Start with the number, because the number moved fast. Google has agreed to cover as much as $44bn of lease payments on data centres owned by other people, should the tenant default. It disclosed the figure last week. At the end of September the same co…
Fareed Zakaria opened with the question everyone is circling. Are we in an AI bubble, and has it begun to deflate? OpenAI has promised to spend hundreds of billions while making a fraction of that, he noted. The maths does not add up. Nadella did not p…
Shein has finally shown investors the numbers. In a draft prospectus filed on July 26, the fast-fashion retailer disclosed annual revenue of $41.8 billion for 2025, up roughly 8% on the year before, alongside a net profit that fell 38.7% to $2.064 bill…
SAP gave investors the number they wanted. Europe’s biggest software company said cloud revenue grew 22% to €6.28 billion in the second quarter, beating forecasts, SAP announced. Its cloud backlog, a measure of future sales, jumped 26%. The stock rose …
Alphabet went into its second-quarter results on Wednesday carrying one question louder than the rest: whether the tens of billions it is funnelling into AI infrastructure has started to earn its keep. Judged by the after-hours share price, the answer …
Nokia reported comparable operating profit of €434mn for the second quarter of 2026, up 18% on the same period last year and comfortably ahead of the €382mn that analysts polled by LSEG had forecast. Net sales rose 8% to €4.82bn, or 9% at constant curr…
On Monday, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley began pitching investors on a bond sale of at least $12 billion, as The Wall Street Journal reported. The money will build a Meta data centre in El Paso, Texas. The structure is the story. Who owns what BlackRock …
Look at what Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle officially owe, and the numbers seem large but manageable. Look off the books, and a second, bigger pile of debt appears. A Nikkei study put that hidden figure at $1.65 trillion, up roughly eig…
Brazil’s instant-payment system Pix has moved from a domestic success story to the centre of a trade fight with the United States, and governments elsewhere are watching how it ends. The dispute hardened in June, when the Office of the US Trade Represe…
PayPal’s board reckons that a $53bn (£39bn) joint takeover approach from Stripe and the private-equity firm Advent International sells the payments pioneer short, the latest twist in a fast-moving round of payments consolidation. People familiar with t…