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On their earnings calls earlier in the week, Meta Platforms and SpaceX delivered the same underlying message to investors: demand for AI is running ahead of the supply of AI compute. On Thursday, another important player in the AI ecosystem—Blackstone, the alternative asset management giant—repeated a version of that refrain.

On its own earnings call, the firm, a major investor at the center of the AI data center boom, faced pointed questions from analysts about rising financing costs and mounting investor concerns over the sustainability of the buildout. Its executives argued that the very factors threatening the AI industry’s expansion could actually work in Blackstone’s favor. CEO Steve Schwarzman noted that constraints on power availability and growing public opposition to new data centers are making it harder to bring new capacity online, potentially making existing facilities more valuable. Blackstone President Jon Gray also suggested the firm could seek higher returns on projects where it hasn’t signed leases yet in order to offset rising borrowing costs.

Blackstone’s third-quarter results offered some support for that argument: Its infrastructure investments were buoyed by what executives called “extraordinary” data center leasing momentum, significantly outperforming its broader private equity and real estate holdings. “Despite all the negative things you’re reading about AI today, when we look across our business, this continues to be the area where we’re driving the highest returns,” Gray said during the call.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the financing concerns and roadblocks threatening the broader AI infrastructure buildout are also hitting closer to home for Blackstone. Fears about rising financing costs have sent CoreWeave’s stock and bond prices plunging—the neocloud’s shares closed down another 10% Thursday after sliding last week—while Australian AI cloud provider Firmus abruptly pulled its initial public offering earlier this month. Blackstone has provided billions in loans to CoreWeave and has both invested in and lent money to Firmus.

Blackstone has also been pressing ahead with brand-new AI ventures. In May, the firm announced an initial $5 billion equity commitment to a joint venture with Google to create a new cloud company that will use Google’s TPU chips, with plans to bring 500 megawatts of capacity online by next year. The venture could need as much as $25 billion in total investment, including some borrowed money, and it has reportedly encountered delays at potential data center sites.

Blackstone, for its part, says that broader anxiety about AI hasn’t undermined its ability to raise fresh cash for making its own investments. “We’re continuing to be able to raise capital. Obviously investors are asking the same question around AI, but what we continue to see is demand and usage of the AI going up faster than the compute,” Gray said.

While Blackstone says it wants to continue going big in AI, it can only finance a tiny portion of the industry’s broader infrastructure buildout itself. The trillions of dollars of financing needed for chips and data centers in the coming years requires raising money from a far broader pool of investors. Blackstone itself has said it’s not clear where all the money will come from.

Jas Khaira, the head of the team leading Blackstone’s push into AI investment, said late last month that the firm is still trying to determine which investors across the public debt and private credit markets will be able to provide the funding needed to sustain the buildout.

“We have not mapped out who’s going to buy all the debt. We have some hypotheses, but the honest answer is we don’t know where all of it will come from,” he said at The Information’s AI Agenda event in San Francisco.

Data Center Headwinds

Despite Blackstone’s overall positive note on AI demand, we got fresh evidence Thursday afternoon of the uncertainty in the IPO market for companies in the data center business. Phoebe Liu and Valida Pau had a scoop that SB Energy, a company controlled by SoftBank Group that is developing an OpenAI data center in Ohio, is discussing a plan to put off its IPO until December or earlier next year. Previously, SB Energy was aiming to go public in September. The best hope for an SB Energy IPO is that the supply of AI compute gets so tight that investors start warming back up to data centers.

Enterprise software firm Datadog recently offered to buy Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4 billion, according to someone with direct knowledge of the talks, the latest sign of white-hot interest in such firms.

Upwind has fielded other takeover attempts from multiple bidders in recent months but hasn’t accepted any offers. It is finalizing a $300 million funding round at a roughly $3.8 billion valuation, meaning the Datadog offer doesn’t carry much of a premium over the private valuation, said two people with knowledge of the situation. The startup sells software to keep tabs on applications, including so-called AI agents, that run in the cloud and to detect and automatically respond to potential evidence of hacks or breaches.

Datadog, which has a $90 billion market capitalization, sells so-called data observability software that helps companies collect and observe data from a wide range of software applications. It also sells security software, meaning adding real-time security capabilities from a product like Upwind’s could be a fit.

The deal discussions come as the cybersecurity sector has been rocked by AI-related threats, as new AI models have shown they can find serious flaws in widely used software, such as the code underlying the PHP programming language, that attackers could exploit. Companies are planning to spend a lot more on cybersecurity software in the wake of such threats.

