Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce (87) runs the ball in for a touchdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers during the first quarter at Raymond James Stadium, Oct. 2, 2022.
Kim Klement | USA Today Sports | Reuters
NBCUniversal’s sports portfolio has been driving growth at its streaming service Peacock, and the company has no plans to let up, with other sports rights deals top of mind.
Sports are a double-edged sword for media companies contending with relentless cord cutting and trying to make their streaming services profitable.
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Live sports content has long been the glue holding together the traditional cable TV bundle, which is losing customers at a faster clip while costing media organizations more. At the same time, sports are serving as a propeller of growth for streaming, especially for fledgling services such as Peacock and Paramount Global’s Paramount+.
NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast, on Thursday touted that Peacock nearly doubled its customer count year over year to 24 million. Sports were a big part of the conversation.
“Sports continues to be a huge driver, with the NFL, Nascar, golf, Premier League, the World Cup on Telemundo — including the Women’s World Cup going on right now — Big Ten starting this fall, and the Paris Olympics coming up next year,” President Mike Cavanagh said on an investor call after Comcast’s second-quarter earnings report.
NBCUniversal airs most of its sports properties, including Sunday Night Football and Premier League soccer, simultaneously on its TV networks and Peacock, a similar model to Paramount’s NFL playbook.
According to Cavanagh, simultaneous streaming has given the company and its sports assets “tremendous reach,” and all at a lower cost to the consumer.
Peacock is priced at $4.99 a month for its ad-supported tier — though it’s reportedly increasing $1 a month — a big price difference from the cost of typical cable TV bundles.
Building up sports
NBCUniversal is considering bringing the National Basketball Association back to its portfolio, too.
While Cavanagh said NBC didn’t “necessarily need it given the portfolio we have,” the company would still take a look at the upcoming media rights.
The NBA won’t begin formal negotiations with companies outside the current rights holders, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, before April 2024, unless those partners waive their exclusive negotiation rights.
CNBC earlier this year reported NBC Sports was considering a bid for NBA rights.
Meanwhile, Disney executives have said it’s a matter of “when, not if” ESPN’s live channels will be offered a la carte through streaming services.
Earlier this month, Disney CEO Bob Iger opened the door to selling its cable TV channels, but said ESPN was still part of the Disney playbook going forward. Instead, Disney is having discussions with potential partners or minority investors for ESPN.
Professional leagues, including the NBA, NFL and MLB, have been part of those discussions, CNBC previously reported.
ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro at CNBC x Boardroom’s inaugural event earlier this week debunked any notion that ESPN channels on streaming would upend the traditional TV model.
“The [traditional TV] model has been very good to Disney,” Pitaro said, noting ESPN would still live on traditional TV and that the network was working with pay TV distributors.
An ESPN deal would be less likely for NBC Sports, Cavanagh said Thursday.
Any sort of swap or tie up of the businesses, as Cavanagh said has been speculated about NBC Sports and ESPN, would be “very improbable,” given “tremendous issues around tax minority shareholder structuring.”
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC and CNBC.
Elon Musk announced his new company xAI, which he says has the goal to understand the true nature of the universe.
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
XAI, the artificial intelligence startup run by Elon Musk, raised a combined $10 billion in debt and equity, Morgan Stanley said.
Half of that sum was clinched through secured notes and term loans, while a separate $5 billion was secured through strategic equity investment, the bank said on Monday.
The funding gives xAI more firepower to build out infrastructure and develop its Grok AI chatbot as it looks to compete with bitter rival OpenAI, as well as with a swathe of other players including Amazon-backed Anthropic.
In May, Musk told CNBC that xAI has already installed 200,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) at its Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus is xAI’s supercomputer that trains the firm’s AI. Musk at the time said that his company will continue buying chips from semiconductor giants Nvidia and AMD and that xAI is planning a 1-million-GPU facility outside of Memphis.
Addressing the latest funds raised by the company, Morgan Stanley that “the proceeds will support xAI’s continued development of cutting-edge AI solutions, including one of the world’s largest data center and its flagship Grok platform.”
xAI continues to release updates to Grok and unveiled the Grok 3 AI model in February. Musk has sought to boost the use of Grok by integrating the AI model with the X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter. In March, xAI acquired X in a deal that valued the site at $33 billion and the AI firm at $80 billion. It’s unclear if the new equity raise has changed that valuation.
xAI was not immediately available for comment.
Last year, xAI raised $6 billion at a valuation of $50 billion, CNBC reported.
