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Students at a high school in the Western Dubuque Community School District went in front of school officials earlier this week to talk about other students creating fake nude images of them using artificial intelligence.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares are surging in premarket trading Thursday as two of its key customers—Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta Platforms (META)—posted strong results and committed to continuing their heavy artificial intelligence (AI) spending. 

During Microsoft’s earnings call Wednesday, CFO Amy Hood reiterated the company’s plan to spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure in fiscal 2025. Meta, meanwhile, said it plans to boost its capital expenditures this year to $64 billion to $72 billion to grow its AI capacity. Mark Zuckerberg, the social media giant’s CEO, called the opportunities in deploying the technology “staggering” during Meta’s earnings call.

Nvidia shares, which are jumping about 4.5% less than an hour before the opening bell, have been struggling this year, falling 19% entering Thursday partly due to investor concerns that Big Tech is slowing or pausing some AI data center buildouts amid the uncertain economic outlook. The company dominates the market for chips needed to build AI systems.

Shares in the chip designer have also taken a hit from the rising economic uncertainty triggered by the trade war as well as growing tensions between Beijing and Washington. It recently warned investors that it expects to take a $5.5 billion first-quarter charge after the U.S. government limited exports of its AI chips to China. Nvidia is expected to report quarterly earnings later this month.

Google’s AdSense advertising network started supporting ads inside users’ chats with some third-party AI chatbots earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.

The company is rolling out the feature following tests with AI search startups iAsk and Liner, the report said, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

“AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show relevant ads in their conversational AI experiences,” Bloomberg cited a Google spokesperson as saying.

The search and advertising giant is ostensibly seeking to capitalize on — and offset the potential threat of — the burgeoning trend of users increasingly using AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity to search the web and answer common queries.

Google has invested heavily in AI tools and products, with a slate of large language models and frequent updates to its Gemini AI apps and models. The company late last year started showing ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it supplies for certain Search queries.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia (NVDA) stock rose as much as 4.3% early Thursday, leading chip stocks higher after Big Tech leaders Meta (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) reaffirmed their aggressive AI investment plans.

Shares of fellow AI chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO) jumped 1.3% and 2.4%, respectively. Nvidia supplier Micron (MU), which makes advanced memory chips for its GPUs (graphics processing units), climbed 2.7%.

Read more about Big Tech stock moves and today’s market action.

NasdaqGS – Nasdaq Real Time Price • USD

As of 10:22:54 AM EDT. Market Open.

NVDA AMD AVGO

The gains follow earnings reports from tech giants Microsoft and Meta late Wednesday that saw the companies affirm — or, in Meta’s case, boost — their investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, as the companies look to increase data center capacity to power AI efforts.

Microsoft reiterated its $80 billion spending plan to build out AI data centers, with more than half of that spending going toward the US. Meta, meanwhile, raised its capital expenditure outlook for 2025, forecasting spending will now fall between $64 billion and $72 billion, up from its prior range of $60 billion to $65 billion.

“This updated outlook reflects additional data center investments to support our AI efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware. The majority of our CapEx in 2025 will continue to be directed to our core business,” Meta CFO Susan Li said.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said: “We remain committed to investing against the strong demand signals we see for our services,” adding that its investment plans for its 2026 fiscal year, which starts in July, remain unchanged.

“We expect CapEx to grow,” Hood added. “It will grow at a lower rate than FY ’25 and will include a greater mix of short-lived assets, which are more directly correlated to revenue than long-lived assets. These investments along with focused execution that delivers near-term value to our customers will ensure we continue to lead through the cloud and AI opportunity ahead.”

Investors had been anxious about a potential pullback in AI investments from Microsoft, with the company reportedly canceling some of its data center projects.

Microsoft and Meta are some of Nvidia’s biggest customers, contributing an estimated $20 billion and $9 billion, respectively, to the chipmaker’s 2024 revenue, according to a DA Davidson analysis.

