TheChek News Flow

Duncan Wanblad says buyer will probably include both government and private entities

De Beers is likely to be sold to a public-private consortium, according to the head of the diamond group’s majority owner Anglo American, after several African countries expressed interest in taking stakes.

Duncan Wanblad, chief executive of the London-listed mining group, said he hoped to wrap up the sale of De Beers this year despite the deteriorating diamond market.

“We are relatively far advanced” in the sale process, which would “almost certainly” result in the government of Botswana taking a greater ownership stake in the company, he told the FT. 

The company is nearing the end of the second stage of the bidding process, in which it will identify its preferred buyer, which would “probably be a consortium” composed of both government and private entities, he said. 

The sale of the struggling diamonds unit is part of a radical restructuring plan that Anglo undertook after fending off a hostile takeover bid by rival miner BHP in 2024. But it comes in the context of a challenging market for the precious stones amid a slowdown in luxury spending by Chinese consumers and competition from cheaper, lab-grown diamonds. 

Anglo this month warned that it may be forced to write down the value of De Beers again — for the third time in three years — when it announces its annual results next week. 

The government of Botswana is a key player in the sale process, given its existing 15 per cent stake in De Beers that President Duma Boko has been vocal about wanting to increase.

In addition, the Angolan government has expressed an interest in buying a slice of the company, with officials telling reporters on the sidelines of this week’s Indaba mining conference in South Africa that the state aimed to take a 20-30 per cent stake. 

Namibia, which produces about a tenth of De Beers’ diamonds, has also been weighing whether to bid for a minority stake in the company, according to people close to the process.

Wanblad said Botswana was “the key determinant here because they are a key shareholder in the business”. 

Given the “tough” diamond market that continued to worsen last year, the timeline for finalising the sale process would depend “on the timing of financing, more than anything else”, he said.

“I’m still hoping that it’s going to get done this year,” he added.

Anglo had initially said it aimed to complete either a sale or a public listing of De Beers by the end of 2025.

In addition to the competition from lab-grown alternatives, the diamond industry suffered last year from US import tariffs on India — which is a major polisher of the stones. That meant the material had not been “flowing as naturally”, Wanblad said. 

Once Anglo has identified its preferred bidder, the company will negotiate terms with the individual or consortium and the government of Botswana. 

While Anglo’s sale of De Beers has drawn criticism from some analysts who believe it is selling at the bottom of the market, Wanblad said it would proceed regardless.

“We should really focus on the stuff that makes the best returns for our shareholders, and it wouldn’t be holding on to De Beers,” he said.

Anthropic’s leaders have been loud about how its AI will reshape businesses but much less boisterous about how it plans to power that usage.

Now the company’s data center ambitions are coming into focus. Anthropic is quietly assembling a veteran team, including two former Google executives, and has discussed securing at least 10 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years, according to two people who have spoken with the firm’s leaders in recent weeks.

Obtaining that amount of computing power would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, though it isn’t clear how much of that Anthropic would be on the hook for. In any case, that figure is far greater than the $180 billion that Anthropic told investors it would spend on servers through 2029.

Anthropic has privately discussed getting 10 GW by renting capacity from cloud providers the way it currently does and, notably, by leasing its own data center space, meaning it would likely purchase and operate the server equipment that goes inside of it.

So far, Anthropic has said it planned to invest $50 billion in data center capacity through a partnership with startup Fluidstack, involving data centers in Texas, New York, and other locations. It did not provide a timeline for that investment or say how the money would be used or how much capacity it might buy. Ten gigawatts of capacity would require far more capital.

Anthropic’s move toward direct leasing suggests it wants to have more control over its servers. It could also help the company save money over time.

To put 10 GW into perspective, Amazon Web Services last week said it brought nearly 4 GW of capacity online in 2025, a period in which its sales increased $20 billion year over year. As of September last year, OpenAI privately disclosed it had contracts in place for 8 GW by 2028.

For now, OpenAI seems to be content with renting data center capacity from major cloud providers, such as Oracle, Microsoft and AWS. OpenAI has publicly discussed its ambitions to control its own facilities, but its recent announcement about a partnership to develop 10 GW of data centers with Nvidia’s help has not materialized. (However, OpenAI has been discussing deals with “colocation providers,” which essentially offer pre-built data centers to which customers can bring their own server hardware).

