MORNING NEWS

Walmart reported its smallest sales gain in more than six years as some Americans continue to spend cautiously—especially when shopping at the retailer’s physical stores. On Thursday, Walmart said U.S. comparable sales, those from store and digital channels operating for the past 12 months, rose 2.6%. That is the smallest quarterly increase the retailer has reported since 2020. The number was hurt by new pharmacy-pricing regulations, without which Walmart would have had a 3.4% lift, the company said.

An experimental mRNA-based vaccine succeeded in preventing cancer from coming back or spreading in a study of high-risk melanoma patients, Moderna and its partner Merck & Co said Wednesday, paving the way for a potentially new life-extending treatment for the thousands of people diagnosed with the deadly skin cancer each year. Moderna's stock surged by about 180 percent.

OpenAI told investors its revenue grew by 18% from the first to the second quarter, while its losses deepened, results that disappointed some shareholders who had hoped the startup would show more progress catching up to rival Anthropic. The company said its revenue grew to $6.7 billion in the three months ending in June, up from $5.7 billion in the first quarter. Meanwhile, its operating margin sank further into the red, pushing the company farther away from profitability ahead of a much-anticipated initial public offering, people familiar with the matter said.

BHP Group reported a 9% increase in annual net profit and an even bigger gain in underlying earnings as prices of copper, now its main profit engine, surged to all-time highs. Australia-based BHP, the world's biggest miner by market value, on Tuesday reported a net profit of $9.83 billion for the 12 months through June, up from $9.02 billion the year prior. A previously announced $2.3 billion write-down of a potash project in Canada weighed on its bottom line.

Berkshire Hathaway added to its stakes in Google’s parent and America’s home-building industry during the second quarter, while selling off its position in Constellation Brands. The Omaha, Neb.-based conglomerate continued to double down on home builders after completing a $6.8 billion purchase of Taylor Morrison in July.

Applied Materials is looking to ramp up its manufacturing capacity to meet continued semiconductor solutions demand as the company’s profit and revenue grow.

Cisco Systems reported a jump in net income in the July quarter as the company continued to receive billions in orders from artificial intelligence hyperscalers. The network-equipment company on Wednesday reported a profit of $3.86 billion, or 97 cents a share, in the quarter ended July 25. That compares with a profit of $2.55 billion, or 64 cents a share, a year earlier.

The cloud-computing company CoreWeave reported its fifth consecutive quarter of record revenue and a sales backlog of $104 billion, a reflection of the continued strength of demand for artificial-intelligence computing. CoreWeave—which buys advanced AI chips known as graphics processing units from Nvidia, installs them in data centers and leases them to such companies as Microsoft MSFT and OpenAI—reported revenue of $2.58 billion for the quarter that ended in June. Analysts polled by FactSet had expected quarterly revenue of $2.55 billion.

Nvidia reached deals with some of Wall Street’s largest firms aimed at raising massive amounts of capital to help the chipmaker’s customers finance the cost of computing power. The chipmaker has signed agreements to partner with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish “compute financing platforms,” the companies announced Monday. The firms aim to deploy over $500 billion of outside capital in the coming years.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena said it is weighing options to preserve its integrity, as its chief executive questioned the impact of Intesa Sanpaolo’s ISP $35 billion takeover bid on the world’s oldest bank and Italy’s economy.