Amazon's cloud business is quietly becoming a different company than its retail roots

Amazon reported overall sales that missed Wall Street's expectations and offered a cautious holiday forecast, blaming inflation-weary shoppers — but buried inside those numbers, its cloud division grew 39% and now generates nearly two-thirds of the company's total operating profit.

The gap between Amazon's sluggish retail side and its booming cloud and AI infrastructure is widening fast, and that split matters: the company everyone thinks of as an online store is increasingly a technology infrastructure business that happens to sell you paper towels.

Intel's factory troubles and a PC slump are a worse combination than anyone expected

Intel beat expectations for the quarter just ended, but its forecast for the next three months came in far below what analysts had penciled in, with the company pointing to a PC market it does not expect to recover until at least mid-2027 and a factory explosion in Israel adding to the pain.

The brutal guidance — earnings roughly half of what Wall Street expected — is a reminder that winning one quarter means little when the road ahead looks this rough, and Intel's shares cratered more than 20% after hours.

Reddit's plan to lock its doors is a bet that its own audience matters more than Google's

Reddit announced it is testing a requirement that users log in before browsing the site, a significant reversal for a platform that has always let anyone read without an account — CEO Steve Huffman tied the move directly to falling traffic from Google as AI-powered search tools send fewer people to the open web.

If Reddit walls off its content to protect it from being scraped, it risks shrinking the casual audience that advertisers pay to reach, making this one of the riskier strategic pivots in social media this year.