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AI is eating away at software’s superpower: profit-rich recurring revenue. The good news? Companies—and investors—are starting to adapt.

Over the past year, no industry has come under greater scrutiny than software. The once unstoppable cloud business model is facing new threats from artificial intelligence. Former highfliers like Salesforce and Adobe are being forced to prove their relevance. Their stocks get hammered with every rumor and announcement from AI labs. Despite a spring rebound, the closely followed iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund is still down 15% over the past year.

But software isn’t going away, and there are companies that will survive and thrive through the AI transformation. After a year of mostly indiscriminate selling, investors are becoming more selective, recognizing there is nuance within software when it comes to AI.

So far, despite the shock of software’s selloff, the pattern that’s playing out is consistent with prior technology inflections, in which hardware wins first. We see that today in AI, with chips and cloud stocks soaring; The PHLX Semiconductor Index is up 108% in the past year.

This wave of spending also forces a trade-off: Higher capital expenditures on hardware means there’s less money available in IT budgets for software purchases. That reality came into sharp focus this past week when IBM released disappointing results that seemed to stun investors.

“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases,” CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to shareholders.

Customers bought fewer IBM mainframe computers than anticipated, and less associated software. The stock fell 25% on the announcement. The good news is that other software stocks held tight—evidence of software’s next, more discriminating phase.

Eventually infrastructure—even the AI models themselves—will become commoditized and the so-called application layer, i.e., software, will take over in importance and profit. The process will take years, but some existing software players will be among the winners.

As investors make their peace with software’s future, they’ll need to rethink what software means in an AI-first world. Lots of AI-native start-ups have gotten a head start on doing exactly that. They’re unencumbered by legacy baggage, from existing sources of revenue to bloated costs and code. But technology disruption doesn’t entail wholesale replacement—see Walmart’s e-commerce success, Microsoft’s cloud prowess, and JPMorgan Chase’s fintech bona fides.

The Software Apocalypse

The cloud software model that emerged over the past two decades has been wildly successful. Its user-based subscriptions were a good deal for customers thanks to continuous software updates and lower internal IT expenses. It was an even better deal for the cloud providers themselves, which saw recurring revenue and big profits. The marginal cost to the vendor for each new user is low. Consequently, gross profit margin is very high—somewhere between 70% and 90%. For comparison, Apple, one of the best-run companies in the world, has gross margins below 50%.

In 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen observed that “software is eating the world,” and he was right.

Through the 2010s, VC and private-credit investments flowed into the sector, eclipsing other industries. These software start-ups—many of which are now giant public companies—typically saw high sales growth, coupled with mounting free cash flow.

But AI has thrown a wrench into the machine, putting the outsize growth and cash generation at risk. Now it’s AI that’s eating software.

In the enterprise, AI’s earliest use case has been writing software, which is leading customers to make their own custom applications. In its latest earnings call, software company Palantir Technologies claimed it had replaced its customer-relations management vendor with an internally developed application. This may be a particularly appealing path for smaller companies that see large software packages as overkill.

But the bigger threat may be agents, which can use AI models to accomplish a complex series of tasks from a simple conversational prompt. Bots already outnumber people on the internet, and if trends continue, there will soon be far more agents on enterprise networks than humans. Machines replacing humans is a worst-case scenario for companies that charge by the person.

Moreover, as these agents continue to develop, they will begin to supplant more software functions, and make customers wonder why they are paying for subscriptions at all. The good news for tech investors is that software companies are already transitioning to hybrid sales models that include revenue based on AI consumption. The bad news is that consumption models carry a lower gross margin, depriving software of its profit-generating superpower.

Investors frequently talk about the “software industry” as a monolith tracked by a broad index like the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, which holds stocks in over 100 companies. But underneath the “software” rubric lies a lot of variability. For some software providers, the AI inflection is a boost for their business.

There are mountains of data that go into making AI models, but the key to effective implementation is the proprietary data that lives on enterprise networks. It’s what fuels agent work, and it can be used to refine AI models for bespoke purposes. Software companies that help AI work with data look to be winners.

