Ofcom said it received evidence showing Microsoft makes it less attractive for customers to run its Office productivity apps on cloud infrastructure other than Microsoft Azure.
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LONDON — Britain’s competition regulator is preparing remedies aimed at solving competition issues in the multibillion-pound cloud computing industry.
The Competition and Markets Authority is set to unveil its provisional decision detailing “behavioral” remedies addressing anti-competitive practices in the sector following a months-long investigation into the market, two sources familiar with the matter told CNBC.
The sources, who preferred to remain anonymous given the investigation’s sensitive nature, said that the cloud market remedies could be announced within the next two weeks. The regulator previously set itself a deadline of November to December 2024 to publish its provisional decision.
A CMA spokesperson declined to comment on the timing of its provisional decision when asked by CNBC.
Cloud infrastructure services is a market that’s dominated by U.S. technology giants Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon is the largest player in the market, offering cloud services via its Amazon Web Services (AWS) arm. Microsoft is the second-largest provider, selling cloud products under its Microsoft Azure unit.
The CMA probe traces its history back to 2022, when U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom kicked off a market study examining the dominance of cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Ofcom subsequently referred its cloud review to the CMA to address competition issues in the market.
Why is the CMA concerned?
Among the key issues the CMA is expected to address with recommended behavioral remedies, are so-called “egress” fees charging companies for transferring data from one cloud to another, licensing fees viewed as unfair, volume discounts, and interoperability issues that make it harder to switch vendor.
According to one of the sources, there’s a chance Google may be excluded from the scope of the competition remedies given it is smaller in size compared to market leaders AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment on this story when contacted by CNBC. Google did not immediately return a request for comment.
What could the remedies look like?
The CMA has said previously in June that it was more minded toward considering behavioral remedies to resolve its concerns as opposed to “structural” remedies, such as ordering divestments or operational separations.
The watchdog said in a working paper in June that it was “at an early stage” of considering potential remedies.
Solutions floated at the time included imposing price controls restricting the level of egress fees, lowering technical barriers to switching cloud providers, and banning agreements encouraging firms to commit more spend in return for discounts.
One contentious measure the regulator said it was considering was requiring Microsoft to apply the same pricing for its productivity software products regardless of which cloud they’re hosted on — a move that would have a significant impact on Microsoft’s pricing structures.
CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell is set to hold a speech on Thursday at Chatham House, a U.K. policy institute. In an interview with the Financial Times, she defended the regulator’s track record on competition enforcement amid criticisms from Prime Minister Keir Starmer that the agency was holding back growth.
She is expected to outline plans for a review in 2025 into whether the CMA should more frequently use behavioral remedies when approving deals, the FT reported.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Tesla posted a teaser video on X sparking speculation that the electric carmaker could be gearing up to release a new car.
The first video posted on Sunday shows a spinning component which many online said could be an internal component of a vehicle. The video ends with the numbers “10/7,” indicating Tuesday’s date.
A second video also posted on Sunday shows just the headlights of a car.
The teasers have sparked conversation online and among analysts about what Tesla is up to — and two theories have emerged.
The first is that it could be the next-generation Roadster vehicle that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising for years.
The second is that Tesla could be about to unveil a long-awaited mass market model.
Musk teased the next-generation Roadster concept back at an event in November 2017, and in June 2018 in a series of tweets.
The billionaire has since hyped the vehicle repeatedly and, in September, said on X that “the new Roadster is something special beyond a car.”
Musk has a history of promising things that are either not delivered or take substantially longer than he initially says.
Meanwhile, Tesla has been saying a cheaper mass-market car will hit the market this year. However, Musk has confirmed this lower cost offering will effectively be a stripped down Model Y.
For investors, a mass-market model is seen as key to revitalizing Tesla’s sales. While Tesla reported a jump in auto deliveries in the third quarter of the year, this was attributed to a pull forward in demand due to the expiration of a federal tax credit. In the quarter before, Tesla reported a delivery decline.
The company has seen a continuous slump in sales in Europe, and it continues to face heavy competition in China, another key market, from local players like BYD which are also expanding overseas.
Chinese players have been launching low-cost offerings in Europe and elsewhere putting more pressure on Tesla to released a model at around the $25,000 to $30,000 mark.
AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.
OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.
“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”
Brockman added that the company is already unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and other products that could generate revenue because of the lack of compute power.
As part of the tie-up, AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, with vesting milestones tied to both deployment volume and AMD’s share price.
The first tranche vests with the first full gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches unlocking as OpenAI scales to 6 gigawatts and meets key technical and commercial milestones required for large-scale rollout.
If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, it could acquire approximately 10% ownership in AMD, based on the current number of shares outstanding.
The ChatGPT maker said the deal was worth billions, but declined to disclose a specific dollar amount.
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AMD one-day stock chart.
The deal positions AMD as a core strategic partner to OpenAI, marking one of the largest GPU deployment agreements in the artificial intelligence industry to date.
AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that AI is on a 10-year growth path, and “at the end of the day, you need the foundational compute to do that.”
“You need partnerships like this that really bring the ecosystem together to ensure that, you know, we can really get the best technologies, you know, out there,” she said. “So we’re super excited about the opportunities here.”
The partnership could help ease industrywide pressure on supply chains and reduce OpenAI’s reliance on a single vendor.
OpenAI unveiled a landmark $100 billion equity-and-supply agreement with Nvidia nearly two weeks ago, cementing the chip giant’s role in powering the next generation of OpenAI models. That arrangement combined capital investment with long-term hardware supply — though in Nvidia’s case, it was the chipmaker taking an ownership stake in OpenAI.
Shares of Nvidia fell 1% on Monday following news of the OpenAI-AMD deal.
That deal accounts for a dedicated 10-gigawatt portion of OpenAI’s broader 23-gigawatt infrastructure road map. At an estimated $50 billion in construction costs per gigawatt — together with the AMD deal — OpenAI has committed roughly $1 trillion in new buildout spending in just the past two weeks.
OpenAI is also in talks with Broadcom to build custom chips for its next generation of models.
The arrangement between OpenAI and AMD adds a new layer to the increasingly circular nature of AI’s corporate economy, where capital, equity and compute are traded among the same handful of companies building and powering the technology.
Nvidia is supplying the capital to buy its chips. Oracle is helping build the sites. AMD and Broadcom are stepping in as suppliers. OpenAI is anchoring the demand.
It’s a tightly wound circular economy, and one that analysts fear could face real strain if any link in the chain starts to weaken.
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For AMD, the partnership is both a commercial milestone and a validation of its next-generation Instinct road map.
After years of trailing Nvidia in the AI accelerator market, AMD now has a flagship customer at the forefront of the generative AI boom.
Su said it creates “a true win-win enabling the world’s most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem.”
It also reinforces OpenAI’s broader infrastructure ambitions.
Through its Stargate project, CEO Altman’s startup is rapidly transforming into one of the most aggressive infrastructure builders in the AI sector. Its first site in Abilene, Texas, is already operational and running Nvidia chips, with construction continuing to expand capacity.
Jason Kim, chief executive officer of Firefly Aerospace, center, during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Firefly Aerospace stock climbed 9% Monday, after the space company said it’s buying defense technology contractor SciTec for $855 million as it looks to strengthen its national security offering.
The deal, announced Sunday, is slated to close at the end of the year and includes $300 million cash and $555 million in Firefly shares.
“These capabilities significantly enhance our ability to deliver integrated, software-defined solutions for critical national security imperatives, particularly Golden Dome,” said CEO Jason Kim in a release.
The company plans to integrate SciTec’s software into its tools. Capabilities such as missile warning, tracking and defense and autonomous command control will also support Firefly’s launch and space services, the company said.
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Last week, Firefly shares sank over 20% in one trading session after the company said a rocket exploded during a ground test at its Texas facility. That came shortly after the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Firefly in an investigation over another rocket failure.
Firefly shares debuted on the Nasdaq this summer to strong investor demand. The public listing marked the third significant space tech debut of 2025, and shares surged more than 30% on its first day of trading. The stock has since pulled back.
Firefly carries a growing list of key government and defense partners as it builds its position in the national security space. That includes a recent $177 million contract with NASA and a $50 million investment from Northrop Grumman.
Once the acquisition closes, Princeton, New Jersey-based SciTec will operate as a subsidiary run by current CEO Jim Lisowski.