Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during a keynote address announcing ChatGPT integration for Bing at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, Feb. 7, 2023.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
Satya Nadella couldn’t help himself. He had something to brag about, and he did it on Microsoft’s painstakingly followed hourlong earnings call with analysts on Tuesday. Never mind that the stock was down about 4% after hours.
Nadella said that while Microsoft isn’t the largest provider of cloud infrastructure for other companies to use to run apps and websites (that would be Amazon, with an estimated 40% share compared to Microsoft’s 20.5%), the company is No. 1 when it comes to selling cloud-based AI services. That category is small but growing quickly after startup OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, which is hosted on Azure, went viral at the end of 2022.
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A bigger artificial intelligence business might help Microsoft grow its position in cloud computing overall. On Tuesday, Microsoft said Azure and other cloud services increased by 26% year over year, faster than all other major product areas other than the Dynamics 365 cloud-based enterprise software.
Historically, Microsoft cares deeply about being dominant. For decades it has done that in PC operating systems with Windows and productivity software with Office. Since becoming CEO in 2014, Nadella has overseen a company that has continued to operate some laggards, including the Bing search engine, Surface PCs and Azure.
But in recent months Microsoft has been on a speed run to sell access to OpenAI’s underlying large language models in Azure to companies big and small, and some entrepreneurs have chosen to use them instead of models from Amazon, Google or startups.
Simultaneously, Microsoft is weaving the models into its own software, including Bing and Windows. Microsoft maintains a deep relationship with OpenAI after having invested billions into the startup.
What’s unclear is how much revenue Microsoft can accumulate from Azure AI services that depend on OpenAI’s technologies, and how much extra revenue that will bring in from companies using non-AI services in Azure. But Nadella sounded hopeful about Microsoft’s prospects in those areas.
“If you think about Azure, we have grown Azure over the years, coming from behind, and here we are as a strong No. 2 — in the lead when it comes to these new workloads,” he said. “So, for example, we are seeing new logos, customers who may have used another cloud for most of what they do are for the first time sort of starting to use Azure for some of their new AI workloads. We also have even customers who have used multiple clouds who used us for a class of sort of workloads also start new projects in data and AI, which they were using other clouds for.”
The concept of AI has been around longer than Microsoft, and Microsoft has been running AI models for other companies for several years. But ChatGPT and image-generation tools such as Adobe’s Firefly have kicked off fresh interest in generative AI, which involves taking a picture or other human input and creating new content with it.
Nadella told analysts to expect the company to win more market share and reduce the cost of acquiring customers.
“And so, yes, we celebrate,” he said.
That’s the reason Microsoft has disclosed how much of the expected Azure cloud growth will come from AI for the past two quarters, Nadella said.
Amy Hood, Microsoft’s finance chief, said on the call that in the fiscal first quarter, which will end on Sept. 30, Azure revenue should grow by 25% to 26% in constant currency, including 2 points from AI services. That could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in new Azure AI revenue.
“There are two parts to even the AI,” Nadella said. “There is the models themselves, with our partnership with OpenAI. That’s sort of one type of spend on compute. And the other is much more revenue-driven, which is we will track the inference cost to the revenue and demand. And you’re already seeing both of those play out.”
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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