After keeping an audience of interrogators waiting, Donald Trump finally arrived on stage for his Wednesday appearance at the convention for the National Association of Black Journalists over an hour late. He blamed the delay not on the furious behind-the-scenes between the NABJ and his campaign about whether he could be factchecked in real time, but on what he described as organizers’ inability to calibrate the audio equipment in time for his highly controversial panel discussion. “It’s a disgrace,” he snarled.

When ABC’s Rachel Scott opened the proceedings by asking the former president his impetus for addressing the Black journalists, women and Chicagoans in the crowd who have been regularly subject to his hostility, Trump dismissed the question as “horrible” and called Scott “nasty” before turning his bluster meter up to 11.

He declared himself the best president since Abraham Lincoln for “the Black population”. He pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris would identify as Black. (“She was Indian, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went.”) He enunciated the word with such contempt, as if coughing up a hairball – buh-LAAAAA-kuh. All the while, crowd reactions whipsawed from incredulous laughter to deep groans. At one point the discussion shifted to Sonya Massey, the latest Black person to be unlawfully killed by Chicago police. “Are you talking [the one] with the water?” Trump asked to audible gasps.

Before that, outright anger was the prevailing emotion among many NABJ members who saw the decision to have Trump at the annual conference and career fair as a betrayal of the association’s core values. The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, who resigned her position as co-chair of the convention’s organizing committee in protest, was among a slew of Black journalists who spoke out about the association’s decision to even invite the presumptive Republican nominee.

NABJ president Ken Lemon defended the decision as part of a tradition of questioning national party leaders – from presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush, to nominees Barack Obama and Bob Dole. What’s more, Lemon said, they had invited Harris, but her campaign would only commit to a video interview. Trump, however, was happy to attend in person. How could he pass up an opportunity for face time with “the Blacks”?

Trump hasn’t exactly been subtle in his courtship of Black voters, from casting the former video vixen Amber Rose in a speaking role at the Republican national convention to promoting his rap sheet and assassination as forms of street cred. Lemon and others in NABJ leadership spun the Trump panel as an opportunity to hold his feet to the fire. But it was the attendees who were held up in the end; many panels were delayed and outright canceled to accommodate Trump, prompting more convention desertions.

It’s a wonder more didn’t change plans earlier after waiting for hours to be let into the venue, a giant auditorium at the end of an impressive ballroom. The security check, run by the Secret Service, was more thorough than the usual airport experience – fresh in the minds of some attendees who had rushed in straight from the plane. As more people streamed in, funk music blasted overhead, giving Trump’s appearance more of a concert vibe. More than a few whipped out their camera phones to take snaps with Trump’s empty stage chair in the background. High on a projection screen just behind was a graphic of the NABJ conference logo with the slogan writ large: “Journalism over disinformation”. You can understand why people might be upset. “I don’t know if surreal is the right word,” Brittny McGraw, the news chief at Nasa told me, “but perhaps that is the word I will go with.”

When Trump finally did take the stage, he played the hits – vowing (again) to close the border, cut inflation (how?) and “drill, baby, drill”. Pitted against the three-woman interview team that also included Semafor’s Kadia Goba and Fox News’s Harris Faulkner, he reserved all of his invective for the “rude” Scott – who seemed unhappy at having to go through with this farce and stood firm in the face of increasing attacks.

When she cut Trump off mid-digression in hopes of pivoting to another question before time ran out, Trump snapped: “You’re the one who held me up!” In their back and forth, Trump seemed to have another Black woman in his sights. He might’ve spent more time directing his attacks at Harris if he wasn’t still so fixated on beating up on Joe Biden for being old; never mind that all his complaining about not being able to hear the questions on stage made him look even older in those moments. After about 35 minutes, thankfully, it was over.

In theory, being interrogated by three Black women should have worked against Trump. Doubtless his many supporters will take his performance as confirmation of his fitness for the fight against Harris. But for the many in the room who could see past the bluster, Trump looked for all the world like an old crank who can barely hear or have a thought without somehow making it racist. Asked by Goba how he’d know if he was too old to stay in the job, Trump didn’t hesitate to take another shot at Scott. “Look, if I came on stage and got treated so rudely as this woman,” he said, still smarting from her pointed line of questioning. That was the payoff the NABJ had hoped for, and Trump never looked more exposed.

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Nvidia shares rebounded on Wednesday after Microsoft indicated it would continue to invest heavily in the technical infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence, highlighting investors’ sensitivity to the spending plans of a handful of Big Tech groups.

Chip stocks including Nvidia, Arm and AMD fell sharply on Tuesday ahead of Microsoft’s latest earnings report. Anxiety about the sustainability of the past year’s monster AI rally had intensified after Google’s quarterly numbers last week, triggering a volatile few days for tech investors that wiped nearly $500bn off the value of Nvidia in little more than a week.