More businesses are using AI agents that connect to other cloud-hosted applications within their systems for tasks like generating and running applications or automating workplace tasks. That has sparked demand for software to track the agents, such as Upwind’s, according to executives who buy security software.

Companies such as Roku and Brazilian neobank Nubank use Upwind’s software to monitor and protect their cloud-hosted applications, according to Upwind’s website.

Datadog tried to buy Upwind last year for around $1 billion, one of the people said, but the talks petered out at the time.

Upwind has since grown quickly: its annual recurring revenue has exceeded $50 million, implying about $4 million in revenue per month, up from roughly $20 million in ARR at the end of 2025, according to someone with knowledge of the figures. A deal at close to $4 billion would be around 80 times the startup’s ARR, which is higher than the revenue multiple of Google’s takeover of cloud security firm Wiz earlier this year.

A representative of Upwind did not have a comment, and Datadog did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Large security software providers Palo Alto Networks, Google, and Crowdstrike have each acquired cloud security startups that compete in some areas with Upwind in recent years, including Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz.

Upwind, founded in 2022 by CEO Amiram Shachar, has already raised over $400 million in total, including a $250 million round in January that valued it at $1.5 billion. Its biggest backers include Bessemer Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, and Cyberstarts; other investors include Salesforce Ventures and Greylock. Globes and Bloomberg earlier reported on the startup’s ongoing funding round.

EV maker Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a U.K. startup founded by veterans of the gaming and autonomous vehicle industries that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds.

Rivian isn’t getting into gaming, but it does want to leverage Third Dimension’s technology to turn real-world data into 3D worlds that can accelerate the development of its advanced driver-assistance features and the self-driving system for the robotaxis it plans to supply to Uber.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The 15-person team at Third Dimension, most of whom are based in the U.K., will be absorbed into Rivian’s autonomy and AI team led by James Philbin. The acquisition also gives Rivian an opportunity to expand its AI hub in London, Philbin said in an exclusive interview.

Third Dimension, which was founded by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokólski in 2024, raised $7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms, including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital, and Solari Capital. While the company’s technology was built to speed up video game development, the founders saw other potential applications, including defense and autonomous vehicles.

Now, under Rivian, they’ll be focused on automated driving. Today, Rivian offers “Universal Hands-Free” driving software that lets drivers take their hands off the wheel on highways, while still watching the road. The company plans to, by the end of the year, release a version of the software that can handle the entire drive through surface streets and highways without touching the wheel, although the driver will still have to supervise and be ready to take over.

Rivian is also working toward full autonomy, which it will deploy in the robotaxi versions of its R2 SUV that will be available on the Uber app in 2028.

“The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem,” Kart told TechCrunch in an interview. “I think as a small company, having to serve many, many different masters is very hard, and so we’re very excited to come work on a problem that has such an amount of scale, where our technology makes a true difference.”

Simulation is a critical tool for autonomous vehicle developers, who use it to train and validate self-driving systems. Historically, these simulators were built on rendering or video game engines and often relied on synthetic data. These virtual environments might look like the real world, but a gap between the two remains, Kart said. The workaround typically requires feeding the simulators ever-larger amounts of data in hopes of closing that quality gap.

Third Dimension’s technology uses AI to match the physical world, which when combined with Rivian’s reams of data could turn into a valuable simulator.

“For us, it’s about taking real scenarios, but making them simulatable,” Philbin said. “These are not synthetic kind of video game styles, they’re real things that happen in the world, but now we get that extra dial of being able to move the cameras around, shift other agents, have maybe different lighting or weather conditions. So it’s a really powerful tool for us.”

It’s technology that Philbin said the company knew it wanted and had actually “done a pretty extensive kind of evaluation of a lot of different providers.”

Any company developing automated driving technology needs data — and a lot of it. But the quality matters too. Real-world data collected from cameras and other sensors is especially valuable.

Rivian collects driving data from tens of thousands of R1T pickup trucks, R1S SUVs, delivery vans, and R2 SUVs on the road today — essentially any vehicle whose owner has enabled external camera sharing. Rivian uses that data, which is aggregated and anonymized, to build training models for driving. According to Philbin, Rivian gets more than 400,000 sequences uploaded from its customer fleets per day.

Third Dimension’s tech will allow Rivian to simulate complex driving conditions without having to wait for rare real-world edge cases to occur, Philbin said.

