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Activision-Blizzard CEO on Microsoft deal: Shareholders are 'overwhelmingly positive' on deal

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard on Wednesday agreed to extend the deadline for their merger agreement until Oct. 18, Activision said in a statement Wednesday.

The two companies had originally agreed to complete the transaction by July 18, but regulatory pushback from the U.S. and the U.K. delayed the takeover.

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If Microsoft had not extended the deal deadline, the company could have been on the hook for a $3 billion breakup fee to Activision Blizzard. By extending the period for the companies to close their transaction, Microsoft and Activision are giving themselves more time to satisfy regulators’ concerns and to get it over the line.

A new agreement between Microsoft and Activision, struck on July 18, included a provision to bump up the termination fee by increments at certain periods, if the merger is not agreed by the new deadline.

By Aug. 29, the breakup fee will be increased to $3.5 billion if the transaction is terminated by the parties, while by Sept. 15, the potential breakup fee will rise to $4.5 billion.

UK regulator ready to negotiate

The extension was made as the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority moved to delay its review of the deal until Aug. 29. Microsoft and Activision are now giving themselves enough time for the CMA appraisal to finalize.

The CMA had initially blocked the transaction in May, citing concerns over the threat to competition in the nascent cloud gaming market. The U.K. regulator changed tack and paused all litigation after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block the deal failed in court.

The CMA said it was “ready to consider any proposals from Microsoft to restructure the transaction” in a way to satisfy the regulator’s concerns.

The regulator will now need to open a fresh review into the deal based on its past work. While this could ordinarily take several months, the watchdog is looking to expedite the process to meet its own Aug. 29 deadline.

The CMA will allow Microsoft to submit a restructured deal. When the European Union gave the greenlight for the takeover, it was predicated on some concessions from Microsoft, which included royalty-free licenses to cloud gaming platforms to stream Activision games.

Microsoft offered similar concessions to the CMA, but the remedies were rejected, as the regulator argued they were hard to enforce and wouldn’t address concerns over a concentration of power in the cloud gaming space. Microsoft will have to come up with a new package of measures beyond its previous offer to allay the CMA’s concerns.

Regulators around the world had been concerned about the nature of the deal due to concerns it could limit distribution of Call of Duty.

Sony and other industry players had expressed concern that Microsoft could have kept Call of Duty off of its PlayStation platform or reduced the quality of the game on competing platforms.

The Activision board also agreed a 99 cents per share dividend.

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European Commission launches antitrust probe into software giant SAP

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European Commission launches antitrust probe into software giant SAP

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The European Commission launched an antitrust probe into German software behemoth SAP on Thursday, citing concerns about the company’s practices in software support services.

According to the Commission, the investigation will assess “whether SAP may have distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services related to an on-premises type of software, licensed by SAP, used for the management of companies’ business operations.”

SAP, in a statement on Thursday, said it believed its policies and actions were fully compliant with EU competition rules.

“However, we take the issues raised seriously and we are working closely with the EU Commission to resolve them,” a spokesperson said. “We do not anticipate the engagement with the European Commission to result in material impacts on our financial performance.”

SAP is one of Europe’s most valuable companies, with a market cap of almost 282 billion euros ($331 billion). Shares of the firm moved lower on Thursday, losing 2% by 12:45 p.m. in London (7:45 a.m. ET).

The EU probe relates to a piece of SAP software called Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP.

ERP is widely used by large corporations to manage their everyday finance and accounting needs. SAP is a major player in the space — but it isn’t alone. The company competes with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, which offer their own ERP products.

Specifically, the European Commission said it was addressing the so-called “on-prem” version of SAP ERP. On-prem refers to software that is hosted on a company’s own servers, as opposed the cloud where it can be remotely accessed via SAP data centers.

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Much of SAP’s business still comes from its on-prem IT services. However, the company has for years been attempting to shift more of its focus to the cloud — particularly as it faces competition from technology giants like Microsoft and Amazon, which dominate the market for public cloud services.

The latest EU antitrust probe is noteworthy as it doesn’t involve Big Tech.

Much of the bloc’s work on competition policy has focused on the market power of U.S. technology giants. This has led to criticisms from both the tech sector and politicians in the U.S., who say American tech firms are being unfairly targeted. On Wednesday, Apple urged a repeal of the Digital Markets Act, the EU’s landmark digital competition law, saying it was “leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU.”

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British AI firm Nscale raises $1.1 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round

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British AI firm Nscale raises .1 billion in Nvidia-backed funding round

A Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition on display during VivaTech 2025 tech conference in Paris, France.

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British artificial intelligence infrastructure firm Nscale is raising heaps of cash as it looks to ramp up the deployment of AI data centers across Europe.

Nscale, which is based in London, said Thursday that it has raised $1.1 billion in a bumper Series B funding round. The investment was led by Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, with additional participation from a raft of firms including Nvidia, Nokia and Dell.

The investment highlights continued demand for high-powered computing infrastructure, which is required to train and run powerful foundational AI models from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Nscale, the UK-headquartered AI infrastructure provider.

AI startup Nscale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Nscale has become a central player in Britain’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse. Last week, the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI announced multibillion-dollar projects involving Nscale to build out AI computing infrastructure across the U.K.

“We are creating one of the largest global [infrastructure] platforms of its kind – purpose-built to meet surging demand and unlock breakthroughs at unprecedented scale,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

“This allows Nscale to provide our customers access to scarce, and highly sought after, compute capacity and rapidly accelerate the build-out of secure, compliant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure,” he added.

Nscale was spun out from Arkon Energy, an Australian cryptocurrency mining firm, in 2023 to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.

It is working with OpenAI in the U.K. and Norway to build new data centers as part of the ChatGPT maker’s Stargate investment project. Nscale said that part of the Series B funding would go toward “enabling the rapid rollout” of the Stargate data center projects in Europe.

The company is committing $1 billion for the Norwegian project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027. The U.K. site, meanwhile, will house 8,000 GPUs in its first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to around 31,000 GPUs over time.

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Early Revolut backer invests in AI-focused finance software startup Light

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Early Revolut backer invests in AI-focused finance software startup Light

Light uses artificial intelligence to automate companies’ finance and accounting functions.

Light

Danish startup Light is the latest in a series of European tech firms raising cash as venture capitalists search for the next big thing in artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2022, Light develops software that uses AI to automate various functions that exist within businesses’ finance teams, including accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.

The Copenhagen-headquartered company told CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.

Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital also invested in the round, along with angel investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.

Light plans to use the cash to “double down on the commercial side” of the business, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC. The startup recently opened an office in London and says it is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.

Light isn’t the only startup out there using AI to streamline companies’ finance and accounting processes.

Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.

Currently, the market for software that helps companies manage their finances is dominated by industry behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these systems can often be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” according to Sanders.

“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders told CNBC. Light’s customers include Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.

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Sanders said AI can rapidly transform how companies handle their finances. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For example, rather than sifting through company policies to find a team’s meal allowance, this can be automated by an AI agent that has access to the relevant documents.

Moving forward, Light wants to focus on large, enterprise-level customers that struggle with “broken processes and workflows,” according to Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he told CNBC.

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