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The Bluesky logo displayed on a smartphone screen. 

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Brazil’s recent ban of Elon Musk’s social media platform X has boosted the profile of its smaller rival, Bluesky, as people search for alternatives to voice their opinions.

Bluesky said in a post that it had attracted two million new users in a span of a week, and the app appeared to be experiencing some problems on Wednesday, with several users reporting an outage.

“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said in a post, adding, “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”

On Saturday, the company also said that users from Brazil were setting new all-time highs for activity.

The reported uptick in the platform’s traffic comes after a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered a nationwide suspension of the X platform on Friday. A Supreme Court panel affirmed the ruling on Monday. 

Predating the ban, X indicated it would not comply with court orders in Brazil concerning its content moderation policies and a request to appoint a new legal representative in the country.

The judge, Alexandre de Moraes, has also ordered daily fines for people or businesses in Brazil that use virtual private networks (VPNs) or other methods to access X while it’s banned, according to local media

X is estimated to have over 22 million users in Brazil. 

As of Wednesday, Bluesky was the top free app on Brazil’s iOS App Store, followed by Threads — an X-alternative by Meta Platforms which also own Facebook and Instagram. 

“We’re so back,” the official Threads account posted on Wednesday without providing further context. 

Market share battle  

Bluesky was first announced in 2019 as a project to build an open, decentralized social protocol, backed by Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter — which was rebranded as X after Musk bought it. Bluesky became an independent company in 2021. Dorsey cut ties with the platform earlier this year.

Bluesky, Threads and the open-source, decentralized network Mastodon, have been competing to unseat X as the top microblogging platform.

Amid controversies surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022 and his subsequent changes to the platform, these companies have experienced a jump in their users.

Bluesky’s sign-ups from the U.K. had reportedly surged last month, while Musk had been posting controversial comments about nationwide riots in the country.

However, despite reports of advertisers and some users fleeing X, none of the alternatives have emerged as a credible threat to X. 

Threads appears to be the closest, with over 200 million monthly active users, according to a post on Threads by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in August.

In May, Musk said in a post that X had reached 600 million monthly active users and around 300 million daily active users.

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Amazon’s new Echo devices designed for Alexa+ start at $99

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Amazon's new Echo devices designed for Alexa+ start at

Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, announces the Echo Studio and Echo Dot Max during an Amazon event showcasing new products in New York City, U.S., September 30, 2025.

Kylie Cooper | Reuters

Amazon on Tuesday unveiled four new smart speakers and voice-activated displays that are revamped with Alexa+, its personal assistant that’s powered by generative artificial intelligence.

The company debuted the Echo Dot Max, a revamped version of its compact smart speaker, which costs $99.99. Amazon also unveiled a new Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11, priced at $179.99 and $219.99, respectively.

There’s also a new version of the Echo Studio, a larger, higher-end model with a more powerful speaker, priced at $219.99.

All the devices are available for preorder on Tuesday, and users will get Alexa+ early access “out of the box,” Amazon said. The Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio ship Oct. 29, while the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 11 ship Nov. 12.

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The devices were launched at Amazon’s fall hardware bonanza, held in New York. They’re the first batch of revamped products under the leadership of Panos Panay, a former Microsoft hardware leader who joined Amazon in 2023.

It’s also the first set of Amazon hardware to integrate the company’s long-awaited Alexa+, which debuted in February and has slowly rolled out in early access for some users.

“These are the most powerful Echo devices we have ever created,” Panay said on stage at the event. “Custom silicon, advanced sensors, our best microphones and sound, noise cancellation, understanding the user, faster than anything we’ve ever delivered before. They’re also beautifully designed to fade into the background.”

Alongside a revamped look, Amazon added new AZ3 and AZ3 Pro chips for edge processing to the devices, which are faster, more powerful and have “AI built right in,” said Daniel Rausch, the head of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo businesses.

Panos Panay, head of Amazon’s Devices and Services team, introduces Echo during an Amazon product event in the Manhattan borough of New York City on September 30, 2025. Amazon announced its next generation of Kindle, Ring, Blink, Fire TV, and Echo devices.

Charly Triballeau | Afp | Getty Images

The devices also feature a so-called Omnisense platform that gives Alexa “better contextual awareness,” Rausch said. It allows the Echo Show to be able to recognize users and serve up personalized insights, like an analysis of how they slept last night or alert users if they left their front door unlocked after midnight.

Amazon faces growing pressure to update its hardware and software for the generative AI age following the success of rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Meta also has its Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which use its Llama large language model to answer spoken questions from the user.

Amazon is also looking beyond Alexa or Echo smart speakers for opportunities in device growth.

The company in July confirmed it’s acquiring AI wearables startup Bee, which makes a wristband that can record and transcribe conversations.

Amazon comments on $2.5 billion settlement with FTC

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Nvidia’s market cap tops $4.5 trillion after string of AI infrastructure deals

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Nvidia's market cap tops .5 trillion after string of AI infrastructure deals

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

Nvidia shares reached a fresh record on Tuesday, climbing almost 3% and lifting the chipmaker’s market cap past $4.5 trillion.

The stock is now up about 39% for the year, and continues to attract investors as Nvidia steps up its pace of deal-making, cementing its position at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

OpenAI said last week that Nvidia would take an equity stake worth up to $100 billion in the AI startup, and would build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data centers filled with Nvidia graphics processing units. OpenAI then announced five massive new data centers with Oracle that are expected to be filled with hundreds of thousands of GPUs. The whole “Stargate” project will cost $500 billion, the companies said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s products comprise about 70% of the spending on a new AI data center.

Analysts at Citi on Tuesday raised their price target on Nvidia from $200 to $210, citing an increased forecast for AI infrastructure spending after the OpenAI announcements.

“We believe OpenAI came to Nvidia asking for help as Nvidia has a very compelling product, and as the number of users and compute being consumed per user basis is growing,” Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote in the note.

OpenAI is far from alone, as Meta, Google and others are also dramatically ramping up their infrastructure spending.

CoreWeave, a cloud provider that includes Nvidia as a large shareholder, said Tuesday it had reached a deal to supply Meta with $14.2 billion in AI infrastructure services.

Nvidia’s stock is outperforming all of its megacap peers so far this year except for chipmaker Broadcom, which is up about 40%, similarly boosted by OpenAI.

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Spotify founder Daniel Ek stepping down as CEO, company names co-CEOs to replace him

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Spotify founder Daniel Ek stepping down as CEO, company names co-CEOs to replace him

Daniel Ek, founder and chief executive officer of Spotify, attends the Cannes Lions 2016 on June 22, 2016 in Cannes, France. 

Antoine Antoniol | Getty Images

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will step down from his position and move to the role of executive chairman, the company said Tuesday.

Spotify shares dipped around 4% following the announcement.

Ek, who co-founded the streaming platform in 2006, will be replaced by current co-presidents and longtime executives Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström as co-CEOs, the company said in a release. The transition will happen Jan. 1, 2026.

“Over the last few years, I’ve turned over a large part of the day-to-day management and strategic direction of Spotify to Alex and Gustav–who have shaped the company from our earliest days and are now more than ready to guide our next phase,” Ek said in a release. “This change simply matches titles to how we already operate.”

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Ek, who has been a member of the board since 2008, said his new role will focus on steering the company’s long-term strategy and providing support to its senior team.

“It’s been an honor of a lifetime for me to be able to lead Spotify for close to 20 years,” Ek said in an X post.

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Spotify year-to-date stock chart.

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