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Microsoft announced a voluntary exit offer for eligible employees at experience level 70 or below in the U.S., Canada, India and the U.K., covering roughly 60,000 workers, or about 27% of its 223,000-person workforce. Employees must decide by December, with departures effective Dec. 31, and some marketing, sales and engineering teams reportedly opted out of participating.
Meta announced plans to raise $95 billion through equity offerings to fund its AI infrastructure and superintelligence efforts, starting with $35 billion in underwritten public equity followed by $60 billion via an at-the-market program. The funds will support AI initiatives including its apps, the Muse AI agent, and data center expansion, alongside operating cash flow, debt, and partnerships. Shares rose 1.6% in premarket trading following the news.
Meta Platforms said it intends to raise as much as $95 billion to support its large-scale investments in artificial-intelligence infrastructure, including efforts tied to what it calls personal superintelligence. The company did not detail the exact financing structure in the announcement.
Meta is launching roughly $35 billion in stock and convertible preferred securities this week, with a further $60 billion share-sale program planned once new nonvoting Class C shares begin trading in early 2027. The company says the fundraising will help finance its AI infrastructure expansion, including four superclusters each exceeding one gigawatt of capacity, as annual capital spending is now forecast at $135 billion to $145 billion. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have reportedly expressed interest in buying up to $5 billion of the shares combined.
Security researchers discovered serious vulnerabilities in the open source PHP programming language this week, prompting urgent warnings for website owners to patch immediately or take sites offline. TechCrunch's Equity podcast hosts discussed the incident, noting the flaws were found by human researchers rather than AI tools.
A former Luminar CTO and co-founder, who worked on lidar technology for self-driving cars, writes that AI companies are evolving from infrastructure customers into infrastructure builders themselves. He draws on his 2022 experience speaking at an automotive conference about the autonomous vehicle transformation to frame today's AI buildout.
SpaceX is reportedly negotiating access to roughly 80,000 cell sites to support a new network, according to a report. Details on the identity of the tower owners, the network's purpose, and timing have not been disclosed.
Barclays has become the latest major company to reduce its workforce, citing efficiency gains tied to artificial intelligence investment. The move follows a pattern across industries this year where firms are cutting jobs or slowing hiring while redirecting spending toward AI infrastructure and capabilities.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which runs TikTok in the US, has been exploring deals to secure several gigawatts of computing capacity over coming years, according to two people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC. One source said the target is around four gigawatts by the early 2030s. TikTok's spokesperson said the company runs primarily on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and that Oracle will remain its primary cloud provider.
The UK government has published a policy paper proposing new criminal offences and penalties for damaging or interfering with undersea cables and pipelines, including physical attacks, cyberattacks, and obstruction of repairs. Proposed penalties range from two years for gross negligence to 14 years for intentional sabotage, alongside potentially unlimited fines and new ministerial powers. The move follows reports of roughly 500 incidents involving Russian fishing trawlers loitering near UK undersea cables over the past four and a half years.
A Consumer Reports survey found that most Americans who have lived in their homes for over three years are paying more for electricity than they did three years ago, with three-quarters saying the increases have strained their household finances. Respondents most often blamed utility company profits and AI data center growth for the hikes, and over 75% said they don't trust state lawmakers to protect them from further rate increases.
In an interview, Celonis's Devavrat explained that the company's 'context model' sits between workflow and system-of-record tools below and business users or AI agents above. He said the model is built to abstract underlying processes, deploy guardrailed agents for specific tasks, and be 'agent first' so other agentic systems can interface with it directly. He added that existing workflow data does not need to be complete or clean for the system to connect to and interpret it.