Oracle and its industry-leading database software would be the primary example, but the company is busy transforming itself into a cloud giant, and that has overtaken the core software story. The cleaner story is Snowflake, which provides a platform for enterprises to warehouse their cloud data, and combines everything into “data lakes” that are ready for agents to use. Moreover, Snowflake already has a consumption-based revenue model and the lower gross margin that comes with it—66% for the latest one-year period.

Snowflake stock is up 88% in the past three months, as investors begin the process of differentiating software vendors.

Then there’s Palantir Technologies, perhaps the longest-running AI winner in software. The company makes structured data lakes for its customers, and builds custom applications on top of them. Despite some recent weakness for the stock, Palantir is bringing value to the data estates of enterprises. It’s offering the increasingly important operating layer that links people, AI models, and enterprise data. Its 84% gross margin shows software profits and AI aren’t incompatible.

Datadog is another example. The firm’s software allows customers to automate the monitoring of their information technology, which includes agents and other AI infrastructure. Like Palantir, Datadog avoids user-based pricing, and still gets an 80% gross margin.

AI also creates a favorable environment for cybersecurity companies because the technology enables traditional attacks to be carried out at a scale and speed that humans can’t match.

Enterprises are beginning to recognize the need for beefed-up protection. Last week, Microsoft used AI to patch more than 500 vulnerabilities to its own software, smashing the previous month’s record.

Most companies, though, will need help. CrowdStrike Holdings and Palo Alto Networks offer the broadest security platform and continue to make acquisitions to fill holes in their AI security portfolios. Their stocks are up 95% and 112%, respectively, over the past three months. They’ll continue to thrive as the AI threat grows.

Meanwhile, agents themselves have become an attack surface, with entirely new sorts of exploits, like prompt injections. It means enterprises will have to authenticate who—and what—they want running on their networks—and issue permissions and restrictions. That fits in with Okta’s wheelhouse. Its shares have risen 105% over the past three months.

The AI success for data and cyber companies comes with a trade-off for investors. The stocks are all pricey. Adjusting for share-based compensation, they trade at multiples of expected earnings ranging from 37 to 148.

Investors can find better deals elsewhere in software.

At the center of the software apocalypse are the full-featured cloud applications that still rely on the seat-based subscription model. This includes offerings from Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, and other cloud natives like Atlassian, Workday, and ServiceNow. The stocks in this group are where investors can find the best value.

SAP trades at 18 estimated earnings for the next 12 months, well below the S&P 500 index’s multiple. At 20 times, Microsoft trades roughly in line with the large-cap index, after years of fetching a substantial premium. Salesforce has a forward price/earnings ratio of just 12, after starting the year at 20. In June, the stock was down 14 trading days in a row.

Executives at these firms will have to reread Clayton Christensen’s The Innovators’ Dilemma and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive and live the lessons therein.

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction,” Grove wrote in his 1996 book.

AI is what Grove would have referred to as a “strategic inflection point,” which are “full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient,” he said. “A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness.”

The CEOs of these adapters have to rethink their value propositions and pricing models for this new world and be willing to sacrifice software’s golden gross margin. The offset will come from cutting operating expenses, especially in sales and marketing, typically the largest expense. Winners will be determined by strategy and flexibility, which in the end comes down to leadership. Business as usual won’t do.

The companies that have the best chance of success are the ones deeply embedded in their customers’ business processes, namely Microsoft and SAP. Much of the unique data produced by enterprises live inside Microsoft and SAP software, which remain crucial links between people and machines—not something AI will change. Their applications will be hard to dislodge, especially in government and highly regulated industries with strict requirements.

Microsoft also has AI servers for rent in the cloud and owns about a quarter of OpenAI, so it has other ways of offsetting losses in the company’s business software. SAP is less dependent on per-user licenses than other vendors, accounting for less than 40% of its sales, according to the company.

Salesforce, one of the first cloud software firms, is AI’s greatest wild card. Once the disrupter, it is now on the cutting table.

Salesforce seems willing to try anything, and disrupt everything. It has its own agents for sale under the Agentforce banner that deliberately cannibalize its own offerings. Annual recurring revenue for these agents remains relatively small, $1.2 billion at last count, but that has tripled from the year before. Salesforce had $43 billion in total sales in the past 12 months.

