Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl recently declared “it’s time for a renaissance in energy and in supersonic flight” as the supersonic airliner company unveiled a Colorado factory dedicated to making gas turbines for AI data centers. But Boom may be facing turbulence after early backers for both ventures have questioned the company’s delivery timeline or backed out entirely.
One of the company’s first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has expressed doubts about Boom’s original plan to deliver the first Overture supersonic airliner in 2029. Kirby’s latest frank assessment came during an interview with the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast that appeared on October 28, 2026.
“‘29 is their official timeline,” Kirby told podcast host Monica Langley. “It’s not going to happen in ‘29—it’s going to take longer.”
Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.
NIC Global is closing its 100,000-square-foot manufacturing site in Woodinville, Wash., as demand shifts to Eastern Washington. (NIC Photo)
Metal fabricator NIC Global plans to close its Woodinville, Wash., plant, eliminating 103 jobs. Declining business from local customers is prompting the company to shift production primarily to Eastern Washington to meet data center-related growth.
The layoffs are scheduled to begin Jan. 18, 2027, with final departures Aug. 31, 2028, according to a notice filed with the Washington Employment Security Department. Affected jobs include assembly, engineering, quality assurance, metal fabrication specialists, and forklift positions.
The building will be returned to its landlord when the lease ends in September 2028.
“This is a sad day for our company. Woodinville is where NIC was formed — three Seattle-area sheet-metal shops brought together under one roof in 2001 — and the people in that building built the foundation of everything NIC is today,” Troy Wood, company president and CEO, said via email.
The 100,000-square-foot site mostly served energy and medical device customers. Wood said the volume of work at the plant has declined while demand has increased in Eastern Washington for customers building power distribution technology needed by data centers.
“NIC is a supplier of sheet-metal fabrications and assemblies, and in our business, being close to our customers is what keeps us competitive,” Wood said.
While most of the work from Woodinville will go to Spokane, and a smaller portion will go to NIC’s Gallatin, Tenn., facility. The company also has manufacturing in Pullman; Chillicothe, Ohio; and Denton, Texas. The work outside of Washington is focused on the heavy truck sector. The company’s headcount is nearly 600.
Laid-off workers will be encouraged to apply for openings at other plants.
There are smaller fabricators remaining in the Seattle area, including JEMCO Components & Fabrications, which provides precision machining and sheet-metal fabrication for customers in medical, aerospace and defense sectors, and QUAL-FAB serving medical and dental customers.
NIC’s legal and financial headquarters will stay in the Woodinville area, where the company plans a new office for its finance, IT, sales and West Coast support teams.
Wood praised the quality and reliability of the Woodinville employees’ work.
“I am grateful to every one of them,” he said, “and especially to those who chose to stay with us through two and a half years of uncertainty and kept doing their jobs with integrity.”
Seattle independent radio station KEXP, based in Lower Queen Anne, lost power early Friday morning. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
KEXP’s website and online streaming were down Friday morning after a power outage hit the Seattle radio station, though its over-the-air broadcast was back and running.
The outage started around midnight, and the station was on and off for a while before it was “knocked offline by a major power outage” between 2 and 3 a.m., said Dashel Schueler, KEXP’s director of marketing and communications. Schueler didn’t know the cause of the outage.
The station’s backup power system, known as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), also failed.
“There’s no power to the server room infrastructure because the UPS that is supposed to protect all of that gear has failed,” Schueler said. Staff are trying to power critical devices to restore services while they wait for the UPS to be repaired or for a workaround that bypasses it.
There’s no estimate yet for when streaming will return.
Listeners in the Seattle area can tune in at 90.3 FM. The outage affects the KEXP.org stream and the station’s mobile app. KEXP estimates about 175,000 people stream its live broadcast each week, and another 85,000 listen to its shows on-demand.
The outage also took down 92.7 KREV, the station KEXP now owns in the San Francisco Bay Area, which relies on KEXP’s Seattle-based digital infrastructure. Because KEXP’s DJs pick songs live rather than playing a preset playlist, underwriting breaks vary in timing and length, Schueler said. DJs fire the separate Seattle and Bay Area spots manually and at the same time.
KREV was back by around 8:30 to 8:45 a.m., running on a barebones setup KEXP typically uses for remote broadcasts, Schueler said. Listeners may notice some issues while the station gets everything put back together.
