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Jonah Alben uses lessons from his days as Stanford rowing coxswain to design AI chips and keep selling to China

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—Nvidia NVDA 2.63%increase; green up pointing triangle had a problem. U.S. officials in 2022 began restricting what the chip company could sell to China, which then accounted for a fifth of its sales.

To keep up its business there, Chief Executive Jensen Huang turned to a lieutenant, Jonah Alben.

Alben told his boss there was no time to design a completely new chip for China. Instead, his answer was to take Nvidia’s top product at the time and reduce its performance to meet the U.S. rules—including by physically burning parts of the chip. Two months later, Nvidia began marketing the modified chip to Chinese customers.

Alben, 51, leads engineering of the world’s hottest product: computer chips for artificial intelligence. If Nvidia were KFC, he would be in charge of the chicken.

“Nvidia wouldn’t be Nvidia without Jonah,” said Leo Tam, a former senior research scientist at the company. “He’s as important to the company as Jensen is.”

The job puts Alben at the center of the U.S.-China technology Cold War—with Chinese startups such as DeepSeek challenging industry leaders in the U.S. by using Nvidia’s made-for-China chips. U.S. officials grumble that the chips push the limit of export controls, undermining efforts to hobble Chinese AI advancement for military purposes. Nvidia says it follows the law.

At the same time, Alben has to ensure that Nvidia keeps its overwhelming lead in AI chips for customers such as Alphabet and Microsoft—the edge that raised Nvidia’s stock-market value above $3 trillion.

Those who know Alben say his success comes from diving into the technical weeds, pushing the boundaries of rules and echoing the ultracompetitive nature of his boss of 28 years, the leather-jacket-wearing Huang.

Nvidia declined to make Alben available for an interview.

One of dozens of executives who report directly to Huang, Alben leads some 1,000 engineers as the company’s longtime head of engineering for graphics processing units. Even in a Nvidia office with some of the smartest Ph.D.s, what stands out to his former and current colleagues is the intellect of Alben, who stopped at a master’s degree. Also impressive, they say, is his ability to manage that collection of brains.

It is a skill Alben credits to the years he spent sitting on the stern of a boat, a skinny fellow barking orders at eight men each double his size.

While attending Stanford in the 1990s, Alben did crew. In his role as coxswain, he led practices on a creek in nearby Redwood City and directed the rowers when to drive harder during races.

One tactic pushed rowers to their limits, at least the first time he tried it.

“Jonah was known for calling the last 200 meters when there were 350 to go,” said former teammate Martin Schwartz.

Rowing rules stated that coxswains weighing under 125 pounds had to make up the difference by carrying sandbags on the boat. But Alben, who tipped the scales at 117, didn’t want to carry an ounce more than necessary.

So on race mornings, say teammates, he chugged 8 pounds of water—about one gallon. Then he held it in until weigh-in and, before the regatta started, urinated it all out.

“Jonah did stand out to me as being somebody who was unusually capable of and willing to be carried onto the scale,” said former teammate Daniel Bergstresser, “in a state of almost popping.”

Alben, who grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., took his Stanford experience to Nvidia in 1997. He made a quick impression. “In 20 years I expect I’ll be working for Jonah,” Huang said at a staff meeting in Alben’s early days, according to a recent book about the company by journalist Tae Kim.

Sasha Ostojic, who a decade ago ran the team that designed software for Alben’s hardware, said Alben was at his best when technical challenges arose.

One time, when a graphics chip in development wasn’t displaying movies properly, Alben met Ostojic and another co-worker to troubleshoot the issue.

“Jonah just comes in and says, ‘Let’s just look into the code line-by-line,’” Ostojic said. “Jonah was driving the situation: What does this do? What does that do?”

The three eventually solved the problem without triggering the worst-case scenario: a hardware fix. “If he makes a wrong move, he could set Nvidia back by six to 12 months,” Ostojic said.

The attention to technical details is also prized by Huang, a former table-tennis prodigy who has attended conferences simply to learn. His theory is that company executives must immerse themselves in leading-edge research to understand where the market is going.

Alben agrees. Asked in a company podcast in 2020 how he would describe his job, he said: “You try to figure out what the future should look like.”

It can take three years to develop Nvidia’s next cutting-edge chip. Alben said he made his best guess at what customers would want by speaking often with Nvidia’s in-house AI researchers.

