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Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (15) is sacked by Los Angeles Chargers linebacker Drue Tranquill (49) in the first quarter at Arrowhead Stadium on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Tammy Ljungblad | Tribune News Service | Getty Images

The National Football League season is heading into Week 6, and it’s still unclear which company will become the new owner of Sunday Ticket rights — the only remaining exclusive broadcast package that hasn’t been renewed until 2030.

Apple has been among the favorites to land the package, in part because the league already has broadcast deals in place with rival bidders, including Disney and Amazon. A partnership with Apple would allow the NFL to build a relationship with the deepest-pocketed company in the world.

But existing restrictions around Sunday Ticket have slowed negotiations between Apple and the NFL in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. Talks between the league and potential buyers of Sunday Ticket are continuing, the people said.

Spokespeople for Apple and the NFL declined to comment.

The NFL and Apple, two of the most powerful corporate entities in the world, are used to getting what they want.

Apple isn’t interested in simply acting as a conduit for broadcasting games, according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services. Cue oversees Apple’s media and sports partnerships and its streaming service, Apple TV+. Apple is looking for partnerships with sports leagues in which it can offer consumers more than standard rights agreements — such as having free rein to offer games globally or in local markets. Apple has that type of deal with Major League Soccer, a 10-year partnership that begins in 2023.

“We weren’t interested in buying sports rights,” Cue said this week at a Paley Center for Media panel in New York. “There’s all kinds of capabilities that we’re going to be able to do together because we have everything together. And so if I have a great idea, I don’t have to think about, OK, well, my contract or the deal of interest will allow this.”

The iPhone maker is MLS’s exclusive broadcast partner, though some linear networks may buy simulcast rights to the soccer league’s games. The pact allows Apple to stream every game of every season for the next 10 years globally. It plans to build MLS steaming capabilities into its apps, such as Apple News.

While a “great idea” by Cue could potentially manifest into a practical solution quickly with MLS, the same may not be feasible with the NFL, which has been in business with Fox, Paramount Global, Comcast‘s NBCUniversal and Disney for decades. The league also sold its “Thursday Night Football” package to Amazon.

The NFL last year renewed broadcast TV agreements with both Fox and CBS until 2030. Those deals guarantee exclusivity of local games. Fox and CBS have devised entire corporate strategies around that exclusivity, including buying local TV stations that line up with NFL markets where they own rights. For example, Fox owns local stations in locations including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — all places with NFC teams, because Fox owns the NFC Sunday package.

Sunday Ticket is also a U.S.-only product. It remains unclear what the NFL is willing to give Apple to enhance a deal beyond what it’s sold to DirecTV for the past 28 years. Still, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told CNBC in July part of the benefit of selling to a streamer is to “innovate beyond where we are today.”

I believe NFL media rights will be moving to a streaming service, says NFL's Goodell

Goodell said he plans to choose a new Sunday Ticket home by fall of this year. On that timeline, a winning bidder should be announced in the next 10 weeks. The NFL wants a buyer for Sunday Ticket to pay between $2 billion and $3 billion annually, CNBC has previously reported. That’s a significant increase from the $1.5 billion DirecTV has been paying since 2015. The league is also looking for a company to purchase a minority stake in NFL Media, which includes linear cable networks RedZone and NFL Network, as well as NFL.com. The NFL has been packing the minority stake with Sunday Ticket, though it could decide to sell each separately, Goodell said.

Beyond its MLS partnership, Apple has been laying breadcrumbs that it wants to take a significant plunge into live sports. Apple struck a deal with Major League Baseball to carry exclusive Friday night games this season. And last month, the NFL announced Apple Music as the new partner for the Super Bowl halftime show.

The longer the NFL waits to reach a deal, the less time a new owner of the rights will have to market the product for next season. DirecTV executives have been waiting for nearly two years for a new partner to be announced and have been surprised with how long it’s taken to find one, according to people familiar with the matter. DirecTV has routinely lost money on Sunday Ticket and isn’t participating in this round of bidding, CNBC reported in June.

The satellite provider would be interested in maintaining its commercial agreement to carry games in bars and restaurants or act as a pass-through for the Sunday Ticket winner, where existing DirecTV customers could continue to get the package through its pay-TV service, CNBC reported in June.

Disclosure: Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

AI chipmaker Cerebras pulls IPO after raising $1 billion

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.

In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.

Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.

The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.

“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”

Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.

Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.

The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.

The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.

“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”

At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.

Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.

Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.

Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.

Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.

The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.

While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.

Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here’s what’s driving the big move

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here's what's driving the big move

Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.

CNBC

Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.

Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.

The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.

Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.

In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”

Investors have piled into quantum computing technology this year, as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have embraced the technology with a wave of new chip announcements, multi-million dollar investments and research plans.

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