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Zoom CEO Eric Yuan speaks at the Dropbox Work In Progress Conference in San Francisco on Sept. 25, 2019.

Matt Winkelmeyer | Getty Images for Dropbox

Zoom is cutting about 150 jobs, CNBC confirmed on Thursday, the latest tech company to slash headcount this year as investors continue to push for efficiency.

A Zoom spokesperson confirmed the cuts amount to less than 2% of the company’s workforce.

“We regularly evaluate our teams to ensure alignment with our strategy,” the spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “As part of this effort, we are rescoping roles to add capabilities and continue to hire in critical areas for the future.”

Zoom said the layoffs are not companywide, and added that it will continue to hire for roles in artificial intelligence, sales, product and across operations in 2024.

The cuts at Zoom were first reported by Bloomberg.

As of Thursday, more than 100 tech companies have laid off about 30,000 employees to start the year, according to layoffs.fyi. January was the busiest month for job cuts in the industry since March.

Last month, Microsoft cut 1,900 positions in its gaming division; Google said it’s eliminating hundreds of roles across the company; and Amazon laid off employees across its Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions.

In addition to Zoom, cloud software vendor Okta announced a downsizing on Thursday, telling employees that it’s laying off 400 staffers, or about 7% of its workforce.

Zoom exploded in popularity at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as workers turned to the video-conferencing platform to stay in touch with colleagues, friends and family. But as the pandemic subsided and many workers returned to in-person roles, Zoom’s stock has stumbled.

Zoom shares are down about 10% this year and have dropped almost 90% from their record high in October 2020.

Last February, Zoom cut around 1,300 workers, or about 15% of its workforce, as the company braced for the “uncertainty of the global economy,” CEO Eric Yuan said at the time. The cuts in 2023 hit every organization across Zoom.

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CoreWeave inks $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI

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CoreWeave inks .5 billion deal with OpenAI

Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, US, on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

CoreWeave on Thursday announced a $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI, expanding its current agreement with the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT.

The new agreement brings the AI cloud infrastructure provider’s total contracts with OpenAI to $22.5 billion.

“This milestone affirms the trust that world-leading innovators have in CoreWeave’s ability to power the most demanding inference and training workloads at an unmatched pace,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.

In March, CoreWeave announced an $11.9-billion agreement with OpenAI to provide AI datacenters and technology over five years. Intrator told CNBC in May that the companies expanded the agreement by $4 billion.

CoreWeave, which went public in March, makes money by renting out data centers packed with numerous Nvidia graphics processing units. The company is backed by Nvidia and makes a significant chunk of its revenue from Microsoft, which is a key investor in OpenAI.

At the time of its prospectus, CoreWeave said it operated 32 datacenters powered over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Earlier this month, CoreWeave’s share price popped after the company disclosed a $6.3 billion order from Nvidia.

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Databricks commits to $100 million in OpenAI spending as high-valued startups team up in AI

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Databricks commits to 0 million in OpenAI spending as high-valued startups team up in AI

Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi.

Databricks

OpenAI and Databricks are two of the most highly valued tech startups on the planet. Now they’re working together.

Databricks, a data analytics software vendor, said Thursday that it has committed to spending $100 million over multiple years with OpenAI. Databricks is making it easier for customers to connect their data stored in its cloud service with GPT-5, announced in August, and other OpenAI models.

OpenAI, which was recently valued by private investors at $500 billion, has become a household name in the years since the launch of its ChatGPT in late 2022. In partnering with Databricks, valued at more than $100 billion in its latest funding round, OpenAI has landed its first formal integration with a business-focused product vendor, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s operating chief, in a news conference Wednesday.

Lightcap said the company’s “aspiration is a multiple” of the $100 million spending commitment in terms of revenue the agreement will generate.

Databricks has formed similar partnerships with Google and with Anthropic. But OpenAI is leading the way with more than 700 million people using its ChatGPT assistant, powered by GPT-5, every week.

The company was making enterprise more of a focus even before the Databricks deal. Microsoft has been bringing OpenAI models into businesses, governments and schools. And OpenAI has been building up its own sales function.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the partnership will simplify the process for its customers when it comes to accessing OpenAI’s models, which they’ve already been using in large numbers.

Until now, if a Databricks customer wanted to tap a proprietary OpenAI model to help analyze internal data, it would have required extensive configuration, as well as legal and security sign-off.

“The key difference here is that any database customer automatically now, just by clicking in the UI, can start using this product,” Ghodsi said, referring to the user interface. Ghodsi said the price is similar to what it would cost if the user went directly to OpenAI.

Greg Ulrich, Mastercard‘s chief AI and data officer, said he’s optimistic about the integration.

“It enables opportunity for research and targeted experimentation, using AI to solve new problems, bringing value to customers, enhancing employee productivity, in an environment that we trust, that we know,” Ulrich said.

It’s an increasingly competitive space.

Databricks rival Snowflake, which has a market cap of $75 billion, announced an expansion of its Microsoft partnership in February, enabling the use of OpenAI models. Oracle, which has a $300 billion cloud contract from OpenAI, said two weeks ago that in October it will launch a service for running Google, OpenAI and xAI models on data stored in its database software.

Databricks said earlier this month that it now generates more than $4 billion in annualized revenue, growing over 50% year over year, with $1 billion coming from AI products. The company’s $100 billion valuation was announced alongside a $1 billion funding round.

OpenAI and Databricks ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list.

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European Commission launches antitrust probe into software giant SAP

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European Commission launches antitrust probe into software giant SAP

Thomas Lohnes | Getty Images

The European Commission launched an antitrust probe into German software behemoth SAP on Thursday, citing concerns about the company’s practices in software support services.

According to the Commission, the investigation will assess “whether SAP may have distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services related to an on-premises type of software, licensed by SAP, used for the management of companies’ business operations.”

SAP, in a statement on Thursday, said it believed its policies and actions were fully compliant with EU competition rules.

“However, we take the issues raised seriously and we are working closely with the EU Commission to resolve them,” a spokesperson said. “We do not anticipate the engagement with the European Commission to result in material impacts on our financial performance.”

SAP is one of Europe’s most valuable companies, with a market cap of almost 282 billion euros ($331 billion). Shares of the firm moved lower on Thursday, losing 2% by 12:45 p.m. in London (7:45 a.m. ET).

The EU probe relates to a piece of SAP software called Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.

ERP is widely used by large corporations to manage their everyday finance and accounting needs. SAP is a major player in the space — but it isn’t alone. The company competes with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, which offer their own ERP products.

Specifically, the European Commission said it was addressing the so-called “on-prem” version of SAP ERP. On-prem refers to software that is hosted on a company’s own servers, as opposed the cloud where it can be remotely accessed via SAP data centers.

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Much of SAP’s business still comes from its on-prem IT services. However, the company has for years been attempting to shift more of its focus to the cloud — particularly as it faces competition from technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the market for public cloud services.

The latest EU antitrust probe is noteworthy as it doesn’t involve Big Tech.

Much of the bloc’s work on competition policy has focused on the market power of U.S. technology giants. This has led to criticisms from both the tech sector and politicians in the U.S., who say American tech firms are being unfairly targeted. On Wednesday, Apple urged a repeal of the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s landmark digital competition law, saying it was “leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU.”

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