US tech stocks slide as Microsoft rout sharpens AI spending doubts January 30, 2026 US technology stocks sold off sharply on Thursday, as a bruising slump in Microsoft sparked investor unease over how long it will take for mass AI investments to pay off. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down 0.72 per cent at 23,685, weighed down by heavy losses across software giants. The S&P 500 slipped 0.13 per [...]
HSBC and Sage tackle Making Tax Digital burden for SMEs January 30, 2026 HSBC UK is launching a new digital tax tool inside its business banking platform, as the countdown to the government’s biggest shake-up of income tax reporting enters its final phase. Built using embedded tech from Sage, the service, called My Business Finances, will allow small business owners to manage invoicing and tax reporting. The move [...]
FTSE 100 Live: Gold rally eases; Trump warns UK on China trade January 30, 2026 Good morning and welcome to the City AM liveblog. As we round off the first month of trading, miners have dominated market activity. After becoming the FTSE 100’s top riser in 2025, gold miner Fresnillo has continued with gains in the new year, netting 20 per cent already. This is an inch below the FTSE [...]
BBC left out of ChatGPT AI news sources January 30, 2026 AI chatbots used by millions to access the news are skewing UK media, with new research showing that some of the country’s biggest and most trusted outlets are being sidelined altogether. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), ChatGPT and Google Gemini did not cite the BBC in any responses to news-related queries, [...]
Billion-dollar regulatory fines fail to dent Big Tech January 29, 2026 For the world’s biggest tech firms, regulatory penalties are no longer a consequential financial event. Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Amazon were fined a combined $7.8bn (£6.2bn) in 2025 for breaches of competition and privacy rules, according to a new Proton report. And while that sounds like a hefty number, in practice, it would have taken [...]
Meta surges, Microsoft stumbles as Big Tech doubles down on AI spend January 29, 2026 Three members of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ Big Tech stocks – Meta, Microsoft and Tesla – gave investors an early read on the health of the AI boom after US markets closed on Wednesday. Meta shares jumped as much as nine per cent in after-hours trading after the Facebook owner posted record revenues and issued an [...]
FTSE 100 Live: Miners lead stock rally; Pound holds onto gains January 29, 2026 Good morning and welcome back to the City AM liveblog. Is President Donald Trump trying to devalue the dollar? That’s the question many in the City and across global markets were asking yesterday after Trump referred to the dollar dropping 1.3 per cent against a basket of currencies as “great”. The President’s triggered another 0.2 [...]
CMA pushes back on Google’s AI overviews January 28, 2026 The UK’s competition regulator has fired an early warning shot at Google’s AI-powered search, in a move that suggests the era of unfettered scraping and summarising may be coming to an end. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Wednesday set out proposed rules that would force Google to loosen its control over how search works in the UK. [...]
Amazon confirms 16,000 job cuts after internal email error January 28, 2026 Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16,000 jobs globally, just hours after staff were mistakenly alerted to the redundancies in an internal email that was not meant to be sent. The latest round of layoffs follows the 14,000 corporate roles Amazon said it would axe in October, taking total white-collar cuts to around 30,000 in [...]
Is Musk’s SpaceX IPO date written in the stars? January 28, 2026 SpaceX may be aiming for the stars in more ways than one as Elon Musk has floated the idea of timing the rocket maker’s IPO to coincide with a rare planetary alignment, as well as his own birthday. The tentative window is mid-June, when Jupiter and Venus will appear unusually close together in the night sky, a [...]
