Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta reported combined capital expenditures of at least $720 billion for the year, mostly on AI infrastructure, during recent earnings calls. Despite no clear returns yet, the companies show no intention of reducing their buildout pace. The article highlights the ongoing massive investment trend in AI data centers.
Microsoft reported spending about $5 billion less on capital expenditures in Q3 than projected because data center capacity it planned to rent was not ready on time. The company did not name the third party, but one of them is cloud firm Iren. This highlights supply chain and infrastructure challenges in AI data center expansion.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that lets publishers opt out of AI scraping. The proposed shared "policy token" signal would live in a website's robots.txt file and apply publishers' AI training preferences across multiple companies instead of requiring individual settings. The proposal is being advanced within the IETF by Anthropic standards technical lead Kevin Kelley.
Why it matters: It signals a coordinated industry move toward a common mechanism for publishers to control AI training data scraping.
Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India. It is the first time the company has made such an offer to so many employees, expanding on a retirement offer limited to around 9,000 employees earlier this year. The move is part of an effort to lower operating costs while avoiding cuts to AI infrastructure investment.
Microsoft disclosed $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI for the quarter ending September 30. The figure includes revenue-sharing payments and underscores the deep financial dependency between the two companies.
Why it matters: Provides concrete financial data on the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, valuable for understanding AI industry economics.
Microsoft says it has built an AI-powered diagnostic tool that outperforms human doctors by up to four times on its own benchmark. The results were published in the journal Science and based on comparisons against physicians using scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman framed the tool as healthcare AI 'finally here.' The benchmark was compiled by Microsoft itself, and the available text gives no further methodological detail.
Microsoft researchers say they have developed a machine learning method that improves weather forecasts two to six weeks ahead, a horizon where physics-based and existing AI models typically lose reliability. The findings were published in Nature, and the tool has been released as open-source software. Microsoft joins Google, Nvidia and others working on AI weather forecasting, with potential users including farmers and emergency responders.
Microsoft held its first live event in two years, announcing the Surface Laptop Ultra, its first device with the Nvidia RTX Spark SoC, starting at $2,599 and shipping October 16. The laptop offers up to 128GB unified memory and Blackwell GPU configurations, aimed at developers and enthusiasts for local AI development and gaming. Microsoft also outlined Windows 11 changes tied to local-AI and agentic workflows.
