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After last week’s earnings onslaught, things will likely quiet down this week. Aside from neoclouds CoreWeave and Nebius, no major tech earnings announcements are scheduled, which gives us a chance to assess what we learned in the past week. One big takeaway is that the enterprise software sector has bifurcated between those firms that are getting something out of AI and those that are not.
It’s no secret Palantir is a winner—its revenue leapt 89% in the first half of this year. As we wrote, Palantir has succeeded in winning lots of business with AI agents and human consultants that help clients make AI work for them. Then there’s Shopify, whose software powers online storefronts for merchants. The company last week reported 34% revenue growth for the quarter, in line with the first quarter—but an improvement on last year’s growth rate, which in turn was faster than 2024’s. Shopify is benefiting from AI chatbots that are giving shoppers recommendations on what to buy, pulling in many cases from its catalog of merchant products.
Shopify says it has structured data in the catalog so AI services can access it easily and show detailed product information when a consumer asks a question. The company is incorporating that with other software to help merchants take advantage of AI-powered shopping research. Shopify executives say AI is helping smaller merchants—the type that are typically on Shopify—get attention for their products. No surprise that MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Morton headlined a report last week thus: “Shop: Here’s Your AI Winner.”
The stocks of both Palantir and Shopify were caught up in the enterprise software sell-off of the first half, falling as much as 40% from where they finished 2025, but both have recovered much of the ground they’ve lost. As of Friday’s close, Palantir is only down 3.2% year to date, while Shopify is only down 5.9%.
In contrast, we reported last week that Canva, a still-private design software firm, has found a growing number of its users are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of Canva, in response to OpenAI’s introduction of a new model that is better at creating designs for media such as posters. That contributed to Canva reducing its revenue growth forecast in discussions with investors last week, we reported. Another issue, our story said, was that the costs of the AI features Canva introduced were so high that it had to slow down their rollout to more users.
Another design software firm, publicly traded Figma, unnerved investors last week by projecting a 12 percentage point slowdown in revenue growth for the third quarter. Figma executives said they were testing new products before starting to charge for them, but the stall fed investors’ worries about the company’s exposure to AI rivals. Figma stock weakened and finished the week down 38% for the year.
There are also questions about Datadog, which sells software that helps businesses monitor how cloud applications perform and identify security threats. In May, Datadog stock had leapt 30% after the company reported that customers using AI-related services accounted for only 20% of the total but 80% of annualized revenue.
But last week, Datadog stock dropped 19% in one day after it projected a slowdown in the third-quarter revenue growth due to one large customer—a “leading AI company”—reducing its usage starting in that period. Executives didn’t give details, but the revelation touched on a worry that investors have about how software firms will lose business over time: Customers might not cut off software suppliers completely, but they will spend less. Despite the sell-off, Datadog’s stock is still up a lot so far this year, so we’d put it in the category of a winner, with an asterisk.
This Week’s Earnings
Two neoclouds, CoreWeave and Nebius, are among the companies reporting earnings this week. Both have seen business take off, thanks to the AI boom. That will be reflected in the huge revenue growth analysts expect them to report, although losses will also increase thanks to the cost of expanding their facilities. Here are the details, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
CoreWeave (Tuesday)
Revenue: $2.55 billion +111%
Earnings per share: a loss of $1.45 compared with a loss of 60 cents a share
Nebius (Wednesday)
Revenue: $574.65 million +447%
EPS: a loss of 86 cents a share compared with a profit of $2.45
In Other News
• A New Mexico judge on Thursday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $567 million in compensation after the company was found liable for harming teens’ mental health in the state.
• China’s top internet regulator said on Thursday it had launched a cybersecurity review of products sold in the country by U.S. security software firm Palo Alto Networks.
Friday on The Information’s TITV
Check out Friday’s episode of TITV in which we talk to the CEO of Lyft following Q2 earnings and discuss exclusive reporting on Dario Amodei’s influence across Silicon Valley.
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