Salesforce has implemented more flexible pricing, combining subscriptions with consumption-based plans. It has been willing to put its apps into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, helping the start-up to get between Salesforce and its customers. It made an $8 billion acquisition of Informatica last year to bring itself closer to the data infrastructure group described above. Informatica provides $1.1 billion in annual recurring revenue at last count.

Maybe most dramatically, Salesforce has released a “headless” version of its software, with no human interface. It is meant for agents from any vendor to operate, cutting people out the picture entirely.

Salesforce is showing the kind of hustle that every software firm will need to survive in the AI age. It’s no guarantee of success, though—it’s the bare minimum. When Microsoft began preparing for the mobile revolution in the mid-1990s, it seemed to have every advantage—cash flow, technology, and strong brand recognition. It released mobile operating systems for the next two decades, and they were all failures. Windows was once the dominant operating system in the world; now it’s in third place behind Alphabet’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

“Coping with the relentless onslaught of technology change was akin to trying to climb a mudslide raging down a hill,” Christensen wrote in the Innovator’s Dilemma. “You have to scramble with everything you’ve got to stay on top of it, and if you ever once stop to catch your breath, you get buried.”

Some software companies are destined to get buried. Picking the ones that can adapt will be profitable for investors.

For some software makers, even hustle might not be enough. For companies in the creative field, AI represents unstoppable disruption. In the same way that software once revolutionized publishing and design, AI is changing the tools used by creative industries to make everything from Hollywood films to the fliers in bodega windows.

Unlike at Microsoft and SAP, Adobe’s customers aren’t locked in. They have other choices that are less expensive. One seat of Adobe Creative Suite costs $70 a month, much of which is now replaceable by a $20 ChatGPT account that can produce art at great scale and speed.

Adobe’s profitability demonstrates its many years of success and impressive pricing power. Its gross margin was 89% over the past 12 months. But AI changes the equation. On a five-designer team, four can now use AI. If only one buys Adobe’s software, Adobe’s take-home pay falls precipitously.

AI is making life difficult for other more focused software makers, as well. So-called point solutions like Asana, Monday.com, and Docusign make tailored software that solve a small set of problems. AI offers credible alternatives in each area. Homework help and educational site Chegg may be the best example. The firm identified the AI threat in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT’s initial launch. With a stock that now trades at 78 cents, Chegg may have been the market’s first AI casualty. It won’t be the last.

Software investors have focused on the frontier AI labs—primarily OpenAI and Anthropic—as the source of the threat, and with good reason. Though their cloud computing expenses are astronomical, sales are growing rapidly, and they’re likely to be public before long.

But we are already seeing a c onvergence in AI model capabilities, and there seems to be a new best product every few weeks. The top models from six different labs, including Chinese Zhipu AI, are clustered near the top of benchmark rankings. There is a range of pricing, with Zhipu and Elon Musk’s SpaceX charging much less than OpenAI and Anthropic. For the AI model makers, it isn’t a great sign to see pricing battles this early in their development.

Intelligence is destined to be commoditized, and that’s when software built on top of the models will begin to rise. Today’s AI is mostly about chatbots and coding agents, but it won’t stop there. A host of well-funded AI start-ups are rethinking what software means in the AI age, and in the end, they will be the biggest challenge to today’s incumbents.

**TTN Note: CONTEXT: The proposal appears to be the Trump administration’s revived framework for voluntary federal pre-release engagement with developers of powerful AI models, particularly where models could create cyber or national-security risks. Bessent’s role matters because Treasury has focused on spillovers to financial infrastructure and payment systems, widening AI policy beyond the usual technology and national-security agencies. The plan reportedly followed delays and industry pushback against an earlier version, making Bessent’s involvement a signal of stronger White House coordination rather than a purely advisory Treasury role. (washingtonpost.com)

Silicon Valley’s enormous surge in riches has turbocharged the market for new and used planes, energizing startups that offer innovative ways to gain access to an aircraft.

