TheChek News Flow

Anthropic has a wet biology lab in the Bay Area where it can use its AI models to run physical experiments, it has confirmed to TechCrunch.

AI leaders have been promising that AI is the key to curing human disease. Dario Amodei opined just last week: “I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years.” To do that, an LLM would have to have methods to test its theories in real life.

“We believe that to do biology, the final test is still, and will be for a while, in real lab work,” Anthropic’s head of life sciences, Eric Kauderer-Abrams, told Reuters. “We absolutely are doing that today.” He added that the lab operates like most biotech labs: Anthropic conducts some research there while also working with external partners.

This news probably shouldn’t be shocking. Anthropic bought Coefficient Bio, a stealth AI biotech, in April.

While Anthropic declined to give specifics on what the wet lab is working on, it did say the main focus was fundamental biology, not drug discovery.

Anthropic doesn’t want to give the appearance of competing with the pharma industry, where it has numerous major customers and partners (e.g., it just announced a deal to work with Novo Nordisk on joint drug discovery). Anthropic has already faced backlash for launching products perceived to compete with those of its customers.

To that end, Anthropic also launched a Life Sciences Verification Program this week, to give vetted bio researchers access to its most powerful models. It has also published recent reports on some of the research it’s doing to support drug discovery. This includes one report on accelerating protein design and one on uplifting bimolecular modeling.

But the world is still reeling from the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic’s own alignment lead gave the odds at greater than 10% that AI could exterminate humanity within the next decade.

The fervor has grown so intense that CEO Dario Amodei published a post last weekend calling on the industry to slow down and institute self-regulation. He has repeatedly called bioterrorism one of AI’s biggest risks.

The juxtaposition of these dire warnings and the wet lab has not gone unnoticed in the tech industry. As investor and AI coding startup founder Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X, somewhat tongue in cheek: “The group behind such hits as: ‘We’re All Going To Die’ and ‘Regulate Me Now’ are building a wet lab in SF. I do not recommend this.”

Almeida was an OpenAI researcher who helped build the chatbot and then invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model-training technique perhaps most responsible for our current age of AI. But despite its capabilities, he was disappointed.

“We have lightning in a bottle, and yet it is not useful,” Almeida told TechCrunch. “I’ve been battling that problem since then. It took me a while to come to the conclusion: The problem is we are optimizing for human language … We have been super good at human language for four years, but it’s not useful for automation because computers speak a different language.”

Two years ago, Almeida left OpenAI to start TypeSafe AI, a startup trying to fix that problem. This week, the company released a new transformer-based model, Jev, that is not a large language model (LLM). It doesn’t output text, but instead produces probabilities, or what the company calls “calibrated decisions.”

Eschewing language does a few things: It makes the model incredibly cheap and fast, and because users define the outputs in advance, it cannot hallucinate. Its output tokens are free, and input tokens are metered by the billion, not the million.

A screenshot shows a comparison of Jev and an OpenAI model responding to the same requests

Developers are taking a great interest in the product; the company briefly lost the ability to serve users from its API because demand was so high. Jev appears most useful for software automation. Thus far, software developers see it as a cheaper and more robust way to incorporate intelligence into their code.

For example, Pranit Sharma, a software engineer at Vercel, a company making agentic infrastructure, said his company had used OpenAI’s ChatGPT Luna 5.6 to run a classifier to review commands for safety. When Vercel replaced OpenAI’s Luna with Jev, it got results five to 18 times more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Another developer, Bryo AI CTO Nikhil Mudholkar, tested Jev against Gemini for classifying business emails. In his test, Gemini was slightly more accurate, but 10 to 20 times more expensive. More interesting to Mudholkar were Jev’s confidence scores — “it is the only one that hands back a real probability which makes it ideal for automating workflows!!”

Besides replacing LLMs in certain use cases, the new model can also augment them, acting as a smart check on misbehavior. Using agents to monitor agents can quickly become expensive, but using Jev to do so, Almeida argues, makes sense. He sees users deploying Jev to track LLM agent traces and prevent jailbreaks.

“At the end of the day, it delegates the hallucination problem a little bit to the user,” explained Armin Ronacher, the CTO of Earendil, which builds the open source model harness Pi. “The user has to say, okay, if this only comes back with 50% probability, maybe this is a coin toss, and I disregard it. But if it’s 95%, sure, then I can do something with it.”

