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Verizon is laying off more than 13,000 employees in mass job reductions that arrive as the telecommunications giant says it must reorient its entire company. The job cuts began on Thursday, per to a staff memo from Verizon CEO Dan Schulman. In the letter, which was seen by The Associated Press, Schulman said Verizon’s current cost structure limits the company’s ability to investpointing particularly to customer experiences. We must reorient our entire company around delivering for and delighting our customers, Schulman wrote. He added that the company needed to simplify its operations to address the complexity and friction that slow us down and frustrate our customers. Verizon had nearly 100,000 full-time employees as of the end of last year, according to securities filings. A spokesperson confirmed that the layoffs announced Thursday account for about 20% of the company’s management workforce, which isn’t unionized. Verizon has faced rising competition in both the wireless phone and home internet spaceparticularly from AT&T, T-Mobile, and other big market players. New leadership at the company has stressed the need to right the company’s direction. Schulman took the CEO seat just last month. In the company’s most recent earnings, he stated that Verizons trajectory was at a critical inflection point”and said, rather than incremental changes, Verizon would aggressively transform its operations. For its third quarter of 2025, Verizon posted earnings of $4.95 billion and $33.82 billion in revenue. The carrier reported continued subscriber growth for its prepaid wireless services, but it lost a net 7,000 postpaid connections. News of coming layoffs at Verizon was reported last week by The Wall Street Journal. The outlet says that the 13,000 job cuts mark the largest-ever round of layoffs at the company. Beyond the cuts across Verizons workforce, Schulman said that the New York company would also significantly reduce its outsourced and other outside labor expenses. Its a tough time for the job market overalland Verizon isnt the only company to announce sizeable workforce reductions recently. More and more layoffs have piled up at companies like Amazon, UPS, Nestlé, and more. Some companies have pointed to rising operational costs spanning from U.S. President Donald Trumps barrage of new tariffs and shifts in consumer spending. Others cite corporate restructuring more broadlyor are redirecting money to artificial intelligence. Regardless, such cuts have raised worker anxieties across sectors. Schulman on Thursday recognized that changes in technology and in the economy are impacting the workforce across all industries. He said that Verizon had established a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund for workers departing the company. Shares of Verizon were essentially flat Thursday. Wyatte Grantham-Philips, AP business writer
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E-Commerce
This week, chips were on the menu in the White House. When you ask about AI and chips, Saudi Arabia has a huge need for computing power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) said at a press conference on Tuesday with President Trump, where he floated a potential $50-billion purchase of American microchips. Trumps Commerce Department signed off on exporting 70,000 such advanced microchips made by Nvidia to state-owned AI firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Little wonder why Jensen Huang, Nvidias high-flying CEO, joined a gaggle of tech moguls including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Michael Dell at a dinner honoring the Saudi royal. By the time MBS was on his flight back to Riyadh, he could tout a new data-center partnership with Musks xAI and fleshed-out joint ventures with firms like Amazon and Cisco. Silicon Valleys bevy of deals with the oil-rich Gulf states are central to so-called AI diplomacy: a policy bet that the United States can leverage access to select tech to compete with Chinas broader economic influence. Were leading by a lot on AI, Trump chimed in during the press conference. China would be in second place, but were leading by a lot. In his administration, this has been a constant refrain. David Sacks, his AI czar and a venture capitalist, has argued that chip sales could shift the balance of power in the region, as the White Houses AI diplomacy boxes China out of the Middle East. Yet the reality is that theres no amount of chips that the United States can throw at Saudi Arabia, the UAE or other Gulf states, to persuade them to decouple from China. China-Gulf relations are already deeply entrenched, with Gulf rulers relying on Chinese supply chains to pursue ambitious visions of domestic economic transformation. So while offering access to Nvidia chips might be useful for securing Gulf-state investments in the United States, they are by no means a killer app that can easily re-establish U.S. market share — or geopolitical influence — in the region. Chips-based diplomacy Its easy to see why the oil-rich Arab monarchies have emerged as the key test case for AI diplomacy. Saudi, Emirati, and other Gulf rulers want to transform their current resource wealth into post-oil sources of income and influence, amping up their strategic value to global powers by routing the flow of global data not just oil through the Persian Gulf. Washington, in turn, wants to capture that strategic value and use the Gulf as a beachhead for pushing back against Chinas growing global influence, ensuring that American tech companies build out Gulf compute infrastructure and that Gulf capital, in turn, flows into U.S. markets. Withholding chips from the Gulf states, Sacks argues, would drive [these states] into the arms of China, helping to create a Huawei Belt and Road in the Gulf, a reference to the tech firm. China ties Theres a glaring problem with this argument, though: The building blocks of Gulf rulers AI visions are overwhelmingly manufactured in China. While the Gulf monarchies might downplay economic cooperation with China out of respect for American sensitivities, they are unlikely to go all-in on a second American century short of a monumental shift in what the United States can offer them. Since 2010, the Gulf states Chinese imports have nearly tripled, even as imports from the United States have barely increased with little reason to expect these trends to reverse in the near future, owing to the fallout from Trumps tariffs and Chinas continued manufacturing growth. This extends beyond cheap commercial goods, encompassing important pieces of digital or electrical