Microsoft has struck a $9.7 billion deal with data-center operator IREN that includes access to Nvidia’s advanced chips, aiming to ease the computing crunch that has kept the tech giant from fully cashing in on the artificial intelligence boom.

The news sent shares of IREN up more than 20% in premarket trading on Monday. AI-server maker Dell rose 5% as it would provide IREN with Nvidia’s GB300 chips and other equipment Microsoft will use for about $5.8 billion.

The five-year deal shows the AI industry’s growing hunger for computing power to run applications such as ChatGPT. It follows earnings from major tech companies last week that underscored capacity shortages were limiting their ability to fully benefit from the boom.

Partnering with IREN would allow Microsoft to expand computing capacity without building new data centers or securing additional power – two of the biggest hurdles slowing its ability to meet surging AI demand.

It will also sidestep heavy capital spending on chips that will lose value as newer, more powerful processors arrive.

IREN, which has a market value of $16.52 billion after a more than six-fold surge in its shares this year, has multiple data centers across North America with a total capacity of 2,910 megawatts. Its facilities are powered fully by renewable energy.

IREN said the Nvidia processors are scheduled for phased deployment through 2026 at its 750-megawatt Childress, Texas, campus, alongside new liquid-cooled data centers designed to deliver about 200 megawatts of critical IT capacity.

Cash from Microsoft’s prepayment will help finance part of its $5.8 billion Dell deal, IREN said in a filing. Its Microsoft contract could be terminated if it fails to meet the delivery timelines.

Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said last week the company now expects its AI capacity crunch to stretch into at least mid-2026, after previously predicting they would improve later this year.

Warren Buffett has a message for people who generate or view AI-created impersonations of him. There’s only one Oracle of Omaha.

Berkshire Hathaway said on Thursday that videos using AI-generated images of its longtime chief executive are circulating on YouTube, featuring comments he never made.

The 95-year-old investor, known for his market instincts and long-held nickname “the Oracle of Omaha,” has increasingly become a target for AI impersonators.

While the visuals often mimic Buffett, Berkshire said the audio typically features flat, generic speech that “clearly” is not his voice.

In a press release titled “It’s Not Me,” the company highlighted one video, “Warren Buffett: The #1 Investment Tip For Everyone Over 50 (MUST WATCH),” in which an impersonated voice offers investment advice.

“Individuals who are less familiar with Mr. Buffett may believe these videos are real and be misled by the contents,” Berkshire said. “Mr. Buffett is concerned that these types of fraudulent videos are becoming a spreading virus.”

The rise of deepfake technology and AI-driven voice tools has made it easier to produce realistic forgeries of public figures, intensifying concerns over misinformation and reputational damage.

In May, the FBI reported that malicious actors had used AI-generated voice calls and text messages to impersonate senior U.S. officials in attempts to access government employees’ personal accounts.

Buffett has previously complained about people pretending to be him, including through increasingly convincing AI-based impersonations.

In October 2024, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, Buffett warned of “fraudulent claims” that he had endorsed political candidates and investment products.

He has largely stepped back from political endorsements after supporting former President Barack Obama and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Buffett will step down as Berkshire’s chief executive at the end of the year and will be succeeded by Vice Chairman Greg Abel.

A consortium of around 20 banks is providing a project finance loan of about $18 billion to support the construction of a data center campus linked to Oracle in New Mexico, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, BNP Paribas SA, Goldman Sachs Group, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are administrative agents on the deal, the report said, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The four lead banks have enlisted other banks and will now sell the debt to additional banks and institutional investors through a retail syndication process, with commitments expected by late November, according to the report.

U.S. tech firms are ramping up investments in data centers to meet soaring demand for computing power, driven by increasingly complex artificial intelligence models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The New Mexico data center campus is part of the Stargate initiative, a $500 billion push to build AI infrastructure across the U.S., led by OpenAI, SoftBank Group and Oracle, the report said, adding that Oracle is expected to be a tenant at the new site.

Pricing is being discussed at 2.5 percentage points over the secured overnight financing rate and the loan is expected to carry a four-year maturity, with two one-year extension options, according to the report.

