Why Paying Should Be A Last Resort In Ransomware Attacks
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The economy as a whole hasn’t shown much improvement. Inflation has been much stickier than most analysts and companies were hoping, with the Federal Reserve declining to lower interest rates on Wednesday. GDP growth has also been much slower than analysts expected. But Big Tech’s push into AI is providing markets with the optimism they’re missing elsewhere. Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon all reported earnings in the last week, and each showed impressive AI-related earnings gains with the promise of more to come.
On Tuesday, Amazon’s quarterly report saw a 13% year-over-year increase in net sales. While the bulk of that came from its e-commerce division, its AWS cloud computing segment saw a 17% sales boost, bringing in $25 billion. Part of AWS’s success came from some of its new AI functions, including its Amazon Q AI assistant for writing, testing, debugging and translating code; and through its Amazon Bedrock generative AI service, which allows companies to build their own apps based on the foundation of LLMs from leading companies including Anthropic, Meta and Mistral AI. Amazon’s optimistic earnings boosted its share price 3% in immediate trading.
Following a blockbuster earnings report last Thursday afternoon that smashed analysts’ expectations, Google parent Alphabet’s stock price surged nearly 10%, boosting it to its first valuation reliably exceeding $2 trillion. Microsoft, which also reported earnings Thursday afternoon, beat analysts’ expectations with overall revenue increasing 17% year over year. Both companies’ success pushed the overall stock market higher and gave a significant boost to the share prices of tech companies in the chip business, including Nvidia, AMD and Arm Holdings.
While Alphabet and Microsoft both have a wide variety of business areas, AI was the engine that drove the results and the rallies. In the beginning of the earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai describes the company as being in…