Another potential use for Jev is model routing, Ronacher said. Predicting whether a given workload requires a specific model would be useful, but using an LLM for the job would be expensive. Jev’s low cost and speed make that kind of real-time sorting possible.

And that’s Almeida’s hope. The model is named after William Stanley Jevons, the 19th-century economist whose eponymous paradox describes how the falling cost of a commodity can lead to it being used more and more. In this case, the falling cost of intelligence should lead to its widespread deployment.

“We think that there’s just going to be smart software all over the place in a way that’s emergent and distributed … much more like the early internet than you know like the mega apps that people are trying to build right now,” Almeida said.

Almeida is tight-lipped about the model’s architecture, which outside observers suspect is built on top of an open-weight LLM. The company refers to Jev as a “System One model,” focused on intuition rather than reasoning, and specifically focused on the right task. Almeida says Jev is trained exclusively on synthetic data using a technique he calls “reinforcement learning from calibrated decisions.”

“We made an early bet that we will be making all of our data, and that has been one of the best bets I’ve ever made in my life — better than our launch, in my opinion, better than RLHF,” he told TechCrunch. “Half of [our company] is a lab that basically owns this entire subfield of statistically well-understood synthetic data, and that is now my life joy.”

For now, Jev stands alone as this kind of model, but Ronacher expects that competitors will spring up now that its utility is apparent.

“We should have seen this earlier in many ways, but presumably because the LLMs are so cheap and subsidized, you often don’t have to be creative yet,” he said.

TypeSafe itself will be building more versions of the model, in new modalities. Asked if TypeSafe is a frontier lab, Almeida said, “the main product of frontier labs is fear or hype. I would like our main product to be intelligence…[but we are] not a lab in the sense of, you know, like bet on infinite wealth, or a religion, or building God in a data center, or whatever is the thing of today.”

Vehicle hasn’t flown since failures left two astronauts stuck on International Space Station for months

Boeing and NASA are in talks about using the company’s Starliner vehicle to handle a big batch of new missions, a turnaround for a ship that posed risks to crew members on a 2024 flight to the International Space Station.

The aerospace giant and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have discussed having Starliner handle 10 or more new flights in the years ahead, people familiar with the discussions said.

Those missions would help ensure the U.S. can get to low-Earth orbit, home to the space station.

“NASA is developing plans to meet our nation’s objectives for a sustained presence in low-Earth orbit” and expects to release details soon, an agency spokesman said. A Boeing spokesman said the company is committed to NASA’s efforts and looks forward to launching the next Starliner mission.

NASA tapped Starliner years ago to handle up to six missions. In the summer of 2024, a Starliner test flight delivered NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the ISS. But the operation was marred by performance problems, including failed thrusters, that posed safety risks to the crew.

NASA officials decided to keep Wilmore and Williams on the station and return them to Earth on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, rather than have them come back on Starliner. They ended up on the research lab for about nine months—far longer than the roughly weeklong visit NASA and Boeing had planned. Starliner hasn’t flown since it returned to Earth empty in September 2024.

The Starliner flight was marked by technical problems, poor communication and management failures, according to a report NASA released earlier this year.

The space agency has been trying to figure out how it will be able to keep conducting crew flights to the station and fly to future private stations U.S. companies are developing. It is analyzing its options partly because SpaceX is starting to sunset its Dragon vehicles.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon variant has been the only certified vehicle to carry NASA astronauts to the space station from the U.S. The Elon Musk-led company has stopped making new Dragon ships, but hasn’t publicly specified when it plans to stop operating the ship.

“We’re not retiring it today,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell recently said of Dragon. The company, which is shifting focus to its Starship rocket and spacecraft, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, NASA said it awarded SpaceX three additional astronaut missions to the space station using Crew Dragon. Those flights are in addition to two launches the company has under contract, and are worth an average of $315 million each.

There are few other vehicles flying to low-Earth orbit. Northrop Grumman has a cargo capsule that flies to the space station for NASA, but not a human-rated one. Russia flies vehicles to the ISS that handle crews and cargo.

