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Amazon warehouses are a more dangerous place to work than comparable facilities, new federal injury data shows.

In 2022, there were 6.6 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon workers, according to a report released Wednesday from the union coalition Strategic Organizing Center, which relies on data submitted by Amazon to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s more than double the rate of all non-Amazon warehouses, which had 3.2 serious injuries for every 100 workers.

Amazon’s serious injury rate fell by about 3% between 2021 and 2022. The rate shot up to 6.8 serious injuries for every 100 workers in 2021, compared to a rate of 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 workers in 2020. Amazon previously attributed the jump to a warehouse hiring push during the pandemic.

Amazon has significantly pared its headcount in the last year as it acknowledged it hired too many workers, and CEO Andy Jassy looks to cut costs across the company. Amazon had 1.54 million employees globally as of the end of the fourth quarter, which is down 4% from the year-ago period.

The SOC report argues that Amazon has “not made meaningful progress” on its total rate of injuries or serious injuries between 2017 and 2022, the six-year period in which it has data. Until 2020, OSHA did not release full injury and illness records submitted by employers, claiming that more detailed logs contained confidential commercial information. That changed after a lawsuit filed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and labor group Public Citizen forced OSHA to release the data.

While Amazon’s serious injury rate fell between 2021 and 2022, its overall injuries increased. Amazon reported 39,000 total injuries at its U.S. facilities in 2022, up from 38,300 total injuries in 2021.

The data suggests that injuries experienced by workers at the company are more frequent and severe than other warehouse workers, SOC said. In 2022, Amazon was responsible for more than half of all serious injuries in the warehousing industry, while making up 36% of its workers, according to the report.

Labor advocates have zeroed in on Amazon’s workplace safety record in their efforts to organize its facilities. Employees continue to point to the company’s productivity demands and the strenuous nature of the job as a catalyst behind high injury rates. Several states including New York, Washington and California have passed laws taking aim at Amazon’s work quotas.

Federal inspectors have repeatedly levied fines against Amazon at several facilities over various safety violations. OSHA cited Amazon at six of its warehouses for failing to report workplace injuries and exposing workers to ergonomic hazards. Those citations followed inspections by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York at multiple sites, and the office’s probe is ongoing.

Last March, the state of Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries cited Amazon’s flagship facility in Kent, Washington, over unsafe work practices. The agency found that many Amazon jobs involve “repetitive motions, lifting, carrying, twisting, and other physical work” and said workers are required to perform these tasks “at such a fast pace that it increases the risk of injury.”

Amazon has appealed the fine and in October filed a lawsuit against the agency, asking a judge to set aside the orders to reduce hazards on the grounds that they violate the due process protections under the 14th Amendment.

The SDNY, a division of the Department of Justice, is also investigating whether Amazon made “false representations” to lenders about its workplace safety record to obtain credit.

Amazon said it will appeal the OSHA citations. It also said it disagrees with the SDNY’s allegations.

Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the SOC report.

The company has previously defended its safety record, and it says it plans to invest $550 million on safety initiatives in 2023, after spending roughly $1 billion on improving safety between 2019 and 2022.

Jassy has said Amazon’s injury rates are “sometimes misunderstood,” but he acknowledged Amazon can do more to improve safety inside its facilities. In 2021, Amazon set a goal to halve its warehouse injury rate by 2025.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021 pledged to make the company “Earth’s Best Employer” and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” Shortly after, Amazon rolled out WorkingWell, a series of programs designed to prevent workplace injuries in its warehouses by encouraging stretching and healthy eating habits, among other things.

WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos releases final letter to shareholders

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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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.

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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.

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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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