I really have nothing nice to say about this Liverpool match...and my mother always said if you can't say anything nice...

Also Microsoft is keeping its 20% revenue share, sources tell us, but OpenAI has more time to make payments.

BREAKING: Amazon is making "significant" cuts to its video-game division, moving away from MMOs like New World, and gutting its Irvine and San Diego development studios www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Fans have spent the last two years wondering why Xbox is closing studios, canceling games, raising prices, cutting jobs, and releasing its games on rival PlayStation and Nintendo platforms. This ambitious 30% profit margin target helps explain many of those moves. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

SCOOP: For the last two years, Microsoft has pushed Xbox to hit profit margins of 30%, an ambitious target that's far higher than the industry average. This chase for profit has led Xbox to raise prices, cut thousands of jobs, and rethink everything. Story: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I for one can't wait for next week when we nail Mo and Cody to the touchline again, ask our fullbacks to underlap constantly, and nobody knows what anybody else is doing while our press looks like steaming dogshit but individually we create enough xG to say maybe on another day...

Well that was not an enjoyable match at all. Slot’s got a lot to work out here.

Globally, data centers are expected to consume more than 4% of electricity by 2035 - if they were a country they’d rank 4th in power use www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202... via @bloomberg.com By Josh Saul, Leonardo Nicoletti, Demetrios Pogkas, @dinabass.bsky.social @naurtorious.bsky.social

Electricity now costs 267% more (!!) for 1 month vs. what it cost 5 years ago near data center hotspots. Awesome reporting from Josh Saul @dinabass.bsky.social Leonardo Nicoletti @naurtorious.bsky.social Demetrios Pogkas (gift link) www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Invisible Technologies, a Scale AI rival that helped train ChatGPT, raised $100M, sources say at a $2B+ valuation, and reports $134M in 2024 sales (Dina Bass/Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

OD, the collaboration between Xbox and Hideo Kojima, is still in development, a Microsoft spokesperson tells me.

BREAKING: Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles.

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

Many of Xbox's subsidiaries are getting hit by the layoffs this morning, including Call of Duty studios such as Raven. Big cuts at Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 - nearly 50% of staff, per source.

BREAKING: The new MMORPG project from Zenimax Online Studios, maker of Elder Scrolls Online, has been canceled as part of the Xbox layoffs, sources tell Bloomberg News. The project, code-named Blackbird, had been in development since 2018. Still more news to come this morning.

Google has signed the first commercial deal with nuclear fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems and will make a second investment in CFS (both of undisclosed size) as cloud and AI companies look for more sources of energy. With Will Wade www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Breaking: Microsoft is planning major job cuts at Xbox that will begin next week, sources tell Bloomberg News. Not yet clear how many people, but it's expected to be big. This will be the fourth mass layoff at Xbox in the last 18 months. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

One of the top-ranked hackers in the US isn't a person - it's an AI from a company called @xbow.com Founded by former GitHub Copilot chief Oege de Moor, Xbow has closed a $75 mln Series B round backed by Altimeter, Sequoia and Nat Friedman www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Bell plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to build data centers in six Canadian cities, its CEO said in an interview. The first site, in British Columbia, is expected to come online in June, with US-based AI chip startup Groq as anchor tenant. @dinabass.bsky.social had the story first:

So why is Microsoft back to pouring resources into training its own large language models? When will it use them as versus OpenAI's? @austincarr.bsky.social and I spoke with Satya Nadella and Mustafa Suleyman on the philosophy behind MAI

2 years ago Microsoft set out to spin an early GenAI lead (courtesy of the OpenAI deal) into corporate & consumer AI gold. @austincarr.bsky.social I take a look at how it's gone, how Satya is hedging bets, building new AI models & navigating changing OAI conditions www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Inside the secretive Microsoft MSTIC unit: How the elite hacker hunters became a pillar of US cyber defenses

Inside the secretive Microsoft MSTIC unit: How the elite hacker hunters became a pillar of US cyber defenses

We took an inside look at Microsoft's MSTIC threat intel center, the team that hunts nation-state hackers and helped the US gov't discover a massive attack on US telecoms over the summer and fall: bloomberg.com/news/feature... Feature by me, @jeffstone.bsky.social and Jake Bleiberg

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water. A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

Arne Slot’s first season at Liverpool has been remarkable. One signing in January and he’s won the league with a month to spare. FSG deserve credit too — they’ve been great owners, even if some fans don’t want to admit it. Stability and smart calls.