To shape its strategy, Anthropic has hired data center executives with decades of experience. Among them are Tim Hughes, chief development officer at data center firm Stack Infrastructure, who is set to begin in a few weeks, according to someone with direct knowledge. Stack is owned by major data center financier Blue Owl Capital and is building a massive data center for Oracle (and Oracle customer OpenAI) in New Mexico.

Anthropic also hired Brett Rogers, who led data center construction and design at Google for nearly six years until 2021, this person said. Rogers joined Anthropic a few months ago, this person said.

These previously unreported hires join Winnie Leung, Anthropic’s head of data center infrastructure, who arrived last year after more than two decades at Google, including as a director of engineering for data center operations.

Anthropic’s recruiting from Google is no accident. Anthropic is a major user of Google’s tensor processing units and recently struck a deal to buy $20 billion of them from Broadcom, which co-designs the chips. (Google is a major investor in Anthropic, and the startup also uses Google’s cloud service.)

Several people in the data center industry said the new hires would give Anthropic greater expertise in identifying data center sites and give it more intelligence about which developers are more reliable than others, so that it can aim to avoid delays that are increasingly common in the field.

Leasing data center capacity is common among large companies, but startups have a harder time signing such deals because they don’t have strong balance sheets or credit ratings, making it too risky for lenders to underwrite debt for the facilities’ owners. To get around these issues, AI startups have historically partnered with cloud providers, which sign long-term leases and rent out servers to the startups.

To lease facilities before it goes public—which would likely strengthen its credit rating and balance sheet—Anthropic will likely need financial backing from a major credit-worthy partner, such as a large cloud provider or chip supplier, to serve as a so-called credit “backstop.” (This would make lenders feel more comfortable, because they would still get paid even if Anthropic defaulted on its lease payments.)

For instance, Anthropic plans to put TPUs in an upcoming Louisiana data center Fluidstack leased, and Google agreed to provide a financial backstop on Fluidstack’s payments. The Google backstop structure was critical to securing financing from lenders, according to people involved in the deal.

Now, it’s Anthropic's turn to see if it can line up similar financial arrangements like Fluidstack. I’m already hearing that major infrastructure investors are willing to fund Anthropic’s buildout, so I’m sure it will only be a matter of time until we see these deals get done.

Space Race

While Anthropic focuses on data centers on earth…everyone is talking about data centers in space! That’s after Elon Musk framed SpaceX’s acquisition of his AI lab, xAI, as part of his lofty vision to build data centers in orbit—though his blog post announcing the $250 billion acquisition didn’t explain how xAI actually fits into that vision. (My colleagues previously wrote about this topic here and here.)

Orbital data centers, made up of satellites harnessing the Sun’s rays, are inevitable because power will become too difficult to find on Earth, making space a cheaper and faster way to build computing capacity, Musk argued in an interview with John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel last week.

Not only does it take too long to get power from the grid, but xAI can’t build its own gas turbine power plants fast enough to keep up with its ambitions.

“The turbines are sold out through 2030,” he said, implying that he thinks he might have to start making his own turbine blades to ease supply constraints.

Not everyone sees space data centers as a near-term priority. AWS CEO Matt Garman said in an interview last week that he thinks we’re “pretty far” away from making space data centers possible. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the TBPN podcast that he doesn’t think space data centers will provide a meaningful amount of compute power in the next five years. That may not be a surprise, given how far ahead SpaceX is in launching rockets compared to every other rocket-launching firm.

“I wish Elon luck,” Altman said.

François Villeroy de Galhau to quit in June, before his term was due to end after 2027 presidential election

France’s central bank chief François Villeroy de Galhau is stepping down early to run a charitable foundation, allowing French President Emmanuel Macron to fill the key role by this summer and before the presidential election of 2027.

Villeroy de Galhau, who has been in the job for nearly 11 years, said in a statement he would leave the Bank of France in early June. His latest six-year term had been due to run until October 2027. He will take over the chairmanship of a children’s and social inclusion charity founded by Catholic priests, and said his decision was personal.

