Rohit Prasad, a top Amazon executive overseeing its artificial general intelligence unit, is leaving the company at the end of this year, the company confirmed Wednesday.

As part of the move, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is reorganizing the AGI unit under a more expansive division that will also include its silicon development and quantum computing teams. The new division will be led by Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of Amazon who currently serves as a senior vice president in its cloud unit.

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Oracle stock dipped about 5% on Wednesday following a report that discussions with Blue Owl Capital on backing a $10 billion data center in Michigan had stalled, although the cloud company later disputed the report.

Blue Owl had been in talks with Oracle about funding a 1-gigawatt facility for OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan, according to the Financial Times.

However, the plans fell through due to concerns about Oracle’s rising debt levels and extensive artificial intelligence spending, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

This comes as some investors raise red flags about the funding behind the rush to build ever more data centers.

The concern is that some hyperscalers are turning to private equity markets rather than funding the buildings themselves, and entering into lease agreements that could prove risky.

Blue Owl did look into the project, but pulled out due to unfavorable debt terms and the structure of repayments, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named in order to discuss a confidential matter.

Blue Owl is still involved in two other Oracle sites, the person said.

The person added that Blue Owl was also concerned that local politics in Michigan would cause construction delays.

Oracle later responded to the FT report, saying the project was moving forward and that Blue Owl was not part of equity talks.

“Our development partner, Related Digital, selected the best equity partner from a competitive group of options, which in this instance was not Blue Owl. Final negotiations for their equity deal are moving forward on schedule and according to plan,” Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert said in a statement.

The cloud company did not name the firm involved in current equity talks for the project.

CNBC has reached out to the FT for comment.

The FT said that Blackstone is in discussions to potentially replace Blue Owl Capital as a financial partner for the data center, although no deal has been signed yet.

Blue Owl Capital has been the primary investor in Oracle’s data center projects in the U.S., including a $15 billion center in Abilene, Texas, and an $18 billion site in New Mexico, the FT said.

“This appears to be a case where the deal simply wasn’t the right one, and seasoned investors understand that success does not require winning every transaction,” Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note on Wednesday.

The bank added that digital infrastructure remains a “core growth vertical” for the Blue Owl, noting an upcoming digital infrastructure fund in 2026 that would add to its $7 billion fund announced in May.

Oracle has $248 billion in lease commitments for data centers and cloud capacity commitments over the next 15 to 19 years as of Nov. 30, the company said in its latest quarterly filing. That is up almost 148% from August.

In September, the cloud computing giant raised $18 billion in new debt, according to an SEC filing. That same month, OpenAI announced a $300 billion partnership with Oracle over the next five years.

By the end of November, the company owed over $124 billion, including operating lease liabilities, according to the filing.

Oracle shares are down about 50% from the high of $345.72 reached in September.

Read the full FT story here.

One of the biggest launches in Apple’s history is supposed to come next year, and it’s got nothing to do with hardware. 

The company has promised investors that it will be launching the next generation of Siri, its artificial intelligence voice assistant. There’s a lot riding on the launch of a “more personal Siri” for Apple, which has so far been absent from the tech industry’s AI race that kicked off when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. 

Apple doesn’t usually tell the public its product roadmap, but in Siri’s case, the iPhone maker made an exception. The company was supposed to launch the new AI assistant in 2025. But in March, Apple delayed the upgrade, even after running ads for the feature, to sometime in “the coming year.”

As consumers become increasingly accustomed to holding free-flowing conversations with the likes of ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini chatbots, the pressure is on Apple to keep up. 

CEO Tim Cook told investors in October that Apple has been making good progress on Siri, and that’s “raised the bar meaningfully about what to expect,” said Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster. 

“They basically said that this year, don’t bother us about AI, and we’ll blow you away by what we show next year,” Munster said. 

Apple stock is up 12% so far in 2025, with much of those gains coming in recent months, as the company’s iPhone 17 launch in September impressed investors. But Android-maker Google is at the center of the AI boom with its own models and tensor processing AI chips, and its stock has surged more than 60% this year.

Throghout 2025, AI was everywhere in Silicon Valley — except in Cupertino.

OpenAI released Sora 2, a video-generating app that briefly topped the Apple App Store charts. Anthropic released several new Claude models. Amazon revamped its Alexa AI assistant. Microsoft released software in November that lets companies manage “AI agents,” a term for AI programs that can work for hours at a time. Even Meta, which has faced its own shifting AI strategy, made moves to prepare for the release of its next frontier model, codenamed Avocado, CNBC reported last week. 

And early in the year, Nvidia took the crown as the most-valuable tech company from Apple. That was driven by the insatiable demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units. During the year, the chipmaker started shipping a type of AI computer called the Grace Blackwell NVL72 that pairs 72 separate AI GPUs together and costs an estimated $3 million.

Apple, meanwhile, hasn’t had a major AI launch since 2024, when it announced Apple Intelligence. The software suite included image generators, text re-writers, the ability to summarize push notifications and an integration with ChatGPT.