Goldman Sachs and Oracle declined to comment on the report, while the other lead banks did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Saturday the semiconductor giant’s business was growing strongly and it was experiencing “very strong demand” for its state-of-the-art Blackwell chips.

“Nvidia builds the GPU (graphics processing units), but we also build the CPU (central processing units), the networking, the switches, and so there are a lot of chips associated with Blackwell,” Huang told reporters at an event held by Nvidia’s longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in Hsinchu.

TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said Huang had “asked for wafers” but that the number was confidential.

Huang said on Friday there were “no active discussions” about selling Blackwell chips, Nvidia’s flagship artificial-intelligence chip, to China. The Trump administration has prevented such sales, saying they could aid the Chinese military and the country’s AI industry.

South Korea’s SK Hynix said last week it had sold out all its chip production for next year and planned to sharply boost investments, expecting an extended chip “super cycle” spurred by the AI boom.

Samsung Electronics also said last week it was in “close discussion” to supply its next-generation high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM4, to Nvidia.

Meta Platforms on Friday said it will invest $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure and jobs over the next three years, including artificial intelligence data centers, as the social media giant races to build infrastructure to power its AI ambitions.

Meta has doubled down on AI, with a target of achieving superintelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines outthink humans.

It has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build several large AI data centers and plans bigger outlays to meet compute needs.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. President Donald Trump that Meta will invest “at least $600 billion” in the U.S. over the next several years at a White House dinner in September.

Zuckerberg said Meta is building compute because “it’s the right strategy to aggressively front-load capacity so we’re prepared for the most optimistic cases,” on the company’s recent earnings call.

Meta has forecast “notably larger” capital expenses next year thanks to investments in artificial intelligence, including aggressively building data centers to power its AI push.

Last month, the social media giant sealed a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund its Louisiana data center, its biggest project globally.

Meta said in October it would invest $1.5 billion in a data center in Texas, breaking ground on its 29th such facility globally.

Amazon.com on Friday said it expanded its low-cost e-commerce service Amazon Bazaar, known as Haul in the U.S., to 14 additional markets, ramping up competition with Chinese rivals like Shein and PDD Holdings’ Temu in the global race to sell ultra-cheap goods like $10 dresses and $5 accessories.

Sweeping import tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump have dented consumer sentiment, especially for lower-income groups, who often seek out cheaper deals.

The standalone Amazon Bazaar app offers similar merchandise to Amazon Haul, the budget-friendly shopping section within the Amazon app, launched last year.

Amazon Bazaar, which launched in Mexico last year, will deliver a majority of products priced under $10 and some as low as $2 to its newest markets, ranging from home goods to fashion, according to the e-commerce giant.

Some of the newer markets for the low-cost e-commerce service include Hong Kong, the Philippines, Nigeria and Taiwan, it said. Since launching in Mexico, Bazaar expanded to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“Amazon Bazaar’s expansion is an important step in Amazon’s international expansion,” said D.A. Davidson & Co analyst Gil Luria. “Amazon has only entered a market when it believed it can scale up to a level where it delights consumers and builds a profitable business.”

Luria said Amazon often takes years to achieve profitability when it enters new countries and markets. The company reported third-quarter international revenue of $40.9 billion, up 10% from the year-ago period, excluding the impact of foreign exchange.

“If it can build a business selling a small selection of very low-cost items at an attractive service level, it could expand beyond the core 23 markets to nearly every other country in the world,” Luria said.

Amazon said products on Amazon Bazaar are shipped directly from the company’s global fulfillment centers to destinations and delivered to shoppers via its network of service partners.

Shein and Temu have also ramped up expansion outside the United States. Shein now operates in more than 160 countries including the U.S., Brazil, Ireland, and Southern China, according to its website. Temu ships to at least 70 countries.

The U.S. operations of both companies were dealt a blow when
the Trump administration banned the use of de minimis, a trade
exemption that allowed packages valued at less than $800 to
enter the country duty-free.

