Microsoft

Earlier this year there were a lot of questions over the $100 billion investment into The Stargate Project, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was quick to defend the software giant’s investment in cloud and AI data center projects. Microsoft posted its Q4 2025 fiscal earnings yesterday, revealing that Azure surpassed $75 billion in revenue over the year. Microsoft is also spending $30 billion on its AI infrastructure investments next quarter, which totals $120 billion over a year if it keeps that spending up.

Microsoft rarely does limited editions of its Surface products, but it has quietly launched a “Smurface Edition” in time for the Smurfs movie. I was expecting it to be a totally blue design, but instead Microsoft has laser-etched the Smurfs to the front, alongside a blue Surface logo. Other than that, it’s a 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $999.99. Only 100 units are available, exclusively at Amazon.

Microsoft first released Windows 10 exactly 10 years ago today. It introduced the idea of “Windows as a service,” a model that delivers regular updates to Windows instead of a major release every few years. While one Microsoft employee called Windows 1o “the last version of Windows,” Microsoft went on to release Windows 11 and keep that Windows as a service model alive today. Windows 10 is a hugely popular OS 10 years on, and Microsoft is still trying to get people to move to Windows 11 ahead of Windows 10’s end of support in October.

Now all Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream games they own (including some console-only titles) from the cloud through the Xbox PC app, just like they can on other devices, which is a feature that has been in testing with Insiders program members.

The vulnerability (CVE-2025-31199), which Apple patched in a March 31st update, could give bad actors access to files inside a device’s Downloads folder and data cached by Apple Intelligence. That includes geolocation data, media metadata, and facial recognition info, according to a report from Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

I reported yesterday that OpenAI is preparing to release GPT-5 in early August, and now references to a new GPT-5-powered “Smart Mode” have reportedly appeared in Copilot. Alexey Shavanov discovered code changes in Copilot that point toward a new smart option that uses GPT-5 to “think quickly or deeply.” Microsoft refused to comment on this alleged GPT-5 appearance.

First announced last year, GitHub Spark lets developers build apps by simply describing their idea — no code needed. The tool works by using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model to field users’ requests, which it can then use to “build and deploy full-stack AI apps.”

Microsoft is giving Skype for Business a few extra months of support. While the main Skype consumer app closed down earlier this year, Skype for Business 2015 and 2019 are set to go end of support in October. Now, businesses will be able to purchase extended security updates for Skype for Business, but only for an extra six months. That brings extended support up to April 14th, 2026.

The new option, which will appear in the “Click to Do” menu, uses AI to generate a written description of an image, chart, or graph on your screen. The feature is rolling out now to Windows Insiders on Snapdragon-equipped Copilot Plus PCs, but Microsoft says support for Intel and AMD-powered devices is “coming soon.”

Earlier this month, an Xbox Game Studios producer suggested that the thousands of workers who were laid off from Microsoft should use AI if they’re “feeling overwhelmed.”