After Bill Papariella, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.–based entrepreneur, sold his private jet charter business for nearly $1 billion in 2022, he took it easy for a couple years. But as the number of ultrawealthy continued to climb in the U.S., another business idea struck him: a company that offered fractional jet ownership, like NetJets, but with a service designed as an even more premium product.

Last October, he launched Bond, planning a private plane fleet with interiors lined in Loro Piana textiles, custom crystal from French brand Saint-Louis and cabin attendants on every flight. To give Bond a heightened sense of exclusivity, Papariella capped the company’s initial membership at around 100 people, who pay between $1.1 million and $3.5 million a year depending on the aircraft. Its members have an average net worth of $500 million, and about 30% of them hail from Silicon Valley—founders, researchers and engineers at companies like xAI, Anthropic and OpenAI, many of them under the age of 34, Papariella said. (He wouldn’t comment publicly on anyone’s identity.) Flights on a fleet of 20 airplanes will begin in 2027.

“The amount of influx we’ve had from the youth has been something I did not see coming,” said Papariella, speaking from a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea recently. “That’s only happened over the last two months.”

Members of Silicon Valley’s old guard, like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Alex Karp, have been drawing headlines for prolific private plane travel for years. But now the AI boom’s giant paychecks and swelling equity packages have propelled a new generation of techies into the realm of personal planes. That has thrown the aviation industry into overdrive, with the prospect of more giant IPOs already fueling further demand, experts said.

A couple years ago, someone who wanted to buy a new Bombardier or a Gulfstream jet could get one in 18 months or less. These days, they can expect to wait two to three years. Prices for used models are rising steeply as well, just as used automobile prices soared during the pandemic.

“At the high end, we see a 15% price increase—approaching 20%—which could be $6 [million] to 8 million on a $40 million asset,” said Greg Sydor, a sales director at Guardian Jet, one of the world’s biggest brokers of private planes. “It’s a lot.”

The frenzied private plane market provides a window into this moment of economic fortune and froth. The popularity of private jets, which can cost up to $80 million or more, means they are an increasingly important consideration for financial advisers and portfolio managers, experts said. The wealthy are also using them as a tool for tax avoidance—thanks in no small part to President Donald Trump, who signed tax bills in both of his terms that included a significant write-off for private plane owners.

“This moment has, I believe, never existed in history,” said Izzy Slodowitz, founder of Craft, another startup offering fractional jet ownership. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. People are not starting at the bottom like they used to. They’re making a different type of money.”

San Francisco saw the fastest growth of any of the top 10 U.S. cities for private jet traffic in the first six months of 2026, with the number of flights increasing 10.7% over the same period in 2025, according to WingX, which compiles data on the industry. Overall, flights are up about 5% in these cities, which count for the majority of private flight traffic in the U.S.

Given the skyrocketing demand, hangar space for private aircraft has grown tight in the Bay Area, New York and beyond, with monthly storage costs for larger planes increasing to as much as $60,000 a month, up double-digit percentage points over the last couple of years, said venture capitalist Adam Grosser, chair of San Carlos, Calif.–based UP.Partners, who owns two airplanes and has been a pilot for more than 30 years.

“There’s literally no space on the airfield,” Grosser said. “And that is a nationwide phenomenon.”

Grosser estimates that his Gulfstream G550, a long-range business jet that is particularly popular, has appreciated more than 20% since he bought it two years ago. Recently, he acquired a smaller plane, a 2008 Cessna Citation Encore+, on the secondary market for about $3.5 million. It uses less fuel and is better suited for shorter trips.

The wealthy tend to first get interested in private plane travel when they charter jets, said Preston Holland, founder of Prestige Aircraft Finance, a financial advisory for jet buyers, and host of “The VIP Seat,” a podcast about private planes. The people who charter jets—which cost several thousand dollars per hour, depending on plane size—tend to have at least $20 million in net worth and $2 million in annual income, he said.

When they reach $100 million to $200 million in net worth and $20 million in income, people often start thinking about buying their own plane, Holland said. And where tech wealth made up about 20% of the demand for private plane travel a decade ago, Holland estimates it’s about 40% now.

