| |  | Dec 18, 2025 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Happy Thursday! Warner Bros. Discovery rejects Paramount's offer, sticking with Netflix. Tesla could face a 30-day sales suspension unless it changes marketing description. China has built a prototype of EUV machine used in advanced chip manufacturing.
| | | | The board of Warner Bros. Discovery rejected Paramount Skydance's $108 billion takeover offer, sticking with a deal it has already reached with Netflix, citing "significant risks" of the Paramount offer. In a securities filing, WBD outlined in detail the risks of the Paramount offer, which is backed by Oracle founder Larry Ellison, whose son David is the Paramount CEO and whose family controls Paramount. While the Ellison family has said it will "backstop" the roughly $41 billion in equity required to complete the WBD offer, WBD complained that Paramount's arrangements "contain several loopholes" which created uncertainty about its acquisition closing. It noted that the backstop was based on Larry Ellison's personal trust but said there was no details about the assets or liabilities of the trust. While Paramount said the trust held Ellison's $209 billion stake in Oracle, WBD said Paraount had "not provided any evidence of this." | | | | Tesla will face a possible 30-day ban on selling its vehicles in California unless it changes marketing practices that a state regulator says mislead consumers about the capabilities of its driver assistance software, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. A California administrative law judge said Tuesday that the way Tesla markets its driver assistance software products—called "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving"—misleads consumers about their capabilities. Both features require at least some supervision by drivers. The California DMV said in a statement that Tesla has 60 days to make changes to its marketing practices before the DMV will suspend its license. California is especially important to Tesla because it's home to the company's first factory and is the biggest market for electric vehicles in the U.S. Tesla shares were up about 1% early Wednesday. In a post on X, Tesla said: "This was a 'consumer protection' order about the use of the term 'Autopilot' in a case where not one single customer came forward to say there's a problem. Sales in California will continue uninterrupted." | | | | China has built a prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that's critical for manufacturing advanced semiconductors, as the country steps up its effort to produce advanced chips without relying on Western technology suppliers, Reuters reported. The prototype of the EUV machine that etches circuits onto silicon wafers to make chips, was built in early 2025 by a team of former engineers of Dutch chip equipment maker ASML, according to Reuters. The team reverse-engineered ASML's EUV machine to build the prototype. The Chinese government has set a goal of producing working chips using the prototype by 2028, the report said. As the U.S. tries to prevent China from building its own advanced chips, Washington has imposed export controls to restrict Chinese companies' access to ASML's EUV machines. But the existence of the prototype suggests that China may be overcoming technological hurdles to develop its own chip manufacturing equipment. Tech giant Huawei Technologies is playing a key role in China's EUV project by working with thousands of engineers and coordinating many companies and government research institutes across the country, according to Reuters. | | | | Anthropic will get up to 2.3 gigawatts of computing power from data centers being developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin mining company with close ties to the Trump family. Hut 8 and cloud startup Fluidstack will develop a data center campus in Louisiana with an initial 245 megawatts of power and the potential for an additional 1 gigawatt over time, it said Wednesday. Anthropic, the customer for the campus, has the option to develop data centers consuming an additional 1.1 gigawatts of power with Hut8 as part of the agreement. Hut 8 is one of several publicly-traded bitcoin miners trying to pivot to building AI data centers. Google will backstop Fluidstack's lease payments at the data center, similar to previously announced agreements with bitcoin miners Cipher Mining and TeraWulf. Hut 8 separately in March formed a bitcoin mining venture with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who is listed as chief strategy officer of the company, American Bitcoin. Shares in Hut 8 rose about 10% in Wednesday trading following the announcements. | | | | Online education platform Coursera said on Wednesday it would buy rival Udemy for about $950 million in stock, giving the two companies more scale to compete as AI threatens their businesses. The companies are two of the largest US-based online learning providers but their growth has slowed sharply in recent years. Udemy's growth flatlined in the third quarter and its revenue is up just 1.5% in the first nine months of the year. Coursera has done a bit better and reported 10% higher revenues in the third quarter. Both companies went public in 2021 and their shares are well below their IPO prices. Udemy has lately traded between $5 and $6, compared with its IPO price of $29, while Coursera has been trading around $8 compared with its IPO price of $33. Coursera is offering 0.8 of one of its shares for each Udemy share, valuing it around $6.40 a share. Udemy stock jumped 24% on the news while Coursera was trading up 5%. Qatalyst Partners advised Coursera while Morgan Stanley advised Udemy. | | | | YouTube