The Nasdaq surged on Thursday, approaching its all-time intraday high set in April.

The Nasdaq's performance contrasted sharply with that of the S

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been appointed as the company's new chairman.

John Thompson, who succeeded Bill Gates as chairman in 2014, will serve as the lead independent director. In addition, the company declared a quarterly dividend of 56 cents per share, payable on September 9. Microsoft had refused to comment on whether it had decided to fire Gates.

On Thursday, the Labor Department issued its weekly report on new jobless claims.

Last week, initial jobless claims unexpectedly increased, breaking a six-week streak of improvement. However, a phase-out of enhanced unemployment benefits in the coming weeks may reduce the total number of claimants. Initial jobless claims for the week ending June 12 were 412,000, compared to 360,000 expected and a revised 375,000 the previous week.

Continuing claims for the week ending June 5 were 3.518 million, compared to 3.425 million expected and a revised 3.517 million the previous week.

Google announced the launch of Tau, a new family of virtual machines based on AMD's third-generation EPYC processor, this morning.

The new x86-compatible system, according to the company, offers a 42 percent price-performance advantage over standard VMs. Google began using AMD EPYC processors for Cloud in 2017, whereas Amazon Cloud's offerings date back to 2018.

According to Google, the Tau family “leapfrogs” existing cloud VMs. The systems are available in a number of configurations, with up to 60 vCPUs per VM and 4GB of memory per vCPU. Networking bandwidth can reach up to 32 Gbps, and they can be combined with a variety of network attached storage options.

AMD shares rose nearly 6% today after the news.

Last year, ByteDance, the parent company of the popular short video app TikTok, reported a $2.1 billion operating loss.

According to a person familiar with the situation, this was due in part to higher expenses incurred from share-based compensation to employees. Speculation about a possible ByteDance IPO has grown, with the company reportedly aiming for a listing of its Chinese assets that could raise several billion dollars.

Apple recently launched the Apple Podcast Subscription service,

which is available to listeners in over 170 countries. The service is expected to strengthen Apple's position in the podcasting space, where it competes with Spotify and YouTube. Subscriptions to shows created by premier studios such as Lemonada Media, Luminary, Realm, and The Washington Post are available through the service.

At the Viva Technology conference in Paris, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is not "making a dent" in its competition with Amazon.

He claims that Facebook's approach is unique in that it strives to be "open and partnership-oriented." The social media behemoth has over a million Shops shops, with hundreds of millions of people engaged.

Facebook intends to include advertisements in its Oculus Quest virtual reality (VR) headset.

Blaston, Resolution Games' futuristic shootout game, will be the first to participate in this experiment. Because of changes made by Apple AAPL and Alphabet GOOGL, the social media behemoth is facing ad-targeting headwinds. BigBox VR, based in Seattle, WA, was recently acquired by Facebook. Population: One, developed by the VR studio, was one of the most popular games released on Oculus Quest 2. In April, Facebook acquired Downpour Interactive, the developer of the VR shooter game Onward.

Shopify (SHOP) plans to make Shop Pay available to all U.S merchants selling items on Facebook, Instagram and Google by the end of the year.

The company is especially targeting merchants who don't use the Shopify Online store. Shopify plans to make Shop Pay more accessible to independent brands to strengthen its user base. Once integrated, it will be the first time that a Shopify product is available to non-Shopify merchants, marking an important milestone in making commerce better and easy for everyone.

Shopify shares rose 3.42% while three major indexes were down more than 0.5% on Wednesday today.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates near zero.

However, more Fed officials now anticipate rate hikes by the end of 2023. The central bank also reiterated its commitment to its asset purchase program, which is currently absorbing approximately $120 billion per month.

Following the Fed's new projections of two rate hikes by year's end 2023, each of the three major stock indexes ended Wednesday's session lower. 

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