Business, Financial & Legal - Page 2

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, has received a record-breaking bonus bordering on the $100 million mark, the same year that Microsoft laid off approximately 15,000 employees.

Nadella was awarded $96.5 million in compensation for the performance of the company, and of that $96.5 million $84 million was in the form of stock awards, while the other $9.5 million was awarded in cash incentives. Nadella takes home $2.5 million from his general salary, which doesn't include his incentives and bonuses.

The massive pay for Nadella comes as Microsoft becomes one of the few companies to reach $1 trillion market cap. Over the past three years, Microsoft's shares have more than doubled, and in 2025 alone, the stock price has increased by 23%.

Warner Bros. Discovery has announced it is now up for sale, with the company stating it has conducted a "review of strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value."

The press release states Warner Bros. Discovery has already received "unsolicited interest" in both Warner Bros. standalone, and the entire company. For those unfamiliar with Warner Bros. Discovery, the company owns many businesses under its umbrella, such as movie studios, streaming platforms, media businesses, and cable networks. Additionally, WBD also owns the international broadcasting rights to a range of sports, such as the Olympics, the French Open in Europe, and the Premier League in the UK.

Warner Bros. Discovery owns the rights to DC Comics, and other popular franchises such as Harry Potter, Batman, and Superman. The company was valued at $45 billion, but does carry billions of dollars of debt on its balance sheet, according to a report from NBC News.

Apple has delivered a heated message to the General Court in Luxembourg, stating that Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into effect in 2023, unlawfully compels Apple to make changes to its iPhone, App Store, and iMessage.

For those who don't know, the DMA is the antithesis of Apple's end-to-end control over its products, as it compels tech companies to make core services interoperable with competitors. Apple argues that the changes it would have to make to its services and products are incompatible with the protections of security, privacy, and even property rights under current EU law, with Apple telling the EU's second-highest court the DMA imposes "hugely onerous and intrusive burdens" on companies such as Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and others.

The aim of the DMA is to prevent big tech companies, such as Apple, from leveraging their dominance in one market to create power within another. An example of this would be the restrictions Apple places on iPhones when it comes to being compatible with other products Apple is trying to compete with, such as earbuds or smartwatches.

TSMC has reported its best quarter in history, with its Q3 2025 earnings report driven by the unstoppable AI and HPC demand, which makes up around 57% of its sales.

TSMC posted $33.1 billion of revenue for Q3 2025, which is up an astounding 40.8% year-over-year, and 10.1% quarter-over-quarter, with a net income of $14.77 billion, which is up 39.1% year-on-year. TSMC's gross margin hit 59.5%, an excellent result for a foundry that is a contract chip maker for other companies and doesn't sell products itself.

The company has enjoyed its best quarter yet thanks to the unstoppable sales of AI accelerators and various AI infrastructure processors including CPUs, DPUs, and networking components. Q3 2025 saw the company also taking in revenue from Apple's latest A19, A19 Pro, and M5 processors made on its N3P process node.

The United States Mint is going to honor Steve Jobs and Apple with a new $1 coin under the 2026 American Innovation $1 Coin Program.

According to the Mint, the new coin will feature a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a rolling landscape that's covered in northern oak trees. The landscape is meant to represent the northern California hills, and is meant to capture Jobs' reflective pose, and how natural environments inspired his goal to design the technology he cultivated into being as natural as native environments.

The coin is inscribed with "Make Something Wonderful," which is a reference to what Jobs would use to write in internal Apple emails to employees about pursuing creativity, along with care in everything the company produced. Elana Hagler designed the aesthetic of the coin, and Phebe Hemphill sculpted it. These two artists are responsible for the blending of realism and symbolism.

Intel has been trying to kill NVIDIA for 33 years, says NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, but now they're BFFs.

In a new interview with Jim Cramer and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, we get some further insight into the NVIDIA + Intel history from 30+ years ago. There are some readers that might remember there was always a strained history between the two companies, with some of you even using nForce motherboards many years ago... that was just one part of this journey.