Europe-based Exploration Co. is developing a cargo capsule called Nyx, as well as an astronaut variant of it for low-Earth orbit. Sierra Space has a plane-like vehicle called Dream Chaser that hasn’t flown to space yet, but said earlier this month it signed deals to transport national-security and commercial payloads on its inaugural mission.

Berlin’s rearmament is critical to deter Russia, but the rising popularity of the German far-right is causing unease among allies

BERLIN—Germany’s fast-paced rearmament is causing growing concern in Europe, rekindling a century-old debate about how much hard power Berlin should have.

The unease is becoming more acute as the Alternative for Germany tops opinion polls. The far-right party, known as the AfD, has embraced Moscow and wants to end what it calls Germany’s “culture of guilt” around its Nazi-era crimes.

“We remember all too well where a rearmed Germany in the hands of a far-right, pro-Russian party can lead,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, one of the few Polish officials who has long supported a stronger German military, told a German newspaper last week.

Days earlier, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left politician currently polling second among candidates in France’s 2027 presidential election, said: “They want to build the largest conventional army in Europe. If I were president, I would tell them that I don’t think that is a good idea.”

Just a few years ago, Germany was widely seen as free-riding on the defense budgets of its U.S., French and British allies. President Trump led a chorus of Western leaders pressing Berlin to match military spending with its economic heft. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has since earmarked more than half a trillion dollars for the armed forces over the next decade.

Yet some European officials are now beginning to worry that the buildup is shifting the balance of power on the continent. Some fear that even without the AfD, a rearmed Germany and Russia will emerge as the continent’s two biggest powers and Berlin might eventually shift back to accommodating the Kremlin to avoid conflict.

Sharpening concerns, Germany’s military procurement has so far benefited mainly German arms-makers. Officials here say they are sensitive to their neighbors’ worries but this has yet to translate into a new approach.

This is reminiscent of what historians call “the German question,” a debate among European powers in the 19th century about how powerful a unified Germany could become before it posed a threat to peace. After Germany started two world wars, the answer came: Not too much.

Post-World War II Germany was locked into a U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. When the Cold War ended, a reunified Germany focused on making money and avoiding military entanglements.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine changed that, kick-starting the biggest rearmament effort on the continent since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Last year alone, the German government procured defense contracts worth over three times as much as those in the U.K., according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an independent think tank.

“This is a revolution and it will definitely have an impact on Germany’s neighbors, the EU and trans-Atlantic relationship,” said Lukasz Jasinski, an expert on German-Polish relations at the Polish Institute for International Affairs, a think tank based in Warsaw. “Germany is crucial for European security but it cannot become too big for Europe.”

Populists have been particularly strident in articulating these fears. Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s nationalist president, said in a speech this month that Germany didn’t need Hitler to be anti-Polish.

The plaudits that greeted Germany’s rearmament drive in 2022 led Berlin to believe it had free rein, said Liana Fix, senior fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“My perception sometimes was that they had drunk too much of their own Kool-Aid,” she said.

Her article “Europe’s Next Hegemon: The Perils of German Power,” which appeared in April in Foreign Affairs, punctured that bubble. The text caught the attention of Merz, who met Fix in Washington earlier this year, according to a German official.

The AfD’s electoral victory this month in eastern Germany, where it scored its best result ever, sent another jolt. The party wants Germany to leave the European Union, lift sanctions on Moscow and resume Russian energy purchases. Some of its leaders have questioned NATO’s utility.

There has been concern in Poland that a far-right German government would revive old territorial claims against its neighbor. After World War II, Germany lost large chunks of territory that once stretched as far east as Kaliningrad, now part of Russia. More than 12 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe.

Germany formally renounced these lands upon reunification in 1990, but some AfD leaders have tapped into the loss felt by some expellees. In 2023, AfD Chairwoman Alice Weidel referred to eastern Germany as “Mitteldeutschland,” or central Germany, which some Polish politicians saw as veiled irredentism. Last year, her co-chair, Tino Chrupalla said, “I don’t see any danger to Germany from Russia,” adding that Poland might be a threat.

Past chancellors worked hard to keep allies on board. When Helmut Kohl pushed for France and the U.K. to bless reunification, he offered to limit the country’s military.

