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INDIA – 2019/08/30: In this photo illustration a popular wireless communication application Verizon logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by
Avishek Das | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

Verizon is partnering with Amazon to use the tech giant’s coming satellite internet system to expand rural broadband access in the United States, the companies announced on Tuesday.

“We’re proud to be working together to explore bringing fast, reliable broadband to the customers and communities who need it most,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.

Amazon is working on Project Kuiper, a network of 3,236 satellites that it plans to use to provide high-speed internet to anywhere in the world. While Amazon has yet to launch its first Kuiper satellites, the Federal Communications Commission last year authorized the system and the company has said that it plans to “invest more than $10 billion” in Kuiper.

The companies’ partnership will see Verizon use Amazon’s system as an extension of its terrestrial service, with Kuiper adding “cellular backhaul solutions to extend Verizon’s 4G/LTE and 5G data networks,” the companies said.

Amazon and Verizon’s teams have begun working together “to define technical requirements to help extend fixed wireless coverage to rural and remote communities across the United States.” The companies see a wide variety of use cases for Kuiper’s extension of Verizon’s network, noting that it will look at “joint connectivity solutions” for industries including agriculture, energy, manufacturing, education, emergency response, transportation and more.

Late last year Amazon gave an early look at the performance of the “low-cost” satellite antenna it has been working on for Kuiper.

A Project Kuiper engineer sets up a a prototype antenna for a test.
Amazon

Jassy noted that “no single company will close the digital divide on its own,” as Kuiper is certainly not alone in the increasingly competitive field of high-speed satellite internet.

SpaceX’s Starlink network is the early leader in the market, with 1,740 satellites launched to date and more than 100,000 users in 14 countries who are participating in a public beta, with service priced at $99 a month.

British-owned OneWeb is the next furthest along in deploying satellites, with nearly half of its planned 648 satellites in low Earth orbit. Like Amazon’s collaboration with Verizon, OneWeb has partnered with AT&T for U.S. connectivity. OneWeb has raised $2.7 billion in funding since emerging from bankruptcy last year, with shareholders including the British government, Indian telecom giant Bharti Enterprises, European satellite operator Eutelsat, and Japanese investor SoftBank.

There are also other satellite broadband systems in various stages of development, including two U.S. systems – satellite-to-smartphone specialist AST SpaceMobile and Lockheed Martin’s partnership with startup Omnispace – as well as Canadian satellite operator Telesat’s Lightspeed network.

While Amazon has yet to send any Kuiper satellites to orbit, the company earlier this year signed a deal with United Launch Alliance for nine launches. The FCC’s authorization of Kuiper means Amazon is required to deploy half of its planned satellites within six years, so the company is on the clock to deliver about 1,600 in orbit by July 2026.

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

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Broadcom beats on earnings and revenue

A sign is posted in front of a Broadcom office in San Jose, California, on Dec. 12, 2024.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Broadcom reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and the chipmaker provided robust guidance for the current period.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: $1.58 adjusted versus $1.56 expected
  • Revenue: $15 billion versus $14.99 billion expected

Broadcom said it expects about $15.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, versus $15.70 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 20% on an annual basis.

The company said net income increased to $4.97 billion, or $1.03 per share, from $2.12 billion, or 44 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company instituted a 10-for-1 stock split a year ago.

Broadcom shares are up 12% this year after more than doubling last year on investor optimism for the company’s custom chips for artificial intelligence. In March, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said it was developing AI chips with three large cloud customers.

Broadcom said that it had $4.4 billion in AI revenue during the quarter, attributing the sales to its networking parts that connect complicated server clusters.

Tan said in a statement that Broadcom expects $5.1 billion in AI chip sales in the third quarter, adding that the company’s “hyperscale partners continue to invest.”

Hyperscalers are companies that build out large cloud systems to rent out to their own customers. They include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those sales are reported in the company’s semiconductor solutions business, which had $8.4 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 17% increase from last year, and above $8.34 billion analyst estimate, according to StreetAccount.

The company’s software business, which includes VMware, grew 25% year-over-year to $6.6 billion in sales, beating the StreetAccount estimate.

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Microsoft’s stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

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Microsoft's stock hits fresh record, rallying despite drop in broader market

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington, on May 19, 2025.

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

On a down day for the market, Microsoft reached a record high for the first time in 11 months.

Shares of the software giant rose 0.8% to close at $467.68. Microsoft has once again reclaimed the title of world’s largest company by market cap, with a valuation of $3.48 trillion. Nvidia has a market cap of $3.42 trillion, and Apple is valued at $3 trillion.

Microsoft last recorded a record close in July 2024. The stock is now up 11% for the year, while the Nasdaq is flat.

Tech stocks broadly dropped on Thursday, led by a plunge in Tesla, as CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump escalated their public beef. Musk, who was leading the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) until last week, has slammed the Trump-backed spending bill making its way through Congress, a spat that has turned personal.

But Microsoft investors appear to be tuning out that noise.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella focused on his company’s tight relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI in an interview with Bloomberg, some portions of which were published on Thursday.

“Why would any one of us want to go upset that?” he told Bloomberg. Nadella told analysts in January that OpenAI had made a large new commitment with Microsoft’s Azure cloud. In total, Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI.

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Anduril raises funding at $30.5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

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Anduril raises funding at .5 billion valuation in round led by Founders Fund, chairman says

The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. 

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, including the new capital, Chairman Trae Stephens said on Thursday.

“As we continue working on building a company that has the capacity to scale into the largest problems for the national security community, we thought it was really important to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we’re working on,” Stephens told Bloomberg TV at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco.

Reports of the latest financing surfaced in February, around the same time the company took over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army. Last week, Anduril announced a deal with Meta to create virtual and augmented reality devices intended for use by the Army.

The latest funding round, which doubles Anduril’s valuation from August, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The venture firm contributed $1 billion, said Stephens, who’s also a partner at the firm.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Stephens said it’s the largest check Founders Fund has ever written.

Since its founding in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.

Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 and later made the virtual reality headsets the centerpiece of its metaverse efforts.

Stephens emphasized the importance of the recent partnership between the two sides, and “Palmer being able to go back to his roots and reach a point of forgiveness with the Meta team.”

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In April, Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a filing with the SEC. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, including Stephens, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time.

Anduril is one of the most highly valued private tech companies in the U.S. and has been able to reel in large sums of venture money during a period of few big exits and IPOs. While the IPO market is showing signs of life after a three-plus year drought, Anduril isn’t planning to head in that direction just yet, Stephens said.

“Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company,” Stephens said. “We’re not in any rapid path to doing that. We’re certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term. Right now we’re just focused on the mission at hand, going at this as hard as we can.”

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