Nvidia chips were originally designed to generate graphics in videogames and other programs. Then, in the early 2010s, the company realized these kinds of chips were also ideal for training AI and solving new problems—which surprised even Alben.

He said he remembered the moment when he realized the chips he was engineering had more potential than he ever imagined: He read a paper about a researcher using a graphics processing unit to simulate how the human nose smells.

“There was no salesperson from Nvidia that had ever called up that researcher to try to sell a GPU to him for that,” Alben said in the podcast. “That has stuck with me as the first time I was like, OK, this isn’t just for the three problems that were listed on our to-do list.”

Broadcom has interest in Intel’s chip-design business, while TSMC is looking at the company’s factories

Intel’s INTC -2.20%decrease; red down pointing triangle rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Broadcom AVGO -1.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle are each eyeing potential deals that would break the American chip-making icon in two.

Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business, the people said.

Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to seek a deal.

Separately, TSMC 2330 -2.75%decrease; red down pointing triangle has studied controlling some or all of Intel’s chip plants, potentially as part of an investor consortium or other structure, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Broadcom and TSMC aren’t working together, and all of the talks so far are preliminary and largely informal.

But the potential deals would have been unthinkable until Intel’s recent struggles made it an acquisition target. The end result could be a breakup of Intel after the American icon spent many decades dominating the business of making central processors for both personal computers and data centers.

Splitting the company would also bring it in line with an industrial shift in recent decades toward specializing in either manufacturing or designing chips, but not both.

Frank Yeary, the interim executive chairman of Intel, has been leading the discussions with possible suitors and Trump administration officials, who are concerned about the fate of a company seen as critical to national security, people familiar with the matter said. Yeary has been telling individuals close to him that he is most focused on maximizing value for Intel shareholders, the people said.

Intel’s struggles began when it fell behind TSMC in making the fastest chips with the tiniest transistors—a position that left it vulnerable to competitors which had chips made by TSMC on contract. And it failed in an ambitious turnaround bid under Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, who was ousted in December.

Intel also has started to separate its chip manufacturing unit from the rest of the company in a series of moves some analysts viewed as precursors to a breakup.

The talks over Intel’s factories are in their early stages, according to people familiar with the discussions. The Trump administration asked TSMC to explore the idea, the people said.

A White House official said the president was unlikely to support a deal that involved a foreign entity operating Intel’s factories.

Aspects of the talks between TSMC and Intel as well as the Trump administration’s involvement in them were previously reported by DigiTimes, Bloomberg and the New York Times.

Intel’s board of directors is now searching for a new CEO whose mission may depend on what parts of the company are left to run. The board has hired recruiters Spencer Stuart to organize the search, which is now more than two months old, according to people familiar with the matter.

Amid a cost-cutting drive over the past couple of years, Intel has already shed numerous businesses and is in the midst of a process to offload a stake in its programmable-chip unit, called Altera. Intel bought Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion.

Intel’s factories in late 2022 began operating as though they were separate, taking orders from the company’s chip-design teams on an equal footing with outside customers. It began reporting separate financial results for the factories last year, and now plans to put them into a subsidiary with its own operating board of directors.

David Zinsner, the company’s interim co-chief executive, said in an interview last month that the new structure would allow the company to bring in outside investors in the factories, including its customers and potentially private-equity players.

Any deal involving TSMC and other investors taking control of Intel’s factories would require signoff from the U.S. government. The Chips Act of 2022 established a $53 billion grant program for domestic chip-making, and Intel was the largest recipient of funding under it, getting up to $7.9 billion to support new factories in Ohio, Arizona and other locations in the U.S. As part of that deal, Intel was required to maintain a majority share of its factories if they were spun off into a new entity, the company said in a regulatory filing.

The deal also faces operational complexities. Intel’s factories have largely been set up to produce Intel chips, and the company has only started trying to make chips for external customers in the past few years. Retooling Intel factories to make advanced chips TSMC’s way would be a significant and costly engineering challenge.

A concern for the TSMC is potential restrictions on deploying its own engineers in the U.S. to oversee production, given the Trump administration’s restrictive stance on immigration, according to people familiar with the company’s operations. A large portion of TSMC’s engineers are from Taiwan and other regions outside the U.S.

Intel has drawn takeover interest over the past year that has intensified since Gelsinger’s ousting. Intel’s market value has sank below that of many companies that were once distant competitors, although its shares rose sharply in the past week as speculation about a potential TSMC tie-up spread.

