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Google headquarters is seen in Mountain View, California, United States on September 26, 2022. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

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Google eliminated over 1,800 jobs in its home state California as part of the biggest round of layoffs in company history.

On Friday, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 employees, roughly 6% of the full-time workforce. According to filings released by the state and viewed by CNBC, 1,845 positions, or 15% of the cuts, were in California.

Most of the headcount reduction in the state occurred in and around the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Some 1,436 jobs were cut in Mountain View, where Google is based, while 119 were in San Bruno, home to YouTube. Palo Alto saw 53 cuts.

“Employee separations at the Facilities resulting from this action are expected to commence March 31, 2023,” read the filings, which were dated Jan. 20.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the March date is due to a notification period required in California. WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) forces employers to give impacted employees as well as state and local representatives at least 60 days written advance notice “of any plant closing or mass layoff.”

Google’s initial announcement said the company would pay U.S. employees “during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).”

More than a quarter of the Bay Area roles affected had “director” or “senior” in the titles. The cuts also included 27 in-house massage therapists, with 24 in Mountain View and three in the Southern California markets of Los Angeles and Irvine.

In total, 177 cuts took place in L.A., mostly from the company’s Playa Vista campus. There were 60 cuts in Irvine.

Alphabet is reckoning with slowing growth and recession risks as the tech market adjusts to the end of an extended bull market. At a companywide meeting on Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the layoffs while taking questions from employees, who expressed concerns about the future.

“I understand you are worried about what comes next for your work,” Pichai said at the meeting. “Also very sad for the loss of some really good colleagues across the company.”

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Nvidia partner Foxconn reports 26% revenue spike as AI boom continues

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Nvidia partner Foxconn reports 26% revenue spike as AI boom continues

The logo of multinational tech company Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai), which is a major manufacturer for Apple products, in Taipei, Taiwan, on April 16, 2025.

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Foxconn, a key Nvidia partner in its artificial intelligence buildout, saw its revenue spike 26% year-on-year in November, as demand for servers continued to ramp up amid the AI boom.

The Taiwanese company, also known as Hon Hai, is the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and makes the servers that hold chips in data centers, as well as assembling Apple’s iPhone. 

Foxconn on Friday reported “strong growth” year-on-year for its cloud and networking products, pointing to “momentum for AI server racks,” in its monthly revenue report. It reported revenue of NT$844.3 billion ($27 billion) for November. 

A longstanding partner to many of the world’s largest tech companies including Nvidia and Apple, Foxconn has become a key player in the rollout of AI infrastructure in recent times. 

It was announced in May that the company would provide infrastructure to a major AI factory in Taiwan, in collaboration with Nvidia and the Taiwanese government. Two months later Foxconn announced it was taking a stake in data center construction company TECO Electric & Machinery Co.

OpenAI said last month that it would collaborate with the Taiwanese company on design work and U.S. manufacturing readiness for next generation AI infrastructure hardware.  

OpenAI taps Foxconn to build AI hardware in the U.S.

Foxconn’s month-on-month revenue was down around 6%, with the company pointing to its smart consumer electronics segment slightly declining. 

“AI server rack shipments continue to ramp up, and ICT products are in peak season in the second half of the year,” the monthly report said in its business outlook for the fourth quarter. 

The company said in November that growth in its AI server business had seen its third-quarter profits jump 17% year-on-year.

Foxconn’s share price has jumped 26% since the start of 2025, following a 76% uptick over the previous 12 months.

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Meet Binance’s new co-CEO Yi He: The mysterious and omnipresent ‘life partner’ of CZ

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Meet Binance's new co-CEO Yi He: The mysterious and omnipresent 'life partner' of CZ

Yi He, co-founder of Binance, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on May 10, 2023.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Binance Holdings, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, named a new co-CEO Wednesday in a major shake-up of its leadership structure.

Yi He, who co-founded Binance with former head Changpeng Zhao in 2017 and has children with the crypto mogul, will now split duties with acting CEO Richard Teng, who announced the news this week.

The move represents the firm’s most significant leadership change since Teng succeeded Zhao, who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. money-laundering laws in 2023. 

