Amazon Is in Talks to Invest Up to $50 Billion in OpenAI’s Latest Funding Round

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0:18Can lawmakers avoid another government shutdown? President Trump says there's a deal in the works. Plus, the White House border czar says he's working on drawing down immigration officers in Minneapolis. I didn't come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. You haven't seen me. I came here to seek solutions. And that's what we're going to do. And the Journal is exclusively reporting that Amazon is in talks to invest up to$50 billion in open AI. It's Thursday, January 29th. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

1:02In Minneapolis, White House border czar Tom Homan has taken over the immigration operation. After a surge of law enforcement officers and weeks of clashes with protesters on Minneapolis streets that led to the deaths of two Americans, Homan signaled a change in tone and tactics. He said today that he was working on a plan to begin reducing the federal law enforcement presence in the city. What we've been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient by the book. Homan said the federal approach in Minneapolis hadn't been perfect. President Trump and I, along with others in the administration, have recognized that certain improvements could and should be made.

1:42That's exactly what I'm doing here. He added that the drawdown would depend on an ability to work more closely with local authorities. And Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration for the journal, says it remains to be seen how different the operations under Homan will look. Our sources are telling us that we should read this as a pretty clear turnaround in strategy. Tom Homan was long a voice in the administration of let's keep ICE operations targeted at specific people. Let's go after mainly criminals. And that was a less popular view for a while. What you saw in Minnesota was what the administration was going for, these big attention-grabbing sorts of operations.

2:22I think what we're going to see are fewer of these large street operations of these roving patrols of agents looking for people to arrest. I don't necessarily think it means ICE is going to stop arresting people in Minneapolis. Speaking at a conference of mayors in Washington today, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called for an end to the aggressive immigration enforcement push across the U.S. Operation Metro Surge needs to end. This kind of conduct and siege needs to stop, not just in Minneapolis. It needs to stop nationwide. There were signs that the government was pulling back in other parts of the country, like in Maine.

3:02That state's Senator Susan Collins, a Republican who is up for re-election, said today that, at her urging, ICE had stopped its heightened operations in the state. Meanwhile, back in Washington, President Trump said the White House was moving toward a deal with Senate Democrats that could stop a partial government shutdown. Hopefully we won't have a shutdown. We're working on that right now. I think we're getting close. The Democrats, I don't believe, want to see it either. The shutdown deadline is tomorrow evening. But after the killing of Alex Preddy in Minneapolis, Democrats don't want to pass a$1.3 billion funding package because it funds immigration enforcement.

3:37And they want new restrictions like mandating the use of body cameras to be part of the law. Here's Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaking on the Senate floor today. Enough is enough. What ICE is doing outside the law is state-sanctioned thuggery and it must stop. He said Congress had the, quote, authority and the moral obligation to act. A vote on the full spending package failed this afternoon in the Senate. Deal talks center around taking the funding for Homeland Security out of that bill, instead passing a short-term measure and later negotiating some restrictions on immigration enforcement.

4:14But as of today, it wasn't clear whether that would happen. Coming up, why ultra-high-end real estate is booming despite a housing market slump, and why drug makers are making some medicines cheaper. That's after the break.

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5:07We're exclusively reporting that Amazon is in talks to invest up to$50 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI is seeking up to$100 billion from investors in its current funding round, and a deal of that size could make Amazon the biggest contributor. Such an investment would deepen the company's relationship. Amazon has also put money into OpenAI competitor Anthropic and has been investing heavily in AI infrastructure while also cutting costs internally. News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Indexes closed mixed today, and WSJ Markets reporter Hannah Aaron-Lang said disappointing earnings from Microsoft led to a tech sell-off, with the Nasdaq closing down 0.7%.

5:50This was primarily driven by tech stocks today. We've got two of the major U.S. stock indexes down on the day. And the big thing is that Microsoft stock dropped quite significantly. Microsoft is a massive company. It's got above a$3 trillion market cap. It's one of only four U.S. companies in that club. So any move that sharp in that big of a stock is going to have an impact on the indexes overall. But then there was also a slide in software stocks, so names like Workday, Salesforce. Wall Street has kind of fallen out of love with software stocks, and there's just some concern out there that AI could pose a really significant threat to those businesses.

6:31Meta bucked the trend with a post-earnings rally, rising more than 10 percent. Apple just reported blowout iPhone sales in the December quarter and record profit. The results exceeded Wall Street expectations. Head to WSJ.com for more details. Chemical's giant Dow is cutting 4 ,500 employees as part of a push to cut costs. It's planning to use artificial intelligence to increase productivity. The job cuts came as the company said its quarterly loss widened because of lower revenue and higher costs. And drug makers started off the year doing something they don't usually do, cutting the prices for some widely used drugs.

7:08Those 20 drugs included treatments for diabetes and blood clots. A firm that analyzes drug prices found that some of the price cuts were big, as much as 92%. A big reason for the cuts were changes to government policy, like the lower prices that Medicare negotiated.

7:27The housing market in much of the U.S. has been bogged down now for a while. There are simply not that many houses to be had, and those that are are too expensive for many would-be buyers. But the ultra-luxury housing market is booming. A report from Compass, the real estate brokerage, says that sales from the country's top 10 luxury markets jumped by about a third last year from 2024. For more on what's driving the market, I'm joined now by Catherine Clark, who covers residential real estate for WSJ. Catherine, we've talked a lot on the show about how the broader housing market isn't doing so well.

7:59Why is the ultra high-end market, which is sales of houses that go for$10 million or more, doing so much better? It basically comes down to the composition of wealthy people's net worth in the stock market, in private equity, in real estate. Those gains are happening a lot faster than the growth of wages for most Americans. So if you look at all these AI companies that have been booming over the last year or two, a lot of those are concentrated in a particular geographic area of this country, the Bay Area, that has very limited inventory of luxury homes. That money has to go somewhere and it's spreading across the country.

8:40When I think of the places where rich people live, I think of, first of all, New York, where I live, but also L.A., big vacation destinations like Aspen, Colorado. But you write that there's also new hotspots growing like Phoenix and San Diego and Dallas. What's driving sales in those cities? The biggest markets for ultra luxury home sales are still New York, Los Angeles, Aspen, Palm Beach. But we're starting to see markets like San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas come into their own. A deal over$10 million used to be a dramatic outlier for those markets. And now they are becoming more commonplace. And I think part of that is this migration that we're seeing from higher tax states to lower tax states like Paradise Valley, Arizona and Austin, Texas.

9:31And folks attribute that a lot to wealthy people relocating from higher tax states like New York and California. That was WSJ reporter Catherine Clark. Thanks, Catherine. Thank you. And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bien-Aimé with supervising producer Tali Arbel. I'm Alex Osala for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

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