TNB Tech Minute: Amazon Joins the $3 Trillion Club

[00:00:01] Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Monday, August 3rd. I'm Imani Moise for The Wall Street Journal. Amazon shares jumped today, propelling the company's market valuation above $3 trillion for the first time. The gain comes on the heels of a 15% jump last Friday, when Amazon stock had its best day in years after investors liked what they saw in the latest earnings report. The e-commerce giant is the fifth ever company to reach the 3 trillion milestone.

[00:00:30] Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet are the other four in that order. Nuclear energy startup Valor Atomics said it's closed a $1 billion fundraising round as it aims to start producing fleets of nuclear reactors. The fundraising round was led by Sequoia Capital, and Sequoia partner Sean McGuire will join the Valor board. Other investors include Point72 Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Valor said it also closed a $200 million credit facility.

[00:01:00] The three-year-old company is part of the Department of Energy's reactor pilot program. In June, it completed a zero-power-fueled criticality demonstration in Utah. And Alibaba's new QEN 3.8 Max model has significantly improved benchmark scores, according to city analysts. As developers speed up their iterations, a model-agnostic environment where enterprises adopt multiple models for different tasks instead of locking into one single vendor is emerging.

[00:01:28] While long-term success will require immense resources and a loyal customer base, analysts say companies like Alibaba, with full-stack capabilities from chips to cloud infrastructure to models and applications, are better positioned to lead. And that's it for your TNB Tech Minutes. We'll have another quick tech update in the morning. and a day that's not an omnibusime team entering a sea member for communications, That's ATLINB we're all羅 comprehend that experience that sowie SF minimum,