The iconic chip maker’s fall from prominence stems in large part from manufacturing stumbles that left it behind TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. It has also been stung by rising competition in the central processing chips that made it a household name, including from Advanced Micro Devices. And Intel largely has missed out on an artificial-intelligence boom that has redirected spending by the tech giants from its processors to Nvidia’s AI chips.

Broadcom in late 2017 made a more than $100 billion unsolicited offer for chip maker Qualcomm. Its efforts to take over its rival were ultimately blocked under the Trump administration, and Broadcom withdrew its bid.

EU is ready to roll out barriers on vessels transporting illicit oil, but Trump administration has yet to say if U.S. will join the effort

The European Union is preparing new sanctions aimed at limiting the Russian “shadow fleet” that transports illicit oil, but it has yet to hear if the Trump administration will join it in targeting the vessels that provide a crucial source of revenue for the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

The illicit tanker fleet sprang up to evade Western sanctions on Russian oil, allowing Moscow to move crude to buyers in India and China by flagging ships in countries such as Gabon. The U.S. Treasury Department in the waning days of the Biden administration sanctioned 183 vessels used by Moscow.

The Trump administration hasn’t dialed back on those sanctions, and it is considering targeting dozens more vessels, people familiar with the matter said. There has been no decision yet, and the administration is still studying various sanctions options, they said.

The White House declined to comment.

The EU had readied a sanctions package that would roughly double the number of third- country vessels it would blacklist for carrying Russian oil, according to diplomats briefed on the discussions. Final approval from EU member states has yet to take place, and officials will meet Wednesday in hopes of reaching agreement.

The U.S. hasn’t yet given any indication of whether it will join the EU in the sanctions, as it typically did during the Biden administration.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal this past week, Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. could pressure Russia using economic or military “tools of leverage” if Moscow didn’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine. He didn’t spell out the details of what those tools would be.

Daniel Fried, a retired U.S. diplomat who coordinated sanctions policy against Russia during the Obama administration, said additional measures targeting the shadow fleet could be a “relatively low risk” way of increasing the impact of a regime already announced by the Biden administration.

“It needs to be enforced,” said Fried, who added that only a fraction of the vessels now engaged in the illicit trade have been sanctioned. “The Europeans would support it. It would be a signal that Trump isn’t going to cave to Putin, and not be Putin’s patsy.”

EU officials are in the final stage of agreeing to list more than 70 vessels from Russia’s shadow fleet with a decision expected to be taken formally when foreign ministers meet Feb. 24, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

By mid-December, the bloc had banned 79 vessels from entering EU ports and from a range of European shipping services, as well as imposing sanctions on shipping responsible for transporting Russian crude oil or oil products.

Enforcing sanctions against Russia’s shadow fleet has presented logistical and legal challenges.

The vessels conceal their role in shipping oil by using deceptive tactics. They fly flags of convenience, register ownership with tax havens, switch off their radio signals to obscure their movements and frequently transfer cargo to other ships. Their numbers range from 400 to 1,400, depending on estimates. A precise tally is probably impossible to determine.

While Trump has lately talked tough about his plans to push Russian President Vladimir Putin into a peace deal, former advisers fear he might not pursue serious action.

Trump said this past week that he had a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” with Putin. It was the first publicly announced call since Inauguration Day with his Russian counterpart. Trump said after the call that negotiations would begin soon to resolve the war in Ukraine.

He also announced a U.S. negotiating team that would include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Michael Waltz and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff.

While Trump’s team hasn’t outlined a peace plan for Ukraine yet, it appears to be assembling one. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, his Ukraine emissary, met with European leaders this past week at a security conference in Munich.

When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, the Biden administration enacted sweeping sanctions against Russia, but balked at seriously targeting its oil exports to avoid causing a global surge in petroleum prices. Some signs of an oil glut could be giving the Trump administration room to maneuver. Oil and gas revenue has accounted for more than a third of Russia’s federal budget in recent years.

The EU worked closely with the U.S. under the Biden administration and other Group of Seven countries, including the U.K., on the vessel-sanctions packages. Some European countries had long chafed at the Biden White House’s reluctance to crack down harder on the shadow fleet over fears of driving oil prices higher before the November election.

European officials said there has only been limited discussions between Brussels and the U.S. over sanctions since Jan. 20, when Trump returned to the White House.

