| |  | Aug 01, 2025 | | | | | | TGIF! A surge in iPhone sales boosts Apple's latest quarterly revenue. Meta Platform seeks partnerships with AI video startups. Amazon Web Services' revenue grows more slowly than Microsoft and Google.
| | | | Apple's iPhone business grew at a rapid clip, as U.S. consumers bought up phones ahead of any possible tariff-related price increase. For the quarter that ended in June, iPhones sales grew nearly 13% from the prior year to $44.6, the fastest growth the business has seen since a pandemic-era surge in sales in 2021. Total revenue grew 9.2% annually to $94 billion, exceeding analyst expectations. The company's stock rose 3% in after-hours trading. The market sentiment has been down on Apple lately, as the company has struggled with its artificial intelligence strategy. Apple hasn't delivered a big AI-powered update to its Siri personal assistant that it announced a year ago. The company's stock is down more than 17% since the beginning of the year and it has fallen from its former perch as the world's most valuable company. It now has a market capitalization of $3.1 trillion, while Microsoft and Nvidia have surpassed $4 trillion market capitalizations this month on the strength of their AI strategies. Apple seems to be telegraphing its willingness to do deals to improve its position in AI. In comments to CNBC on Thursday afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company was open to mergers and acquisitions to "accelerate our roadmap." | | | | Meta Platforms has sought partnerships with startups developing artificial intelligence models to generate and edit videos, The Information reported Thursday. Meta is in talks with Pika, which develops AI that can generate realistic videos, about a possible partnership that could include licensing technology from Pika or acquiring the startup. Meta has also discussed a possible acquisition with video generation startups Higgsfield and Runway, but those talks are no longer underway. The owner of Facebook and Instagram has been on a hiring spree to revamp its AI efforts. Meta in recent weeks has poached dozens of researchers from its rivals, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, to staff its new AI division. This month, the social media giant acquired voice AI startup PlayAI as part of that recruiting push. In addition to providing talent, a deal with a video AI startup would also boost Meta's efforts to integrate AI into its social media apps. Meta last month introduced AI-powered video-editing features to its Meta AI assistant and to Instagram's video-editing app, Edits. | | | | Amazon Web Services revenue rose roughly 18% to $30.9 billion in the second quarter, as its pace of growth held steady from the first quarter and badly lagged revenue accelerations that smaller cloud competitors Microsoft and Google reported earlier this week. Amazon shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading. When asked by analysts why AWS was growing more slowly than competitors, Amazon executives blamed power constraints and said that over time, more customers would be attracted to Amazon's lower costs. Amazon said overall revenue increased 13% to $167.7 billion in the second quarter, while operating income rose 30% from a year earlier to $19.2 billion. Amazon said that its operating profit could come in as low as $15.5 billion in the current quarter, which would be a more than 10% year-on-year decline, and forecast overall sales of $174 billion to $179.5 billion for the third quarter, or growth of 10% to 13% from a year earlier. | | | | Shares of Coinbase fell by more than 6% in post-market trading after the crypto exchange missed profit estimates in the second quarter, as lower trading volume weighed on its revenue. The cryptocurrency exchange posted earnings of 12 cents per share. It reported $1.5 billion in total revenue, up from $1.45 billion in the same quarter last year but slightly missed the $1.59 billion consensus estimate. Total trading revenue declined by nearly 40% to $764 million, down from last quarter, amid a sluggish crypto market. Revenue from Coinbase's subscription and services business also fell slightly by 6% to $656 million. Despite lower volatility in the second quarter, the company saw all-time highs in custody and derivatives trading services, said Anil Gupta, Coinbase's head of investor relations. | | | | Klarna, the Swedish installment lender, is considering reviving its potential New York initial public offering as soon as September as shares in U.S. fintech companies surge, Sky News reported. Klarna filed for its IPO in March and was seeking to raise at least $1 billion at a valuation of more than $15 billion, according to reports. In April, the fintech company paused its IPO efforts after President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs triggered a public market selloff. Shares in Affirm, a Klarna competitor, have almost doubled its April low of $35.75. And Chime, a banking app that went public in June, has seen its stock trade up nearly 25% from its IPO price of $27. See our Tech IPO Tracker for more details. | | | | Paramount's streaming revenue