Shares in Microsoft slid nearly 2 per cent in New York on Wednesday after the Seattle-based company narrowly missed lofty expectations for cloud growth. But comments from executives that demand for its AI services continued to exceed available supply of computing power, a problem that was driving continued investment in data centres, boosted market sentiment around their semiconductor suppliers.

Nvidia climbed 11 per cent on Wednesday, while AMD — which reported strong demand for its AI chips on Tuesday evening — rose 4 per cent. Shares in Arm, the UK-based chip designer, rose 7 per cent.

The gains helped the Nasdaq index rebound from Tuesday’s slump, rising 2.6 per cent.

Microsoft said sales in its closely watched Azure cloud computing platform had risen 29 per cent year on year in the quarter to June 30, missing forecasts for a rise of between 30-31 per cent and below last quarter’s growth rate of 31 per cent.

Microsoft’s capital expenditures for the quarter to June 30 hit $19bn, nearly 80 per cent higher than the same period a year ago and ahead of Wall Street’s forecasts. “Nearly all” of that was cloud and AI-related spending, said its chief financial officer Amy Hood, and those investments would pay off during the second half of the year when Azure growth would “accelerate”.

Analysts at TD Cowen said on Wednesday that they had raised their forecasts for Microsoft’s capital spending from $70bn to $84bn for the 2025 financial year.

Hood said that half of Microsoft’s capital spending went towards land, building and leases, which “really will be monetised over 15 years and beyond”, while the other half was spent on technical equipment, including chips and servers, which would be “based on demand signals”.

Analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a note on Wednesday: “We believe this new disclosure will go a long way to relax investor concerns regarding the timeliness of converting capex to revenue.”

Tech companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are investing tens of billions of dollars a year in data centre capacity to support what they believe will be a huge wave of AI applications, following rapid adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT app since its launch nearly two years ago.

Analysts at CFRA said they expected Amazon to “ramp up” its capex this year to support both its logistics network and the infrastructure underpinning AI, predicting that the total for 2024 was likely to be about $64bn, up from $52.7bn in 2023.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said during an onstage conversation with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg that the social media group had installed about 600,000 of its latest AI chips. “You’re operating larger than just about anybody,” he said, to which Zuckerberg replied with a grin: “We’re good customers.”

But even as tech leaders boast about their AI firepower, investors have been growing increasingly cautious about the near-term returns from that spending in recent weeks.

“The market is turning on the realisation that the rate of profit growth at these Big Tech names is almost certainly going to slow,” said Manish Kabra, head of US equity strategy at Société Générale. “Is Nasdaq going to rise more than 35 per cent every year? Perhaps, but probably not. So the market wobbles, and traders rotate in and out of names like Nvidia.”

Chip stocks were further boosted by a Reuters report on Wednesday that new US export restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China would exempt allies including the Netherlands and Japan, home to key suppliers ASML and Tokyo Electron. ASML shares rose 5 per cent on the report.

NPR is in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics. For more of our coverage from the games head to our latest updates.

Ilona Maher is hard to miss.

The U.S. women’s rugby sevens center has emerged as one of the stars of this year’s Olympic Games, whether she’s charging down the pitch in red lipstick or goofing around on TikTok with her teammates.

Maher helped Team USA win its first-ever medal in women’s rugby on Tuesday, defeating Australia in nail-biting fashion. Afterward, she spoke emotionally about the importance of growing the sport.

“We wanted to do this to show what rugby could be in America,” Maher said. “We say in rugby a lot that we want to ‘pass the jersey.’ … I think today really made the jersey better so that other young girls can grow up wanting to play rugby, wanting to be professionals, wanting to live the life we live where we travel the world and go to the Olympics.”

The 27-year-old Vermont native has been an athlete to watch — both on and off the playing field — since the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, when she charmed the world with her honest review of the controversial cardboard beds, blunt takes on the Olympic Village social scene and other behind-the-scenes looks at the highly-restricted pandemic-era Games.

Maher’s social media star has only grown in the years since. She’s used the platform to bring attention to women’s rugby and spread messages of body positivity, including popularizing the hashtag #beastbeautybrains (her sister Olivia, by the way, is the creator of #girldinner).

Just days into the Paris Olympics, Maher officially became the most-followed rugby player on Instagram with 1.4 million followers, a number that’s since grown to 2 million. She has 1.9 million and counting on TikTok.

So far, Maher has fangirled over Snoop Dogg, converted retired NFL player Jason Kelce into a U.S. women’s rugby hype man (a la Flavor Flav), tested the beds again and posted about looking for love at the Olympic Villa in a spoof of the reality show Love Island.

She’s also clapped back at negative comments about her weight and muscular stature (“every day I get called masculine, I get called manly” she said in one 2022 TikTok).

In a now-viral video response posted earlier this month, 5-foot, 10-inch Maher, who holds a degree in nursing, pointed out that BMI is a flawed measurement, especially for athletes.