Amazon launched Haul in the U.S. in 2024 and has since
expanded the in-app service to Britain, Germany, France, Italy,
Spain, Japan and Australia.
(Reporting by Arriana McClymore in New York and Anuja Bharat
Mistry in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Matthew Lewis and
Himani Sarkar)

The Washington Post said it is among victims of a sweeping cyber breach tied to Oracle software.

In a statement released on Thursday, the newspaper said it was one of those impacted “by the breach of the Oracle E-Business Suite platform.”

The paper did not provide further detail, but its statement comes after CL0P, the notorious ransomware group, said on its website that the Washington Post was among its victims. CL0P and Oracle did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

Ransom-seeking hackers typically publicize their victims in an effort to shame them into making extortion payments, and CL0P are among the world’s most prolific. The hacking squad is alleged to be at the center of a sweeping cybercriminal campaign targeting Oracle’s E-Business Suite of applications, which Oracle clients use to manage customers, suppliers, manufacturing, logistics, and other business processes.

Google said last month that there were likely to be more than 100 companies affected by the intrusions.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday doubled down on the company’s ask for the U.S. to expand eligibility for a Chips Act tax credit, as the country accelerates efforts to secure its position as a global leader in artificial intelligence.

Altman’s comment follows OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane’s October 27 letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios seeking an extension of eligibility for the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit (AMIC) to AI server production, AI data centers and grid components.

The AMIC is a U.S. federal tax incentive designed to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

“We think U.S. re-industrialization across the entire stack — fabs, turbines, transformers, steel, and much more — will help everyone in our industry, and other industries (including us),” Altman said in a post on X on Friday.

But the tax credit is “super different than loan guarantees to OpenAI”, Altman said.

The company has spoken with the U.S. government about the possibility of federal loan guarantees to spur construction of chip factories in the U.S., but not data centers, Altman had said earlier this week.

OpenAI has committed to spend $1.4 trillion building computational resources over the next eight years, he had said.

Booming demand for AI models and products, including OpenAI’s widely used ChatGPT, has prompted leading tech companies to unveil ambitious plans for building more data centers and developing advanced chips.

David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, however, had said there would be no federal bailout for AI.

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) developer DeepSeek made its first public appearance in almost a year after it became a global sensation, fielding a senior researcher who told a government-organised internet conference that he was pessimistic about AI’s future impact on humanity.

Chen Deli took the stage alongside the chief executives of five other companies including Unitree and BrainCo at the World Internet Conference in the city of Wuzhen, in the eastern province of Zhejiang. The six companies together are known in China as “six little dragons” for AI.

Asked about DeepSeek’s global success and how its open-source approach would encourage the progress of AI, Chen said he believed that AI could be a great aid to humans as it improved over the short term, but that it could threaten job losses in 5-10 years as it becomes good enough to take over some of the work humans perform. AI firms needed to be aware of these risks, he said.

“In the next 10-20 years, AI could take over the rest of work (humans perform) and society could face a massive challenge, so at the time tech companies need to take the role of ‘defender’,” he said.

“I’m extremely positive about the technology but I view the impact it could have on society negatively.”

Since it made global headlines in January after releasing a low-cost AI model that outperformed leading U.S. models, DeepSeek representatives have only made one public appearance when its founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng met Chinese President Xi Jinping at a televised meeting with local entrepreneurs in February.

Neither Liang or the company have commented publicly on their success and they have skipped major Chinese technology conferences in the country in the months since.

Since the company’s stunning breakout, the Chinese government has positioned DeepSeek as a symbol of the country’s technological capabilities and resilience against U.S. sanctions, as the technology rivalry between the two nations intensifies.

While DeepSeek has not released a major model upgrade since January, the company’s subsequent announcements have continued to draw significant attention.

In September, it unveiled an upgrade to its V3 model, which it described as its latest “experimental” version that is more efficient to train and better at processing long sequences of text than previous iterations.

The company has also emerged as a key player in China’s efforts to build its own AI ecosystem and advance the domestic chip sector.

Chinese AI chip companies including Cambricon and Huawei have developed hardware compatible with DeepSeek’s models.

In August, DeepSeek’s announcement of an upgraded model optimized for Chinese-made chips prompted a surge in domestic chip stock prices.