Breaking down Anthropic’s 3Q26 inference costs, we can see that SpaceX captured the vast majority of the incremental spend, while AWS, GCP, and, to a lesser extent, Azure captured just $820 million combined. This makes it hard not to speculate that Anthropic renegotiated compute pricing with its cloud providers in 3Q26, weighing on AWS’s and GCP’s growth.

$6135.T Makino also crushed it: revenues rose 19%, operating profit jumped 60%, and orders increased 26% last quarter. Order growth surpassed sales growth across all regions, with aerospace, semiconductor, automotive, and medical applications boosting demand for complex machining. Management raised the full-year OP forecast by 32%. At ~12 P/E, Makino is too cheap for what it offers. I'm holding.

These are all “gray rhino” risks—obvious threats that the market continues to underappreciate. Everyone knows ChatGPT will have an impact on Google, but amid the focus on what has happened over the past year, that threat has been overlooked. Meta, too, has spent years laying the groundwork to improve its performance in historically weaker verticals.

In 2009, working at Yahoo, I oversaw Ad Marketplaces - which included management of the PPC advertising system. We had a terrible set of options. @Google had a better search engine, and was consistently eating our share of consumer search. The monetization load on Google search at that time was remarkably low - 1 ad per search max, often zero ads. Wall Street wanted revenue growth. Consumers wanted better search results. Advertisers wanted quality clicks. We chose Wall Street. There were times where we had so many ads on the page that zero organic search results showed above the fold. We sacrificed the search experience for revenue growth, in the face of a competitor whose experience was virtually un-monetized and clearly superior. We grew revenue from search at double digits rate, while share of search queries was steadily negative. There was another path, but the company lacked the fortitude to put the search experience and advertisers first. @Google @sundarpichai find themselves in a comparable situation today. @ChatGPT @claudeai @GeminiApp all provide better search experiences today with very light or zero ad load. And at the same time, @Google is making decisions that drive revenue growth at the expense of both the user experience AND the trust of advertisers - just at the moment where those constituents trust will be most important. Google was the company that always played the long game. In moments like these, we learn whether that’s because a monopoly on the best ad business ever built made it easy to do that, or if they’re really willing to make the hard tradeoffs that we weren’t at Yahoo back in 2009.

@flyrodcapital My guess is that $GOOGL continues to experiment with ad load and placement in AI Overviews / AI Mode user journeys, optimizing for long-term retention. It's a difficult task. Also, Q3 2025 wasn't an easy comp.

Anthropic has more cash than almost every company in America. The nearly 6-year-old artificial intelligence lab disclosed on Monday in an S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had $112.4 billion in cash, plus another $19.3 billion in short-term investments, as of June 30. Read more:

$BUG is now outperforming $SOXX at more than 75% YTD. Our cybersecurity analysts comment on the potential AI model revenue from cybersecurity and how the security market could be divided between AI labs and incumbent security platforms like $CRWD.

hello! 你好! apa khabar! வணக்கம்! no better place for a multitasker than a country with four official languages. now in Singapore: 🇸🇬

Bloomberg reports $MSFT will offer voluntary buyouts to ~60,000 employees. That is not 60,000 layoffs, and the difference matters for the math. A few observations: 1. Scale: Microsoft ended FY26 (June) with ~223K employees, its first YoY headcount decline in a decade (228K in FY25). 60K eligible is ~27% of the company. Eligibility is VP-level and below on select teams in the US, Canada, India and the UK. Data center, sales and marketing staff are excluded. 2. Who is likely in scope (my read): Strip out sales/marketing (~43K) and data center ops, and what remains is mostly engineering/product (R&D ~77K) and corporate functions (G&A ~14K). Microsoft is trimming the people line in exactly the areas where AI tooling is supposed to raise output per head. 3. The precedent: April's first-ever Voluntary Retirement Program covered ~8,750 US staff (age + tenure of 70+). The cost was guided at ~$900M (~$350M COGS / ~$550M opex). On the July call management said it came in lower than expected, which suggests uptake was modest. 4. Implied math (my est., 20% uptake): ~12K exits x ~$200K fully loaded cost = ~$2.4B/yr in savings, ~1.8% of FY28 opex. Severance at ~$125K/head = ~$1.5B one-time, likely booked in the Dec quarter when offers are accepted. 5. EPS impact (my est., 19% tax, ~7.4B shares): One-time charge ~-$0.16. Savings +$0.13 in FY27 (half year) and +$0.26 in FY28 (~+1%). FY27 GAAP is roughly a wash; on an ex-charge basis it is a clean +$0.13. 6. For context: Revenue per employee is already ~$1.5M (FY26 $332B / 223K). $2.4B of savings is about 4 days of FY27 capex (~$230B, my est.). This is margin hygiene, not a capex offset. 7. Caveat: Package terms aren't public, and some of the savings will likely be redeployed into AI talent and compute. Management has already guided FY27 operating margin down slightly, so the net EPS uplift could be closer to half. The real signal isn't the dollars. Microsoft is the first megacap to explicitly trade people opex for compute capex at this scale. Watch whether peers follow.

Recommended reading for the weekend: 1. @FundaAI — Physical AI: From the Robot-Data Race to a Second Demand Curve for Compute 2. @Citadel — October Update: Fundamentals in Focus 3. @satyanadella — Models as Insider Risks in the Super Intelligence Era 4. @KobeissiLetter — The "Stealth" Bear Market: A Historic Opportunity 5. @arthurmensch — Build or surrender 6. @Cayden_Liao — The Biggest Hack in Crypto History That Never Happened Have a great weekend!