Teng, who was appointed amid intense regulatory scrutiny of Binance and crypto more broadly, notably had a background in financial regulation and services, formerly holding a senior regulatory role at Singapore’s central bank.

“[Yi He] has been there from the start, and she has been driving a lot of changes and driving the growth of Binance,” Teng told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on Wednesday shortly after the announcement.

Binance CEO sees exponential growth for company with new leadership structure

Yi He’s elevation to the co-CEO position represents the appointment of an insider with longstanding ties to Zhao, also known as CZ.

The move comes after U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned CZ, who had previously pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering while heading the cryptocurrency exchange.

The Trump administration has taken a friendlier stance toward the crypto industry, with several high-profile cases dropped in recent months. 

Queen behind the scenes

Yi He has maintained a relatively low public profile compared to CZ, with many details regarding her roles and activities at Binance unclear.

Her social profiles list her most recent position as Chief Customer Service Officer at the crypto exchange.

One of the last major public statements from the businesswoman was in defense of CZ during his 2024 trial, among 161 letters requesting leniency from the court.

In her letter written in Chinese, Yi He identified herself as CZ’s business partner and “the mother of his three children.”

She claimed that she met CZ at a public blockchain event in 2014, three years before Binance was founded. She was then working at cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin and recruited CZ to join her.

“As CZ’s life partner, I’ve known him for nearly ten years, so I understand a side of him that’s often overlooked,” she wrote in the 2024 letter defending him.

Binance said in a statement Wednesday that Yi He has “played a fundamental role in shaping Binance’s vision and culture, guiding a strategy focused on users’ needs and innovation.”

The company also included a public statement from Yi He, in which she emphasized her and Teng’s “complementary perspectives and shared vision.” 

“Together, we bring diverse perspectives and are confident in leading the future of the industry during this pivotal time, as we responsibly expand our global presence and drive sustainable innovation with our users always at the center,” she said.

Binance CEO Richard Teng on crypto regulation and Trump's pardon for founder CZ

Federal probes into Binance have also referenced her role in the company. In 2020, U.S. prosecutors reportedly sought records of communications involving Yi He and other executives related to anti-money laundering compliance and the creation of Binance’s U.S. entity.

Media reports have previously painted Yi He as a “Crypto Queen” wielding massive sway behind the scenes at Binance. 

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal in 2023,  Yi He was a former Chinese talk-show host before joining OKCoin, and she entered a relationship with CZ while working together in Shanghai. 

The report added that He would assume sweeping control over the crypto giant’s marketing and investment divisions. 

Binance and Yi He did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

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Global websites back online as Cloudflare issues a dashboard fix

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Global websites back online as Cloudflare issues a dashboard fix

The Cloudflare logo appears on a smartphone screen and on the background on computer screen Internal server error in this photo illustration on November 18, 2025 in Lviv, Ukraine.

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U.S. internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said on Friday it had issued a fix for an issue with its dashboard and related apps.

Shares of the company fell as much as 4.5% in premarket trading after global websites went down and Cloudflare said it was investigating.

The company issued an update minutes later saying it had “implemented a fix” and was watching for results. Cloudflare shares pared some of its losses on the news and were last seen 2% lower.

Sites including professional networking platform LinkedIn, digital currency exchange Coinbase and online publishing platform Substack were among those that appeared to be impacted by the issue.

Outage monitoring site Downdetector, which itself appeared to be briefly impacted, said users reported a sharp uptick in problems on sites, including e-commerce platform Shopify, HSBC and food delivery group Deliveroo, among others, at around 9:16 a.m. London time.

These reports fell as Cloudflare implemented its fix shortly thereafter.

The outage comes less than three weeks after a similar Cloudflare crash caused error messages across the internet, an issue that the company said was “unacceptable” at the time, given the importance of its services.

Cloudflare’s software is used by many businesses worldwide, helping to manage and secure traffic for about 20% of the web. Among the services it provides are that it guards against distributed denial of service attacks, which are when malicious actors attempt to overload a website’s system with so many traffic requests that it can’t function.

— CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed to this report.

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