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U.S. data center operator Vantage has raised 720 million euros ($821.4 million) — the first of its kind deal in Europe.

The asset-backed securitization (ABS) deal, the first ever euro-denominated with data center assets on the continent, involves four data centers in Germany.

The company said it will be paying on average a 4.3% coupon on the bonds issued through the process.

In an ABS, Vantage raises money by using its data center infrastructure and future revenues from the facilities as collateral.

Vantage said it will use the funds primarily to pay off existing construction loans previously secured for the facilities.

“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Sharif Metwalli, chief financial officer of Vantage Data Centers, told CNBC.

Vantage added that despite the large sum borrowed, the demand from investors exceeded the amount raised.

“So this transaction was actually pretty highly levered, frankly,” Rich Cosgray, senior vice president of global capital markets at Vantage Data Centers told CNBC. “It was higher leverage than our prior transaction and we had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level.”

“Yet, despite that, we were basically two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings, and we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process,” Cosgray added.

The four facilities — two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt — have access to around 55 megawatts of power and “are fully leased to hyperscale customers,” the company said in a statement. The four facilities were valued at more than $1 billion earlier this year.

Last year, Vantage also raised £600 million through the first-ever securitization of a data center in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). The deal involved two units from the company’s Cardiff campus with 148 megawatts of electricity power. Across the region, the company has 2,500 megawatts of data center capacity either operational or under development.

The transaction was led by Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank as joint lead managers and Vantage was represented by the British law firm Clifford Chance.

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OpenAI’s Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

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OpenAI's Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days

Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.

Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.

Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.

“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.

Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.

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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”

“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.

During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.

“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”

WATCH: Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI’s new Sora video model

Hollywood backlash grows against OpenAI's new Sora video model

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

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Intel gives first look at next-gen chips, says Arizona fab is fully operational

An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.

The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.

The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.

“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.

Courtesy: Intel

Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.

In August, the U.S. government took a 10% stake in the company in an effort to beef up U.S. manufacturing capabilities. Intel has also received investments from SoftBank and AI chipmaking giant Nvidia.

Since taking the helm of Intel in March, Tan has faced massive pressure to deliver.

This summer, President Donald Trump called Tan “highly CONFLICTED” and demanded his resignation, but later changed his tone.

Intel shares have bounced 87% this year.

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Intel year-to-date stock chart.

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AI worries have climbed but demand is off the charts, says Bernstein's Rasgon

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

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Google launches Gemini subscriptions to help corporate workers build AI agents

Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.

Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images

Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.

Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.

Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.

Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.

The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.

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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.

Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.

Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.

Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.

“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”

WATCH: Box CEO on AI monetization: Agents offer new monetization for existing software companies

Box CEO on AI monetization: Agents offer new monetization for existing software companies

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