| |  | Jul 31, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Thursday! OpenAI has reached $12 billion in annualized revenue. Meta Platforms' second-quarter revenue exceeds its own forecast. Figma's IPO price values the company at $19.3 billion.
| | | | OpenAI has reached $12 billion in annualized revenue, nearly double its pace at the beginning the year, The Information reported Wednesday. The rise suggests the company will be able to hit is projections of generating $12.7 billion in revenue this year. The growth comes as the company logs roughly 700 million weekly active users for its ChatGPT products used by both consumers and business customers, up from 500 million weekly active users OpenAI said all of its products had in late March. Increased use will also drive up its costs. The company now expects to burn roughly $8 billion in 2025, up $1 billion from the cash burn it projected earlier in the year. | | | | Meta Platforms on Wednesday reported second-quarter revenue of $47.5 billion, up 22% from a year earlier. That exceeded its own forecast of $42.5 billion to $45.5 billion, showing the strength of its digital advertising business and sending its shares up as much as 11% in after-hours trading. Meta forecasted that, in the third quarter, growth could tick up to 24% or slow to 17%. The company did not share an estimate for its fourth-quarter revenue, but said it expected growth to slow for that quarter as it lapped "a period of stronger growth" from a year earlier. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp raised its estimate for capital expenditures this year to $66 billion to $72 billion, up from a previous forecast of $64 billion to $72 billion. Meta also projected rapid growth in operating costs due to "infrastructure costs" and "employee compensation." The company has been on an aggressive dealmaking and hiring spree over the past several months as it seeks to improve its position in artificial intelligence. Meta's second-quarter profits rose 36% to $18.3 billion. | | | | Figma priced its IPO at $33 a share on Wednesday, giving it a $19.3 billion valuation on a fully-diluted basis, and making it one of the most valuable company backed heavily by venture capitalists to go public in years. The company's stock will start trading Thursday. The pricing means Figma will have raised more than $400 million for the business in the IPO, with existing shareholders including CEO Dylan Field, other executives and venture capital firms like Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital selling a total of $800 million. The price is a significant step up from the $26.5 a share midpoint price at which it started conversations with investors. Investors have had few IPOs to buy, and were drawn to Figma's strong profitability and high growth. | | | | China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, said it summoned Nvidia on Thursday to discuss alleged security risks with its H20 chips. The regulator's move comes in response to a bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers in May, which requires location verification for artificial intelligence chips that are subject to U.S. chip export controls for China. The regulator requested that Nvidia provide an explanation for the potential "backdoor security risks" with H20 chips, which the U.S. company designed for the Chinese market in order to comply with U.S. export rules. Nvidia has found itself at the center of escalating U.S.-China tensions recently. In April, the Trump administration restricted Nvidia from selling H20 chips to China without a license. But earlier this month, the administration lifted the restriction to allow Nvidia to resume the sale. Meanwhile, some U.S. officials have expressed concerns that permitting the sale of those chips could enable China to become more competitive in AI and strengthen its military capabilities. This isn't the first time Chinese authorities have raised security concerns about U.S. technology firms. In 2023, China banned key infrastructure operators from using products from U.S. memory chip maker Micron. Last year, an industry group in China called for a security review of Intel products. | | | | Microsoft's revenue growth accelerated to 18% in the three months ending in June, driven by stronger-than-expected sales in its Azure cloud computing unit, the company said on Wednesday. Revenue in Azure grew 39%—a significantly higher rate than the roughly 34-35% growth the company had forecast, and faster than its 33% growth in the prior quarter. Shares jumped nearly 7% in after-hours trading. CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement that the growth was due to "cloud and AI" spending by businesses across every sector. The company told investors in April that its cloud unit was growing rapidly thanks to a large new commitment by OpenAI, one of its largest cloud customers. OpenAI has projected to spend more than $6 billion this year to run ChatGPT and other products, largely on Azure. Azure made more than $75 billion in revenue in the past twelve months, Nadella said, up from roughly $56 billion the year prior. By contrast, AWS—Microsoft's biggest cloud rival—brought in $107.6 billion in 2024. Capital expenditures were $24.2 billion, up from $21.4 billion in the quarter prior. That brings the company's total capex for the past year to $87.9 billion, exceeding the $80 billion that the company told investors in January that it expected to spend during that period. Microsoft has said it expects capex to continue to grow in the year ahead as it builds out massive datacenters needed to power AI applications for customers including OpenAI. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said capital expenditures would rise to $30 billion in the coming quarter, implying that the company's capex will continue to accelerate in the year ahead. That pace implies Microsoft's capex could exceed $120 billion in the coming year, or 37% higher than this year. | | | | Palo Alto Networks will buy the login software firm CyberArk for $25 billion, the companies announced on Wednesday. CyberArk, a publicly traded startup based in Israel, sells software for verifying companies' employees when logging into applications that run in the cloud. The 26-year-old firm competes with the likes of Okta and Microsoft, and it was trading with a market cap of roughly $18 billion before the deal talks were first reported by media outlets on Tuesday. The transaction is expected to close in 2026, and marks the second cybersecurity megadeal announced this year alongside Google's planned $32 billion acquisition of the cloud security startup Wiz. Palo Alto Networks has been steadily acquiring other cybersecurity firms in recent years, including the AI-focused security startup Protect AI for $700 million earlier this year, and the secure browser startup Talon for over $600 million in 2023. | | | | Apple officially responded to the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit, saying the agency's case seeks to "degrade the privacy and security benefits of iPhone" and would "eliminate" the iPhone's competitive differentiation. "This lawsuit threatens the very principles that set iPhone apart in a fiercely competitive market," Apple wrote in a Tuesday filing. The U.S. agency, which filed its initial claim against Apple in March 2024, has focused on five methods Apple allegedly uses to protect its iPhone monopoly – suppressing "super apps," blocking cloud streaming gaming apps, degrading messaging apps, restricting smartwatch integration with the iPhone and withholding access of digital wallets to the company's tap-to-pay technology. Apple said that the U.S. agency is going after a "random collection" of design choices. Apple said that for each of these five cases, it was focusing on the user and weighing the risks and benefits of opening up access to third-party developers. "This careful balance Apple maintains is a defining feature of iPhone," the company wrote. | | | | JPMorgan Chase and Coinbase signed an agreement to directly link customers' bank accounts to their cryptocurrency wallets, a move that could undercut data aggregators between banks and companies. Under the new deal, which is expected to go into effect next year, customers can also fund Coinbase accounts with their Chase credit cards and redeem Chase rewards. This comes as fintech and crypto companies are clashing with banks over fees accessing customers' account information. Earlier in July, JPMorgan began to notify fintech companies that it would charge them each time a customer's information was accessed, which they now get for free. | | | | Amazon will pay the New York Times between $20 million and $25 million in cash each year to license its content for AI, the Wall Street Journal reported. That sum is equal to roughly 1% of the Times's 2024 revenue. Under the deal, which was first announced in May, Amazon can use the Times's content both for training AI models and for use in its products like Alexa. The deal is Amazon's first agreement with a publisher and the Times's first AI licensing deal. AI companies have been striking deals with publishers to license their content for use in AI search results, as well as training new AI models. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging they used the Times's articles without permission to train large language models. OpenAI has agreements with several other news publishers, including News Corp and Axel Springer. The deals can be structured in a variety of ways, including cash payments as well as credits to use AI firms' technology. | | | Popular articles By Theo Wayt and Rocket Drew
By Miles Kruppa, Cory Weinberg and Anissa Gardizy
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