Technology

Alphabet posted 24% year-over-year revenue growth and an 82% surge in Google Cloud revenue to $24.8 billion, with Cloud operating income more than tripling to $8.8 billion. Capital expenditure of $44.9 billion exceeded operating cash flow, producing negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion for the quarter, and full-year capex guidance was raised to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion. Shares fell 7% after the report, reflecting investor concern over the scale and open-ended timeline of infrastructure spending required to sustain that growth.

SpaceX's 13th Starship test on July 24 successfully deployed 20 Starlink V3 test satellites, completed an in-space engine relight, and landed the upper stage intact in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy booster fell short, with five engines failing to relight during the landing sequence and resulting in a harder-than-planned Gulf of Mexico splashdown. No next flight date has been announced, and booster landing-burn reliability remains an open engineering problem.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 on July 24 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, matching Opus 4.8 pricing and undercutting Fable 5 by half. The model's strongest benchmark claims, including a reported threefold lead on ARC-AGI-3 and a top score on Frontier-Bench v0.1, are vendor-reported rather than independently verified. The release is broadly available across Anthropic's API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry, with a one-million-token context window and five configurable effort levels.

AMD unveiled its Instinct MI400 GPU series and the Helios rack-scale reference design on July 23, with the 72-GPU Helios rack rated at 2.9 exaFLOPS of FP4 compute and volume deployment expected in the second half of 2026. Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic have each made commitments to deploy Helios systems, though most shipments are not expected until late 2026 or 2027. AMD's performance comparisons against Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform are self-generated and have not been independently verified.

Check Point disclosed CVE-2026-16232, a CVSS 9.3 authentication bypass in SmartConsole that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to gain full administrative access to firewall and VPN configurations. Exploitation has been confirmed against a small number of customers whose management servers were internet-exposed without IP restrictions. CISA added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with a remediation deadline of July 25, 2026 for Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies; fixed hotfix levels are available for R81.20, R82, and R82.10.