“By June, a little more than a year before the end of my second term, it seems to me I will have accomplished the core of my mission,” Villeroy de Galhau said in a statement, stressing the bank’s role in “underpinning confidence throughout various crises”.

The move is unusual, however. The timing means Macron will name a replacement before the presidential contest of 2027.

Macron cannot stand again for a third term. The far-right is polling far ahead of potential contenders on the left or from a central bloc, with Marine Le Pen and her number two Jordan Bardella riding high in election run-off scenarios.

Villeroy de Galhau, who was appointed for his first six-year term by Socialist president François Hollande in 2015, was in charge of the central bank during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent efforts by the French government to boost the economy.

He has been highly visible in France, including as a commentator on the economy, recently warning over the country’s high deficit. In the past two years, he has often been cited as a possible candidate for prime minister.

Since 2024, several governments appointed by Macron have fallen in quick succession as lawmakers wrangled over the budget, after a legislative election splintered the French parliament.

Villeroy de Galhau was also an advocate for lower interest rates at the ECB. His exit comes ahead of a sweeping reshuffle in top European Central Bank jobs by the end of 2027, which will culminate in the replacement of its president Christine Lagarde.

Lagarde said the ECB’s governing council has “benefited enormously from the realism combined with strong European convictions and vision” that Villeroy de Galhau “always brings to the table”.

In a letter to employees shared by the Bank of France, Villeroy de Galhau, who turns 67 later this month, said he had been approached by the Fondation Apprentis d’Auteil and was leaving the central bank of his own accord.

“I naturally took this important decision independently . . . I informed the president (of France) and government authorities a few days ago, as well as the president of the ECB,” Villeroy de Galhau wrote.

The succession race could include internal and external candidates, and the person put forward by the president would need to be approved by the finance committees in the Senate and lower house of parliament.

France’s deputy central bank governor Agnès Bénassy-Quéré is also seen as a strong contender for an ECB board seat.

The investment is Apollo’s second in a chip vehicle for xAI, which merged with SpaceX.

Apollo Global Management, one of Wall Street’s biggest private credit firms, is nearing a deal to lend about $3.4 billion to an investment vehicle that will purchase Nvidia chips and lease them to Elon Musk’s xAI, which just merged with SpaceX, said a person with knowledge of the deal.

The deal would be Apollo’s second big investment in a vehicle to lease chips to xAI, following a similar $3.5 billion loan it made in November. Apollo is also planning to invest in the equity of the new vehicle, which is aiming to raise $5.3 billion in equity and debt, the person said.

The investment, which could be finalized as soon as this week, is designed to relieve some of the financial pressures on xAI as Musk lays out grand ambitions to build the world’s biggest data centers for developing AI models. Valor Equity Partners, a longtime investor in Musk’s companies, is arranging the deal.

The vehicle is part of a larger effort by Valor to raise $20 billion in debt and equity for AI chips it will install in xAI data centers.

Apollo agreed to the deal before Musk decided to merge xAI with SpaceX, effectively bolting his cash-burning AI company and social media business onto his crown jewel, the space company. The combined company is preparing for an initial public offering that aims to raise $50 billion. Bonds xAI issued last year have rallied following news of the merger, pushing down yields.

Through last fall, xAI was burning through more than $1 billion a month, according to financial documents for the first nine months of 2025. The company spent $7.8 billion on property and equipment purchases in that period as it raced to build massive data centers for developing its Grok series of AI models.

Its closest startup competitors, Anthropic and OpenAI, have also spent heavily on research and computing resources, but both are generating billions of dollars in revenue from their AI products. Musk’s AI company recorded nearly $210 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2025.

Musk did not face too much friction in raising money for xAI. The company said last month it had raised $20 billion from investors in a separate fundraising, $5 billion more than it initially expected. That’s on top of about $19 billion in previous rounds of fundraising, according to documents viewed by The Information.

However, he has increasingly turned to the debt markets and his most loyal backers to fund his ambitious plans to build the world’s largest AI data centers. In the summer, he tapped Morgan Stanley to raise about $5 billion in debt carrying 12.5% interest rates.

