Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Thursday, February 5th, and this is your FT&E's briefing.
Alphabet is still putting a lot of its weight behind artificial intelligence,
and we'll talk about the challenges of unpacking millions of documents on Jeffrey Epstein,
plus why OpenAI senior staff are leaving the company.
I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
Google said it plans to spend at least $55 billion more on capital expenditure this year than Wall Street had expected.
The focus is on, you guessed it, AI.
That brings its capex to as much as $185 billion.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said, quote,
we're seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board.
The spending spree overshadowed a second straight quarter with revenue of more than $100 billion.
That was driven by strong earnings from the company's advertising and cloud computing divisions.
Shares were volatile in after hours trading.
And speaking of U.S.
tech stocks, they had another bad day yesterday.
The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite fell one and a half percent, and the S&P slipped half a percent.
Disappointing results from the chipmaker AMD added fuel to the AI-related fire.
AMD seemed to do everything right.
It reported strong first quarter sales guidance and higher than expected revenue in the fourth quarter of last year,