Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence
Quarterly result and outlook pumps up Micron stock
Micron Technology stock soared after it reported a record-breaking financial performance in the third quarter of the 2026 financial year (Q3 FY26), powered by surging demand for memory chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Micron shares (NASDAQ: MU) leapt $164.39 (15.69%) to $1,212.99 in after-hours trading following the release of the results, which included forecasts of quarterly profit and revenue well above expectations. They had earlier closed $3.26 (1.31%) down at $1,048.51, capitalising the company at $1.18 trillion (A$1.71 trillion) in regular trading on Wednesday (Thursday AEST). The U.S. computer chip maker said net income was $28.243 billion in the three months ended 28 May 2026, 1400% more than $1.885 billion in the previous corresponding period (pcp) and 104% more than $13.785 billion in the second quarter. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) soared 1418% to $25.67 on revenue, which was 346% higher at $41.456 billion, both compared with the pcp. For the first nine months of the FY26 year, net income increased 786% to $47.268 billion, and diluted EPS leapt 772% to $41.40 on revenue, which was 203% higher at $78.959 billion. The company said net income was $28.243 billion in the three
Artificial Intelligence
Compute Economy Pt 3: The circle and the bottleneck
Artificial intelligence's giants are funding each other and queuing to tap the public ledger, three of them floating inside a single year. Strip away the fluff and the glaring constraint isn't working capital - it's power. SpaceX currently has the headlines, but its float onto United States markets is only the first of three - each likely in the trillions of dollars. Anthropic lodged confidential IPO paperwork on 1 June, and OpenAI followed a week later, each chasing a valuation near or above a trillion dollars, each leaning on the same two banks - Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Behind the listings runs a stranger arrangement, where a small group of firms keep paying one another to build the same thing. NVIDIA backs the AI labs, the labs commit hundreds of billions to the cloud providers, and the clouds spend it straight back on NVIDIA chips. Analysts now tally more than US$800 billion sitting inside that loop, which is why the question beneath every float is whether this is demand or the same money going round in a circle. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta together plan around $725 billion of capex in 2026, most of it on data-centre hardware. The trouble is that the spending runs well ahead of the revenue
Artificial Intelligence
Compute Economy Pt 2: The US$37.5bn gap
SpaceX sold investors on a US$45 billion, three-year AI contract. Then Musk's own posts shrank it to a few months - and the lawyers wanted to know why. Missed the first instalment? Read here: Compute Economy Pt 1: SpaceX a data centre wearing a rocket SpaceX's AI arm loses money at speed, and the only way the sums work is if outside customers pay to use the data centres it owns. Two large ones have signed up, and between them they turned company into something it never set out to be. Anthropic agreed to rent the full capacity of the Colossus 1 site in Memphis for $1.25 billion a month, taking more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 Nvidia chips. Google followed weeks later, committing $920 million a month from October for a slab of compute, with cancellation rights from the end of 2026. On the page, the Anthropic deal ran through May 2029 and totted up to about $45 billion, the sort of marquee revenue line that helps carry a $1.8 trillion valuation. Then Musk went on X and made that number a good deal smaller.The deal shrunkThe prospectus had Anthropic's payments running through May 2029, reading like a multi-year arrangement. Days later, Musk posted that SpaceX had not committed to anything long-term, des
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic disables AI models due to US govt order
Anthropic has suspended access to its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models in response to a United States Government order based on national security concerns. The privately-owned but soon-to-be-listed AI model developer said it received the export-control directive on Friday, requiring it to suspend access to its newly launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals. Anthropic said the broad scope of the order left it with little choice but to disable the models for all users to ensure compliance. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers," the company said in a statement. Access to its other AI models, including the well-known Claude remained unaffected. The Government has not detailed the concerns, but Anthropic said it understood officials believed they had identified a way of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards, known as a ‘jalbreak’, to obtain information related to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. But it also said the vulnerabilities uncovered were minor, previously known and could also be identified by other publicly available AI models. "We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for reca
Artificial Intelligence
Compute Economy Pt 1: SpaceX a data centre wearing a rocket
The biggest float in history sold investors a space story. Read the prospectus, and 93% of the pitch is artificial intelligence. Elon Musk rang the Nasdaq opening bell from Starbase on Friday, and the biggest initial public offering in history began trading under the ticker SPCX. SpaceX priced at US$135 a share, raised roughly $75 billion, and closed its first session 19.34% higher at $161.11, lifting it to around $2.1 trillion. That ranks the group sixth among all listed U.S. companies, ahead of both Meta and Tesla, and makes Musk the world's first trillionaire on paper. No firm had ever pulled this much out of public markets in a single listing, and the scramble to get in suggested few buyers stopped to ask what they were actually holding. "SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the Moon, take you to Mars and ultimately beyond," Musk told the crowd at his Starbase headquarters on launch day. The people who bought a slice of that Mars dream picked up something rather different, though, and the prospectus admits as much in plain text.Read the small printEvery company filing to go public picks an industry code, and rocket makers such as Boeing and Virgin Galactic sit under the headings for spacecraft and aeronauti

