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A Boeing 767-300 cargo plane overran the runway at Miami International Airport and caught fire. The incident left five people dead and five seriously injured, and the aircraft collided with several vehicles. Flight recorders have been recovered and investigators are currently looking into the cause.
Roku has launched its first self-branded OLED smart TVs, expanding its premium lineup. The 55-inch and 65-inch models are offered in 120 Hz versions priced at $999 and 144 Hz versions at $1,299, and they are sold exclusively through Amazon.
YouTube has expanded its shopping affiliate program to include Amazon, allowing creators in the United States to tag Amazon products in Shorts, longer-form videos and livestreams. When viewers purchase through those tags, creators earn a commission on the resulting sales. This new feature integrates Amazon links directly into YouTube content.
Amazon has been purchasing large quantities of rare books, scanning them for use in artificial-intelligence training and then destroying the volumes. A shipment of such books was tracked to the company’s Las Vegas facility, where the items were confirmed to have been trashed after digitisation.
A U.S. appeals court has overturned a prior ruling that barred Perplexity from using its agentic shopping tools on Amazon’s platform. The decision restores the company’s ability to operate its AI shopping bot on Amazon, allowing the bot to resume browsing and purchasing items through the retailer’s site. The court’s reversal removes the injunction that had temporarily halted the service.
Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging that the company illegally poached its executives. The suit questions the enforceability of term employment agreements under California law. Warner Bros. claims Amazon’s actions violated those agreements.
Microsoft is testing a free, ad-supported cloud-gaming service for Xbox Insiders, restricting sessions to one hour and allowing play only of games the users already own. Amazon is integrating its Luna cloud-streamed titles, such as Fallout 4, into Prime Video. Both companies acknowledge that cloud gaming has not yet proven successful.
Amazon MGM Studios has removed a nearly completed film centered on Sam Altman from its slate. The decision comes after the company announced a partnership with OpenAI that includes a multibillion-dollar investment. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, was reportedly close to finishing when the drop occurred.
Odyssey, a startup focused on world-model technology, secured a $310 million financing round that values the company at $1.45 billion. The round was led by Amazon along with other major investors, including Nvidia and AMD. The company will use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud partner and will deploy AWS Trainium chips for its models.
The FCC has extended the deadline for Amazon’s Leo satellite broadband constellation, removing its spectrum-priority status while still requiring the company to launch the full 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2029. The agency also waived the earlier requirement that half of the satellites be deployed by July, giving Amazon additional time to meet the overall schedule.
Microsoft executives expressed reservations about funding OpenAI in 2018, fearing that withholding support could drive the company toward Amazon. They also worried that OpenAI might criticize Azure if it moved to Amazon’s platform.
Amazon has entered a multiyear licensing agreement with Oprah Winfrey to bring her podcast to the company’s streaming services. The deal will see twice-a-week video podcasts launched in July, repurposing content from The Oprah Winfrey Show, and forms part of Amazon’s broader strategy to monetize all podcast offerings.
California has filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of pressuring brands to ask competing retailers to increase prices on certain products. Internal communications cited in the filing show Amazon allegedly coordinating these price-raising efforts, which the suit claims have driven up costs for consumers across the Internet.
Amazon is providing Anthropic with a multi-year investment that could total as much as $25 billion, including an initial $5 billion tranche. In return, Anthropic has pledged to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade and will use the funds to purchase Amazon-made chips.
Amazon spent $35 million on marketing and acquired the film rights from Melania Trump’s production company for a documentary that features top cinematographers and expensive music, a budget far higher than typical documentary promotions. The filmmakers have defended the cost as unrelated to bribery, while observers have noted the unusually large spend and raised questions about Amazon’s motives.
Microsoft has launched the Maia 200, its second-generation AI inference accelerator built on TSMC’s 3 nm process and succeeding the 2023 Maia 100. The chip, containing over 100 billion transistors, is being deployed today in Azure’s US Central data-center region and is designed to run AI models faster and more efficiently, delivering roughly three times the FP4 performance of Amazon’s Trainium and surpassing Google’s TPU in FP8 benchmarks.