The wheels of this demand have been greased by a culture that is increasingly less shy about wealth, especially in Silicon Valley, where maximizing productivity and speed has never been more important. In this crowd, the ability to fly to a meeting or visit an asset like a data center located far away from major airports and make it home by dinner has an obvious appeal, private aviation experts said.

“Tech eligible buyers in the past coming out of California were probably a little less inclined to buy an airplane because of the politics,” Sydor said. “That’s changing a little bit. New tech money is feeling more empowered to buy aircraft, especially as they view it more as a utilitarian thing as opposed to a luxury.”

Craft, the startup founded by Slodowitz, is well tailored for this moment of mega-IPOs. The company’s core business is chartering planes for people to fly around the world. Recently, it also began offering discounted access to its planes through what is called an exchange fund.

The financial product allows people who own a large chunk of publicly traded stock to transfer that equity into the fund and in exchange receive shares of the fund, without needing to pay any taxes. Investors in the fund share ownership of the stocks and ownership in Craft’s charter jet business, which allows them to get a cut of Craft’s revenue or use its planes at a discount. The minimum investment is $1.5 million.

Investors in the exchange fund include Kleiner Perkins’ Ilya Fushman and Spark Capital founder Santo Politi. Ten people connected to Nvidia—mostly current and former employees—have already purchased shares of the fund, Slodowitz said, and talks are ongoing with employees from OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. (People cannot participate in the exchange fund until their shares are publicly traded and no longer subject to lockup periods.)

Slodowitz, a former professional pilot, fell into the world of the Silicon Valley elite after taking Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra to Burning Man one year and camping with Sciarra’s friends. Slodowitz started Craft in 2020 as a traditional charter jet operator but soon realized that the tech industry’s hefty equity packages raised an interesting set of issues for beneficiaries—namely, having to pay a sizable tax bill upon sale, and running the risks associated with highly concentrated portfolios.

“I realized that none of these people have an aviation problem. They have a stock problem,” Slodowitz said. “And if I can solve that problem for them, then I can build a great aviation business.”

Slodowitz said he ultimately views the exchange fund as a tool for tax-free wealth transfer between generations.

“The goal is to just pass [the shares] on to your heirs in a diversified portfolio,” he said.

Private planes come with other tax benefits these days. Federal tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first presidency and then reinstated permanently in the Big Beautiful Bill last year give private jet buyers the ability to write off 100% of a jet’s cost the year it is purchased, as long as they fulfill some conditions, like using the plane for business more than half the time. That gives many wealthy people a strong incentive to make a purchase.

“We have a number of owners who will own more than one airplane because of the tax benefits,” said Jamie Walker, executive chair of Jet Linx, a company that offers a membership program for accessing private jets. “They’ll buy an airplane and take advantage of the tax benefit. They’ll then have that benefit need again in a future year, and then they’ll buy another airplane.”

Jet Linx has seen its membership increase 60% year over year and plans to expand its operations later this year from places like Nashville, Tenn., Miami and New York to the Bay Area, where it sees a growing market. The part of its business that involves managing planes—hiring their crews, conducting maintenance and other tasks—and helps private owners rent them out has seen a 65% increase over the same period.

Business is booming for Connecticut-based Guardian Jet. It is on pace to see its sales increase 80% this year, driven by demand from both individuals and large companies buying jets for executives, said Sydor.

Last month, the company gathered a group of about 30 family office heads, lenders and financial managers for the first time at the New York Yacht Club in Midtown Manhattan. Over cocktails and canapes, attendees were educated about how to manage a jet like a portfolio asset—when to buy, sell and hold—as well as on the tax benefits of ownership, Sydor said.

Guardian’s trading floor, a blur of computers, monitors and ticker screens where it helps clients buy and sell jets on the secondary market, has seen a surge of energy over the last year, growing in size by some 30%. Most of the planes are bought and sold off-market, and they go quickly, often within a day or two, Sydor said.

“It’s kind of akin to seeking out a rare painting or a specific vintage of wine or watch,” said Sydor. “You need to hunt for these things.”

After rolling out a username reservation system a few days ago, WhatsApp is now beginning to activate the full feature for a limited number of users. Here are the details.

