As AI agent traffic surpasses human traffic on the internet, companies working in commerce and finance are building tools that allow agents to take action on behalf of users at a rapid pace. Days after trading platform Robinhood introduced agents that can trade for users, Coinbase launched its own agents that can execute trades and pay for premium research.

The company said Thursday that users can integrate the agent with their main account and start trading. If users don’t want to give the agent access to their main account, they can choose to have it operate in a separate sandbox.

Coinbase noted that the agent can use tools like Coinbase Advanced, the company’s platform for professional traders that includes extra features like TradingView charts to analyze and execute trades. Users can ask the agent to rebalance their portfolio, ask it to follow an investment thesis and trade on their behalf, or provide advice on a one-time crypto trade.

At the moment, the agent can trade in crypto spot markets and derivatives, with support for equities and prediction markets planned for the future. Coinbase added that it will soon add support for custom limits such as maximum trade size, which services the agent can interact with, and how much it can spend.

Coinbase is taking advantage of the open x402 payment protocol it launched in collaboration with AWS, Anthropic, Circle, and Near last year. Using this standard, the agent can pay for premium research data APIs and on-demand compute for trading insights without requiring any login or subscription. This website lists services that the agent can access through the x402 protocol.

The trading platform has been actively investing in AI tools for the last few years. It launched AgentKit, which allows developers to integrate automated wallets into their apps in 2024. Last December, it added an AI-powered assistant to the app that provides trading tips and financial advice. The company said that the latest agent launch can also work in ChatGPT or Claude through its MCP server.

“Coinbase for Agents is informed by insights gleaned from years of building the agentic economy, and the primary goal is to create agents that can transact. And unlike pure trading platforms, we’re the only one that combines exchange access with a native payments protocol. We’re aiming to build a fundamentally different product for a future where most of the internet is accessed through agents,” Lincoln Murr, Head of AI Product, told TechCrunch via email.

AI companies are exploring agentic payments at a rapid pace through new partnerships. Last month, Visa invested in Replit to power agentic payments for developers. The payment network company made a deal with OpenAI this week to explore similar products. The pace of development in the sector has made global financial regulators take notice. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) said that there should be strong safeguards in place to mitigate AI risks.

SpaceX has lined up another compute deal ahead of its historic IPO, this time with Google. The company announced the deal in a regulatory filing on Friday.

Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.”

The deal is similar in length and scope to the one SpaceX announced with Anthropic in late May. As part of that deal, Anthropic agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 to rent all the available compute from its Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, that xAI — now part of SpaceX — originally built for its own artificial intelligence efforts.

Google’s deal appears to be paying for roughly half the amount of compute that Anthropic has access to at Colossus 1. SpaceX didn’t say which specific data center Google would be using. CEO Elon Musk has previously suggested his company would reserve the Colossus 2 data center for xAI.

Anthropic was significantly limited in its compute capacity prior to its deal with SpaceX, raising usage limits on the same day the deal was announced. Google is in a very different position, with some estimates naming it as the world’s largest single owner of AI compute.

In a statement, a Google representative described the deal as a result of unexpected demand for its recently launched AI products. “Google Cloud and SpaceX are long-time partners,” Google said in a statement. “This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform, Gemini Enterprise, which has been even higher than we expected.”

But its parent company Alphabet is on a spending spree. Alphabet has already committed to more than $180 billion in capital expenditures this year and has said it expects that to “significantly increase” in 2027. To help with that, Alphabet recently announced an $80 billion equity sale.

Also like the Anthropic deal, the agreement with Google includes a cancellation clause. Both SpaceX and Google have the option to terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice after December 31, 2026. Google’s access to the data center will ramp up “through September at a reduced fee,” according to the filing.

“If we fail to deliver access to the committed amount of GPUs by September 30, 2026, then following a one-month grace period, Google may immediately terminate the agreement or accept the number of GPUs provided” with a reduction in the monthly fees, it reads.

SpaceX announced the deal just one week before the company’s stock is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq exchange. Paperwork filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows the company is aiming to raise around $75 billion at a valuation of around $1.75 trillion — making it the largest in history.

Google is a longtime investor in SpaceX. Its stake in Musk’s company is expected to be worth more than $100 billion after the IPO. The companies are also reportedly in talks to try to build orbital data centers — a major component of SpaceX’s future plans post-IPO.