“Especially when you think about validation, right? So that’s really the piece where you’re saying, ‘is the system good to ship?’” Philbin said. “And there, you really want to have a good sense of this sim-to-real gap, because to do that kind of hand on heart, you really need to trust that answer is in the positive. Otherwise, you’re measuring something that’s not representative of how it will actually perform in the real world.”

Michigan reactor restart is delayed as Trump administration champions nuclear energy to meet booming AI power demand

US regulators have issued a warning to a nuclear project critical to Donald Trump’s efforts to revive the industry, after a contractor fell into a reactor cavity and a bundle of fuel rods nearly tipped over during refuelling.   

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Holtec International, a company racing to reopen a shuttered reactor at the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, to address a “chilled work environment” that has made staff hesitant to raise safety concerns without fear of retaliation.

The warning has prompted concerns among critics that financial and political pressures to revitalise nuclear power as an answer to booming AI-driven energy demand are increasing risks of accidents.

The NRC performed an inspection at Palisades in July over concerns about safety awareness. It followed an incident last year in which a worker fell into the reactor cavity, ingested some water and was sent off-site for medical attention. The individual was decontaminated by radiation protection personnel but had 300 counts per minute detected in their hair, according to an incident report.

In a second incident in August, a bundle of nuclear fuel rods tilted over during a refuelling operation, delaying what was anticipated to be the first reopening of a shuttered nuclear reactor in the US.

The NRC also said nine of the 15 reactor operators at Palisades failed the test for an initial licence examination administered in July and August. Six individuals were issued operator licences.

Holtec, which has never operated a nuclear power plant, has secured about $2.2bn in government support for a project that has been touted as a symbol of US nuclear resurgence. The owners of two other nuclear plants slated for decommissioning — Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa — announced restarts soon after Palisades began work.

The Trump administration has promoted nuclear energy as an edge in the AI race against China. It has slashed regulation, provided tens of billions of dollars in funds and promised to reverse a culture of “risk aversion” at the NRC to accelerate projects.

The warning issued to Holtec by the NRC last week landed as investor interest in the nuclear sector has faded, driven by concerns the AI boom is slowing.

More than $30bn has been wiped off the value of five of the largest US-listed nuclear energy companies in the last year — Oklo, Centrus Energy, BWX Technologies, NuScale and Nano Nuclear. Last month, Holtec was forced to postpone a planned initial public offering that was expected to raise $900mn and value the New Jersey-based company at up to $10bn.

Palisades first became operational in 1971. It was decommissioned in 2022 but received a $1.5bn loan from the Department of Energy in 2024 to finance its restoration.

“The situation at Palisades is that you have a power plant operator newbie in Holtec trying to restart a nuclear reactor, and they may be under a lot of financial and political pressure to get this done speedily,” said Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair from 2012 to 2014.

“The ‘chilled work environment’ warning issued by the NRC raises concerns that staff don’t feel like they can speak up to raise safety concerns and prevent accidents,” she added. “That perhaps reflects the new culture sweeping through part of the industry — move fast and break things. But to ensure safety, nuclear needs a culture based on going slowly and carefully.”

Holtec faces a March 2027 contractual deadline to begin supplying power to customers, who secured an extra $1.3bn in government funds to buy power from Palisades.

In a statement to the FT, Holtec said it took the issues identified by the NRC seriously and was addressing them to ensure the plant runs safely. It said the fuel assembly that tilted over was successfully recovered without spilling in a “remarkable demonstration of technical ingenuity”.

“A strong safety-conscious work environment is fundamental to our culture,” the company said. “The assertion that we have rushed has directly been countered by the work that has been accomplished.”

The NRC told Holtec its concerns about workplace culture must be addressed promptly to prevent further “cultural decline” within the affected departments. NRC has asked Holtec to correct the problems and will review the company’s plan within 30 days.

However, the NRC downplayed any immediate risk to the public, saying mitigating measures ensured plant safety was not compromised. Holtec said the worker who fell into the reactor cavity last year had sustained minor injuries from the fall but quickly returned to work.

Holtec, which is trying to transform itself from a supplier of nuclear components and services into a reactor design and plant operator, has faced governance questions in the past. It has been the target of a whistleblower lawsuit and legal disputes involving former executives, relating to allegations of financial misrepresentation, executive retaliation and fraudulent practices.

Kris Singh, founder and chief executive of Holtec, rejected the claims in a prior interview with the FT.

The NRC said in a statement that its “safety mission remains our top priority.”

