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Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches slew of infrastructure projects from MMRDA Grounds, at Bandra-Kurla Complex, Bandra (East) on Jan. 19, 2023 in Mumbai, India.

Satish Bate | Hindustan Times | Getty Images

Apple has a big week planned in India, where the iPhone maker has growing ambitions.

After opening a flagship store in Mumbai, CEO Tim Cook will travel to New Delhi to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. Modi is keen to discuss Apple’s plans to continue expanding across the country and about the number of new jobs the company will create, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

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Modi also wants to hear from Cook about the challenges he’s facing in trying to grow the company’s production across the different states, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the topic.

“Among the biggest impediments now are at the state level,” said Nelson Cunningham, co-founder of diplomatic solutions firm McLarty Associates. “That’s where companies are finding the most headwinds,” added Cunningham, who recently returned from a trip to India.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment about a meeting with Modi.

Apple has been expanding iPhone manufacturing in India through its suppliers. JPMorgan estimates Apple will move 25 percent of its iPhone production to India by 2025.

Apple’s growth in India is widely seen as a success story by Modi and Indian officials. In November, a group of state ministers were deployed to the U.S. to meet with big companies in New York and across Silicon Valley, sources said. Their pitch? You, too, can be like Apple and manufacture and sell in India.

At a recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting that CNBC attended, a high-ranking Indian official said Apple’s achievements represent a good case study for companies considering investing in India.

But Apple’s challenges in India’s consumer market are apparent. India’s smartphone market is dominated by Google’s Android phones, which are typically less expensive than iPhones. Google’s control is so great that the company was slapped with an antitrust fine of $160 million, which was upheld in March by an appeals court in India.

Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, is optimistic on Apple’s prospects.

“Rome was not built overnight and neither will Apple’s broader India strategy,” Ives wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

More broadly for U.S. tech companies, there are concerns about how the Indian government navigates data collection, and a competition policy that’s currently tabled in India’s parliament.

“Where India lands on data protection is an open factor right now,” said Cunningham. “Where they come out will determine whether foreign firms go deeper into India.”

Another issue is a lack of highly specialized labor. While India is on pace to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, its information technology sector only employs roughly 5 million people.

Some major U.S. corporations have built footholds in India through acquisitions. Walmart bought control of e-retailer Flipkart for $16 billion in 2018. Flipkart and Amazon are dueling for the top spot in India’s e-commerce market, and both face competition from newcomer Meesho.

Disney entered the country following its $71 billion purchase of Fox’s entertainment business. That deal brought with it Star India, which is the nation’s leader in sports media. According to Media Partners Asia, Disney’s Hotstar streaming service had 49 million subscribers in 2022 in India, versus Amazon Prime Video’s 17 million and 7.5 million for Netflix.

“Disney has focused on the mainstream, Bollywood content that appeals to the masses,” said Pramit Chaudhuri, Eurasia Group’s head of South Asia.

— CNBC’s Steve Kovach contributed to this report

WATCH: Tim Cook visits India to open first Apple retail store

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ incident

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay 'kiss cam' incident

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.

Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.

“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.

Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.

Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”

In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

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Musk’s Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

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Musk's Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

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CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says ‘no more blank checks’

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says 'no more blank checks'

The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
  • Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated

Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.

For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.

The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.

In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.

Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.

Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.

Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.

Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.

“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”

Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.

The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.

Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.

Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.

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