LIBPOOL BACK ON OUR PERCH LIBPOOL LIBPOOL BACK ON OUR PERCH

And Mo gets his!

It's a bit wacky to be in a position to cheer that loudly at the scene of a ref miming the shape of a screen but at this exact moment I'm not inclined to criticize VAR

Some personal news: After covering Microsoft for more than half that company's 50 years, I'm excited to be switching to a newly created AI Infrastructure beat! The brilliant @brodyford.bsky.social will be taking over for me, joining the equally brilliant @mattmday.bsky.social on the Microsoft patch.

Google Cloud has secured a $2.5 billion contract with Salesforce (normally a mostly-AWS shop), plus a bunch of product integration work meant to help Google and Salesforce better compete with Microsoft Office and Microsoft AI tools. Story with @brodyford.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI showed off the updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology that the billionaire has said is the “smartest AI on Earth.”

NEW: Apple, SpaceX and T-Mobile have secretly been working together to launch Starlink satellite support for iPhone customers. It’s a secret addition in iOS 18.3 and Starlink will slowly roll out in beta for T-Mobile users who apply. Details here: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Microsoft and OpenAI are looking into whether a group linked to DeepSeek obtained data output from OpenAI's API in an unauthorized manner, sources tell @shiringhaffary.bsky.social and me www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I know we're all paying attention to the $500B massive AI infrastructure/data center thing but also Microsoft and OpenAI made some tweaks to their multiyear deal: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The US FTC says Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, as well as AWS and Google's with Anthropic, raises antitrust concerns: bloomberg.com/news/article... with @ebirnbaum.bsky.social @rachelmetz.bsky.social @leahnylen.bsky.social

Microsoft says Jay Parikh will oversee new Core AI engineering group (he had been hired at the end of October as minister without portfolio)

sadly cruel censorship did not allow me to use the best quote I got on background for this, "we're existentially fucked" foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/07/c...

Wait till he finds out where the Gulf of California is

I had a blast talking with the crew over at @theverge.com about what comes next for antitrust

A few weeks before they were expected to start reporting to the office full time, thousands of Amazonians are being told that their employer will not have space for them to R T the O: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon gave Microsoft a list of tweaks, including more comprehensive logging of user activity. “They’ve done yeoman’s work,” Amazon’s chief information security officer told me. “We’ve given them some pretty steep tasks.” Amazonians should see cloud-based Office next year

News: Amazon employees were supposed to have Microsoft’s cloud-based Office suite by now. But the rollout has been delayed for a year following a high-profile hack, giving time for Microsoft to address Amazon’s concerns about the security of the software: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

What's old is new, time flat circle etc. FTC officially launches sweeping antitrust probe of Microsoft over whether the company is illegally mainting its dominace in enterprise software and cloud computing. W/ @leahnylen.bsky.social and @dinabass.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

And so it begins. w/ @sisco.bsky.social and @dinabass.bsky.social www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Jacob Trouba responds to trade talk after Rangers put him back on the block: Trouba on being involved in a fresh round of trade talk: "You've got to kind of block all that out and just focus on playing hockey."

New: Video game console-makers are grappling with a future where consumers can't really tell the difference between 4k and 8k. After the PS5 Pro release, we ask: How much better can these things really get? Story with Takashi Mochizuki and @dinabass.bsky.social: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon makes chips. A lot of them. I spent some time with Amazon's scrappy engineers, who want a piece of Nvidia's lucrative AI chip business. They might get it. (If the software works...) New: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

So, @propublica.org reports that Georgia's maternal mortality review committee determined that two women died after being denied access to care under the state's abortion ban, and Georgia's response is to dismiss all members of the committee. www.propublica.org/article/geor...

Already seeing "beat the tariffs" sales.