Morgan Stanley said the latest debt offering was “oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors.”
Competition among American AI startups is intensifying, with companies raising huge amounts of funding to buy chips and build infrastructure.
Musk has called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke,” in a bid to set it apart from its rivals. But this has not come without its fair share of controversy. Earlier this year, Grok responded to user queries with unrelated comments about the controversial topic of “white genocide” and South Africa.
Musk has also clashed with fellow AI leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Most famously, Musk claimed that OpenAI, which he co-founded, has deviated from its original mission of developing AI to benefit humanity as a nonprofit and is instead focused on commercial success. In February, Musk alongside a group of investors, put in a bid of $97.4 billion to buy control of OpenAI. Altman swiftly rejected the offer.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Ramon Costa | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Huawei has open-sourced two of its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas.
The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of the AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology.
Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei’s latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions.
In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a “muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack,” said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei’s “Ascend ecosystem strategy” that would help speed up the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries.”
The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company’s Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China’s leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China.
A Google-like strategy?
Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. “The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products,” he added.
According to experts, the coupling of Huawei’s Pangu models with the company’s AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications.
While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.
“Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn’t need to be,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research.
“Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so,” he added.
Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models.
Huawei’s announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets.
In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them.
“Huawei’s open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei’s] other products,” Einstein said.
As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries.
Digital illustration of a glowing world map with “AI” text across multiple continents, representing the global presence and integration of artificial intelligence.
Fotograzia | Moment | Getty Images
As artificial intelligence becomes more democratized, it is important for emerging economies to build their own “sovereign AI,” panelists told CNBC’s East Tech West conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on Friday.
In general, sovereign AI refers to a nation’s ability to control its own AI technologies, data and related infrastructure, ensuring strategic autonomy while meeting its unique priorities and security needs.
However, this sovereignty has been lacking, according to panelist Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at SCB 10X, the technology investment arm of Thailand-based SCBX Group. He noted that many of the world’s most prominent large language models, operated by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, are based on the English language.
“The way you think, the way you interact with the world, the way you are when you speak another language can be very different,” Tharnpipitchai said.
It is, therefore, important for countries to take ownership of their AI systems, developing technology for specific languages, cultures, and countries, rather than just translating over English-based models.
Panelists agreed that the digitally savvy ASEAN region, with a total population of nearly 700 million people, is particularly well positioned to build its sovereign AI. People under the age of 35 make up around 61% of the population, and about 125,000 new users gain access to the internet daily.
Given this context, Jeff Johnson, managing director of ASEAN at Amazon Web Services, said, “I think it’s really important, and we’re really focused on how we can really democratize access to cloud and AI.”
Open-source models
According to panelists, one key way that countries can build up their sovereign AI environments is through the use of open-source AI models.
“There is plenty of amazing talent here in Southeast Asia and in Thailand, especially. To have that captured in a way that isn’t publicly accessible or ecosystem developing would feel like a shame,” said SCB 10X’s Tharnpipitchai.
Doing open-source is a way to create a “collective energy” to help Thailand better compete in AI and push sovereignty in a way that is beneficial for the entire country, he added.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available, allowing anyone to view, modify and redistribute it. LLM players, such as China’s DeepSeek and Meta’s Llama, advertise their models as open-source, albeit with some restrictions.
The emergence of more open-source models offers companies and governments more options compared to relying on a few closed models, according to Cecily Ng, vice president and general manager of ASEAN & Greater China at software vendor Databricks.
AI experts have previously told CNBC that open-source AI has helped China boost AI adoption, better develop its AI ecosystem and compete with the U.S.
Access to computing
Prem Pavan, vice president and general manager of Southeast Asia and Korea at Red Hat, said that the localization of AI had been focused on language until recently. Having sovereign access to AI models powered by local hardware and computing is more important today, he added.
Panelists said that for emerging countries like Thailand, AI localization can be offered by cloud computing companies with domestic operations. These include global hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Tencent Cloud, and sovereign players like AIS Cloud and True IDC.
“We’re here in Thailand and across Southeast Asia to support all industries, all businesses of all shapes and sizes, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise,” said AWS’s Johnson.
He added that the economic model of the company’s cloud services makes it easy to “pay for what you use,” thus lowering the barriers to entry and making it very easy to build models and applications.
In April, the U.N. Trade and Development Agency said in a report that AI was projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033. However, it warned that the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, with nations at risk of lagging behind.
Among UNCTAD’s recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth was shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources.