Technology

Samsung and Broadcom signed a memorandum of understanding on July 25, 2026, covering HBM supply, 2nm and sub-2nm foundry manufacturing, and advanced packaging for AI accelerators — but the $200 billion figure is Samsung's own estimate of potential value, not a contracted revenue commitment. No binding purchase agreements or public financial filings have been located, and a South Korean government official described the deals as conditional advance orders contingent on production. The MOU is one piece of a broader $950 billion package of non-binding semiconductor cooperation agreements announced during South Korean President Lee Jae Myung's U.S. visit.

A magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto Prefecture on July 28, 2026, prompting TSMC to evacuate all personnel from its JASM facility before gradually resuming operations after structural inspections cleared the buildings. As of July 29, TSMC had not reported equipment damage, wafer losses, or customer shipment delays, and the plant accounts for less than 3% of TSMC's total production capacity. Broader supply chain effects remain uncertain, as nearby semiconductor equipment suppliers Tokyo Electron Kyushu and Horiba suspended or delayed operations pending safety assessments, and regional logistics disruptions could produce short-term delays.

The Model Context Protocol's July 28, 2026 revision removes protocol-level sessions, the initialize handshake, and SSE resumability, introducing wire-level breaking changes that require version header negotiation or gateway translation for mixed deployments. Roots, Sampling, Logging, and the HTTP+SSE transport are formally deprecated under a new twelve-month minimum deprecation policy before removal. All four Tier 1 SDKs ship same-day support, and AWS contributed a redesigned Tasks extension that moves long-running agent coordination out of the stateful core into a versioned extension.

Microsoft's fiscal year 2026 fourth-quarter earnings, released after market close on July 29, arrive against a backdrop of $190 billion in full-year capital expenditures, a stock down roughly 18 percent year-to-date, and analyst consensus of $87.4 billion in revenue and $4.24 EPS. Azure grew 40 percent in Q3 and is guided to sustain that pace in Q4, while Copilot surpassed 20 million paid seats with sequential seat additions expected to rise. The results land one week after Alphabet raised its own 2026 capex outlook to $195–$205 billion and one day before Amazon reports AWS figures, giving investors a direct hyperscaler comparison set.

Meta Platforms will report its second-quarter 2026 results after market close on July 29, 2026, with analyst consensus pointing to approximately $60.2 billion in revenue, representing roughly 27% year-over-year growth. The report will be the first to reflect the company's raised full-year capital expenditure guidance of $125–$145 billion, nearly double its 2025 capex of $72.2 billion, driven by AI data center and GPU buildout. Investors will also watch for the first concrete disclosure of Threads advertising revenue and any update to the delayed Llama 4 Behemoth model rollout.

Amazon will release its Q2 2026 financial results on July 30, 2026, following a Q1 in which AWS posted $37.6 billion in segment sales, its fastest growth rate in 15 quarters. The upcoming call will center on whether that growth rate has continued to accelerate, how the $364 billion contracted backlog has shifted, and the pace of capital expenditure that reached $43.2 billion in Q1 alone. Analysts are forecasting AWS growth of 31 to 33 percent year-over-year for Q2, against a backdrop that includes a confirmed $100 billion Anthropic capacity commitment and layoffs within Amazon's AGI division.