TL;DR

Palo Alto Networks shareholders have rejected executive pay seven times since 2015, the most in the S&P 500, yet CEO Nikesh Arora’s package is valued at nearly $100 million. The stock is up 800% under his leadership, but ISS and institutional investors cite structural pay concerns and a 442-to-1 CEO-to-worker ratio.

A majority of Palo Alto Networks shareholders have voted against the cybersecurity company’s executive compensation packages seven times since 2015, a record that makes it the most rejected pay programme in the S&P 500 and the third-most in the Russell 3000. The most recent vote came in December, when less than half of shareholders supported a package valued at nearly $100 million for CEO Nikesh Arora, a figure that would exceed the compensation of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Tim Cook at Apple, and Satya Nadella at Microsoft, all of whom run companies at least three times larger by market capitalisation.

The votes are non-binding. Palo Alto Networks is not required to act on them, and it has not meaningfully changed course despite seven rejections in 11 years. The company’s board called Arora “a world-class, exceptionally talented CEO whose focus and interests fully align with those of our shareholders,” noting that the stock has added more than $100 billion in market capitalisation since he took over in 2018.

The performance argument

Arora’s defence is straightforward: he has delivered. Palo Alto Networks shares have gained nearly 800% since 2018, roughly four times the S&P 500’s return over the same period. Annual revenue has quadrupled to more than $9 billion. The company has been transformed from a firewall maker into one of the world’s largest cybersecurity platforms, competing at the top tier of the enterprise security market alongside CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and Fortinet. Arora oversaw the acquisition of CyberArk Software earlier this year in a deal valued at approximately $25 billion.

“You can correlate the amount I’ve gotten paid to the $100 billion,” Arora said in an interview. He also noted that his compensation structure has not always worked in his favour: in fiscal 2024, he said, he missed his targets and “got paid zero,” earning only his $1 million base salary and $1.2 million in non-equity incentives. “I worked for free for 12 months,” he said.

Why shareholders keep voting no

The persistent opposition reflects specific structural concerns rather than a blanket objection to high pay. The proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services has recommended that investors vote against Palo Alto Networks’ compensation packages in all but three of the past 11 fiscal years, warning that an “unmitigated pay-for-performance misalignment exists” and that Arora’s target compensation was nearly twice that of peers. Glass Lewis urged rejection in the last three fiscal years.

The Florida State Board of Administration, which oversees investments for the retirement fund of public employees, has been particularly vocal. Michael McCauley, senior officer for investment programmes and governance, cited “insufficiently challenging goals” within the pay packages and “weak” links between actual payouts and shareholder returns. The question of how corporate wealth is distributed between executives and workers is not unique to Palo Alto Networks, but the company’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 442 to 1, against a US corporate average of 281 to 1, makes the disparity particularly stark.

The company’s “moonshot” pay structure is part of the problem. Palo Alto Networks ties big payouts to gains in revenue, profitability, and other financial metrics, with maximum payouts set at four times the target (reduced from six times after shareholder pushback). Brian Bueno of Farient Advisors called this “very unusual,” noting that most companies cap performance-based stock awards at two times the target.

The governance gap

Say-on-pay votes were introduced under the Dodd-Frank Act after the 2008 financial crisis, intended to give shareholders meaningful input on executive compensation. In the enterprise software sector, where competition for executive talent is intense and stock-based compensation dominates, the votes have had limited impact on actual pay levels. Only 1.4% of Russell 3000 companies saw their say-on-pay votes fail in 2025.

Palo Alto Networks is an outlier precisely because the stock performance is so strong. Research suggests shareholders tend to tolerate high pay when returns are strong, making the seven rejections at a company with 800% stock gains genuinely anomalous. The pattern suggests that institutional investors are objecting not to the outcome (exceptional returns) but to the mechanism (a pay structure they consider insufficiently rigorous and excessively generous relative to peers).

The cybersecurity industry is consolidating rapidly, and Arora’s track record of platform-building and acquisitions makes him difficult to replace. That leverage dynamic, a CEO who has delivered extraordinary results and cannot easily be substituted, is exactly what non-binding say-on-pay votes were not designed to address. Every enterprise software company is racing to embed AI, and Palo Alto Networks is expected to report record revenue when it posts quarterly results later on Tuesday. The shareholders will keep voting no, and the pay will keep flowing.