Intel was a much bigger, confident, and more commanding company during the 2000s, leaving NVIDIA to be "just" a graphics card company. NVIDIA was making bigger and bigger waves during the 2000s and into the 2010s, to its leadership position now in GPUs, AI GPUs, and everything in between.

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has commented on the recent deal between AMD and OpenAI, where Team Red signed over 10% of the company to provide next-generation AI GPUs to OpenAI to power upcoming artificial intelligence programs.

It was only recently that AMD and OpenAI announced a multibillion-dollar partnership that involved AMD signing over 10% of itself to OpenAI to provide AMD Instinct GPUs, specifically the AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs to OpenAI to provide 6 gigawatts of power for upcoming AI systems. As for 10% of the company, the way the deal is structured is the shares are scheduled to vest when specific milestones are achieved, with the first tranche of the stock set to vest after the initial gigawatt is successfully deployed.

Furthermore, share vesting is also tied to AMD reaching specific share price targets, OpenAI achieving technical and commercial milestones, and OpenAI purchasing waves of AMD GPUs. The deal between AMD and OpenAI comes only a week after OpenAI announced a similar deal with NVIDIA, except NVIDIA didn't sign over any of its shares, and instead of agreeing to provide 6 gigawatts of power with its GPUs, it will be powering 10 gigawatts.

TSMC's advanced 3nm and 5nm process nodes continue to be in hot demand, as cloud and AI applications push into a full-scale explosion, expected to be "100% booked" into 2026, and it's no surprise.

In a new report from Ctee, we're learning from industry insiders who have said TSMC's new 3nm and 5nm production capacity remains fully utilized, with the capacity utilization rate (UTR) projected to hit 100% in the first half of 2026. Multiple big tech companies like Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek have fully soaked up TSMC's new 3nm process node, with NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI platform in the HPC field also expected to consume a bunch of its production capacity in 2026.

US tech companies have adopted TSMC's new 3nm process node already, with Apple's new M5 family of processors on TSMC's new 3nm node, as well as Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Elite processors, while on the HPC side of things NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin GPU family and AMD's next-gen Instinct MI355X AI accelerator will debut in 2026 on TSMC's new 3nm process node.

Elon Musk's xAI has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the ChatGPT-maker has stolen trade secrets by hiring two former xAI employees.

xAI filed a new lawsuit against Xuechen Li, a former xAI employee who sold his stock in the company and departed for a position at xAI rival company, OpenAI. It's unclear whether Li actually began working at OpenAI, but xAI's lawsuit accuses the former employee of stealing trade secrets from xAI to take to OpenAI, specifically secrets related to xAI's AI model, Grok. The lawsuit also states Li, an "early xAI engineer," along with Jimmy Fraiture, a former "senior finance executive" at xAI, were "induced" by OpenAI to steal trade secrets in its desire to win the artificial intelligence race.

xAI claims that OpenAI is threatened by the "innovativeness and creativity of xAI's code," and that Grok currently offers "more innovative and imaginative than those offered by its competitors, including OpenAI." Furthermore, xAI cites Grok's leading scores on industry benchmarks, and that OpenAI simply became the dominator in the AI race by being the "first mover." The lawsuit doesn't stop there, as xAI claims OpenAI is engaging in a "coordinated, unfair, and unlawful campaign" to target xAI employees for recruiting.

TSMC is making great strides in the development of its next-gen A16 and A14 process node technology, with huge improvements over its N2 process node in both performance and energy efficiency.

In a new post on X by Research Director and Semiconductor Analyst at The Futurum Group, Ray Wang, that TSMC says its next-gen A14 node (1.4nm) has achieved "yield performance" ahead of schedule. The performance improvements expected from TSMC's next-gen A14 node are impressive to say the least.

TSMC's upcoming A16 technology will integrate nanosheet transistors with Super Power Rail (SPR) and novel backside contacts to deliver industry-leading logic density, power efficiency, and most importantly: performance. A16 compared to N2 will see 8-10% higher speed, 15-20% less power, and around 1.1x chip density, making TSMC's upcoming A16 process perfect for HPC products that need complex signal routing and robust power delivery.

