Author name: Chris Alas

We’ve reached November and the United States government is still shut down. It is genuinely worrying for people and for businesses. The stoppage has entered day 36, becoming the longest in recent history, with public services disrupted and hundreds of thousands of employees unpaid or on temporary furlough. The U.S. economy is starting to feel it week by week. Some analysts estimate alarming losses of around $15 billion per week while government activity is frozen, a bill that does not simply disappear when Capitol Hill reaches a late deal. The cost is not just a headline number.

In the United States OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, signed today a $38 billion cloud computing agreement with Amazon Web Services. The alliance gives immediate access to hundreds of thousands of next-generation GPUs and reinforces AWS as the go-to provider for large-scale AI workloads. Beyond the headline, the message is clear: global competition is pulling ahead at the pace of those who can finance and operate massive compute infrastructure, not just those with good ideas.

Amazon just joined the list of companies making massive cuts to their teams and announced the elimination of about 14,000 corporate roles at the end of October 2025. That number landed after days of rumors and leaks pointing to a possible adjustment of up to 30,000 positions, although the company stuck to the 14,000 figure as the confirmed round. The stated goal is to gain agility, simplify layers, and redirect resources toward strategic bets like artificial intelligence, without framing it as a plain cost-cutting move.