Tech
Satya Nadella insists people are using Microsoft’s Copilot AI a lot
Microsoft delivered a solid earnings report on Wednesday with $81.3 billion in revenue for the quarter (up 17%), net income profits of $38.3 billion (up 21%), and a record-breaking Microsoft cloud revenue of over $50 billion.
But the stock was getting pounded on Thursday as investors worried about how much the tech giant was spending to build out its cloud and questioned whether that investment would pay off. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the answer to that question is yes — and spent considerable time on the earnings call trying to make that point.
Microsoft has spent almost as much on capital expenditures in the first half of its current fiscal year as it did in all of the previous year. And the numbers truly are enormous: Microsoft spent $88.2 billion on capital expenditures last year and has spent $72.4 billion so far this year.
Much of that spend is to serve AI to enterprises and major AI labs, especially OpenAI, as well as Anthropic. The big question on investors’ minds is: Will the spending turn into more use and ultimately profits?
Investors are scared that Microsoft’s main enterprise cloud product, Azure, and its Microsoft 365 apps didn’t grow as fast as they wanted.
“The fact that BOTH Azure and the M365 segments fell a bit short is the key negative we’re hearing,” Wall Street analyst for UBS, Karl Keirstead, wrote in his research note on Thursday. (Keirstead isn’t worried about it, though, and recommends buying the stock.)
Still, a few months ago, news reports circulated that people didn’t really want to use Microsoft’s AI, despite Copilot being weaved into all kinds of Microsoft products.
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Nadella spent much of his time during the earnings call engaged in what is best described as AI use PR. Despite his pitch, some of the numbers he gave were pretty squishy.
For instance, Nadella said daily users of its consumer Copilot AI products had grown “nearly 3x year-over-year.” This refers to AI chats, the news feed, search, browsing, shopping, and “integrations into the operating system.”
As to how many actual users that represents, he didn’t say. (We’ve reached out to Microsoft and asked.)
Last year, in its annual report, the company said it surpassed 100 million monthly active Copilot users, but that counted both commercial users and consumers.
He was more up front with Microsoft’s coding AI, GitHub Copilot, saying it now has 4.7 million paid subscribers, up 75% year-over-year. That appears to be a healthy business. Last year, in its annual report, Microsoft said that GitHub Copilot had 20 million users, a figure that includes those opting for the free tier.
He also said Microsoft 365 Copilot now has 15 million paid seats from companies buying it for their employees. This is out of a base of 450 million paid seats, the company said.
And Nadella called out the growth of Dragon Copilot, Microsoft’s healthcare AI agent for medical professionals (a competitor to superhot startup Harvey). He said this product is available to 100,000 medical providers and was used to document 21 million patient encounters over the quarter, up threefold year-over-year.
Will the billions spent on data centers be worth it? Nadella obviously thinks so. He and CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call that demand for AI services across products far outstrips data center supply, so all of the new equipment is essentially booked to capacity for its lifespan.
Tech
New York lawmakers propose a three-year pause on new data centers
New Yorker state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would impose a moratorium of at least three years on permits tied to the construction and operation of new data centers. While the bill’s prospects are uncertain, Wired reports that New York is at least the sixth state to consider pausing construction of new data centers.
As tech companies plan to spend ever-increasing amounts of money to build AI infrastructure, both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concerns about the impact those data centers might have on surrounding communities. Studies have also linked data centers to increased home electricity bills.
Critics include progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, who has called for a national moratorium, as well as conservative Florida Governor Ron De Santis, who said data centers will lead to “higher energy bills just so some chatbot can corrupt some 13 year old kid online.”
More than 230 environmental groups including Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace recently signed an open letter to Congress calling for a national moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
Eric Weltman of Food & Water Watch told Wired that the New York bill — sponsored by state senator Liz Krueger and assemblymember Anna Kelles, both Democrats — was “our idea.” Data center pauses have also been proposed by Democrats in Georgia, Vermont, and Virginia, while Republicans sponsored similar bills in Maryland and Oklahoma.
