Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multiyear partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple said in a statement Monday.

The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, the companies added.

Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.

In August, Bloomberg reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a custom Gemini model to power a new iteration of Siri. The news outlet later reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1 billion a year to utilize Google AI.

The deal is another major indicator of growing trust in Google’s accelerating AI agenda and comeback against OpenAI. In 2025, the search giant logged its best year since 2009 and surpassed Apple in market capitalization last week for the first time since 2019.

Google already pays Apple billions each year to be the default search engine on iPhones. But that lucrative partnership briefly came into question after Google was found to hold an illegal internet search monopoly.

In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business.

The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such as the one with Apple.

Shares climbed following the news but later pulled back. Google briefly touched above a $4 trillion market value.

Apple has mostly stood on the sidelines of the AI frenzy that’s swept up Wall Street since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the end of 2022.

Hyperscalers Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft have shelled out billions on AI products, tools and infrastructure for their customers.

That’s amped up the pressure on the iPhone maker to deliver an impressive Siri AI voice upgrade, which it delayed last year until 2026, despite running ads for the product.

“It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Apple currently partners with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and Apple Intelligence, specifically for complicated queries that can tap into the AI model’s world knowledge. It’s unclear what the Google partnership means for the ChatGPT integration in the future.

The iPhone maker told CNBC that it isn’t making any changes to the agreement. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Google has made steady progress on its AI agenda, introducing its upgraded Gemini 3 model late last year.

In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s cloud segment signed more deals worth over $1 billion through the third quarter of 2025 than the previous two years combined.

As retailers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence tools to lure shoppers and run key parts of their business, Google wants to make sure it’s in the center of the action.

At the kickoff of the National Retail Federation’s annual show on Sunday, Google announced the launch of what it’s calling the Universal Commerce Protocol. The company wants UCP to become an industry standard that retailers use for their AI agents and systems across tasks like discovery, buying and “post-purchase-support.”

Google says the open-source protocol creates a unified system spanning the shopping experience, from searching to payment, so that retailers don’t have to build their own tools and connect the various functions.

“It’s very important to have a standardized way so we can scale these things and everyone can be prepared for all the various steps to happen,” Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president of Google ads and commerce, said in an interview. “Businesses can pick and choose what they want so there’s flexibility for them.”

E-commerce has emerged as one of the major battlegrounds in the booming generative AI market, with Google facing off against OpenAI, Perplexity and Amazon, as they all try and get consumers to use their various apps and services to begin their shopping journey.

In September, OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, which allows users to buy some products through ChatGPT, taking a fee from transactions it helps orchestrate. OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol developed in partnership with Stripe, is open source and could compete with UCP.

Perplexity in May said it’s partnering with PayPal to let users buy products, book travel and secure concert tickets directly in its chat without leaving the platform, and in November said it will roll out a free agentic shopping product for U.S. users ahead of the holiday season.

And earlier last year, Amazon launched “Shop Direct,” a feature that lets consumers browse items from other brands’ sites on Amazon. Some of those items include a button labeled “Buy for Me,” an AI agent that can purchase products from other websites on a shopper’s behalf.

By 2030, the retail market could represent a $3 trillion to $5 trillion opportunity globally due to AI-powered tools and agentic commerce, according to a report in October from McKinsey.

Google said UCP was co-developed with companies including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target. The protocol will soon power a new checkout feature allowing users to buy direct from Google’s AI Mode or Gemini App. They can pay via Google Wallet, but Srinivasan said the company plans to include other payment methods like PayPal in the future. 

Srinivasan said UCP will be compatible with other existing protocols.

As part of Sunday’s announcements, Google also introduced a feature called Business Agent, allowing shoppers to chat with brands.

“This is to address the newer consumer behavior which is shifted toward more conversational commerce,” Srinivasan said. “We want retailers to be able to connect to users on our surfaces but using their own voice.”

Then there’s Google’s core market: advertising.

Google said it’s testing “Direct Offers,” which will let retailers promote unique discounts, such as 20% off of a product, if a user of the AI Mode chatbot expresses intent to buy something.

“Our role in the ecosystem is that of a matchmaker and one way is with ads,” Srinivasan said. “It’s a really big focus for us to innovate in the space that adds value to both retailers and buyers.”

WATCH: Alphabet tops Apple by market cap

Deep within the bowels of JPMorgan Chase’s data centers and cloud providers, an artificial intelligence program crucial to the bank’s aspirations grows more powerful by the week.

The program, called LLM Suite, is a portal created by the bank to harness large language models from the world’s leading AI startups. It currently uses models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Every eight weeks, LLM Suite is updated as the bank feeds it more from the vast databases and software applications of its major businesses, giving the platform more abilities, Derek Waldron, JPMorgan chief analytics officer, told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

“The broad vision that we’re working towards is one where the JPMorgan Chase of the future is going to be a fully AI-connected enterprise,” Waldron said.

JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, is being “fundamentally rewired” for the coming artificial intelligence era, according to Waldron. The bank, a heavyweight across Main Street and Wall Street finance, wants to provide every employee with AI agents, automate every behind-the-scenes process and have every client experience curated with AI concierges.