Around 7:30 a.m., KEXP DJ John Richards read messages on air from listeners across Seattle who were happy to have the station back — terrestrially at least.
A few posts from listeners on X and Bluesky referenced the streaming outage.
Update: Late Friday afternoon KEXP said it was still working to restore services, but it did manage to put up a temporary livestream on its site.
Elon Musk has outlined Neuralink's ambitions for Telepathy and Blindsight, two brain implants targeting paralysis and blindness. He also hopes future technology could help people walk and use their hands again.
Dexcom G7 15 Day arrives in Canada in November with longer sensor wear and expanded insurance coverage. Here's what users should know before switching.
In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape.
Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.
The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape.
Most conventional firearms come with serial numbers and leave unique microscopic markings on bullets and cartridge cases when fired. Investigators can use these clues to trace weapons or connect them to crimes. However, 3D-printed firearms, commonly called ghost guns, present a different challenge. They can be manufactured without serial numbers, and their unconventional construction can […]
At TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026, happening November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, networking powered by Braindate is designed to make those conversations easier to find, whether they are in 1:1 or small-group on-site meetings. Register before the event starts to save up to $100 on your pass, plus get a second for free.
In 2015, biomedical entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was Silicon Valley's golden girl, lauded as the youngest and richest self-made female billionaire thanks to the company she founded, Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion at the height of its success. Then it all came crashing down when accusations of fraud surfaced about the company's signature blood-testing device, culminating in a sensational trial. Holmes was convicted on four counts and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Holmes is back in the headlines thanks to a new film, You Can See Everything, which depicts the final days before Holmes, having exhausted her appeals, went to prison. Co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, it's a surreal, absurdist piece that has largely been received with gushing enthusiasm and no small amount of hype, with some declaring it the best film of the year. A few contrarian voices have emerged over the past week with much-needed reality checks, but there's no denying the film is destined to be an awards-season darling.
Pardon me for joining the buzzkills, but I cannot in good conscience jump on the You Can See Everything bandwagon. Sure, it has its moments, and the second half is highly entertaining, but there's nothing here to warrant all the breathless hyperbole. For all their much-touted access, Oppenheim and Fielder have produced a surprisingly shallow film that runs in circles, yielding very little fresh or novel insight—into Holmes, personally, or much else.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts Thursday that “some folks are sleeping a bit” on how much progress the company’s stores business has made. (GeekWire File Photo)
No company has ever had a business with $1 trillion in annual revenue. Andy Jassy says Amazon is on a path to have two.
Amazon Web Services and the company’s stores business could both reach that milestone in the next five to 10 years, the Amazon CEO said Thursday in the company’s third-quarter earnings release and on its call with analysts.
It’s “pretty rare” for Jassy to make a projection that far out, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak observed on the call, asking how he gets there.
Jassy’s answer started with AWS, which is at a $184 billion annual revenue run rate after growing 39% in the third quarter. He expects growth of more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028, and pointed to a $578 billion backlog of contracted AWS revenue.
The largest customers reserve capacity in huge blocks, sometimes as much as a gigawatt at a time, giving Amazon “very good visibility” into 2027, 2028 and part of 2029, he said.
Beyond that, he said, businesses are still early in using AI, the cost of running AI models keeps falling, and new uses keep emerging, such as AI models finding and fixing security flaws.
“You can’t predict with any certainty five to 10 years from now, especially at these types of growth rates,” Jassy said of AWS. “But it’s not a stretch for us to imagine that this could be over a trillion dollar business.”
Jassy’s forecast is a big jump from seven months ago. In March, Jassy told employees that AWS had a chance to reach at least $600 billion in annual revenue within about a decade, double his earlier expectation, according to Reuters.
Amazon’s stores business is bigger than AWS. Sales from Amazon’s online and physical stores totaled $309 billion over the past 12 months, or about $575 billion if Jassy is including third-party seller services and advertising in his trillion-dollar projection. We’ve asked Amazon to clarify.
For comparison, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, had $713 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.
Whichever numbers he’s using, Jassy said “some folks are sleeping a bit” on how much progress the stores business has made.
Jassy argued that Amazon’s stores business is gaining ground on competitors. Amazon added more than $90 billion in gross sales over the past 12 months, he said, and is adding about twice as much per quarter as its next-largest U.S. competitor.
