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Tech News
Microsoft is offering voluntary exit packages to roughly 60,000 workers in the US, UK, Canada and India, a far larger rollout than the retirement offer limited to about 9,000 staff earlier this year. The move follows a 4,800-person layoff months earlier that hit Xbox and sales teams, and comes as Microsoft's headcount fell year over year for the first time in a decade, to about 223,000 as of June 30th.
In quarterly earnings, Microsoft lowered its fiscal-year capex guidance to $170 billion from $175 billion, while Alphabet kept its $195-205 billion range unchanged. Both companies cited supply delays from third-party GPU providers, with Microsoft CFO Amy Hood saying some capacity won't be available until the first half of 2027, and Alphabet's CFO noting outside computing power only came online late in the quarter.
A new analysis looks at the employment impact of data centers, which typically require massive capital investment in land, buildings, equipment and power but employ only a few dozen people on-site, in roles such as IT technicians, engineers and security guards. The report identifies three indirect ways these facilities can generate local employment beyond their small permanent staff, as billions of dollars continue to pour into data center construction across the United States.
Microsoft spent $45.2 billion on capital expenditures in the September quarter, below the $51.7 billion Wall Street expected, and trimmed its calendar 2026 spending forecast from $175 billion to $170 billion. CFO Amy Hood attributed the shortfall to delayed capacity deliveries from third-party partners rather than a pullback, with spending expected to accelerate once those facilities come online later in the fiscal year.
Cybersecurity firm Intel471 found that Italian organizations account for roughly 7% of all initial-access listings sold on cybercrime forums, second only to the United States at 30%. The company also ranks Italy fourth globally among countries most targeted by ransomware, a disproportionate share given its size and economy. Analyst Gianluca Tiepolo said the investigation began after Italy repeatedly topped the firm's internal monthly threat reports.
Microsoft reported net profit of more than $36.6bn and revenue of $92.3bn for the quarter ending September, a 19% year-on-year increase driven largely by 30% growth in its cloud business. The results came just days after the company said it would offer buyouts to around 60,000 employees as part of cost-cutting tied to heavy AI investment. Shares rose nearly 2.9% in after-hours trading following the announcement.
Oracle forecast $225 billion in revenue for fiscal 2030, implying 35% average annual growth, and said it will cap additional fundraising through that period at $20 billion, split evenly between debt and equity. The company told the SEC that vendor financing, customer-supplied hardware and prepayments should cut upfront cash needs as it moves toward positive free cash flow. Shares had fallen roughly a third this year on worries about Oracle's debt load amid its AI infrastructure spending spree.
Black Lotus Labs, Lumen's threat research arm, says it has spent three years tracking a rotating-relay framework it calls Silent Train, used by Chinese state-linked group Volt Typhoon. The group reportedly exploited at least four zero-day vulnerabilities in edge and management infrastructure, routing attacks through overseas VPS servers and chains of hijacked devices like routers to mask their origin before cleaning up after each operation.
Nvidia and Oracle announced general availability of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 racks and standalone Vera CPU instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Superclusters at Oracle AI World. The move follows Google Cloud's similar Vera Rubin availability announcement last week. Separately, independent benchmarks on a Vera server (not run on OCI hardware) showed significantly higher memory bandwidth than a dual Xeon 6 system.
Eclypsium's October InfraTrust Pulse report tracked 133 new security advisories across 18 vendors between September 18 and October 14, covering 2,813 vulnerabilities, with 37 rated critical and 58 exploitable remotely without authentication. The report highlights so-called PHP2Shell flaws affecting PHP code embedded in the web management interfaces of firewalls, VPNs, application delivery controllers, and other appliances, noting that 16 advisories involved vulnerabilities already listed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
Microsoft is offering a voluntary exit package to roughly a quarter of its global workforce, covering eligible employees at level 70 or below in the US, India, Canada and the UK. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said eligible organizations were chosen based on each business's priorities, customer commitments and workforce needs. This follows an earlier 2026 retirement offer to 8,750 US employees in April and July layoffs of 3,200 Xbox staff.
A group of financial institutions including Blackstone has arranged $63 billion in financing to buy AI computing hardware from Broadcom, which will then be leased to Anthropic. The structure allows Anthropic to access large volumes of AI infrastructure without directly financing the purchase itself.