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Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, which it said is significantly more capable than the model it released less than a month ago, as the company steps up efforts to contend with the leading frontier labs.

The back-to-back launches come after nearly a year where Google didn’t release a new flagship frontier model, ceding ground to rival labs OpenAI and Anthropic.

The new model is priced the same as Gemini 4 Argon, announced on Sept. 30 and released widely earlier this month, with an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, the company said on Wednesday. That will double after the teaser rate ends.

Google says Carbon is a “significant leap in cybersecurity capabilities,” and is nearly two times better at generating secure code than Argon. Carbon’s release comes on the heels of a cybersecurity crisis as rogue AI agents have exploited both corporate and government vulnerabilities.

As with Argon, Google said it will release Carbon to a subset of cybersecurity professionals and then to partners in its Fairwind program. It also said it was actively engaged in the U.S. government’s program for pre-release model testing.

Anthropic’s highly anticipated megalisting has been looming over the broader initial public offering market, holding back other companies gearing up for debuts, Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange Group, said at The Information’s WTF Summit on Wednesday.

The pipeline for potential new listings is “really strong,” Martin said, but it “has been held back by the Anthropic S-1 having to flip public.” Anthropic publicly filed its IPO paperwork on Monday for a planned listing on NYSE rival Nasdaq. The filing didn’t disclose how much Anthropic is aiming to raise, but previous reports put that figure as high as $100 billion.

Martin said there is “a limited amount of attention a portfolio manager is going to devote at one given time,” and given the size of Anthropic’s offering it makes sense for other companies to wait for it to go first. That includes Nscale, which filed publicly last month for a NYSE-listed IPO but hasn’t moved forward yet, a move Martin said was “really good” and “healthy.”

Apple has announced its first touchscreen Mac computer, but it will come with a massive spike in price. The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display will start at $2,899. On Tuesday, Apple introduced a new MacBook Pro with the M6 chip and no touchscreen that will start at $1,999.

The touchscreen MacBook will be available in 14- and 16-inch versions, as well as M5 Pro or M5 Max chip options. Apple said the touch sensor is built directly into the display panel and not layered on top, a design that is intended to reduce latency. The iPhone’s Dynamic Island—the interactive notification hub—will be making its way to the new touchscreen MacBook.

The announcement is a major turnabout for Apple. For years, Apple executives mocked the notion of bringing a touchscreen interface to their Mac lineup, even as a growing number of Windows laptops began incorporating the feature over the years.

Still, the touchscreen computer market remains relatively small, with only around 20% to 25% of notebook PCs including touch technology, according to technology analyst firm Omdia.

Oracle shares rose more than 10% Wednesday after the company sketched out a timeline for when it would begin to slow its capital spending for data centers and start generating cash again.

The company described future capital spending in fiscal years 2028 and 2029 as “a period of peak capex,” with free cash flow turning positive in fiscal year 2028, which begins in June 2027, and reaching more than $30 billion by fiscal year 2029. Beginning in its 2029 fiscal year, growth will be “self-funded,” the company said, with net debt to adjusted earnings shrinking to below 3.5 times, a key ratio watched by lenders and a threshold often seen as a rating-agency dividing line between investment grade and junk credits.

Future capital raises to fund capex will be capped at $20 billion through fiscal year 2030, split evenly between debt and equity, the company said. That was lower than some analysts have forecast.

Oracle was a relative latecomer to renting out servers en masse to AI developers, and it is competing against larger and more established cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. But Oracle has signed deals with OpenAI worth $300 billion in revenue if it completes a series of costly data center projects for the ChatGPT maker.

As a result, Oracle’s data center spending has become a symbol of investor worries about companies that could be biting off more than they can chew, financially speaking, in pursuing AI cloud growth. Traders betting the company would default on its debt pushed its credit default swap spread to a record wide this month. Investors fear its credit rating, currently the lowest tier of investment grade, will descend into junk status.

While Wednesday’s stock gains brought Oracle market capitalization to $438 billion, its shares are still down about 27% this year.

Microsoft revenue rose 19% to $92.3 billion in the September quarter, 1 percentage point faster than the growth it reported in the second quarter. Accelerating sales in its Azure cloud unit, driven in part by server rental revenue from OpenAI, offset the slight revenue decreases in its Xbox and devices units.

Notably, Microsoft said revenue tied to OpenAI represented nearly 11% of its overall revenue in the quarter.

The company didn’t disclose the number of paid subscribers of its Copilot AI features, after previously saying three months ago that it had 30 million such subscribers as of the end of June. That could raise questions about whether Anthropic and other AI firms are challenging Microsoft’s core software application business. Still, Microsoft said total revenue in its 365 Commercial Cloud unit—which includes Copilot as well as sales of its broader suite of Office software—rose 17% to $27.7 billion, 1 percentage point faster than in the June quarter.

Microsoft boosted spending on new data centers to $45.2 billion in the September quarter, 30% higher than the same period a year earlier. However, that was lower than the $50 billion capex that Microsoft had projected to spend in the period, which the company attributed to delays in getting access to data centers built by third parties. In any case, the capex dragged down its free cash flow 27% to $18.6 billion from the same period a year earlier. Microsoft earlier this week announced that it would offer voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, or 27% of its staff.

But Microsoft said strong demand justified its growing cloud buildout. Revenue from its Azure cloud server rentals was $33 billion, up 48% from the same period a year prior, a 5 percentage point acceleration from Azure’s growth rate in the prior quarter. However, the result paled in comparison with Google’s cloud-server growth, which more than doubled to $30.7 billion in the September quarter, thanks in part to sales of its tensor processing units. Microsoft develops its own AI server chips but they are far more nascent.

