 | Jan 10, 2025 | | | | | | TGIF! Amazon releases ad tools to help merchants sell on other e-commerce sites. Frank McCourt's Project Liberty submits formal offer to buy TikTok. SoftBank and Arm Holdings consider acquisition of chip startup Ampere.
| | | | Amazon has built a massive advertising business by charging merchants to promote their product listings on its site. Now, Amazon wants to sell the technology behind its ad business to other e-commerce companies. A new product, called Amazon Retail Ad Service, will let outside retailers use Amazon's technology to sell ads throughout their website, including in search results. Amazon said multiple online retailers are already testing the technology, including the SoftBank-backed Asian grocery delivery service Weee!, supplements site iHerb and party supplies seller Oriental Trading Company. The service will put Amazon in competition with Instacart, which sells ad services to grocers, as well as advertising technology firms like Criteo that offer similar services. Amazon said in a press release the service keeps retailers' information separate from Amazon Ads and other parts of its business. Other large online retailers including Walmart and DoorDash have also built their own ad businesses similar to Amazon, which took in $14.3 billion in ad revenue in the third quarter of 2024. | | | | Project Liberty, the organization founded by billionaire Frank McCourt, on Thursday said it submitted a formal proposal to acquire TikTok's U.S. assets. McCourt said the offer would keep the short-form video app, which has 170 million monthly users in the U.S., alive in the country without using its current algorithm. (China's export control rules prohibit Chinese companies from selling their software algorithms to buyers outside the country without Beijing's approval.) The formal offer comes a day before the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in TikTok's effort to block the U.S. law that could ban it on Jan. 19 if it doesn't cut ties with its Chinese parent company ByteDance. It's unclear what price Project Liberty offered ByteDance. TikTok and Project Liberty did not immediately provide a comment. Earlier this week, "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary signed onto McCourt's effort, though it's unclear if he's made a capital commitment, and if so how much. | | | | SoftBank and its Arm Holdings chip design subsidiary are considering an acquisition of Ampere Computing, a server chip design startup led by former Intel executive Renée James, Bloomberg reported. The acquisition interest reflects SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son's desire to make Arm the main focus of his broad AI strategy, which also includes investments in energy-related projects and large-scale GPU purchases. Arm's server chips, which are cheaper and consume power more efficiently than x86 chips, are seeing growing demand as more companies outfit data centers with Nvidia's GPU chips. Ampere, founded in 2017, attracted an early slate of big-name customers like Microsoft, ByteDance, Tencent, and Cloudflare and was last valued at $8 billion in 2021. An Ampere acquisition would bring SoftBank highly sought-after chip design talent as well as relationships with some of the tech industry's biggest cloud spenders. | | | | Conversational AI startup Cohere unveiled a preview of North, a new product that marries its large language models and search models to help corporate users work faster, co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez said in a blog post. The Information reported last month that Cohere was working on such a product, which is similar to existing offerings like Glean and ones in the works at Google and OpenAI. Cohere's North shows how the startup is moving beyond its roots in foundational models to offer products aimed at businesses, which could help it generate revenue faster. Cohere was valued at $5.5 billion after a funding round last July but a few months earlier was making just $35 million in annualized revenue, as we've reported. The North product also positions Cohere in the market for AI agents that automate tasks like handling internal finance interactions and customer support. While this is quickly becoming a crowded market, Cohere is playing up its security capabilities in order to distinguish itself from rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. | | | | Cybersecurity startup Wiz ended its long search for a chief financial officer with its appointment Thursday of Fazal Merchant, a former executive at Dreamworks and Tanium. The hiring of Merchant, who will also serve as the company's president, puts the company on track for an initial public offering likely by next year. The company, backed by Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks Capital, ended talks with Alphabet last year for a $23 billion acquisition and has said it plans to go public once it hits $1 billion in annualized revenue. Wiz was recently valued by investors at $16 billion in a private share sale, The Information previously reported. | | | | Amazon is exploring creating more news programming after it aired a live U.S. Election Night special hosted by veteran news anchor Brian Williams last November, according to Variety. While the talks are early, the streaming video giant is reportedly interested in creating more news specials tied to particular events, versus creating its own news division. Live programming overall has become a greater focus area for Amazon, which in recent years has been buying up the rights to exclusively air major live sports including NFL games, NBA games (starting later this year) and NASCAR races. Such programming typically can attract millions of viewers at once, which is attractive to advertisers that Amazon wants to sell commercials to. Alberg Cheng, a vice president at Amazon and head of its U.S. Prime Video operations, is overseeing the news effort, per the report. | | | | | | | Opportunities Empower your teams to stay ahead of market trends with the most trusted tech journalism.
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