Reuters:
Microsoft reports Azure Q2 revenue up 39% YoY, vs. 38.8% est.; Microsoft cloud's contracted backlog grew 110% to $625B, ~45% of which was driven by OpenAI alone  —  Microsoft (MSFT.O) delivered a marginal beat on quarterly revenue expectations for its crucial cloud-computing business on Wednesday …

Tim Cook’s call for “deescalation” is meaningless without specifying which side he’s calling upon to change course, and there’s no weaker sauce than the weak sauce of “both sides”.

Krystal Hu / Reuters:
PaleBlueDot, which operates a GPU capacity marketplace and designs GPU clusters for enterprises, raised a $150M Series B led by B Capital at a $1B+ valuation  —  Artificial intelligence cloud startup PaleBlueDot AI has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the company …

We live in a golden age of controllers. The gamepads on the market now are of higher quality, more versatile, and more customizable than anything from even one console generation ago. If you play games on an Xbox Series X or Series S (or a Windows PC), you have the unenviable task of choosing between […]

Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Microsoft says capital expenditures for Q2 hit $37.5B, exceeding analyst estimates for $36.2B; MSFT drops 4%+ after hours  —  Microsoft Corp.'s spending surged to a record high and cloud sales growth slowed, sending the shares down amid investor concerns that it could take longer than expected …