Jensen Huang’s comments at Computex defend the Samsung bonus structure that delivers $400,000 to chip engineers, but land alongside an $80bn Nvidia buyback announced two weeks ago.

Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive, told reporters on the sidelines of Computex in Taipei on Tuesday that workers should be paid “as much as possible,” framing the principle as the response to a question about Samsung Electronics’ new bonus structure that delivers as much as $400,000 to memory chip engineers.

“I pay my employees as much as I can,” Jensen Huang said, before adding, “but it doesn’t make this right,” in an unusual public hedging from a CEO who almost never qualifies his own positions in real time.

The Samsung context is the trigger for the question. The Korean memory firm’s union and management reached a deal earlier this month, after a near-strike that survived an injunction filing from a smaller non-chip union, that allocates 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit to chip-division bonuses, with payouts of up to 600 million won (about $400,000) per memory-division worker contingent on sustained profit targets through 2035.

The arrangement was described in Reuters analysis as the largest single profit-share commitment in major Korean corporate history. Samsung supplies HBM4 to Nvidia for the Vera Rubin platform, which made the question to Huang structurally relevant rather than merely topical.

The harder context is the cash-return commitment Nvidia announced two weeks before Huang’s remarks. The company’s Q1 fiscal 2027 results, released on 18 May, included an $80bn share repurchase authorisation, a quarterly cash-dividend increase from $0.01 to $0.25 per share (a 2,400% lift), and a stated commitment to return at least 50% of free cash flow to shareholders through 2026 and beyond. The company returned a record $20bn to shareholders in the quarter alone.

Nvidia’s $81.6bn quarterly revenue and 85% year-on-year growth comfortably support the return profile, but the arithmetic relationship matters: the buyback alone is larger than Nvidia’s total annual payroll many times over.

The two positions Huang is now publicly holding, that workers should be paid as much as possible and that Nvidia should return half its free cash flow to shareholders, are not strictly in tension. Both can be true; the company has the cash to do both.

But the public framing matters at a moment when corporate AI productivity gains are increasingly accumulating to shareholders rather than to workforces, and when Morgan Stanley’s European-banking forecast last week doubled the projected AI-driven job-loss figure to 20%.

Huang’s instinctive defence of high worker pay, even with the “it doesn’t make this right” hedge, is the closest a major AI-infrastructure CEO has come to publicly acknowledging the labour-and-capital tension the AI build-out is producing.

The other Huang comment from this week’s Computex appearances is worth noting alongside. Huang told a separate audience that Nvidia engineers should be using AI tokens worth roughly half their annual salary every year to remain productive, framing non-use of AI tools as analogous to designing chips with pencil and paper.

That position is, on its own terms, a defence of generous worker compensation in token-purchasing rather than salary terms: if engineers are issued $100,000-$150,000 in annual token budget on top of base pay, the realised compensation package is materially larger than the published salary figure suggests.

It is also a framing that depends entirely on AI-token costs remaining at current pricing rather than continuing to rise on the trajectory Commonwealth Bank’s Matt Comyn flagged this week.

Nvidia employs roughly 36,000 people globally. Average compensation per employee, on the company’s most recent disclosures, runs to several hundred thousand dollars including stock-based compensation. The AI boom has driven Nvidia’s share price up roughly 1,170% over the past five years, which has made meaningful numbers of Nvidia employees who hold restricted-stock units into multi-millionaires through normal vesting cycles.

His remark therefore lands inside an Nvidia compensation reality that has, by the standards of large public technology companies, already been unusually worker-favourable.

Huang is travelling to Seoul this week to meet Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and other Korean industrial leaders. The bonus-structure question will likely come up again. The public position Huang has now taken is harder to walk back than the standard executive non-answer.

TL;DR

Tencent will let PayPal users make cashless payments in China through WeChat Pay’s QR code merchant network, starting with US users. The move targets foreign tourists who struggle with China’s cashless economy, as visitor numbers surpass 35 million.

Tencent has announced that PayPal users will be able to make cashless payments in China by scanning QR codes through WeChat Pay’s merchant network. The integration, which will be available to US-based PayPal users first with more markets to follow, connects PayPal’s 400 million-plus user base to the payment infrastructure that covers virtually every taxi, restaurant, and shop in mainland China.

