General Wire — 14 August 2026

Business

AI servers now bring Foxconn more revenue than everything else it makes combined. The Taiwanese contract manufacturer posted a record second-quarter net profit of NT$60bn ($1.86bn), up 35% on a year earlier, on consolidated revenue of NT$2.52trn — up 41% year on year and 19% on the first quarter. Cloud and networking products, mostly AI servers and racks, made up 51% of revenue, passing half for the first time, against 48% in the previous quarter. — Taiwan News · Hon Hai

Tencent’s revenue beat expectations, but investors spent the earnings call asking about capital expenditure. Second-quarter revenue rose 11% to RMB 204.8bn, helped by accelerating games sales and AI-driven advertising, with non-IFRS net profit up 9% to RMB 68.4bn. Capital expenditure jumped about 176% year on year as the company builds out AI infrastructure — heavy enough to drag free cash flow negative — and management used the call to defend the returns it expects to earn on that spending. — South China Morning Post · CNBC

Economics

US inflation slowed in July, and the Fed’s hawks lost their argument. Consumer prices rose 0.1% on the month, pulling the annual rate to 3.4% from 3.5% in June. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, eased to 2.5% from 2.6%. Shelter accounted for roughly two-thirds of the monthly rise, while the energy index fell 1.5% on the month — though it remains 14.7% higher than a year ago. Some Fed officials had been weighing a rate rise in response to inflationary pressure; after the release, futures traders put the odds at about 64% that the federal funds rate stays in its 3.50%–3.75% range in September. — CNBC · Morningstar

The White House says $75bn of Chinese goods reached America through third countries. A 25-page report titled “The Great Transshipment Scam” alleges Chinese exporters used more than 40 countries as way stations to disguise the origin of US-bound goods between February 2025 and February 2026, costing an estimated $19bn to $34bn in forgone tariff revenue. The named intermediaries include many of America’s largest trading partners — Mexico, Canada, the EU, India, Japan and South Korea. The administration says it will respond with an AI-driven system to flag suspect origin claims before goods clear customs. — South China Morning Post · Fox News

Finance

Norway’s oil fund returned 11.5% in the second quarter, its strongest since 2020, and promptly warned against reading anything into it. The $2.3trn Government Pension Fund Global, run by Norges Bank Investment Management, booked a first-half profit of more than NKr1.75trn (about $185bn), a record for a six-month period, taking its value to roughly NKr22.7trn at the end of June. Equities returned 16% against 1.1% for fixed income, with chief executive Nicolai Tangen attributing the result to Asian technology stocks in particular. The fund also disclosed a $1.22bn stake in SpaceX for the first time. Tangen’s message to investors was that returns of this order should not be treated as the run rate. — CNBC · CNBC · Fortune

Tech / AI

Sourced from the Economic Times’ ET AI newsletter.

Databricks raised $5 billion at a $190 billion valuation, six months after being valued at about $134 billion. The round was led by Coatue Management alongside Blackstone, MGX and T. Rowe Price, with Sixth Street Growth among new investors. The company had reportedly wanted to raise $1 billion and investors pushed for $15 billion before it settled in the middle. Behind the valuation: Databricks has passed a $7 billion annualised revenue run-rate with more than 80% year-on-year growth in the second quarter, its Lakehouse data-warehousing business is beyond $1.5 billion annualised and growing over 100%, and the newer Lakebase product has crossed a $100 million run-rate. Proceeds are earmarked for products helping businesses build and manage AI agents. — Bloomberg · CNBC

DeepSeek launched V4-Pro and raised API prices by between 50% and more than 1,100%. The Chinese lab is also introducing peak and off-peak billing, with peak hours running 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC and off-peak rates set at half of peak. V4-Flash output tokens go to $1.32 per million at peak and $0.66 off-peak, against a current flat $0.28; V4-Pro cache-miss input tokens rise to $1.32 per million at peak from $0.435. DeepSeek said the updated pricing goes live at 16:00 UTC on 16 August, framing the change as a way “to allocate resources more reasonably” and to push developer workloads toward less congested hours. — Caixin Global · Reuters via Investing.com