If the effort succeeds, the project could have profound implications for the bank’s employees, customers and shareholders — even the nature of corporate labor itself.

Waldron, who gave CNBC the first demonstration of its AI platform seen by any outsider, showed the program creating an investment banking deck in about 30 seconds, work that would’ve previously taken a team of junior bankers hours to complete.

But similar to how the internet story played out in the 1990s, near-term expectations for AI may have outstripped reality. Most corporations had no tangible returns yet on their AI projects despite more than $30 billion in collective investments, according to an MIT report from July.

In the case of JPMorgan, even with it $18 billion annual tech budget, it will take years for the company to realize AI’s potential by stitching the cognitive power of AI models together with the bank’s proprietary data and software programs, said Waldron.

“There is a value gap between what the technology is capable of and the ability to fully capture that within an enterprise,” Waldron said.

Companies “do work in thousands of different applications, there’s a lot of work to connect those applications into an AI ecosystem and make them consumable,” he said.

If JPMorgan can beat other banks to the punch on incorporating AI, it will enjoy a period of higher margins before the rest of the industry catches up. That first-mover advantage will allow it to grow revenues faster by going after a larger slice of the addressable market in global finance — enabling the bank to pitch more middle-market companies in investment banking, for instance.

In May, JPMorgan’s consumer banking chief told investors that operations staff would fall by at least 10% in the next five years thanks to artificial intelligence deployment.

“In an AI world, you’ll still have people at the top who are managing and have relationships with clients, but many, many of the processes underneath are now being done by AI systems,” Waldron said.

Despite market concerns that the AI trade is a brewing bubble, corporate clients are actually more worried now that if they don’t start adopting it soon, they’ll fall behind and lose share, said Avi Gesser, a Debevoise & Plimpton partner who advises corporations on issues around AI.

“People are starting to see what these tools can do,” Gesser said. “They’re sort of like, ‘Wow, if you get the workflow right, implement it properly and have the right guardrails, I could see how that would save you a lot of time and a lot of money and deliver a better product.”

Artificial intelligence has been a shot in the arm for digital advertising.

Meta and Alphabet both reported sales and earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations, but the strength in digital ad spend was notable.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that AI helped imbue “greater efficiency and gains across our ad system,” thus contributing to the 22% year-over-year increase of second-quarter sales that hit $47.52 billion.

Meta finance chief Susan Li also told analysts during a follow-up earnings call on July 30 that the online ad market appears to have improved since April.

In April, Li noted that Asia-based online retailers pulled back on their digital ad spending amid broader macroeconomic uncertainty due to President Donald Trump’s tough tariffs and the closing of the de minimis trade loophole.

This quarter, Li said there’s been a noticeable “improvement” with those Asian-based ecommerce firms, which have increased their digital ad spending on the platform along with small, North American-based advertisers.

“We generally expect another quarter of healthy advertising demand,” Li said about the advertising pickup.

Gil Luria, the head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, said that while there is still broader macroeconomic uncertainty, “today, digital advertising in general, is doing well; It is simply an extension of the fact that the consumer is still strong.”

“There’s optimism that consumer spending will hold up and therefore all the downstream markets will hold up,” Luria said.

“I think one of the things that its earnings taught us was that you can spend a lot of money on AI when your core business is doing well, and especially when your core business has been already benefiting from the investments that you’ve made in AI,” Jasmine Enberg, a vice president and principal analyst for eMarketer, said about Meta’s second quarter.

The continued jaw-dropping pace of AI spending also doesn’t seem to be slowing any time soon.

Alphabet added an extra $10 billion to its 2025 forecast for capital expenditures, now pegged at $85 billion, while Meta raised the low end of its capital expenditures for the year to come in between $66 billion and $72 billion instead of $64 billion and $72 billion.

Investors showed no signs of trepidation about Meta and Alphabet’s massive AI spend because those companies’ overall sales continued to rise.

Outside of the tech giants, Reddit reported strong second-quarter sales of $500 million, representing a 78% year-over-year increase that helped lift the company’s shares as much as 20%.

“They kind of rose back like a phoenix and had some extraordinary results,” Luria said about Reddit, which saw its shares plummet over 15% in February after it reported weaker-than-expected user numbers due to a Google search algorithm change.

Reddit’s blockbuster quarter contrasted with similar-sized peers like Snap and Pinterest, which both reported lukewarm quarterly earnings this week.

Snap’s second-quarter sales grew only 9% year-over-year and it missed Wall Street’s estimates on global average revenue per user, a metric that refers to how much money the company derives from each user.

Contributing to the miss was a botched update to Snap’s advertising platform that hurt the company’s “topline growth,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in an investor letter.

The Snapchat parent on Wednesday also added Reddit to its list of competitors in its latest 10-Q filing on Wednesday, indicating a potential, burgeoning rivalry.

Meanwhile, Pinterest shares sank over 10% on Thursday after it reported second-quarter earnings that missed on earnings per share.

Pinterest finance chief Julia Brau Donnelly told analysts during an earnings call that the company is still noticing some tariff-related concerns, “and broader market uncertainty” as it previously indicated in May.

