An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The backstop from Nvidia would help the ChatGPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt project that SoftBank's energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. For OpenAI, a deal would be the first step toward controlling its own infrastructure instead of renting it from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, while for Nvidia, it would guarantee demand for its chips for years to come.

The project is expected to cost more than $500 billion in total, including the chips inside the data center, according to the WSJ. The $250 billion guarantee covers the data center lease and debt financing, but would not cover the Nvidia chips inside the center, the WSJ said, adding that the chipmaker was also discussing financing OpenAI's chip purchases worth up to $350 billion. Nvidia's backing would support financing vehicles aimed at reassuring lenders about the project's funding, the report added. The first phase of the project is expected to be finished in 2028, with around 800 megawatts of power, the Journal said. The report notes that the U.S. government will control access to the power, while Japan will fund it separately under a trade agreement tied to Tokyo's $33 billion investment in a natural gas plant. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will reportedly help determine who receives access.

Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle's first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description.

Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense's chief information officer, said in the release that the agency is saving at least $441 million for taxpayers "by fundamentally improving how we procure on-premises Oracle capabilities."

The Washington Post describes a mid-tier executive at Meta as one of Silicon Valley's "winners" whose financial security suddenly "evaporated" as their workforce "pushed headlong into AI and heavy job cuts," creating a transformed job market. "Her ex-husband, a designer at Meta who was laid off in 2020, eventually gave up looking for jobs in his profession. He now lifts boxes at a warehouse." Layoffs.fyi, which tracks announced job cuts, counts more than 800,000 tech workers laid off since 2022, including large staff reductions in recent months at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon... "There's this whole tranche of people who've been quite used to being among the most upwardly mobile in society who are all of a sudden saying, 'Now I'm the guy on the streetâs'" said Oliver Raskin, who founded Silicon Valley market research consultancy Signalcraft Insights and has surveyed attitudes in the tech labor force... "The rise of AI, especially, is bound to change the workplace radically," [said Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin]. "But the way it's going to happen is similar to how technology transformed the auto industry." Ruth Milkman, a labor sociologist at the City University of New York, said that technology workers are getting a dose of what workers in other industries have long complained about: jobs that feel unsteady or rob them of autonomy. "Low-wage workers are used to it," she said...

Many layoffs at technology companies are probably a hangover effect from over-hiring in prior years, experts say. And they don't account for a spotty recent increase in hiring in the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and jobs in media and entertainment. Digging deeper, though, some economists say there are signs that Silicon Valley and other technology-reliant parts of the American economy have reached a turning point where they are growing without needing as many people. The notion was encapsulated in a recent talk that ricocheted through group chats across the tech industry: In it, a partner at the start-up incubator Y Combinator heralded a new generation of AI-first companies that will only need human labor for "novel situations," "ethical considerations" and "high-stakes moments."

Gad Levanon, chief economist at the labor research nonprofit Burning Glass Institute, said that the number of hours worked in the information sector has dipped since 2022, while the sector's economic output has increased by about 8 percent a year — more than three times the overall growth rate of the U.S. economy. He says the data reveals a sea change in industries, including technology and finance, toward doing more work with the same or fewer people — one that is spreading to other professional classes. "That's the new reality for white-collar and tech-exposed work: output up, headcount flat or down," Levanon said...

Raskin, who has worked in the tech world since the late '90s, said that even though the current moment feels unsettling to many, he's hopeful that it's an early chapter in an evolving story. "It's happened many times before," he said, "that something implodes and all these people lose jobs, but then that talent gets cycled into whatever the next thing is — into a new wave of prosperity."
In the article tech entrepreneur Anil Dash quips that Silicon Valley techies are "are guinea pigs for what tech dudes want to do to everyone."

Oracle cut roughly 21,000 jobs over the past year as it reorganized around AI and ramps up spending on data centers for customers such as OpenAI and Meta. The restructuring cost the company about $1.8 billion and, while Oracle says AI deployment may drive further reductions, it also warns the cuts could create skills shortages and hurt productivity. The BBC reports: The software and cloud computing firm says it had around 141,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2026, down from about 162,000 workers at the same time last year. The "deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," the report says. The cuts, which amount to about 13% of Oracle's workforce, are part of a wider trend among tech firms as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building AI infrastructure like data centers.

"Battered by years of mass layoffs, California tech workers were hoping the job market would rebound this year," reports the Los Angeles Times. "But things are getting worse." The class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees is landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others struggle to find work. The have-nots are doing everything that used to guarantee great jobs — refreshing resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles and doing interviews — but companies are much more picky these days. The tech jobless are rethinking their lives. Some are taking pay cuts, others are leaving tech. Some are going back to study or launch startups. Some have retired....

