What's up: Tech CEOs praised Trump at a White House dinner last night; The FTC is preparing to question AI companies over its impact on children; Is cybersecurity training a bust?

Good morning. How are Pokémon cards like Nvidia GPUs? Both are highly collectible, commanding loyal followings and fetching high prices. And both are core to e-commerce giant eBay’s effort to remake itself for the age of artificial intelligence.

The company rode the internet’s early e-commerce boom to become a publicly traded billion-dollar firm, but a number of factors, including rising competition, have turned up the heat. In 2020, eBay lost its second-place standing among America’s largest online retailers to Walmart, according to eMarketer. It is now fourth, behind Apple.

“If eBay were in a race, we were maybe trailing,” Mazen Rawashdeh, eBay’s chief technology officer, told the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Belle Lin. “The AI era reset the clock for us.”

EBay said it is doing this in part by leaning heavily on its own homegrown efforts. Running its own data centers helps it maneuver the tech infrastructure changes that AI requires, the company said. That includes amassing its own graphics processing units. 

At the same time, eBay has zeroed in on selling what it calls “focus” categories, which include trading cards and other items that, as it happens, make for a perfect scenario for AI shopping agents, which eBay also is developing.

Finding that rare Charizard. Using AI to help find products is a critical need for eBay’s marketplace, said Deutsche Bank analyst Lee Horowitz. That’s because eBay’s product listings are nonstandard—it’s not as easy to find a limited-edition trading card as it is to find a generic tube of toothpaste, he tells the WSJLI. Read the story.

The monthly nonfarm payrolls data, due at 8:30 a.m. ET, is expected to provide more evidence the labor market cooled over the summer. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal expect the U.S. added around 75,000 jobs last month. It will be the first such report since President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We will be looking for more possible signs of AI's impact on the IT job market. Stay tuned.

Speaking of jobs. OpenAI plans to launch a new AI-powered jobs platform next year to help match employers with candidates who have AI skills in a bid to accelerate the technology’s deployment across businesses and government agencies, Bloomberg reports. OpenAI will also introduce a new certification program in the coming months that will teach workers how to better use AI on the job.

A study involving nearly 20,000 employees at UC San Diego Health, found that mandatory cyber awareness training did not provide beneficial security knowledge to users, WSJ reported. The problem? Bad or repetitive content or poor delivery mechanisms, or just inherent flaws in the format of online training. 

When a nationwide computer system holding sealed court documents was compromised five years ago, technologists and experts, including then-Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, sounded the alarm, urging for a rapid modernization of the decades-old system. Not much happened. This summer it was hacked again, the New York Times reports.

Tesla’s board is asking investors to approve a new pay package for Chief Executive Elon Musk that could be worth as much as $1 trillion over the next decade.

Tech CEOs including Tim Cook and Sam Altman took turns praising President Trump at a White House dinner Thursday, with some laying out how much their companies plan to invest in the U.S. Trump opened the dinner saying his administration has been working to remove roadblocks to connecting data centers to the grid.

Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s Sierra is the latest $10 billion AI startup. The startup just raised $350 million in fresh capital. Sierra is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines that are valued at or above $10 billion, CNBC reports.

• Taylor spoke earlier this year at the WSJ Tech Council Summit about the future of AI agents.

Broadcom cited continued strength in custom AI accelerators, networking and VMware for its record third quarter revenue, Barron's reports. Looking ahead, CEO Hock Tan announced the semiconductor and software maker secured $10 billion in AI orders from a new qualified customer, which he believes will “significantly” improve the AI revenue outlook for fiscal 2026.

JetBlue Airways will be Project Kuiper's first airline customer.  Amazon.com's satellite-internet business will provide Wi-Fi service to a quarter of the airline's fleet, WSJ reports. 

Alibaba, ByteDance and other Chinese tech firms remain keen on Nvidia's AI chips despite regulators in Beijing strongly discouraging them from such purchases, Reuters reports. They want reassurance that their orders of Nvidia's H20 model, which the U.S. firm in July regained permission to sell in China, are being processed, and are closely monitoring Nvidia's plans for a more powerful chip, tentatively named the B30A and which is based on its Blackwell architecture,

The Federal Trade Commission is requesting documents from OpenAI and other tech companies as it plans to study the impact of AI chatbots on children’s mental health, WSJ reported.

Crowds traversed the perilously warped boardwalk between the Mets-Willets Point subway station and Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens this week in search of overpriced Polo sweaters, ice-cold honey deuce drinks and a little bit of tennis. But for readers of the Morning Download, the most exciting part of the U.S. Open may not be what was happening on the court, but rather just outside it. (In room 1341, to be exact.)

Inside this windowless bunker, United States Tennis Association partner IBM has a staff of 20 collecting and analyzing over 156 data points from every point scored during the open. That includes information like serve speed and X, Y, Z coordinates of the ball, even sound (if the crowd goes wild) and player movement (a wiped brow, for example), all captured by 12 hawkeye cameras on each court.

Over the course of the entire Open, IBM said it will collect more than 7 million data points. That information, plus 20 years of historical match data and millions of online articles (with varying levels of punditry) are powering IBM’s watsonx fan experience in the U.S. Open app, which includes features like realtime winner predictions.

Watsonx has had some success in the past. IBM noted it correctly predicted the men’s singles winner of Wimbledon the past three years, including the widely-criticized left field prediction that 20-year-old Carlos Alcaraz would defeat seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic in the 2023 finals. Even John McEnroe said he was ‘astonished’ by the call. (We suspect our data-savvy readers are probably a little less stunned).

Follow the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X for more behind the scenes tech tours.

Hundreds of people including South Korean workers were arrested in an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor battery plant under construction in Georgia, weeks after the carmaker pledged $26 billion in U.S. investments. (WSJ)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced sharp questioning from both Democrats and Republicans during a tense Senate hearing about turmoil that has gripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his moves to transform U.S. vaccine policy. (WSJ)

The U.S. is preparing to start renegotiating its largest free trade deal—the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Within the next month, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will begin public consultations on renegotiating the deal, which it must do by Oct. 4 under the 2020 law that implemented the pact. (WSJ)

This week’s ouster of Nestlé Chief Executive Laurent Freixe served as a lesson to other European executives: When it comes to office romances, expect to play by American rules. (WSJ)

This September, The WSJ Technology Council will convene senior technology leaders to examine how AI is reshaping organizations—redefining teams and workflows, elevating technology’s role in business strategy, and transforming products and services. Conversations will also delve into AI’s evolving security risks and other fast-emerging trends shaping the future.

Select speakers include:

Carolina Dybeck Happe, COO, Microsoft
Severin Hacker, CTO, Duolingo
Yang Lu, CIO, Tapestry
Tilak Mandadi, CTO, CVS Health
Helen Riley, CFO, X, Google's Moonshot Factory

September 15-16 | New York, NY
Request an invitation | Participants and program

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.