What's up: Google revenue soars on AI boom; IBM keeps riding the cloud; If Indiana Jones used AI....

Good morning.  Most companies are still figuring out how to deploy even one AI-powered agent that can perform a task autonomously or in coordination with humans.

For Walmart, that does not appear to be a problem. In recent months it has built dozens, so many in fact that it is consolidating all those agents into four discrete interfaces it calls “super agents.”

“It became very clear that we could dramatically simplify,” Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s chief technology officer and chief development officer, tells the WSJ's Isabelle Bousquette. “If I have an agent that helps you with your payroll and I have a different agent that helps you with identifying merchandising trends, you shouldn’t have to remember that and switch between those two.”

Kumar said the shift is a natural evolution based on the fact that the company found so many different use cases for AI agents. The technology has buy-in at all levels at Walmart, he said.

Deepening its AI push, the company Wednesday said it hired Daniel Danker, an executive at Instacart, as the head of global AI acceleration, product and design, reporting to McMillon. Read the story.

Nvidia, AMD CEOs rally behind President Trump’s AI ‘Action Plan’. The chief executives of chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices stood behind the Trump administration’s new artificial-intelligence “action plan” on Wednesday, welcoming a set of moves that could serve as a further boon for the American chip sector.

The administration said the plan will make it easier and faster for tech companies to build the data centers needed to train AI models and get the power they need for those centers.

AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su told the Wall Street Journal's Belle Lin that the Trump administration’s AI plan heralds an era where the U.S. stands to win the global AI race.

“For the U.S. to lead in AI, we have to run fast, and the AI action plan is a great way of just laying out all the various pieces that will be helpful for us to run fast,” said Su, who spoke Wednesday at a Washington AI event.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, speaking at the same event, proclaimed onstage that the unique advantage America has that other countries do not is President Trump.

“On the first day of his administration, he realized the importance of AI and he realized the importance of energy,” Huang said. Read the story.

Other provisions in the action plan included directives that the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and other agencies identify and gut any regulations that block the development and use of AI, WSJ reported. President Trump’s team also took aim at what it describes as “woke” and biased AI, planning to ban such systems from getting government business in an executive order.

Google revenue, spending soar on AI boom. Alphabet recorded record sales of $96.4 billion in the second quarter, driven by growth in its cloud and search divisions that was tempered by heavy spending on artificial intelligence. The company said capital expenditure expectations for the year would increase by 13% to about $85 billion

“We are leading at the frontier of AI and shipping at an incredible pace,” said Chief Executive Sundar Pichai. “AI is positively impacting every part of the business, driving strong momentum.”

Google Cloud, a key component of the company's AI strategy brought in $13.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 32% from the previous year. 

Google’s search division, which is core to the advertising business, grew 11.7%. In May, it overhauled its classic search engine with the U.S. introduction of “AI Mode,” which answers search queries in a chatbot-style conversation with fewer links.

• Is AI Killing Google Search? It Might Be Doing the Opposite

IBM keeps riding the cloud. The company posted higher sales and profit in the second quarter as cloud software sales jumped and its consulting business rebounded. Software revenue increased 10% to $7.39 billion, just below analysts’ expectations of $7.43 billion. Revenue in its hybrid cloud business climbed 16%.

Tesla can't get out of reverse. Net income at the EV maker plunged 16% in the second quarter, marking further steep declines at a company that has been in freefall since Chief Executive Elon Musk’s entrance into partisan politics in 2024.

SK Hynix to boost investments, Nvidia's main supplier of high-bandwidth-memory products said it plans to increase spending this year to meet strong demand for AI chips that helped it achieve a record second quarter.

China moves. Amazon shut down an AI research lab in Shanghai in the latest move by a U.S. tech company to reduce China-based R&D efforts, FT reports. Microsoft and IBM have made similar moves. Also altering its China footprint amid rising geopolitical tensions: Consulting giant McKinsey. FT reports that the firm is telling mainland China-based staff to avoid projects using generative AI.

If Indiana Jones used AI. Google DeepMind researchers using an AI model trained on troves of ancient text were able to date an inscription linked to the Roman emperor Augustus to A.D. 15. The New York Times reports that the origin date had been hotly contested among historians. The researchers in the journal Nature described the process as contextualization, with AI used to identify “parallels—inscriptions that share similar words, phrases, formulae or broader social, linguistic and cultural analogies.”

Informa CEO bets on AI. The U.K. events and academic-publishing group aims to accelerate its top-line growth with help from AI. The company has built an internal AI platform that it uses for tasks such as product creation, screening, event curation and marketing planning, CEO Stephen Carter tells WSJ.

The Justice Department in May told President Trump in May that his name is among many in the Epstein files. Many other high-profile figures were also named, Trump was told. (WSJ)

Columbia University reached a deal with the Trump administration, ending a confrontation that disrupted U.S. higher education and sparked a contentious renegotiation of academia’s relationship to the federal government. (WSJ)

President Trump’s push to introduce a new standard for global trade is coming into sharper focus as U.S. and European Union officials converge on a possible 15% tariff deal, which could come on the heels of a similar agreement with Japan. (WSJ)

The militaries of Thailand and Cambodia exchanged heavy fire on their disputed border, killing several Thai civilians and injuring others in a significant escalation of long-running territorial tensions between the two Southeast Asian nations. (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.