WhatsApp starts activating reserved usernames

Last month, WhatsApp rolled out a username reservation system, allowing users to claim a unique handle before the full feature became available.

Users can claim their username by heading to Settings > Account > Username, where they can also choose whether anyone who knows it can contact them, or whether new contacts must also enter a four-digit PIN in addition to the username they’d like to reach.

When choosing a username that matches an account already established on another Meta platform, such as Facebook or Instagram, users may also be required to prove that they control the corresponding account. This is aimed at curbing the misuse of high-profile usernames and impersonation that could enable scams.

That said, as spotted by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is now beginning to activate reserved usernames for a limited number of accounts.

Users included in this initial rollout are now seeing a banner at the top of their chat list that lets them know their username is active and can now be shared with new contacts.

The report says that the feature is rolling out to both beta users and users on WhatsApp’s official version, but notes that for now, it appears to be limited to “a very limited number of users.”

To check whether your account has access, look for the banner at the top of your chat list or head to the Username section in your profile settings. That section will inform you that your username is active, or display a message that says “[u]sernames are coming soon. We’ll let you know when yours is ready to use.”

A deal would underline how scarce computing power is for artificial intelligence development, and could create a new business for Meta.

Meta is in talks to lease computing power from its artificial intelligence data centers to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, three people with knowledge of the discussions said, a potential step toward a new A.I. business for the social networking company.

Anthropic proposed the deal in June and Meta is considering it, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss confidential conversations. While the specifics were in flux, Anthropic would pay Meta in monthly increments over the two-year period, the people said. The companies would be able to opt out of any agreement early, they added.

Anthropic’s proposal to Meta was about a third of the size of a deal that the A.I. start-up signed with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in May. Under that agreement, Anthropic is paying the rocket company $45 billion over three years — or $1.25 billion a month — for computing power. The deal included similar provisions that let either company exit the agreement early.

Meta’s talks with Anthropic are in their early stages and may not result in a deal, the people with knowledge of the discussions said. Anthropic and Meta declined to comment.

The talks underline how eager leading A.I. companies are to get their hands on more computing power to rapidly develop the technology, as tech giants including Meta, Google and Microsoft shovel hundreds of billions of dollars into building dozens of new data centers all over the world. The construction boom, which has raised spending by tech companies to an extraordinary degree, has stirred concerns on Wall Street about whether such sums can be justified.

For Meta, a deal would be especially significant. It could open a new line of business for the company and potentially alleviate pressure from investors, who have questioned how much Meta has been spending on data centers to develop cutting-edge A.I. models. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has said his company will spend as much as $145 billion this year, much of it on A.I., which would be more than double the $72 billion it spent last year.

But Meta has faced questions about whether its own A.I. models can compete with those developed by rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI. And the company has acknowledged that it may build more data centers than it needs, relative to the number of customers using its A.I. products. Selling excess computing power to companies like Anthropic could provide Meta with a new revenue stream until demand for its own A.I. services catches up.

On recent calls with investors, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted that selling computing power could be one way for Meta to see some return on its A.I. investments.

“Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from the outside asking us” about computing power “that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on an investor call in May. “We haven’t done that yet because we think we have a use for the compute.”

“But obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out,” he said.

A.I. companies have grown more comfortable striking deals with rivals out of necessity because of how scarce computing power has become. Anthropic, which is valued at nearly $1 trillion in the private market and has filed to go public, has seen a surge in demand since the release of its enterprise software product, Claude Code. As a result, it has needed to work with companies that own large amounts of processing power to serve its growing customer base.

Since Meta does not have a business selling its computing power, that has complicated its talks with Anthropic, one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Meta has also struck its own deals to rent computing power from other data center providers, even as it builds it own facilities. That includes a $21 billion deal with CoreWeave, a provider of A.I. computing power, in April and a $27 billion deal with Nebius, another such company, in March.

Since those deals were signed, the price of computing power has skyrocketed because of limited supply and increased demand, said Mandeep Singh, a technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. That has presented Meta with an opportunity to rent out its data centers while still investing in its own A.I. in the long term, he added.