According to Politico, Krueger described her state as “completely unprepared” for the “massive data centers” that are “gunning for New York.”
“It’s time to hit the pause button, give ourselves some breathing room to adopt strong policies on data centers, and avoid getting caught in a bubble that will burst and leave New York utility customers footing a huge bill,” she said.
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Last month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a new initiative called Energize NY Development, which her office said would both modernize the way large energy users (i.e., data centers) would connect to the grid while also requiring them to “pay their fair share.”
Tech
NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo joins Kalshi as an investor
Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks announced Friday that he has joined prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder, making him the first NBA player to invest directly in the company.
“The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” said the two-time NBA MVP in a social media post. “Today, I’m joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now.”
The announcement has not gone over well on social media. On Reddit, for example, one user described it as “literally a conflict of interest,” while another described Kalshi as “cancerous” and yet another wondered, “is this even allowed.”
According to The Athletic, the NBA’s recent collective bargaining agreement allows players to advertise and take stakes of up to 1% in sports betting companies, as long as they’re not promoting league-related wagers.
Kalshi said it will partner with Antetokounmpo on marketing and live events — and in accordance with the company’s “strict terms of service that ban insider trading and market manipulation,” he will not be allowed to trade on markets related to the NBA.
Tech
Benchmark raises $225M in special funds to double down on Cerebras
This week, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems announced that it raised $1 billion in fresh capital at a valuation of $23 billion — a nearly threefold increase from the $8.1 billion valuation the Nvidia rival had reached just six months earlier.
While the round was led by Tiger Global, a huge part of the new capital came from one of the company’s earliest backers: Benchmark Capital. The prominent Silicon Valley firm invested at least $225 million in Cerebras’ latest round, according to a person familiar with the deal.
Benchmark first bet on 10-year-old Cerebras when it led the startup’s $27 million Series A in 2016. Since Benchmark deliberately keeps its funds under $450 million, the firm raised two separate vehicles, both called ‘Benchmark Infrastructure,’ according to regulatory filings. According to the person familiar with the deal, these vehicles were created specifically to fund the Cerebras investment.
Benchmark declined to comment.
What sets Cerebras apart is the sheer physical scale of its processors. The company’s Wafer Scale Engine, its flagship chip announced in 2024, measures approximately 8.5 inches on each side and packs 4 trillion transistors into a single piece of silicon. To put that in perspective, the chip is manufactured from nearly an entire 300-millimeter silicon wafer, the circular discs that serve as the foundation for all semiconductor production. Traditional chips are thumbnail-sized fragments cut from these wafers; Cerebras instead uses almost the whole circle.
This architecture delivers 900,000 specialized cores working in parallel, allowing the system to process AI calculations without shuffling data between multiple separate chips (a major bottleneck in conventional GPU clusters). The company says the design enables AI inference tasks to run more than 20 times faster than competing systems.
The funding comes as Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., gains momentum in the AI infrastructure race. Last month, Cerebras signed a multi-year agreement worth more than $10 billion to provide 750 megawatts of computing power to OpenAI. The partnership, which extends through 2028, aims to help OpenAI deliver faster response times for complex AI queries. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also an investor in Cerebras.)
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Cerebras claims its systems, built with its proprietary chips designed for AI use, are faster than Nvidia’s chips.
The company’s path to going public has been complicated by its relationship with G42, a UAE-based AI firm that accounted for 87% of Cerebras’ revenue as of the first half of 2024. G42’s historical ties to Chinese technology companies triggered a national security review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, bumping back Cerebras’ initial IPO plans and even prompting the outfit to withdraw an earlier filing in early 2025. By late last year, G42 had been removed from Cerebras’ investor list, clearing the way for a fresh IPO attempt.
Cerebras is now preparing for a public debut in the second quarter of 2026, according to Reuters.
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