Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, appears at the Political Opening of the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, on Aug. 23, 2023.
Franziska Krug | German Select | Getty Images
Microsoft is seeing “huge demand” for its new Starfield video game, Phil Spencer, the software company’s CEO of gaming, said on Wednesday.
“We think this game is going to be available to literally hundreds of millions of people on the devices that they already own, and looking to make this game as accessible as it can be to players,” Spencer told CNBC’s Steve Kovach.
The game, described as “the first new universe in 25 years” from Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios, appeared on Wednesday on PCs, Xbox consoles and other devices accessed through the cloud, for those who pay for the Game Pass subscription service. Microsoft picked up the game through its $8.1 billion acquisition of game publisher ZeniMax, the parent of Bethesda.
While Microsoft is aiming to make its games widely available, the company also wants to ensure that its consoles have some notable attractions as it competes with Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Switch. Gaming accounts for 6% of Microsoft’s revenue, and Xbox content and services revenue grew 5% in the second quarter, faster than Windows, devices and some other parts of the company.
Gaming has taken center stage at Microsoft as the company tries to finalize the $68.7 billion acquisition of publisher Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty and other franchises. The deal hit regulatory snags, but is still poised to close.
Starfield is an expansive open-world game with over 1,000 planets for players to explore as they build and buy spaceships. Before the acquisition, ZeniMax was planning to release the game on PlayStation, Jim Ryan, CEO of the Sony Interactive Entertainment business, said in a taped appearance at a hearing in San Francisco in June in connection the Microsoft-Activision deal.
Ryan said he wasn’t a fan of Starfield becoming a Microsoft exclusive, which would signify that it wouldn’t come to other consoles.
“We’ve had more players for any next-gen exclusive than we’ve had this generation all up,” Spencer said. He was referring to the current consoles, the $500 Xbox Series X and $300 Xbox Series S, which both went on sale in 2020. Those who bought premium editions of the game got early access last week.
Spencer said Starfield is the most wish-listed game the company has had on the Steam game store. On the review website Metacritic, Starfield currently has a score of 86 out of 100, based on 55 reviews from critics.
Spencer said tens of millions of Game Pass subscribers were getting a chance to play Starfield on Wednesday. As of January 2022, Microsoft said Game Pass had over 25 million subscribers.
Spencer stopped short of proclaiming that Starfield would debut on the PlayStation, but he is promising that some of Activision’s most popular titles will remain available on the PlayStation for years to come.
In July, Sony signed an agreement that would keep Call of Duty games on PlayStation for a decade. Microsoft has been working to resolve regulators’ concerns about the pending Activision acquisition by assuring it will keep games on Nintendo consoles, Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming offering and other services.
Microsoft announced plans for the Activision Blizzard transaction in January 2022. It was supposed to close by June 2023, but the companies said in July they had agreed to push back a deadline to complete the deal to Oct. 18.
In August, Microsoft submitted a new proposal to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority that would involve transferring to game publisher Ubisoft the cloud streaming rights to Activision’s PC and console games for 15 years if the deal closes.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while World leaders listen during a summit of European and Middle Eastern leaders on Gaza on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
This might not be Christmas, but the war in the Middle East is over — at least according to U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Monday, Trump declared at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that the “long and painful nightmare” was finally over for both the Israelis and Palestinians. More straightforwardly, Trump gave an unequivocal “yes” when asked by reporters if the war in the Middle East has ended, Reuters reported.
Broadcom, meanwhile, surged almost 10% after it jointly announced a partnership with — who else? — OpenAI to build and deploy custom chips. But where this puts Nvidia, OpenAI’s other near and dear one, and on whose chips the ChatGPT maker relies, remains a question.
Though Christmas has yet to arrive, OpenAI is starting to look like the tech sector’s Santa Claus.
— CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt contributed to this report.
What you need to know today
War in the Middle East is over, Trump says. At Israel’s parliament, Trump gave a speech in which he said that the “long and painful nightmare” for both the Israelis and Palestinians was over. He also urged, at a separate event, for leaders to put “old feuds” behind.
Broadcom joins the OpenAI party. The two companies announced Monday that they’re planning to develop and deploy OpenAI-designed chips, amounting to 10 gigawatts, starting late next year. Shares of Broadcom popped almost 10% on the news.
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U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Argentina’s President Javier Milei during the 80th United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, New York, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
In a move that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Thursday on social media site X, the U.S. is providing a $20 billion currency swap line with Argentina’s central bank — essentially exchanging stable U.S. dollars with volatile pesos.
