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.
Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures attends Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 at San Francisco Design Center on September 11, 2013 in San Francisco, California.
Steve Jennings | Getty Images
Opendoor, the online real estate platform that’s seen a surge of retail investor interest in recent months, said Wednesday that it’s tapped former Shopify executive Kaz Nejatian as CEO and named co-founder Keith Rabois as chairman.
The stock popped 30% in extended trading, and is now up more than fifteenfold since hitting its record low in June.
Rabois, a partner at Khosla Ventures, helped launch Opendoor in 2014, along with a group that included Eric Wu, who served as the first CEO before stepping down in 2023. Wu is rejoining the board as part of Wednesday’s announcement.
The moves come after Carrie Wheeler last month resigned as Opendoor’s CEO following an intense pressure campaign from investors. Rabois and hedge fund manager Eric Jackson were among those who were vocal critics of Wheeler and called for her departure.
The company was at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq in May due to its stock price being below $1. Weeks later, Opendoor attracted a surge in interest from retail investors, earning it “meme stock” status, after Jackson began touting the company.
With the after-hours pop, Opendoor now has a market cap of close to $6 billion, up from less than $400 million less than three months ago.
Nejatian spent six years at Shopify and oversaw the Canadian e-commerce company’s product division in addition to serving as its COO. Nejatian’s last day at Shopify will be Sept. 12, and the company’s executive team will “assume Kaz’s responsibilities,” Shopify said in a regulatory filing.
“Literally there was only one choice for the job: Kaz,” Rabois said in a statement. “I am thrilled that he will be serving as CEO of Opendoor.”
Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2020. The company’s business involves using technology to buy and sell homes, pocketing the gains.
Oracle Corp Chief Executive Larry Ellison during a launch event at the company’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California June 10, 2014.
Noah Berger | Reuters
Oracle‘s massive growth trajectory for cloud infrastructure is lifting all boats.
The cloud giant forecasted skyrocketing sales to $114 billion in the company’s fiscal 2029, signalling demand for artificial intelligence processing will remain high over the next few years, and will require Oracle to build out new data centers.
“The guide for a 14x of Oracle’s cloud infra segment in 5 years, mostly from GPU cloud demand, and the guide for capex of $35b in FY26 is bullish Nvidia, other AI hardware suppliers and the eco-system of partners building and financing Oracle’s GPU data centers,” wrote UBS analyst Karl Keirstead in a note on Wednesday.
As Oracle shares roared 40% higher on Wednesday, companies that provide the chips and systems for its buildout — or even compete with it — are seeing their stocks boom.
Nvidia, which says its computers and chips comprise about 70% of the total budget for an AI data center, climbed 4%.
Broadcom, which makes networking gear to tie Nvidia chips together and plays a key role in custom AI chips for companies like Google, climbed 9%.
AMD is the main Nvidia competitor for graphics processors used for AI, although its chips currently only have a small fraction of the market. Its shares rose 3%.
Micron, which makes memory used in Nvidia’s most advanced chips, rose 4%.
Super Micro and Dell, which both make complete server systems around Nvidia’s chips, each rose 4%.
“The vast majority of our CapEx investments are for revenue-generating equipment that is going into the data centers,” Oracle’s Safra Catz said on Tuesday.
The biggest gainer was one of Oracle’s so-called neo-cloud competitors, CoreWeave, which rose 20% on continued exuberance around insatiable demand for AI compute. Neo-clouds compete against Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for cloud customers by focusing on offering better access and tools for artificial intelligence.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, chief executive officer and co-founder of Klarna Holding AB, center, and Michael Moritz, chairman of Klarna Bank AB, center right, during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Klarna shares popped 30% in their New York Stock Exchange debut Wednesday, opening at $52, after the Swedish online lender priced its IPO above its expected range.
The company, known for its popular buy now, pay later products, priced shares at $40 on Tuesday, raising $1.37 billion for the company and existing shareholders. The offering valued Klarna at about $15 billion.
The IPO marks the latest in a growing list of high-profile tech IPOs this year, suggesting increased demand from Wall Street for new offerings. Companies like stablecoin issuer Circle and design software platform Figma soared in their respective debuts. Meanwhile, crypto exchange Gemini is expected to go public later this week.
“To me, it really just is a milestone,” Klarna’s co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s a little bit like a wedding. You prepare so much and you plan for it and it’s a big party. But in the end — marriage goes on.”
Klarna’s entry into the public markets will test Wall Street’s excitement about the direction of its business. The company has in recent months talked up its move into banking, rolling out a debit card and personal deposit accounts in the U.S.
Klarna has signed 700,000 card customers in the U.S. so far and has 5 million people on a waiting list seeking access to the product, Siemiatkowski told CNBC. He added that Klarna Card represents a different proposition to rival fintech Affirm’s card offering, which has attracted 2 million users since its launch in 2021.
“We’re attracting a slightly different audience maybe than the Affirm card,” Siemiatkowski said. “I get the impression that is more a card where people use it simply to be able to have financing with interest on slightly higher tickets.”
In addition to Affirm, Klarna also competes with Afterpay, which was acquired for $29 billion in 2021 by Square, now a unit of Block.
Klarna faces some potential regulatory headwinds. In the U.K., the government has proposed new rules to bring BNPL loans under formal oversight to address affordability concerns regarding the market.
A banner for Swedish fintech Klarna, hangs on the front of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to celebrate the company’s IPO in New York City, U.S., September 10, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
The IPO is poised to generate billions of dollars in returns for some of Klarna’s long-time investors. Existing shareholders are offering the bulk of Klarna shares— 28.8 million — on the public market. At its IPO price of $40, that translates to over $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, Klarna raised $222 million from the IPO.
Sequoia, which first backed in Klarna in 2010, has invested $500 million in total. The venture firm sold 2 million of its 79 million shares in the IPO, meaning it’s generated an overall return of about $2.65 billion, based on the offer price.
Andrew Reed, a partner at Sequoia, told CNBC that he was still in college when Sequoia made its first investment in an “alternative payments company in Stockholm.” The early work, he said, was around expanding in Europe.
“Being here in New York 15 years later with over 100 million consumers and over $100 billion of GMV [gross merchandise value] and close to a million merchants, it is staggering what one year after another of execution and growth and Sebastian’s long-term vision can do,” Reed said.
Another Klarna investor hasn’t been so lucky. Japan’s SoftBank led a 2021 funding round in Klarna at a $46 billion valuation and has since seen the value of its stake plunge significantly.