Amazon Cuts Deep, AI Heats Up, and a $1 Billion Supercomputer Deal: Big Tech’s Week of Reckoning and Reinvention

28th October 2025

From Amazon’s largest round of corporate layoffs since 2022 to the U.S. government’s billion-dollar bet on AMD for AI-powered supercomputers, this week paints a picture of a tech industry at a crossroads: trimming fat while doubling down on artificial intelligence. Qualcomm is jumping headfirst into the data center AI chip race, challenging Nvidia and AMD, while America’s wealthy are cashing in on tax breaks that make private jets a “business expense.” All this and more in today’s Read It And Eat!

Major Headlines

• Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say

Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning on Tuesday, as the company pares expenses and compensates for over-hiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon's 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would mark Amazon's largest job cut since late 2022, when it started to eliminate around 27,000 positions.

Amazon has been trimming smaller numbers of jobs over the past two years across multiple divisions, including devices, communications and podcasting. The cuts beginning this week may affect a variety of divisions, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology or PXT; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services, the people said. Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will start going out on Tuesday morning, the people said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy, including by reducing the number of managers. He installed an anonymous complaint line for identifying inefficiencies that has elicited some 1,500 responses and over 450 process changes, he said earlier this year.

Jassy said in June that the increased use of artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to further job cuts, particularly through automating repetitive and routine tasks. "This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force," said Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst. "Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure." Reuters

• U.S. Department of Energy and AMD cut a $1 billion deal for two AI supercomputers

  
  

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and AMD have announced a partnership for building two supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a foundation for future nuclear fusion and medical research. 

The partnership has the DoE and ORNL on the blue corner, and AMD, HPE, and Oracle on the other. The deal is that ORNL will host the datacenters, thus presumably providing the energy to run them, and the private companies will foot the bill for the hardware and software. When built, both sides will share the computing power.

The supercomputers themselves will predictably be an all-AMD affair for the major bits of hardware. 

The first one is called Lux and is set to be functional within six months, with AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators, to the tune of 1400 W board power each. ORNL director Stephen Streiffer says Lux will be three times as powerful in AI over current supercomputers, while Lisa Su states it was the fastest deployment of this size of supercomputer.

The second supercomputer will be called Discovery and is scheduled for delivery in 2028 and an operational kick-off in 2029. Discovery will use AMD's upcoming Instinct MI430 parts, a design with one Epyc CPU and four MI430X-HPC dies. The 430X and 450X are variations of the same design, with the former focusing on high-precision FP32 and FP64 performance, while the latter goes in the exact opposite direction and bets all its chips on FP8 and FP16.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says this project will "supercharge" research on multiple fronts and tackle "large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security". He seems particularly bullish on fusion energy, stating he believes that with the help of these systems, [the U.S.] will have "practical pathways to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years." He also hopes that cancer will become a manageable disease in a timeframe of five to eight years. TomsHardware

• Qualcomm stock jumps 11% as company enters AI chip race, taking on Nvidia, AMD

  
  

Qualcomm (QCOM) shares soared more than 20% Monday before closing the day out up 11% after the company announced it is entering the data center market its new AI200 and AI250 chips and rack-scale server offerings.

The move puts Qualcomm into direct competition with the likes of Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), as the company seeks to stake its claim to a portion of the multibillion-dollar data center market. Available beginning in 2026, the AI200 is both the name of Qualcomm’s individual AI accelerator and the full server rack it slots into, complete with a Qualcomm CPU. The AI250 is Qualcomm’s next-generation AI accelerator and server coming in 2027. A third chip and server are scheduled for 2028. Qualcomm says it will follow this annual cadence moving forward.

The company said that its AI200 and AI250 chips take advantage of its custom Hexagon NPU, or neural processing unit. The company has rolled out NPUs in its Windows PC chips and is taking the teachings from those processors and scaling them up for the data center. Qualcomm is also touting its servers’ total cost of ownership as a key benefit, thanks to their low power consumption. The chips, the company explains, are specifically designed for AI inference, or the process of running AI models. In other words, customers won’t use them to train new AI models. Yahoo.Finance

• Trump-Era tax loophole fuels surge in private jet sales and 'luxury write-off'

  
  

A tax break known as bonus depreciation now lets business owners deduct 100% of certain purchases from their taxable income. Americans are taking advantage.

President Trump’s landmark legislation expanded a tax break known as bonus depreciation, which now lets business owners deduct 100% of certain purchases from their taxable income. Eligible splurges include yachts, cars, racehorses, and private jets—as long as they’re used for business more than half of the time. 

Demand is climbing; Sales of private jets are up by 11% from this time last year, according to data from the jet broker Global Charter. Horse sales at the world’s largest thoroughbred auction in Kentucky grew by 24% last month compared to 2024. Gas stations and car washes also qualify. Sales of these establishments spiked after Trump temporarily expanded bonus depreciation in 2017. 

One entrepreneur told Bloomberg that he avoided millions of dollars in taxes by buying several car washes, which offset income from the sale of his family business. Looking ahead this rule will cost the IRS $363 billion in lost revenue over the next decade, according to estimates by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Reuters

Minor Headlines 

• Paul Biya declared winner of Cameroon presidential election BBC

  
  

• Hurricane Melissa is expected to make landfall in Jamaica today as a Category 5 storm Aljazeera

  
  

• Paramount to cut 1,000 jobs in first round of layoffs Reuters

  
  

• Gold sinks toward $4,000 as trade optimism spurs sell-off. Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• S&P500 now above 6,800 for first time Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• Musk could leave Tesla if $1 trillion pay plan is rejected, chair warns Reuters

  
  

• UnitedHealth lifts 2025 profit forecast, CEO eyes growth in 2026 Yahoo.Finance

  
  

• Trump asks Supreme Court to allow firing of Copyright Office head  Reuters