Mixed Markets

European markets ended marginally lower on Thursday, with a strong pound and losses for drugmaker AstraZeneca PLC weighing on the London blue-chip benchmark, a day after it logged its biggest gain in more than two months. BT was the biggest riser on the index, up 4% after UK broker Numis gave the telecoms company a "buy" rating.

U.S. stocks were little changed in late morning trading on Thursday as a fall in healthcare and consumer discretionary stocks capped gains, while investors turned their attention to second-quarter earnings. Amazon.com shares fell 0.7 percent and was among the top three drags on the S&P and the Nasdaq, while a 0.8 percent drop in McDonald's weighed on the Dow.

Among stocks, Target rose 3.4 percent after the retailer gave an upbeat second-quarter forecast. The news boosted other retailers, with Wal-Mart and Costco rising about 1.3 percent.

Google’s London Data Centre

Google has revealed it has built a London data centre for the cloud computing services it rents to third parties. The facility is its second in Europe, after Brussels, and promises to provide faster access times to nearby clients. Until now, the search giant has focused on opening data centres for its cloud computing platform in the US and Asia, where it has bases in Singapore, Taiwan and Tokyo.

In announcing the London centre, it also disclosed plans to open facilities in Finland, the Netherlands and Frankfurt. "GCP (Google Cloud Platform) customers throughout the British Isles and Western Europe will see significant reductions in latency when they run their workloads in the London region," said product manager Dave Stiver, referring to processing delays caused by the distances data has to travel.

A spokeswoman for the company added that the decision to build a London centre had been taken before the Brexit vote and was therefore unrelated to speculation that the UK's data privacy laws may diverge from the EU's in the future.

Thursday’s Stock Movers

Shares of AstraZeneca PLC AZN dropped 3.5%. The shares were losing the most since November following reports Chief Executive Pascal Soriot was set to become CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

BT Group PLC BT.A rose 4% as the U.K.’s Office of Communications said it is setting up dedicated measures to monitor BT’s Openreach network unit.

Shares of oil producers BP PLC BP and Royal Dutch Shell PLC both ended down 0.8% after a volatile day for oil prices CLU7 after the International Energy Agency said OPEC production rose in June.