What's up: Nvidia hits $5 trillion; AWS plans $5 billion South Korea spend; fashion meets AI; 

Good morning. The after-the-close earnings announcements yesterday from three tech giants marked a milestone for AI investment, with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet showing a clear payoff and promising to invest more capital. Meta, the laggard of the group, said it was accelerating capital spending, too.

Earlier in the day, Nvidia became the first company with a $5 trillion market capitalization, given announcements that it made the prior day at its GTC conference in Washington. Nvidia said Tuesday the AI infrastructure giant had orders for 14 million more Blackwell chips over the next five quarters, in total representing about half a trillion dollars in sales, according to the WSJ.

The tech giants are creating infrastructure as fast as they can, and they still can’t keep up with corporate and consumer demand for AI.

The WSJ Leadership Institute tech team listened to the earnings calls from Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet. Here are our main takeaways:

Tom Loftus on Meta: They admitted that despite all the spending on AI—on data centers, on talent—they, in true try-hard fashion, realized that they need to try harder, to spend more

“We keep on seeing this pattern where we build some amount of infrastructure to what we think is an aggressive assumption, and then we keep on having more demand to be able to use more compute,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call.

Belle Lin on Microsoft: Taken together, Microsoft’s performance and remarks to analysts this quarter show that the AI boom is still alive and well. Like competitor Oracle, which reported nearly half a trillion dollars in contracted future revenue, Microsoft said the total value of cloud contracts it has signed but not yet realized increased by 51% to $392 billion.

I was struck by this statement from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai overview on the company’s earnings call, which shows how massive capital spending on AI infrastructure has laid the rails for growth at Google Cloud Platform.

Our complete enterprise AI product portfolio is accelerating growth in revenue, operating margins and backlog. In Q3 customer demand strengthened in three ways. We are signing new customers faster. One. The number of new GCP customers increased by nearly 34% year over year. Two. We are signing larger deals. We have signed more deals over $1 billion through Q3 this year than we did the previous two years combined. Third, we are deepening our relationships. Over 70% of existing Google Cloud customers use our AI products … as we scale we are diversifying revenue. Today, 13 product lines are each at an annual run rate over $1 billion.

The big questions now are whether these trends are sustainable, and to what effect on businesses and consumers. And if the current pace of adoption holds, can people keep up?

Nvidia is now a $5 trillion company. The tech giant only hit the $4 trillion mark in July.

And in another sign of the times, Caterpillar, best known for its mining and construction machinery, is having an AI moment.

The Irving, Texas company reported big third-quarter gains in its engine business. A 31% increase in sales of power generators, mostly to data-center developers, pushed up engine-segment sales and profit by 17% from a year earlier, WSJ reports.

Also having a moment, memory chips.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as well as U.S.-based Micron Technology, are enjoying surging demand for a variety of products both for training and running artificial-intelligence models, WSJ reports. OpenAI’s demand alone is set to be up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, which is more than double the industry’s current HBM capacity, according to SK Hynix.

But it's different for automobile chips.

A decision by the Dutch government to seize control of Netherlands-based chip maker Nexperia from its Chinese owners is not playing well in the global car industry, WSJ reports. Ongoing turmoil has prevented the automobile chip supplier from fulfilling orders. On Monday, Honda cut production in Alliston, Ontario, where workers assemble Civic sedans and CR-V sport-utility vehicles.

How did embattled chipmaker Intel end up hosting the hottest tech party in town last night? With a bet on fashion. 

Influencers, gamers and tech showed up Wednesday for the opening of Intel’s new popup shop experience in Manhattan and to watch luxury brand Monse show its Pre-Spring 2026 collection. The WSJ Leadership Institute was there to cover it, and also to ask the important questions, like why on earth is Intel — arguably the least stylish of the tech giants — hosting a fashion show?

It turns out, it’s really, really hard to market AI PCs, said Intel CMO Brett Hannath. The popup is designed to give visitors a first-hand look at how capable and elite the computers are. While the fashion show was just there to remind us that tailored coats are in this season. (Trendy CIOs, take note).

Truthfully, there was some simpatico, with the models walking in front of an AI-generated cityscape. No AI was used in the actual designing of the collection, but co-creative directors Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia said it’s become a great tool to expand the Monse creative universe.

All in all, an iconic evening where tech and fashion collided. Although not literally…The word on the runway was that a number of PCs had to be moved out so the models didn’t trip over them.

— Isabelle Bousquette 

Follow Isabelle on Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter for more behind the scenes musings on NYC’s tech scene.

AWS plans to invest an additional $5 billion in South Korea over the next six years. As part of the effort to build new AI data centers in the country, Amazon's cloud unit will partner with South Korea’s SK Group conglomerate to build a facility in the country’s southeastern industrial city of Ulsan, WSJ reports.

Universal Music settles with AI firm Udio. The artificial intelligence music generator will launch a new platform trained on licensed songs, WSJ reports, part of a settlement in a dispute in which Universal, the world’s largest record company, accused Udio of copyright infringement.

It's alive! On Wednesday, readers learned two things. 1. Internet dial-up pioneer AOL still exists and 2. It is being acquired by Italian technology company Bending Spoons. AOL has around eight million daily active users and a high customer retention rate, WSJ reports.

President Trump said that he has ordered the Pentagon to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis” with Russia and China. (WSJ)

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a blunt message for investors who have assumed the central bank would be on cruise control toward a third rate cut in December: Not so fast. (WSJ)

President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emerged from their first face-to-face meeting in six years with a temporary truce in the bruising trade fight, with the U.S. agreeing to reduce tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for a pledge by China to crack down on the trade in the chemicals used to produce fentanyl. (WSJ)

French police have made five new arrests in connection to the heist at the Louvre, in the clearest sign yet that thieves who broke into the world’s most visited museum may have relied on a wider network. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.