Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on June 8, 2022.
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As growth in traditional tech equipment and software slowed to a trickle in recent years, cloud computing gobbled up spending, reflecting a dramatic change in how companies were choosing to run applications and store data.
But in the past two weeks, the biggest names in cloud infrastructure issued clear warnings to suggest that the frenetic expansion of the past half-decade is cooling. Historically high inflation and a steady increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve have led businesses to curtail spending and seek ways to get more out of their existing infrastructure.
Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, the three leaders in the market for cloud-based storage and servers, all reported deceleration in their respective businesses. On Thursday, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which also includes Workplace productivity software, showed revenue for the fourth quarter that was below analysts’ estimates.
“In Q4, we saw slower growth of consumption as customers optimized GCP cost, reflecting the macro backdrop,” Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, told analysts on the earnings call.
Google Cloud revenue growth slowed to 32% in the fourth quarter from almost 38% in the third period. Revenue of $7.32 billion trailed analysts estimates of $7.43 billion, according to StreetAccount.
Amazon, which pioneered the market over 15 years ago and maintains a commanding lead, said AWS revenue growth decelerated to 20% from 27%. The unit notched sales of $21.4 billion, while analysts were projecting $21.87 billion. As recently as 2018, AWS was growing over 45%.
Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, told analysts that large companies worked with AWS in the fourth quarter to trim their spending because of the difficult economy, a trend that started in the middle of the third quarter. He’s not expecting it to reverse anytime soon.
“As we look ahead, we expect these optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters,” Olsavsky said.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who started AWS with company founder Jeff Bezos and ran the division until taking the helm at the parent company in 2021, spoke up later on the call to tout the robust pipeline of cloud migrations. However, according to a regulatory filing, customers are showing less confidence in longer-term deals. Amazon reported $110.4 billion in commitments on contracts with original terms longer than one year. That was up 37% from a prior year, a decline from 57% growth in the third quarter.
Analysts at Bank of America lowered their forecast for AWS, and now expect growth for the year of 11% instead of 15%. That would be down from nearly 29% in 2022.
“We see LT cloud trajectory as bent and not broken,” wrote the analysts, who have a buy rating on the stock.
Results from Alphabet and Amazon follow Microsoft’s report last week. Microsoft’s Azure unit is second in cloud infrastructure to AWS.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022.
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Microsoft said its Azure and other cloud services revenue growth slowed to 31% from 35%, though the company doesn’t disclose the size of the business in dollars.
On the earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said growth in Azure consumption moderated in December. The company expects even slower Azure growth in the first quarter as organizations look for opportunities to run their existing applications in a more cost-effective manner.
CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged that trend, but said it’s not permanent.
“At some point, the optimizations will end,” Nadella said on the earnings call. “In fact, the money that they save in any optimization of any workload is what they’ll plough into new workloads, and those workloads will start ramping up.”
Nadella’s view is supported by at least some industry experts. Tech research firm Gartner is expecting the category to grow overall by 26.8% in the full year, compared with 25.9% in 2022. The Gartner prediction across all of IT is for revenue growth of 2.4%.
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
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.
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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.