FT : Inside Mytheresa, ecommerce’s biggest winner It went from Munich store to g

Inside Mytheresa, ecommerce’s biggest winner
It went from Munich store to global billion-dollar business. We visit its original home

In 1987, Susanne and Christoph Botschen opened Theresa, a womenswear boutique in central Munich with an instinct for designers the city hadn’t yet discovered. It was among the first retailers to bring Prada and Dolce & Gabbana to Munich and by the early 1990s it was championing Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Romeo Gigli and Helmut Lang.

In 2006, the Botschens built a website and changed the brand name to Mytheresa (they sold the business in 2014). Two decades later that website turns over close to €1bn a year, selling an edit of some 250 fashion brands and sitting at the centre of a group that last spring absorbed Net-a-Porter, Mr Porter and Yoox. 

The physical store has grown as well. In 2020, a menswear boutique opened next door to the original on Maffeistrasse, in the heart of the city’s luxury quarter, and now the interior of the 1,200sq m women’s shop has been reimagined by Italian architect Roberto Baciocchi. It unfolds across three distinctly designed floors: brown carpeting and travertine on the ground floor for shoes, bags and accessories; warm wood and mirrored fitting-room columns upstairs for ready-to-wear and fine jewellery; and a monochrome basement of illuminated columns and aluminium mesh dedicated to contemporary fashion. It stocks The Row, Alaïa, Phoebe Philo, Sacai, Toteme and Manolo Blahnik – all exclusive to the store in Munich – alongside Bottega Veneta, Khaite, Celine, Valentino, Gucci, Prada and Miu Miu. 

Some 45 people work across the two boutiques, which took €14.4mn in net sales last financial year. The manager, Stefan Kern, has been with Mytheresa for more than 30 years. Many customers have been shopping with him for decades.

“This is where the business started and where a lot of brand relationships started,” says Michael Kliger, the CEO of LuxExperience, the NYSE-listed group that now owns Mytheresa. “We were not a magazine. We were not a tech start-up. We were first and foremost a boutique. This is where the DNA is: curation and inspiration.” As a physical boutique, space is always limited. It’s a discipline they also exercise online. “The biggest mistake you could make is to think ‘the website is endless, so I can have infinite pieces’.”

Francis Belin, who took over as Mytheresa’s CEO in January this year after nearly a decade at Christie’s, says the customers appreciate curation. “They say, ‘I want to go to Mytheresa and see the best 20 black dresses of the season. I don’t need 750.’”

Tiffany Hsu, Mytheresa’s chief buying and group fashion ventures officer, says the store stocks brands according to a strict criteria. “Is it filling a gap, either aesthetically or functionally?” she asks. To be a “hot” name is not enough. “Hype is very shortlived. We’re not chasing a quick buck. We are chasing long-term loyalty and a lifetime spend.”

Early on the store was critical to the website’s success. “In the beginning it was the gauge for many brands that started to work with us digitally,” says Kliger. Today, it still acts as a sounding board. Hsu says that while crunching data is all important, the dialogue that the store has with its clients remains an invaluable resource.

“When customers return something online, they just say it’s too big or too small, or they don’t like the materials,” she says. “The store will give you more insight – the button doesn’t really work, the fit is weird, or they think it’s too expensive.” It’s a depth of insight that has been gathered over years.

Personal service remains a focus across the stores and website. Belin says 40 per cent of business is done with four per cent of clients. The brand employs approximately 100 personal shoppers, and facilitates a programme of Maison Mytheresa events. Some of these glitzy happenings take place in Munich, with a year-round calendar of dinners, cocktails and bespoke occasions working with brands including Manolo Blahnik, Valentino and Gabriela Hearst. 

Others happen further afield. In May, top menswear clients travelled to the Amalfi Coast for a two-day experience with Brioni that culminated in a bespoke tailoring masterclass at Il San Pietro di Positano from the house’s chief master tailor, Angelo Petrucci. In June, Maison Mytheresa popped up on a yacht on the Côte d’Azur for a series of trunk shows, private styling appointments and conversations with brands including Missoni, Roberto Cavalli, Aquazzura and Saman Amel.

“These aren’t transactional events,” says Belin. “They are recognition for loyalty; it’s the experience that money can’t buy.” Numbers are small – around 50 to 70 guests at a time. “You have clients hopping on a plane to fly 10 hours for the dinner and then flying back,” says Belin.

Menswear – which launched online in 2020 and accounts for around 10 per cent of the business – is where the brand will next flex its muscles. Sophie Jordan, Mytheresa’s menswear buying director, says what surprises her is the client appetite for self-expression: statement tailoring is a strong category, whether that’s “a hot-pink double-breasted suit from Tom Ford” or “a softer silhouette tuxedo with a satin scarf detail from Valentino”. At the Munich store, top brands include Miu Miu, Loewe and Saman Amel for a clientele that’s “confident and independent with a highly developed sense of personal style”. 


Kliger’s ambition for the business starts and ends with the client. “We want to have the most amazing customer file in the world for luxury,” he says. “It’s not a revenue target. It’s a customer target that then translates itself into revenue.” As for the shop, it will remain at the heart of the brand – the place where Munich gets Phoebe Philo, The Row and Alaïa before anywhere else in the city. And, as Kliger says, “a fantastic opportunity for people in Munich to see luxury retail in its physical form and to understand what it means”. 

