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REUTERS/Marco BelloNEW YORK, April 27 (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) CEO Jamie Dimon sent a clear message to employees this month: get back to the office. The largest U.S. lender's employees inundated an internal messaging forum with criticism after its operating committee posted an edict entitled, "The importance of being together." JPMorgan first called employees back to the office on a rotational basis in mid-2021 after months of pandemic shutdowns. "We don't want to punish everybody because of that, but people agreed to do three days a week; we expect three days a week." Many branch employees, building staff and other workers have reported to offices throughout the pandemic without the option to work remotely.

The company forecast revenue in its main segments for the current quarter would match or top Wall Street targets. Those results and Microsoft's helped boost shares of Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), another major cloud operator, 4.8% in after hours trading. Microsoft revenue rose 7% to $52.9 billion in the quarter ended March, inching past analyst estimates of $51.02 billion, according to Refinitiv. The bulk of Microsoft sales still come from selling software and cloud computing services to customers. The sales drop in the segment was less severe than analysts expected, with Microsoft reporting revenue of $13.3 billion versus analyst estimates of $12.19 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

SL Naturenergie's predicament is common in the renewables sector where companies, from startups to medium sized and blue-chip firms, are competing for a limited pool of labour with appropriate skills. Currently it faces a shortage of around 216,000 skilled workers needed for the expansion of the solar and wind energy sectors, a study by German organisation KOFA, or the Competence Centre for securing skilled labour, showed. In many jobs in the renewable energy sector, pay is above average, he said, citing a renewable energy wage premium of more than 10% in construction and installation activities, as well as architectural and engineering services. Volker Quaschning, a professor of renewable energy systems at HTW university in Berlin, says a third of places on these courses at HTW are unfilled. Last month Germany also unveiled draft reforms on skills training accreditation and promoting immigration in a bid to plug labour shortages in the economy.

OAKLAND, California, April 19 (Reuters) - Silicon Valley 5G chip startup EdgeQ Inc said on Wednesday it raised $75 million to help fund a ramp up in production as the company starts selling its technology to customers, including telecom operators. EdgeQ makes semiconductors that power base stations for 5G telecom towers and for 5G access points that can be installed inside places like factories to run robots and autonomous vehicles wirelessly, said Vinay Ravuri, CEO and co-founder of EdgeQ. The fundraising shows that companies viewed as promising by investors are able to secure financing even though funding has dried up for many startups following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the ensuing banking sector turmoil in March. EdgeQ has a valuation of "hundreds of millions of dollars", said Ravuri, adding it was "definitely less than" $1 billion. The recent advent of a new open standard chip architecture called RISC-V has made it possible to design its new 5G chip more cost effectively, he said.

OAKLAND, California, April 19 (Reuters) - Chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries Inc (GFS.O) said on Wednesday it had filed a lawsuit against International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N), accusing it of unlawfully sharing confidential intellectual property and trade secrets. New York-based GlobalFoundries said in its complaint that IBM had shared IP and trade secrets with Rapidus, a new state-backed Japanese consortium that IBM is working with to develop and produce cutting-edge two-nanometre chips. It also asserted that IBM had unlawfully disclosed and misused its IP with Intel Corp (INTC.O), noting that IBM had announced in 2021 it would collaborate with Intel on next-generation chip technology. "IBM is unjustly receiving potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing income and other benefits," GlobalFoundries said in a statement. GlobalFoundries is seeking compensatory and punitive damages as well as an injunction against IBM to stop using the trade secrets.

Some are turning to startups who are pivoting to using powerful chips to run quantum-inspired software on regular computers as they bide their time. In the past 18 months, quantum software startups including SandBoxAQ - an Alphabet spinoff - raised about $1 billion, according to data firm PitchBook. Ultimately, the software inspired by quantum physics won't perform well on quantum computers without some changes, said William Hurley, boss of Austin-based quantum software startup Strangeworks. Still, he said companies that start using them will have engineers "learning about quantum and the phenomenon and the process, which will better prepare them to use quantum computers at the point that they do so." Strangeworks, which also operates a cloud with over 60 quantum computers on it, raised $24 million last month from investors including IBM (IBM.N).

