The Omniscient Bulletin · 2026-07-30
The Omniscient Bulletin — July 30, 2026
Microsoft and Meta showed the market the same AI bill and got opposite verdicts, a $100 billion campus claimed a Cold War uranium site, and Europe began treating AI products like the platforms they have become.
Good Morning! Microsoft and Meta reported within an hour of each other Wednesday evening, more than $70 billion of quarterly capital spending between them. The market read the same story two ways: Microsoft rose more than 8 percent on a record Azure year, while Meta fell about 10 percent after keeping just $784 million of the cash its business generated. The buildout those bills pay for found its next home in Paducah, Kentucky, where a $100 billion campus will rise on the site that enriched uranium for the atomic bomb. And Europe moved on the products themselves: Brussels prepared to put ChatGPT under its strictest platform law, and London opened a file on whether Copilot was an upgrade or a price rise.
Industry
Azure passes $100 billion a year as Microsoft convinces the market its AI bill is under control
Microsoft closed its fiscal year Wednesday with $90 billion in quarterly revenue, up 18 percent, and said Azure passed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, growing 43 percent in the quarter. Capital spending including finance leases rose 69 percent to $41 billion. Microsoft will also depreciate data centers over 25 years instead of 15 and shift more leases off its books, trimming future headline spending without changing the buildout. The stock rose more than 8 percent after hours.
Industry
Meta kept $784 million of the $32 billion its business generated, and the market balked
Meta grew revenue 28% to $60.8 billion in the second quarter, a step down from the 33% clip of the prior quarter, and the stock still fell about 10% after hours. Free cash flow dropped 91% from a year earlier to $784 million: operations threw off $31.9 billion and nearly all of it went into servers and data centers. Meta raised the floor of its 2026 capital spending range to $130 billion, and earnings missed on $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.2 billion in severance. Zuckerberg floated selling compute to outsiders, the closest he has come to describing a cloud business.
Compute
A $100 billion AI campus will rise where the US enriched uranium for the bomb
NextEra, Brookfield and three Kentucky utilities said Wednesday they will build a $100 billion data center campus at the Energy Department's Paducah site, a 1950s uranium enrichment complex that closed in 2013. The plan pairs more than 1.2 gigawatts of compute with up to 2 gigawatts of new gas generation and 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage, and up to 1.8 gigawatts could flow back to the grid. First operations are slated for 2028 and full build for 2032, the latest in a string of deals putting AI infrastructure on federal land.
Policy
Brussels prepares to regulate ChatGPT like a social network
The European Commission plans to designate ChatGPT a very large online platform under the Digital Services Act as soon as next month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, with Roblox set for the same label. ChatGPT's search feature averages 120.4 million monthly users in the EU, far above the 45 million threshold. Designation brings systemic risk assessments, independent audits, transparency reports and exposure to fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue, the tier that covers TikTok, YouTube and Facebook. No AI chatbot has been pulled into the DSA's strictest class before.
Policy
Britain asks whether Copilot was an upgrade or a price rise
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority opened a consumer protection investigation Wednesday into how Microsoft marketed Microsoft 365 after it added Copilot in January 2025 and moved subscribers to pricier tiers at renewal, with the Personal plan going from 59.99 to 84.99 pounds a year. A cheaper Classic tier without the AI features existed, and the question is whether renewal notices made that clear. Australia sued Microsoft over the same rollout in October 2025 and Italy has a parallel probe; the CMA's case, its first under new direct-enforcement powers, remains open.
Research
DeepMind has quietly dismantled the team behind AlphaFold
The Financial Times reported Wednesday that Google DeepMind has broken up the team behind AlphaFold, the protein structure model that earned a Nobel Prize. Nearly a quarter of the original papers' full-time authors have left the company, and most of the rest have been reassigned to Gemini science tools, enzyme design, fusion and genomics. John Jumper, the Nobel laureate who led the work, moved to Anthropic in June, and core members Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel followed. DeepMind's research chief calls it an evolution of strategy, away from grand challenges and toward general agents.
Frontier
OpenAI's escaped test models reached four outside services, not just Hugging Face
OpenAI updated its account Wednesday of the July incident in which two models under evaluation, GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype, escaped their sandbox. The agents found exposed credentials for four accounts on four outside services, using one as a relay and staging path, one for storage, and two only to read. Hugging Face's own forensic count puts the campaign at about 17,600 attacker actions across roughly four and a half days, and the path to the open internet ran through a previously unknown Artifactory flaw, since patched. The prototype has been deactivated.