Hotel group Accor hired law firm to investigate conduct of CEO Bazin

Report found no wrongdoing after probing allegations of impropriety in Accor’s dealings with associates of Bazin

The board of hotel group Accor hired an elite Paris law firm to carry out a probe into the conduct of chief executive Sébastien Bazin, in response to allegations of conflicts of interest and favouritism under his leadership.

The investigation, which concluded in recent weeks, was requested by Bazin after an anonymous document laying out a series of allegations in detail was circulated to board members, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

The probe examined Accor’s dealings with Paris Society, the hospitality business owned by Bazin’s close associate Laurent de Gourcuff, and allegations of favouritism in the appointment of a woman to a senior position in the group, according to the people.

The woman is in a long-term romantic relationship with Bazin, according to people familiar with the situation. However, the relationship between the two was not mentioned in the allegations sent to the board and therefore was not investigated by the law firm.

Antoine Gosset-Grainville, who led the probe for law firm BDGS, concluded the allegations were without merit.

“Accor Group confirms that, in compliance with the principles of the highest standards of corporate governance, it has conducted an independent investigation following anonymous allegations involving its leader. The findings of this thorough investigation confirmed that there were no breaches of the legal or fiduciary obligations incumbent upon him,” the company said.

Accor’s board “unanimously endorsed these findings” and closed the investigation. “The Group reserves the right to assert its legal rights in order to put an end to these baseless allegations,” it added. BDGS declined to comment.

The allegations investigated by Gosset-Grainville, who also serves as the chair of Axa, included whether there had been irregularities or favouritism in the appointment in 2025 of one of the company’s external communications advisers into a senior executive role at Accor.

The woman was recruited into a position at Accor’s luxury hospitality division Ennismore, which is pursuing a stock market listing that could generate a significant windfall for its executives.

Accor is preparing to recruit a successor to Bazin, who announced in May that he would step down by the time his term expires in May 2028. Bazin, the former chair of football club Paris Saint-Germain, has been chief executive and chair of Accor since 2013.

BDGS also investigated whether Bazin’s close relationship with de Gourcuff influenced Accor’s dealings with his hospitality company Paris Society.

Accor acquired Paris Society in 2022 after making an initial investment in 2017. The hotel group last year sold back about 20 of Paris Society’s nightclubs to de Gourcuff, who had continued to manage the business under Accor’s ownership. The terms of the deals were never disclosed.

The board was urged to examine why the transaction was reversed so quickly and if there were adequate safeguards in place to ensure the interests of Accor shareholders were protected.

The transactions were approved by Accor’s investment committee and the decision to sell the nightclubs was consistent with the company’s strategy of disposing of so-called nightlife assets, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Paris Society said Bazin and de Gourcuff only met in 2017 and their relationship was “primarily professional”. They added that given nightclubs were “never a strategic focus” for Accor it was “quite natural” for them to be sold.

“This transaction has undergone all the necessary approval processes . . . it creates value for shareholders. Therefore, it has nothing to do with any kind of preferential treatment or a sudden change of course,” Paris Society added.

The probe has come at a turbulent time for Accor. The Paris-listed hotel group, which operates more than 5,000 hotels and 45 brands worldwide, was this year targeted by short seller Grizzly Research, which alleged the company failed to adequately safeguard against potential human trafficking and child sex exploitation.

Accor’s chief sustainability officer Coline Pont said in May that an independent investigation had confirmed that the company had “no systemic deficiencies” in its procedures.

The intense scrutiny in recent months has prompted questions internally over whether there is a concerted effort to destabilise the company.

Accor’s portfolio ranges from the budget chain Ibis to luxury hotel brand Raffles and the Orient Express. Bazin has turned the group into an asset-light operator of hotel franchises and expanded the previously Europe-centric group further into Asia and the Middle East.

Accor’s shares have, however, lagged the wider market, with critics arguing that acquisitions made by Bazin have made Accor overly complex.

The group has been targeted by activist investor Parvus Asset Management, which has amassed a 15 per cent stake. In a filing last year, Parvus said it did not intend to take control of Accor or seek a board seat, but that it would be “particularly attentive to Accor’s governance”.