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OpenAI’s advertising business has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, the company said Monday, suggesting it is likely to fall well short of the $2.4 billion in ad revenue it had projected for 2026.

The ChatGPT creator launched ad sales in the chatbot in February, as a way to generate money from the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT without pay. Earlier this year, OpenAI bet ads would become the largest driver of its revenue by the end of the decade. Lately, however, OpenAI has focused heavily on building a business selling to enterprises.

In a blog post on Monday, OpenAI said advertising was “one pillar of OpenAI’s diversified business model, alongside consumer subscriptions, enterprise offerings and usage-based APIs,” the term by which developers can plug into OpenAI’s AI models.

The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 22 states sued Amazon for overcharging its advertising customers by allegedly manipulating ad auctions.

Advertisers promoting their products on Amazon’s marketplace buy ad spots where the price is set in auctions. In the complaint, the FTC and the states allege Amazon added an extra charge to bids in order to raise the price that advertisers paid above what one employee said could be achieved by “advertiser competition” alone.

Amazon said in response that the FTC’s claim “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate,” noting that “advertisers adjust bids based on real-world performance.” It said “in no scenario does an advertiser pay more than their bid.” Amazon also said it was “patently false” that Amazon tried to deceive anyone.

The FTC also presented evidence that Amazon took several steps to conceal that it was inflating auction prices from advertisers. The complaint says the practice started in 2018 and continues on to this day, and that it likely resulted in advertisers overpaying by tens of billions.

The lawsuit is reminiscent of antitrust cases against Google which accused that company of also manipulating ad auctions, in both its search advertising business and its advertising technology business. Google lost both cases.

The suit is at least the third lawsuit the FTC has filed against Amazon in the past few years, including a major case alleging the tech giant illegally monopolized ecommerce. As part of that case, the FTC called the advertising fees Amazon charges merchants “monopoly rents.” That case is expected to go to trial next year. Amazon settled a separate case with the FTC last year; this one centered on Amazon’s alleged practice of tricking customers into signing up for Prime accounts and making it difficult to cancel.

Anthropic signed a deal to rent $35 billion worth of compute capacity from Nvidia-backed cloud provider Lambda Labs, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Nvidia, an investor and supplier to Lambda, will supply its chips for the data center providing the capacity to Anthropic and hold the lease on it, the report said. Hut 8, a former bitcoin mining company, is developing the data center in Nueces County, Texas.

Anthropic has been making efforts to alleviate its compute crunch by signing a series of agreements that give it access to servers that run AI. The Lambda deal comes less than a week after Anthropic secured $45 billion of compute from U.K. cloud provider Nscale. Earlier this year, it agreed to pay SpaceX $40 billion for compute through 2029.

After 15 years leading Apple, Tim Cook is stepping down as chief executive on Monday. And while he is committed to a smooth transition and continuity to the tenure of John Ternus—senior vice president of hardware engineering, who takes over on Tuesday—changes are already happening.

Notably, long-time Apple executive Phil Schiller is stepping down as head of App Store and product events, Bloomberg reported. The App Store team will be moved under services lead Eddy Cue, while events will be switched to public relations lead Kristin Huguet Quayle.

Schiller, who previously was senior vice president of marketing until 2020, was part of the Apple old guard with deep connections to cofounder Steve Jobs when he came back to the company to successfully lead the company as CEO. (Schiller was once nicknamed “mini-Steve” as he mirrored Jobs’ fierce management style.) Schiller was often more influential than his titles would suggest, as he would weigh in on various parts of the business and product strategy. Bloomberg reported that Schiller would stay involved in the company and keep his title of “Apple Fellow” but was part of ultimately retiring.

In his own goodbye memo to employees, Cook wrote: “This is a moment I always knew would come one day, and yet it is still hard to believe it has arrived and I am writing these words.”

