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Jul 02, 2026
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Happy Thursday! Nvidia will backstop some cloud customers' GPU use in exchange for a cut of their revenues. Meta is planning for a cloud business. Alibaba and its payment affiliate pay $600 million in settlements with the U.S. over the sale of illegal drugs.
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Nvidia is promising to financially backstop young cloud providers that rent out its graphics processing units in exchange for a share of their revenues, The Information reported Wednesday. The backstop would come in the form of promising to rent back unused GPUs if the companies can’t find AI developers to rent them. GPUs are typically the most expensive part of an AI data center, so guaranteeing to rent unsold GPU capacity makes it much easier for chip buyers with subpar credit ratings to get the loans they need. The move is part of Nvidia’s longstanding push to help more companies be able to afford its vaunted but expensive GPUs.
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Meta Platforms is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, Bloomberg reported, putting it in direct competition with cloud firms such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Meta has spent heavily to expand its AI data centers in recent years, to give it more capacity for its own AI development and operations. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled in recent months that he could sell some excess capacity to other firms. “It’s definitely on the table,” Zuckerberg said at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting in May. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken similar steps, striking deals with firms such as Anthropic and Google to rent out spare capacity originally developed for SpaceX’s own AI unit. Launching a cloud business would help Meta generate revenue that could offset some of the substantial costs associated with its AI data center expansion. The Bloomberg report said Meta is building a unit to sell excess computing capacity to external customers, the report said, citing unnamed sources. Meta is also considering offering access to AI models hosted on its own infrastructure, alongside raw computing capacity.
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and its affiliated payment processor AUS Merchant Services agreed to pay $600 million to resolve U.S. allegations that they failed to prevent illegal sales of pharmaceuticals, controlled substances and related equipment through Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, according to the Department of Justice. The DOJ said Alibaba admitted that it failed to stop third-party merchants from engaging in about 80,000 product sales worth more than $200 million in total, between January 2016 and December 2024. AUS, a subsidiary of Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, failed to stop some merchants from using its payment service to facilitate prohibited sales, the DOJ said. Under the non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ, Alibaba will pay $125 million in a criminal fine and an additional $200 million to forfeit the value of the illicit sales. AUS will pay a $85 million criminal penalty and forfeit $190 million. Both firms agreed to enhance their compliance programs and to cooperate with any related DOJ investigation in the future. “Alibaba reached a mutually satisfactory resolution with U.S. regulators on bringing stricter compliance to the sale of products in the United States by third-party merchants on its e-commerce platforms,” an Alibaba spokesperson said. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to fully resolve this matter. We have made continuous improvements to our compliance program and will continue to do so to ensure compliance with laws and regulations in all markets where we operate,” an AUS spokesperson said.
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Microsoft is planning to lay off thousands of employees across the company in the coming week, including in sales and engineering units, according to someone briefed on the plans. The layoffs will also include job cuts across Microsoft’s Xbox gaming organization that have been previously reported. Microsoft typically conducts layoffs after the close of its fiscal year, which ended on Tuesday. The company last year laid off more than 9,000 employees in July after cutting 6,000 employees just a few months prior. This year’s layoffs are expected to be significantly smaller, said the person briefed on them, in part because Microsoft already offered a voluntary buyout program for employees near retirement age earlier this year. But salespeople who earn commissions were not eligible for the buyouts, this person added. The cuts come as Microsoft aims to balance costs, including its unprecedented spending on data centers needed to train and run AI applications for itself and its customers. Even with its massive layoffs last year, headcount stayed flat between 2024 and 2025 at around 220,000 employees. However, Microsoft earlier this year froze hiring in sales and other departments, and CFO Amy Hood said in April that its headcount slightly declined from the same period a year earlier and is expected to decline slightly in the year ahead. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment. Business Insider earlier reported some details of the planned layoffs.
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Shares of Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons, which is rolling up aging internet businesses, opened up 11% in its public debut on Wednesday. The company had priced its initial public offering at $29 a share, just above the preliminary range of $26 to $28 a share. The IPO price values the company at $19.4 billion. Bending Spoons has swallowed up well known firms such as AOL, Eventbrite, Vimeo and Evernote. In the first quarter, those acquisitions more than doubled its revenue to $601 million, and helped it report an operating profit of $120 million compared with an operating loss a year earlier. A successful IPO would show that it’s not only AI-related firms which can do well on the public markets. The real test, however, will be where Bending Spoons trades in the coming weeks.
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