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An Apple Watch Ultra 2 device is displayed for sale at The Grove Apple retail store on release day in Los Angeles on Sept. 22, 2023.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Apple has stopped selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 smartwatches on its U.S. website, CNBC checks show.

Apple’s website for the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 said “currently unavailable” when viewed Thursday. The page now features a promotional image for the Apple Watch SE, a lower-cost model first introduced in 2022 that is unaffected by the patent dispute.

Apple said earlier this week that it would stop selling its latest Watch models on its website on Thursday and in Apple stores starting after Sunday. The Apple Watch SE is still available from Apple and retailers will be able to sell the latest models while they still have stock.

“Following December 24, 2023, Apple no longer sells Apple Watch units in the United States with the ability to measure blood oxygen,” according to fine print on Apple’s product pages.

The pause in sales is in response to orders from the International Trade Commission in October that found that the device’s blood oxygen sensor had infringed on intellectual property from Masimo, a medical technology company that sells to hospitals. Apple will be prevented from importing the devices, which are manufactured in China.

The pause means Apple is not selling the latest models of one of its most important products in its largest market during the busiest time of the year for Apple sales.

It could also make it more difficult for users to get repairs for existing watches by preventing swaps of broken older hardware not under warranty, according to Bloomberg News.

An Apple representative didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Apple shares were down slightly during trading on Thursday.

President Joe Biden could still veto the ITC ban before Christmas, but a White House spokesperson said earlier this week that the decision would fall to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

“We’re tracking this case and the Dec. 25 deadline,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday.

The U.S. trade representative “has the President’s delegated authority to make these determinations,” Jean-Pierre said, adding that Ambassador Katherine Tai is “carefully considering all of the factors in this case.”

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As Tesla layoffs continue, here are 600 jobs the company cut in California

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As Tesla layoffs continue, here are 600 jobs the company cut in California

As part of Tesla’s massive restructuring, the electric-vehicle maker notified the California Employment Development Department this week that it’s cutting approximately 600 more employees at its manufacturing facilities and engineering offices between Fremont and Palo Alto.

The latest round of layoffs eliminated roles across the board — from entry-level positions to directors — and hit an array of departments, impacting factory workers, software developers and robotics engineers.

The cuts were reported in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act filing that CNBC obtained through a public records request.

Facing both weakening demand for Tesla electric vehicles and increased competition, the company has been slashing its headcount since at least January. CEO Elon Musk told employees in a memo in April that the company would cut more than 10% of its global workforce, which totaled 140,473 employees at the end of 2023.

Previous filings revealed that Tesla would cut more than 6,300 jobs across California; Austin, Texas; and Buffalo, New York.

Musk said on Tesla’s quarterly earnings call on April 23 that the company had built up a 25% to 30% “inefficiency” over the past several years, implying the layoffs underway could impact tens of thousands more employees than the 10% number would suggest.

According to the WARN filing, the 378 job cuts in Fremont, home to Tesla’s first U.S. manufacturing plant, included people involved in staffing and running vehicle assembly. There were 65 cuts at the company’s Kato Rd. battery development center.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Among the highest-level roles eliminated in Fremont were an environmental health and safety director and a user experience design director.

In Palo Alto, home to the company’s engineering headquarters, 233 more employees, including two directors of technical programs, lost their jobs.

Tesla has also terminated a majority of employees involved in designing and improving apps made for customers and employees, according to two former employees directly familiar with the matter. The WARN filing shows that to be the case, with many cut from the team at Tesla’s Hanover Street location in Palo Alto.

Tesla faces reduced demand for cars it makes in Fremont, including its older Model S and X vehicles and Model 3 sedan. Total deliveries dropped in the first quarter from a year earlier, and Tesla reported its steepest year-over-year revenue decline since 2012.

An onslaught of competition, especially in China, has continued to pressure Tesla’s sales in the second quarter. Xiaomi and Nio have each launched new EV models, which undercut the price of Tesla’s most popular vehicles.

