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 [...]
Anthropic and OpenAI raise billions as LLM race accelerates January 28, 2026 The AI boom took another leap forward this week as rival labs Anthropic and OpenAI moved to lock in eye-watering sums of funding, as the chatbot race accelerates. Anthropic has closed a funding round of between $10bn and $15bn at a valuation of around $350bn, comfortably overshooting its original target. The round was led by [...]
Just Eat wants you to stop scrolling and start talking January 27, 2026 Just Eat Takeaway has launched an AI voice assistant in its UK app, allowing customers to place orders by speaking rather than navigating menus. The feature is integrated into Just Eat’s existing in-app chat function and lets users describe what they want in natural language. The assistant then recommends restaurants, dishes and products across food, grocery [...]
Anthropic chief: AI will ‘test who we are as a species’ January 27, 2026 The co-founder of the £350bn AI giant Anthropic has warned that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power” as the technology advances and warned that “it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.” In a 20,000 word essay, Dario Amodei, warned that the development [...]
Big Tech’s AI borrowing boom tests US bond market January 27, 2026 Big Tech is on track to become the dominant force in the US corporate bond market, as the race to build AI infrastructure drives an unprecedented surge in borrowing that is beginning to worry investors. By the end of the decade, around half of the 10 largest borrowers in the US bond market will be [...]