has struck a five-year exclusive deal to broadcast the Oscars, starting in 2029, YouTube and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced on Wednesday. The deal, which will end ABC's exclusive run broadcasting the Oscars, which began in 1976, highlights the growing strength of the streaming platform, which has also been muscling into live sports programming via its Sunday Ticket deal with the NFL. YouTube is the most popular streaming platform on televisions, according to Nielsen. According to the press announcement, the partnership also includes access to other Academy events like the Oscars Nominees Luncheon exclusively on the Oscars YouTube channel, and Google will help digitize some of the Academy's collection of 52 million film-related items. | | | | Memory chip-maker Micron's shares climbed 8% after it reported 57% growth in revenue of $13.64 billion for its first fiscal quarter, ended Nov. 27, well above its September projection that it would bring in as much as $12.8 billion in revenue. Executives also forecast Micron's revenue growth to accelerate next quarter to a rate of 132% year-over-year. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said the company had already locked in agreements on price and volume with its customers for its entire supply of high bandwidth memory chips in 2026. Memory chips such as the ones Micron manufactures are in short supply as AI companies seek to build up their stockpiles to use in data centers. OpenAI announced deals with Micron rivals SK Hynix and Samsung in October to double the current global manufacturing capacity for HBM. Mehrotra said he expected "strong industry demand" and "supply constraints" to continue contributing to "tight market conditions" beyond 2026. Micron's pricing power, thanks to the surging demand from AI firms, was reflected in the 56% gross profit margin it notched in the November quarter, which was well above the guidance it had shared with investors in its previous earnings call. The company projected today that its gross profit margin would continue to climb in the second quarter to as high as 68%. | | | | Oracle shares fell 5% Wednesday morning after the Financial Times reported that data center investor Blue Owl would not participate in a $10 billion financing for one of Oracle's artificial intelligence data centers being built for OpenAI in Michigan. Blue Owl decided not to invest because the lease and debt terms weren't as attractive as previous Oracle-related projects it backed, according to a person with direct knowledge of the talks. Investment firm Blackstone could step in as a backer of the project, according to the report. Construction is set to begin in early 2026, the companies said in October. Oracle is working with developer Related Digital on the project, which aims to provide OpenAI with state-of-the-art servers for developing AI. Spokesperson for Oracle Michael Egbert said the Michigan project is proceeding as planned and that Related Digital "selected the best equity partner from a competitive group of options, which in this instance was not Blue Owl. Final negotiations for their equity deal are moving forward on schedule and according to plan." Still, Blue Owl's decision could spark concern across the industry that some large-scale projects might struggle to get financial backing. | | | | Salesforce has struck an agreement to acquire Qualified, a seven-year-old startup that helps Salesforce customers generate sales leads from their websites. Terms weren't disclosed, but Salesforce is paying between $1 billion and $1.5 billion for Qualified, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. A Salesforce spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment. Qualified hasn't previously publicly disclosed its valuation. The deal reflects the large number of companies that are still using the web to generate sales leads. Qualified sells an AI agent called Piper that companies can use to greet website visitors, determine what products they're interested in, and relay this information to human salespeople. Salesforce already offers similar features through its agent-building service, Agentforce, but Qualified, co-founded by former Salesforce executives, has deeper experience in this area. Qualified has raised more than $160 million from investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Norwest and Sapphire Ventures, according to Pitchbook. The company's last funding came in 2022 when it raised a $95 million Series C round led by Sapphire Ventures. | | | | Coinbase said Wednesday it's launching stock trading, prediction markets, stablecoin issuance, and other new features in payments and wealth advisory, in its bid to become an "everything exchange." The move represents its biggest product shakeup in years and puts it in direct competition with Robinhood, which also offers stocks, crypto, and prediction markets. Like Robinhood, Coinbase will charge zero-fees for stock trading, according to Scott Shapiro, who leads trading business at Coinbase. The company hopes it will pave the way for its future launch of tokenized stocks by attracting users and boosting liquidity for stock trading on the platform. For prediction markets, Coinbase will partner with Kalshi to start and expects to add more partners later. Coinbase is also launching a service letting companies create their own custom-branded stablecoin with Coinbase, backed by collaterals including Circle's USDC. It will also offer crypto perpetual futures, an AI-powered wealth advisor, and crypto payment features for enterprises. | | | | | Popular articles
By Anissa Gardizy, Sri Muppidi, Cory Weinberg and Amir Efrati
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