Welcome back to Markets Desk, here's what's moving the needle right now.
Amazon continues its aggressive push into artificial intelligence, poaching Pedram Rezaei from Microsoft, where he served as chief technology officer of Copilot. Rezaei joins AWS's Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies group, and his departure is the latest in a string of senior exits from Microsoft's AI division, signaling real competitive pressure at the top of the talent market.
Shifting to storage hardware, Western Digital and Seagate shares are recovering after analysts stepped in to cool concerns over a potential threat from Toshiba. Even if Toshiba doubles its production capacity, analysts say it remains well behind both incumbents in scale and market position, and that gap does not close overnight. The reassurance was enough to bring buyers back into both names.
And on the policy front, Social Security's annual cost-of-living adjustment announcement drops October fourteenth. The adjustment is tied directly to inflation data, and with price pressures having eased considerably over the past year, beneficiaries should expect a notably smaller increase than the outsized adjustments seen in two thousand twenty three and two thousand twenty four. For tens of millions of retirees, that number matters deeply.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
