Uber Technologies is cutting about 3,300 jobs, or roughly 10% of its global workforce, in its largest round of layoffs since the COVID-19 pandemic as the ride-hailing company restructures its operations, reduces management layers and prepares for a transportation market being shaped by autonomous vehicles.

At the same time, Uber is winding down its operations in Nigeria and Uganda, effective Wednesday, September 2, in a move that further demonstrates the company’s effort to concentrate resources on markets where it sees greater potential for scale and profitability.

The two developments come as Uber faces mounting competition from robotaxi operators, pressure in its food-delivery business and rising technology costs. The company is seeking to reduce organizational complexity while redirecting resources toward autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and other areas it considers strategically important.

Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi said in an internal message to employees that the restructuring would simplify Uber’s organization and accelerate decision-making.

“A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating,” Khosrowshahi said. “It will also generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years.”

Unlike a number of technology companies that have attributed recent layoffs directly to artificial intelligence, Khosrowshahi did not cite AI as the principal reason for the job cuts. Instead, he pointed to management complexity that accumulated during a period of rapid expansion.

Uber plans to reduce the number of employees who are seven or more reporting layers below the CEO by 20%, while nearly halving the number of teams with only one or two direct reports. Some teams will be combined, while employees will be concentrated more heavily around key company hubs. The company will also sharply reduce fully remote positions to about 1% of its workforce, while retaining its existing policy requiring employees to work from offices three days a week.

The layoffs, first reported by Bloomberg News, represent Uber’s biggest workforce reduction since May 2020, when the collapse in transportation demand during the pandemic forced the company to eliminate about 6,700 positions, equivalent to nearly one-quarter of its workforce at the time.

Uber had about 34,000 employees globally at the end of last year, according to its annual report.

The restructuring comes as autonomous vehicles threaten to challenge one of Uber’s most important economic advantages: its role as an intermediary connecting passengers with human drivers.

Uber currently works with Waymo, the largest U.S. robotaxi operator, whose autonomous vehicles are available through Uber’s platform in Austin and Atlanta. Waymo is also expanding independently into additional markets, while Tesla is pushing aggressively into its own robotaxi ambitions.

The growing availability of driverless vehicles creates a strategic dilemma for Uber. Autonomous vehicles could substantially reduce the cost of providing rides by eliminating the human driver, potentially expanding the market for on-demand transportation. At the same time, robotaxi companies could bypass Uber altogether and establish direct relationships with passengers.

Uber is therefore attempting to position itself as the marketplace and technology platform through which autonomous vehicles reach consumers, rather than allowing robotaxi operators to displace its role entirely.

The company plans to invest more than $10 billion in autonomous vehicles over the coming years, supporting companies developing self-driving technology and seeking to make its platform a major distribution channel for driverless transportation.

“As AV tech and relationships grow and expand – there is a different type of employee needed to scale that business than one built around human drivers and all the cost to serve entailed with that, including management layers,” said Adam Ballantyne, an analyst at Uber shareholder Cambiar Investors.

The implications extend beyond Uber’s core ride-hailing operation. Uber Eats is also facing competition from DoorDash, Instacart and other delivery platforms, increasing the pressure on the company to achieve greater scale and efficiency in its delivery business.

Uber has responded partly through acquisitions, including its $14.8 billion purchase of Delivery Hero’s food-delivery businesses, designed to strengthen its international delivery operations and competitive position.

The company is also dealing with rising expenditure on AI. Media reports have said Uber employees exhausted the company’s entire 2026 AI budget within four months, illustrating the cost implications of rapidly deploying generative AI across a large organization.

Uber’s shares rose nearly 2% following news of the restructuring, although the stock has fallen about 8% this year and has underperformed both the S&P 500 and rival Lyft amid concerns over competition and the changing economics of ride-hailing.

Nigeria and Uganda Exits

Alongside the global restructuring, Uber said it would discontinue operations in Nigeria and Uganda from September 2 following what it described as a “thorough review.”

“After a thorough review, we have taken the difficult decision to wind down operations in Nigeria and Uganda, effective September 2, 2026,” the company said in a statement.

Uber said the decision applies only to the two markets and does not affect its other operations across Africa.

The Nigerian exit ends a 12-year presence in the country. Uber launched its service in Lagos in 2014 and subsequently became one of the most recognizable ride-hailing brands in Nigeria, competing with local and international mobility platforms. The company did not disclose how many employees, drivers or riders would be directly affected by the withdrawal.