Intel is ramping up the number of the High-NA EUV lithography tools from ASML right now, where it has just a single High-NA EUV machine but is reportedly ordering another two machines to ramp up its next-gen 14A process node.

In a new post from Jerry Capital on X, Intel reportedly plans on buying two more of ASML's bleeding-edge High-NA EUV lithography tools -- the semiconductor magic machine -- in its battle for silicon supremacy against the likes of especially TSMC, but also Samsung.

Intel's upcoming 14A process node will use High-NA EUV lithography, representing a historic release for the semiconductor foundry division: making and shipping a next-generation processor in-house on the very latest semiconductor production technology.

Apple has TSMC fabbing all of its chips used inside of its new iPhone Air and iPhone 17 family of smartphones, but in the years to come we could see its chips made at Intel on American soil.

Apple's new A19 and A19 Pro chips inside of its new iPhones are fabbed at TSMC on its new N3P process, and with Apple boasting a gigantic $600 billion earmarked for US manufacturing, involving TSMC Arizona in making over tens of millions of Apple chips in the USA.

In a recent interview with CNBC and Apple executives, we saw the discussion turned towards if whether Apple would use Intel as a semiconductor foundry partner, and the company said they would. This pends on whether Intel succeeds with all of its promises with its new 14A process node, and even if it did, it could still be many years before Apple is making custom silicon with Intel Foundry Services.

The PC gaming market is in a healthier position than it has been in many years according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research, which reports that there has been a record 35% growth in 2025 with $44.5 billion in sales.

The firm reports that the PC gaming hardware market is poised to reach a record 35% growth for 2025, which would mean $44.5 billion in sales for the PC hardware segment alone from gamers, with JPR expecting to keep the $40B+ gravy train trend to continue through to 2028.

JPR's research is based on the sales of PC gaming hardware that includes desktop and laptops, AIB partners, and gaming peripherals. One of the key reasons for the big increase from $33 billion in 2024 to $44.5 billion in 2025 is because of Windows 11, which has new hardware requirements that are pushing PC gamers to either upgrade their existing systems with new hardware, or buy a pre-built gaming PC with new hardware.

PCI-SIG announced the next-next-gen PCIe 8.0 specification last month, but now the body that controls the PCIe standard has released PCIe 8.0 specification, version 3.0 to its members.

The next-next-gen PCIe 8.0 standard won't be for consumers and gamers right away but it is being tailor-made for super-intensive workloads like AI, quantum computing, and more. Right now, PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 are more than enough for virtually all gamers as the latest GPUs don't fully saturate the bandwidth available to PCIe 5.0.

Meanwhile, Gen4 SSDs still pump over 7GB/sec and Gen5 SSDs pump an even faster 14GB/sec+, which is way more than enough for gamers and average users. PCIe 6.0 isn't coming until after 2030 and by then, more users will be on the Gen5 standard without a need to do 32GB/sec+ reads from their SSDs let alone GPUs using the full bandwidth of a PCIe 6.0 x16 port.

The remains of an unexploded bomb from World War II were unearthed over the weekend at the old Kaohsiung Refinery, which is undergoing environmental remediation ahead of the construction for TSMC's new semiconductor plant.

The Kaohsiung City government's Construction Office reports that construction workers in the former refinery's storage tank dug up the unexploded bomb at around 11:30am, immediately notifying the Taiwan military. Military officials quickly arrived at TSMC's construction site, determining that the bomb posed no immediate safety threat, and then removed the unexploded bomb an hour later.

The 8th Army Corps said in a press release that it had removed an unexploded aerial bomb from TSMC's construction site in Kaohsiung's Nanzih District, with the bomb appearing to be from an "early period" but doesn't have a visible batch number or any other identifying marks on it, as it was highly corroded.

Mark Zuckerberg has filed a lawsuit against Meta over Facebook, accusing him of violating its "standards of impersonation" by creating a Facebook page with his own name.

