Microsoft and Activision agree to extend $69 billion deal deadline in wait for UK approval
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.
Technology
Sam Altman says OpenAI will top $20 billion in annualized revenue this year, hundreds of billions by 2030
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to media following a Q&A at the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that the artificial intelligence startup is on track to generate more than $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate this year, with plans to grow to hundreds of billions in sales by 2030.
The company has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. The staggering sum has raised questions from investors and others in the industry about where OpenAI will come up with the money.
“We are trying to build the infrastructure for a future economy powered by AI, and given everything we see on the horizon in our research program, this is the time to invest to be really scaling up our technology,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “Massive infrastructure projects take quite awhile to build, so we have to start now.”
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet following the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. The startup is currently valued at $500 billion, though it’s still not profitable.
In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that OpenAI was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.
Friar caught the attention of the Trump administration this week after she saying at at event that OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips.
She clarified those comments late Wednesday, writing in a post on LinkedIn that OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments.
“I used the word ‘backstop’ and it muddied the point,” Friar wrote. “As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part.”
Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be “no federal bailout for AI.” He wrote in a post on X that if one frontier model company in the U.S. fails, another will take its place.
Altman said Thursday that OpenAI does “not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI datacenters.” He said taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor decisions, and that “if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”
“This is the bet we are making, and given our vantage point, we feel good about it,” Altman wrote. “But we of course could be wrong, and the market—not the government—will deal with it if we are.”
WATCH: Trump AI czar David Sacks says ‘no federal bailout for AI’ after OpenAI CFO’s comments
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during a dinner with tech leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. US President Donald Trump said he would be imposing tariffs on semiconductor imports “very shortly” but spare goods from companies like Apple Inc. that have pledged to boost their US investments. Photographer: Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Will Oliver | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta projected that 10% of its overall sales in 2024, or about $16 billion, came from running online ads for scams and banned goods, according to a Thursday report from Reuters.
Those kinds of ads included promotions for “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products,” according to the Reuters report, which was based on internal company documents. Those documents showed the company’s attempts to measure the prevalence of fraudulent advertising on its apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Meta brought in more than $164.5 billion in overall sales for 2024. Last week, the company said that third-quarter sales rose 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion and that it lifted the low end of its total expenses for the year by $2 billion as part of its massive investments into artificial intelligence.
The Reuters report cited a December 2024 document that showed how Meta each year generates roughly $7 billion in annualized sales from so-called “higher risk” scam ads, which are promotions that are clearly deceptive. Each day, Meta shows users an estimated 15 billion of these higher risk scam ads, the Reuters report said, citing a separate document.
Although some of the documents show that Meta aims to reduce the amount of bogus ads on its platform, the Reuters report also said that other documents suggest the company is concerned that its business projections could be impacted by any abrupt removal of the fraudulent promotions.
A Meta spokesperson said that the company “aggressively” addresses scam and fraud ads on its apps. The projections that 10% of the company’s 2024 ad sales came from bunk ads “was a rough and overly-inclusive estimate rather than a definitive or final figure; in fact, subsequent review revealed that many of these ads weren’t violating at all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the leaked documents present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams by focusing on our efforts to assess the scale of the challenge, not the full range of actions we have taken to address the problem,” the spokesperson said.
WATCH: Wall Street backs AI winners, and Meta’s not one of them this quarter.
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