That makes the business less than half the size of Bank of America Corp's (BAC.N) Merrill Wealth Management arm, the $18-billion behemoth Sieg ran until he left last month. Another challenge is that Citi has historically been undersized and a bit of a laggard in the space...especially in the wealth business where it’s all about existing relationships." In some ways, Citigroup is playing catchup after selling its old wealth business, Smith Barney, a decade ago to Morgan Stanley, which then leaned heavily into wealth management. That bet paid off - Morgan Stanley's wealth unit, led by Andy Saperstein, brought in record revenue last year. Two years ago, Citigroup unified its various wealth businesses into a single organization led by Jim O'Donnell that included its private bank and personal wealth division.

April 12 (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) asked its managing directors to work from the office for five days a week, the largest U.S. bank said in a memo. CEO Jamie Dimon, along with Wall Street counterparts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley, has been a strong advocate of in-office work. JPMorgan reminded staff on hybrid schedules that they were required to be in the office at least three days a week. It plans to roll out more automated attendance tracking to manage work schedules, real estate and security. "Everyone should be able to work five days a week in the office," the bank said.

April 11 (Reuters) - Banks that contributed the bulk of $30 billion in deposits to First Republic Bank (FRC.N) plan to set aside about $100 million each in first-quarter earnings in case of potential losses, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The sources declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the situation. The banks declined to comment. The four largest U.S. banks were among a group of 11 lenders that bolstered First Republic after its shares plunged during the crisis triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Major U.S. banks will begin reporting first-quarter earnings from Friday.

March 30 (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc (C.N) hired Andy Sieg to lead its global wealth arm, the lender said on Thursday, from Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), where he led the Merrill Wealth Management unit. Two years ago, Citigroup unified its various wealth businesses into a single organization led by Jim O'Donnell that included its private bank and personal wealth management divisions. Fraser signaled the bank's intention to become a global leader in wealth management at its investor day last year. "This is a fantastic opportunity to build a leading wealth management business at the world's most global bank at a time of massive wealth creation," he said in a statement. Sieg's departure prompted the appointments of Lindsay Hans and Eric Schimpf as co-leads of Merrill Wealth Management, Bank of America said in a separate statement.

[1/2] Horizon Quantum Computing Chief Science Officer Si-Hui Tan and Chief Executive Officer Joe Fitzsimons sit in front of their white board in Singapore in this handout photo taken November 2021. Courtesy Horizon Quantum Computing/Handout via REUTERSOAKLAND, Calif March 31 (Reuters) - Singapore-based software startup Horizon Quantum Computing on Friday said it raised $18.1 million to expand its engineering team and speed up product development. The company, founded in 2018, created a programming language called Helium for quantum computers, designed to make it easier to tackle complex problems. Quantum computers, based on quantum physics, could potentially perform some calculations millions of times faster than the current fastest super computers. Horizon Quantum Computing said it is also planning to open its first European offices in Ireland, where it is building its new engineering center.

March 30 (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc (C.N) on Thursday it has hired Andy Sieg to lead its global wealth arm from Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), where he led the Merrill Wealth management unit. Two years ago, Citigroup unified its various wealth businesses into a single wealth management organization, which was led by Jim O'Donnell and included the Citi Private Bank and Citi Personal Wealth Management. At its investor day last year, Fraser signaled the bank's intention to become a global leader in wealth management. Sieg's departure led to the appointments of Lindsay Hans and Eric Schimpf as co-leads of Merrill Wealth Management, Bank of America said in a separate statement. Sieg joined Merrill Lynch in 1992 and had served as Merrill president since 2017.

NEW YORK, March 29 (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp's (BAC.N) digital personal finance tool, Life Plan, has attracted more than $55 billion in new money since its launch in late 2020, as customers use technology to set financial goals. Life Plan, which has more than 10 million users, enables customers to set goals such as saving for a vacation or college or to build a retirement fund. BofA's app allows customers to move money around their bank and brokerage accounts, as well as pull in funds from other institutions, David Tyrie, chief digital officer at Bank of America, told Reuters. While millennials and Gen-Z account for 63% of the app's users, Gen X and baby boomers make up 38%. Reporting by Lananh Nguyen and Nupur Anand in New York; Editing by Josie KaoOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

OAKLAND, California, March 29 (Reuters) - U.S. chip giant Intel Corp (INTC.O) said on Wednesday its first semiconductor for data center customers focused on power efficiency, Sierra Forest, would be delivered in the first half of next year, as it outlined a chip release schedule after prior delays. Intel still dominates the markets for PC and server processing chips, with a market share greater than 70%, tech research firm IDC has calculated. Intel said the next power-efficient chip, Clearwater Forest, would come to market in 2025. Rivera said that Intel was also working on building the Intel Developer Cloud with 256 Xeon chips and 512 Gaudi chips for artificial intelligence (AI) that would be available for AI developers to train and run new models. She said AI startups Hugging Face and Stable Diffusion were already using Intel chips.