FT : BP and Shell’s strategy counterpoint Lacking natural advantages and nationa

BP and Shell’s strategy counterpoint
Lacking natural advantages and national support of other energy majors, the companies need to be more nimble

When oil companies are riding high on elevated energy prices as they are now, there can be a tendency to overlook just how different majors are.

Underneath record profits are extremely varied strategies, political relationships and long-term prospects. But BP and Shell in particular stand out. Lacking the natural advantages and national support that other majors enjoy, the companies are having to take a different tack.

Compare BP and Shell with the national oil companies: Saudi Aramco, Adnoc, Petrobras, the Chinese state giants, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), Malaysia’s Petronas, among many others. 

These companies have a straightforward mission: extract oil and gas, sell it, and serve the state by paying dividends into the treasury and supplying the domestic market. They do not usually have to take on significant risks, such as drilling for oil in unexplored basins, and they do not have to worry as much about politics. Even when governments committed to faster climate action are voted in, such as in Brazil and Mexico, the importance of oil and gas revenues to the public finances is usually enough to protect their interests and overcome social opposition. 

Then there are what we might call national champions; companies that are independent, or which have a minority state share, but which are part of their country’s energy and industrial strategy. Some of the biggest ones are France’s TotalEnergies, Norway’s Equinor and Italy’s Eni. They can count on governments that regard their success as a national interest, paving the way for everything from an education system designed to produce sufficient numbers of engineers and geologists, to diplomatic support overseas, to a president or prime minister helping to open the door to a prospective concession. 

In a world that is retreating from globalisation, being able to lean on government support to navigate sanctions or open up routes to resources is a competitive advantage. Of course, the same governments may charge a price: obliging companies to fix domestic fuel prices or shield domestic jobs. 

The US supergiants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, occupy a category of their own. Their relationship with Washington changes with each new administration, but they can also depend on the structural advantages of having huge domestic oil and gas resources, access to the world’s deepest and most risk-tolerant capital markets, and the US brand overseas. 

In contrast, the national support for BP and Shell is far less clear. Once, BP was an arm of British foreign policy and Shell was the pride of both the Netherlands and the UK. Today, they are political orphans; Britain has no settled idea of what role it wants them to play. The government barely acknowledges them, despite their status as two of the country’s largest companies. 

It is perhaps no coincidence that, without a clear sense of national support and purpose, the strategies of BP and Shell have been the most volatile among their peers in recent years. Both have spent countless hours ruminating about what role they should play in society. Amid huge public support for climate change action, Shell and BP went down a rabbit hole of green investments that destroyed shareholder value. Having spent billions with too little to show for it, both companies have now swung hard in the other direction, to focus on oil and gas. This may also be a miscalculation. Electricity is growing faster than the energy system as a whole, and public support for politicians to force more action on climate change is likely to strengthen, rather than soften. 

But there are positives too. The two companies have the flexibility to pursue the projects they want to, living by their commercial wits without doing the bidding of any domestic political master. This sense of commerciality is most obviously on show in their trading divisions, the units that buy and sell oil and gas produced by themselves and others. Shell and BP are widely acknowledged in the industry to have the top trading teams, helping the companies navigate market swings.

Neither company is willing to reveal how much money its traders make, but analysts say the returns are vast. Most other oil companies are now trying to emulate their success.

This trading mindset may also give Shell and BP flexibility in the energy transition. When countries eventually slow down their oil consumption, and energy systems become fragmented, national companies will still have their singular mission, US majors will have their enormous resource base, but Shell and BP may be nimble enough to keep trading. 

FT : Anthropic and OpenAI bankers push for top-tier credit ratings post-IPO Inve

Anthropic and OpenAI bankers push for top-tier credit ratings post-IPO
Investment-grade designation would unlock cheaper financing for AI labs and their infrastructure partners

Anthropic and OpenAI’s bankers are lobbying for an investment-grade credit rating after their upcoming initial public offerings, a designation that would lower the borrowing costs for their ambitious AI infrastructure plans.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have held talks with credit rating agencies in recent weeks on behalf of the two leading AI labs, as they look to gain access to the $11.7tn corporate bond market post-IPO, said people familiar with the matter.

Analysts at the rating agencies told the FT that bankers acting for Anthropic and OpenAI had argued that the two companies’ public listings would unlock vast amounts of liquidity and improve the health of their balance sheets.

“Wall Street is trying to minimise their overall debt impact by arguing that these two companies will soon be flush with liquidity,” said one senior credit analyst.

Achieving an investment-grade rating from Fitch, Moody’s and S&P soon after going public would be a remarkable feat for the two lossmaking AI labs, unlocking big benefits for the companies and their infrastructure partners including Oracle and Nvidia.

The rating would open the door to pension funds, insurers and other institutional investors that take far more limited positions in riskier speculative-grade debt.

It would provide another example of Wall Street changing longstanding practices to usher in the three largest IPOs in history. SpaceX, which went public in June, was the first large tech company to receive an immediate investment-grade rating.

Elon Musk’s rocket conglomerate also benefited from changes to index rules that meant billions of dollars in passive investment tracking the Nasdaq immediately flowed into its stock.

Previous tech heavyweights such as Meta, Netflix and Tesla waited a decade or more after their listings to get a top-tier credit rating.