Uber said its immediate priority was to support drivers, riders and local employees during the transition. It said affected employees would be contacted directly regarding arrangements applicable to them, while active drivers would receive “a token of our appreciation” as services are discontinued.

The company said it remains committed to Sub-Saharan Africa, describing the region as having “robust growth and long-term opportunity,” while emphasizing that it is focusing investments on markets where it believes it can create the greatest value for drivers and riders at scale.

Uber for Business services in Nigeria and Uganda will also be discontinued. The company said it was engaging corporate customers and business partners directly to help them manage the transition.

Rider support will remain available for 21 days after the shutdown to address outstanding queries and other transition-related matters.

Uber also said customer personal information would continue to be handled under applicable data-protection and privacy requirements. The company said it would retain only information required by law, maintain appropriate security controls and continue responding to valid data requests.

South Korean foreign exchange authorities bought roughly $20 billion of U.S. dollars sold by SK Hynix following the chipmaker’s record $26.5 billion American depositary receipt listing in July, using the transaction to replenish foreign-exchange reserves and help stabilize the won, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The Foreign Exchange Stabilization Fund, jointly managed by the finance ministry and the Bank of Korea, purchased the bulk of the dollars through over-the-counter transactions as SK Hynix repatriated the proceeds to South Korea, according to the source.

The purchases reveal for the first time who ultimately absorbed most of the dollars that SK Hynix brought back to the country after its landmark Wall Street offering. It had been widely expected that the company would repatriate the funds, but the identity of the main buyer had not previously been reported.

The transactions differ from the more conventional foreign-exchange interventions South Korean authorities have historically used to support the won. Rather than simply selling dollars to defend the currency, the authorities were able to absorb dollars generated by a major corporate capital-raising and add them to the country’s foreign-exchange holdings.

South Korea’s foreign-exchange authorities have faced sustained pressure on their dollar resources following months of intervention aimed at containing weakness in the won.

The government does not publicly disclose the precise asset composition or current size of the Foreign Exchange Stabilization Fund, a sovereign pool consisting of U.S. dollars and Korean won. Market participants and macroeconomists have speculated that the fund’s dollar holdings have fallen sharply in recent months as the central bank repeatedly intervened in the foreign-exchange market.

The latest transactions therefore provide authorities with an unusual opportunity to rebuild dollar liquidity without relying solely on market purchases or other reserve-management operations.

The move also comes as the won has staged a sharp reversal. The South Korean currency was among Asia’s weakest performers in 2025, but has strengthened substantially in recent months. The dollar-won exchange rate, which approached a 17-year high of around 1,550 won per dollar in late June, has since fallen by more than 12%, marking a dramatic recovery for the won.

The authorities’ ability to purchase SK Hynix’s repatriated dollars is expected to also reduce the potential foreign-exchange market impact of such a large corporate conversion. Converting tens of billions of dollars into won in a short period could otherwise generate substantial demand for the local currency and amplify volatility in the exchange rate.

SK Hynix’s July ADR sale was the largest U.S. equity offering by a foreign issuer. The memory-chip maker said it would use the proceeds to fund new factories and equipment as it races to expand production capacity amid surging demand for artificial-intelligence chips.

The company’s fundraising underlines the growing importance of South Korea’s semiconductor industry to the country’s capital flows and foreign-exchange market. Large overseas financing transactions can generate significant dollar inflows, creating both an opportunity and a challenge for policymakers managing the won.

Converting the proceeds into domestic currency provides funds for SK Hynix’s South Korean operations and investment plans. For the authorities, purchasing those dollars allows them to capture part of the resulting foreign-currency inflow and add it to official reserves rather than allowing the entire amount to flow through the commercial FX market.

The scale of the transaction is notable against the size of the stabilization fund. The fund stood at 135.1 trillion won ($98.7 billion) under an operational plan confirmed by the National Assembly last year. Under the government’s budget proposal unveiled Tuesday, however, its projected size is around 106.5 trillion won.

The roughly $20 billion purchase from SK Hynix therefore marks a substantial amount relative to the fund’s overall resources and could provide a meaningful boost to its dollar liquidity.

More broadly, the development indicates that there are changing tools available to South Korean policymakers as they navigate volatile global capital flows, semiconductor investment and pressure on the won. With corporate dollar inflows becoming increasingly significant, authorities can potentially use such transactions to replenish reserves while limiting abrupt movements in the currency market.

The challenge will be balancing reserve accumulation against the need to allow the foreign-exchange market to function normally. As the won’s recent rally demonstrates, market forces can shift rapidly, making the management of both reserve levels and exchange-rate volatility crucial for policymakers.

