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Jeffrey Smith, CEO and chief investment officer at Starboard Value LP.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Starboard Value, the activist fund run by Jeff Smith, has taken a sizable stake in graphics-design firm Autodesk and has spoken with the company’s board in recent weeks over a number of serious concerns involving its disclosures around an internal investigation that led to the ouster of its chief financial officer.

Starboard’s stake is valued at roughly $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter. The activist, which has a long track record of investing in the technology sector, is particularly concerned about the timing of Autodesk’s disclosure of an internal investigation which revealed that executives misled investors around the company’s free cash flow metrics and operating margins, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential information freely.

The results of that probe led to the ouster of Autodesk’s then-CFO, Deborah Clifford, who was moved to a different executive role within Autodesk. The probe found that executives manipulated reporting tied to company’s contract billing structure, as Autodesk shifted back to upfront payments from annualized payments, to improve those metrics.

Autodesk first disclosed in April that it had begun an internal investigation into disclosure issues around those metrics, almost a month after it had first begun the investigation and had informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was probing its financial reports. Autodesk shares slid 20% over the next few weeks. The company’s market cap now sits slightly below $50 billion.

The delayed disclosure came a little more than a week after the deadline to nominate directors closed. The tight window and timing of the disclosure has raised significant concerns inside Starboard, the people said, that Autodesk’s board deliberately chose not to inform shareholders ahead of its annual meeting. Such a delay would potentially limit a shareholder’s ability to nominate its own candidates in a contested fight.

Starboard is weighing legal action in Delaware Chancery court to compel the reopening of Autodesk’s nominating window and the delay of Autodesk’s annual meeting, the people said. Autodesk’s shareholder meeting is currently scheduled for July 16.

The activist also believes that the company can drive actual margin improvement and improve investor communications to help bolster Autodesk’s stock, the people said.

Starboard has built stakes in other major technology companies, including Marc Benioff’s Salesforce and Splunk, which was sold to Cisco in 2023 for $28 billion.

News of Starboard’s stake and plans was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

Autodesk has faced activist scrutiny before. In 2016, it settled with two activist investors at Sachem Head Capital Management and Eminence Capital to stave off a proxy contest.

Autodesk disclosed earlier this year that it is facing Justice Department and SEC probes. A representative for the company did not immediately return a request for comment.

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OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract

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OpenAI wins 0 million U.S. defense contract

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”

“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.

Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.

The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.

In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information. 

WATCH: OpenAI hits $10 billion in annual recurring revenue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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