Since 2022, more than 815,500 tech workers have been laid off, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts. The tsunami of pink slips surged in 2023, when companies that had gone on hiring sprees during the COVID-19 pandemic began to cut back. From January to April, U.S. tech employers announced 85,411 job cuts this year, up 33% from the same period last year, according to global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that the number of information jobs — which includes jobs in hard-hit Hollywood as well as tech — tumbled 17% between the middle of 2022 and this February. The San Francisco Bay Area has been hardest hit, the institute said in a recent report, with the number of jobs declining by 0.4%, compared with 7.5% growth over a similar time span before COVID-19 slammed into the U.S. economy.

Tech layoffs are also spilling over into other industries. Automaker General Motors laid off roughly 600 workers in its information technology department, and Walmart is reportedly laying off or relocating roughly 1,000 workers in its technology and products teams. Recruiters say companies have become much more selective, requiring AI skills, combining different positions and interviewing more people for each job. "You're seeing elongated hiring cycles," said Robert Lucido, senior director of strategic advisory at Magnit, a California company that helps tech giants and other businesses manage contractors, freelancers and other contingent workers. "There's more opportunity to fill the need that they truly want."

Paul Flaharty, district president at staffing firm Robert Half in Los Angeles, said companies are laying off workers, but also creating new roles tied to AI initiatives. "For individuals that are displaced, it's really important that they find ways to upskill themselves so that they can make themselves as attractive as possible for these new jobs that are being created," he said. Kira Martins was already taking on more work in a small team at Snap — the parent company of disappearing messaging app Snapchat — when she was laid off in April. The company said the layoffs were to cut costs as it focuses on profitability, noting how employees are using AI to "reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers...." Martins, a 36-year-old Los Angeles resident, views AI as a tool and is optimistic about finding her next role. People still need to decide how to use AI and check the work it generates, she said. "In tech, you want to be a first adopter, because if you don't move quickly, it's very easy to become irrelevant," she said. "Everyone's kind of hopping on the AI train."
A former Google worker (laid off more than a year ago) says he's still job hunting, according to the article, and "he's learned it's not enough to just apply in this competitive market. Workers really need to network and leverage their connections to get seen by hiring managers and stand out."

But when 64-year-old product manager Bruce Bowers lost his job at Oracle — along with thousands of others — he just started his retirement early.

ShinyHunters claims it exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, where it says it stole 40GB of student and billing data. "ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand," reports The Register. From the report: "University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents," a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. "We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs." They didn't say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims.

A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters' claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations. Google said it spotted malicious activity, "consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273," between May 27 and June 9, and notified more than 100 global orgs "whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these, we're told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector. Oracle has released a "patch availability document," but it's unclear whether a patch is currently available.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Few business leaders have been as deeply embedded in popular culture as Elon Musk, the ambitious entrepreneur who has become a central figure in internet culture and amassed a fortune that has made him the world's first trillionaire. At a time when concerns about inequality are high and public attitudes toward the ultra-wealthy have soured, Musk has managed to retain a loyal following despite his stratospheric net worth and without the folksy persona that endeared other tycoons such as Warren Buffett to the masses.

While admirers view Musk's no-filter style as part of his appeal, critics have accused him of wielding oligarch-like power, raised concerns about governance at his companies and objected to his increasingly partisan political interventions. Still, SpaceX, the sprawling rocket, satellite and AI company that together with electric-car maker Tesla form the center of Musk's empire, raised a record $75 billion in its initial public offering on Thursday, highlighting investor enthusiasm for his business ventures. Prior to the share sale, Forbes pegged his net worth at roughly $780 billion, far ahead of the man next in line, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page.

"The second richest person has been hovering around $300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk can potentially be worth tomorrow," said Matt Durot, deputy editor at Forbes Wealth. "And only one other person, (Oracle founder) Larry Ellison, has ever been worth $400 billion." Most of Musk's wealth now rests with SpaceX, where he holds a stake worth roughly $866 billion. Along with Tesla and the rest of his properties, his net worth will exceed $1.1 trillion when the stock begins trading Friday, according to Forbes and Reuters calculations based on company filings.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ComputerWeekly: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative, said: "We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cyber security. June's record-shattering drop ... is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale. The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018. It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist."