Units sold are up nearly 15% so far this year, Jassy said. He noted that nearly 80% of retail sales still happen in physical stores, which he expects to shift online over time.
It’s not going to be cheap to get there. Amazon expects to spend about $220 billion on capital projects this year, mostly for AWS, and Jassy said the company will spend “meaningfully more” in 2027. He said Amazon has “a clear line of sight to attractive financial returns” and is earning back its capital spending faster than before.
The impact is showing up in Amazon’s finances. Its free cash flow, the cash left over after capital spending, was negative $42.4 billion over the past 12 months, compared with positive $14.8 billion a year earlier.
With its spending running ahead of the cash its businesses bring in, Amazon has raised $115 billion through long-term debt this year. Its interest expense more than tripled in the third quarter to $1.7 billion, cutting into its profit.
“We’re in the very early days of this inflection,” Jassy said. “Our strategy is working, and I expect it will for the foreseeable future.”
In the future, you won’t be able to use Reddit without logging in.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the impending change in a letter (PDF) to shareholders today about Q3 performance. He said that Reddit is shifting “to a logged-in-only experience," adding:
Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally. It also allows us to protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data, and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world.
Huffman also said that the login requirement will help Reddit better retain new users.
AWS now brings in revenue at a $184 billion annual pace, and it’s closing in on Amazon’s third-party seller business as the company’s second-largest source of sales. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon Web Services revenue grew 39% to $46 billion in the third quarter, its fastest pace in nearly five years, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he expects the cloud unit to top 40% growth in both 2027 and 2028.
That wasn’t enough for investors. Amazon posted earnings of $1.89 per share, well short of the $1.97 analysts expected, as higher interest costs on its growing debt and other losses ate into its profit.
Operating income beat expectations at $28.1 billion, above the high end of Amazon’s own guidance, and the 13.9% operating margin for the quarter was the highest in the company’s history.
Revenue of $201.9 billion, up 12%, came in just under analyst estimates but at the top of Amazon’s forecast range. Shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading, after closing down 4% during the regular session.
Update: On the earnings call, Jassy said AWS has a backlog of $578 billion in contracted future revenue, more than double a year earlier. He also said Amazon expects to spend “meaningfully more” on capital projects in 2027 than the roughly $220 billion it plans for this year.
Amazon may need to count on its legendary willingness to be “misunderstood for long periods of time,” as it asks investors to look past the costs to where its biggest businesses are headed.
In the company’s earnings release, Jassy said Amazon’s retail business is gaining market share with improving margins. Retail sales, including online stores, physical stores and third-party seller services, totaled nearly $500 billion over the past 12 months, and AWS is now at a $184 billion annual revenue run rate.
“There has never been a trillion dollar revenue business, and we may have two of them in the next 5-10 years,” he said.
On the earnings call, Jassy said those two businesses are AWS and Amazon’s stores business.
Advertising grew 11% to $19.6 billion, or 12% excluding currency changes, down from 22% on that basis a year earlier. Amazon blamed the timing of Prime Day and a few other factors, and said it expects ad growth to return to the high teens in the fourth quarter.
Online stores grew 2% to $68.5 billion, held back by Prime Day moving into the second quarter this year. Amazon said overall revenue growth would have been about 4 percentage points higher without the shift.
Third-party seller services, the fees Amazon collects from merchants on its site, grew 9% to $46.5 billion. AWS came within about $500 million of it.
Subscription services, which includes Prime memberships, grew 11% to $14 billion.
Physical stores, mostly Whole Foods, grew 2% to $5.7 billion.
Outlook: Amazon expects fourth-quarter revenue of $240 billion to $247 billion, up 12% to 16%, and operating income of $28.5 billion to $33.5 billion.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call that costs for Amazon Leo, the company’s satellite internet service, are weighing on its fourth-quarter profit forecast as the service gets ready to launch later this year.
Wall Street had expected fourth-quarter operating income of $33.2 billion, near the top of that range, according to analyst Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives. It still expects to spend about $220 billion on capital projects this year.
Amazon’s free cash flow, the cash left over after capital spending, was negative $42.4 billion over the past 12 months, compared with positive $14.8 billion a year earlier, mostly because of its AI investments.
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