“I do have a BMI of 30. I am considered overweight,” she concluded. “But alas. I’m going to the Olympics, and you’re not.”

In another much-liked TikTok, posted from Paris, Maher encouraged people to take note of all the different body types of the athletes competing in the Olympics.

“All body types are worthy, from the smallest gymnast to the tallest volleyball player or rugby player to a shotputter and a sprinter,” she said. “All body types are beautiful and can do amazing things, so truly see yourself in these athletes and know that you can do it too.”

Maher’s videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and admiring comments from grateful viewers who credit her with getting them interested in the Olympics and women’s rugby.

After Tuesday’s win, Maher acknowledged that social media does come with added pressure to perform, something she said she talked about with her sports psychologist “at least every day” leading up to the Olympics.

“I want to show people that I can be good at social media and I can do a lot of social media but also be a very good rugby player,” she said. “And that was important to me.”

The rise of Ilona Maher

Ilona Maher, pictured in an April 2024 portrait, has dominated the Paris Olympics on the pitch and on social media.

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Maher was an all-around athlete at Burlington High School, where she played hockey, basketball and softball. While her dad was a college rugby player, she didn’t check out the sport until age 17.

“My senior year I just wasn’t really that into softball anymore, so I looked at some things and saw that there was a local rugby team at South Burlington High School,” Maher told Vermont Public in 2018. “My dad’s played rugby for a while … and so I tried rugby and found I was pretty good at it, and it just kind of started to roll from there.”

Maher played rugby at Norwich University for a year before being recruited to Quinnipiac University. There, she won three championships in the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association (NIRA) and was named to NIRA’s All-American team all three years.

In 2017, she received the MA Sorensen Award, which is given to the nation’s top collegiate women’s rugby player.

Maher, who also holds a master’s degree in business administration and management from DeVry University, was selected for the U.S. national rugby team before she graduated from college.

She made her debut at a Women’s SVNS tournament in Paris in 2018 and has competed in the Rugby World Cups in 2018 and 2022 — as well as, of course, two Olympics. Rugby sevens, which made its Olympic debut in 2016, is made up of seven players playing two seven-minute halves, as opposed to 15 players playing 40-minute halves.

Maher has turned heads for her aggressive playing style, including her high-speed runs and stiff arm. She’s recently been compared to Baltimore Ravens running back Derrick Henry, who in turn shouted her out.

One thing that makes Maher even more distinct on the pitch is her signature red lip. She told “CBS Mornings” this week that she wears lipstick while playing to “stick it to the man.”

“It doesn’t take away from your athletic ability if you wear makeup,” Maher said, adding, “I feel that I can be a beast and can play this very physical, aggressive sport while also keeping my femininity while I do it.”

The rise of U.S. women’s rugby

Team members for the United States — including Maher in the center of the top row — and New Zealand pose at the medal presentation ceremony for the Rugby Sevens in Saint-Denis, France on Tuesday.

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Maher has spoken about using TikTok to have fun and promote her sport — both to potential viewers and future players.

“I think it just doesn’t get the attention it deserves,” she told Vermont Public in 2021, adding that she and her team are working to get more girls interested in rugby.

“Because we have some of the best athletes in the U.S.,” Maher added. “And if we could get people really into rugby, I think we could be a powerhouse in the world.”

Women’s rugby has grown increasingly popular worldwide and in the U.S., with the consultancy Elite Rugby Scholars saying in 2022 that participation levels had doubled “each year for the past five years.”

The USA Rugby Women’s Premier League, founded in 2009, is the top annual American women’s rugby union competition (as opposed to rugby sevens, which is what Maher plays) — but the players are not paid.

The sport took its first step towards professionalism in April of this year when Women’s Elite Rugby (WER) announced it would hold its inaugural season in 2025.

WER is planning between six and eight teams with roughly 30 players each and bankrolled by private investment, according to ESPN. On Wednesday, it announced its first three cities: Boston, Chicago and Denver.

And American women’s rugby dominance at the Olympics seems poised to draw even more support — financial and otherwise — for the sport at home.

Just after Team USA’s win on Tuesday, American businesswoman Michele Kang — who owns the Washington Spirit as well as soccer clubs in France and England — announced she would donate $4 million to the U.S. Women’s Rugby Sevens team over the next four years, to help “grow the support and provide improved resources to its players and coaching staff” ahead of the 2028 summer Olympics.

In a statement, Kang described 2024 as a “banner year for women’s sports with record-breaking attendance and viewership,” including rugby. She highlighted a few key players, Maher among them.

“This Eagles team, led by players like Ilona Maher and co-captains Lauren Doyle and Naya Tapper, has captivated millions of new fans, bringing unprecedented attention to the sport,” she wrote. “As corporate sponsors and broadcast networks increasingly see the value and enthusiasm for women’s sports, now is the moment to unlock the full potential of these incredible female athletes and inspire generations to come.”

NPR’s Juana Summers contributed reporting from Paris.