rose 15% to nearly $2.2 billion during the second quarter, driven in part by pricing increases. However, the company, which owns the Paramount+ and Pluto TV streaming services, saw streaming ad revenue drop 4% year over year, due to the impacts of lower ad prices and more available ad inventory in the overall streaming market. The Paramount+ streaming service also lost subscribers when compared to the first quarter, ending June with 77.7 million subscribers. The company said this drop was due to the expiration of an international distribution deal that included the service in a cable TV bundle. Overall TV revenue for the company dropped 6% to $4 billion. Paramount's overall streaming revenue was able to offset that decline in dollar terms. Paramount's sale to the Ellison family-backed Skydance is expected to close on August 7. The company's non-executive chairman Shari Redstone gave prepared remarks during the earnings call, but she and other executives did not take questions. | | | | Salesforce and ServiceNow have each invested $750 million in contact center automation company Genesys, in the latest sign of AI breathing new life into one of the older segments of the enterprise software market. The new funding values Genesys at $15 billion, a person close to the company said. Genesys, led by former Microsoft executive Tony Bates, competes with Salesforce and ServiceNow in the market for AI agents that handle customer service interactions. Both companies have also previously invested in Genesys. The new funding reflects the strategic value of Genesys' customer data, which includes voice recordings and call transcripts. Genesys also recognizes this value, as it charges customers extra for analyzing the audio data through third-party AI providers. While Genesys was originally founded in 1990, it has overhauled its business under Bates and now generates a vast majority of its revenue from cloud products. After filing confidentially for an IPO last October, Genesys in its April quarter hit $2.1 billion in annual recurring revenue—the value of its contracts over the next 12 months—up 35% from last year. | | | | Microsoft's market capitalization briefly exceeded $4 trillion for the first time on Thursday after the company reported better-than-expected cloud growth in the three months ending in June, before closing at $3.97 trillion. Microsoft stock was up more than 4% from the day prior, and is up by more than 28% over the past year. Microsoft is the second company in history to achieve the milestone, following Nvidia, which crossed $4 trillion in market capitalization earlier this month. The growth reflects Microsoft's success in expanding its cloud computing business over the past decade, which has been its dominant source of revenue in recent years despite the company's long history as an enterprise software provider. It also shows how Microsoft is cashing in on demand for the Nvidia-powered servers needed to run AI applications. Microsoft's cloud growth has been driven in part by large commitments from customers like OpenAI, which uses Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform to run ChatGPT and which has projected to spend more than $6 billion on Microsoft servers this year alone. | | | | Tesla launched a ride-hailing service in the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday, featuring humans in the vehicles' drivers seats operating a version of its driving software. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said Tesla will offer a self-driving "Robotaxi" service to half of the U.S. population this year, the company has yet to receive the necessary regulatory approvals in many areas where it wants to launch. Tesla is billing the Bay Area launch as a "ride-hailing service," not a full Robotaxi launch. Tesla is lagging behind Alphabet's Waymo, which already operates without safety drivers in several U.S. metropolitan areas including San Francisco. In Austin, the only other city where Tesla has launched ride-hailing, backup operators sit in the front passengers' seat of vehicles. | | | | CoreWeave secured $2.6 billion in debt to help it purchase equipment for its contract with OpenAI, the server rental company said Thursday. The loan facility gives CoreWeave access to more capital as it looks to buy and deploy chips for a contract with OpenAI the company previously said is worth up to $11.9 billion over five years. CoreWeave entered the public markets in March with about $8 billion in debt and has raised billions more since, including a $1.75 billion offering it finalized earlier this week. OpenAI has turned to a growing roster of cloud providers to satisfy its significant computing needs after its exclusive deal with Microsoft ended in January. The ChatGPT maker invested $350 million in CoreWeave as part of the deal it struck in March. CoreWeave said the loan facility will have an interest rate of 4 percentage points above the secured overnight financing rate, which is currently hovering around 4.3%. | | | Popular articles By Theo Wayt and Rocket Drew
By Miles Kruppa, Cory Weinberg and Anissa Gardizy
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