In an earnings call key to soothing skittish investors, the world’s biggest company by revenue arrived with its head in the clouds. And that was just fine by Wall Street.

Shares of Amazon jumped as much as 9% in after-hours trading Thursday after second-quarter earnings results that included rip-roaring cloud revenue, demonstrating the world still can’t get enough compute. Investors took it as a sign that generating a return on enormous artificial intelligence investments is possible, which is more than can be said about some fellow hyperscalers.

Tipping of the Hyperscales

Jittery investors are finally starting to get an idea of what they do and do not like to see from Big Tech hyperscalers. Meta plummeted nearly 8% on Thursday following its after-the-bell earnings call the day before, in which executives increased the lower end of its capex forecast even as AI spending was already eating into its free cash flow. Microsoft, on the other hand, had its best trading day since 2008 on Thursday: Shares of the Windows-maker jumped more than 15% after it held capex guidance steady on Wednesday and reported that demand for AI compute pushed annual revenue for its Azure cloud business past $100 billion for the first time ever in fiscal 2026, which ended in June.

The reaction to Amazon’s results was considerably closer to investors’ reception of Microsoft’s performance than to Meta’s. CEO Andy Jassy hiked the company’s capex guidance about 10% to $220 billion. That’s more than both Meta and Microsoft, and roughly on par with Google’s recently increased capex guidance (which scared Wall Street last week). But investors, for now, saw enough from a booming cloud business and signs that the AI bet is actually paying off to stay upbeat:

• Revenue for Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud provider in the world, jumped 37% year over year to $42.2 billion. That’s the fifth straight quarter of acceleraeting AWS growth, and the fastest growth rate in 18 quarters.
• Meanwhile, Amazon said both AWS’s AI business and the company’s burgeoning in-house chips business surpassed $25 billion annual run rates in the quarter, with both marking triple-digit growth rates year over year.

Trainium Wheels: In fact, founder Jeff Bezos has recently touted the AI chips business as a future “pillar” for the company. Anthropic and OpenAI have both signed on to use the company’s in-house Trainium chips, while revenue commitments for its recently launched next-gen Graviton chips nearly tripled quarter-over-quarter. In the meantime, Amazon has quietly shuttered its Artificial General Intelligence lab and is winding down work on its flagship Nova AI model, according to a Business Insider report (though it is developing a new frontier model expected to debut this fall). If you can’t beat the frontier AI model peers, you can always supply chips to them. Oh, and toilet paper and sticky notes and whatever else they might need.

KKR keeps on keeping on, despite what you may have heard about private credit market troubles.

As many private market firms struggled to sell assets in order to return cash to their eagerly waiting investors, KKR’s profits soared in the second quarter, thanks in part to a record $1.29 billion of asset sales. The firm reported profit of $660.1 million, up from $472.4 million during the same period last year. Adjusted earnings of $1.63 per share were higher than the $1.43 that Wall Street was expecting.

“A common narrative that investors hear is that our industry isn’t returning capital to investors,” Robert Lewin, chief financial officer at KKR, said on a call with analysts. “This is just not accurate from a KKR perspective.”

Blue Owl’s Blues

Private credit investors (and firms) haven’t had an easy ride of late. Many of the major players have capped withdrawals as jittery investors yank their money out of private-market funds. KKR and rivals like Blackstone and Apollo Global Management have businesses that go beyond private credit, which has helped them weather the storm. Blackstone, for instance, attracted second-quarter inflows into its private-equity arm that helped counterbalance dwindling excitement from individual investors about private credit.

Blue Owl hasn’t been so lucky:

• The firm’s new fundraising in the second quarter dropped roughly 16% from the first quarter and 37% from a year ago, the company recently reported. That brought Blue Owl’s assets under management to $158.1 billion from $159.2 billion at the end of the first quarter.
• Likely as a result of those headaches, Blue Owl is taking a page out of its competitors’ books. The firm that made a name for itself in the private credit business is now taking a more multi-strategy approach: Three-fourths of its outside capital raised in the last year has gone toward non-direct lending segments such as real assets, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Earnings On Deck: Wall Street will get some more insight into the state of private credit today when Ares Management reports its second-quarter earnings. Apollo is on deck, with its earnings report coming on Tuesday.

Beijing and Washington are playing a game of robot chicken as trade tensions over humanoid tech escalate.

China’s commerce ministry on Thursday threatened to retaliate over the Federal Communications Commission’s ban on foreign-made robots. The FCC said two days before that it was adding advanced robotics, including humanoid and quadruped robots, to a list of restricted imports. The tech poses cybersecurity risks that could threaten critical infrastructure, according to the agency.

The FCC did not explicitly call out China, but Beijing was quick to take the ban personally. That’s probably because Chinese companies dominate the robotics industry.

Sorry, Tesla Optimus

Interact Analysis has found Chinese companies make up 90% of global android shipments. More than 13,000 humanoid robots were shipped last year, and of that, China’s top two robot-makers, Agibot and Unitree, shipped more than 5,000 each, Omdia found. US competitors including Figure AI and Tesla shipped at most a few hundred. Morgan Stanley expects shipments to ramp up this year to 50,000:

• China has been pushing to advance its AI models even while facing restrictions on vital components needed for AI chips. Robots enhanced by AI could help China pull ahead in the AI race as the country leverages its manufacturing powerhouses.
• Chinese robots have gone viral for their dancing skills, but they’re more likely to have an impact on the factory floor than the dance floor. Robots can be used on production lines or to transport components through tight spaces.

Turning Gears: The US has been ramping up restrictions related to China’s AI, saying the bans protect national security, in part since AI has military and cybersecurity uses. But Beijing thinks “national security” is, basically, a cop-out, saying the US wants to distort markets to its own advantage. The US received the most Chinese-made androids last year, Interact Analysis found, and Nvidia said last month it would team with Unitree to build research-focused humanoid robots. A ban could put the country’s robots on the back foot as US rivals like Tesla try to get a step ahead.