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Trump lowers tariffs on China, which agreed to pull back some rare earth restrictions. The developments came as the president concluded his trip to Asia with a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a military base in Busan, South Korea. President Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that he halved the 20% tariffs levied on China due to its role in fentanyl production, bringing the overall tariff rate on Chinese goods to 47% from 57%. Following the meeting, China’s commerce ministry said it would enact a one-year suspension of some rare earth export controls, but did not mention dropping its requirement for export licenses for seven kinds of rare earth minerals and the magnets made from them, which have been snarling manufacturing in the US and Europe. A comprehensive trade deal between the US and China was not announced. Earlier in the day, Trump said a trade deal between the US and South Korea was “pretty much finalized.”—HVL
Big Tech had a big earnings day. Meta, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company Alphabet all reported earnings yesterday, with investors watching to see whether their massive AI expenditures are paying off. Meta’s stock slumped in after-hours trading, despite it reporting record revenue for Q3, as it revealed expectations that AI infrastructure spending would grow significantly next year, plus a significant one-time tax hit. Microsoft unveiled plans to spend big to double its data center capacity, and it also fell in extended trading. But Alphabet’s stock rose, even though it too upped its anticipated capital expenditures. The company raked in more than $100 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and its cloud unit’s revenue grew 34% year over year. Amazon and Apple will announce their earnings today.—AR
Microsoft suffered a cloud outage. As if reporting earnings didn’t make for a stressful enough day at Microsoft HQ yesterday, starting at about noon ET, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service experienced an hourslong outage that impacted workplace productivity software Microsoft 365 and workplace distractions Xbox and Minecraft. The company said the outage—which caused disruptions to businesses globally, including Alaska Airlines and Vodafone—was likely triggered by an “inadvertent configuration change.” Azure is the second-place player with about 23% of the cloud infrastructure market. It trails Amazon Web Services (32%), which had its own major outage last week.—AR
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