Using economic levers against Russia is appealing to Trump, who has criticized billions of dollars in military aid going to Ukraine and promised to negotiate a quick end to the war. Trump has appeared increasingly impatient with Putin, who has so far said he is willing to talk, but shown little inclination to end the war.

Trump sounded a warning against Putin days after he was sworn in as president last month, writing on Truth Social that he would enact sanctions if Putin didn’t end the war. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” he wrote.

Russia has invested $10 billion since 2022 to expand its shadow fleet, according to calculations by the Kyiv School of Economics. More than 70% of Russia’s seaborne oil exports have been transported using such vessels, it said.

Kellogg, the Ukraine envoy, last month suggested that bringing world oil prices down to $45 a barrel would be enough to force the Kremlin into a deal. Trump himself has caused world oil prices to soften by publicly prodding Saudi Arabia, which has excess capacity, to pump more to bring down prices.

Few expect that the U.S. could arrange such a precipitous price drop without the help of the Saudis, who are disinclined to embark on such a move.

Such an effort could also carry significant risks. While it would strain Russia’s economy, it might also destabilize oil-dependent economies in the Middle East and Africa. It might also discourage investment in U.S. domestic energy production.

The U.S. proposals have been watched warily in the Kremlin, whose reliance on oil-export revenue has long been an Achilles’ heel to its national-security state. The Soviet Union’s finances were devastated by a collapse in oil prices during the 1980s, and Putin’s own rise to power in the early 2000s was in many ways facilitated by an oil-price recovery.

The Kremlin effectively parried many of the economic sanctions early in the war by redirecting trade toward partners such as India and China and imposing currency and financial controls. But Russia’s economy is facing headwinds of rising inflation and a worsening labor shortage due to the demands of the Ukraine war. Economists said a decline in living standards could affect ordinary Russians severely this year or next.

The government should place the struggling utility into special administration

It has been another bumpy week for Thames Water. Thousands of South London customers were left without water after a pipe burst. The Financial Times reported that half the utility’s sewage plants lack the pipes and tanks to process enough waste water — leading untreated effluent to spill into rivers and waterways. The debt-laden utility appealed to raise customers’ bills by even more than the 35 per cent by 2030 that the regulator Ofwat has permitted, and has been wrangling in court over a proposed £3bn creditor bailout. It is time the company was put out of its misery via a special administration regime (SAR) — a form of temporary renationalisation — enabling its unsustainable finances to be restructured in the public interest.

Thames Water, which supplies a quarter of the UK population, is the poster-child for the failures of England’s experiment with privatising formerly public regional water companies, which were floated with zero debt in 1989. Its steady revenues from a captive market attracted financial buyers who, even more than happened at many counterparts, leveraged up its balance sheet to the hilt to maximise returns.

A regulatory focus on consumer prices and the operating entity, rather than on the arcane corporate structures above it, proved inadequate. Since rising interest on Thames Water’s £16bn net debt first caused funding issues in 2023, the debt has swelled to nearly £19bn.

A High Court judge has this month been hearing arguments over a proposed restructuring plan involving a £3bn loan from the utility’s top-tier bondholders, which include US hedge funds such as Elliott Management. The financing, at a steep 9.75 per cent annual interest rate, is intended to provide a “bridge” to a broader restructuring, allowing time to raise new equity and renegotiate debts. The judge is expected to publish his decision this week on whether the plan meets corporate legal requirements. If he rejects it, Thames Water has said it will run out of cash by March 24, so it will almost inevitably fall into special administration — the first water company in England and Wales to do so since privatisation.

Even if the £3bn bailout is granted, there is no guarantee new equity investment will be secured. The chief financial officer told the court he expected the utility’s total interest bill to reach £800mn-£900mn next year including the new loan costs, and its bill for restructuring lawyers and advisers could top £200mn. A Liberal Democrat MP representing environmental campaigners said about a third of Thames Water’s customer bills already went towards servicing its debt.

There is a strong argument, then, that administration is in the broader public interest and the best interests of the company’s 16mn customers — and may be the ultimate destination in any case. The SAR process is designed to enable administrators to impose a haircut on creditors to shrink the balance sheet, and restructure the company to make it viable for the future. Thames managers would be freed up to concentrate on turning operations around. The aim should be to return Thames to the market as a stable, privately owned firm.

