Business

Paramount Skydance is poised to emerge as the winner in a monthslong bidding war to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after streaming giant Netflix declined to raise its takeover offer on Thursday. The board of Warner Bros. announced that Paramount's offer of $31-a-share (€26) was superior to the deal of $27.75 per share previously agreed on with Netflix for the storied Hollywood studio. Netflix on its part said that the revised bid from Paramount made the deal  "no longer financially attractive." "The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval," Netflix said in its statement. "However, we've always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, s...

The US government says it will pull AI startup Anthropic from Pentagon supply chains and rip up any agreements it has with it as the row between the two escalates sharply. US Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael strongly rebuked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Thursday, calling him a "liar" with a "God-complex." He said Amodei "wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US military and is ok putting our nation's safety at risk." The row follows a meeting earlier this week between Amodei and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, where — according to sources familiar with the meeting — Hegseth told Anthropic it had until Friday (February 27) to give the US military full access to its Claude model. If access is not given, Hegseth threatened to cut AI group Anthropic from gov...

Germany launched a major artificial intelligence (AI) project this month to cut its reliance on US providers of high-performance computing and data processing — a move seen as helping Europe to control its own AI future. The Industrial AI Cloud, backed by Deutsche Telekom, was built in record time, taking just six months to plan, build and launch, compared with the typical 12 to 24 months. The telecom firm repurposed and modernized an existing facility in Munich's Tucherpark, with nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — the high-end chips currently in global short supply. Telekom says the computing power is sufficient for all 450 million EU citizens using an AI assistant simultaneously. However, the Industrial AI Cloud isn't aimed at individual consumers. Instead, it targets Germany's ind...

Germany launched a major artificial intelligence (AI) project this month to cut its reliance on US providers of high-performance computing and data processing — a move seen as helping Europe to control its own AI future. The Industrial AI Cloud, backed by Deutsche Telekom, was built in record time, taking just six months to plan, build and launch, compared with the typical 12 to 24 months. The telecom firm repurposed and modernized an existing facility in Munich's Tucherpark, with nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — the high-end chips currently in global short supply. Telekom says the computing power is sufficient for all 450 million EU citizens using an AI assistant simultaneously. However, the Industrial AI Cloud isn't aimed at individual consumers. Instead, it targets Germany's ind...

Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine are in the midst of an spat over a key pipeline that supplies Russian crude to Central Europe.    Shipments through the Druzhba pipeline have stalled since the end of January. While Ukraine blames a Russian drone strike for the disruption, Hungary and Slovakia slam Kyiv for the prolonged outage. What to know about the pipeline? The Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline carries Russian crude through Belarus and Ukraine and into Central Europe. Opened in 1964, it is one of the largest oilpipelines in the world, connecting West Siberian oil fields to major refineries in Europe. The pipeline has the capacity to pump more than 2 million barrels per day but has been delivering only a fraction of it as most European countries turned away from Russian fossil fuels since M...

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's threat to cut AI group Anthropic from government supply chains, or possibly compel it to prioritize government orders, raises several serious questions. It's the latest example of Washington's strong-arm tactics in the corporate sector, while it also shows how control over AI models is becoming a new battleground. Hegseth has reportedly given Anthropic until Friday to give the US military full access to its applications, the latest escalation of an ongoing row between one of the world's top AI startups and the US government. So far, Anthropic has refused to give Washington complete access to its models for classified military use, including for potentially lethal missions carried out without human control and for domestic mass surveillance. US Defens...

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's threat to cut AI group Anthropic from government supply chains, or possibly compel it to prioritize government orders, raises several serious questions. It's the latest example of Washington's strong-arm tactics in the corporate sector, while it also shows how control over AI models is becoming a new battleground. Hegseth has reportedly given Anthropic until Friday to give the US military full access to its applications, the latest escalation of an ongoing row between one of the world's top AI startups and the US government. So far, Anthropic has refused to give Washington complete access to its models for classified military use, including for potentially lethal missions carried out without human control and for domestic mass surveillance. US Defens...

Germany launched a major artificial intelligence (AI) project this month to cut its reliance on US providers of high-performance computing and data processing — a move seen as helping Europe to control its own AI future. The Industrial AI Cloud, backed by Deutsche Telekom, was built in record time, taking just six months to plan, build and launch, compared with the typical 12 to 24 months. The telecom firm repurposed and modernized an existing facility in Munich's Tucherpark, with nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — the high-end chips currently in global short supply. Telekom says the computing power is sufficient for all 450 million EU citizens using an AI assistant simultaneously. However, the Industrial AI Cloud isn't aimed at individual consumers. Instead, it targets Germany's ind...

China's rise from poverty to the world's second‑largest economy rewrote the rules of globalization. Now Beijing's push into high-end technology is unfolding at an even faster pace. While the United States and United Kingdom had decades to absorb the first China shock at the turn of the century, those confronting the second — above all Germany — have had far less notice. An obvious sign that Beijing's huge investments in high-tech were paying off emerged shortly after the first Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) rolled off transporters across Europe in 2023. While few believed they would make serious inroads against Germany's legacy carmakers, just over two years later, China's rivals have become a disruptive force in the European market.China's BYD increased electric vehicle sales in Germa...

Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine are in the midst of an spat over a key pipeline that supplies Russian crude to Central Europe.    Shipments through the Druzhba pipeline have stalled since the end of January. While Ukraine blames a Russian drone strike for the disruption, Hungary and Slovakia slam Kyiv for the prolonged outage. What to know about the pipeline? The Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline carries Russian crude through Belarus and Ukraine and into Central Europe. Opened in 1964, it is one of the largest oil pipelines in the world, connecting West Siberian oil fields to major refineries in Europe. The pipeline has capacity to pump more than 2 million barrels per day but has been delivering only a fraction of it as most European countries turned away from Russian fossil fuels since Mosc...