It\u2019s the second voluntary buyout offer that Microsoft has offered employees this year, after giving 7% of its US workforce the option to retire early in April.<\/p>\n
Microsoft had 223,000 employees globally at the end of June, down from 228,000 at the end of 2025, according to regulatory filings.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Microsoft also announced a new Surface Ultra laptop that runs on Nvidia\u2019s artificial intelligence chips and will cost more than US$2500.<\/p>\n
The launch is part of a broader push by tech companies to release hardware that can handle more AI computing on-device and offline, so users do not have to rely solely on remote cloud data centres, where running AI is slower and more expensive.<\/p>\n
Microsoft will hold a call with analysts on Wednesday afternoon to discuss its quarterly results.<\/p>\n
Shares in Google owner Alphabet plummet on profit miss, ad slowdown<\/p>\n
Shares in Google parent Alphabet fell more than 10% in after-hours trading Wednesday as the company reported lower-than-expected profit and a slowdown in its advertising business while it maintained big spending on AI.<\/p>\n
Net profit slid 25% from a year earlier to US$26.2 billion in the July-to-September period, or US$2.12 per share, well short of expectations by analysts surveyed by FactSet.<\/p>\n
Alphabet booked an US$8.7 billion loss on its equity investments, which it attributed to its stake in SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company where shares have struggled since going public in June.<\/p>\n
Revenue rose 25% to US$127.6b, slightly below the about US$128b analysts had forecast.<\/p>\n
Advertising revenue grew 11% to US$82.0b, short of expectations. Revenue from Google\u2019s search business, still the company\u2019s largest source of income, rose 12% to US$63.4 billion, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.<\/p>\n
YouTube, now the most-watched content provider on American TV screens, saw advertising revenue grow 9% to US$11.2b, down from 13% growth in the previous quarter. YouTube Music and Premium passed 150 million subscribers worldwide, including trials.<\/p>\n
Alphabet\u2019s net profit fell 25% to US$26.2b in the July-to-September period. Photo \/ Getty<\/p>\n
Google Cloud, which rents computing power and AI tools to businesses, saw revenue jump 103% to US$30.7b, ahead of analyst expectations.<\/p>\n
The company said sales of its in-house AI chips, known as TPUs, contributed significantly to that growth. Operating income for the unit tripled to US$11.1b.<\/p>\n
Google is also selling its TPU chips to outside companies, in a growing challenge to market leader Nvidia. OpenAI plans to buy some of the chips, according to media reports this week.<\/p>\n
Alphabet\u2019s \u201cOther Bets\u201d division, which includes robotaxi company Waymo, posted revenue of US$372 million and an operating loss of US$2.0b.<\/p>\n
Waymo now provides more than 500,000 paid rides per week across 15 US metropolitan areas and aims to reach one million weekly rides by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
\u2018Long-range planning\u2019 <\/p>\n
Alphabet spent US$51.4 billion on capital expenditures during the quarter, mostly on data centres and AI chips, more than double the US$24 billion a year earlier.<\/p>\n
Its latest forecast for capex spending is between US$195b to US$205b in spending for 2026.<\/p>\n
The company said it would continue to increase capex spending significantly in 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would broadly think of all of this as a long-range planning process, not a short-term allocation exercise,\u201d Google chief executive Sundar Pichai told analysts of the company\u2019s investment splurge.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s spending, which included a fine paid to the European Union, outstripped the cash generated by Alphabet\u2019s businesses for a second straight quarter, leaving a US$9.1b gap.<\/p>\n
During the quarter, Alphabet raised US$28.7 billion by selling bonds and US$12.4 billion by issuing new shares to help pay for its AI ambitions.<\/p>\n
Google has stepped up the pace of its AI releases since a delay to a flagship model in July raised questions about whether it was falling behind rivals OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n
It launched Gemini 4 at the end of September and later released a version focused on cyber security.<\/p>\n
The Gemini app has reached one billion users. Google\u2019s AI models now process nearly 32 billion tokens, or units of text, per minute, more than four times the level of a year ago, the company said.<\/p>\n
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, is also one of Google\u2019s largest cloud customers. It has committed to using up to one million Google AI chips.<\/p>\n
In September, a US judge declined to order Google to sell off parts of its advertising technology business, imposing restrictions on how it operates instead.<\/p>\n
– AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the second voluntary buyout offer that Microsoft has offered employees this year, after giving 7% of its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[74,11730,55179,18459,9442,138,6162,371,22218,28161,5346,9866,367,83475,609,14574,130,111,139,69,162710,5340,13420,15267,7493,8037,180,26818,131,1680,5977],"class_list":["post-644641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-after","tag-afternoon","tag-azure","tag-beats","tag-better","tag-business","tag-cloud","tag-computing","tag-division","tag-expectations","tag-expected","tag-fuelled","tag-google","tag-grew","tag-microsoft","tag-miss","tag-more","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-popped","tag-profit","tag-quarter","tag-reported","tag-revenue","tag-september","tag-shares","tag-sinks","tag-than","tag-wednesday","tag-which"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}