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Oct 17, 2025
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TGIF! Oracle raises AI cloud revenue projection while struggling to profit from older Nvidia chips. Venture capitalist and major Democratic party donor Ron Conway criticizes Marc Benioff's support of Trump and quits the Salesforce Foundation. Tim Cook visits China as the iPhone Air secures regulatory approval for sale in the country.
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Oracle has struggled to generate gross profit margins higher than 25% from renting out one- to two-year old Nvidia server chips to artificial intelligence developers, The Information reported Thursday. The previously unreported data show Oracle has a wide gap to fill to reach what co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said Thursday would be 30% to 40% gross margins from the AI cloud business in the coming years. The company also increased its revenue projection for its cloud business in fiscal 2030 to an astounding $166 billion, up 15% from a projection it
made a month ago. The company is reinventing itself as a cloud provider, and its margin projections suggest it will find ways to lower the cost of chips it buys from Nvidia or will be able to charge customers such as OpenAI more to rent the chips. Internal data also show the company is losing money on rentals of the newest Nvidia chips, Blackwell, as well as on chips from AMD that came out last year, the report said.
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Ron Conway, the venture capitalist and major Democratic party donor, has left the board of the Salesforce Foundation and criticized Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s recent cheerleading of President Donald Trump. A week ago, Benioff told The New York Times that he supports Trump sending troops into San Francisco to combat crime, a comment that has sparked outrage within the cities’ liberal circles. “It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway wrote in an email to Benioff. Conway had served on the Salesforce for a decade, and his friendship with Benioff, who was once seen as a leader for left-wing ideas in San Francisco, dates back even further.
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Apple’s iPhone Air became available for preorders in China Friday, after a delay due to regulatory approvals. The iPhone Air’s China debut, about a month after the phone’s U.S. launch, comes just after CEO Tim Cook visited the country earlier this week. During his China trip, Cook met with senior officials at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which oversees telecom operators, and the Ministry of Commerce, according to the Xinhua news agency. The visit coincided with Apple’s announcement that it finally received approval to release iPhone Air in the country. Cook pledged in meetings with Chinese officials that Apple would continue to invest in China and help accelerate the country’s economic development. His visit comes as Apple shifts iPhone production out of China to India to avoid being caught in the middle of an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. Separately, Apple COO Sabih Khan visited several Chinese-owned Apple suppliers including Lens Technology, which makes the iPhone’s glass screens, the Chinese financial news outlet Yicai reported.
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CoreWeave has hired Jon Jones, the former head of Amazon Web Services’ global startups and venture capital business, as its first chief revenue officer, the company confirmed Thursday. The Information first reported Jones’ departure from AWS last month. He had been in the role for just one year and had mostly focused on landing business from AI startups. Coreweave, which rents artificial intelligence cloud computing services to companies like OpenAI, went public this March.
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OpenAI said Thursday it has blocked users from using its Sora AI video app from generating videos of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while it “strengthens guardrails for historical figures.” In a joint statement on X with King’s estate, OpenAI acknowledged that some users had generated “disrespectful” videos of him. “While there are strong free speech interests in depicting historical figures, OpenAI believes public figures and their families should ultimately have control over how their likeness is used,” the statement said. “Authorized representatives or estate owners can request that their likeness not be used in Sora cameos.” AI products have previously faced criticism for their depictions of public figures. For instance, xAI’s Grok has depicted politicians in violent or sexual situations, and Google’s Gemini generated images of U.S. founding fathers as Black, which Google then corrected.
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Microsoft is adding new AI features to its forthcoming Windows 11 operating system that will let users speak to their computer to automate tasks like locating and editing files, organizing tabs, or managing calendar events, the company announced on Thursday. The new push comes as Microsoft aims to convince more con | | | |