The discussions about OpenAI and Anthropic’s ratings are ongoing and no final decisions have been made, the people said. Both companies have yet to publicly lay out their IPO roadmaps.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Moody’s and S&P all declined to comment. Fitch did not respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic and OpenAI have recently arranged substantial credit lines with big banks but have mainly relied on institutional and venture capital investors to finance their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on specialist chips and data centres to train and run their models.

Both labs have also leaned on the investment-grade rating of partners to secure preferential borrowing terms for debt tied to their infrastructure projects.

However, concern over the mounting debt load tied to AI projects has pushed up borrowing costs in recent months. An investment-grade rating would give the companies access to a broader pool of capital and obtain better borrowing terms.

Analysts at rating agencies are waiting to see the results of their IPOs before reaching a decision. The two companies remain unprofitable and have shown little sign of generating positive free cash flow. They also face growing risks, including the popularity of Chinese open-weight models.

“We still treat OpenAI and Anthropic as deep in speculative grade . . . they are in the red,” said another senior credit analyst.

The credit ratings of OpenAI and Anthropic are important to their Big Tech partners, which have taken on hundreds of billions of dollars in guarantees on the assumption that both labs will soon be able to borrow on their own.

Nvidia’s $105bn of credit support for a massive OpenAI data centre in Ohio terminates when the start-up wins a “satisfactory credit rating”, filings show.

A ratings bump could also help Oracle refinance some of its current debt pile after raising funds to fulfil a $300bn data centre build-out for OpenAI that has put it at risk of losing its investment-grade status following a recent downgrade.

Google and Broadcom have similarly extended tens of billions of dollars in credit support to back Anthropic’s use of their chips, with both companies betting that it will need less help after its IPO.

Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said last week that Anthropic’s listing meant its “investment credit will change”, noting that along with rival OpenAI, they were “growing to be hyperscalers in their own right”.

He described the frontier AI labs as “two geniuses in the middle of Outer Mongolia, and they need to go to college . . . So we do what we can to help them. And part of it is creating sources of financing to help.”

Jordan Chalfin, head of technology at research firm CreditSights, wrote last week that Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth could help justify an investment-grade rating if it raised roughly $100bn in its IPO.

Anthropic is expected to unveil its IPO prospectus soon, allowing investors to pore over its finances ahead of a listing that could value the five-year-old company at $2tn or more. OpenAI is expected to follow suit with an IPO next year.

Analysts said opaque finances and the start-ups’ use of flattering annual recurring revenue figures have masked their actual performance.

“Both companies have not provided concrete details,” one credit analyst said.

SpaceX issued $25bn in bonds days after it went public and received its investment-grade credit rating from all three rating agencies in June. S&P at the time said the rating reflected the “solid foundation” that the rocket maker had built through its launch business and Starlink satellites.

However, SpaceX’s bonds sold off shortly after being issued, which could also serve as a cautionary tale for credit investors.

“Those deals performed very poorly,” said Andrzej Skiba, head of US fixed income at RBC Global Asset Management. “It makes sense to take a bit more time to introduce themselves to debt holders before printing paper.”

FT : London plays defence

London plays defence

A series of foreign bidders snapping up British companies this year has raised fears that the local market is losing its relevance, with a particular worry that strategically significant businesses will go to overseas buyers.

Enter Cerberus, the US private equity firm founded in 1992 by billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg, which is nearing a £1bn deal to carve out the defence business of the London-listed engineering group Goodwin.

The deal, which the FT revealed on Tuesday, could be finalised within days, according to people familiar with the matter. Goodwin’s shares dropped sharply after the story.

Cerberus has a record in the aerospace and defence sector, while Feinberg last year left his post as the firm’s leader to become the US Department of Defense’s de facto chief operating officer under Pete Hegseth.

However, its planned carve-out of Goodwin’s assets could lead to scrutiny given the sensitive nature of the 143-year-old British company’s operations.

If Cerberus was able to seal the deal, it would mark the latest military asset with British roots to be sold to an American company after Lockheed Martin outbid rivals a couple of months ago to buy naval technology group Ultra Maritime.

Goodwin, which had attracted interest from several buyout firms earlier this summer, is a component supplier for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines.

It also works with America’s Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, guided-missile destroyers and Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers. That may mean officials on both sides of the Atlantic are paying attention.

FT : Greece’s pitch to billionaires The hedge fund industry has for the past de

Greece’s pitch to billionaires

The hedge fund industry has for the past decade failed to provide much alpha and substantially outperform the roaring global financial markets. But when it comes to the personal finances of the firms’ billionaire executives, there’s an unbeatable new trade materialising.

Billionaire Chris Rokos is on the cutting edge. The founder of macro hedge fund Rokos Capital Management is moving his tax residency from the UK to Greece.

In England, the top income tax rate is 45 per cent and carried interest is taxed at a rate of 34 per cent. Meanwhile, in Greece, wealthy individuals have since 2019 been allowed to exempt their foreign gains from its tax net by paying an annual flat tax of €100,000. Foreigners are also exempt from Greek inheritance tax on assets located outside the country.

It’s not hard to see the calculation Rokos, who paid himself £477mn last year, is making.

Athens also added a sweetener this summer for private equity and hedge fund executives relocating to the country: they will pay only a 5 per cent tax on bonuses and carried interest, down from the normal rate of 15 per cent.