And with the addition of hundreds of CVEs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and other third-party flaws taking the total to almost 600, Chris Goettl, vice president of security product management at Ivanti, said talk of a 'Patch Apocalypse' was no longer unwarranted. "We are in the Patch Apocalypse. The Patch Apocalypse is now," said Goettl. "This is not intended to be a scare tactic. It is meant to outline the challenge that many organizations were anticipating, but the new generation of LLMs [Large Language Models] has accelerated significantly in the first half of 2026."

"There are going to be more CVEs resolved by vendors at a faster and more continuous pace than we have ever seen previously. Unfortunately, this will also include more zero-day and n-day exploits than previously seen as well. The window from release from a vendor to exploitation had already shortened to five days as of 2023 threat intelligence data." Goettl said that many suppliers have acknowledged the need to use AI tools in their security research to identify and resolve flaws, with Oracle, Google Chrome and Mozilla all upping the cadence of their updates. Whether or not Microsoft follows suit remains to be seen.

Wix is laying off roughly 20% of its workforce, about 1,000 employees, as CEO Avishai Abrahami cites both the rapid evolution of AI and currency pressure from a stronger Israeli shekel against the dollar. The web developer joins a growing list of tech companies making similar cuts, including Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit. Fast Company reports: "We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s," [wrote Abrahami]. "This is not just about adopting new tools -- it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage, and how they operate. Companies that embrace this change will not only build faster; they will build things the previous generation literally could not have imagined."

Abrahami also cited the poor exchange rate between the Israeli shekel and the U.S. dollar. The Israeli currency has significantly strengthened in the past few quarters against a weakening dollar, and the shekel is up nearly 30% against the greenback over the last year.

"As the majority of our teams are Israel-based, a very meaningful portion of our costs are shekel-denominated, while our revenue is largely dollar-denominated," Abrahami explained on X. "This creates a structural pressure on our ability to operate at our current scale. It is a reality that directly shapes what is sustainable for our company."

Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.

"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...

The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.

Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.

Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.

Intuit is reportedly cutting about 3,000 jobs, or 17% of its workforce, as it restructures around AI and simplifies its corporate organization. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues. Companies such as Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have let go of thousands of employees each, all of them citing a need to refocus expenditures around AI projects as a reason to cut jobs and restructure their organizations. [...]

Intuit, however, hasn't been perceived as a beneficiary of the AI boom, with its shares consistently underperforming in the broader S&P 500 over the past 12 months. The company has been caught up in the broader current of worries that traditional software-as-a-service firms will not be able to keep up or compete, as new and upcoming AI products and services threaten to change how software is developed and how it is used. In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier. The company expects revenue to increase by about 10% in the third quarter, for which it will report results later today.

Snap is laying off about 1,000 employees, or 16% of its workforce, while closing 300 open roles as it tries to cut costs and push toward profitability with more AI-driven efficiency. "While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers," CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo, which was included in the company's 8-K filing (PDF). "We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives." The Verge reports: The changes are expected to save Snap $500 million by the second half of 2026. Snap had about 5,261 full-time employees as of December 2025, and now joins the growing list of tech companies that have already announced significant layoffs this year, including Meta, Amazon, Oracle, GoPro, and Jack Dorsey's Block.

"Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth," Spiegel wrote. "Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value."

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, nearly half of planned U.S. data center projects are being delayed or canceled. "One major reason behind these setbacks is the availability of key electrical components -- such as transformers, switchgear, and batteries -- that are used both at data center sites and outside of them," reports Tom's Hardware. "Meanwhile, grid infrastructure is also stressed by electric vehicles and electrified heating systems." Tom's Hardware reports: Approximately 12 gigawatts (12 GW) of data center capacity is expected to come online in the U.S. in 2026, according to data by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. Yet only about one-third of that capacity is currently under active construction because of various constraints.

Electrical infrastructure represents less than 10% of total data center cost, but it is as vital as compute hardware. A delay in any single element of the power chain can halt the entire project, which makes transformers, switchgear, and similar devices critical items despite their relatively small share of CapEx. Due to high demand, lead times for high-power transformers have expanded dramatically in the U.S.: delivery typically took 24 to 30 months before 2020, but waiting periods can stretch to as long as five years today, according to Sightline Climate cited by Bloomberg. For AI data centers, this is a catastrophe as their deployment cycles are under 18 months.