Cook will stay on as executive chairman and is expected to be deeply involved in parts of the company. “I look forward to seeing you in my new role at Apple Park and around the world,” he wrote.

Shares of Chinese online fashion giant Shein ended flat on its first day of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange, capping off the company’s convoluted multiyear quest to go public.

Shein’s shares opened at HK$48.56 on Tuesday, and dropped as much as 10% before shedding the losses and closing at HK$48.5, according to Hong Kong stock exchange data. By comparison, the benchmark Hang Seng Index dipped 0.93%.

As of Tuesday market close, Shein had a market capitalization of $26 billion, a far cry from the height of $100 billion reached during a private funding round in 2022. The company raised HK$13.6 billion ($1.7 billion) in the initial public offering.

Shein for years tried to downplay its China roots and position itself as a global company, as its fashionable, ultracheep clothing gained popularity among consumers in the West. The company tried to go public in both New York and London, but the attempts were thwarted by criticism against its labor and environment practices and China’s straining ties with the U.S.

Wearing a white, Shein-branded T-shirt like other employees, Sky Xu, the company’s elusive founder and CEO, attended the listing ceremony in Hong Kong but stayed out of the limelight most of the time. He didn’t deliver a speech or participate in the iconic Hong Kong-style gong-striking ritual on stage to mark the beginning of trading. Shein’s employees struck the gong and CFO Leigh Gui delivered a short speech.

Nvidia invested $3.5 billion in convertible bonds issued by Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek, Nvidia said, the latest sign of collaboration between the two companies.

MediaTek will now formally produce Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion chiplets, switches and custom memory, which connects non-Nvidia GPUs, CPUs or other specialized chips to each other. (Amazon is the first high-profile chip designer that has said it plans to use NVLink Fusion products; Nvidia announced the news during its earnings call last week.) Nvidia first announced NVLink Fusion in 2025 as a move to shift from pure chip designer to broader AI infrastructure company, as it adapts to a world with more competition. “Nvidia is an AI infrastructure provider, not a chip builder,” said Dion Harris, Nvidia’s senior director of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, in a Monday briefing with reporters. We are trying to “meet the customers where they are.”

As part of the deal, Nvidia and MediaTek will also collaborate on future generations of Nvidia’s Spark chips powering consumer PCs as well as business computers using Nvidia GPUs with MediaTek technology.

MediaTek’s profile has risen lately as the company has won Google as a customer to help with Google’s TPUs and to supply modems for Google’s latest Pixel smartphone.

Chinese AI firm Z.ai’s revenue in the first half jumped nearly fivefold from a year earlier to 954 million yuan ($142 million), boosted by skyrocketing sales of cloud-based AI model services.

Z.ai, whose stock is listed in Hong Kong, said its “open platform and API revenue,” which includes the sales of its models through application programming interfaces and other services such as coding plans, surged more than 28 times to 825 million yuan. Its loss for the period narrowed 12% to 2.07 billion yuan.

The fast growth in API sales in the first half reflects the popularity of the company’s GLM-5.1 and GLM-5.2 models, which delivered strong coding capabilities at affordable prices. Last month, Z.ai released its new-generation model, GLM-5.3, which is challenging U.S. frontier models in coding and agentic tasks.

But Z.ai is also leading an intensifying price war among Chinese AI models, which could affect its revenue and margins in the second half of this year. Last week, the company launched GLM-5.3 Flash, a low-cost model that only charges $0.15 for input and $0.50 for output per 1 million tokens.

Communities that don’t want data centers will end up being “backwards and poor,” President Donald Trump said on Monday, signaling his backing of the politically-charged industry ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

“If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame,” Trump added in a social media post. Last week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that Democrats were using voter opposition to data centers successfully in a campaign against a sitting Ohio Senator, Axios reported.

Construction of data centers is becoming a difficult issue for politicians amid voter backlash. There were more than 500 active data center bans at the start of August, according to The Information’s analysis of thousands of legal documents and local news reports.