Last month at an event in Las Vegas, Nat Sahlstrom, a director for Amazon’s cloud computing unit, told an audience that electrical power is “the lifeblood of the modern data center,” reminding the crowd that the unit—known as Amazon Web Services—had pledged four years earlier to one day rely solely on renewable energy.

What he didn’t say is that after a spurt ...

Juniper Networks, which makes high-end devices that route traffic around the internet, looked to be making headway in a key growth market a few years ago when it started selling its routers to Amazon Web Services. AWS is the biggest of the public cloud providers that handle an increasing share of big companies’ computing work.

But hopes that AWS could jumpstart Juniper’s stagnant ...

Six months after Facebook launched a slate of original news shows from outlets like CNN, ABC News and BuzzFeed, the company has told news executives it is likely to reduce its funding for individual shows, as it refines its programming strategy for the effort.

Facebook’s overall spending on news content for its Watch service—$90 million, according to people familiar with the news ...

For some time, Apple has been serious about building more wireless components for its own devices, putting its own Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips into the latest Apple Watches and AirPod earbuds.

Professor Song-Chun Zhu of UCLA is one of the world’s leading authorities on computer vision. He has won numerous grants, including from the Pentagon—and more recently from Huawei Technologies. Now, Mr. Zhu, who has already received one-third of the $450,000 Huawei grant, says he doesn’t want to accept the rest because of the controversy swirling around the Chinese telecom ...

Five days before an Uber self-driving car prototype killed a pedestrian in Arizona last March, a manager in Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit warned the group’s top executives that the software powering the company’s prototype robotaxis was dangerous. He also warned that the human back-up drivers in the vehicles weren’t properly trained to do their jobs or were not ...

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants advice, he occasionally turns to a kindred figure: Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist. Recently, Mr. Gates suggested to Mr. Zuckerberg that Facebook consider hiring someone with a profile like that of Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer at Microsoft, a lawyer who has become an influential ambassador to ...

Investors in Lime were surprised this spring that the startup already had spent much of the $70 million it had raised only a few months earlier. The company was trying to shift quickly from running a bike-share business to one focused on electric scooters, and needed to buy thousands of the vehicles, according to people familiar with the matter. It lost an average of $6 million a month the ...

Qualcomm is laying off 269 employees at its offices in Raleigh, N.C. and San Diego, mostly in its faltering data center unit, according to documents reviewed by The Information. Only around 50 employees remain in the data center unit, down from nearly 1,000 employees earlier this year, said one person with knowledge of the situation.

The layoffs follow earlier rounds of staff cutbacks in the ...

Google is secretly exploring ways to use Tencent as a proxy for Google Cloud in China, where the U.S. company doesn’t operate its own cloud-computing business, people familiar with the matter said.

If the project moves forward, corporate customers using Google Cloud’s software tools and services outside China—for tasks ranging from database management to analytics to ...

China’s ByteDance, the world’s most valuable startup worth $75 billion, is in talks to raise the equivalent of more than $1 billion for its first venture fund to invest in artificial intelligence and media content, people familiar with the matter said.   

The Beijing-based company, whose popular video app TikTok is growing in the U.S. and other overseas markets, seeks to ...

On the 20th floor of a nondescript office building in China’s southern boomtown of Shenzhen, employees from small businesses such as electronic-component makers can often be seen in a colorful bright office checking out big TV screens displaying Google Search, Gmail and YouTube—which are otherwise blocked in China.

They are in one of more than two dozen Google Export Experience ...

A few years ago, Rethink Robotics was hailed as a revolutionary company that would change the course of industrial robots. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2015, the company raised $150 million in financing from backers such as Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs at a valuation that reached $291 million.

Its relatively low-cost machines were designed to work closely with people, unlike heavy ...

Uber has held talks recently with electric scooter rental startup Bird to acquire the company in what could be a multibillion-dollar deal, said several people briefed on the discussions.

But Uber is considering another option: The company has also recently held acquisition talks with the scooter company, Lime, said one of the people. While Uber hasn’t yet arrived at a  decision ...

In recent years, the chip giant Intel sought to burnish its brand with a series of whimsical marketing antics—from a light show at the 2018 Winter Olympics consisting of Intel drones to a collaboration with Lady Gaga, who performed at the 2016 Grammy Awards with dancing robotic arms and interactive holograms.

Now Intel is sharply scaling back an in-house advertising group, called Agency ...

Sidewalk Labs executives were full of ambition two years ago when they pitched their parent company, Alphabet, more than 600 pages of plans for building a city neighborhood from scratch.

The 2016 proposal, which Sidewalk described as preliminary, was designed to stretch the conventions of urban planning, proposing things like enclosing the newly created district with a 260-foot-tall plastic ...