This changed over time. After the eurozone crisis broke out, Angela Merkel imposed German-style fiscal discipline on debt-ridden Greece in exchange for a bailout. When Russia annexed Crimea, she ignored Ukrainian and Polish warnings against opening a second Nord Stream natural gas pipeline linking Germany directly to Russia.

Fix said Germany could address the misgivings by binding its rearmament closer to Europe. This could include joint European procurement, more coordination and integration of the defense industry, as well as joint command structures within NATO. It could also agree to a longstanding demand from cash-strapped allies for joint EU-level borrowing to fund defense.

Instead, Berlin recently exited multibillion-euro projects with France and the Netherlands. Almost two-thirds of 2025 military spending went to German companies, some 30% went into German production of mainly U.S. systems and close to 10% went outside Europe, according to the Kiel Institute. A tiny amount went to European allies.

The concerns about Germany’s buildup are sharpening at a time when the U.S. is planning to downgrade its presence on the continent. Washington often played mediator between European countries with divergent interests and historical grievances.

Rym Momtaz, a researcher at Carnegie Europe, said France was concerned about Germany replacing it as a leading military-industrial power. Paris, she added, also believed that Berlin didn’t understand that acting at scale across Europe was the only way to deter attacks on the region.

“I think there is widespread nervousness across the French system whether it is political, diplomatic or military about the role that Germany seems to want to give itself,” she said.

In a recent cable seen by The Wall Street Journal, a European diplomat wrote that too often since the start of the war in Ukraine, Berlin was seeing what was good for Germany as necessarily good for Europe. Germany’s allies needed to press Berlin to work with them.

Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary-general of NATO, said that some complaints were exaggerated. Germany was engaged in a necessary catch-up, he said, noting that it would have spent an additional $400 billion on defense since 1990 if it had met NATO’s spending target of 2% of economic output.

“Germany wants to claim leadership; it isn’t always making great efforts in keeping its partners happy,” he added.

Diplomats and analysts doubt that Merz, the most unpopular chancellor in living memory, has enough political capital left to change course. Granting concessions to European neighbors in an effort to make Germany’s rearmament more acceptable to them could even bolster Merz’s nationalist opponents.

Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a former diplomat, said rearmament was always going to evoke fears given Germany’s 20th century history. Germany, he added, should reassure its allies that it was aimed solely at meeting NATO and European commitments.

“It is not about making Germany great again.”

Little-discussed potential risk of popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs is on warning labels outside of U.S.

Michelle Fennell was sitting at her desk when her right eye started feeling heavy. Suddenly, it was blurry and her peripheral vision waned. It felt like she was looking through a fishbowl; she could see straight ahead but not to her right or down.

Two weeks later, a doctor diagnosed Fennell, 53 years old, with nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, a condition that leads to sudden, often permanent vision loss.

The doctor asked what medicines she was taking. “He said right away, stop taking Ozempic,” to protect her remaining vision, said Fennell, who started taking the drug to treat her Type 2 diabetes six months prior. “I was shocked.”

Some emerging scientific research points to an increased risk for patients taking certain GLP-1s to develop NAION. But the evidence is mixed, and not clear enough to say whether or how the drugs cause the condition, doctors and researchers said.

Fennell is one of dozens of people suing Novo, maker of the popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, claiming the medication caused this side effect. There are also a similar but smaller number of lawsuits against Eli Lilly, maker of Zepbound. Both companies are fighting the litigation, saying there isn’t enough evidence to support the idea that drugs are to blame.

Still, some countries have compelled Novo and Eli Lilly to include warnings or information about NAION on the drugs’ labels. There is no such warning in the U.S., though the Food and Drug Administration is investigating the potential link after first identifying a possible connection to NAION in late 2024.

An FDA spokesperson said the agency will decide whether to take action after its assessment, but didn’t say when that might be.

“FDA is usually pretty conservative in terms of what warnings are worth mentioning in the label,” said Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who studies FDA regulation. “They would want there to be a credible association that they believe provides some basis for saying that there’s causation,” meaning evidence that the drug does, in fact, cause the side effect.

While some evidence suggests semaglutide could roughly double patients’ risk, that would still lead to very few losing vision, doctors said. Even at that elevated rate, it would mean two per every 10,000 people taking the drug on average would develop the condition.