The move comes amid liquidity concerns in Argentina that threatened stability for the country as it faces key midterm elections. There are equal parts economic and political stakes with the venture, which marks the first U.S. intervention of this nature since rescuing Mexico in 1995.
A woman cleans the store window of the Amazon house after activists sprayed paint on its logo during a protest on the opening day of the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2025.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Amazon fired a Palestinian engineer who was suspended last month after he protested the company’s work with the Israeli government.
Ahmed Shahrour, who worked as a software engineer in Amazon’s Whole Foods business in Seattle, received an email on Monday informing him of his termination. When he was suspended in September, Amazon said the decision was the result of messages Shahrour posted on Slack criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.
Amazon said its investigation found Shahrour had violated the company’s standards of conduct, written communication policy and acceptable use policy, alleging that he “misused company resources, including by posting numerous non-work-related messages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
“In the next 24hrs you will receive an email with detailed information about your termination, including information about your benefits and final pay,” an Amazon human resources employee wrote in a message to Shahrour that was obtained by CNBC. “We appreciate the contributions you’ve made during your time with Amazon and wish you the best in your future endeavors.”
An employee group associated with Shahrour put out an afternoon press release saying that he was fired after a five-week suspension “for protesting Amazon’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military, known as Project Nimbus, which he states constitutes collaboration in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Shahrour had urged the company to drop the contract that involves Amazon providing the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other infrastructure. He also protested and handed out flyers at Amazon’s downtown Seattle headquarters.
In a statement to CNBC, Shahrour said his firing is “a blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissent from Palestinian voices within Amazon and shield Amazon’s collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told CNBC in a statement that the company doesn’t tolerate “discrimination, harassment or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace.”
“When any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings,” Glasser said.
Shahrour’s termination comes on the same day that Palestinian militant group Hamas released the first seven surviving Israeli hostages, marking the first stage of a ceasefire deal brokered with the help of U.S. President Donald Trump. As part of the agreement, Israel was also scheduled to free nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners later in the day.
The war started just over two years ago, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel followed with a sustained assault that killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including thousands of civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Across the tech industry, workers have become more outspoken in their criticism of business dealings with the Israeli military.
On Thursday, a Microsoft engineer resigned after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza. Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues in a letter that, “I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time.”
In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said Israel’s military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.
Microsoft fired two employees in August who participated in a protest inside the company’s headquarters. In April 2024, Google terminated 28 employees after a series of protests against labor conditions and its involvement in Project Nimbus.
Amazon hasn’t acknowledged the Nimbus contract beyond stating that it provides technology to customers “wherever they are located.” Google has previously said it provides generally available cloud computing services to the Israeli government that aren’t “directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads.” Microsoft said in August that most of its work with Israel Defense Forces involves cybersecurity for the country, and that the company intends to provide technology in an ethical way.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday that artificial intelligence could become a larger part of global GDP as the technology spreads across industries.
Tan said the current global GDP sits around $110 trillion, with 30% of that figure “valued from industries related to knowledge-based, technology-intensive.”
“And you put in generative AI, you create intelligence in a lot of other aspects of society,” Tan continued. “That 30% say will grow to 40% of all GDP. That’s $10 trillion a year.”
If AI grows and becomes responsible for a larger piece of global GDP as Tan predicts, it would be a boon to the nascent tech sector and all the industries it relies on. Broadcom makes chips and networking equipment and has been a huge beneficiary of the AI boom as hyperscalers buy up its products. The stock is currently up 53.86%.
Broadcom and OpenAI announced their official partnership on Monday, saying they would jointly build and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom artificial intelligence accelerators. The move is part of a broader effort to scale AI across the industry. Broadcom shares surged in response to the news, up 9.88% by market close.
Broadcom and OpenAI’s deal is the latest in a slew of pricey partnerships among key Big Tech players related to AI.
Tan said OpenAI is “one of those few players in the forefront of creating foundation models,” and noted that even as a private company, the ChatGPT maker is worth about $500 billion. According to Tan, Broadcom’s “hard-nosed” approach to business doesn’t keep the company from looking several years in the future “at this phenomenon, this wave called generative AI.”
Broadcom is tight-lipped about its customers, but said earlier this year it was developing new AI chips with three large cloud customers. Management announced last month it had secured $10 billion in chip orders from a fourth unnamed client.
Tan told Cramer that Broadcom is working closely with “about seven players,” four of which he defined as “real customers,” or ones “who have given us production purchase orders at scale.”
“We feel very good about it,” Tan said of Broadcom’s partnerships. “Because each of these guys need a lot of compute capacity for them to basically play in this game and eventually win this game of creating the best foundation model in the world.”
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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust owns shares of Broadcom.