Martin Peers

Mark Zuckerberg seems to enjoy stealing Sundar Pichai’s thunder. Close observers of the cloud sector will know that Google Cloud has one of its big annual events in Las Vegas this week, and it’s rolling out lots of announcements, including a new custom-designed chip for cloud computing. It seems Meta Platforms couldn’t resist getting in on the action,

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Photo by Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images.

Spotify reported 20% higher revenue in the first quarter, and a healthier operating profit than it has demonstrated in some time, reflecting the impact of price increases last year.The music streaming service said it generated an operating profit of 168 million euros, or a margin of 4.6%, compared with operating losses in three of last year’s four quarters. Revenue growth meanwhile

Demonstrators hold signs in support of TikTok in front of the U.S. Capitol Building earlier today. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images.

Artificial intelligence development may be sucking up vast amounts of money from big tech—but hey, at least business is good! That’s the picture painted by earnings updates from both Alphabet and Microsoft on Thursday—echoing a similar state of play reported by Meta Platforms on Wednesday. All three companies reported strong operating profit growth for the March quarter—46% for Alphabet and 23% for Microsoft, neither as good as Meta’s 91% jump but solid nonetheless. All three are benefiting from cost cutting over the past year, combined with top-line expansion.

Phew, what a week! We got a blizzard of quarterly earnings updates from tech firms, most of them followed by investor calls that were full of artificial intelligence talk. Much of that was corporate blather, of course, but there were a few moments when actual information was transmitted. Not all of that was relevant to the subject at hand, to be sure. For instance, as Elon Musk was explaining layoffs at Tesla, he pivoted for a moment to discuss the human organism. “Humans are around 35 trillion cells.…You’re basically a walking cell colony of roughly 35 trillion, depending on your body mass, and about 3x that number in bacteria,” he said. Tell us more!

A Tesla showroom in Shanghai ahead of Elon Musk's visit to China. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty Images.

An Apple Store in Shanghai. Photo by Wang Gang/VCG via Getty Images.

If you’re lying awake at 3 a.m. one night, try reading the Justice Department’s 509-page “proposed finding of fact ” in its antitrust lawsuit against Google’s search business, a revised version of which was filed with the court on Tuesday. You likely won’t make it past the extensive table of contents before you fall asleep. Even so, getting through the document is probably worth it, at least for investors in Google’s parent company, Alphabet. For those people, understanding the government’s case is essential. A government victory could impose restraints on Google’s search business, its cash cow. And depending on what those constraints are, they could hurt Google’s earnings power enough to affect its ability to keep up in artificial intelligence.