Critics have suggested even a temporary renationalisation would be expensive for the government. But debt interest would be frozen, freeing up cash to invest in infrastructure. Conservative and Labour governments have worried that imposing losses on investors, some from overseas, would deter vital investment in other infrastructure projects. But an insolvency process is a normal part of capitalism, to ensure productive assets can be preserved and relaunched. In this case, it would be the best way to end a saga of mismanagement, financial engineering and ineffective regulation — and maximise the chances of a sounder business emerging.

VTB Europe’s liquidators accuse Angola of loan default

Frankfurt-based firm, which has been ringfenced from Russian parent, launches arbitration proceedings

Liquidators of the European arm of VTB Bank have accused Angola of defaulting on a loan after the lender’s Russian parent was hit by sanctions, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Frankfurt-based OWH, the former VTB Europe, has launched arbitration proceedings against the African country to repay the loan, the people said. It is seeking to recover money on assets that were held in the subsidiary and severed from state-owned VTB by western sanctions on Russia.

The case underlines how, years on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and with hopes of a peace deal now rising, the complex fallout from sanctions on Russian banks still haunts countries that once borrowed from Moscow.

Angola disclosed in documentation for a bond issue in December and January that it is fighting a legal claim of default on a debt where all of the lenders had been subject to sanctions, but it did not identify the entity or the loan involved.

OWH, which is no longer subject to sanctions and has been ringfenced from its Moscow-based parent, declined to comment.

Angola’s finance ministry declined to comment on the identity of the entity taking legal action mentioned in the bond documentation. It added that it was “willing to disclose more details . . . as soon as there is a resolution to it, to avoid speculation and to inform all stakeholders, at the right time, on how [it] will be resolved”.

The mystery over the claim of default has perplexed investors at a time when President Joao Lourenço’s indebted government is trying to regain access to global bond markets — after the country was hit by high US interest rates and a drop in oil prices — and drive down its double-digit borrowing costs.

Angola issued nearly $2bn in bonds in December and January and has used the debt as security for a $1bn loan from JPMorgan. Officials have said they plan to sell more debt.

The exact size of the debt that OWH claims it is owed is unclear.

VTB lent billions of dollars to Angola since 2012 as part of a push by the Russian bank into Africa, but much of this borrowing had been repaid by 2019.

However, Angola also borrowed $278mn from VTB’s former Austrian branch and Russian state-backed lenders Vnesheconombank, Roseximbank and Gazprombank in 2011 to buy a communications satellite supplied by Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms and aerospace exporter.

The satellite loan was due to be repaid last year. By then, all four original lenders had been targeted by US or other sanctions.

Angola disclosed in bond issuance documentation up until 2022 that it still owed $200mn to VTB Bank Austria, which became part of VTB Europe. This disclosure did not appear in documents for the latest debt sale.

German regulators ringfenced the operations of VTB Europe, which had thousands of German depositors, in 2022 following sanctions on the Russian parent.

Renamed OWH, the subsidiary was removed from the US sanctions list in April last year and is now in liquidation. OWH also has a licence under the UK sanctions regime that allows it to receive payments.

“The existence of international sanctions, particularly as they relate to Russian entities, has caused legal and practical difficulties in the performance of such commitments, as Russian counterparties themselves have acknowledged,” Angola’s finance ministry said.

“The fact is that there is an arbitration process under way in which two parties have different understandings on the same matter,” it added.

VTB Bank said that it “has no claims against the government of Angola” and that it is not responsible for any actions by OWH’s administrator, after the bank lost control over the unit on what it called “totally illegal grounds”.

Vnesheconombank and Gazprombank did not respond to requests for comment. Roseximbank declined to comment.

EU plans Donald Trump-style import ban on food

Brussels wants to block farm products containing prohibited pesticides

The EU wants to block imports of certain foodstuffs made to different standards to protect its farmers in an echo of US President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” trade policy. 

The European Commission will agree next week to explore greater import limits, according to three officials, a move that would raise tensions with trading partners. Early targets could include US crops such as soyabeans which are grown using pesticides EU farmers are not allowed to use.

“We have very clear signals from the parliament, very clear signals also from the member states and from our farmers: whatever is banned in the EU, it should be banned in the EU, even if it is an imported product,” health commissioner Olivér Várhelyi said in an interview last month.