While the company’s improved AI-powered notification filtering and photo-editing features have been praised, other AI features faced issues. For example, Apple briefly turned off an AI feature that rewrote push notifications from news apps inaccurately (it’s since been turned back on by default).

The most notable of the Apple Intelligence features were the upgrades to Siri, but they were delayed in the spring, with the company saying development would take longer than first thought. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s worldwide marketing chief, said the company “didn’t want to disappoint customers,” in a June interview with The Wall Street Journal.

At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, AI was barely mentioned.

Apple did say that its new chips had better AI performance, and it debuted a number of machine learning features, such as AirPod live translations and intelligent call screening. Developers were also invited to tap into Apple’s foundation models. But the company didn’t announce anything on the scale of the chatbots and generative AI products that its peers have released.

Closing the year, Apple has shaken up its AI leadership ranks, signaling where the company stands when it comes to implementing a strategy to keep pace with rivals’ ground-breaking technology. 

In early December, Apple said John Giannandrea, the company’s machine learning and AI strategy chief, would retire in 2026. Many of his responsibilities will be split among COO Sabih Khan, services chief Eddy Cue and new hire Amar Subramanya, who previously worked at Google and Microsoft. Software chief Craig Federighi also gained expanded oversight over AI, with Subramanya reporting to him, Apple said.

The hiring of Subramanya, who was the head of engineering for Google Gemini before briefly joining Microsoft in an AI executive role, is particularly notable. The iPhone maker doesn’t tend to publicly discuss its engineering talent, especially new hires that don’t report directly to Cook.

The public announcement of a vice president hire like Subramanya shows how important it is for Apple to prove to investors and the public that it’s willing to shake up its AI leadership.

It’s become clear that Apple is playing a different game than its peers, which have taken a cloud-based approach to AI that requires spending heavily on infrastructure.

Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon committed a collective $380 billion this year on capital expenditures, much of it on Nvidia-based data centers to create and serve the most advanced AI models.

Apple also increased its capital expenditures, but on a much smaller scale. Apple spent $12.71 billion on capital expenditures in the year ended in September, up 35% on an annual basis, but less than the company spent in 2018. Rather than using Nvidia chips in servers for Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker says it uses chips that it originally designed for its computers because of user privacy reasons.

A key question for Apple is whether it will seek a partner to power the new Siri.

The improvements to the upgraded Siri are expected to include the ability for the voice assistant to do things like make a reservation intelligently based on a user’s travel plans and personal relationships.

Currently, when Siri is presented with complicated queries, the AI offers to have ChatGPT answer the question. At a panel shortly after the Apple Intelligence launch last year, company executives said that there was a chance other foundation models, including Google’s Gemini, could be built into the service. The latest version of Google’s model, Gemini 3, was released in November to positive reviews.

Cook has also said that Apple is open to making big acquisitions, which have been exceedingly rare to date. The valuations of AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have reached levels that make them almost impossible to acquire, even for a company with Apple’s cash flow.

OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation in an October share sale, and Anthropic was valued at $350 billion in November. By comparison, Apple’s largest acquisition of all time is its 2014 purchase of Beats Electronics for $3 billion.

Apple’s lack of spending has led some investors to fret about the company’s AI strategy, putting more pressure on the Siri upgrade.

“Investors have already gotten enough gray hairs waiting for Apple to come out with their AI strategy,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. “It’s time to come out and show the world what the strategy is.”

Analysts and consumers may not see the threat to Apple, but company executives do. While testifying in a May trial, Apple’s Cue said AI technology is moving fast enough that users may not need an iPhone in a decade.

That’s because new hardware devices can use AI to create new user interfaces and features that aren’t possible with smartphones. Some early AI gadgets have already hit the market.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses can use AI to identify objects in a user’s range of view, and Meta announced this month that it bought a startup called Limitless. That company’s AI pendant can record conversations and generate summaries for them. A purchase price wasn’t disclosed.

But the biggest threat to Apple may be from its current AI partner.

Earlier this year, OpenAI bought io, former Apple design guru Jony Ive’s AI devices startup, for $6.4 billion, and now Ive is helping the AI lab build next-generation consumer devices. Ive, who left Apple in 2019, is still widely seen as one of the driving forces behind the hardware maker’s biggest hits, including the iPhone and the iPad.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in November that the company had “finally” finished its first device prototypes. Neither he nor Ive said what the devices are, just that they’re targeting a calmer “vibe” with their hardware than a smartphone.

Earlier this month, Altman told journalists that he believes OpenAI’s real rival isn’t Google, but Apple. He said smartphones are not well-suited for AI companions or other use cases, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But Apple still has time to ready its counter. Ive said in November that it would be about two years before he expects the OpenAI devices to be revealed to the public.

“They have more time than people realize to figure this out,” Munster said. “But as far as the near-term, they’ve got to deliver a 10 out of 10 when this new Siri comes out.”