The move addresses a specific pain point. China’s economy runs on mobile payments, with WeChat Pay and Ant Group’s Alipay processing trillions of dollars in transactions annually. Foreign visitors who arrive without access to either platform often find themselves unable to pay for basic goods and services, since many Chinese merchants no longer accept cash and few accept international credit cards at the point of sale. Both WeChat Pay and Alipay have allowed foreigners to link international bank cards since 2019, but adoption has been limited by a cumbersome onboarding process that requires downloading Chinese apps and navigating interfaces designed for domestic users.

Why PayPal matters

PayPal integration sidesteps the onboarding problem entirely. A US tourist arriving in Beijing does not need to download WeChat, create an account, or link a bank card to a Chinese payment platform. They scan a WeChat Pay QR code with their existing PayPal app, the transaction processes through WeChat Pay’s merchant network, and the charge appears on their PayPal balance or linked card. The friction reduction is significant for a demographic that currently struggles with China’s cashless infrastructure.

Tencent is also waiving transaction fees for first-time users who link international bank cards directly to WeChat, a separate incentive aimed at encouraging deeper integration beyond the PayPal pathway. The company reported that foreign traveller transactions in China jumped nearly 80% year on year in the January-to-April period of 2026, suggesting that China’s broader tourism push is already driving payment volume growth.

China’s tourism strategy

The PayPal deal is part of a coordinated effort by Beijing to attract more foreign tourists after the pandemic-era collapse in international arrivals. China has expanded visa-free access to travellers from dozens of countries, including the UK, Spain, and Australia, though US travellers still require a visa except for brief transits to third countries.

The strategy is working by the numbers. Foreign visitors to China, excluding those from Hong Kong and Taiwan, surpassed 35 million in 2025, exceeding the pre-pandemic record of nearly 32 million set in 2019. Tourism contributed more than 4% of China’s GDP in 2024. China’s approach to technology adoption has created an economy where digital infrastructure is more advanced than in most Western countries, but that very advancement creates barriers for visitors who are not part of the domestic digital ecosystem.

Gary Ng, a senior economist for Asia Pacific at French bank Natixis, said the move aligns with a global trend of payment platform integration through mutually recognised cross-border QR codes. The same dynamic is playing out in Southeast Asia, where Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia have established bilateral QR code payment links.

Limited near-term impact

The practical significance of the PayPal integration depends on the volume of US travellers to China, which remains relatively low compared to pre-pandemic levels and is further constrained by the ongoing visa requirement. Ivan Su, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said the initial impact may be limited in terms of overall benefit for Tencent given those volumes.

The competitive dynamic between WeChat Pay and Alipay adds another dimension. As fintech platforms globally expand into cross-border payments, both Chinese platforms are racing to be the preferred gateway for foreign visitors. Alipay has its own international partnerships and has been more aggressive in marketing to tourists through in-app translation features and curated city guides. Alibaba’s broader technology ambitions give Alipay a parent company with deep resources to invest in cross-border payment infrastructure.

For Tencent, the PayPal deal is less about immediate revenue and more about positioning WeChat Pay as the default payment rail for international visitors. Chinese platform companies are navigating a regulatory environment that encourages international engagement while maintaining domestic control over data and financial flows. Connecting PayPal to WeChat Pay’s merchant network threads that needle, giving foreign users access to the payment infrastructure without giving them direct access to the underlying Chinese financial system.

Google parent company Alphabet said Monday that it plans to raise $80 billion to help pay for the massive AI infrastructure buildout it has planned. Alphabet will sell off that amount in stock and will then use the funds to pay for “general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute,” the company said in a statement.

Part of the plan involves selling $10 billion in stock to Berkshire Hathaway, the massive global holding company formerly led by Warren Buffett.

“The company is experiencing strong demand for its AI solutions and services from enterprises and consumers, at levels that are exceeding the company’s available supply,” Alphabet said in its statement. “By scaling its investments, the company seeks to expand its foundational infrastructure to support the significant growth opportunity ahead.”

The company added that the stock plan represented a way to “fund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet.”

Like other tech giants, Google has announced plans for a massive investment in compute this year, the likes of which will be used to support a flurry of new AI services. At Google I/O last month, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company expects to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion on capex before the year is out. Google and other tech giants are expected to spend as much as $700 billion this year on AI capex.