In what sounds like a bizarre turn of events for the entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and now current CEO of Meta, isn't actually suing his own company, but a bankruptcy lawyer from Indianapolis, Indiana, with the same name has filed a complaint. The lawyer, Mark Zuckerberg, is suing Mark Zuckerberg (the CEO) for his Facebook page being taken down five times in the last eight years, which is a Facebook page he uses to advertise his business, and one he has paid $11,000 to advertise on.

According to the complaint filed on Wednesday, Meta accuses Zuckerberg of impersonating the company's CEO, writing to the lawyer that his Facebook page violates the company's "standards of impersonation". The following day, Zuckerberg (lawyer) told 13News that his account was now enabled, which was later confirmed by Meta, with a spokesperson saying the company has "reinstated Mark Zuckerberg's account, after finding it had been disabled in error." Notably, this issue with Zuckerberg's (lawyer) account has been ongoing since 2017.

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang recently visited TSMC where he discussed internal company matters, but also delivered a message to the semiconductor manufacturer that TSMC may have to share revenue with the Trump administration.

That was the rumor, but according to a new report from FocusTaiwan that has cited a response from TSMC, that information wasn't correct at all, and that no such suggestion was made by Huang. The rumor is an extension of the deal President Trump made for American chip manufacturers on exporting chips to China, which was to pay 15% of the revenue made on selling chips to China to the US government. The trade deal focused on companies such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.

That trade deal has yet to be written in stone. Then a report by the Taiwanese outlet CNA was published that claimed NVIDIA's CEO traveled to Taiwan to inform the chip giant it may need to share its revenue from China chips as well, which would essentially bring TSMC in on the deal with the American chip makers. However, according to the recent report from FocusTaiwan, that doesn't seem to be true. TSMC has dismissed the rumor, and said Huang was invited to the headquarters to give a speech and participate in the birthday celebration for TSMC founder Morris Chang.

NVIDIA has just posted its Q2 2025 financial report, with $46.7 billion in revenue over the three-month period, breaking its previous sales record from Q1 2025 with $44.1 billion.

The company posted a press release on its website noting that its quarterly earnings are up 56% from a year ago, as well as no H20 AI GPUs sold to China-based customers in Q2 2025. NVIDIA benefited from a $180 million release of previously reserved H20 chips sitting in inventory, from around $650 million in unrestricted H20 sales to customers outside of China.

NVIDIA expects the next quarter to be even bigger again, once again breaking (even the new Q2 record) in Q3 2025, with the AI GPU leader projecting $54 billion in revenue. That would mean $44B for Q1, $46.7B for Q2, and a big step up to $54B in Q3... GB200 is mass-produced now, and the new Blackwell Ultra GB300 AI servers are now hitting the market... Q3 is going to be massive for NVIDIA.

Microsoft has called an emergency press conference only hours after a group of protesters stormed a building at the company's headquarters.

The emergency press conference was held in the same room where protesters had earlier that day entered without permission, as Microsoft's Vice Chair and President, Brad Smith, addressed a group of reporters to discuss the situation. The press conference was also livestreamed directly to the official Microsoft YouTube channel, and its 15-minute duration can be viewed above.

The protesters that stormed Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, were part of the No Azure for Apartheid group, which entered Microsoft's premises without permission and locked employees out of offices. Smith added that the protesters even planted crude listening devices in the form of smartphones under couches and behind books. The Microsoft vice president stated that the protesters refused to leave, and as a result, the Redmond police were called, and they were removed.

Australia Post has just immediately suspended most packages and goods being sent to the United States, with limits in place from the government-owned postage service to deliveries of just letters, documents, gifts valued under $150 to get through.

The postal service has taken some rather huge steps in stopping any forms of postage to the US, after the Trump administration tariff on low-value parcels is due to come into effect soon. Australia Post will still deliver letters and documents, as well as packages that are declared as gifts that are worth under $100 USD ($153 AUD).

Gary Starr, the executive general manager of parcel, post and e-commerce services at Australia Post said: "However, due to the complex and rapidly evolving situation, a temporary partial suspension has been necessary to allow us to develop and implement a workable solution for our customers. Specifically, the requirement for duties and taxes to be prepaid on all shipments prior to their arrival in the US.".