Rokos is something of a coup for Greece, which designed the new tax regime to lure investors from places such as the UK and the Gulf to establish substantial operations in Athens. The country’s officials have been pitching executives on the tax strategy.

Representatives from the Greek government went to the offices of a top London hedge fund and were “marketing the fiscal benefits [for] hedge funds” of relocating, an executive at the fund told the FT. Vasilis Karatzas, an adviser to finance minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis, personally courted Rokos for months as he weighed up where to move.

Rokos is not unusual among his set for doggedly pursuing lower taxes, even if it means moving overseas.

He follows several other wealthy tax emigrants who have left the UK in recent years including steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal; Nassef Sawiris, Egypt’s richest man and co-owner of English football club Aston Villa; and Richard Gnodde, vice-chair of Goldman Sachs.

The new tax regime on offer in Greece comes with a condition. The taxpayer’s employer must spend at least €3mn a year operating in the country to benefit from the lower carried interest tax rate. Still, it’s a small price to pay for a 5 per cent tax rate on bonuses and carried interest for your billionaire traders.

Rokos Capital Management is expected to start with a relatively small presence in Athens, but the operation could eventually grow to about 50 people, according to people familiar with the situation.

Relocating from a global financial centre to the Mediterranean may seem a dramatic way to achieve tax savings for Rokos’ executives. But from a purely financial standpoint it’s better than anything the hedge fund can offer to its own investors.

FT : How Greece is wooing hedge funds

How Greece is wooing hedge funds
Athens has persuaded billionaire Chris Rokos to move his tax residency and has held talks with other funds it hopes will be lured by tax breaks

Earlier this year, a top London hedge fund with offices around the world was approached by a group of unlikely suitors: representatives from the Greek government.

“Greece came to the office and it is [was] a very attractive proposition . . . they were marketing the fiscal benefits [for] hedge funds,” said an executive at the fund. 

Greece has this summer thrown down the gauntlet to the UK, Switzerland and the Gulf with a new tax regime designed to lure investors to establish substantial operations in Athens.

The Mediterranean country has for years offered some tax breaks for wealthy individuals, but in June, after consulting with hedge fund managers, it quietly introduced incentives specifically to benefit private equity and hedge funds. Qualifying executives who relocate to Greece pay a 5 per cent tax on bonuses and carried interest — investment managers’ profits on successful deals — down from the normal rate of 15 per cent.

This week, Athens secured its highest-profile win to date when it emerged that billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Rokos was relocating his tax residency from the UK to Greece.

Vasilis Karatzas, an adviser to finance minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis, courted Rokos for months as he weighed up where to move, while Pierrakakis said Rokos had spent an hour with him in his office hours before his announcement.

Rokos followed several other high-profile wealthy individuals who have left the UK in recent years, reacting to fiscal tightening under the Labour government, a tough inheritance tax regime and the end of “non-dom” tax breaks.

Greece has also drawn growing interest among Gulf investment firms, said Karatzas, in the face of the regional conflict sparked by February’s US and Israeli attacks on Iran. Karatzas, who designed Greece’s tax offer, said Athens had held discussions with various large hedge funds about establishing operations there.

Greece has since 2019 allowed wealthy individuals — both foreigners and Greeks — whose tax residency is in the country to exempt their foreign gains from its tax net by paying an annual flat tax of €100,000. This is a similar, but cheaper, arrangement to Italy, where a flat tax regime of €300,000 a year has drawn in private equity executives, bankers and entrepreneurs.

Crucially, foreigners are also exempt from Greek inheritance tax on assets located outside Greece.

The new preferential treatment for private equity and hedge funds comes with a significant condition: the Greek operation employing them must spend at least €3mn a year operating in the country. The threshold was designed by the government to ensure that funds establish genuine operations rather than a nominal presence.

“The main objective is for them to come here and set up real businesses,” Karatzas told the FT. “Either you come properly or you don’t come at all.”

Rokos Capital Management is expected to start with a relatively small presence in Athens, but the operation could eventually grow to about 50 people, according to people familiar with the situation. RCM declined to comment.

The Greek government has also sought to structure the incentives so that investment managers can establish operations in the country without creating unintended tax liabilities for their wider international businesses. This is a key differentiator from Italy, said Elsa Littlewood, private client tax partner at BDO.

Executives relocating from abroad can also already benefit from Greece’s so-called 5C regime, under which qualifying employment income is subject to a 50 per cent tax exemption for seven years.

As well as London and the Gulf, government officials expect interest from Switzerland. But several people familiar with the offering cautioned that Greece needed to prove its credentials as a serious place for finance and business.

“Greece is good for the creative industries, but the jury is out for business,” said a European media entrepreneur who left London for Athens last year after more than two decades in the UK.

“Life is cheaper and you have the sun.”

One London-based Greek investor said he knew of at least 20 compatriot families who relocated from London to Greece in the past two years. “Deep down, they would rather stay in London, but the inheritance tax gave them no choice,” he said, referring to the UK’s tax of 40 per cent on assets above a given threshold, even for foreigners.

“Enquiries about Greece from our high-net-worth clients in the UK have definitely increased, but at this stage it’s not the favoured destination,” said Vincent Lazimi, a partner at law firm Jeantet in Paris. “It’s mostly Italy and Switzerland, sometimes Dubai, sometimes Greece.” 

