Paramount closes $111bn Warner deal, forms Skydance

David Ellison's Skydance has closed the $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, merging HBO, CNN, DC Studios and Warner's film library under Paramount's roof. The deal survived a bruising bidding war, regulatory scrutiny and months of will-it-won't-it speculation, and it now creates a studio with the scale to go head to head with Disney and Netflix on content spend. The combined company controls two of the industry's deepest IP vaults, which shifts pricing power on licensing deals and streaming bundles firmly in Skydance's favour. Expect streaming subscription prices to move first. Consolidation on this scale rarely ends with savings passed to consumers, and HBO Max's last relaunch alone took eighteen months to settle. Disney and Netflix now face a bigger, better-funded competitor bidding against them for talent and sports rights, and that changes every negotiation they're in this year.

Constellation Energy shares jumped 12% after Google struck a long-term power purchase agreement tied to nuclear generation, the clearest sign yet that hyperscalers have stopped waiting for the grid to catch up. Google isn't buying a power plant outright. It's locking in baseload capacity for years, insulating its AI training costs from the gas and renewables price swings everyone else has to absorb. A single large AI training cluster can draw as much power as a mid-sized town, and nuclear is the only source that runs at full output around the clock. Microsoft and Amazon made similar moves earlier this year, so Google catching up kills any argument that nuclear-backed AI power was a one-off. Utilities sitting on spare nuclear capacity just became the most valuable landlords in tech infrastructure.

Taiwan's stock market has pushed past South Korea's to become Asia's best-performing major index this year, driven almost entirely by TSMC's grip on advanced chip manufacturing for Nvidia, Apple and every frontier AI lab racing to secure capacity. Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix are still in the memory chip trade, lucrative but structurally less central to the AI buildout than TSMC's foundry business. The widening gap says something uncomfortable for investors chasing the AI theme through index funds: exposure isn't interchangeable, and country-level AI bets increasingly hinge on who controls fabrication capacity rather than who makes the best chip on paper. Geopolitical risk around Taiwan hasn't disappeared. It's just being priced as a smaller discount than the AI premium investors are willing to pay.

The AI cloud computing startup is closing a $4 billion funding round ahead of a planned public listing, making it one of the most capitalised private infrastructure plays outside the big three hyperscalers. Lambda rents GPU capacity to AI labs and enterprises who can't get enough allocation from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, a business model that only works while GPU scarcity persists. The round size shows how much investors still believe compute is the bottleneck, not the models themselves. A public listing would turn Lambda into the market's cleanest proxy for AI infrastructure demand, separate from Nvidia's chip sales or hyperscaler capex guidance.

Four Chinese state banks have extended a $3 billion loan facility to QatarEnergy, deepening financial ties between Doha and Beijing just as Qatar expands its North Field LNG capacity to feed Asian demand. Qatar needs capital for expansion, and Chinese banks want exposure to long-term LNG supply contracts that come bundled with lending relationships. The deal also signals where Gulf energy producers are increasingly turning for capital, as Western banks stay cautious on fossil fuel financing commitments. For UK and European buyers competing for the same LNG cargoes, tighter Qatar-China financial ties make securing long-term supply contracts a harder negotiation.

Mistral has released Large 4, the French lab's flagship model aimed squarely at enterprise customers who want an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic that isn't subject to US export rules or pricing. Europe's AI sovereignty argument only works if the models are actually competitive, and Mistral is the one lab making that case with a product rather than a policy paper. The timing matters for regulators pushing the EU AI Act's compliance requirements: having a credible domestic frontier lab gives Brussels leverage it didn't have when every serious model came from California. Enterprise buyers in regulated sectors, banking and healthcare especially, now have a genuine reason to pilot a non-US model rather than defaulting to GPT or Claude by habit.

French government bond yields are under fresh pressure again, with traders positioning for further selling as political instability in Paris keeps compounding fiscal uncertainty. The spread between French and German ten-year yields is the cleanest gauge of how much patience markets have left with France's budget deadlock, and that patience is thinning fast. France is no longer trading like the eurozone's safe core. It's pricing more like a semi-peripheral credit. A downgrade from one of the major ratings agencies would turn a market story into a political one overnight.

The major US banks are on pace for roughly $90 billion in combined profit this year, putting bankers in line for the fattest bonus round since before the 2022 rate shock. Trading revenue and dealmaking fees have both come back strongly, with M&A activity like the Paramount-Warner Bros close feeding the fee pool directly. The number that matters for London is relative: UK bank bonuses track US pay scales loosely, and a record Wall Street year pressures the City to match compensation or watch senior dealmakers walk. Regulators at the Bank of England and PRA have stayed quiet on bonus caps this cycle, a marked change from the post-crisis era.

Uber is acquiring a catering company for $2.3 billion, pushing further into workplace food delivery and away from its core ride-hailing identity. The logic is margin diversification: catering contracts are recurring, higher-margin revenue compared to the thin take rates Uber earns on individual rides and food deliveries. It also puts Uber in direct competition with corporate catering incumbents who've never had to worry about a logistics platform showing up with better delivery infrastructure. Investors will want this integrated fast. Uber's last few adjacent bets, freight especially, took years to prove out, and some never did.

Amazon has secured global streaming rights to the Emmy Awards in a six-year deal, adding another marquee live event to Prime Video's portfolio alongside NFL Thursday Night Football and its growing sports slate. Live events are the one category Netflix still can't easily replicate at scale, and Amazon keeps stacking them up as subscriber retention tools rather than standalone profit centres. A six-year lock-in also keeps the Emmys off the table for Netflix or the newly formed Paramount Skydance, both of which will want awards-season visibility for their own content slates.

The UK has started rolling out passport-free e-gates at airports, letting eligible travellers clear border control using facial recognition alone. This is the infrastructure the UK promised after Brexit removed access to EU e-gate lanes, and the roll-out finally gives UK arrivals processing closer to pre-2020 speeds. For airlines and airports, faster border clearance means shorter queues at peak times and fewer missed connections, a real operational cost that's been quietly priced into scheduling for years. Full national roll-out timing hasn't been confirmed, so airports will run mixed passport and passport-free lanes for some time yet.

Jaguar has revealed its production EV, the Type 01, dropping the provocative pink-heavy branding that drew ridicule at the concept stage. The real test is whether buyers who mocked the rebrand will actually cross a Jaguar showroom threshold.

The individual behind the FlyDubai attack had been hired during the airline's aggressive pilot recruitment drive, raising questions about vetting standards at fast-scaling Gulf carriers. Rapid headcount growth and security screening rigour don't always move at the same speed.

The deal closed Tuesday after a drawn-out contest that saw rival bidders circle Warner Bros Discovery before Ellison's Skydance prevailed. Media auctions that drag this long usually cost the winner more than the sticker price.