China's Shanghai Composite Index closed up 9.30 points (+0.24%) at 3,903.72 on Thursday, Aug 20. Shenzhen Composite Index closed up 82.63 points (+0.59%) at 13,972.78. CSI 300 Index closed up 4.05 points (+0.09%) at 4,592.75. ChiNext Index closed up 22.09 points (+0.64%) at 3,495.59. STAR Market 50 Index closed down 14.55 points (-0.87%) at 1,652.97.

Meta Platforms spends several hundred million dollars a year on Microsoft Azure for AI model access and consumes trillions of tokens on the platform each week, making it one of Microsoft’s largest AI clients, a person familiar said. Microsoft and Meta declined to comment. Microsoft’s Foundry marketplace, a core part of its AI strategy offering multi-vendor models, had about 100,000 customers by July. While Microsoft often highlights industrial clients in its marketing, its biggest AI customers remain other tech firms, including ByteDance, Adobe, Perplexity and startup Sierra. Meta is buying model access across multiple platforms based on availability and cost to accelerate software development; its developers have used OpenAI technology via Foundry to help evaluate Meta’s own model outputs.

U.S. EIA net finished petroleum product imports for the week to Aug. 14: -258,000 b/d, prior 206,000 b/d.