But Karatzas thinks that Greece’s improved financial position will start to move the needle.

“Greece has fiscal security for the next decade,” he said. “Because our debt has been restructured, we have a predictable fiscal path and we don’t need to increase our taxes.”

The arrival of international hedge funds could have an impact beyond the relatively small number of highly paid executives expected to relocate, according to Vassilis Vizas, tax and legal leader at PwC Greece.

“There [are] less than a dozen licensed hedge fund managers in Greece and they largely manage Greek assets,” Vizas said. “For the first time, you could have people based here managing substantial international assets.”

The significance was not simply that “10 wealthy people come here and spend a lot of money”, Vizas added, but the potential to create an asset-management ecosystem of service providers around international firms that has not previously existed in Greece.

The flow of newcomers may be limited by shortages of high-quality office space, housing suitable for relocating executives and places at international schools.

Inspired Education Group, which owns private schools around the world, entered the Greek education market in September 2024 by acquiring the well-known Moraitis School and the Costeas-Geitonas School in Athens. It is building a third, 1,300-place school at the Ellinikon development, Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, which will offer both Greek and international curricula.

“With the new government we felt more confident about stability and growth opportunities in Greece,” said Nadim Nsouli, founder and chief executive of Inspired. “We’re seeing people from southern Europe and the Middle East moving to Athens. It’s not the London people for now; it’s not perceived yet as a financial centre.”

The residential real estate market in Athens has rebounded and prices have surpassed pre-crisis highs, said Dimitris Manoussakis, head of Savills Greece. “There’s a serious shortage of new apartments,” he said.

The city’s southern suburbs — a coastal stretch dubbed the Athens Riviera — have experienced an influx of foreign buyers from Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and Israel, he added.

Some foreign buyers will soon face higher transaction costs: earlier this month the Greek government sought to increase the country’s property transfer tax for non-EU buyers from 3 per cent to 15 per cent.

The government push to attract investment firms marks a striking reversal for a country that a decade ago was struggling to keep capital inside its borders. Greek banks were subjected to capital controls in 2015 at the height of the sovereign debt crisis, while the country spent years increasing taxes as it sought to repair its public finances.

But it may still have work to do to convince the international finance community to move there in large numbers.

The hedge fund executive who received the Greek government’s marketing pitch said that employees did not seem ready to move to the country just yet.

“We looked into it but for the time being there are no takers,” he said.

>>> US After Hours Summary: INNV +13.1%, AVO +5.8% higher on earnings; CHYM +10.

After Hours Summary: INNV +13.1%, AVO +5.8% higher on earnings; CHYM +10.2% higher on Stride Bank acquisition and guidance; TTAN -21%, BRZE -13.2% and CASY -9.9% under pressure after earnings

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: INNV +13.1%, AVO +5.8%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: CHYM +10.2% (to acquire Stride Bank for $590 mln in cash; also offers guidance), PYXS +7.2% (to present updated clinical data), ASMB +4.8% (exercises U.S. profit-share option with GILD for HSV program), CMTG +3.9% (CEO/Chairman discloses insider purchase), XYZ +2.9% (applies to establish national trust bank for bitcoin and stablecoin custody), BETR +2.3% (COO to depart), OCGN +1.5% (DMC backs continuing modified Phase 2/3 OCU410ST Stargardt study after interim look), ESP +1.4% (promotes new CFO; declares special cash dividend of $0.75/share), CNXC +1.2% (acquires CastleHill), BJ +0.8% (discloses settlement agreement), RKLB +0.7% (launches germanium-free IMM Apex solar cell for space applications), CLSK +0.3% (August operational update), O +0.2% (increases dividend), SNAP +0.2% (names new Chief Commercial Officer), ISRG +0.2% (publication of a landmark systematic review and meta-analysis in the peer-reviewed Annals of Surgery Open), EGO +0.1% (announces first copper-gold concentrate at Skouries)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: TTAN -21% (also CRO to step down), BRZE -13.2%, CASY -9.9%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: TH -7.2% (launches secondary stock offering), INGM -6.2% (launches secondary stock offering), TPG -1.7% (discloses departure of President), GLXY -0.9% (update on ERCOT Batch Zero large load classifications), STAA -0.7% (names former CEO as Chief Commercial Officer), BBOT -0.5% (highlights BBO-8520 NSCLC data, prioritizes KRAS combination programs), AHCO -0.3% (names new CFO), CNL -0.1% (announces maiden Mineral Resource for its Apollo Deposit at the Guayables Project)

WSJ : OpenAI Says It Has Solved a Millennium Prize Problem—a Holy Grail of Math

OpenAI Says It Has Solved a Millennium Prize Problem—a Holy Grail of Math
As the leading AI labs battle for math supremacy, OpenAI spent millions of dollars and cracked the Navier-Stokes problem. Rivals are already challenging AI’s biggest math breakthrough yet.


In a year of unthinkable math progress, as increasingly powerful AI systems have cracked conjectures that had long stumped humans, OpenAI published a breakthrough on Tuesday that represents the most significant advance yet.

Back in 2000, seven of the deepest and most difficult unresolved questions in mathematics were enshrined as the Millennium Prize Problems. Since then, some of the world’s brightest minds have pursued the most elusive answers in math—and the $1 million promised for any solution.

Despite the intellectual firepower aimed at these notorious problems, only one had ever been solved.

