Microsoft is planning to use the data center capacity its renting from Nebius as part of that enormous recent ~$19 billion deal to build its own AI models, @brodyford.bsky.social scoops: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

News: Microsoft sales czar Judson Althoff is getting a bigger new job: Commercial CEO. He'll take on marketing/operations teams to free up Satya Nadella & Co. for technical work. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Panos is assembling a team.

Loitering at Amazon's new hardware launch event in NYC. First, some new Ring cams: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The world's biggest supercomputer, and many of its best minds, working feverishly to invent a newfangled Yahoo dot com landing page.

"The newspaper and other news organizations reported that Israel’s military intercepted millions of Palestinian mobile phone calls, stored them on Microsoft servers and used the data to select bombing targets in Gaza." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle an FTC case that it tricked shoppers into signing up for Prime and made it hard to cancel. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft Copilot: Now, with models from the Pepsi to OpenAI's Coke. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon Prime on trial in Seattle: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Many Cascade PBS journalists I admire are losing their jobs. Seattle is also losing a valuable piece of its news ecosystem. I think of the many journalists scattered throughout local newsrooms who passed through Cascade PBS/Crosscut at some point, freelanced there, or got their start there.

Whole Foods is taking its 365 house brand international. Singapore tomorrow, with plans for more expansion to other countries where Amazon's organic grocer doesn't operate any stores stores: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I have some notes

Big bills for Amazon and Microsoft if this holds. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon's Kuiper satellite venture figures its on track to serve US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK by 1Q 2026: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Staggering numbers

Amazon's kicked the tires of GM's BrightDrop EV delivery vans: www.bloomberg.com/news/article... Small-scale - on the order of a dozen vehicles - testing as part of Amazon's massive last-mile fleet.

Another target of the FTC's Amazon probes: the company's fast-growing advertising business. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Today's (second?) most important Microsoft news: they're throwing more chips at their internal AI effort: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft is returning to the office* www.bloomberg.com/news/article... *for three days a week, starting in the Seattle area, starting in February.

Amazon's going shopping in Latin America, buying a stake in Rappi, along with the option to scoop up 12% of the Colombia-based quick delivery/everything app outfit. New: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

More on the quest to turn everything and everyone into a surveillance camera

Amazon's Delivery Service Partners - the folks who run those blue Prime-branded vans and hire the drivers - are complaining about suddenly enormous repair bills for their vans. Some say the costs jeopardize their ability to keep running: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Some Labor Day-adjacent reflections on Microsoft's No Azure for Apartheid activists:

Huh www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

extraordinarily rare press conference at Microsoft in Redmond today, hours after protesters occupied Brad Smith's office. "We need to uphold our human rights standards and we will," he said. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Protesters say they occupied Microsoft president Brad Smith's office this afternoon. Police spokesperson tells me they've detained at least two people in the Redmond HQ campus building that holds the offices of Microsoft's top execs.

Microsoft faces an employee-led guerilla campaign of mass emails and public disruptions over its sales to Israel. This month, things escalated, with two protests - and 20 arrests - on campus in Redmond. New w/@brodyford.bsky.social: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

BREAKING: Eric Adams Advisor Winnie Greco Handed a CITY Reporter Cash Stuffed in a Bag of Potato Chips www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/w...

18 arrests, Redmond PD says.

Several arrests - I counted 10+ - at a No Azure for Apartheid protest on Microsoft's campus this afternoon: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Back for a second day.

Hindsight is 20/20 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Looked something like this:

Microsoft workers and supporters of a push for the company to cut ties with Israel have set up an encampment-style protest at the company's Redmond headquarters campus: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Same

Jeff Bezos found a lot of good fortune on the way to becoming Jeff Bezos. One big element was having a mom who went to bat for him, constantly. Jackie died today at 78.

hey article wassup

Not usually a Posting About Customer Service Complaints kind of guy, but ...What, post office?

Well well well www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Hiroshima," published in 1946, changed journalism, Jane Mayer writes. It "was a model of what might be called the ethical exposé. It was built on rigorous reporting and meticulously observed details, and, through its quiet, almost affectless voice, the reader became another eyewitness."

New: A few weeks ago, when my father-in-law died, the funeral home asked if we wanted to use AI to write his obituary. So I dug into it and found that it's the biggest new trend in "death care." Tens of thousands of AI obits have been made already. Often the families don't even know wapo.st/4okuxIg

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

“There is a Wall Street finance person narrative right now that AWS is falling behind." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft finally reported an Azure revenue number, after years of various less-than-specific ways of describing cloud sales that elicited complaints from analysts, investors, reporters &even a post-MSFT Steve Ballmer bloomberg.com/news/article... by @mattmday.bsky.social @brodyford.bsky.social

wheeeeeeeeeeee www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft has decided to end one of the tech industry's silliest parlor games: Lets guess how much money Azure makes. Azure made $75,000,000,000 (+) in the year ended in June. New w/ @brodyford.bsky.social: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

All-timer of a company name. Does what it says on the box! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Well look at that, Seattle boasts a commercial space boomlet: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Microsoft and OpenAI are making strides in talks that would clear the way for the startup to restructure (and raise a lot more $). Key to the progress, we hear: Microsoft's increasing comfort that it won't find itself suddenly cut off from OAI's tech: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...