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Microsoft’s capex outlay this year would be enough to buy every outstanding share of Disney

CFO Amy Hood said on last night’s earnings call that the company will spend $190 billion on capex in 2026.

4/30/26 11:00AM

Microsoft beat analysts’ estimates for third-quarter earnings and revenue on Wednesday, powered by strong cloud demand and a surging AI business, but questions still lingered about how much its bets on artificial intelligence will pay off.

The solution? Pump even more capital expenditure into the infrastructure it thinks will enable AI in the future. And the numbers are eye-popping.

On last night’s earnings call, CFO Amy Hood said Microsoft spent $31.9 billion on capex in Q3, but looking forward, the company expects to spend a whopping $190 billion in 2026. For perspective, that’s enough money to buy every outstanding share of Disney and have about $10 billion left over.

Microsoft’s competitors are also eyeing gargantuan capex outlays this year. Last night on their earnings calls, Meta said it would spend between $125 billion and $145 billion, Google said it plans on spending between $180 billion and $190 billion, and Amazon said it would spend $200 billion.

Microsoft also discussed a shift in how business customers are choosing to license their software. The traditional per-user “seat” model is being supplanted with “seat plus consumption” as users devour more AI tokens for agentic work in the company’s productivity apps.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the call:

“Any per-user business of ours, whether it’s productivity, coding, security, will become a per-user and usage business. That’s the best way to think about it.”

Microsoft’s earnings release also offered positive signs that its AI services are picking up steam. Nadella said the company now has 20 million Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats, up 250% year on year.

The company still has a massive $627 billion backlog of booked business, also known as remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which is up 99% year on year. However, if you take OpenAI’s huge chunk of booked business out of that bucket, the RPO for the third quarter went up just 26%, in line with “historic seasonality.”

Looking forward, Hood said that 25% of that RPO will be recognized on the books in the next 12 months, up 39% year on year.

It also said it expects “modest acceleration” in its AI-powering cloud business in the second half of the calendar year.

Shares were down 4.3% in recent trading.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5