Trump on Thursday attacked countries that blocked US products, including the EU, which he said barred shellfish from 48 of the US’s 50 states. He has threatened tariffs on those who do not change their policy.

The commission has long opposed calls from France and other member states for reciprocal treatment, arguing that it could be in breach of WTO rules. The body only allows restrictions on scientific grounds that do not discriminate against imports.

The EU bans many pesticides because they damage plants or animals — even as its health agency has ruled that some are safe to ingest at low levels.

The EU plan is included in a Vision for Agriculture road map drawn up by farm commissioner Christophe Hansen. An official with knowledge of the document plans said it referenced the need to abide by international rules.

“We are only talking about the most hazardous pesticides and there will be an impact assessment to protect competitiveness before any decisions,” one official said, adding that “we need coffee and mangoes and avocados”.

Várhelyi said pesticides using carcinogens, mutagens or endocrine disrupters should not be allowed into the bloc on imported food.

“If science says it is not safe, then we shouldn’t have it.”

“If we want to be scientifically based, then science is universal. So we have to make sure whatever is imported complies with this.”

One such substance is paraquat, a herbicide banned in the EU but used in the US on crops including soyabeans.

Pesticide Action Network Europe, a campaign group, found pesticides such as the fungicide propiconazole and bee-killing neurotoxic insecticides in many imports, according to a report it published earlier this month.

“These substances often appear in ‘pesticide cocktail’ mixtures, and in some cases, their levels exceed the established legal residue limits for individual pesticides,” the group said. “Higher allowed residue limits are often maintained to accommodate international trade partners, jeopardising the health of European citizens.”

Tea and coffee were the most common products with banned pesticide residue, with 38 per cent of tea samples and 23 per cent of coffee. Almost a quarter of samples from India, and 17 per cent from China, both big tea growers, contained banned pesticide residues.

The commission will also include in future trade deals higher animal welfare standards. The EU has rules on the amount of space for hens and calves, cleanliness of accommodation and other things that increase costs for farmers. 

One of the officials said it would boost public support for trade deals, after national parliaments have refused to ratify some recent accords because of their perceived impact on farmers and the environment.

Biotech behind Alzheimer’s drug seeks partners for blood-brain barrier technology

BioArctic is developing a process to allow drugs to cross the layer of cells that protects the brain

The Swedish biotech behind a groundbreaking Alzheimer’s treatment is in talks with partners for its new technology that allows drugs to cross the notoriously tricky blood-brain barrier. 

BioArctic signed the first deal for its “brain transporter” with Bristol Myers Squibb late last year. The deal is worth up to $1.4bn and allows the US drugmaker to start trials using the technology to deliver another Alzheimer’s drug. 

The biotech, which created the Alzheimer’s medicine Leqembi that is now sold by Biogen and Eisai, is in talks with several other large pharmaceutical companies to license the transporter, hoping it will make drugs for other neurological conditions more successful. 

Gunilla Osswald, BioArctic chief executive, said this year was a “new era” for the company, as it invests in its own drug pipeline and has “a lot of interest from Big Pharma in our brain transporter technology”. 

Leqembi was the first drug that slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s, where other treatments could only help reduce symptoms. It was discovered by BioArctic’s founder Lars Lannfelt after a study of the brains of people with Alzheimer’s in a remote Arctic community.

Getting drugs across the barrier into the brain has been one of the hardest problems for treating neurological conditions. Per-Ola Freskgård, BioArctic’s vice-president of science and technology who joined the company from Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, said it had been a “very very big issue in the industry”. 

BioArctic’s technology takes advantage of the biochemical process for transporting iron into the brain to deliver drugs. So far, it has evidence that it dramatically increases the delivery of antibody treatments into the brains of animals, but it needs to be tested in humans.

In the deal with Bristol Myers Squibb, BioArctic licensed both the brain transporter and a potential Alzheimer’s treatment, which will probably be in clinical trials in the next two years. 

In other partnerships, drugmakers are considering whether they can use the BioArctic technology to revive older drugs that had difficulty entering the brain at all, or which caused unacceptable side effects because of the high dose required to get them across the barrier. 

Roche and US biotech Denali Therapeutics are among those working on blood-brain transport technologies. 

Osswald said that BioArctic was more financially stable, citing growing royalties from Leqembi. The drug is now approved in 10 markets, though not yet in Europe. 

