| |  | Oct 29, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Wednesday! Microsoft will get a 27% stake in OpenAI and retain the rights to use OpenAI's intellectual property through 2032. Nvidia has received more than $500 billion in orders through 2026. Apple supplier Skyworks Solutions is acquiring its main rival Qorvo for $10.6 billion.
| | | | Microsoft will get a 27% stake in OpenAI valued at $135 billion and will retain the rights to use the startup's intellectual property through 2032, the companies announced on Tuesday. Microsoft will give up its right of first refusal over OpenAI's compute contracts, which had meant OpenAI had to ask Microsoft first whether it could handle cloud computing needs before OpenAI could ask other cloud firms. In recent months OpenAI has got permission from Microsoft to strike deals with a variety of cloud firms, including Oracle and Google Cloud. In exchange for Microsoft giving up the right, OpenAI has committed to spend an additional $250 billion on Azure server rentals over an unspecified period of time, the companies said. The companies also announced several tweaks to their existing agreement. Microsoft's rights to OpenAI IP no longer include the startup's hardware products, and OpenAI can develop new products with third parties other than Microsoft. But Microsoft will continue to get a share of OpenAI's revenue until 2030 or until the startup develops artificial general intelligence, or AI capable of human-level thinking, the companies said. The announcement comes as OpenAI moves ahead with its plans to restructure its for-profit business, a key step in its ability to raise more money and eventually go public. | | | | Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed Tuesday that Nvidia has received more than $500 billion in orders, counting from the start of calendar 2025 through 2026, reflecting demand for its latest chips, the Blackwell and the Rubin. That's an enormous volume of orders, more than five times the revenue generated by an earlier generation of Nvidia chips, Hopper, from 2023 to 2025, excluding sales in Asia. Nvidia stock rose 5%. Meanwhile, Nvidia also announced that it would invest $1 billion in Nokia, the Finnish telecommunications company that provides network equipment and software. As part of the deal, Nokia will adopt Nvidia's new telecommunications hardware that is designed for artificial intelligence. "We're going to create, for the first time, a software-defined programmable computer that's able to communicate wirelessly and do AI processing at the same time," said Huang said onstage at Nvidia's developer conference in Washington, D.C. Using AI will be able to make wireless communications more energy-efficient, he said. Nvidia announced a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and Oracle to develop two AI systems at the Argonne National Lab, one of which will include 100,000 Blackwell chips and the other of which will feature 10,000. Nvidia also announced that nine national labs and many quantum computing companies will adopt Nvidia's new technology for connecting AI chips and quantum computers. Huang played to the patriotism of the D.C. audience, opening his talk with a video montage of U.S. inventions and closing by thanking the audience for "making America great again." He gave shoutouts to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and President Donald Trump. | | | | Skyworks Solutions, which supplies radio frequency chips to Apple and other smartphone makers, is acquiring its main rival Qorvo for $10.6 billion in a combination of cash and stock. The news, announced Tuesday morning, confirmed a report in The Information late Monday night. Skyworks' shares jumped 13% on Tuesday, while Qorvo shares rose 11%. The deal comes as growth in the smartphone maker has slowed, as consumers hold onto phones longer. Both companies had also warned that sales to their biggest customer, which they previously said was Apple, were weakening because other rivals were winning business. In a statement, Skyworks CEO Phil Brace said the combination would have more ability to "bring even greater innovation to our customers." Qorvo's sales in the June quarter, for instance, fell 7.6%. It fell 1.3% in fiscal 2025. Skyworks reported a 5.2% decline in revenue for the nine months ending June. The price Skyworks is paying for Qorvo, of about $114 a share based on Skyworks' price early Tuesday, was a big premium to where Qorvo has lately been trading. It had closed on Monday at $92.13. | | | | OpenAI on Tuesday said that it completed its corporate restructuring into a public benefit corp., clearing the company's path to an eventual public offering. Microsoft, which had invested more than $13 billion into the company, holds a 27% equity stake in the company worth $135 billion based on the company's recent employee share sale that values it at $500 billion, confirming some details earlier reported by The Information. OpenAI's nonprofit, which had previously controlled the for-profit when it was a limited liability corp., is now called the OpenAI Foundation and holds a 26% equity stake in the public benefit corp., for a stake worth roughly $130 billion. The OpenAI Foundation also has warrants to receive additional shares if it hits a certain valuation. That mirrors the prior arrangement, which allowed the nonprofit to receive profits after early shareholders and employees were paid out a portion of eventual profits. OpenAI's employees and investors hold the remaining 47% of the company. On Tuesday the Delaware and California state attorneys general, which needed to review the conversion because of the AI research lab's start as a nonprofit, said they won't oppose the recapitalization. The state attorneys general noted they had secured certain commitments, including that the nonprofit's board will retain control and oversight over the public benefit corp. The board of the nonprofit includes most of the members of the for-profit board, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. | | | | Arvid Lunnemark, one of the four co-founders of Anysphere, which develops the Cursor AI coding software, announced that he is leaving the startup earlier this month. "Today, I told the team that I have decided to leave Cursor," he wrote in a statement on his website on October 18th. "It is, of course, with a mix of feelings. I'm sad to leave the team and the product; I'm excited for the ideas I get to explore next." Lunnemark