Author: Jaxon Bennett

One thing to start: London’s Heathrow airport has been forced to close until midnight after a fire at a nearby electricity substation caused a “significant power outage”.And another thing: Alimentation Couche-Tard and Seven & i expect concrete negotiations with private equity firms to start within weeks on the carve-out of thousands of stores in the US, in a pivotal moment for the Canadian group’s $47bn takeover attempt of the 7-Eleven owner.Welcome to Due Diligence, your briefing on dealmaking, private equity and corporate finance. This article is an on-site version of the newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Nvidia’s market capitalisation of roughly $3tn has occasionally made it the biggest company in the world. Founder Jensen Huang, a man rarely short of self-confidence, hinted this week at plans that could make it even bigger.At Nvidia’s annual, festival-like GTC conference on Wednesday, Huang said he expected his company to spend around $500bn on electronics over the next four years. Of that, “several hundred billion” could be produced in the US. This is the kind of remark that plays nicely to the…

Assaf Rappaport sought to reassure employees at his cyber security start-up Wiz last summer after walking away from a potential $23bn acquisition by Google’s parent company Alphabet.“We are going to go so big, we are going to make so much money in the future that you won’t regret it.” That was the message from the company’s chief executive during staff town halls at its offices in New York and Tel Aviv, according to a person familiar with his remarks.This week, Wiz reached a landmark deal to be acquired at a much higher price of $32bn. For insiders who know Rappaport,…

The boss of the UK biotech seen as a beacon of hope for the London IPO market only four years ago has admitted the business has become a takeover target.Oxford Nanopore’s chief executive and co-founder Gordon Sanghera told the Financial Times that the gene sequencing company, whose shares have fallen 85 per cent from their 2021 peak, is “exposed” to acquisition. For three years after the listing, Sanghera’s Nanopore shares allowed him to veto an acquisition, but this has now expired. “Should [the veto right] have been a bit longer?” he said in an interview. “Right now, from where I’m…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.As pollution shrinks the amount of freshwater that people across the world can use, tackling the problem with new treatments and upgraded infrastructure is urgent. However, having the most useful information possible to act on is essential. This is why innovators are looking to artificial intelligence — which can provide accurate real-time analysis — to identify contaminants and enable faster, focused clean-ups.The sources of water pollution are complex, as they can include industrial chemicals, plastic waste, the contaminants picked up by floodwater…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For a tech industry intoxicated by advances in artificial intelligence, the idea that fully humanoid robots will soon be stalking the earth hardly seems a stretch.Elon Musk recently predicted a $10tn market for Optimus, Tesla’s attempt at an artificial human that can take over your household chores. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang said this would be “the largest technology industry the world has ever seen”.And to judge by the surge of investment into robot start-ups and a flood of videos online of two-legged…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Tesla is recalling more than 46,000 Cybertrucks in the US to replace an exterior panel that could fall off while driving, marking the latest safety setback for a product that Elon Musk has described as the “toughest” pick-up truck.The recall will cover all the vehicles that were built from its launch in November 2023 through February 2025, according to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “If the central panel separates from the vehicle while in drive, it could create a…

JD Vance told a funny story at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington this week. He recalled a Silicon Valley dinner he and his wife Usha attended, before he became vice-president, where the talk had been of machines replacing humans in the workforce. According to Vance, an unnamed chief executive from one giant tech company said that the jobless of the future could still find purpose in fully immersive digital gaming. “We have to get the hell out of here. These people are effing crazy,” Usha texted him under the table.Why Vance thought it a good idea to tell this…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Japan lost its edge in chips decades ago — to chip designers in the US and manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea. Since the 1990s, the gap has only widened. The world’s most advanced silicon, powering artificial intelligence, is not made in Japan. Yet Japanese chip-related stocks are still going strong.The supply chain disruptions and swings in demand that trouble chipmakers across Taiwan, South Korea and the US have been kinder on Japanese companies. Shares of Advantest and Resonac, formerly Showa Denko,…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The “business hospice” is how some companies are describing the final destination for corporate operations at risk of being wiped out by artificial intelligence.Orchestrating a soft landing for people working in such activities is just one of the new challenges facing managers, according to AI ethicist, Lollie Mancey, who introduced me to the term this month.Her point is that nobody goes into business hoping their legacy will be an enterprise that consists of a handful of executives and some large language models:…