Tencent Holdings used its second quarter to show what an AI build-out costs a company that can afford one. Capex reached CNY52.8 billion (US$7.81 billion), up 176% from a year earlier, and free cash flow turned negative for the quarter after large prepayments for computing capacity.
Cisco Systems closed fiscal 2026 with results that would normally have looked decisively positive. Revenue rose 18% to US$17.3 billion, networking orders posted double-digit growth for an eighth straight quarter, and AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers reached 4.5 times the previous year's total. Yet the market's focus shifted to a less comfortable signal: Cisco expects non-GAAP gross margin to ease next quarter, suggesting the hyperscaler business is now large enough to move the company's overall economics.
Tencent Holdings reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of CNY204.8 billion (US$30.30 billion), up 11% year-on-year, as it sharply increased artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure spending. Management said on the company's August 12 earnings call that the spending is weighing on near-term earnings but is intended to build a "large and valuable AI-native new business."
Cisco Systems closed fiscal 2026 with record results and told investors that the AI-driven "networking supercycle" it has described is still in its early stages. The company backed that view with a fiscal 2027 revenue target for AI infrastructure from hyperscalers and a series of new design wins disclosed on its August 12 earnings call.
Honor unveiled the Robot Phone on August 12, 2026, calling it the world's first "robot phone" and positioning it as the clearest hardware expression yet of the company's push to become an AI device maker rather than just a smartphone brand. Preorders opened the same evening, with sales beginning August 18.
Typhoons and extreme heat have dominated headlines since the summer of 2026, while heavy rain and drought have alternated with increasing frequency in recent years. Amid this backdrop, weather forecasting has increasingly turned to AI. The shift is challenging numerical weather prediction (NWP), the supercomputer-driven approach that has underpinned the global meteorological industry for decades.
Alphabet's decision to shift day-to-day control of Google DeepMind from Demis Hassabis to his deputy, Koray Kavukcuoglu, was not sudden—it capped a difficult year in which Google lost ground to rivals in the AI race, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Information Technology Total Services (ITTS) said its business recovered in the first half of 2026 as enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation work advanced and data governance and other smart applications began going live at customer sites. The Taiwanese SAP consulting and managed-services provider said enterprise demand for AI is now tied to broader work on data integration, governance, and process redesign rather than single-tool deployments.
As 2026 enters its second half, the PC market is facing pressure from both demand and supply. Rising memory and CPU prices are pushing up system prices and weighing on end-market demand, while AI data centers are crowding out memory capacity and reducing allocation for the consumer market; shortages are also appearing in CPUs and a range of peripheral chips.
Foxconn said its decade-long partnership with Sharp has entered a new growth phase, as the Taiwanese electronics group expands into AI servers, semiconductors, robotics, and next-generation communications. The comments, made at Foxconn's second quarter 2026 investor conference on August 12, came as the two companies marked 10 years since Foxconn completed its investment in Sharp.
Speaking at the OCP APAC Summit 2026, Ayar Labs CEO Mark Wade argued that copper interconnects have become one of the biggest obstacles to realizing the vision of open computing.
More coverage