A spokesperson for Novo said the personal-injury lawsuits are without merit and that the company is vigorously defending against them. A large, company-funded study analyzed randomized-controlled trials of patients on the drugmaker’s GLP-1s and found the drugs didn’t increase patients’ risk of developing the condition.

“There are no indications that we should really be worried about NAION,” said Dr. Tina Vilsbøll, senior medical officer at Novo and lead author on the study. “I do not see causality.”

Eli Lilly said patient safety is the company’s top priority, and they will “continue to review data, including any data regarding ophthalmic issues.” The company didn’t comment specifically on the litigation but in a court filing, Lilly said studies don’t prove any GLP-1s cause NAION, and said its medicines are safe and effective.

While Novo’s and some other studies found no increased risk, another from a specialized eye center reported nearly an eightfold increase. Researchers reach different conclusions in part because of different methods they use to classify NAION, which lacks its own specific diagnosis code. The link is also difficult to study because many patients have other health conditions that independently raise their risk of NAION, like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, or sleep apnea. The condition is caused by decreased blood flow to the optic nerve.

Doctors should help patients assess their own risks and benefits, said Dr. John J. Chen, a doctor who specializes in diseases of the optic nerve and a professor at Mayo Clinic. For patients who need Ozempic to control their diabetes or heart disease, the benefits probably outweigh the risk, he said.

The calculations are different for people who don’t have the same obesity-related risk factors. “If they want to lose 5 pounds, that’s probably not worth the possible risk,” he added. “If you’re that one patient with NAION, that’s devastating.”

In the U.S., personal-injury firm Weitz & Luxenberg has filed more than 90 lawsuits since 2025 in state court in New Jersey on behalf of patients, including Fennell, who developed NAION while taking Ozempic or Wegovy. They are seeking compensation from Novo. NAION usually affects one eye, but sometimes both, and there is no approved treatment for it.

A separate group of lawsuits filed in federal district court in Philadelphia around the same time also allege that Novo and Lilly’s GLP-1 drugs caused NAION, and that the companies failed to adequately warn patients. The federal and state cases are pending.

In June 2025, the European drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, concluded that NAION is a very rare side effect of semaglutide, the main ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, and recommended adding a warning to the European label for the Novo drugs. The medications’ labels also carry warnings or information about NAION in the U.K., Japan and Australia. In Australia and New Zealand, the information appears on other GLP-1 labels, too, including Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro.

In Denmark, where Novo is based, 27 patients have been awarded upward of $1.5 million in compensation for NAION that they developed after taking Ozempic or Wegovy. An additional 38 cases are pending, according to the independent authority Danish Patient Compensation, which evaluates medical claims that are paid out by the Danish government for patients who experience rare and serious side effects from drugs. Novo said it isn’t involved in those cases.

Novo’s Dr. Vilsbøll said the payouts aren’t an indicator of causality.

Jay Vandegriff, a 69-year-old plaintiff in one of the U.S. lawsuits, started taking Ozempic to treat his Type 2 diabetes in November 2023. On Christmas the following year, he noticed what he thought was a smudge on his glasses. He cleaned them and realized that the mark, which looked like it was from a pencil eraser, was in his own field of vision. He was diagnosed with NAION, which eventually claimed two-thirds of his vision in his left eye.

Vandegriff, a software startup founder, has to stop working on his computer by noon each day because his right eye tires out. An avid skier, he can no longer go out in fog or snowstorms. He gave up fly fishing altogether because of difficulty tying a fly to his line.

“It’s affecting every minute of every day,” he said of the vision loss. He wishes he had known about the possible risk. “I’d almost pay anything to get my eyesight back.”

For those that do develop the condition, it often appears within the first six to 18 months after starting a GLP-1, according to study findings.

In 2025, the American Optometric Association recommended that any patient starting a GLP-1 get an eye exam to check their optic nerve health. Having a physically small or crowded optic nerve, also called a “disc at risk,” is the single strongest anatomical risk factor for developing NAION, optometrists and neuro-ophthalmologists said.

If a patient has a disc that “does look scary, then that’s a conversation,” said Dr. Teri Geist, an optometrist and president of the association. “But I don’t think every person being on a GLP-1 needs to worry about going blind.”