Valor has a long history of backing Musk’s companies. Its CEO, Antonio Gracias, serves on the board of SpaceX, according to a biography on the firm’s website, and has described himself as Musk’s close friend. In 2008, Valor arranged $40 million in bridge financing to keep Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, afloat.

In the past, Valor partners, including Gracias, have embedded themselves inside Musk’s companies to provide expertise during pivotal moments, including at Tesla during a production crisis and at Twitter, later renamed X, after Musk restructured it.

Apollo, which manages more than $900 billion in assets, has been ramping up efforts to finance AI chips and data centers. The firm last year purchased Texas-based Stream Data Centers and has been exploring ways to invest money from its life insurance arm in computing facilities for large tech companies.

Apollo often steps in to back companies that are struggling to raise cash. It usually demands high returns and strict protections against losses. Christopher Lahoud, an Apollo partner who led a deal in 2021 to rescue rental car company Hertz from bankruptcy, is overseeing the firm’s xAI investment.

The Apollo debt for the vehicle is expected to carry an interest rate of 9.5%, said the person with knowledge of the deal. Apollo is also planning to sell a portion of the debt to other firms and has been helping to sell equity in the vehicle, the person said. An Apollo spokesperson declined to comment.

In a pitch to equity investors, Valor projected they could earn annual returns greater than 22% if the vehicle is able to sell the chips and data center equipment for one-quarter their purchase price five years from now, a scenario it presented as a “base case.”

Investors could make annual returns of almost 17% in the firm’s “downside case”—that is, if the vehicle is able to sell the chips to refiners for the value of their raw materials, including gold and copper, according to the documents viewed by The Information. Investors could make similar returns if xAI renewed its lease for another three years at a discount ranging from 40% to 70%, the documents said.

As OpenAI faces intensifying pressure from rival Anthropic’s improved coding tools, CEO Sam Altman is telling employees and investors that his company is seeing its share of momentum.

Altman told OpenAI employees on Friday that ChatGPT, the company’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, is “back to exceeding 10% monthly growth,” according to an internal Slack message viewed by CNBC. OpenAI is also preparing to launch “an updated Chat model” this week, Altman said.

More than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week, but Google and Anthropic have been gaining ground. OpenAI declared a “code red” in December to improve ChatGPT, and temporarily sidelined several projects to focus on that effort.

In his message on Friday, Altman said OpenAI’s coding product, Codex, grew about 50% from a week ago. Codex competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has seen a wave of adoption over the last year.

OpenAI launched a new Codex model, GPT‑5.3-Codex, last week, as well as a stand-alone app for users with Apple

computers. Altman said Codex’s growth is “insane,” according to the internal message.

“This was a great week,” Altman wrote.

It was also a contentious week.

Altman and other senior executives took to social media to respond to swipes from Anthropic, which ran Super Bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI’s decision to run ads within ChatGPT. In a post on X, Altman said that the commercials were “deceptive” and that OpenAI would “obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them.”

On Monday, OpenAI will officially begin testing ads within ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Last month the company said the ads will be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers and will not influence ChatGPT’s responses.

OpenAI expects ads to make up less than half of its revenue long term, the person said. The digital ad market has long been dominated by Google and Meta, with Amazon

becoming a bigger player in recent years.

Message to investors

Altman and CFO Sarah Friar have been selling investors on OpenAI’s growth story as the company looks to wrap up what could be a $100 billion fundraising round, sources told CNBC.

In private meetings, the executives are highlighting OpenAI’s strength with consumers, growing enterprise business and access to compute, according one person, who asked not to be named because the talks are private.

OpenAI has been circulating charts as part of the discussions. One chart shows that Codex, based on internal data, is eating into Claude Code’s market share, according to a screenshot seen by CNBC.

OpenAI expects fundraising talks to heat up over the next two weeks, one person said. OpenAI closed a $41 billion round in March than included a $30 billion contribution from SoftBank and $11 billion from other investors.

The current funding round could close in two parts, as CNBC previously reported. The first would include capital from Microsoft and Nvidia as well as Amazon

, which is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in the company. Other contributions from participants like SoftBank, which has discussed putting in another $30 billion, would follow.

The details of the round are fluid and could still change.