GameStop made a $55.5 billion unsolicited offer to buy eBay and the big plan appears to be to cut the marketing budget. You can tell that few are taking GameStop's $125 a share for eBay seriously because eBay shares were last trading at $110.
You can find the not-so-flashy offer at GameStop Investor Relations.
Sierra, a customer experience company led by Bret Taylor, said it raised $950 million in venture funding at a valuation of $15 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global and GV.
The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) evaluated the open-weight AI model DeepSeek V4 Pro and found it lags frontier models by about 8 months.
CAISI, a unit of NIST, has a full report, but the most notable comparison is cost. After all, a model that lags frontier models by 8 months may be just swell for most use cases.
"CAISI selected a U.S. reference model by filtering out U.S. models that performed significantly worse on public benchmarks or that cost significantly more per token than DeepSeek V4 Pro. The only model meeting these criteria was GPT-5.4 mini, which was selected as a point of reference. In CAISI’s aggregated capability analysis, GPT-5.4 mini receives an Elo score of 749, which is similar to DeepSeek V4 Pro’s score of 800.
DeepSeek V4 costs less than GPT-5.4 mini on 5 out of 7 CAISI benchmarks."
Ever since Microsoft reported its fiscal third quarter earnings I've been stuck on one word: Eval-max. Eval-max? What?!?
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the following (emphasis mine):
"It was a record third quarter powered by the continued strength of Microsoft Cloud, which exceeded $54 billion in revenue, up 29% year-over-year. Our AI business surpassed $37 billion ARR, up 123%. We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform shifts that will change the entire tech stack as agents proliferate and become the dominant workload. This will drive TAM expansion and change the value creation equation across the entire economy. To capture this opportunity, we are executing against 2 priorities. First, we are building the world's leading cloud and AI infrastructure for agentic computing era. Second, we are building high-value agentic systems across core domains such as productivity, coding and security. These 2 layers reinforce each other, and we are focused on driving competitive value and differentiation for customers across each so that they can eval-max their outcomes."
Max could become the new "super." All you have to do is attach it to every word and you'll sound ___. I'll leave the blank to you.
Earnings to know after the bell.
Qualcomm shares surged on its first quarter earnings report based on potential data center and AI inference momentum.
In the you can't make this up department, OpenAI outlined how GPT-5.1 and later models became fascinated with goblins, gremlins and other creatures. The short version is that OpenAI created a "nerdy" persona that ran with the goblin and gremlin theme.
PayPal is reorganizing into a checkout division led by PayPal, a consumer financial services unit led by Venmo and a payment services and crypto division that'll include Braintree.
The new approach, laid out by new CEO Enrique Lores, is notable since it may signal a Venmo spinoff in the future. There were a bunch of executive moves too.
Meta released its first quarter results and overall they were strong with revenue up 33% from a year ago. As usual, Meta said it will spend more money on AI infrastructure. The company said 2026 capital expenditures will be between $125 billion to $145 billion, up from the $115 billion to $135 billion forecast last quarter.
Here's the problem. Unlike Google, Amazon and Microsoft, Meta has to monetize AI through advertising. It doesn't have a cloud business where it can sell capacity to enterprises.
Some initial takeaways on cloud earnings all hitting at the same time.
Google Cloud is thriving as an AI layer and TPU sales are strong. The integrated AI stack pitch is working well. Things are going so well that I don’t sweat the company raising its capex outlook again. Alphabet is getting returns. Annual revenue run rate for Google Cloud now $80 billion.
AWS has a big base and accelerating growth. You can quibble about 28% growth missing whisper numbers, but hey it’s a $150 billion annual revenue run rate.
Microsoft Cloud is consistent, growing and almost boring. That’s not a bad thing. Microsoft Azure revenue was up 40% in the fiscal third quarter.
Most of the MAG 7 reports tonight as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all report earnings. I'll be focused on the cloud hyperscalers.
For all three companies, capital expenditures will be closely scrutinized as will revenue growth in cloud units. All three companies have shares that have delivered strong gains in the last month. For instance, Amazon and Alphabet are up 30% and 27% in the last month, respectively. Microsoft has surged 17% in the last month.
Those gains mean there's little margin for error and a high likelihood of sell the news.
Nvidia delivered the latest addition to its Nemotron model family. The company launched Nvidia Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, an open multimodel model designed for AI agents using video, audio, image and text. Nvidia said a host of software companies including Palantir, DocuSign, Infosys and Oracle are evaluating the model.