Tesla’s stock price has tumbled about 30% so far this year, while the S&P 500 is up 11%.

Musk has been trying to convince investors not to focus on vehicle sales and instead to back Tesla’s potential to finally deliver self-driving software, a robotaxi, and a “sentient” humanoid robot. Musk and Tesla have long promised customers self-driving software that would turn their existing EVs into robotaxis, but the company’s systems still require constant human supervision.

Other recent job cuts at Tesla included the team responsible for building out the Supercharger, or electric-vehicle fast-charging network, in the U.S.

Tesla disclosed plans in its annual filing for 2023 to grow and optimize its charging infrastructure “to ensure cost effectiveness and customer satisfaction.” Tesla said in the filing that it needed to expand its “network in order to ensure adequate availability to meet customer demands,” after other auto companies announced plans to adopt the North American Charging Standard.

Since cutting most of its Supercharger team, Tesla has reportedly started to rehire at least some members, a move reminiscent of the job cuts Musk made at Twitter after he bought the company and later rebranded it as X. Musk told CNBC’s David Faber last year that he wanted to rehire some of those he let go.

Read the latest WARN filing in California here:

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AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave raises $7.5 billion in debt deal led by Blackstone

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AI infrastructure startup CoreWeave raises .5 billion in debt deal led by Blackstone

Michael Intrator, CEO of CoreWeave, participates in a CNBC interview on May 9, 2024.

CNBC

Fresh off a $1.1 billion equity funding round, artificial intelligence infrastructure startup CoreWeave has raised $7.5 billion in debt so that it can more heavily invest in its cloud data centers.

Blackstone’s funds led the lending round, with participation from Coatue, Carlyle, BlackRock and others. In its equity financing two weeks ago, CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion.

Investors are flocking to CoreWeave, because the 550-person company is one of the main providers of Nvidia’s chips for running AI models. Demand for the technology is soaring as businesses across virtually all sectors are racing to integrate AI chatbots into their products following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

With Nvidia’s AI-focused graphics processing units (GPUs) in limited supply, CoreWeave’s access to the processors has made it a hot commodity. That means the company, which is backed by Nvidia, is going up against the world’s top cloud infrastructure operators, including Amazon and Google.

On its website, CoreWeave claims to have lower on-demand prices than any major cloud company. Even Microsoft, the world’s second-largest provider of cloud infrastructure, has started relying on CoreWeave to help supply OpenAI with the computing power it needs.

Collette Kress, Nvidia’s finance chief, said at a Citigroup event in September that CoreWeave has “quite some skills in terms of just their speed of adoption, their speed in terms of setting things up.”

A CoreWeave spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company is using Nvidia GPUs as collateral for the fresh debt financing. Such GPUs were used as collateral in a $2.3 billion debt round last year, Reuters reported.

The new debt will help CoreWeave pay for servers loaded with GPUs, as well as networking equipment and cabinets, the spokesperson said.

WATCH: CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator discusses the competitive landscape

CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator discusses the competitive AI landscape

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Microsoft’s Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by British regulators

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Microsoft's Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by British regulators

The Microsoft logo is displayed on a smartphone.

Mateusz Slodkowski | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority cleared Microsoft’s AI partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously inviting views on whether the arrangement qualified as a merger.

The CMA said in a brief statement Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002.”

CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral, a French AI firm founded in 2023, won a 15 million euro ($16 million) investment from Microsoft earlier this year.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. tech giant receives a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

In April, the CMA began seeking views from interested parties on partnerships agreed by U.S. tech giants with smaller AI firms to determine whether arrangements between the companies qualify as mergers.

As part of that effort, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed by Microsoft and Mistral, as well as into whether Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees from AI startup Inflection constitutes a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic.

Now, the regulator says it’s no longer looking into Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. It has given no update on its inquiries into the Amazon-Inflection deal and into Microsoft’s hiring of employees from Inflection.

Microsoft previously denied its deals with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring of employees from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon has also said that its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

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