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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.SEATTLE—Not long ago, Amazon was seen as an also-ran in the great AI race.Microsoft, in particular—with its partnership with OpenAI and cloud business outpacing Amazon’s AWS—seemed to have reclaimed its place as the Puget Sound’s reigning tech giant.Things are looking much different for AWS today.That’s thanks to some savvy deals of its own with OpenAI and Anthropic, plans for $200 billion of infrastructure spending and Amazon’s long-term bet on custom chips. It’s also not involved in the ugly tech trial of the year sucking in the biggest names in AI, from Elon Musk and Sam Altman to Mira Murati and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.“People thought we were behind,” Matt Garman, head of Amazon’s cloud-computing business, AWS, told me in an interview here on the corporate campus.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mollie Amkraut Mueller’s mumbling was starting to get on her husband’s nerves.What was once a sacred nightly routine—putting the toddler to bed, collapsing onto the couch and opening their laptops to finish their work in peace—had become anything but peaceful. Instead of typing quietly, Amkraut Mueller started to hold down the function key and talk in hushed tones to her computer.Amkraut Mueller, who runs her own artificial-intelligence business in Seattle, is hooked on Wispr Flow, a dictation app that users are pairing with coding tools like Claude Code and Codex to turn rambling, stream-of-consciousness prompts into coherent, usable text in seconds.Efficient, yes.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Yoodli has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by WestBridge Capital, as the Seattle-based experiential learning platform strengthens its team and expands more aggressively into the enterprise market. Existing US-based investors Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the round.

“If you read the news, it feels like Armageddon,” he told employees in a meeting that lasted past 10 p.m. local time, according to Bloomberg. During the meeting, which was streamed live on his social media platform X, Musk further appealed: “I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire. I understand if you don’t want to buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down.” Musk also advised Tesla employees to “hang onto” their stock despite the «rocky moments.» Notably, Tesla shares have plunged more than 40% this year, erasing gains from a stock surge that followed President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

green card holders are increasingly facing secondary inspections and overnight detentions by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at American airports. According to TOI's Lubna Kably, immigration attorneys have reported a growing trend of CBP officials questioning elderly Indians who spend winter months in India and pressuring them to voluntarily surrender their green cards by signing Form I-407. Under the US Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a lawful permanent resident (LPR), or green card holder, returning to the US after an absence of more than 180 days is treated as seeking «re-admission» and becomes subject to grounds of inadmissibility. Although green card abandonment is typically considered when someone stays outside the US for more than a year, attorneys are now seeing increased scrutiny even for shorter absences. Ashwin Sharma, an immigration attorney based in Florida, said, “I have personally handled cases recently where the CBP has targeted elderly Indian green card holders, particularly grandparents who happen to have spent a bit longer outside the US, and pressured them to sign Form I-407 to ‘voluntarily’ surrender their lawful permanent resident status (green card). And the moment they have tried to push back, they have been met with threats of detention or ‘removal’ by the CBP officers who have been emboldened by Trump to see themselves as judge, jury, and executioner.”

Kripa Upadhyay, a Seattle-based immigration attorney, told TOI's Lubna Kably, “As heartless as this may seem, foreign nationals (especially those needing renewal of H-1B or F-1 visa stamps) really need to think twice about leaving the US right now.” The US Department of State recently changed eligibility requirements for interview waiver or «dropbox» appointments. Earlier, anyone who had been issued a non-immigrant visa (except B visitor visas) could apply for a waiver if their visa expired within 48 months. Now, dropbox is limited only to applicants renewing the same category of visa that expired within the last 12 months.

US Federal Trade Commission asked a federal court in Seattle on Wednesday to delay a September trial in its case alleging Amazon misled consumers over its Prime subscription service, citing «severe resource shortfalls in terms of both money and personnel.» Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, told US District Judge John Chun during a hearing that the agency faces a «dire resource situation» amid cost cutting measures enacted under President Donald Trump's administration. «We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,» Cohen said. Cohen's statements are the first clear indication of how large-scale efforts led by Trump advisor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to shrink government are affecting the FTC, which enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Tesla shares were at a five-month low, Tesla showrooms in the US are being vandalized, Tesla cybertrucks were set on fire in Seattle, and the electric vehicle maker’s sales are down in the US and Europe. That US President Donald Trump has bought a Tesla car might seem like good news, signalling support at the highest level.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Amazon.com’s cloud-computing business on Thursday unveiled its first-ever quantum computing chip, which it claims marks an important step in the development of useful, reliable quantum computers. The chip, dubbed Ocelot, can lower the costs of reducing quantum computing errors by up to 90%, the Seattle-based tech giant said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For Pfizer Inc., the strategy has been “go big, or go home". When the covid-19 pandemic first hit, Pfizer’s big bet on its partnership with BioNTech SE hit a home run.

Bridgetown Research has raised $19 million in a funding round led by global venture capital firms Lightspeed and Accel.

A year before Elon Musk helped start OpenAI in San Francisco, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen already had established his own nonprofit artificial intelligence research laboratory in Seattle

White House has posted a video online showing immigrants in shackles being prepared to board a deportation flight from Seattle. The video showed handcuffs and chains being lifted from a basket filled with other shackles, jingling as they were removed and then arranged on the airport tarmac alongside four additional sets of restraints.

Recent aviation disasters and close calls definitely have people worried about the safety of flying

Trump's birthright citizenship executive order is set to hear arguments Thursday over a longer-term pause of the directive, which aims to end citizenship for children born to parents not legally in the country.

It’s one thing to fix your home after something basic has gone wrong, but it’s a different beast to rebuild and recover after a major natural disaster has destroyed multiple properties on your street, in your neighborhood or across the region

With his 70th birthday looming on this year’s horizon, Microsoft founder Bill Gates looked inward to open a window into the man behind Windows and other seminal software that turned the personal computer into a household staple

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. U.S. tech companies are used to some competition from China, but DeepSeek seems to be operating on another level.

US President Donald Trump has more than lived up to his promise of disruption. «Your head will spin when you see what's going to happen,» he had said about his day 1 in White House. And he did make heads spin with his dozens of orders.

Starbucks said Friday it plans an unspecified number of layoffs as it restructures its corporate staff