Big Tech has gone all in on AI, with the three Big Tech “hyperscalers” — operators of massive data centers, including Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft — and Meta set to spend north of $330 billion at maximum this year.

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Those investments have come under some scrutiny as investors await an AI payoff and Big Tech’s monetization of the technology relative to its investments remains murky.

Meta said 30% more advertisers are using its AI tools and that Meta AI has “almost 1 billion” monthly active users but didn’t specify how much AI contributed to its first quarter earnings results, which beat expectations.

Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes its AI business, rose 21% from the prior year to nearly $27 billion. Microsoft said its Azure cloud service, which falls within that segment, saw revenue jump 35% from the prior year, with AI contributing 16 percentage points of that growth. Still, that revenue is far lower than Microsoft’s dollar figure for investments in AI in the past several years.

Meta stock rose 6% Thursday morning while Microsoft jumped 10%.

NasdaqGS – Nasdaq Real Time Price • USD

As of 10:22:52 AM EDT. Market Open.

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Nvidia’s gain Thursday helped pare its year-to-date losses, with the stock down roughly 19% at of the end of Wednesday’s trading session, more than the S&P 500’s 5% drop.

Nvidia’s gain also comes after the stock was issued a rare Sell rating by analysts at investing firm Seaport Wednesday, which said that the benefit of AI to tech stocks has been priced in for now.

Nvidia stock has also suffered as President Trump introduces restrictive trade policies that would hinder the chipmaker’s business abroad, particularly with China, as global competition heats up.

CEO Jensen Huang visited Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and called on Trump to change rules for AI chip exports.

“We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world,” Huang said in a brief meeting Wednesday with reporters in Washington, according to Bloomberg. “The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that.”

The commentary followed a report that Trump officials are looking to change a Biden-era AI trade rule set to go into effect in May, potentially making it more restrictive, which sent Nvidia shares tumbling early Wednesday.

Laura Bratton is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X @LauraBratton5.

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Here is your AI recap of the monthly sales-team meeting held at 14:00 on May 1st 2025. There were ten attendees at the meeting, and 45 questions were asked. A total of 18 action items were detected. Main themes: sales results; sales pipelines; Optimate launch; “The Accountant 2”.

Elon Musk is pushing back on a report that his flagship company Tesla is looking to replace him as CEO after months of absenteeism in favor of his work as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — and a decidedly inefficient first quarter for Tesla. 

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that as of several weeks ago, Tesla’s board of directors had taken exploratory steps towards finding a suitable replacement, including by reaching out to executive recruitment firms. They had also warned Musk that he needed to refocus on the company.

Last month, Tesla reported a 71-percent cliff dive in earnings for the first quarter of 2024. Year-over-year revenue fell nine percent, and total earnings dropped from $1.4 billion in the first quarter of last year to $409 million in the first quarter this year. The value of Tesla’s stock has also plummeted over $120 since Trump’s inauguration, erasing all of its post-election gains and then some.  

With Musk’s attention already split between his various companies, which are now competing with his foray into political graft through his financial partnership with the Trump administration, it’s no wonder Tesla might be looking for new management. 

Musk, however, will not go down without a fight — or at least some very angry posts. 

“It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the [Journal] would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors,” Musk wrote in the early hours of Thursday morning on X, which he also owns but is not the CEO.. 

In another post, Musk wrote that “WSJ is a discredit to journalism.” 

In a statement issued shortly after the article’s publication Tesla Board Chairman Robyn Denholm wrote: “Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company. This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.” 

The Journal noted in their article that Tesla had not provided a statement on the matter prior to the report’s publication. 

Musk’s work at DOGE has created a public image problem for the various brands under his umbrella. The CEO has become the face of mass firings, arbitrary program cuts, plutocracy, and unelected political influence in the short months he’s worked as the president’s attack dog. Backlash to the president was compounded by backlash to Musk, and protests — and in some instances vandalism — outside of Tesla dealerships became a widespread form of opposition to the administration. Not even Trump’s attempt to turn the White House lawn into a makeshift Tesla dealership could effectively counteract the damage. 