BioArctic reported its fourth-quarter earnings this month. Net revenues were SKr101.2.mn ($9.37mn), up from SKr11mn in the same period the year before. Its operating loss narrowed to SKr53.5mn in the past three months of 2024, compared with a loss of SKr78.1mn the previous year. Shares in the company, which is listed in Sweden, have risen more than 10 per cent in the past year.

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Protesters target Tesla showrooms over Elon Musk’s cost-cutting

The billionaire has become a focus of outrage at the Trump administration’s attacks on government agencies

Protesters gathered outside Tesla showrooms across the US on Saturday to demonstrate against the drastic cuts Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to President Donald Trump, is imposing on the federal government.

Organisers cited 37 protests across the country as part of an effort co-ordinated through the social media hashtags #TeslaTakedown and #TeslaTakover.

Musk’s car company is emerging as a target for political outrage in the US and Europe in response to the billionaire’s outsized influence in the White House.

Through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Musk has orchestrated the dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants, and gained access to sensitive US Treasury payments. He has also voiced his support for the German far-right and called for the centre-left government of Sir Keir Starmer in the UK to be thrown out.

What began with Tesla owners slapping bumper stickers on their cars saying “I bought this before Elon went crazy” has grown to activists projecting an image of Musk making a gesture many have likened to a Nazi salute on to Tesla’s factory in Berlin.

The UK campaign group Led by Donkeys joined with Germany’s Centre for Political Beauty in January to project the image, part of a longer montage of Musk’s recent political statements. The group said it was produced in response to the Tesla chief executive’s endorsement of German far-right political party, the AfD.

Local news outlets have reported on arson and attempted arson at Tesla showrooms in Oregon and Colorado. Earlier this month a Tesla showroom in The Hague was defaced with graffiti that included swastikas and anti-fascist slogans.

Dutch police confirmed to the FT that they were in contact with Tesla and the investigation was continuing, but no arrests had yet been made.

Tesla’s stock, which climbed after the presidential election, fell 6 per cent on Tuesday to $328.50. It rebounded to close the week at $355.84 but is still down 12 per cent since the start of the year.

“The worry of the Street is that Musk dedicating so much time — even more than we expected — to Doge takes away from his time at Tesla,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

“In addition, Musk’s Doge-related actions and more powerful alliance with Trump clearly could alienate some consumers to move away from the Tesla brand.”

About 50 to 100 protesters turned out in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, carrying signs saying, “Dethrone Musk” and “If Tesla survives, your country dies”.

Edward Niedermeyer, author of Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, was one of them. Since Musk’s power is not derived from election to public office, he said, boycotting and divesting from Tesla is the only tool available to curb his agenda.

He argued that Tesla was overvalued and that its core business of making and selling cars was deteriorating. Significant losses could force investors to sell, triggering a drop in the share price and forcing Musk to sell a portion of his shares to meet a margin call.

“Every Tesla sale that you prevent, every dollar not spent servicing a Tesla, not charging at the Supercharger — these further degrade the business,” Niedermeyer said.

“It’s not easy, it’s not guaranteed, but we do have the opportunity to wipe out a huge amount of Elon Musk’s wealth.”

In Chicago, protesters carried a banner saying “Stop buying Nazi cars”.

City resident Lisa Pereira said she came to the demonstration because “you have to do something”. She said she was disturbed by the administration’s attempts to crush diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, its aggressive immigration enforcement, and the power wielded by Musk.

“Everything is a little off the rails,” she said. “So I decided I had to show up. I had to be in cahoots with my soul.”

Chris White said he attended on Saturday because he fears “we’re living through a fascist coup”.

“My kids are trans,” he said. “I’m getting told they don’t exist. I don’t know if their healthcare will exist.”

Though one man yelled from a truck, “Elon’s my hero!” most passers-by in the heavily Democratic city expressed support.

“I’d rather buy a Rivian,” said one, referring to the electric-truck maker whose showroom was a block away from the protest.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kimi AI launches free, unlimited model Kimi 1.5 to rival GPT 4o and Claude 3.5. Make no mistake: the AI arms race is officially underway, and China is rapidly becoming a formidable player in developing some of the most advanced models we have seen yet.

Just days after DeepSeek R1 made headlines, Moonshot AI introduced Kimi AI 1.5, a model already touted superior to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This latest entrant shows advancements in multimodal reasoning, long-context understanding, and real-time data processing, raising questions about the future of AI dominance.