To address shortages, companies are turning to global markets. As a result, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea became the biggest suppliers of high-power transformers for AI data centers to AI data centers. At the same time, imports of high-power transformers from China surged from fewer than 1,500 units in 2022 to more than 8,000 units in 2025 through October, according to Wood Mackenzie data cited by Bloomberg. The volatility of exports from China does not end with transformers, as the PRC accounts for over 40% of U.S. battery imports, while its share in certain transformer and switchgear categories remains near 30%, according to Bloomberg.

bobthesungeek76036 shares a report from the Register: Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners. The layoffs were carried out via email, according to copies of the message viewed by Business Insider. The email told affected workers they would be terminated immediately and to provide a personal email for follow-up.

The cuts echo a TD Cowen forecast earlier this year, when the investment bank questioned how Oracle would finance its expanding AI datacenter buildout and suggested headcount reductions could reach 20,000 to 30,000. It is not clear how many employees were notified on Tuesday, but one screenshot that purports to show the number of internal Slack users showed a drop of 10,000 overnight.

[...] Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company's workforce. According to posts from Oracle workers on LinkedIn, the cuts were spread through multiple departments around the country, with employees in Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas taking to social media to say they were among those chopped. "This news didn't seem to affect stock price," adds bobthesungeek76036. "ORCL is up 6% for the day."

"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly: Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue.

But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around".
Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era." Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.

The deal to take control of TikTok's U.S. business came with an unusual condition, according to people familiar with the matter. The investors — which include Oracle, Abu Dhabi investor MGX, and private-equity firm Silver Lake — "paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January," reports the Wall Street Journal, "and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total." The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said... Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal. Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump's role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers...

The TikTok fee extracted from private-sector investors is the administration's latest transaction involving the nation's largest businesses. Trump took a nearly 10% stake in semiconductor company Intel and has agreed to take a chunk of chip sales to China from Nvidia in exchange for granting export licenses. The administration has also taken equity stakes in other companies and has a say in the operations of U.S. Steel following a "golden share" agreement with Japan's Nippon Steel in its takeover.
Reuters notes earlier this month, a lawsuit was filed by investors in two of TikTok's social media rivals, seeking to reverse the approval of the deal.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

OpenAI is reportedly backing away from expanding its AI data center partnership with Oracle because newer generations of Nvidia GPUs may arrive before the facility is even operational. CNBC reports: Artificial intelligence chips are getting upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built, a market reality that exposes a key risk to the AI trade and Oracle's debt-fueled expansion. OpenAI is no longer planning to expand its partnership with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, home to the Stargate data center, because it wants clusters with newer generations of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The current Abilene site is expected to use Nvidia's Blackwell processors, and the power isn't projected to come online for a year. By then, OpenAI is hoping to have expanded access to Nvidia's next-generation chips in bigger clusters elsewhere, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. In a post on X, Oracle called the reports "false and incorrect." However, it only said existing projects are on track and didn't address expansion plans.

CNBC notes: "Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger."

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claiming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." Problem: The putative "ground-up rewrite" is actually the result of running the existing copyrighted codebase and test suite through the Claude LLM. In so doing, the maintainers claim that v7 now represents a unique work of authorship, and therefore may be offered under a new license. Version 6 and earlier was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Version 7 claims to be available under the MIT license.

The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision, which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression -- the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.

An anti-corruption group has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that transferred TikTok's U.S. operations to a group of investors tied to the administration. The suit claims the arrangement violates a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest and alleges the deal financially benefited Trump allies while leaving the platform's algorithm under Chinese ownership. NBC News reports: The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise the "reputational cost of corruption in America," argues the deal violates a law intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and has enriched Trump's allies. That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said that TikTok couldn't be distributed in the United States unless the Chinese company ByteDance found an American-based corporate home by the day before Donald Trump returned to office. The law was upheld by the Supreme Court.

"The law was clear, but it was never enforced," says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law." The plaintiffs in the suit are two software engineers from California: One is a shareholder in Alphabet Inc., YouTube's parent company; the other is a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Inc., which is Instagram's parent company. Both say they suffered financially due to the non-enforcement of the law. "The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences," said Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor. "The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means that it can censor the content that it doesn't like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and it can censor the information that it doesn't like. Really it's a situation that's going to be terrible for users, and terrible for free speech on the platform."

India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers.

The bank's analysts contend that enterprise software competition turns on factors that have little to do with the ability to write code -- sales teams, cross-licensing agreements, patented IP, first-mover lock-in, brand awareness, and go-to-market infrastructure. If a massive, low-cost, domain-expert workforce couldn't crack the market over several decades, HSBC argues, the idea that AI-generated code will do so is, in the words of Nvidia's Jensen Huang that the report approvingly cites, "illogical."