Nathaniel Whittemore

When ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, his decision to back OpenAI put Nadella's company at the forefront of the AI boom.

More recently, the relationship has cooled and with it the perceived value of Nadella's foresight.

Microsoft is now invested in Anthropic and look to incorporate its capabilities into its products.

An open AI hungry for computing power has turned to Oracle, Google, and Amazon.

All of this AI polyamory has put Microsoft's eggs in a few more baskets, but it has also highlighted that Microsoft's early mover advantage has run its course.

The AI sparkle that illuminated the market value, that more than doubled, has diminished.

The thorny issue of ROI is stalking all the top AI players, but the pressure has mounted on Adela because of the shifting narrative of the AI industry.

The AI story of 2026 so far is one that says Google, with its Gemini model, is crushing it with consumer use cases and benefiting from the availability and lower cost of its own chips.

At the same time, Anthropic's coding capabilities are at the leading edge of redefining software engineering.

Whatever the reason, with its huge base of enterprise users and ownership of the coding mega-platform GitHub, Microsoft stands accused of letting its advantages dwindle.

Now, Dave does end on a positive note, reminding us all that Microsoft's critics today were Google's critics yesterday, but pointing out that Microsoft has to do something to shift the narrative back in its favor.

Now, one more market story to really round things out and let us know where we stand.

We also got earnings reports from South Korean memory giants Samsung and SK Hyang.

If you've been keeping an eye on RAM prices recently, you probably already know how this went.

Samsung reported that profits had doubled from this time last year, reaching $13.7 billion.

This was a 61% increase from the previous quarter, vastly outpaced already lofty analyst estimates.

Stripping out just the memory division, profits were up fivefold year over year.

Samsung said that they would, quote, proactively address market demand by focusing on high value-added products.

In other words, they will prioritize high bandwidth memory for AI chips and make as much money as they possibly can.

The story was similar for SK Hynix, who doubled operating profit to $13.5 billion.