Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman sign ‘VCsforKamala’ pledge started by Seattle investor

VCsforKamala: A new initiative led by Seattle venture capitalist Leslie Feinzaig (above) — aiming to garner support for presidential hopeful Kamala Harris — has attracted signatures from Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and more than 200 other venture capitalists. Read more.

• Meanwhile, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is launching a new “Just the Facts” video series to help inform voters on key election-related issues.

Microsoft’s capital spending soared to $19 billion in the fourth quarter as the company raced to expand and update its data center infrastructure to keep up with AI demand. Wall Street balked at the company’s Azure cloud growth rate and projections. Read more.

• Microsoft will give employees a special one-time cash award amounting to an additional 10% to 25% of the value of their annual bonuses. Read more.

Amazon says a new multimodal AI model significantly improves its "Just Walk Out" technology by analyzing different types of sensor data simultaneously, boosting accuracy and efficiency, and helping to accelerate its rollout to more third-party stores. Read more.

• In other Amazon news, a federal regulator ruled that the tech giant is a distributor and bears responsibility for faulty products sold by third-party merchants on its marketplace — a decision that could have major ramifications for Amazon’s e-commerce business.

Boeing named aerospace executive Kelly Ortberg as its new CEO on Wednesday, and a report indicates that he’ll be based in Seattle — suggesting that Boeing could return its headquarters to the city where it was founded. Read more.

Bungie is laying off 220 employees in the game studio’s second reorg in nine months. “We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red,” CEO Pete Parsons wrote in a post detailing the cuts. 

Mike Galgon knows a few things about entrepreneurship. The co-founder of advertising giant aQuantive also helped launch Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs. Now Galgon (above, second from right) is CEO of Global Partnerships, an impact-first investor based in Seattle that provides capital to impoverished people and their businesses in Latin America and Africa. Read more.

Lime will debut a new micromobility electric vehicle in Seattle called the “LimeGlider” that is part bike, part scooter, with a big cushioned seat and no pedals. Read more. 

Hot Links:

• Amazon’s healthcare business was projected to lose more than $1 billion this year — but also generate more than $3 billion in revenue, according to internal docs. (Business Insider)

• Starbucks’ mobile ordering system went down Tuesday during a buy-one-get-one promotion before being restored. (Axios)

• T-Mobile stock rose more than 3% after the carrier beat earnings expectations. The Bellevue-based company is also “sneaking into the cable industry’s backyard.” (T-Mobile, Wall Street Journal)

• The CEO of Delta Air Lines blasted CrowdStrike and Microsoft, saying the companies have offered nothing for the outage that cost Delta $500 million. (CNN)

• Jeff Bezos’ management rules at Amazon are “slowly unraveling.” (Fortune)