Financial Mindset

Microsoft said its Azure cloud business surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue in its recently-ended fiscal year, cheering investors in the company even as the broader market plunged on worries over AI spending and U.S. inflation. Cloud growth in Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter increased 43% percent year-over-year, providing a boost to overall quarterly revenue of $90 billion , above analyst estimates of $87.7 billion. Azure, the core of Microsoft’s cloud business, surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time ever this fiscal year, rising 33% over last year’s $75 billion, Microsoft said. The gain helps cement Microsoft’s Azure as a leading cloud giant behind Amazon Web Services, and as one of the most prominent providers of the infrastructure undergirding the AI era.  Shares of Microsoft rose more than 8% in after-hours trading, following a broad market selloff in regular trading Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve held interest rates s...

A diary played an unusual role in a  contentious Senate hearing Wednesday  – musings from Dr. Anthony Fauci, a scientist who became a leading voice in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, for years has accused Fauci, the longtime top  infectious disease official  at the National Institutes of Health, of lying about the origins of the coronavirus. In previous hearings, the now-retired Fauci denied the accusation,  calling it “preposterous.”  On Wednesday, he  invoked the Fifth Amendment  in declining to answer more questions. But Paul drew public attention to the latest proceeding by releasing more than 1,000 pages of a long-running diary that Fauci kept – entries that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News his agency extracted from government computers and provided to the GOP-led committee. Paul drew on selected excerpts to argue that Fauci’s “private record tells a d...

Smaller, less digitized Southeast Asian markets are adopting AI-native systems faster than mature economies—partly because they don’t have to deal with the baggage of legacy infrastructure. “Southeast Asia holds a lot of market potential because it’s very hungry for innovation,” Verena Siow, SAP’s new APAC chief, tells Fortune in an interview at the firm’s Singapore office. “The economies which had a later start are looking to leapfrog into the latest and greatest tech.” Southeast Asia, home to young, digitally-savvy populations and a rising middle class, offers fertile ground for leapfrogging, a phenomenon where countries bypass traditional stages of development and move directly towards newer technologies and business models.    For European software giant SAP, this has translated into burgeoning interest in its business AI propositions. “Companies in this region tend to have fewer resources and smaller IT departments, so they’re looking to move straight t...

Dr. Anthony Fauci  on Wednesday repeatedly invoked  the Fifth Amendment  and declined to answer dozens of questions from senators in a Republican-led committee hearing about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision, at least for now, shielded Fauci from answering questions that could expose him to accusations of lying under oath. Though he received  a pardon  in early 2025 from Democratic President Joe Biden, some Republicans pursuing a yearslong campaign for his arrest had suggested he could still face charges for any perjury committed during Wednesday’s hearing. The scientist, who helped lead the nation’s COVID-19 response, was subpoenaed to testify under oath by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has long had an antagonistic relationship with Fauci. In response to angry, sometimes mocking, questions from Republican senators, Fauci  declined to answer  more than 100 times, injecting new drama into partisan divides that have  fes...

Jensen Huang says AI is going to kill tasks, not jobs—a distinction that could define whether the future of work brings mass unemployment or a new wave of growth and opportunity. Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco over the weekend, Huang didn’t mince words about the effect AI will have on the labor market. “Many tasks will be automated away,” he said in a video published Monday by the famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. “Every single job will change, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new jobs.” And yet the Nvidia CEO made clear that tasks are not the same thing as jobs. As such, he pushed back on the narrative of a white-collar bloodbath that some high-profile AI leaders have predicted. Instead, Huang argues, AI will bring more jobs, not fewer. “The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards,” he said. “AI automates tasks away, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs.” As companies continue adopting AI, however, the nu...

When Robinhood and Coinbase went public back in the first half of 2021, the companies occupied very different lanes. Today, the two founder-led firms are clashing on multiple fronts as Robinhood seeks to co-opt large portions of Coinbase’s crypto empire, while the latter has rebranded itself as an “everything exchange” for stocks and more. Both firms report second-quarter earnings this week, and their results are likely to reveal which has the upper hand. While the market has soured on both stocks, there are strong indications that one firm—Robinhood—is in a position to turn the corner, thanks to its early momentum in new and emerging sectors like prediction markets and tokenized finance. Coinbase, meanwhile, is struggling to find its footing after betting heavily on a strategy involving its in-house blockchain that has yet to pay off. Q2 earnings preview for COIN and HOOD Robinhood is set to release second-quarter earnings on Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET, and Coinbase will do ...

South Korea’s Kospi closed down nearly 11% on Tuesday, its eighth circuit breaker of 2026 and one of the worst days of the year. South Korea’s famously volatile retail market is now infecting Western markets: The American semiconductor index SOX fell as much as 6% Tuesday, a fourth straight losing session and its longest streak this year, dragging the Nasdaq-100 down 9.7% from its record high—just short of a correction. Yet the panic doesn’t square with what’s happening on the ground. Memory prices just keep going up, not down. Third-quarter contracts for DRAM are settling 20% to 30% higher this month. Google and Meta have signed contracts locking in prices and volumes for five years, and analysts generally don’t expect meaningful new supply until 2028. “Right now there’s a lot of panic around the AI investment,” Gil Luria, a technology analyst at D.A. Davidson, told Fortune, “and the panic appears to be indiscriminate.” What gives? Well, three explanations are circulati...