After Musk’s millions were unsuccessful in buying a Wisconsin State Supreme Court seat, he seemed to take a deliberate step back from the spotlight, possibly in anticipation of the end of his temporary employee status in the White House, which is set to expire this month. 

At a Wednesday Cabinet meeting, Trump gushed over Musk, reassuring him that he had been “treated unfairly, but the vast majority of people in this country really respect and appreciate you, and this whole room can say that very strongly,” noting that he has “really been a tremendous help.” 

Musk — wearing two MAGA hats stacked on top of each other — replied to a chorus of forced laughter: “Well, Mr. President, you know they say I wear a lot of hats.”

The Tesla CEO has indeed been attempting to balance several hats, and it’s clear that at least one of his companies is begging him to take a few off. 

A data point caught my eye recently. Bots generate more internet traffic to websites than humans now, according to cybersecurity company Thales.

This is being driven by a swarm of web crawlers unleashed by Big Tech companies and AI labs, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, that slurp up copyrighted content for free.

I’ve warned about these automated scrapers before. They’re increasingly sophisticated and persistent in their quest to harvest information to feed the insatiable demand for AI training datasets. Not only do these bots take data without permission or payment, but they’re also causing traffic surges in some parts of the internet, increasing costs for website owners and content creators.

Thankfully, there’s a new way to thwart this bot swarm. If you’re struggling to block them entirely, you can send them down new digital rabbit holes where they ingest content garbage. One software developer recently called this “diabolical” — in a good way.

It’s called AI Labyrinth, and it’s a tool from Cloudflare. Described as a “new mitigation approach,” AI Labyrinth uses generative AI not to inform, but to mislead. When Cloudflare detects unauthorized activity, typically from bots ignoring “no crawl” directives, it deploys a trap: a maze of convincingly real but irrelevant AI-generated content designed to waste bots’ time and chew through AI companies’ computing power.

Cloudflare pledged in a recent announcement that this is only the first iteration of using generative AI to thwart bots.

Digital gibberish

Unlike traditional honeypots, AI Labyrinth creates entire networks of linked pages invisible to humans but highly attractive to bots. These decoy pages don’t affect search engine optimization and aren’t indexed by search engines. They are specifically tailored to bots, which get ensnared in a meaningless loop of digital gibberish.

When bots follow the maze deeper, they inadvertently reveal their behavior, allowing Cloudflare to fingerprint and catalog them. These data points feed directly into Cloudflare’s evolving machine learning models, strengthening future detection for customers.

Will Allen, VP of Product at Cloudflare, told me that more than 800,000 domains have fired up the company’s general AI Bot blocking tool. AI Labyrinth is the next weapon to wield when sneaky AI companies get around blockers.

Cloudflare hasn’t released data on how many customers use AI Labyrinth, which suggests it’s too early for major adoption. “It’s still very new, so we haven’t released that particular data point yet,” Allen said.

I asked him why AI bots are still so active if most of the internet’s data has already been scraped for model training.

“New content,” Allen replied. “If I search for ‘what are the best restaurants in San Francisco,’ showing high-quality content from the past week is much better than information from a year or two prior that might be out of date.”

Turning AI against itself

Bots are not just scraping old blog posts, they’re hungry for the freshest data to keep AI outputs relevant.

Cloudflare’s strategy flips this demand on its head. Instead of serving up valuable new content to unauthorized scrapers, it offers them an endless buffet of synthetic articles, each more irrelevant than the last.

As AI scrapers become more common, innovative defenses like AI Labyrinth are becoming essential. By turning AI against itself, Cloudflare has introduced a clever layer of defense that doesn’t just block bad actors but exhausts them.

For web admins, enabling AI Labyrinth is as easy as toggling a switch in the Cloudflare dashboard. It’s a small step that could make a big difference in protecting original content from unauthorized exploitation in the age of AI.