Unlike Meta, Donnelly said that “Asia-based e-commerce retailers pulled back spend in the U.S.,” underscoring how some advertisers gravitate toward bigger online ad platforms amid any signs of global economic uncertainty.

“There’s very little room for mistakes or missteps,” Enberg said about the quarterly earnings reports from smaller tech firms like Snap and Pinterest.

WATCH: Tech growth rates are remaining robust.

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

BEIJING — Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com reported earnings this week that not only reflected improving Chinese consumer spending, but also the growing benefits of artificial intelligence in advertising.

E-commerce giant Alibaba said late Thursday its Taobao and Tmall group sales rose by 9% year on year to 101.37 billion yuan ($13.97 billion) for the three months ended March 31. That’s above the 97.94 billion yuan predicted by a FactSet analyst poll, and the quarterly growth figure was well above the 3% segment increase for the 12-month period ending March 31.

“The e-commerce and ad revenues were positive surprises as there were expectations tariffs would affect consumer behavior,” Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, said in an email regarding the three companies’ earnings results.

It’s important to note the earnings releases cover only the period before U.S.-China tensions escalated in April with new tariffs of more than 100% on products from both countries — an effective trade embargo. The two countries issued a rare joint statement Monday announcing a 90-day reduction in most of the recently added tariffs.

The U.S.-China trade dispute since April has negatively affected consumption to some extent, given the increased uncertainty for small and medium-sized businesses, Charlie Chen, managing director and head of Asia research at China Renaissance Securities, said Friday. He expects that as trade tensions ease, consumption will rise.

But despite lackluster consumption overall, sales of certain electronics and home appliances have done well since last year thanks to China’s trade-in subsidies for supporting such consumer spending.

JD.com on Tuesday said its sales of for that category surged by 17% from a year ago. Overall, the e-commerce company reported a 16.3% increase in revenue from its retail business to 263.85 billion yuan in the three months ended March 31. That was better than the 226.84 billion yuan in retail segment sales predicted by a FactSet poll.

On Wednesday, Tencent said its “fintech and business services” segment, a proxy for consumer-related business transactions, reported a 5% year-on-year revenue increase to 54.9 billion yuan in the first quarter.

While Nomura analysts said that segment revenue growth was in line with estimates, they pointed out in a note that “Tencent ads was a big outperformer in the Chinese ads industry despite the challenging macro environment.”

Tencent’s marketing services revenue surged by 20% to 31.9 billion yuan, helped by “robust advertiser demand” for short videos and other content inside its WeChat social media app. Tencent noted “ongoing AI upgrades” to its advertising platform.

Singapore — Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba‘s Taobao shopping app topped the Apple App Store charts in Singapore after releasing an English version on Tuesday — thanks to translations powered by artificial intelligence.

That’s according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm whose data shows Taobao shot to first place in Apple’s Singapore App Store across all categories, as of Sept. 11. On Tuesday, the day the English-language version was announced, the app rose from fifth to first place in the shopping category.

Prior to this, the Taobao app had still enjoyed relative popularity and was consistently ranked in the top ten shopping apps for iPhone users from mid-August onwards, according to Sensor Tower.

The new update “highlights Taobao’s dedication to serving its Singapore users, who have shown a strong desire for an English-language interface, reflecting their diverse language fluency,” Alibaba said in a press release Tuesday. It did not elaborate on the AI translation features. The company has its own AI model.

The release said the new platform “enhances accessibility for non-Chinese users, eliminating their need for manual translations that previously made shopping less convenient for them.”

Taobao and Tmall are Alibaba’s biggest source of revenue by far, but to date have primarily sold to people in China using a Chinese-language interface. Taobao and Tmall Group’s revenue for the quarter ended June 30 was 26.55 billion yuan ($3.65 billion), a 6% increase year-on-year.

Alibaba has in recent years has also sought to ramp up its overseas e-commerce business with platforms such as Alibaba.com and AliExpress.

Singapore is the first market where Taobao will introduce this new update, alongside the city-state’s neighbor, Malaysia, according to Alibaba.

As early as last year, Singaporean Taobao users had previously made guides on how to purchase clothes, furniture and lifestyle items from Taobao. These video guides were posted on the ByteDance-owned TikTok platform, another Chinese app. Several videos amassed more than 10,000 views, with one accumulating 105,000 views.

Alibaba’s latest move reflects the growing trend of Chinese businesses striving to expand globally, and using Singapore as a cultural testbed to further their ambitions to reach the Western market.

Last week, consulting firm Bain and Company said in their study of Asia Pacific-headquartered consumer goods companies that Chinese companies have a significant advantage versus South Korean and Japanese companies in the race to go global: the large ethnic Chinese diaspora settled outside of mainland China.

“There are many of these Chinese companies that have really ambitious global mindsets and are able to take the sort of entrepreneurial, fast-innovation capability that they built domestically and use that to create new positions overseas,” David Zehner, senior partner at Bain, previously told CNBC.

According to a government report as of end-June 2023, almost three-quarters of Singapore’s 5.92 million-strong nation is of Chinese descent. About 20% of Malaysia’s population is ethnically Chinese.