Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Narayana Nadella speaks at a live Microsoft event in the Manhattan borough of New York City, October 26, 2016.
Lucas Jackson | Reuters
Microsoft‘s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google.
One area where Microsoft has a distinct advantage over others in the AI race is in its ownership of Windows, which gives the company a massive PC userbase.
Microsoft CEOSatya Nadella said in January that 2024 will mark the year when AI will become the “first-class part of every PC.”
The company already offers its Copilot chatbot assistant in the Bing search engine and, for a fee, in Office productivity software. Now, PC users will get to hear more about how AI will be embedded in Windows and what they can do with it on new AI PCs.
Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Prior to Google’s event, OpenAI announced its new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor, and its Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s models..
For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold: keeping a prominent position in AI and bolstering PC sales, which have been in the doldrums for the past two years following an upgrade cycle during the pandemic.
In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote that he remains “bullish on the PC market recovery” due to commentary from customers and recent “upward revisions to notebook” original design manufacturer (ODM) builds.
Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments increased 0.9% in the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs was “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last month.
New AI tools from Microsoft could offer another reason for enterprise and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, whether they’re made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.
“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization it should, we believe, drive up usage of Windows, stickiness of Windows, customers to higher priced more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue to Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings.
While Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. That could include, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.
What’s an AI PC?
The key hardware addition to an AI PC is what’s called a neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are designed to specifically handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, they’ve been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.
Microsoft hasn’t said what AI PCs will be capable of yet without an internet connection. But Google’s PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn’t have a full computer processor, can summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend text message responses and more using its Gemini Nano AI.
Computers with Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with a dedicated NPU are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip with an NPU will be available in the middle of this year, while AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro is expected sometime during the quarter.
Intel says the chips allow for things like “real-time language translation, automation inferencing, and enhanced gaming environments.”
Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next round of Macs sometime this year.
Windows on Arm
Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips powered by Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “the Next Generation of Windows on Arm,” which will likely cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how that’s different from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.
Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13%, according to recent data from Canalys.
In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner designs and other benefits like cellular connections. But earlier versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they offered consumers. In 2018, for example, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip couldn’t run most Windows applications.
Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has an FAQ page dedicated to computers running on ARM hardware.
AI everywhere else
Microsoft will also be hosting sessions like “AI Everywhere” covering how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices that run in the cloud.
An “Azure AI Studio” session will look at how developers can create their own Copilot chatbots, which may be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. Imagine, for example, a company creating a chatbot that can help employees select health benefits.
Coinbase unveiled Wednesday an “everything app” designed to bring more people into the crypto economy.
The “Base App,” which replaces Coinbase Wallet, will combine wallet, trading and payment functions as well as social media, messaging and support for mini apps – all running on the company’s homegrown public blockchain network Base, which is built on Ethereum.
So-called super apps like WeChat and Alipay – which bundle several different services and functionalities into a single mobile app – have long been viewed as the holy grail of fintech by the industry. They’re central to everyday life in China but haven’t been successfully replicated in the West. Meta Platforms and X have made attempts to realize that vision, integrating payments, messaging and social content, among other things.
For Coinbase, the intent is to expand its reach to a new subset of consumers who aren’t necessarily interested in buying or trading crypto, the company’s core business. Over-reliance on that revenue stream has been a sticking point for the company, and some analysts view the Base blockchain as a way for it to drive utility in crypto beyond speculative trading.
As part of the Base App launch, Coinbase also rolled out two key functions meant to help power it: an identity verification system called Base Account and an express checkout system for payments with the Circle-issued USDC stablecoin, called Base Pay.
Base Pay is a one-click checkout feature for USDC payments across the web, developed with Shopify. At the end of the year, Coinbase plans to bring Base Pay to brick-and-mortar stores with tap-to-pay support. Alex Danco, product manager at Shopify, said at Coinbase’s unveiling event that the function has been turned on for tens of thousands of its merchants this week, and will roll out to every merchant by the end of the year. Shopify will also offer 1% cash back in the U.S. for users who pay with USDC on Base later this year, he said.
Base is often touted for its ability to settle a payment in less than a second for less than a cent, which its fans expect will help the network grow in a way other crypto-based payments efforts haven’t.
Now, Coinbase hopes to tap into an opportunity to settle payments on the Base network that go beyond trading and payments. With the introduction of the everything app, the company is emphasizing the opportunity for a new economic model for content creators in particular – one that might give them more direct and diverse monetization options for their content as well as more control over their identity and data.
Coinbase will fund creator rewards and waive USDC transaction fees within chats in the app as part of the effort to bring more users on chain. It is not expected to generate significant revenue right away.
The new consumer app comes as the crypto industry and Coinbase, in particular, embrace a boom in product launches and rollouts thanks to the pro-crypto policies of the Trump administration and more clearly defined crypto regulations expected from Congress — perhaps as soon as this week. Last month Coinbase launched its first credit card with American Express and Shopify rolled out USDC-powered payments through Coinbase and Stripe.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.
Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.
OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.
The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.
The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.
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Last year, Oracleannounced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.
Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.
“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.
Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.
Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.
Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.
Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.
On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.
“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”
In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.
“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.