MSFT up 15.5% on cloud beat; META down 8% on free cash flow collapse

The 10-year Treasury stood at 4.67%, the 30-year mortgage rate reached 6.66%, and the VIX sat at 20.7 — rate and volatility context that followed Wednesday's Federal Reserve hold with three hawkish dissents. Markets chose not to wait on that backdrop. On Thursday, they moved on earnings.

The MSFT print and the chip sector rally.

$MSFT finished up 15.5% after quarterly results showed AI infrastructure spending translating into cloud revenue acceleration rather than simply inflating capex. That result triggered a broad semiconductor move: $AMAT gained 15.0%, $AMD added 13.0% — aided by a Susquehanna price target increase and renewed interest in server-chip exposure — and $INTC gained 11.3% after TSMC disclosed it would adopt Intel's AI chip packaging technology, a specific design win that gives Intel's foundry business a concrete customer validation. $ORCL added 8.3%, lifted by the MSFT cloud print and a separately announced expansion of its Gemini partnership with Alphabet. $AVGO gained 4.7% after Google disclosed a $15 billion financing arrangement for an Anthropic-linked Texas AI campus built on tensor processing units co-designed with Broadcom.

META, ADBE, CRM, and LLY: the other read.

$META fell 8.0% after reporting free cash flow declined 91% while the company raised its minimum capital-spending guidance. AI infrastructure spending at scale does not automatically generate cash — Thursday's print made that arithmetic visible. $ADBE lost 5.9% and $CRM lost 4.1%; neither had a company-specific dateable catalyst on Thursday, but both repriced as investors revisited the economics of AI-adjacent software names following META's result. $LLY dropped 4.5%; the company announced a $750 million manufacturing expansion with Resilience to boost U.S. medicine production, but available reporting does not supply a clear negative catalyst, and the driver of Thursday's decline is not settled.

Earnings desk.

$AAPL beat fiscal Q3 estimates on iPhone demand; iPad and Services revenue both missed. After-hours trade weakened after management indicated rising memory costs leave iPhone pricing "not immune" to pressure. $AMZN gained more than 8% after hours on a Q2 beat anchored by AWS cloud growth at a more-than-four-year high; the company framed AI infrastructure spend as the driver of that acceleration. $MA posted a clean Q2 beat on payments network volume — the day's least complicated earnings result. $COIN fell 6.0% after reporting a Q2 net loss of $359.5 million and missing revenue estimates, with crypto trading activity slowing materially in the quarter.

What we set aside.

Two Berkshire B-class tickers were examined and produced no filings or substantive news within the reporting window.

Filings desk. No insider transactions above $1 million or material corporate events cleared the gate today.

The desk is watching $AAPL's after-hours settlement and whether the memory-cost language previews a formal iPhone pricing update in Friday's session.