OAKLAND, California, March 28 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Tuesday said it released open source ChatGPT-like models for the research and business community to use for free in an effort to foster more collaboration. Silicon Valley-based Cerebras released seven models all trained on its AI supercomputer called Andromeda, including smaller 111 million parameter language models to a larger 13 billion parameter model. Cerebras said the smaller models can be deployed on phones or smart speakers while the bigger ones run on PCs or servers, although complex tasks like large passage summarization require larger models. Most of the AI models today are trained on Nvidia Corp's (NVDA.O) chips, but more and more startups like Cerebras are trying to take share in that market. The models trained on Cerebras machines can also be used on Nvidia systems for further training or customization, said Feldman.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) - Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), the U.S. semiconductor designer that dominates the market for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, said it has modified its flagship product into a version that is legal to export to China. On Tuesday, the company said it has similarly developed a China-export version of its H100 chip. The rules around AI chips imposed a test that bans those with both powerful computing capabilities and high chip-to-chip data transfer rates. A chip industry source in China told Reuters the H800 mainly reduced the chip-to-chip data transfer rate to about half the rate of the flagship H100. The Nvidia spokesperson declined to say how the China-focused H800 differs from the H100, except that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."

On Tuesday at its developer conference GTC, Nvidia unveiled CUDA Quantum, a platform for building quantum algorithms using popular classical computer coding languages C++ and python. "CUDA Quantum will do the same for quantum computing, enabling domain scientists to seamlessly integrate quantum into their applications and gain access to a new disruptive computing technology," said Tim Costa, Nvidia's director of HPC and quantum. One difference, Costa said, is while CUDA is proprietary, CUDA Quantum is open source and was developed with input from many quantum computing companies. Nvidia also launched a new hardware system called DGX Quantum to connect the quantum computer with classical computers. "We see more and more demand to integrate these quantum computers with standard computers," said Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines.

Quantum computers, based on quantum physics, have the potential one day to complete some calculations millions of times faster than the most powerful supercomputer today. One challenge is that quantum processors with quantum bits, or qubits, often need to be stored at very cold temperatures near zero Kelvin, or -273.15 Celsius. On the other hand, classical computers operate in more moderate temperatures. SEEQC has also built its quantum computer this way and is now trying to modify it with its new chips. Today's superconducting quantum computers have hundreds of qubits, but some estimate thousands, or even a million could be needed to create a quantum computer to run useful algorithms.

☆ Dow Jones news to lay off employees today–union
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-11 | by ( Helen Coster | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

Jan 11 (Reuters) - Dow Jones, a division of News Corp that includes the financial news outlets the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch, plans to lay off a number of employees on Wednesday, according to IAPE, the union representing unionized Dow Jones employees. In a statement to Reuters, a Dow Jones spokesperson said that "several teams have partially reorganized to align with our priorities and position us for further growth" and "certain positions have been eliminated." The news of expected layoffs at Dow Jones comes amid planned cuts at other outlets, including the Washington Post. In December News Corp (NWSA.O) named Sunday Times editor Emma Tucker the new editor of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters Corp (TRI.TO), competes with Dow Jones.

Dec 12 (Reuters) - News Corp (NWSA.O) named Sunday Times editor Emma Tucker the new editor of the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires on Monday. In his new role, Murray will take on “several critical growth projects supporting News Corp,” the company said. That vision appears to align with that of the Journal's publisher and Dow Jones chief executive, Almar Latour, who is credited with leading the digital transformation of the publication, which now boasts more than 3 million digital subscribers. “Emma is a brilliant, inspiring editor, with digital nous and the highest standards of integrity,” Thomson said in a statement on Monday. “She has been a thoughtful custodian of The Sunday Times and will bring verve and virtue to Dow Jones.

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