Group led by Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner estimate team revenue will more than double to at least $1.6 billion in a decade

The buyers of the Los Angeles Lakers are telling prospective investors they expect to nearly triple the basketball team’s valuation within 10 years.

That is one of several aggressive financial projections included in an investor presentation being circulated by Thrive Capital, the investment firm helmed by Joshua Kushner, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

A group led by Kushner and former Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger last month struck a deal to purchase the team from finance mogul Mark Walter at a $12.5 billion valuation. In the presentation, the buyers laid out plans to expand the storied National Basketball Association franchise, including through international growth and new opportunities in local media rights.

Those moves would help boost the Lakers’ valuation to at least $30 billion in a decade, the buyer group said, assuming that TV and streaming rights double in value. More favorable assumptions for the same period would place the long-term valuation at $62 billion.

The buyers are inheriting an already lucrative business. The group said the Lakers are on track to generate $681 million in revenue in 2026, with ticketing and media rights accounting for the largest share. Under their plans, they said, revenue would hit at least $1.6 billion by the end of 2037.

Profits are expected to zoom up as well, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization set to more than triple from an estimated $129 million to more than $589 million over that span, according to the presentation.

Thrive Eternal, a sports-focused holding company, struck its first deal earlier for a stake in Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants. Meanwhile, Jeanie Buss, the late Lakers owner Jerry Buss’s daughter, is fighting to hold on to a piece of the Lakers against Jerry Buss’s five other children.

The plan outlined by Thrive identifies around $150 million in near-term incremental revenue by 2028. That would come partly by reclaiming roughly 6,000 broker-held season tickets for single-game sales, which would raise average single-game ticket prices from $217 to $361. Lakers ticket prices have already been on the rise, and under Thrive’s plan more of that revenue would go to the team, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The buyers would also capture $40 million to $75 million from sponsorship opportunities and extract at least $20 million in operating cost efficiencies.

In 2024, the NBA struck media partnerships worth $77 billion over 11 years that more than doubled fees shared by teams in the league. Thrive said in its presentation that it expects fees can double again when the pact comes up for negotiation.

Live sports are a major draw for broadcasters and streamers alike, because they motivate people to subscribe to services and watch in real time, creating high-value opportunities for advertisers. Still there are questions about how ratings will hold up in a fragmented landscape that increasingly requires fans of the NBA and other sports to pay for multiple services to watch their favorite teams.

British data centre group Nscale files for $35bn US listing

Start-up has won a huge contract to supply computing power to Anthropic

Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider Nscale has filed to go public in the US just two years after it was spun out of a crypto mining group, in a multibillion-dollar bet that investor enthusiasm for computing infrastructure projects will endure growing calls for an AI slowdown. 

The London-headquartered group, which counts former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg as members of its board, was targeting a valuation of up to $35bn in its initial public offering, said people familiar with the matter.

The group reported a net loss of $1bn on revenues of $141mn in the first half of the year, with the bulk of the loss driven by non-cash charges.

Nscale, led by founder Josh Payne, raised $2bn in March at a $14.6bn valuation in a round led by Norwegian energy group Aker and 8090 Industries, with backing from Nvidia, Dell and Nokia, among others. Ahead of its IPO, it has raised a total of $3.7bn in equity and more than $5bn in debt, according to deal tracker Dealroom.

As part of its listing, Nscale will launch a retail offering for UK investors, allowing them to purchase shares at the same price as existing shareholders via the investment platform RetailBook, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company, which is listing on the New York Stock Exchange while maintaining its British domicile, employs about 450 people in the UK.

The group was spun out of Australian bitcoin mining infrastructure group Arkon Energy in 2024 and has rapidly become one of Europe’s best-funded data centre providers, despite its limited record. It has received enthusiastic endorsement from Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang who last year declared it a “national champion for the UK”, as the Silicon Valley chip group said it planned to invest £500mn in Nscale.

Nscale said it had 7MW of active computing power in its own data centres and another 48MW running in rented data centre space, as of the end of August, under contracts worth $2.6bn. It has a further 1.3GW of capacity in the pipeline to fulfil $101bn of contracts not yet started.

The company’s prospectus highlighted the depth of its relationship with Nvidia, its GPU supplier, customer and financial patron.