studied math and computer science at MIT, according to his LinkedIn, before co-founding Anysphere in 2022 with three classmates. Enthusiasm for AI-powered coding tools has propelled Anysphere to over $500 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year. Anysphere has been considering offers to invest in the startup at around a $30 billion valuation. | | | | Livestream shopping app Whatnot announced a $225 million fundraising Tuesday at a valuation of $11.5 billion, more than double the level at which it last raised. The round was led by existing investors DST Global and Capital G, and included other investors like Sequoia Capital, Greycroft and Andreessen Horowitz. The new funding, which Whatnot said it would use to expand internationally and launch new features, comes less than a year after the company boosted its valuation to $5 billion in a January funding round. Whatnot said the gross merchandise value for products sold through its platform this year has already surpassed $6 billion, more than double its GMV for all of 2024. Whatnot has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for live shopping, a form of e-commerce popular in Asia where hosts showcase and sell items on QVC-like livestreams. Whatnot and other platforms like TikTok, which has heavily incentivized merchants that use its TikTok Shop storefronts to sell products via livestreams, have helped to get U.S. audiences accustomed to watching and purchasing from livestreams. | | | | Amazon is cutting around 14,000 corporate jobs, human resources executive Beth Galetti wrote in a memo published by Amazon Tuesday. The job cuts are aimed at "further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets," she wrote. The cuts, which are Amazon's largest since laying off roughly 27,000 employees in several waves in late 2022 and early 2023, continue a push started by CEO Andy Jassy last year to reduce bureaucracy and management layers at the company. Prior to the latest cuts, Amazon had around 350,000 corporate employees. Most employees who are affected by the cuts will have 90 days to look for another role at Amazon, Galetti said in the memo. Galetti didn't specify in the memo which teams or departments would be affected by the cuts, though news reports earlier this month said that human resources staffers and other parts of Amazon's consumer division were likely to be affected. Amazon is due to report earnings Thursday, Oct. 30. | | | | Adobe and Google have been working together as industry partners for nearly two decades, and now AI is bringing them closer. In an expanded agreement between the companies, Adobe customers will be able to use Google's latest AI models to power applications like Photoshop and Premiere. In addition, Adobe's business customers will be able to customize Google's AI models with their own proprietary data to reflect the style of their company brand, said an Adobe spokesperson. The deal illustrates the growing popularity of Google AI models like Nano Banana, which lets users edit their photos, and Veo 3, which creates video from text prompts, with creative professionals. It also shows how Google's strength in AI, which is already helping it poach cloud AI business from rivals, is helping it get a stronger foothold in other market segments. Adobe has developed its own set of AI models, known as Firefly, for tasks like image and video generation, so supporting a competing model might seem like a shift. But the expanded tie-up with Google is part of Adobe's strategy to let customers use a variety of different third-party models to run its apps. That's similar to the approach cloud providers have used to get customers building AI apps. | | | | Securitize, which helps asset managers put their products on the blockchain, said it will go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal that values the firm at $1.25 billion in pre-money equity. Securitize, which is backed by BlackRock, will merge with Cantor Equity Partners II, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2026, the companies said. Existing investors, such as BlackRock, ARK Invest, and Morgan Stanley, will roll over their interest into the combined company. It will also raise $225 million in private placement from new and existing investors. Founded in 2017, Securitize helps asset managers such as BlackRock and Apollo bring their products onto blockchain for wider distribution. Its largest product is BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, which has amassed $2.85 billion in assets in part because it holds reserve assets for stablecoins such as Ethena's USDtb. In the second quarter, Securitize made $17.5 million in revenue and $4.2 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. It expects full-year revenue to be $69 million in 2025 and $110 million in 2026. | | | | Nvidia is jumping into the self-driving car technology market, unveiling a deal with Uber to partner on production of thousands of vehicles that can run as robotaxis on Uber's service. Stellantis, maker of Fiat and Chrysler, will produce the cars. Uber said 5,000 of the cars will be delivered for use on its service, although Nvidia put the ambition more grandly, announcing it plans the Uber partnership to support 100,000 cars over time, starting in 2027. The partnership adds to the range of self-driving car options that Uber has, of which the most important is a partnership with Alphabet's Waymo. But the significance of the announcement is more what it means for Nvidia and other rivals, including Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk has said robotaxis are a key part of its long term growth. Tesla has begun a limited robotaxi service in Austin Texas and San Francisco. Stellantis, the automaker, is collaborating with Nvidia and Uber to provide autonomous vehicles. Lucid and Mercedes-Benz will also use Nvidia's self-driving technology, as will self-driving trucking companies Aurora, Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi. Nvidia's new technology, called Drive AGX Hyperion 10, is a computer and set of sensors that is intended to enable any vehicle to drive autonomously. Uber and Nvidia are also working on providing data to develop self-driving software using Nvidia's Cosmos AI model, which is designed to generate realistic videos. | | | | | Popular articles By Aaron Tilley and Wayne Ma
By Kalley Huang, Erin Woo and Stephanie Palazzolo
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