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Thursday, July 30, 2026
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Today’s top story
INDUSTRY
Azure passes $100 billion as Copilot hits 30 million seats
Microsoft
Microsoft reported $90 billion in fiscal Q4 revenue, with Azure and other cloud services growing 43% year over year and Azure crossing $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats, adding roughly 10 million in the quarter, and the company said it brought 88 new data centers online during the fiscal year. Shares rose about 8% after the report, and management guided to a further step-up in AI infrastructure spending in fiscal 2027.
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Why it matters
Azure's first $100 billion year at 43% growth is the clearest evidence yet that AI demand is converting into durable cloud revenue rather than one-off experimentation. Copilot's seat count doubling its quarterly net adds also gives the first credible scale benchmark for paid enterprise AI assistants.
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More headlines
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INDUSTRY
Meta lifts capex floor to $130 billion as cash flow collapses
Meta's Q2 revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion, but earnings missed as operating costs climbed and free cash flow fell to $784 million from $10.9 billion a year earlier. The company narrowed 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $130–145 billion, raising the low end, and shares fell nearly 10% after hours.
CNBC
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POLICY
More than 1,200 frontier lab staff sign AI pacing letter
The "Pacing the Frontier" letter, organized by Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI, asks Washington to help build the technical and governance tools needed to verifiably slow automated AI development if capabilities outrun oversight. Signatories include Dario Amodei, Jakub Pachocki and Ilya Sutskever, and both OpenAI and Anthropic have since endorsed the statement as companies.
Fortune
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POLICY
EU to place ChatGPT under strictest Digital Services Act rules
The European Commission is preparing to designate OpenAI's ChatGPT and Roblox as very large online platforms as soon as August, after ChatGPT's EU user base passed the 45-million threshold by a wide margin. Designation brings systemic risk assessments, transparency reporting, supervisory fees and exposure to fines of up to 6% of global revenue.
Bloomberg
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INDUSTRY
Samsung posts record quarter on AI memory demand and HBM4
Samsung reported record Q2 revenue of 171.5 trillion won and operating profit of 89.5 trillion won, driven by AI server demand, constrained capacity and higher memory prices, while its mobile division posted an operating loss. The company shipped first HBM4E samples and expects HBM4 sales to more than triple in Q3, with supply tightness persisting into 2028.
Investing.com
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FUNDING
Cyera to buy Oasis Security for $1 billion to police AI agents
Data-security company Cyera signed a letter of intent to acquire Oasis Security for about $1 billion, roughly $700 million of it in cash, to add non-human identity management for service accounts, tokens and AI agents. Oasis was last valued at $700 million in March and will operate as a dedicated unit inside Cyera.
TechCrunch
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This week in benchmarks
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vs. Wednesday, July 22, 2026
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Intelligence
GPT-5.6 Sol (high) fell from #5 to #9
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Intelligence
Claude Opus 4.8 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort) fell from #6 to #10
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Intelligence
GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) fell from #3 to #6
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Intelligence
Kimi K3 fell from #4 to #7
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Coding
GPT-5.6 Sol (medium) fell from #6 to #9
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Coding
Kimi K3 fell from #7 to #10
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Read past briefs and the live benchmarks at
ai-newsletter-eta-lemon.vercel.app.
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