The chipmaker has signed a $1.2bn deal to lease capacity from Nscale and invested over $2bn in Nscale, including $1bn of convertible notes subscribed as recently as Tuesday. It has separately guaranteed $860mn of Nscale’s lease obligations at a facility in Texas.

Amid booming demand for AI infrastructure that has also propelled upstart cloud providers such as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Nebius, Nscale has won big contracts with Microsoft and OpenAI. However, the ChatGPT maker in April put on hold its planned Stargate UK project at an Nscale site in north-east England. Former OpenAI and Meta executive Fidji Simo joined Nscale’s board last week.

The UK company last month signed a landmark deal with Anthropic to rent capacity from its flagship data centre in West Virginia, in an agreement worth up to $45bn over six years. Nscale has estimated the site, which is under construction and is scheduled to start coming online late next year, will cost about $70bn, including a 2-gigawatt natural gas power plant to support the facility.

However, last weekend, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei called for an industry slowdown in AI development, in a move backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk. The calls sparked a sell-off among AI infrastructure and semiconductor stocks at the start of the week, driven by fears that Big Tech companies would slow their capital investment in data centres.

Nscale’s filing comes after nuclear energy company Holtec International on Wednesday pulled its planned IPO over investor concerns about a potential slowdown in the AI data centre market.

Westinghouse Electric, the US nuclear reactor design and services group, confidentially filed for an IPO in July and hopes to fetch a valuation of roughly $50bn, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Japanese investment group SoftBank, meanwhile, hopes to list its US data centre developer, SB Energy, sometime in the next few weeks. OpenAI and Nvidia will own large stakes in the company, which is targeting a valuation of about $50bn despite having yet to bring a single facility online.

Whether it’s a behemoth still in the prime of its life or turnaround story that’s gaining momentum, these six retailers are worth a look.

The time between September and December passes in the blink of an eye. And once again, retailers are up at bat.

Back to school is behind us, but the holiday shopping frenzy begins in October, meaning retailers’ biggest season is just a few weeks away. Unfortunately they face a tough setup. Persistent inflation is weighing on shoppers and pushing up input and labor costs. It’s also souring investor sentiment on consumer stocks: The consumer discretionary sector is deep in the red year to date, while the consumer staples sector’s 2026 rise still lags behind the S&P 500.

Things aren’t entirely bleak, however. It might not have seemed like it, given that the second-quarter earnings season included so many big selloffs, but there was more expansion than average in terms of retailers’ margins and top- and bottom-line results. There were success stories too, like Best Buy’s ability to beat high expectations and new hope at Old Navy following the Gap division’s leadership change. Many companies noted ongoing resilience among their customer base, even if they remain very value conscious.

Higher gas prices are a burden for many shoppers, but that is somewhat offset by a relatively strong labor market and recent years’ wage growth, which has helped Americans regain some of the purchasing power they lost during the pandemic era. Holiday spending has broken records in recent years despite inflation, and that could be the case again. Deliotte expects holiday retail sales growth as high as 4.8% this year, to some $1.7 trillion, led by e-commerce.

From proven winners to retailers on the road to recovery, there are clear options for investors who think American consumers won’t let them down.

Walmart’s stock took a beating after its fiscal second-quarter results last month. Yet that looks like a buying opportunity. It’s true that its same-store sales growth was its slowest in years, mandatory lower drug prices hurt its top line, and that the company is funneling much of its tariff refunds into price cuts. Yet the world’s largest bricks-and-mortar retailer is thriving in the e-commerce age, using tech to its advantage, from increasingly automated distribution centers to AI-powered product search. Its valuation, while still plump, doesn’t look as inflated as it once did.

Speaking of big box stores, Target’s comeback looks like it’s finally taking hold. The turnaround has been years in the making, and even a big 60% year-to-date run hasn’t put it close to its pandemic-era peak. Nonetheless, the company’s recent earnings reports have shown promise, sparking investor hopes that new management is finally finding a formula—and merchandise—that works. Wolfe Research analyst Spencer Hanus sees a turned corner: “Month over month, it feels like we’re visiting a new Target; whether it’s the fashion ‘edits,’ beauty studio, or center of store, newness continues.”

