inc. logo is displayed on a glass door at the company’s office in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014. SK Hynix aims to select a U.S. site for its advanced chip packaging plant and break ground there around the first quarter of next year.

SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s SK Hynix on Thursday posted record operating profit and revenue in the second quarter on sustained demand for its high bandwidth memory technology used in generative AI chipsets. 

Here are SK Hynix’s second-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate: 

  • Revenue: 22.23 trillion won ($16.17 billion) vs. 20.56 trillion won
  • Operating profit: 9.21 trillion won vs. 9 trillion won

Revenue rose about 35% in the June quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit rose nearly 69%, year on year.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue rose 26%, while operating profit jumped 24%.

The company said in a statement that it enjoyed strong demand and favorable pricing conditions in the first half of the year. SK Hynix added that there was a low likelihood of sharp demand corrections for the rest of 2025, due to stable customer inventory levels and expected demand from new product launches.

SK Hynix is a leading supplier of dynamic random access memory — a type of semiconductor memory commonly found in PCs, workstations and servers that is used to store data and program code.

Much of the company’s recent success can be credited to its business in high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers. 

SK Hynix has established itself as the global leader in HBM, supplying clients such as U.S. AI darling Nvidia. In the first quarter, this had seen the company overtake rival Samsung Electronics in the global DRAM market for the first time, according to Counterpoint Research.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month estimated that SK Hynix had tied Samsung’s combined DRAM and NAND revenues in the second quarter, with both vying for the top position in the global memory market. NAND is a type of flash memory that is commonly used in storage devices. 

Samsung and US.-based memory maker Micron Technology are both seeking to catch up to SK Hynix in the HBM space. However, analysts expect SK Hynix’s dominance to persist in the short-term.

“As of now, I believe SK Hynix still holds its leadership in the HBM race … despite Samsung’s and Micron’s catch‑up efforts,” said Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group. 

“I expect this edge to persist through the rest of 2025 and extend into 2026,” he added.

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IBM shares drop despite earnings beat

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IBM shares drop despite earnings beat

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna appears at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 16, 2024.

Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

IBM shares fell as much as 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the tech conglomerate issued second-quarter results that topped Wall Street projections.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: $2.80 adjusted vs. $2.64 expected
  • Revenue: $16.98 billion vs. $16.59 billion

IBM’s revenue increased nearly 8% year over year in the quarter, according to a statement. Growth in the first quarter was below 1%. Net income, which includes costs related to acquisitions, rose to $2.19 billion, or $2.31 per share, from $1.83 billion, or $1.96 per share, a year ago.

Software revenue climbed about 10% to $7.39 billion, exceeding the $7.43 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount. Hybrid cloud revenue, including Red Hat, showed 16% growth. The software unit’s gross margin of 83.9% was barely narrower than StreetAccount’s 84.0% consensus.

Revenue from consulting rose almost 3% to $5.31 billion, higher than StreetAccount’s $5.16 billion consensus. Infrastructure revenue went up 14% to $4.14 billion, above the $3.75 billion StreetAccount average estimate.

During the quarter, IBM announced the next-generation z17 mainframe computer and the acquisition of data and artificial intelligence consulting firm Hakkoda.

IBM called for over $13.5 billion in 2025 free cash flow, similar to a projection from April. The company still sees at least 5% revenue growth at constant currency for the year.

As of Wednesday’s close, IBM shares were up 28% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index has gained around 8% in the same period.

Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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