But now OpenAI has published what it says is the solution to a second Millennium Prize Problem. And this one was produced by AI.

The lab said on Tuesday that one of its internal models has solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, a fundamental question about the rules that describe how liquids and gases move.

For nearly a century, mathematicians have tried to determine whether smooth solutions to the equations describing three-dimensional fluid motion always remain smooth or if they ever break down. To put it less mathematically: On paper, can water blow up? OpenAI says its model found a scenario in which “an initially smooth fluid at rest can develop a singularity in a finite time.” In the proof, a spaghetti-like vortex gets smaller while spinning faster and faster, its speed growing without limit in what mathematicians call “finite-time blowup.”

OpenAI published its findings along with the 165-page proof and a formalization that verifies the argument step by step. The company says it took as many as 10,000 AI agents working together on the problem about 88 hours to find the solution. It also took “millions of dollars” in computing resources.

The race to solve a Millennium Prize Problem had become so ferociously competitive that OpenAI’s researchers did not circulate the results with outside mathematicians before publication.

Over the weekend, the math community on social media erupted with chatter that a Millennium Prize Problem had been solved. In the hours before Tuesday’s announcement, the mathematical drama took another turn when competing researchers challenged OpenAI’s version of events.

By the time mathematicians prepared to read the proof, they could agree on one thing: It appeared to be the most striking example of artificial intelligence doing something that lots of brilliant humans have been trying and failing to do for a very long time.

“It’s undeniable that symbolically, it’s a big moment—and the next in a natural chain of big moments,” said Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician who had not yet reviewed the paper.

Not long ago, the smartest models struggled with basic math. In recent years, they have become smart enough to earn a silver medal and then gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad. By this year, they were solving major open problems. Their rapid improvement has left researchers inside frontier labs both surprised and alarmed by the pace of development.

“Even a month ago, I don’t think we would have predicted that we would be talking about a Millennium Prize Problem,” said Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist. “We see this as a demonstration of just how far AI has gotten—and how quickly.”

In recent months, the AI companies have flaunted the capabilities of their models by trumpeting advances in combinatorial geometry and algebraic number theory, turning math into an unlikely form of advertising. Despite those strides, the possibility of a frontier lab taking the giant leap it would require to solve a Millennium Prize Problem seemed improbable.

This latest discovery was made by an unreleased model that OpenAI says is “significantly more capable” than GPT-6 Astra, which the lab released just last week.

When the company tested both models on its own benchmark of math problems, Astra was able to solve about 10%. The unreleased model scored closer to 50%.

“Basically, you throw at it almost any open problem,” said OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck, “and it’s a coin flip whether the model can solve it.”

This model has been in training since late August, the company said. On Sept. 1, with the math community buzzing about rumors that Anthropic had solved two Millennium Prize problems, OpenAI unleashed the model on all six open questions. Even then, researchers expected it would produce the same results as the other times they have pointed their models at the infamous Riemann hypothesis, the P vs. NP problem and the Navier-Stokes equation.

“We didn’t expect it to solve any,” said OpenAI researcher Noam Brown.

After 50 hours of work, the AI had made enough progress on a problem related to Navier-Stokes that the humans intervened. They made a calculation of their own to shift the agents away from the other five problems—and put all of the effort’s computing power into this one.

With that investment, the AI increased the size of its army of agents from 100 to as many as 10,000. To resolve Navier-Stokes, they sent 2.7 million messages and used 130 billion output tokens—the rough equivalent of a million books. The company says their work was completed on Saturday and computer-verified on Sunday.


The news of a result surprised even the wonkiest researchers inside OpenAI, who scrambled to check it by using their own AI agents.

Dan Roberts was at a park with his kids when he got word of the breakthrough on Slack.

Cheuk Hei Chu found out when he looked at his phone after emerging from an escape room.

OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen was asleep in Tokyo and woke up to several frantic calls.

“I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night,” he said.

But it wouldn’t be the last sleepless night for the OpenAI team.

In recent months, solving the kind of math problems that most people find unintelligible has become a subject of vicious competition between the world’s most valuable AI companies.

And in the hours leading up to publication, that rivalry blew up in a very human way.

OpenAI says it began the furious sprint to a Navier-Stokes resolution last week, after hearing rumors that a Millennium Prize problem had been solved—by Anthropic.

As it turned out, the rumors concerned work by Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge and New York University math professor Tristan Buckmaster on a related question about fluid dynamics. OpenAI says it contacted them over the weekend to discuss publishing the results at the same time. From there, the accounts diverge. Before OpenAI released its proof, Buckmaster published his work with Alpöge.

Buckmaster said in a statement that he and Alpöge used models from both Anthropic and OpenAI in their work, and he asked OpenAI whether its new model had been trained on or had access to those sessions.

OpenAI said that neither its agents nor researchers saw the competing unpublished work until it was released publicly. The company said it was unlikely that data from people using its products had helped improve the models, but it couldn’t rule out the possibility.

The proof that was published Tuesday dates back to the 1800s, when Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes developed a set of partial differential equations that would later help us design airplanes, forecast the weather and understand how blood flows through our bodies.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute made the Navier-Stokes equation one of the seven problems worthy of a million-dollar bounty. The prizes were meant to draw attention to how little we knew about math—no matter how many of us have suffered through high-school algebra.