Artificial Intelligence
Mission Critical: The AI boom is floating on party balloons
Donald Trump cancelled Thursday night's planned attacks on Iran hours after promising them, declared a peace agreement approved by all parties, and the Dow jumped more than 900 points as Brent crude slid towards US$88 per barrel. Not bad for a 24-hour stretch in which the same account had vowed to hit Iran very hard that night and seize Kharg Island, the country's main oil export hub. Here's the wrinkle the relief rally skipped past - the naval blockade remains in full force until the signing, so markets are pricing a peace whose critical chokepoint stays shut. And the asset that matters most isn't crude at all, but a gas most punters associate with kids' birthday parties. When Iranian missiles hammered Qatar's Ras Laffan complex in early March, QatarEnergy halted output and declared force majeure on long-term LNG contracts to buyers across Europe and Asia. Ras Laffan also happens to yield roughly one-third of the world's helium, an element no advanced chip fab runs without, and those volumes vanished along with the LNG. The kicker is the timing, because since hostilities kicked off in late February the S&P 500 has gained more than 7% while the index stripped of AI stocks has gone precisely nowhere. Wall Stree
Artificial Intelligence
Oracle weakens after strong Q4 amid AI capex worries
Oracle Corporation shares fell in extended deals on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) due to worries about the scale of its artificial intelligence (AI) investment and despite the company reporting stronger-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter of the 2026 financial year (Q4 FY26). The shares dropped US$12.26 (6.09%) to $189.00 in after-hours trading after the software and cloud-computing giant revealed that capital expenditure (capex) was $55.7 billion in FY26, more than its $50 billion target. Earlier, the company reported a 26% lift in net income to US$4.304 billion (A$6.15 billion) for the three months ended 31 May 2026. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) grew 21% to $1.45 on revenue, which rose 21% to $19.2 billion in the latest quarter, while adjusted EPS of $2.11 beat estimates of $1.96, but investors were more concerned about the cost of building data centres and AI infrastructure. The results were driven by continued strength in Oracle's cloud business, where revenue surged 47% to $9.9 billion in Q4, with cloud infrastructure revenue climbing 93% to $5.8 billion. For FY26, net income surged 37% to $17.087 billion and diluted EPS rose 34% to $5.83 on revenue, which was 17% higher at $67.4 billion.Source: Oracl
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft to step into the competitive world of AI
Microsoft has announced a brand new artificial intelligence (AI) model, a first of its kind for the company. The announcement came at the Build developer conferences, where the Copilot+ PCs were also notably missing, marking a move away from reliance on other artificial intelligence developers. The MAI-Code-1-Flash will seek to compete with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI. It will produce source code based on written descriptions taken from people, which will then be used for websites and more. Microsoft also announced it would introduce a reasoning model, the MAI-Thinking-1. “What you just saw is a pretty significant shift,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the conference. “We believe the time has come for every company to just move from consuming a frontier model to fully participating at the frontier in the frontier ecosystem.
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic opens Mythos to the public via Claude Fable 5
Anthropic has cleared its top-tier Mythos technology for general release through Claude Fable 5, betting that fresh safeguards can contain a capability it previously deemed too dangerous to share. Subscribers on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans get Fable 5 free through 22 June, after which Anthropic will pull it and require usage credits until capacity expands, while business users face a mandatory 30-day data retention requirement that the firm says supports safety monitoring rather than model training. The pitch, stripped of the marketing, seems straightforward enough: a model powerful enough to worry its own makers, now available to almost anyone, provided it never notices you asking the wrong question. Anthropic originally launched Mythos as a preview restricted to a handful of partners, citing concerns about the model's potential to do damage in the wrong hands, a caution rooted in the system's unusual talent for finding and exploiting software flaws. What changed is not the underlying technology but the wrapping around it, because Anthropic said Fable 5's broad release became possible thanks to new safeguards that block responses in specific high-risk areas, including cybersecurity and biology. When the mod

Artificial Intelligence

Quarterly result and outlook pumps up Micron stock

Compute Economy Pt 3: The circle and the bottleneck

Compute Economy Pt 2: The US$37.5bn gap

Anthropic disables AI models due to US govt order

Compute Economy Pt 1: SpaceX a data centre wearing a rocket

Mission Critical: The AI boom is floating on party balloons

Oracle weakens after strong Q4 amid AI capex worries

Microsoft to step into the competitive world of AI

Anthropic opens Mythos to the public via Claude Fable 5

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