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Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned. 

“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”

Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.

That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.

“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo. 

“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”

Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster. 

“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.

The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.  

Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work. 

“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”

Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote. 

Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’s chief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.

Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.

“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Lightning Round: Uber goes higher from here, says Jim Cramer

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

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Ether and related stocks gain amid the latest crypto craze: Tokenization

A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.

“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.

On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.

The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.

Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.

The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.

Fundstrat's Tom Lee on being named chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.

Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.

The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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