In 2010, a reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman was honored for proving the Poincaré conjecture, the first Millennium Prize Problem to be solved. Then he proved just how unpredictable humans can be when he declined the money.

OpenAI won’t be collecting the $1 million, either.

“Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models,” the company said. “We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize.”

The Information : How Six AWS Engineers Rebuilt Bedrock to Challenge Microsoft

How Six AWS Engineers Rebuilt Bedrock to Challenge Microsoft

The Takeaway
  • AWS Bedrock faced early performance issues, prompting a rebuild with Project Mantle.
  • Mantle improved Bedrock’s reliability and scalability for complex AI workloads.
  • Rebuilt Bedrock now draws spending from Azure, accelerating AWS growth.

In early 2025, things were tense inside Amazon’s cloud unit. Bedrock, a new service designed to run AI models, was proving buggy. Customers were getting error messages repeatedly and sometimes waiting weeks for the computing capacity they needed, according to people with knowledge of the customer issues.

As these problems surged, a senior engineering leader, Anthony Liguori, led a team that came up with a plan for a revamped version of Bedrock—known as Project Mantle—designed to fix the throttling and error messages and enable the service to scale to serve larger numbers of users, said two of the people with direct knowledge of the situation. Liguori worked with five other senior engineers to build Mantle using AWS’ in-house AI coding tool, Kiro.

Mantle launched in December last year. A few months later, AWS added OpenAI models to Bedrock’s array of models—which include Anthropic’s Claude, among others. Business is booming.

AWS is now drawing some spending away from Microsoft’s Azure, according to Randall Hunt, chief technology officer at consulting firm Caylent, which advises businesses on how to use AWS. While AWS is bigger than Azure by cloud market share and revenue, Microsoft’s cloud unit previously was able to exclusively offer OpenAI models, giving it an edge over other cloud firms.

Customers are “able to get consistent, reliable performance from Bedrock as opposed to Azure where the performance was a little bit of guesswork,” he said. Hunt said spending on AWS by his financial services clients has grown by five times since May. He says AWS’ AI service offers better performance than rivals like Microsoft.

Amazon said in July that it added more customers to Bedrock in the first half of 2026 than in the service’s first two years, and customers spent more on Bedrock in the second quarter than in all prior quarters combined. Amazon doesn’t break out Bedrock’s revenue, but it reported that AWS’s growth rate accelerated 9 percentage points, to 37%, in the second quarter. Microsoft’s Azure grew 42%, 2 percentage points faster than in the previous quarter.

Microsoft said in a statement that “as AI adoption grows and workloads evolve from model development toward large-scale inference and agent-based applications, Microsoft has continually advanced its AI stack to support changing customer needs and increasing AI demand.”

Bedrock’s early struggles show how the mammoth compute needs of AI have bedeviled even AWS, the industry’s top cloud provider by market share.

An AWS spokesperson said in a statement: “To keep pace with surging demand on Bedrock, we rebuilt its inference engine from the ground up with performance and security in mind. Our approach is clearly resonating with customers. Bedrock is the fastest growing multi-billion-dollar service in AWS history and is used by hundreds of thousands of customers.”


Technical Challenges

AWS launched Bedrock in the fall of 2023, nearly a year after ChatGPT’s introduction in late 2022 kicked off the AI race. Amazon had previously offered AI-powered tools such as SageMaker. But ChatGPT’s popularity caught the company off guard. AWS engineers worked 60-hour weeks to build a service that allowed customers to connect their cloud applications to large language models, according to someone who worked on it.

AWS needed a new service partly because customers couldn’t run leading AI models on its existing systems. Unlike other kinds of software, the models work with proprietary weights that AI firms closely guard and wouldn’t allow customers to access.

But the quick engineering to set up Bedrock led to a product that at times felt “glued together,” according to two people who worked on it later on. Its design meant it didn’t make full use of the AI chip capacity it had, which led to customers getting error messages and hampered AWS’ efforts to scale Bedrock for larger numbers of users, according to one of the people and someone else who worked on it.

An AWS spokesperson said, “We’re constantly making changes to our services and striving for perfection, but [we] also know that operating at our scale will occasionally surface unforeseen challenges, which we identify, communicate to customers and resolve as quickly as possible.”

Meanwhile, capacity was also increasingly a problem for customers. Each user got a base amount of capacity, and if they started to use more, they would be limited until AWS could unlock more compute. For some customers, that wait time could be up to three weeks, a former employee said.

A constant stream of customers throughout 2025 complained about Amazon throttling their access to Anthropic models, according to a person who worked on the product. AWS leaders at one point were concerned that AI coding startup Lovable would defect from Bedrock as a result of its struggles to use Anthropic on Bedrock, The Information previously reported.

In early 2025, an internal report circulated within the AWS sales team said that Bedrock’s technology challenges were undermining efforts to woo customers, according to someone with direct knowledge of the note. Around the time, senior leaders called Bedrock’s capacity problems a “disaster,” The Information reported last year.

Hunt said his clients found that Anthropic ran as much as 63% slower on Bedrock, as measured by tokens per second, than if they went directly to Anthropic in 2024. When businesses go directly to an AI firm, they connect to the model via an application programming interface, although cloud servers host the model. Anthropic used Google Cloud in addition to AWS to offer direct connections via API for its models.

