File: The Amazon distribution center in Garner, N.C. opened in August 2020. Across four floors, the warehouse covers 2 million square feet.
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Amazon workers at a facility near Raleigh, North Carolina, overwhelmingly voted against unionizing on Saturday.
Of the 3,276 ballots cast, there were 2,447 votes opposing the union and 829 in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board. There were 77 challenged ballots, a gap that’s too narrow to change the outcome of the election. The results still need to be certified by the NLRB.
The election at the facility, named RDU1 and located in the suburb of Garner, came after organizers with the upstart Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) campaigned at the warehouse for the past three years. The facility employs roughly 4,700 workers.
CAUSE said in a statement that the election results were a “result of Amazon’s willingness to break the law.”
“Amazon’s relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us prove that this company is afraid of workers coming together to claim our power,” the group said. “Amazon may think it is above the law, but we will not accept a system that allows billionaires and corporations to play by a different set of rules.”
Amazon spokeswoman Eileen Hards denied that the company broke the law or interfered with the election.
“We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon,” Hards said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to make this a great place to work together, and to supporting our teammates as they build their futures with us.”
Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, has long sought to keep unions out of its ranks. The strategy succeeded in the U.S. until 2022, when workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted to join the Amazon Labor Union. Last month, workers at a Whole Foods store in Philadelphia voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
Amazon responded to the Garner union drive with a barrage of anti-union messages in the warehouse, on a website, and sent through its AtoZ app to employees. A leader of the warehouse urged employees to “vote no,” saying a union “can get in the way of how we work together.” The company described CAUSE as an “outside party” that’s “claiming to be a union.”
Amazon has previously said its employees can choose whether or not to join a union, and that it speaks “openly, candidly and respectfully about these topics” so that they can “make an informed decision.”
CAUSE was founded in 2022 by RDU1 employees Mary Hill and Rev. Ryan Brown to voice concerns about the company’s response to the Covid pandemic, which they viewed as inadequate. The group sought to organize RDU1 to boost wages and secure longer breaks.
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Starting pay at RDU1 is $18.50 an hour. CAUSE has pushed to negotiate for wages of $30 an hour.
In its statement on Saturday, CAUSE said it intended to continue organizing at RDU1 “because over half of Amazon employees are still struggling with food and housing insecurity.”
Labor groups have looked beyond NLRB elections in an attempt to gain a union foothold at Amazon. They’ve assisted employees with filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB against Amazon, accusing the company of violating labor laws.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters helped coordinate a picket effort at nine Amazon facilities in December. Amazon said the walkout had no impact on its operations.
The Teamsters union has said it represents 9,000 Amazon workers around the country, although the company has refused to recognize the union and bargain with leadership.
Unions have enjoyed increasing support across the country, with 67% of Americans saying they approve of labor unions, according to Gallup. But that hasn’t translated into higher membership rates. Union membership in the private sector declined slightly to 5.9% in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
North Carolina had the lowest union membership rate in the country last year, with only 2.4% of workers in the state represented, according to the BLS.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz, center, speaks during a dinner at the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025. President Donald Trump hosted technology and business leaders for dinner after they joined First Lady Melania Trump’s meeting of the Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force at the White House.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
Oracle shares spiked 22% in extended trading on Tuesday after the database software maker indicated hefty growth prospects due to new cloud contracts, even as earnings and revenue missed estimates.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.47 adjusted vs. $1.48 expected
Revenue: $14.93 billion vs. $15.04 billion expected
Revenue increased 12% from $13.3 billion a year earlier during the quarter, which ended on Aug. 31, according to a statement. Net income was about flat at $2.93 billion, or $1.01 per share, compared to $2.93 billion, or $1.03 per share, in the same quarter last year.
Oracle said its remaining performance obligation, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, now stands at $455 billion, up some 359% from a year earlier. During the quarter OpenAI said it signed an agreement with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity.
Alongside larger cloud providers such as Microsoft, Oracle has been one of the big winners of the artificial intelligence boom, due to its cloud infrastructure business and its access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) needed for large workloads. CEO Safra Catz said in the statement that the company signed four multibillion-dollar contracts with three different customers in the quarter.
Also in the quarter, Oracle said cloud rival Google’s Gemini AI models would become available on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
In the statement, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chairman and technology chief, said that in October the company will bring out an Oracle AI Database service that will allow for running AI models from OpenAI and other companies atop client data stored in Oracle databases. The effort would deepen Oracle’s product integration with OpenAI. In August, Oracle said it has brought OpenAI’s new GPT-5 AI model to its cloud applications.
Oracle’s generated $3.3 billion in revenue from cloud infrastructure, up 55% from a year earlier. The growth rate was 52% in the fiscal fourth quarter.
According to the statement, Oracle now sees $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in the 2026 fiscal year, according to the statement. That suggests 75% growth from the $10.3 billion total in fiscal 2025. The company called for the sum to reach $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion in 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030 fiscal years.
Kirk Materne, an Evercore analyst with the equivalent of a buy rating on Oracle stock, said in a note to clients that he had anticipated $108 billion in fiscal 2029 cloud infrastructure revenue.
In July, Microsoft said it produced $75 billion in revenue from its Azure cloud infrastructure in the past 12 months. Market leader Amazon’s cloud revenue in the same period approached $112 billion.
