Oracle disclosed Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including jobs eliminated because of AI. 'The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,' the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing. The revelation puts new numbers to what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. We recently wrote about why that rationale is something companies may want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the headcount they're now cutting was hired during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what's really going on. Below, a running look ' in reverse chronological order ' at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor....
Checking in five months later, the space continues to sizzle from a startup funding standpoint, even though public markets have pulled back from the space in recent days. So far in 2026, investors have poured around $10.7 billion into seed through pre-IPO rounds for companies in Crunchbase's semiconductor category. That puts funding on track to eclipse last year's levels. Beyond Cerebras Systems, which went public last month after securing a $1 billion February pre-IPO round, a number of semiconductor-focused startups are raising considerable investor capital this year. Using Crunchbase data, we put together a list of the 10 largest venture funding recipients. One of the three largest fundraisers after Cerebras is MatX, a developer of chips customized for the large model needs of AI labs. The Silicon Valley startup raised a $500 million Series B in February led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness. Another moving up the ranks is Ayar Labs, which also secured $500 million in a March Series E financing led by Neuberger Berman. The San Jose, California-based company is an AI infrastructure startup focused on optics technology, with strategic backers including AMD Ventures and Nvidia....
The power plants are considered 'mobile' by the state of Mississippi because they are sitting on flatbed trailers, thus allowing them to dodge to air pollution regulations for one year. The NAACP, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in the area, says the unchecked emissions from the turbines is worsening air quality in an already polluted region. This week, it asked the court for an injunction against xAI. At issue is the 'mobile' nature of the turbines. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the NAACP, says the turbines are being operated in violation of federal law, which says that power plants mounted on a trailer can still be considered stationary and subject to air pollution regulations. XAI has been granted permits for 15 of its turbines. A Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce press release previously said that 'about half' of the 35 turbines in operation in May 2025 would remain on site. However, xAI has continued to install more. Currently, it's operating 46, according to a local news report....
Maybe you've seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century. Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that'going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today's secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture'not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches. Many of us thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen. Donald Trump, acting like some 16th-century European prince, has made the presidency his own personal fiefdom. Vladimir Putin borrows ideas from reactionary thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin'an Eastern Orthodox, anti-liberal philosopher who rejects the Enlightenment'to justify his imperial conquest of Ukraine....
