Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., appears at a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on May 24, 2022.
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Microsoft will hold off on offering salary increases to full-time employees, CEO Satya Nadella told staffers by email on Wednesday.
The move aligns with Microsoft’s efforts to reduce costs as revenue growth slows and clients reel in spending. In January the software maker said it would cut 10,000 jobs, or just under 5% of its workforce. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and other tech companies have downsized as well in recent months.
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Last year, as inflation rippled through the economy, Microsoft nearly doubled the budget for merit increases and boosted stock allocations for certain employees. This year, compensation will look more normal.
“We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages,” Nadella wrote in the email. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Insider reported on the message earlier.
Nadella said performance bonuses for Microsoft’s top executives will be down considerably from last year.
In April, Microsoft finance chief Amy Hood said year-over-year revenue growth in the current quarter would slow to 6.7% from 7.1% in the first three months of the year. The company also called for operating expenses to grow less than 2%, compared with 7.4% growth in the first quarter.
In addition to his comments on pay, Nadella highlighted Microsoft’s effort to capitalize on a growing artificial intelligence market.
“We are clear that we are helping drive a major platform shift in this new era of Al, and doing so in a dynamic, competitive environment while also facing global macroeconomic uncertainties,” Nadella wrote.
In January, Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment in startup OpenAI, which relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to run its viral ChatGPT chatbot and provide large language models such as GPT-4 to power apps from Microsoft and a variety of other companies.
Hood said last month that Microsoft’s capital expenditures would increase quarter over quarter because of investment in Azure AI infrastructure.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
During an earnings call with analysts, Micron, which makes memory storage used for computers and artificial intelligence servers, said data center needs have fueled greater demand for its products.
Micron said it expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to hit $100 billion by 2028, growing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. Management also upped its capital expenditures guidance to $20 billion from $18 billion.
“We are more than sold out,” said business chief Sumit Sadana. “We have a significant amount of unmet demand in our models and this is just consistent with an environment where the demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future.
Micron topped Wall Street estimates for the fiscal first quarter and issued blowout guidance.
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The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.78 per share on $13.64 billion in revenue, surpassing LSEG estimates for earnings of $3.95 per share and $12.84 billion in sales.
Revenues in the current quarter are expected to hit about $18.70 billion, blowing past the $14.20 billion expected by LSEG. Adjusted earnings are forecast to reach $8.42, versus expectations of $4.78 per share.
JPMorgan upped its price target on the stock following the results, citing the favorable pricing setup, while Bank of America upgraded shares to a buy rating.
Morgan Stanley called the results the best revenue and net income upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” outside of Nvidia.
“If AI keeps growing as we expect, we believe that the next 12 months are going to have broader coat tails to the AI trade than just the processor names and memory would be the biggest beneficiary,” analysts wrote.