📰On The Record – 7th July 2026

Microsoft confirmed yesterday it was cutting around 4,800 jobs — roughly 2% of its global workforce — with its Xbox gaming division bearing almost all of the pain. About 3,200 gaming roles will disappear over the next year, and several studios face sale, spin-off, or closure. This isn't really a gaming story, though. It's a capital story: Microsoft is quietly starving one business to feed another, redirecting cash and headcount toward AI and cloud infrastructure. When one of the world's richest companies still feels the need to trim, it tells you how expensive the AI arms race has become for everyone.

Broadcom and Apple extended their chip partnership through 2031 yesterday, locking in custom silicon supply — including wireless components — for years of future iPhones and beyond. Apple accounts for roughly a fifth of Broadcom's annual sales, so this is as much about Broadcom's stability as Apple's supply chain. It also quietly answers a question investors had been nervously asking: would Apple eventually build everything in-house and cut suppliers loose? The answer, for now, is no. In an industry obsessed with vertical integration, sometimes the smartest move is admitting you still need your supplier.

South Korea's SK Hynix launched a $28 billion Nasdaq listing yesterday, one of the biggest overseas share sales in US history. The money will fund new factories and equipment for the high-bandwidth memory chips that power AI systems built by the likes of Nvidia. For SME owners watching AI costs climb, this is a reminder: the real winners of the AI boom might not be the chatbots, but the memory makers behind them.

Anthropic signed a 20-year, $19 billion lease with TeraWulf yesterday to build a huge AI data centre in Kentucky, securing up to 401 megawatts of power. TeraWulf shares soared on the news, capping its journey from bitcoin miner to AI infrastructure landlord. Construction won't finish until 2028, but the message landed immediately: AI companies are now signing energy contracts the size of small countries' power grids.

EasyJet shares jumped almost 10% yesterday after the airline agreed in principle to a £5.5 billion takeover by US investment firm Castlelake — its fifth offer, and the first one accepted. The deal values EasyJet at £6.90 a share and promises money for fleet upgrades, but it still needs to clear EU rules requiring majority European ownership before an August 3 deadline.

Sky agreed yesterday to buy ITV's media and entertainment arm — its free-to-air channels and ITVX streaming service — for up to £1.6 billion, in a deal designed to build a British challenger to Netflix, Disney and Amazon. ITV Studios, the production house behind hits like Love Island, stays independent. Regulators still need to sign off.

A daily score of business conditions (scored out of 100), with a breakdown of what’s driving it.

The Daily Business Index climbed to 54.0 today, up 2.3 points, as a genuinely global rally sent the Dow above 53,000 for the first time in its history. Asia, Europe and the US all rose together, oil slid to its cheapest in months after OPEC+ agreed to pump more, and US jobless claims came in better than expected — a hopeful counterweight to last week's weak jobs report. Not everyone's celebrating though: Microsoft cut nearly 4,800 jobs, mostly in its Xbox division, a reminder that even in a booming market, belts are still being tightened.

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The most interesting leadership call yesterday belonged to the bosses at Sky and ITV, who chose consolidation over competition. Rather than keep fighting Netflix and Disney separately with shrinking budgets, both companies decided a combined broadcaster stood a better chance of surviving the streaming wars. It's not a flashy pivot — no AI rebrand, no buzzword strategy — just two long-standing British institutions accepting that scale now matters more than independence. The lesson for any executive watching margins shrink: sometimes the boldest move isn't fighting harder, it's admitting you're stronger together than alone.

Around a year ago, Trump signed an order pushing his reciprocal tariff deadline back to August 1, then fired off letters to more than a dozen countries warning of new rates if they didn't strike a deal. Markets shrugged it off as just another delay in a year full of them. Twelve months on, with trade deals still being renegotiated and tariff disputes still working through the courts, it turns out "final deadline" was never really final. Some things never change.

What it means: An ADR is basically a US-listed stand-in for shares of a foreign company, letting American investors buy and sell them on Nasdaq or the NYSE without touching a foreign stock exchange directly. SK Hynix used exactly this route for its $28 billion listing yesterday — proof that even a Korean chipmaker wants easy access to US investor cash.