infrastructure like cell-phone networks and solar panels. The Gulf states have ramped up imports of semi-conductors as part of investments in knowledge-economy industries, data centers, and government e-services. Semiconductor imports to the UAE, for example, grew from around $500 million in annual spending from 2015 to 2019 to over $730 million from 2020 to 2023, with over two-thirds of imports in the latter years sourced from Chinese firms. The UAE also expanded its annual imports of higher-end graphics chips to nearly $1 billion in 2023, with Chinese firms providing over half of that value. Geopolitical annoyance It’s little wonder, then, that the Gulf states have resisted pressure from Washington to pivot from China on matters of economic or even security cooperation. The UAE, for one, has repeatedly annoyed Washington through the closeness of its ties to China, facing allegations of leaking sensitive information about U.S. national-security capabilities to Chinese firms. While state-run AI firm G42 committed to severing ties with Chinese entity Huawei as a condition of partnering with Microsoft in 2024, it did so by selling off its Chinese holdings to yet another state-run Emirati firm overseen by the same Emirati royal. Saudi Arabia, generally more sensitive to U.S. policymakers views on China, has likewise kept its options open with respect to Beijing. Saudi entities continue to partner with Hong Kong-based SenseTime in AI development and deployment, even as the company remains under U.S. sanctions for its role in surveillance of Chinese Uyghurs. This hedging also reflects Gulf rulers concerns about the staying power of present-day U.S. technological advantages. At a time when the United States is floating new restrictions on Chinese students and scholars, the UAE is welcoming them to its Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The Gulf states will do what they need to keep the door open to U.S. technology including outright bribery but theyll be building compute in partnership with China no matter what the United States does. Can they even build it? Set aside the strategic-competition framing, and more practical questions come up like whether the Gulf states can even build and power these projects. While the UAE has pulled off complex projects before, its proposed 5 GW Stargate campus would be larger than the largest AI data center in the United States and around 50 times larger than the largest such in-country installation. Saudi Arabias proposed 500 MW data-center partnership with Elon Musks xAI is larger than the countrys entire installed capacity at present, and comes even as the monarchy is quietly abandoning its failed megaprojects of yester-year. To be sure, Silicon Valley firms will want these deals all the same, and properly structured such partnerships might shore up U.S. influence alongside Chinas economic influence in the region. But at least for now, theres no level of U.S. direct investment or degree of technology sharing that will get the Gulf states to pivot back away from China. And that means asking hard questions about how much the United States can afford to place critical digital infrastructure on a geopolitical fault line for generations to come.
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E-Commerce
While President Donald Trump has struggled to settle on a way to address Americans concerns about high costs, Vice President JD Vance on Thursday offered a more direct and empathetic message, saying, We hear you and theres a lot more work to do. But the American people need to have a little bit of patience, Vance said in remarks at an event hosted by Breitbart News. The vice presidents remarks come as the White House grapples with how to speak to voters about the cost of living, an issue that emerged as a vulnerability for Republicans in this months off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. Vance said the Trump administration has made incredible progress in tackling cost-of-living concerns as they worked to undo policies from former President Joe Biden. As much progress as weve made, its going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom, which we really do believe is coming. We believe that were on the front end of it, Vance said. Trump, whose tariffs have contributed to higher prices for many goods, has insisted that prices are down, pointing to gas and egg prices specifically. The president has said Democrats’ arguments about affordability during the election were a con job, and saying, I dont want to hear about the affordability, because right now, were much less. However, in recent days he has shifted his response, acknowledging that there is room for consumer prices to drop further. Vance addresses Republican infighting Vance was asked about recent high-profile rifts within Trump’s Make America Great Again coalition. Trump broke with one of his most loyal backers, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, over her complaints he was spending too much time on foreign policy and had dragged his feet on releasing files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump also has been reluctant to disavow white nationalist Nick Fuentes and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who recently hosted Fuentes for a friendly interview, touching off turmoil on the right. Vance did not directly address the recent infighting, but said he thinks the debates within the party are healthy. Its totally reasonable for the people who make up this coalition to argue, about issues, said Vance, who often publicly engages in online debates on his X account. But Trump’s MAGA coalition needs to remember, that we have a lot more in common than we do not in common and that supporters are up against a radical leftist movement. Have our debates but focus on the enemy, so that we can win victories that matter for the American people, Vance said. The vice president and former senator said Republicans have to keep their coalition united, especially heading into next year’s midterm elections that determine control of Congress. He said the working class voters who elected Trump to the White House don’t necessarily turn out to vote in midterm elections and said Republicans need to motivate them. I think thats one of the lessons that we learned in Virginia and New Jersey is that when Donald Trump is not on the ballot, youve got to give people something to actually believe in, something to be inspired by, to get out there and vote, Vance said. Theyre not going to vote just because you have an R next to your name. Michelle L. Price, Associated Press
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