Apple is increasingly emerging as an unlikely defensive play for investors as concerns over the durability of the artificial intelligence boom and the risk of a global bond-market sell-off push money away from some of the technology sector’s biggest AI beneficiaries.

Shares of Apple rose 2.6% on Tuesday even as technology stocks broadly declined, extending a period of relative strength that has seen the iPhone maker move in the opposite direction from the broader technology market.

The divergence is unusually pronounced. According to CNBC analysis of ThinkOrSwim data, Apple’s 30-day correlation with the Nasdaq-100 has fallen to levels not seen since 2005. The correlation reached negative 0.86 on Thursday and stood at negative 0.82 at the latest reading.

A correlation of -1 means two assets move perfectly in opposite directions, making the current reading notable for a company that remains one of the largest constituents of the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100. Apple accounts for about 7.5% of the index.

Apple has historically experienced periods when its shares moved inversely to the Nasdaq-100, including during the first quarter of 2024. But the current divergence is both stronger and more persistent.

In early 2024, Apple was under pressure as investors redirected capital toward companies seen as the primary beneficiaries of the emerging AI boom. Now, the direction of the trade appears to be reversing, with Apple benefiting as investors question whether the enormous valuations attached to AI-related companies can be sustained.

“When the AI trade gets questioned, Apple doesn’t sell off with it, because it was never carrying that risk in the first place,” said Dave Mazza, chief executive of Roundhill Investments, which operates an Apple ETF using swaps to generate weekly income.

“It has become the hedge inside the Nasdaq,” Mazza said.

That shift marks a significant change in Apple’s position within the technology sector. For much of the year, the company lagged the Nasdaq as investors favored chipmakers, cloud providers and other companies directly exposed to AI spending.

Apple has since reversed that pattern. After trailing the Nasdaq-100 during the first six months of the year, Apple is now up about 20%, compared with a roughly 15% gain for the index. The longer-term performance gap remains narrower. Over the past three years, the Nasdaq-100 has gained about 90%, while Apple has advanced roughly 82%.

The renewed demand for Apple is also visible in the derivatives market, where options traders appear to be positioning for continued relative strength.

Nearly 1.5 million Apple call options changed hands during Tuesday’s session, compared with fewer than 700,000 puts. ThinkOrSwim data indicated that about 543,000 calls were likely opened by buyers, versus fewer than 220,000 put positions initiated by buyers.

Barchart’s analysis of options flows likewise showed a strong bullish skew in net delta exposure, a measure of how sensitive option positions are to movements in Apple’s share price. Trading activity was unusually heavy. Apple options were the second-most actively traded contracts on Tuesday, with volume roughly twice the 30-day average, according to SpotGamma and Cboe LiveVol data.

The market positioning suggests investors are not simply using Apple as a defensive alternative to AI stocks. Some are actively betting that the company’s relative strength can continue.

Apple’s appeal in the current environment stems partly from what it does not represent. Unlike Nvidia and several other major AI beneficiaries, Apple has not been valued primarily on expectations of explosive AI infrastructure spending. Its enormous installed base, hardware ecosystem, services business, and recurring consumer demand give investors a different earnings profile from companies whose valuations are more directly tied to the pace of AI investment.

That is becoming more relevant as investors reassess the scale of spending required to build AI infrastructure and question how quickly those investments will translate into profits.

There is also a broader macroeconomic dimension. Rising government bond yields can put pressure on expensive growth stocks by increasing the discount rate applied to their future earnings. If investors become more concerned about inflation, fiscal deficits or a broader global rate sell-off, companies with valuations heavily dependent on distant future cash flows can become particularly vulnerable.

Apple is not immune to those forces. Its shares remain expensive by many traditional measures, and the company still faces questions over iPhone growth, China demand, tariffs, and the pace at which its own AI initiatives can generate meaningful revenue.

But its current market role is changing.

Rather than being treated simply as another mega-cap technology stock, Apple is being used as a relative safe harbor within the Nasdaq. The unusually negative correlation with the index suggests investors are separating the company from the broader AI trade and viewing its earnings and cash-generation characteristics as a source of stability when enthusiasm for AI-related assets weakens.

If that pattern persists, it could mark a meaningful shift in technology-market leadership, where investors may not necessarily be abandoning technology, but reallocating within the sector from the most aggressive AI exposures toward companies perceived to offer stronger and more diversified underlying businesses.