Bedrock’s issues even raised the ire of senior executives in other divisions of Amazon. Dave Treadwell, then a senior vice president in Amazon’s e-commerce division, told AWS leaders in early 2025 that consistent error messages and capacity issues on Bedrock made him want to switch to OpenAI models running directly from the ChatGPT firm, according to two people who heard the comments. OpenAI models that run directly from OpenAI have done so mostly via Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

A person close to Amazon disputes Treadwell, who is now at AWS, made the comment.

Mantle’s Fix

Then came Liguori’s suggestion to create a new version of Bedrock. At AWS’ annual Re:Invent customer conference last December, Dave Brown, then head of its cloud server business, introduced Mantle—a new layer of technology to run Bedrock—and explained that it was designed to let AWS scale the Bedrock service to meet anticipated future demand.

“As models evolve and usage grew, it became clear that inference needed a different architecture,” Brown said in a keynote speech at the event. (Brown recently left AWS and joined Meta Platforms).

Brown also pointed out a shortcoming in Bedrock’s initial design: It was set up using principles applicable for handling requests for standard web services.

But running AI models to power applications—a process known as inference—is more complicated than running older cloud services, where customers store data and pull it out for analysis or other applications. Inference requires finding enough servers to handle workloads even as demand fluctuates constantly. That became especially evident in 2025, when customers were using AI for more complicated tasks.

“Inference works differently than traditional compute patterns we’ve been optimizing for for the past two decades,” Brown said at Re:Invent.

Mantle was designed to accommodate the fact that people using complex AI had “spiky” workloads—ones that take up a lot of compute suddenly and then use very little—at once, whereas older AI only allowed simpler tasks that more standard architecture could handle.

The longer-duration tasks of new AI agents also required a different system to allocate capacity, a spokesperson said.

To solve the problem with spiking at scale, Mantle introduced a new feature where customers could assign different levels of priority to different tasks on Bedrock, so AWS could dedicate more capacity to the ones they cared more about. Mantle also worked to separate the impact of customers’ workloads, so if one customer had a particularly intense workload, it should only affect their capacity and not another customer’s, a system akin to having multiple points of entry at a concert venue, a spokesperson said.

AWS also made Mantle more compatible with an existing AWS service called Journal, which saves an agent’s progress along the way, so customers don’t have to start from scratch if something goes wrong halfway through a long process. This helped Mantle accommodate the longer tasks people were now doing with AI.

“With Mantle, our realization is at the heart of inference is not quite a web service but more of a scheduling system,” said Joe Magerramov, a former AWS vice president who helped create Mantle, on an AWS podcast in January. (Magerramov followed Brown to Meta last month).

Directly Compatible

Mantle was also built to be directly compatible with APIs from OpenAI and Anthropic, a departure from the first version of Bedrock, which required customers to write custom code to use the AI labs’ APIs.

By early 2026, Mantle was up and running. One former employee said the time for customers to get more capacity dropped to two days in late 2025, from three weeks earlier that year. In his investor letter in 2026, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called out Mantle as the “backbone of our very successful Bedrock service.”

Also later in 2025, Bedrock started running mostly on Amazon’s own AI-specialized Trainium chips, the company said. That gave AWS a new source of computing power as the supply of Nvidia chips continued to face constraints.

To be sure, customers still sometimes encounter delays when using the service. A manager at one AWS customer, which uses Bedrock to access Anthropic Claude models via Mantle, said his firm has experienced intermittent service disruptions in the past few months, the longest of which lasted for around 11 hours.

Half a dozen clients of AI consultancy Loka have switched to running OpenAI models on Bedrock, rather than directly from OpenAI or on Azure, said machine-learning lead Bojan Jakimovski.

There are “some benefits of migrating, [like] fast inference, net more throughput,” said Jakimovski. “The cost is the same—everything is the same.”

9to5 :Apple’s latest acquisition is about technology that sounds futuristic Avat

Apple’s latest acquisition is about technology that sounds futuristic

EU filings revealed today that Apple has acquired a company called Sonera, makers of wearable-centered technology that sounds like it’s from the future.

Apple is a secretive company that often doesn’t disclose its acquisitions. But under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, certain acquisitions have to be disclosed publicly on the EU’s website.

Today the latest addition to that site is Sonera, a company that “is developing a chip-based magnetic sensor.”

Here are more details, per a Sonera press release from 2023:

Sonera has developed a new sensing modality that non-invasively measures magnetic fields generated by the body, in contrast with the electrical sensing techniques commonly used today. This proprietary technology holds the key to making brain activity as easy to measure as heart rate, temperature, and other physiological signals, and enabling data-backed insights related to movement, health, thoughts, and emotions.

The press release, first discovered by MacRumors, mentions an S1 chip which could “enable an entirely new class of consumer wearables and experiences based on muscle activity.”

Sonera’s proprietary approach “measures magnetic fields produced by the electrical currents from neural activity” and thus bypasses the need for direct skin contact.

It’s unclear how much progress Sonera has been able to make since that 2023 press release. But clearly, Apple found something of value in their technology.

The ability to read brain activity through measuring magnetic fields sounds like it could be the premise for a new Apple TV sci-fi series. But it’s easy to see lots of potential as Apple pushes further into wearables, and enhances its wearable products with AI.

What do you think Apple might use Sonera’s technology for? Let us know in the comments.