Packages move along a conveyor at an Amazon fulfillment center on Cyber Monday in Robbinsville, New Jersey, on Nov. 29, 2021.
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Amazon will host a spring sale next week with discounts on seasonal items, and this one is not restricted to Prime members.
Amazon said Thursday that the event, which it’s calling the “Big Spring Sale,” will run for six days starting March 20, in North America. Unlike the Prime Day discount bonanza typically held in the summer, next week’s event will be open to shoppers who don’t pay for a Prime membership. The subscription program costs $139 per year, or $14.99 a month, in the U.S., and perks include free, speedy shipping; video streaming; and access to exclusive Prime Day deals.
Spring fashion, fitness products, outdoor furniture, Amazon-branded devices and other “warm weather essentials” are among the categories that will be discounted, Amazon said. It’s the first time Amazon has held such an event in the first quarter.
In recent years, Amazon has added shopping events, including a “Prime Big Deal Days” in the fall, a 48-hour “Pet Day” and a beauty-focused sale ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The company is launching its spring event as shoppers, grappling with high inflation, remain hungry for discounts. Inflation has receded from its 40-year highs in mid-2022, but it remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal. Consumer prices rose more than expected last month, increasing 3.2% in February from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday.
Amazon also faces rising competition from low-cost retailers Temu and Shein, which have been on an ad-spending blitz to attract American shoppers. Shein mostly offers deeply discounted apparel and accessories. Temu is akin to an online flea market and has seen its popularity boom due to its rock-bottom prices and a gamified shopping experience.
US President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Junichi Miyakawa, chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp., and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced a joint venture to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure worth billions of dollars with the leaders of Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC, and Oracle Corp., an effort aimed at speeding development of the emerging technology.
Aaron Schwartz | Sipa | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI and its principal cloud partner, is losing its designation as exclusive provider of computing capacity for the artificial intelligence startup.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said that it’s still in a favorable position with OpenAI. Going forward, when OpenAI seeks additional capacity, Microsoft will have the “right of first refusal” before OpenAI checks with other parties.
The change in their relationship was disclosed as part of President Donald Trump’s announcement of the Stargate Project, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. Executives from those companies committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be set up as a separate company.
Oracle is a “key initial technology partner” alongside Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia in setting up data center infrastructure, OpenAI said in a blog post.
“The data centers are actually under construction,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said at a press conference at the White House, alongside Trump. “The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations beyond the Abilene location, which is, which is our first location.”
In 2019, three years before the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which committed to moving its services to Azure. As OpenAI’s computing needs expanded, Microsoft signed contracts with third-party cloud providers, such as CoreWeave, to supplement its Azure cloud infrastructure.
Oracle entered the mix last year. The database software maker, which trails Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the cloud market, said in June that Microsoft’s Azure AI platform would be extended to Oracle’s cloud.
OpenAI said on Tuesday that it will continue to increase consumption of Azure, and Microsoft said OpenAI recently made “a new, large Azure commitment” for products and model training. Microsoft still has rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, which can go in products such as Copilot. And it still has the exclusive on supplying computing requests for OpenAI’s application programming interface.
But the relationship has shown signs of strain, and Microsoft named OpenAI as a competitor in July. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s big ambitions on a podcast with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley that was released in December.
“What he wants to do, I have to accommodate for, so that he can do what he does,” Nadella said. “And he needs to accommodate for the discipline that we need on our end, given the overall constraints that we may have.”
At a press briefing to announce a joint venture for investing in artificial intelligence infrastructure, Trump was asked by a reporter if he was open to “Elon buying TikTok.”
“I would be if he wanted to buy it, yes,” Trump said in response. “I’d like Larry to buy it, too.”
TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, is in a state of limbo in the U.S. after Trump signed an executive order on Monday to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. for 75 days. That order aims to suspend a ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court last week upheld the validity of a national security law that would penalize app stores and service providers for hosting TikTok unless ByteDance sold it.
Analysts have valued TikTok’s U.S. business at about $50 billion.
Trump said on Tuesday that TikTok would be “worthless” without a permit to operate in the U.S., but could be worth $1 trillion with one.
Musk, who is also CEO of SpaceX and owner of social media app X, was one of Trump’s top financial backers in the campaign and is positioned to wield major influence in the administration. Ellison is a longtime Trump supporter, and Oracle is TikTok’s cloud infrastructure provider in the U.S.
“What I’m thinking about saying to somebody is, buy it and give half to the United States of America,” Trump said. “And we’ll give you the permit.'”
Trump said ByteDance would have “the ultimate partner” in the U.S. which would “make it very worthwhile for them in terms of the permits and everything else.”
Trump’s views on TikTok have shifted radically since his first term. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order to ban the app. A federal court viewed his effort as “arbitrary and capricious,” and blocked him. He began to speak more favorably of TikTok after he met in February with billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a major ByteDance investor who also owns a stake in the owner of Truth Social, Trump’s social media app.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew attended Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
ByteDance has not indicated whether it will sell TikTok, but the Chinese government has reportedly considered a plan that would involve Musk acquiring the operations.
Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Oracle and TikTok representatives also didn’t provide an immediate comment.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder, president and CEO, speaks about the future of artificial intelligence and its effect on energy consumption and production at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2024.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Nvidia passed Apple in market value on Tuesday, once again becoming the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world.
Shares of the chipmaker rose over 1% on Tuesday, and shares are up about 4% so far in 2025 after rising 171% in 2024 and nearly 239% in 2023, reflecting insatiable demand for the company’s artificial intelligence chips.
Meanwhile, Apple shares slid 4% on Tuesday. They’re now down 12% this year after gaining 30% in 2024. The iPhone maker has developed its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features for its phones and laptops, but its business doesn’t have the same level of exposure to the AI boom.
Nvidia has the vast majority of market share for graphics processing units, or GPUs, which have become essential for developing and deploying AI software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While revenue growth has slowed, it still nearly doubled to $35.08 billion in the most recent quarter.
Apple was the first company to reach the $1 trillion, $2 trillion and $3 trillion market cap milestones. Nvidia previously passed Apple in June and then again in November.
On Tuesday, Nvidia had a market cap of about $3.4 trillion, versus Apple at $3.3 trillion.Microsoft is just behind them at $3.2 trillion. A major buyer of Nvidia’s GPUs. Microsoft said earlier this month that it expected to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in fiscal 2025.