Microsoft are building a data center in Wales. Microsoft are building a data center in Wales. Tue 4 Nov 2025 10.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 4 Nov 2025 10.01 EST If you like reading our newsletter, forward this email to five friends with a demand they sign up like itâ s a chain letter warning of bad luck for five years. In this weekâ s news, AI companies hit mind-boggling financial milestones such as a $5tn valuation, a $100bn quarter, and a string of deals worth nearly $600bn. Last week, the chipmaker Nvidia hit a valuation of $5tn.

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, speaks at the company's annual developer conference in Seattle, Washington. Tech giant reports earnings of $3.72 per share day after deal with OpenAI pushed value of company to more than $4tn Microsoft blew off concerns of overspending on AI on Wednesday, reporting elevated earnings even as it faced an outage of its cloud computing service, Azure, and its office software suite, 365. The strong earnings report comes a day after a deal with OpenAI pushed the value of the tech giant to more than $4tn. After its Xbox and investor relations pages went down, the company issued a statement that said: "We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services."

The second major cloud outage in less than two weeks, Azure's downtime highlights the "brittleness" of a digital ecosystem that depends on a few companies never making mistakes. Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, its widely used 365 services, Xbox, and Minecraft started suffering outages at roughly noon Eastern time on Wednesday, the result of what Microsoft said was "an inadvertent configuration change." The incident--which marks the second major cloud provider outage in less than two weeks--highlights the instability of an internet built largely on infrastructure run by a few tech giants. Microsoft's problems specifically originated from Azure's Front Door content delivery network and emerged just hours before Microsoft's scheduled earnings announcement. The company website, including its investor relations page, was still down on Wednesday afternoon, and the Azure status page where Microsoft provides updates was having intermittent issues as well.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Users will soon be able to use PayPal to pay for product recommendations made by OpenAI's ChatGPT. PayPal recently signed a contract with OpenAI to integrate the digital wallet into ChatGPT, reports CNBC . This will allow users to easily pay for the products they discover via the AI tool. The agreement allows PayPal users to make payments via ChatGPT merchants to list and sell their goods in ChatGPT.

KDDI enters into'responsible' AI agreement with Google KDDI said its AI service, which will be launched in spring 2026, will "protect the rights of content providers." Major Japanese telecommunications firm KDDI signed an agreement Tuesday with Google Cloud Japan in a bid to develop a "responsible" AI search service that only shows content that creators have given consent to. The agreement would allow KDDI to harness Google's AI assistant Gemini and AI-optimized research tool NotebookLM. "We will promote'responsible AI' that uses AI ethically, legally, and appropriately, and provide an environment where content providers and customers can use AI safely and securely," the company said in a statement. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Nvidia, the artificial intelligence (AI) chip leader, will build seven new supercomputers for the United States Department of Energy (DOE), CEO Jensen Huang has said. The company has $500bn in bookings for its AI chips, Huang said on Tuesday in a keynote address at the company's GTC event in Washington, DC, the US capital. It is striking deals around the world while also navigating a US-China trade war that could determine which country's technology is most used across the globe. Investors are looking for clarity on what chips the tech company will be able to sell to the vast Chinese market, but Huang in his keynote speech praised policies by US President Donald Trump while announcing new products and deals. These included network technology that will let Nvidia AI chips work with quantum computers.

An illustration photo shows the OpenAI logo displayed on a smartphone with the Microsoft logo in the background in Chongqing, China on Aug. 27, 2025. An illustration photo shows the OpenAI logo displayed on a smartphone with the Microsoft logo in the background in Chongqing, China on Aug. 27, 2025. OpenAI has completed a restructuring, dividing itself into a nonprofit and for-profit entity, the company announced on Tuesday. The nonprofit arm, now called the OpenAI Foundation, will have a $130 billion stake in the for-profit enterprise, a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC. "The OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group will work in concert to advance solutions to hard problems and opportunities posed by AI progress," the company said in its blog post announcing the restructuring. "This includes making intelligence a tool that everyone can benefit from, building safe and aligned systems, turbocharging scientific discovery, and strengthening global cooperation and resilience."

Microsoft and OpenAI have reached a deal to allow the ChatGPT maker to restructure itself into a public-benefit corporation, valuing OpenAI at $500bn and giving it more freedom in its business operations. The deal, unveiled on Tuesday, removes a major constraint on raising capital for OpenAI that has existed since 2019. As its ChatGPT service exploded in popularity, those limitations had become a notable source of tension between the two companies. Microsoft will still hold a stake of about $135bn, or 27 percent, in OpenAI Group PBC, which will be controlled by the OpenAI Foundation, a nonprofit, the companies said. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington in the United States, has invested $13.8bn in OpenAI, with Tuesday's deal implying that the firm had generated a return of nearly 10 times its investment.

Is artificial intelligence to blame for Amazon job cuts? Multinational technology company Amazon is laying off about 14,000 employees, the company has confirmed . A message sent out to staff on the company's website followed media reports that the group was planning 30,000 job cuts. News of the layoffs on Tuesday came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) technology was likely to s pell job cuts . He also launched an "inefficiencies initiative" in which he invited workers to report unnecessary bureaucracy and inefficiencies that could be targeted for cost savings.

BEIJING/SINGAPORE - Chinese state-owned defense giant Norinco in February unveiled a military vehicle capable of autonomously conducting combat-support operations at 50 kilometers per hour. It was powered by DeepSeek, the company whose artificial intelligence model is the pride of China's tech sector. The Norinco P60's release was touted by Communist Party officials in press statements as an early showcase of how Beijing is using DeepSeek and AI to catch up in its arms race with the United States, at a time when leaders in both countries have urged their militaries to prepare for conflict. A review of hundreds of research papers, patents and procurement records gives a snapshot of the systematic effort by Beijing to harness AI for military advantage. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.