People walk by an Apple store at the Westfield UTC shopping center in San Diego, California (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

A single comment from an Apple exec about AI search is upending the tech pecking order

Eddy Cue’s testimony shows that Apple sees the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

5/7/25 11:45AM

Apple bigwig Eddy Cue’s comments Wednesday about potentially adding AI-powered search to his company’s Safari browser could be a massive blow for Google’s decades-long dominance in web searches. Investors ran for the hills, sending Google’s stock down 8.4% in recent trading, pulling the broader market down with it.

Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said while testifying in the Department of Justice case against Google that Apple was “actively looking at” adding AI-powered search to its Safari browser. Cue said OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic were possible options to add to Safari in the future, according to the report: “We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default.”

An 8% drawdown in Google stock reflects a staggering roughly $150 billion worth of market cap destroyed in a span of minutes. Shares of Apple were recently down 1.8%. The S&P 500 also dropped on the news, falling about 0.6% from peak to trough before recovering some ground to become barely green for the day as of 12:37 p.m. ET.

Another sign that AI may be making seismic changes to the web search industry: Bloomberg reports that Cue also said today that Apple saw in-browser searches fall for the first time in April, which he suspected was due to AI.

Court documents in 2024 revealed that Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine in the Safari browser. That deal was ruled to be illegal last summer.

$20B

Paid to apple by Alphabet for search

It’s unclear whether a shift to AI search results would box Google out of Apple’s browser search, but to put the amount into context, Apple generated $394 billion of revenue in 2022, so a $20 billion payment would be the equivalent of about 5% of that total.

While Google’s search business generated $50.7 billion last quarter, it’s also investing heavily in AI. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recently said he hopes to reach a deal with Apple to include the model on iPhones this year.

Cue’s comments appear to show that within Apple, execs see the shift to AI-powered search as inevitable.

Cue testified, “There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen.”

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Jon Keegan2h

Microsoft pledges $8 billion for data centers, cloud computing in UAE

Microsoft announced another large AI-related investment in the United Arab Emirates today, pledging $7.9 billion for data centers and cloud computing.

The deal adds to the $7.3 billion it has already poured into the Gulf state, including a $1.5 billion equity stake in G24, the country’s sovereign AI company.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a post on X:

“This reflects a shared vision for AI innovation, economic growth, and ensuring that the benefits of AI are diffused broadly. Microsoft is committed to the future of the UAE and the strong ties between our two nations.”

Microsoft had previously been approved by the Biden administration to send the equivalent of 21,500 of Nvidia’s less powerful A100 GPUs. The Trump administration, which has made a big push for investments in the UAE since President Trump’s visit in May, recently approved shipments of several billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips to the nation.

The new deal involves the equivalent of 60,400 A100 GPUs, which include some of the state-of-the-art GB300 GPUs.

Microsoft Vows to Spend $8 Billion in UAE Through 2029 on Cloud, Chips

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a post on X:

“This reflects a shared vision for AI innovation, economic growth, and ensuring that the benefits of AI are diffused broadly. Microsoft is committed to the future of the UAE and the strong ties between our two nations.”

The new deal involves the equivalent of 60,400 A100 GPUs, which include some of the state-of-the-art GB300 GPUs.

Rani Molla3h

Prediction markets think Tesla investors will approve CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package on Thursday

Polymarket users are highly convinced that Tesla investors will approve CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package later this week, with the market-implied likelihood on the event contract at one point stretching above 97% today, though it’s since come down to around 94%.

Of course, even if investors approve his 2025 CEO Performance Award at the November 6 shareholder meeting, that doesn’t necessarily mean Musk will get the full payout. The deal is performance-based and requires Musk and Tesla to hit a number of lofty goals over the next decade, including:

Boosting the company’s market cap to $8.5 trillion from today’s $1.46 trillion.
Delivering 1 million AI robots (it has so far delivered none).
Having 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation (there are currently about 30 in Austin without a Tesla employee in the driver’s seat).

Tesla’s board and Musk have been loudly campaigning for the pay package’s approval. Board Chair Robyn Denholm wrote in an investor letter last week that it’s integral to keeping Musk. Musk himself took over the company’s earnings call last month to argue that the 29% voting control that’s part of the pay package would be integral to guiding Tesla’s development of AI robots.

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said.

Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

Rani Molla

Phoning it In

Meta still wants to have its iPhone moment

More than a decade after Meta’s phone flop, it’s still trying to get in on hardware.

Rani Molla & Jon Keegan4h

OpenAI inks $38 billion deal with Amazon for compute

Amazon managed to pull off its monster quarter without any of those juicy OpenAI deals on its books that many of its competitors had. But now it too has one. The company’s stock, which vaulted on its earnings report last week, jumped 5% in early trading.

The ChatGPT maker has signed a $38 billion multiyear deal with Amazon Web Services to use its compute and reduce its reliance on Microsoft.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted at the as yet announced deal on the company’s earnings call last week when he described the company’s massive backlog of AWS business:

“Backlog grew to $200 billion by Q3 quarter end, and doesn’t include several unannounced new deals in October, which together are more than our total deal volume for all of Q3. AWS is gaining momentum.”

The deal notes that the agreement calls for “hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs.” Notably, this deal does not appear to use Amazon’s Trainium chips, which it has been pushing as part of its massive Project Rainier. The initiative will run 500,000 of the custom chips.

In a press release announcing the deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said:

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

In a post on X, Jassy said the deal takes effect right away:

“OpenAI will start using AWS’s infrastructure immediately and we expect to have all of the capacity deployed before end of next year-- with the ability to expand in 2027 and beyond.”

In the wake of this news, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives bumped up his price target on the e-commerce and cloud giant to $340 from $330, writing that this deal “is a continued move in the right direction for Amazon as they broaden AI services.”

OpenAI signs $38 billion compute deal with Amazon, partnering with cloud leader for first time

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hinted at the as yet announced deal on the company’s earnings call last week when he described the company’s massive backlog of AWS business:

“Backlog grew to $200 billion by Q3 quarter end, and doesn’t include several unannounced new deals in October, which together are more than our total deal volume for all of Q3. AWS is gaining momentum.”

In a press release announcing the deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said:

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

In a post on X, Jassy said the deal takes effect right away:

“OpenAI will start using AWS’s infrastructure immediately and we expect to have all of the capacity deployed before end of next year-- with the ability to expand in 2027 and beyond.”

Rani Molla6h

Tesla sales fell in several European countries in October, including an 89% drop in Sweden

On the heels of Tesla’s record delivery quarter, early data from Europe suggests the bad news that has plagued the EV maker on the continent for much of the year is continuing. Tesla sales fell drastically in October in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, according to Reuters, while rising slightly in France compared with a year earlier.

Tesla continues to face political backlash in Europe for CEO Elon Musk’s involvement in far-right political campaigns there, as well as from steep competition from rivals like BYD and legacy European brands making the switch to EVs.

Of course, sales in what Musk has called Tesla’s “weakest market” weren’t very robust to begin with. In Sweden, for example, Tesla sales fell nearly 90% to just 133 vehicles, “lagging not just mainstream brands but also luxury German automaker Porsche,” Reuters said.

Tesla sales plunge again in some European markets in October

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