Morning, {{first name | folks}}! Amazon’s AWS business grew 39% as demand for AI computing accelerated, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees, and OpenAI-backed Thrive agreed to acquire home security giant ADT for $15.3 billion. Plus, Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a potential trillion-dollar IPO, and Google is bringing interactive 3D creation into AI Studio. Let’s get into it!
Today’s Top 5
Amazon Reports 39% Growth in AWS Revenue as AI Demand Surges: AWS revenue reached $46 billion, its fastest growth in nearly five years, while Bedrock token usage surged 17 times year over year.
Microsoft Offers Voluntary Buyouts to 60,000 Employees: Microsoft is offering buyouts to around a quarter of its global workforce across the US, UK, Canada and India, following 4,800 job cuts earlier this year.
OpenAI-Backed Thrive Holdings to Acquire ADT for $15.3 Billion: Thrive Holdings is acquiring the home security company, bringing ADT’s network of millions of connected homes into its portfolio.
Anthropic Reportedly Targets a $1.5–2 Trillion IPO Valuation: The potential listing would put pressure on Anthropic to show Claude can grow beyond its strong foothold in software development.
Google Adds XR Blocks to AI Studio for Building Interactive 3D Experiences: Users can describe an augmented or virtual reality experience and have Gemini generate interactive 3D scenes with objects, animations and physics.
Amazon is seeing its AI investments translate into one of its strongest cloud performances in years. AWS revenue jumped 39% to $46 billion in the third quarter, its fastest growth in nearly five years. Spending by Fortune 500 companies on Amazon Bedrock, its AI platform, grew nearly sevenfold, while total token usage surged 17 times year over year.
Amazon plans to invest around $220 billion this year, much of it in AI infrastructure. The spending comes as free cash flow turned negative $42.4 billion over the past 12 months, showing the scale of investment required to keep up with demand for AI computing.
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada and India. That’s roughly a quarter of its global workforce, following 4,800 job cuts earlier this year.
The offer comes as Microsoft pours billions into AI infrastructure and changes how its teams operate. It gives thousands of employees a chance to leave voluntarily while the company shifts more of its resources towards AI.
OpenAI is backing the $15.3 billion acquisition of ADT through Thrive Holdings, where it is an investor and technology partner. The deal gives Thrive control of one of America's biggest home security companies, with shareholders set to receive $10 per share.
ADT already has millions of homes connected to its alarms and monitoring services. Now, with OpenAI's technology in the picture, the company could bring AI into how it detects threats, handles alerts and protects customers. Neither company has announced specific products yet.
Anthropic is heading towards a potential IPO at a valuation of $1.5–2 trillion. Claude has become a major business, particularly among software developers, but that success raises a bigger question: can Anthropic get companies in other industries to spend just as heavily on AI?
That’s what investors will be looking at. Anthropic has huge computing costs to cover and needs to keep improving its models while finding new sources of demand. Its next challenge is proving that Claude can become essential well beyond the world of coding.
Google has brought XR Blocks into AI Studio, letting users describe an augmented or virtual reality experience and have Gemini build it. A prompt can generate a 3D scene with interactive objects, animations, physics, and hand gestures, without developers having to create every element from scratch.
Users can then test their creations in a desktop simulator or on Android XR headsets and make changes by describing what they want to adjust. It gives developers a quicker way to experiment with spatial apps, turning an idea into something they can actually interact with before committing to a full build.
Other AI Signals:
OpenAI updated its Model Spec, reorganizing its guidance around five core values, including human intent, safety, honesty, agency and care, with new guidance on memory and personalization.
LangChain added browser use and background subagents to Managed Deep Agents, allowing agents to interact with websites, fill out forms and delegate longer tasks.
Google Cloud expanded Knowledge Catalog's semantic-model support, connecting business definitions across platforms so AI agents can work with more consistent company data.
IBM released Granite Switch 4.1.1, adding updated speech recognition across 10 languages and an improved decision adapter.
Hugging Face launched Project ProtoStar, bringing universities, companies, and research groups together to make scientific datasets, models and code more accessible for AI research.
AI Tools to Try:
AI Ranked Monitor: Check whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity can access your website and identify technical issues affecting AI search visibility.
Judgment Labs: Monitor AI agents in production, trace their actions and identify failures before they affect users.
Nativ: Run open-source AI models locally on Apple Silicon Macs without sending your data to cloud services.
Genjutsu AI: Transform existing videos by changing people, objects and backgrounds while preserving the original movement and camera work.
