Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk.
Google Cloud is putting serious distance between itself and the competition. The unit posted eighty-two percent revenue growth last quarter, reaching twenty-four point eight billion dollars, accelerating sharply from sixty-three percent in the prior period. That compares to forty-three percent at Azure and thirty-seven percent at AWS, a gap that is no longer easy to dismiss.
Shifting to Asia, Japanese equities are under meaningful pressure today, with the Nikkei two twenty-five falling below the sixty-five thousand nine hundred level. The selloff extends yesterday's losses and tracks broadly negative signals out of Wall Street overnight. Weakness is spread across most sectors, suggesting this is macro-driven risk-off positioning rather than a single-catalyst move.
And in a story that blends geopolitics with markets, Seoul and Washington have agreed to cut their joint military drills roughly in half, as the Trump administration reportedly pursues a summit with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. That diplomatic signal carries real consequence for regional stability calculations and could influence how investors price risk across Korean assets in the near term.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
