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Tech News
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta's board of directors is in a standoff with CEO Mark Zuckerberg after he sought a large stock-heavy pay increase, with some directors reportedly threatening to resign if he does not relent. The dispute follows Meta posting negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion in the third quarter of 2026, its first such shortfall since 2012, amid heavy AI investment.
A draft IPO prospectus reviewed by the Wall Street Journal shows Anthropic posted an $80 billion net loss for the first six months of 2026, up sharply from $13 billion in the same period a year earlier. Revenue over that span rose only modestly, from roughly $15.2 billion to $16.3 billion, while the company has also committed to about $450 billion in cloud computing infrastructure spending over the next seven to ten years.
Meta reported record third-quarter revenue of $64.6 billion and announced plans for a stock split alongside the creation of a new class of shares intended to help finance its artificial intelligence investments. The company said the new share class will not alter Mark Zuckerberg's existing voting control.
Major tech companies are investing heavily in hiring and training 'forward-deployed engineers' who embed with corporate clients to turn AI models into working business applications. AWS has committed $1 billion to such an initiative, OpenAI has launched a deployment business backed by over $4 billion, Anthropic is spending $100 million to train 10,000 of these engineers by 2027, and Accenture with Google Cloud are building a 1,000-person team.
CoreWeave's stock has fallen more than 25% over the past week as investors grow wary of the company's debt load and the broader 'neocloud' business model. The decline comes amid a wider pullback in AI-related stocks this week, driven by growing market anxiety over heavy spending in the sector.
Deutsche Bank's analysis shows AI-related spending accounted for up to a third of UK economic growth during the first seven months of the year. The finding comes as Britain's economy has performed better than many forecasters had expected.
Dell Technologies stock fell 11% on Wednesday, pulling down Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle, Super Micro and NetApp amid worries that enterprise AI spending won't match the scale of the ongoing data center buildout. Barclays analysts cut ratings on Dell, HPE and NetApp from buy to hold, saying they see no 'meaningful AI inflection' in enterprise demand and attributing recent revenue gains largely to a global memory shortage rather than AI adoption.
Microsoft has rejected claims that it ordered Azure division leaders to cut expenses by 20% to help fund rising AI spending. A company spokesperson called the reports 'inaccurate and careless' and said no such directive was issued.
Analysts and industry forecasts cited suggest that for current AI investment levels to be justified, American consumer and business spending on AI technology would need to rise to roughly 9% of GDP—comparable to what households spend on food. The comparison highlights the scale of spending growth implicitly assumed by bullish AI investment projections.
Meta is rolling out new AI-powered offerings targeted at companies, aiming to turn its heavy AI infrastructure spending into revenue-generating products. The push involves selling AI tools and services to enterprise clients rather than only consumer-facing features.
CNBC's Jim Cramer said this week that despite growing safety concerns raised by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, he expects AI investment to keep accelerating because companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are generating too much revenue to slow down. After conversations with executives at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, Cramer said he remains bullish on data center component makers and cybersecurity firms like Palo Alto Networks, Okta and CrowdStrike.
Payments firm Ramp's survey of 70,000 businesses found only 56% paid for AI tools in August, up just 0.4% from July, marking a sharp deceleration in adoption. Spending per employee among the top 1% of firms fell nearly 10% to $7,205, which Ramp economist Ara Kharazian attributes partly to seasonal vacation effects and partly to falling token prices, now averaging $0.68 per million tokens versus a March peak of $1.15.