What's up: Intel to lay of 15% of workers; Chinese hackers chalk up another win with Sharepoint hack; Behind the Bylines: The WSJ's Belle Lin on that big AI event in D.C.

Good morning. Once upon a time the combined force of Microsoft and Intel—or "Wintel"—dominated the PC market and business technology.

But then came the Apple iPhone and ARM chips, the cloud, Nvidia with its GPUs and finally... ChatGPT. 

Memos released by the chief executives of both companies Thursday revealed how much their paths have diverged since.

“There are no more blank checks,” Intel Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan wrote in a memo to staff. “Every investment must make economic sense.”

The chipmaker said it would cut 15% of its workforce and scrap plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities as it raced to refocus on the AI chips market. 

Microsoft's Satya Nadella was a bit more philosophical, his memo pondering "The enigma of success”—not a Depeche Mode B-side, but the phenomenon of "being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before" while simultaneously experiencing layoffs.

“Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding,” he wrote. “But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.”

The backstory to the memos. Microsoft had the foresight to move beyond its cash cow, Windows. It missed mobile and social, but it was able to ride the waves of what came next, in part because of Nadella's embrace of a more open approach.

Intel, focused perhaps a bit too much on the short term high of its data center business, failed to anticipate the boom in demand for the powerful chips used to develop AI models. In this fast-moving tech landscape, missing so much as one product cycle at the wrong time can kill you. Read the story.

Failed Microsoft security patch is latest win for Chinese hackers. A hack that involved several versions of Microsoft’s SharePoint software has spurred renewed criticism that the company has failed to give priority to cybersecurity, WSJ's Robert McMillan reports.

Microsoft released patches for a pair of SharePoint bugs earlier this month, but the fixes were quickly bypassed, allowing China-linked hackers to break into hundreds of organizations, according to security researchers.

As of Wednesday, researchers said more than 400 SharePoint servers had been hacked—many of them belonging to government entities.

Laptop farmer sentenced. American Christina Chapman was sentenced to 8½ years in prison by a federal judge for operating a “laptop farm” that North Korean scammers used to connect remotely to more than 300 U.S. companies, WSJ reports. Among the companies that the North Koreans—who were working on behalf of their cash-strapped government—infiltrated was Nike, according to court filings.

The Download: Who was the bigger draw? President Trump or Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang?

Lin: The organizers kept the show pretty well under wraps and so us journalists were not aware of who was going to show up next on stage. A lot of the attendees were also similarly surprised. Maybe that added some of the allure, maybe some frustration. But the room was packed and people were ready to hear from the president.

The Download: You have been covering AI and have talked numerous times with the big players. But was there anything new that you learned from this high-profile Washington event? 

Lin: That's an interesting question. It's one thing to see images of all the tech CEOs lined up at Trump's inauguration and to read about the amount of money that poured into this administration from the tech industry. But it's another to see all the power players together and the amount of chumminess on display.

That caught me by surprise. Trump did this sort of calling out of all the VIPs. And you see all the tech CEOs and his administration officials sitting together and chatting and having these sort of close conversations. The degree to which Silicon Valley and D.C. have come together, just seemed like a big turnaround from the previous administration.

C3.ai founder and Chief Executive Tom Siebel announced plans to step down, citing health concerns, Bloomberg reports.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that TikTok will “go dark” unless China allows the U.S. to assert more control over the short-form video app. The White House has been facilitating a deal for investors to take ownership of an American-operated TikTok.

Amazon Web Services cancelled plans for a $353 million facility in Ireland, citing  issues with power for the project, Bloomberg reports.

Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service experienced an outage for several hours Thursday, the Verge reports.

Buoyed by voters’ improving views of the economy, President Trump’s political standing is showing notable resilience, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, despite the unpopularity of the GOP’s big tax-and-spending law, dissatisfaction with Trump’s tariff plan and high suspicion that the government is hiding important information about its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. (WSJ)

The Federal Communications Commission approved Skydance Media’s merger with Paramount Global on Thursday, clearing the way for the more than $8 billion deal to close and ending a multiyear saga with enough plot twists for a soap opera. (WSJ)

New York City’s sanctuary-city policies are unconstitutional and limit local police and correction officers from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, the Justice Department said in a federal lawsuit Thursday. (WSJ)

The White House is seeking fines from several universities it says failed to stop antisemitism on campus, including hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard University, in exchange for allowing the schools to access federal funding. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.