The Disney+ logo is displayed on a TV screen in Paris, December 26, 2019.
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Disney is raising prices on almost all of its streaming offerings as it looks to accelerate profitability for the business.
Commercial-free Disney+ will cost $13.99 per month, a 27% increase, beginning Oct. 12. Disney+ with ads will remain $7.99 per month. Disney will also expand its ad-tier offering to select markets in Europe and in Canada beginning Nov. 1.
Disney is increasing the price of Hulu without ads to $17.99 per month, a 20% price hike. Hulu with ads will also staythe same price, at $7.99 per month.
For comparison, Netflix’s standard plan without commercials is $15.49 per month. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max is $15.99 per month.
The decision to price Disney+ nearly as high as commercial-free Netflix and Max, and charge even more for Hulu, signals Disney believes its content library can compete with both of those services. When Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger launched Disney+ in 2019, he deliberately set the niche family offering at a low price of $6.99 per month — nearly half the price of Netflix.
Last year, Disney increased the cost of Disney+ by $3 per month. Iger acknowledged he was surprised the price increase led to minimal cancelations of the service.
“We took a pretty significant price increase at Disney+ sometime late in 2022, and we really didn’t see significant churn or loss of subs because of that, which was actually heartening,” Iger said during Disney’s earnings call on Wednesday.
Iger noted that Disney is deliberately trying to steer users toward its ad-supported services by keeping prices for those services the same. The advertising landscape for streaming is healthier than traditional linear TV, Iger added.
Disney has added 3.3 million subscribers for its U.S. advertising-supported service after it launched in December, Iger announced on the call. About 40% of new Disney+ subscribers have signed up for the ad tier, he said.
Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger.
Charley Gallay | Getty Images
Disney is now betting consumers will pay more for its streaming services even as the Hollywood writers and actors strikes threaten its content pipeline in the coming months.
For consumers who want both Disney+ and Hulu without commercials, they can pay $19.99 per month in a new “premium duo” offering — a $12 per month savings. That offer will be available starting Sept. 6. The Disney+ and Hulu bundle with ads will not change from its $9.99 per month price.
Disney also increased the price of its bundle of Disney+ (no ads), Hulu (no ads) and ESPN+ (with ads) to $24.99 per month from $19.99 per month. The bundle of all three products with commercials will be $14.99 per month, an increase of $2 per month.
Disney said Wednesday its streaming division lost $512 million in its fiscal third quarter. Disney+ excluding India’s Hotstar added 800,000 subscribers during the period. Disney+ ended the quarter with 105.7 million Disney+ subscribers, excluding Hotstar, and about 146 million in all.
Disney is also increasing the price of Hulu + Live TV with ads to $76.99 from $69.99 per month. The commercial-free Hulu + Live TV will jump to $89.99 per month from $82.99 per month.
WATCH: Bob Iger will lead Disney through this difficult time, says BofA Securities’ Jessica Reif Ehrlich.
Correction: This story was updated to reflect that the ad-free Disney+ price increase will take effect Oct. 12. A previous version misstated the date.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an opening ceremony for Tesla China-made Model Y program in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 7, 2020.
Aly Song | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI’s Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot.
Shares gained about 3%.
Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles “next week at the latest.”
xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the vitriol written by the chatbot.
In response to a user post on his social media platform X, Musk said the company is expanding its Austin, Texas robotaxi service area this weekend. He also said Tesla is awaiting regulatory approval for a launch in the Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”
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The expansion of robotaxi and Grok integration comes at a fraught time for Musk and his empire.
Tesla set its annual shareholder meeting for Nov. 6, a Thursday filing showed. A group of investors recently called on the electric vehicle company to schedule the meeting.
Its last shareholder meeting was in June 2024, as Musk established himself as a major backer of President Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign. Musk later led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
After stepping down from DOGE at the end of May, Musk has openly feuded with Trump on social media over the major tax bill, with the president suggesting the government look at cutting contracts for Musk’s companies.
Shares have tanked from their post-election high over investor concerns that the public fight could hamper Tesla. Slowing sales and rising competition also stifled some investor appetite.
Tesla shares fell Monday, with the company losing $68 billion in value after Musk continued to blast Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and said he was establishing his own political party, the “America Party.”
The world’s richest man suffered another blow Wednesday when Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of his social media platform X, leaving the role after a turbulent two years for the company.
The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
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