Microsoft cuts 9,000 jobs as it invests in AI, Tesla’s woes deepen as sales fall again

Microsoft has confirmed that it will lay off as many as 9,000 workers, in the technology giant’s latest wave of job cuts this year. The company said several divisions would be affected without specifying which ones but reports suggest that its Xbox video gaming unit will be hit. Microsoft has set out plans to invest heavily in artificial intelligence (AI), and is spending $80bn (£68.6bn) in huge data centres to train AI models. A spokesperson for the firm told the BBC: “We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.” The cuts would equate to 4% of Microsoft’s 228,000-strong global workforce. BBC

Tesla’s woes have deepened as latest production and deliveries figures showed a greater fall than expected. A total of 384,122 Teslas were delivered from April to June this year, a 13.5% drop on the same period last year and the second quarter of slumping output. Wall Street analysts had expected Tesla to report about 1,000 more deliveries. It’s bad news for Tesla chief executive Elon Musk in a week of attacks from President Donald Trump on him personally, as well as his companies. Sky News 

Even Tesla’s energy storage business, which has been a small, yet notable bright spot, can’t escape the cloud that’s hanging over the company. For the second consecutive quarter, deployments of its Powerwall and Megapack stationary storage products have declined, according to stats released by Tesla. In the second quarter of this year, the company installed 9.6 gigawatt-hours of storage, down 0.8 gigawatt-hours from the first quarter. TechCrunch

A jury in San Jose, California, said on Tuesday that Google misused customers’ cellphone data and must pay more than $314.6m to Android smartphone users in the state, according to an attorney for the plaintiffs. The jury agreed with the plaintiffs that Alphabet’s Google was liable for sending and receiving information from the devices without permission while they were idle, causing what the lawsuit had called “mandatory and unavoidable burdens shouldered by Android device users for Google’s benefit”. The Guardian 

OpenAI has agreed to lease 4.5 gigawatts of computing power from Oracle in a deal worth about $30bn a year that is one of the largest cloud agreements to date for artificial intelligence. The deal marks a big expansion of OpenAI’s “Stargate” data centre project, which it launched with SoftBank in January to gain access to vast amounts of computing power to develop its powerful AI models and meet consumer demand for products such as ChatGPT. FT.com

Qantas is contacting customers after a cyber attack targeted their third-party customer service platform. On 30 June, the Australian airline detected “unusual activity” on a platform used by its contact centre to store the data of six million people, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers. Upon detection of the breach, Qantas took “immediate steps and contained the system”, according to a statement. The company is still investigating the full extent of the breach, but says it is expecting the proportion of data stolen to be “significant”. BBC 

SpaceX has revealed to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that it deorbited 472 Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites – burning them up in Earth’s atmosphere – during the six-month period from December 2024 to May 2025 (2.6 per day), which marked a significant increase from previous period of six-months when just 73 met a fiery demise. At present Starlink has around 7,900 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (c.4,300 are v2 Mini / GEN 2A) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km – and they’ll add thousands more by the end of 2027. ISPreview