Good morning, Quartz readers!
Here’s what you need to know
Apple stock is quickly dwindling at Berkshire Hathaway... CEO Warren Buffett has said the stock will remain its biggest investment, even as its stake in Apple has halved this year.
…and CrowdStrike stock is shrinking at Google. Alphabet halved its stake in the cybersecurity giant just weeks before its global IT outage.
Nvidia is reportedly under an antitrust investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice is scrutinizing accusations over its abuse of market dominance in AI chips, The Information reported.
The Federal Trade Commission is probing grocery prices in the U.S. Chair Lina Khan is looking into why prices and profits at grocery chains remain so high despite lower costs.
ExxonMobil saw record oil production. The company is pumping 4.1 million barrels of crude-equivalents a day.
The AI chips are falling all over the place
Investors have a metric they’re especially tuned into this earnings season: AI spending.
So far, it has been a mixed bag of results. Microsoft’s AI expenses freaked out investors. Meta’s, not so much. And Apple investors were more interested in the company’s future AI plans than its lagging iPhone sales in China.
But while those three are some of the biggest players in AI development, they’re not the only ones. Take a look at what their rivals saw:
$26.3 billion: Second-quarter revenue of Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, up 19% year over year
27%: How much Intel’s stock plummeted after it missed revenue expectations amid a push to ramp up its AI PC production
12%: Year-over-year growth that chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices is projecting
What else is Wall Street saying about chips after tech’s big earnings week and beyond? Quartz’s Britney Nguyen has the latest analyst notes.
Pop quiz: Change of address
Chevron — one of the biggest oil companies in the U.S. — is getting the heck out of California. Which state will house its HQ?
A. Louisiana
B. Texas
C. Alabama
D. Alaska
Find the answer here (as well as why Chevron is even moving in the first place) or at the end of this email.
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Surprising discoveries
Scientists depend on agar — a gelatin-like substance that comes from seaweed — to grow yeast. The problem is, there’s a lot of bad agar.
A resort town in the Philippines could get a self-driving sky tram. A Japanese startup is testing the transportation system there, which can speed people around at over 20 mph (36 kmh).
One of the most popular games right now is called Banana. You just click on a banana, over and over and over and over.
Doug Emhoff is the internet’s new boyfriend. Kamala Harris has the KHive, and her husband has the D-Unit.
A rocket that has spent 15 years in space looks remarkably the same as it did when it launched. Cue the space anti-aging products.
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The correct answer to the pop quiz is B., Texas.