There is an old cliche that the US innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates. We look beyond the stereotypes to determine where this free real-time search, file analysis, and research tool fits in the competitive AI market.

• Moonshot’s Kimi AI 1.5 free model challenges paid AI tools from OpenAI and Google.
• Its multimodal capabilities allow seamless integration of text, images, and code.
• Kimi AI outperforms DeepSeek in reasoning, but DeepSeek excels in math and logic.
• Accessible via web and mobile, Kimi AI requires no login for immediate use.
• Kimi AI highlights China’s growing AI influence.

Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, develops the Kimi AI chatbot. It is a large language model (LLM) designed to understand and generate human-like text responses, particularly in Chinese.

This latest AI tool can handle up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, making it highly effective for analyzing lengthy documents and handling complex tasks.

Moonshot AI is positioning Kimi as a cost-effective yet powerful alternative to the frontier models coming out of the United States, building it at a fraction of their cost.

The Kimi AI model stands out due to several unique features. Its multimodal capabilities allow it to process and reason across text, images, and code. This gives it an edge in tasks requiring multiple formats. Its extended context processing enables it to handle up to 128,000 tokens in a single prompt, maintaining context over long conversations.

Performance benchmarks place Kimi ahead of many established models. On the MATH 500 benchmark, it scored 96.2%, surpassing GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in mathematical problem-solving.

It also ranked in the 94th percentile on Codeforces, a competitive coding platform, and demonstrated superior performance in the MathVista benchmark, particularly excelling in vision-language tasks.

Overall, Kimi 1.5 AI has surpassed GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 by up to 550% in some benchmarks around reasoning and problem-solving.

One of the problems with benchmark tests is that making comparisons can be notoriously tricky and misleading. But, Kimi’s reported numbers suggest a significant leap in AI capabilities.

How to Use Kimi AI

Users can access Kimi AI through a web interface or the Kimi app. The AI can be used in multiple ways, including uploading files such as PDFs and Word documents for analysis, engaging in real-time web searches across over 100 websites, and utilizing its advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities to solve complex problems.

Kimi AI 1.5 is completely free, unlike many leading AI models that operate on a subscription basis.

This democratizes access to advanced AI and challenges the traditional monetization strategies of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

This strategy pressures established AI companies that rely on paid models, forcing them to rethink their approach to accessibility and pricing in an increasingly competitive market.

While OpenAI and Anthropic continue monetizing their AI offerings and offering expensive features, Moonshot AI’s free access model changes how AI can be used at scale without cost barriers.

The team behind Kimi AI includes some of China’s brightest AI researchers. Zhilin Yang, a Carnegie Mellon University PhD with deep expertise in machine learning, founded Moonshot AI.

The company has quickly become one of China’s “AI Tigers,” receiving substantial funding from Chinese tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding and venture capital firm HongShan, not to mention a respectable $3 billion valuation.

Many have also praised the AI tool’s ability to handle extensive text processing and real-time data retrieval, hailing it as a serious competitor to OpenAI.

Jun Xia, Portfolio Manager, CFA, at DPS, said in a LinkedIn post:

However, skeptics remain cautious about AI benchmark results, as self-reported metrics often lack independent verification.

Xia also expressed concerns, saying that “sooner or later, all those free AI tools could be banned by the US for reasons such as ‘data protection’ and ‘national security,’ etc.”

Predictably, geopolitical considerations continue to shape discussions around AI development, particularly with Chinese companies gaining momentum against their Western counterparts.

But Kimi AI is just one of many new solutions disrupting the search and research space.

Mel Morris, the English entrepreneur best known for his early backing of Candy Crush, recently told us that his approach to an AI research engine delivers a more comprehensive understanding of complex topics.

Speaking on Tech Talks Daily podcast, Morris shared insights into how Corpora.AI is also moving beyond surface-level results and provides users with extensive, well-sourced information.

Morris also believes that AI research should become more transparent. “If an AI tool doesn’t show you its sources, you have no idea where the information came from,” he said.

There is no denying that competition is much better for users than having a few key players dominating the world of AI.

The Bottom Line

As AI development continues to accelerate, the introduction of powerful contenders from Corpora.AI to Kimi AI 1.5 marks a massive shift in how AI technology is built, distributed, and accessed worldwide. For users, it is already transforming real-time search and file analysis. What does this mean for Google? That’s a story for another day.