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1.	Microsoft CEO Relinquishes Some Duties to Focus on Technology By Nick Wingfield Source: The Information

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is handing off some of his business responsibilities so he can redouble his focus on the company’s biggest technical challenges.

In a message to Microsoft employees on Wednesday, Nadella said that the changes will result in Judson Althoff, who has been Microsoft’s chief commercial officer, becoming CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business. Oversight of Microsoft’s marketing and operations organizations will move from Nadella to Althoff.

“This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work—across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation—to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift,” Nadella said in his message.

Some things will not change though. Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, will still report to Nadella, in addition to reporting to Althoff. And Carolina Dybeck Happe, Microsoft’s chief operations officer, will continue to report to Nadella.

2.	Apple, OpenAI Seek to Throw Out Elon Musk’s xAI Antitrust Lawsuit By Theo Wayt Source: The Information

Apple and OpenAI asked a federal judge to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought by Elon Musk’s xAI that alleged the two companies squashed competition in artificial intelligence by steering users toward ChatGPT instead of competitors like xAI’s Grok.

In a court filing late Tuesday, Apple called xAI’s suit a “multi-step chain of speculation on top of speculation” that failed to prove actual injury. In a separate filing, OpenAI said: “Elon Musk is waging a campaign of lawfare against the leading artificial intelligence company, OpenAI.”

xAI’s original suit, which was filed in August in Texas, alleged that a deal Apple announced in 2024 to integrate ChatGPT into iOS was anticompetitive. Apple said in its response that its deal with OpenAI is “expressly not exclusive,” and The Information reported in May that Apple is evaluating models from other companies including Anthropic and Google to power the next iteration of Siri. In addition to xAI’s antitrust suit, the company sued OpenAI last week for allegedly stealing trade secrets by poaching employees. Musk is also personally suing OpenAI in a bid to stop it from converting to a for-profit company.

3.	Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab Launches First Finetuning Product By Stephanie Palazzolo Source: The Information

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup cofounded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, announced its first product, an application programming interface that allows developers to finetune, or tweak, open-source models.

The product, called Tinker, allows developers to customize models on their own datasets, while Thinking Machines handles the infrastructure work like keeping chips up and running in the background, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. The Information first reported on Thinking Machines’ efforts to make such model customization more accessible.

Murati publicly launched Thinking Machines in February this year, after a number of OpenAI researchers left the ChatGPT-maker to work with her and other top researchers. Since then, though, it’s been unclear to people outside the company, even its own investors, what its long-term product goals are.

4.	Fermi Soars to Nearly $22 billion Valuation in Trading Debut By Miles Kruppa Source: The Information

Shares in Fermi America rose more than 50% to almost $33 a piece following its listing on the Nasdaq exchange, a sign of investor exuberance for companies building data centers for artificial intelligence.

Fermi, which was founded this year, is building a data center site connected to natural gas and nuclear power in Amarillo, Texas, on a more than 5,000 acre plot of land leased from the Texas Tech University System. It hasn’t made any revenue so far, though it’s signed a non-binding agreement with an unnamed tech company interested in being a tenant for the site.

Fermi’s trading debut gave it a valuation of about $21.5 billion, according to the fully diluted share count it outlined in an initial public offering prospectus.

5.	OpenAI Taps Samsung, SK Hynix for Massive AI Infrastructure Project By Qianer Liu Source: The Information

OpenAI signed preliminary agreements with South Korea’s largest memory chip makers to supply its ambitious Stargate datacenter project.

The deals were announced during a trip by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to Seoul. The operator of ChatGPT is leading a sweeping global push to build massive new data centers for AI — a project likely to cost trillions of dollars and consume vast amounts of chips, servers, cooling systems and electricity.

OpenAI said in a statement that its demand for high-bandwidth memory could reach as much as 900,000 wafers per month. SK Hynix said in a separate statement that this would be more than double the industry’s current production capacity.

SK Hynix is the worldwide leader in supplying high-bandwidth memory, which is critical for Nvidia’s chips, while Samsung is working to take a larger share of the fast-growing market. The companies are the latest to support OpenAI’s global AI infrastructure buildout alongside Nvidia and Oracle.

After Seoul, Altman was set to visit Taipei for meetings with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn, major partners in the AI server supply chain, local Taiwanese reports said.