Oracle shares hit a record last month and are up 45% in 2025 as of Tuesday’s close, while the S&P 500 index has gained 11%.
A gain of 22% or better on Wednesday would represent the best day for the stock since the dot-com boom of 1999 and its third-sharpest rally ever. It would also lift the company’s market cap past $800 billion.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is developing news. Please check back for updates.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
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Google’s cloud chief Thomas Kurian on Tuesday explained how the tech giant is already monetizing its various artificial intelligence services to generate revenue.
“We’ve made billions using AI already,” said Kurian, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco.
Kurian said that Google Cloud’s backlog of customer demand is growing faster than its revenue.
“Our backlog is now at $106 billion — it is growing faster than our revenue,” he said. “More than 50% of it will convert to revenue over the next two years.”
During its most recent second quarter, Google parent Alphabet in July reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing business, which was a 32% increase from the year prior. Alphabet’s net income increased to $28.20 billion, up nearly 20% from the previous year. While Google’s cloud unit lags Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud units, it’s growing faster than them.
Here’s what Kurian said about how Google Cloud is monetizing AI:
Consumption
Kurian said some people pay Google by consumption, giving the example of AI infrastructure purchased by enterprise customers.
“Whether it’s a GPU, TPU or a model, you pay by token — meaning you pay by what you use,” he said. Tokens represent chunks of text that a AI models process when they generate or interpret language.
Some people use customer service systems, paying for it by what Kurian called “deflection rates.” Such rates are priced based on the business value customers get — things like uptime, scalability, AI features and security.
Google Cloud also provides tools like a “deflection dashboard,” that customers can use to track and manage agent interactions.
Last month, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Meta had largely been reliant on Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, though it also uses Microsoft Azure.
Subscriptions
Some customers pay for cloud services by way of subscriptions.
“You pay per user per monthly fee — for example, agents or Workspace,” said Kurian, referring to the company’s Gemini products, which has its own subscription tiers with various storage options, and the Google Workspace productivity suite, which also has several subscription tiers,.
Google One, a popular personal cloud storage subscription, offers a basic monthly service to users for $1.99 a month. Earlier this year, the company offered a new subscription tier called “Google AI Ultra,” which offers exclusive access to the company’s most “cutting edge” AI products with 30 terabytes of storage for $249.99 per month.
Kurian gave an example of Google Cloud’s cybersecurity subscription tiers, saying “we’ve seen huge growth in that.”
Upselling
Kurian said that upselling is another key aspect of Google Cloud’s strategy.
“We also upsell people as they use more of it from one version to another because we have higher quality models and higher-priced tiers,” Kurian said.
He said that once customers use Google’s AI services, they wind up using more of the company’s products.
“That leads customers who sign a commitment or contract to spend more than they contacted for, which drives more revenue growth,” he added.
Kurian says it is capturing new customers more quickly too.
“We’ve seen 28% sequential quarter-over-quarter growth in new customer wins in the first half of the year,” said Kurian, adding that nearly two-thirds of customers already use Google Cloud’s AI tools in a meaningful way.
“Selling to existing customers is always easier than selling to new customers, so it helps us improve the cost of sales,” Kurian said.
Apple increased the starting price of one of its iPhone models and replaced another with a pricier device on Tuesday, as analysts and investors widely expected.
Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro now starts at $1,099. That’s $100 more than last year’s iPhone 16 Pro.
Apple also replaced last year’s $899 iPhone 16 Plus in its lineup with a new thin and light device called the iPhone 17 Air, which starts at $999, or $100 more.
Apple and its CEO Tim Cook have largely managed the Trump administration’s tariffs, and the company has successfully reoriented much of its supply chain to import iPhones to the U.S. from India, instead of China, where tariffs are higher.
Still, investors and analysts widely believed Apple would raise iPhone prices as the company expects to spend more than $1 billion this quarter on tariff costs.
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Apple, as expected, tried to soften the price increase blow by pointing out that this year’s entry-level phones now all come with 256GB of storage, as opposed to the 128GB that was standard on last year’s phones. Apple did not mention tariffs or anything about how it manufactures iPhones.
Apple charges users more when they get extra storage on an iPhone. Upgrading to 512GB of storage on an iPhone 17 Air costs $200 this year.
“iPhone 17 Pro starts at $1099, the same great price as last year’s 256 gigabyte iPhone 16 Pro,” said Apple’s chief marketer Greg Joswiak during the launch event.
Apple is judicious about raising hardware prices in the U.S.
This is the first time that Apple’s entry-level Pro phone has gotten a price increase over $999 since the debut of its predecessor iPhone X in 2017.
On Tuesday, Apple kept the starting price of its entry-level phone, the iPhone 17, steady at $799. Its most premium device, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, didn’t get a bump either.
Apple left prices the same for the other new hardware items it announced on Tuesday. Its new AirPods, which can translate conversations in real time, still retail for $249, the same price as the first AirPods Pro in 2019.
Apple also kept Apple Watch prices stable.
The Apple Watch Series 11 is $399 for the smaller version, the same price as it has been since 2018, when Apple was on Series 4, and Apple’s high-end sport watch, the Ultra 3, remains $799 and up.