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Is there a fire alarm going off at Microsoft’s headquarters? A slew of Microsoft executives have bolted for the exits in recent weeks, most recently Ryan Roslansky, executive vice president of Office apps, who said Thursday he would leave at the end of this year. A day earlier it was Microsoft Science President Peter Lee’s turn. Both follow a bunch of other senior exits over the past few months, most prominently Office and Windows chief Rajesh Jha.
Those exiting are mostly veterans who had been at the company for 15 years or more. Each had their own reasons for leaving, we’d guess—for example, new jobs elsewhere. But it’s likely not a coincidence they’re choosing to leave as Microsoft, like other companies, is having to rethink how it operates to deal with both the opportunities and the threats posed by AI. In this environment, it makes sense that people who have been at Microsoft for years and probably have made a lot of money on the stock (it’s up 1,289% since 2014, according to Koyfin) would decide to get out now while the going is good.
After all, while Microsoft’s cloud operation will surely grow faster as a result of AI workloads, new AI services could undercut its software business. If you’re a Microsoft veteran who no longer has the hunger to prove yourself, why deal with the stress? Leave it to younger people.
It’s also notable that in recent months, CEO Satya Nadella has been promoting younger folk, such as Asha Sharma, who has recently been getting a lot of attention as she shakes up the troubled gaming unit. And in the spring, Nadella put Charles Lamanna and Jacob Andreou in charge of Copilot. Both Andreou and Sharma are relatively new to Microsoft, having previously worked at Snap and Instacart, respectively, among other places.
Who else might leave? Microsoft is a 51-year-old company, so there are probably lots of veterans. Roslansky’s and Lee’s departures this week surely won’t be the last.
How to Sink in Today’s Choppy IPO Waters
All those companies who’ve put off their IPOs in the past couple of weeks weren’t crazy. A little-known data center builder, Accelevation (that’s not a typo) Holdings, braved the market and came off the worse for it.
After pricing its IPO at $18 on Tuesday—below its $20 to $24 tentative range—Accelevation saw its stock fall for two straight days to Thursday’s close of $16.59.
It has to be said that Accelevation is no prize. The company loses money and is carrying $647.8 million in debt against $28 million in cash on its balance sheet. It planned to use the money raised from the offering to reduce that debt, but only by about a quarter. And as its business is building data centers, including cabling and cooling, its growth depends on the AI boom. That’s a very hot business right now, with everyone seemingly jumping into the market, but it won’t last.
Still, even for healthy companies, this market may not be forgiving, thanks to steadily rising interest rates, among other things. That won’t necessarily stop more appealing companies from going public, however. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Anthropic, the most hotly anticipated IPO of them all, is targeting its offering for mid-November.
By the time Circle actually went public later that spring, Trump had backed down a little on the tariffs and the market had recovered. “No one can predict what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Allaire said.
In Other News
• Nvidia and SoftBank have each made the final $10 billion investment in their separate $30 billion pledges to OpenAI’s last funding round, which raised a total of $122 billion.
• OpenAI said it recently identified and mitigated a “coordinated model-distillation campaign” involving individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the Chinese developer of Kimi models.
• Australian neocloud Sharon AI has secured $356 million through its first loan backed by its graphics processing units, making it the latest cloud provider to finance its expansion by borrowing against chips and cash flows from customer contracts. The facility carries an interest rate of 9.95% before fees.
• A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed lawsuits from education technology company Chegg and Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone, Variety and other publications, which alleged that Google had violated antitrust law when its AI Overviews summaries used their content. The court rejected the argument that Google trades search traffic in exchange for content, along with denying the publishers’ claims that it has a monopoly.
• OpenAI said it fired three safety employees for mishandling corporate data. More here.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which Akash speaks with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire about Anthropic’s imminent IPO and AI safety regulation.
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