Microsoft reported fourth-quarter capital expenditure of $41 billion, up 70% year over year, and simultaneously lowered its 2026 capex forecast to $175 billion from $190 billion. The company was explicit that spending plans have not changed. An accounting change did. That combination deserves more attention than it will get, because a $15 billion reduction in a guidance figure that everyone on the street uses as a proxy for compute added is not a reduction in compute added.

Moonshot AI closed a $3.5 billion round at a $35 billion valuation, having initially targeted somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion, and plans a Hong Kong listing as early as this year. CXMT’s IPO prospectus disclosed that Alibaba holds a stake of nearly 5%, now worth more than $20 billion, against a closing market capitalization of roughly $464 billion on July 28. One model developer and one DRAM manufacturer, heading for the same venue, at valuations set almost entirely by domestic capital.

Three rounds closed in a single session, all funding the same problem from different angles. Onyx Security raised a $113 million Series B led by Bessemer for a platform that lets enterprises deploy AI agents securely, taking total funding to $153 million. Groundcover raised a $100 million Series C led by One Peak for observability software capable of monitoring AI agents, bringing its total to $160 million. Spur Intelligence raised $200 million led by Insight Partners for technology that distinguishes human from bot traffic to identify fake users and threats.

I’ve been dismissive of the line that AI would create more jobs than it destroys. It always sounded like something you say to a select committee — technically unfalsifiable, emotionally reassuring, and never accompanied by a name or a wage. I assumed the people saying it couldn’t produce a single worker who was better off. They can now. It’s just nobody they were talking about. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and BlackRock are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, at some of the highest pay the construction trades have ever seen.

Qualcomm reported third-quarter revenue of $9.95 billion, down 4% year over year, guided fourth-quarter profit below consensus, and said revenue from Apple will decline faster than it previously expected. The stock fell more than 7% after hours. Earlier the same day, the company disclosed a ten-year agreement to supply chips for BMW’s future digital cockpit and advanced driver-assistance systems. Both disclosures are accurate descriptions of the company. They are describing different decades.

Qualcomm has signed a ten-year agreement to supply chips for BMW’s future digital cockpit and advanced driver-assistance systems, extending a relationship that already produced a jointly developed automated driving stack into the next generation of the manufacturer’s software-defined vehicle architecture. Ten years is an unusual public commitment length even by automotive standards, and it reflects how the qualification process actually works. A cockpit and driver-assistance platform is validated as a system: silicon, board design, thermal envelope, operating system, safety certification, and the toolchain the manufacturer’s own software teams build against.

Robinhood reported second-quarter revenue of $1.31 billion, up 32% year over year against a $1.29 billion consensus. Inside that number, event contracts revenue rose more than tenfold to $156 million while crypto revenue fell 38% to $100 million. The prediction market business is now larger than the crypto trading business, and it got there in roughly a year. That crossover is the print. Crypto trading was the growth engine that carried this company through two cycles and it is behaving exactly as a transactional crypto business always behaves, which is to say it tracks retail speculative appetite with no floor underneath it.

Russia has charged Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorist activity, alleging that Telegram was used by Ukrainian intelligence to organize attacks inside Russia. The charge places the founder of the most operationally significant messaging platform in the conflict under criminal jurisdiction in the country he left in 2014 after refusing to hand user data to Russian authorities. Telegram’s dual status is the whole problem No platform occupies a stranger position in this war.

The eighth-generation Galaxy Z Fold is drawing a familiar verdict from reviewers: the hardware that matters most has improved, and the compromises have moved rather than disappeared. The positives are substantial. The device is comfortable to hold when closed, which has been the recurring complaint about book-style foldables and the main reason buyers return to conventional phones. The inner display’s shift toward a 4:3 aspect ratio makes the unfolded state genuinely useful for reading and document work rather than presenting a shape that suits neither.

Samsung reported second-quarter revenue of roughly $118.1 billion, up 130% year over year and a shade under the $118.9 billion consensus, alongside operating profit of about $61.46 billion, up 1,814% against a $60.68 billion estimate. Revenue missed. Profit did not. The distance between those two facts is the entire memory cycle compressed into a single print: sales slightly more than doubled while operating income went up eighteen-fold, which is only arithmetically possible when the incremental bit sells at a price the cost base was never built to justify.