Microsoft expects revenue growth in the current quarter to be 18% to 19%, chief financial officer Amy Hood said. Azure revenue growth is expected to accelerate to 49% to 50% and 365 commercial revenue is set to accelerate to 19% growth, Hood said.

The company’s revenue backlog grew 73% from a year earlier to $677 billion, which the company said primarily came from future Azure commitments.

Revenue in Microsoft’s Xbox unit fell 2%, continuing a pattern of shrinking revenue over the past year; Microsoft has recently conducted layoffs and overhauled its games strategy in an effort to balance Xbox’s expenses and return to revenue growth. Overall, Microsoft’s gross profit margins fell more than 1 percentage point to 68% in the quarter compared to a year earlier.

Google’s cloud sales surged in the latest quarter but overall revenue at parent Alphabet grew a slower-than-expected 25% to $127.6 billion, disappointing investors.

Operating profit rose in the third quarter, but net profit declined by nearly a quarter to $26.2 billion, well below analysts’ estimates according to S&P Capital IQ. The decline flowed in part from an $8.7 billion loss on its holdings of its equity securities—a category that had contributed a big gain in the second quarter of this year. Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi, on the earnings call, said that came mainly from a third-quarter drop in the share price of SpaceX, in which Google is a big investor.

Alphabet’s shares fell by nearly 9% in after hours trading.

Google Cloud revenue in the third quarter more than doubled from a year earlier to $30.7 billion, powered by demand from AI customers, the company said Wednesday. Sales of its tensor processing unit AI chips also meaningfully contributed to growth, it said.

The Information on Monday reported that Google had struck a deal to sell its TPUs to OpenAI—the same day Google announced a deal with Oracle for it to offer the AI chips. Ashkenazi said TPU system sales would continue to grow in the current quarter and ramp up significantly in 2027.

Ashkenazi also the cloud business had a backlog of $561 billion, up from $514 billion last quarter.

In the earnings call, Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said the company would launch agentic AI services for consumers later this year.

Google’s services business—its largest, which includes its core search advertising operation—grew less than 11% in the quarter, its slowest rate since the first quarter of last year. Google chief business officer Phillip Schindler said advertisements in its AI search engine were monetized less than traditional ads.

Reflecting Google’s enormous spending on AI data centers, the company reported negative free cash flow of more than $9 billion. That marked its second straight quarter of negative cash flow, and was a big increase in the deficit from the negative $5.9 billion for the previous quarter.

Ashkenazi said Google continues to expect its capital expenditures to increase significantly next year.

Earlier today, Google released its latest model, Gemini 4 Carbon, which it said was significantly more capable than its previous model, Argon, released less than a month ago.

ServiceNow shares dropped 19% in after its third-quarter earnings, even after the IT service management software provider slightly beat its earlier revenue growth estimate for its September quarter and forecast a 2% uptick in growth for its current quarter.

It’s the latest sign that investors are wary about the potential threat that AI could pose to ServiceNow’s business.

ServiceNow’s revenue grew 20.5% to just over $4.1 billion in its September quarter compared to last year, which was down from 24% growth last quarter. However, ServiceNow is expecting around $4.25 billion in revenue for its current quarter, which would represent growth of around 23%.

Investors may also be focusing on a dip in growth of revenue that ServiceNow has contracted but not yet recognized and expects to book over the next 12 months—known as “current remaining performance obligations.” That revenue grew 21% to $13.65 billion in the company’s September quarter, but ServiceNow expects growth to slow to 18.5% in its current quarter.

Meanwhile, ServiceNow is continuing to highlight growing customer adoption of its AI products. The company’s volume of AI deals grew 80% during the September quarter compared to last year, and it also raised its annual contract value target for AI products to $1.7 billion by the end of 2026, up from the $1.5 billion in May and $1 billion at the beginning of the year.

Chipmaker Marvell Technologies has been in talks to buy data center optics maker Lumentum, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A deal for Lumentum would rank as one of the largest semiconductor deals, as Lumentum has a market capitalization of more than $80 billion. The status of the deal couldn’t be learned, but Bloomberg reported that a transaction could be announced as soon as next week.

Spokespeople for both companies didn’t respond to a request for comment. Shares of Lumentum were up 8% after the Bloomberg report, while shares of Marvell were down by 8% in after-hours trading.

Shopify said it has added agentic payment technology created by Visa, Mastercard and American Express for its checkout feature, Shop Pay, a move that runs counter to how Stripe mainly handles agentic shopping and credit cards.

Visa, Mastercard and American Express have introduced agentic payment tokens, which represent a user’s card information, that allow authorized AI agents to spend money directly from a user’s card. That means the agent won’t see the user’s actual card details, while preserving credit card rewards and fraud-protection measures.

The card networks’ approach differs from a popular approach by Stripe, which issues a separate, single-use virtual card for AI agents that is tied to the cardholder’s account. Stripe’s approach has created concerns for card networks because it can leave them with less control over the shopping and payment process and make it harder to connect the user with the actual purchase.

Alphabet said on Wednesday that it sold $12.4 billion worth of stock in the third quarter as part of an at-the-market program it announced earlier this year. The Google parent company issued 12 million class A shares for $4.3 billion and 24 million class C shares for $8.1 billion through its equity offering program.

Alphabet’s ATM program is part of a broader $90 billion equity fundraising package the company announced in June. The company still has $27.6 billion available under the program as of Sept. 30, giving the company the flexibility to continue selling shares into the open market. But the biggest tech companies have been competing for capital amid heavy AI infrastructure spending. Meta is aiming to raise $97.5 billion through stock sales to finance AI investments, the company said on Tuesday, more than its previously announced $95 billion target.

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