Quiet luxury looks to be napping, based on the lack of love for Ralph Lauren stock. Time to wake up. In the most recent quarter, Ralph Lauren’s revenue, earnings per share, gross margins, and margins on earnings before interest and taxes, or Ebit, all expanded above expectations. Inventories also looked healthy, and consensus estimates for the full year and the next were revised higher following the report. Despite all that, the shares have since slumped. The market isn’t giving Ralph Lauren enough credit for its on-point merchandising and the relative resilience of its higher-income shoppers.

Off-price has long been one of the brightest spots in retail, and Ross Stores has been its breakout star this year. Its blockbuster first-quarter same-store sales raised the bar, and its second quarter easily cleared it, thanks to strong sales, margin expansion, and an upbeat outlook. The results support the idea that the company is in the midst of a real upswing. It’s attracting new, often younger customers as it bolsters its social-media presence, and its ability to deliver value is important to consumers who are dealing with ongoing inflation.

Household-products maker SharkNinja has done well since Barron’s has been recommending it, most recently in June. The company’s beat-and-raise quarter in August shows that SharkNinja still knows how to give people what they want, churning out innovative products that often go viral. August saw search volume climb 38% for more than 100 of the company’s trademarks tracked by Jefferies analyst Randal Konik, who thinks the shares should trade to $240, up more than 40%. Thanks to new artificial-intelligence tools for monitoring profitability in real time, the company can now lean into its best-performing categories.

It feels like cheating to include Amazon.com in a list of promising retailers, since it’s much more of an AI play —and one that, judging from its most recent earnings report, is doing quite well. Yet Amazon is still the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, and it’s the gold standard for online sales. And while it may seem like online shopping already took over during the pandemic, it’s still expanding, as 2027 is expected to be another year of double-digit compound annual growth for e-commerce sales. The company does face questions about the recent fatal cargo plane crash in Miami, but those should prove manageable given the company’s size. The stock’s forward price-to-earnings ratio, meanwhile, is just a few turns above the S&P 500’s.

PizzaExpress cooks up sale at up to £500mn valuation

Company owners, including Bain Capital’s special situations unit and Cyrus Capital Partners, are working with bankers at Rothschild

PizzaExpress has lined up investment bankers to explore a sale that would value the UK high street dining group at up to £500mn, six years after creditors took control in a restructuring.

The company, whose owners include Bain Capital’s special situations unit and Cyrus Capital Partners, is working with bankers at Rothschild after receiving approaches from both industry bidders and investment firms, according to people familiar with the matter.

The chain, known for its “American Hot” and “Sloppy Giuseppe” pizzas, could be worth up to £500mn in a deal, the people said, cautioning that discussions remained preliminary and there was no certainty a deal would be struck.

Since first opening in London’s Soho in 1965, PizzaExpress has expanded to more than 360 restaurants across the UK and Ireland, with franchise operations in a dozen other countries.

PizzaExpress recently signed a deal to enter the popular fried chicken market by bringing US brand, Houston Hot Chicken, into its stable. It also launched a macaroni and cheese and chicken wings takeaway menu in March.

The business posted flat sales of £440mn in 2025 while its adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation rose 6.3 per cent to £53mn. It reported sales of £112mn in the first quarter of 2026, the most recent period for which data is available, a 3.7 per cent increase from the same period a year earlier.

The group is owned by investors who took over the company after the coronavirus pandemic forced a drastic restructuring, including the closure of dozens of outlets.

Shareholders injected £20mn into the business in April 2025, as part of a £55mn refinancing that extended some of its debt.

Despite its debt pile, three years ago PizzaExpress weighed a possible takeover offer for Wagamama owner The Restaurant Group before rival bidder Apollo won out in the deal. 

PizzaExpress was launched by entrepreneur Peter Boizot who shipped a pizza oven from Rome after lamenting a lack of Italian cuisine in the UK. The pizza chain has changed hands several times since then.

The growth of the business, which has also spent time on the London Stock Exchange, was propelled following a 1993 takeover by entrepreneurs Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond. Its subsequent owners have included private equity firm Cinven, which bought it in 2007.

Before Bain and other creditors took over in 2020, it was owned by China’s Hony Capital, which acquired the company in a debt-laden £900mn deal in 2014.

Bain, PizzaExpress and Rothschild declined to comment. Cyrus and Rothschild did not immediately respond to requests for comment.