“NRC inspectors continuously monitored Holtec’s actions to safely remove the tipped — not dropped — fuel assembly from the reactor core and its placement in the spent fuel pool. They are independently assessing activities at Palisades and will continue to closely monitor Holtec’s restart-related work.”

The US Department of Energy said Palisades’ return to service remained subject to NRC approvals and it was working closely with the regulator and Holtec to advance the “American nuclear renaissance”.

“This is why appropriate regulatory oversight is useful in the nuclear sector and in this case it seems to be working,” said Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, a climate and energy think-tank.

He said restarting the Palisades plant would be “good symbolism” for nuclear energy growth in the US, particularly given the scale of the challenge in bringing a more-than-half-century-old plant back to life.

“This is difficult, because Holtec never operated this plant, many of the components are old and there have been some well-documented mistakes in the process. But given the volume of investment this project is highly likely to go ahead,” he said.

Some local activists who oppose the reopening of the Michigan plant fear the potential for a serious nuclear accident if the plant restarts, claiming the NRC is no longer an independent regulator and Holtec lacks the skills to do the job.

“There’s tremendous financial pressure on the company, political pressure on company. They are muddling through but they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Michael J Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan, an environmental group. “The NRC is an enabler and they are in collusion with the nuclear power industry.”

Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey had an idea to genetically engineer war dogs for the U.S. military, law enforcement, and other emergency response teams. On Thursday, that idea came out of stealth as Warhound, backed by $200 million in funding from investors including Sequoia, 8VC, and In-Q-Tel, a venture firm backed by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. The round values the company at $1.2 billion.

Warhound’s dogs, which do not exist yet, will take on tasks that are dangerous for humans or difficult for machines, such as bomb detection, searches, and other specialized operations. In its launch announcement, the company said that more than 80% of the U.S. military’s working dogs come from Europe, and less than half of them are fit for service.

That means the supply of working dogs is dwindling, and the U.S. increasingly relies on foreign nations for dogs that play an important role in the military and in law enforcement. Warhound aims to change that. The hope is that Colossal can use its technology to engineer dogs with “characteristics suited to demanding missions,” the company said in a press release.

Lamm told TechCrunch he met Luckey about a year ago at a conference, where Luckey said more should be done for the military’s working dogs. The two kept in touch, and Lamm researched how working dogs are bred. He learned that many of them do not make it through training because of inherited predispositions to problems like poor eyesight or the high possibilities of cancer, hip dysplasia, or muscle atrophy.

Lamm believed dogs could be enhanced for health, longevity, and “for things like speed and agility or enhance olfactory sensors for bomb sniffing and whatnot,” he said. His team studied top-performing working dog breeds — the Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd — taking cell lines (living cells grown in a lab) from them and putting them in a biobank. From there, the team will edit the dogs’ genes, adding ones that will improve performance and removing ones that will not, to create “a new type of dog.”

Anduril, meanwhile, will provide software and hardware, such as protection vests and goggles, to assist the dogs and their handlers with situational awareness and coordination. Lamm said to imagine, for example, bulletproof vests with data sensors that send information back to the handlers so they can better understand what is happening.

“The idea is, if we make the dog safer, make it healthier, make it perform better, it’s going to perform better in the line of duty,” Lamm said. He added that Anduril’s additions will make the dogs safer and healthier beyond their genetics, “on top of the dog, not in the dog.” He believes the enhancements will also better protect the dogs’ human handlers.

Luckey is a partner in the venture but owns no equity in it, Lamm told TechCrunch. Colossal owns equity in the business and supports it by licensing its technology.

Colossal is currently known for its de-extinction efforts to bring back animals like the dodo and the mammoth. As Lamm previously told TechCrunch, the company has been using AI, buying and building technology to help with gene cloning and with identifying and copying animal genes.

Lamm said the first batch of dogs is about to be cloned and incubated, with births expected early next year and service ideally beginning within two years. Viagen, another Colossal-owned company, will partner with Warhound to clone the dogs. Lamm said Viagen’s technology has a high cloning success rate, and Colossal already uses it in its program to protect endangered species.

Warhound doesn’t know yet how much it will charge for the dogs, but it expects to sell to first responders, the Department of Defense, military service groups, and police forces. Asked about government approval, Lamm said the company has briefed many government groups about the business.

Asked about civilian safety once genetically enhanced dogs enter service, Lamm said each dog will be trained like any military working dog and managed by whoever buys it.

The company said it is working under the guidance of the American Humane Society to help certify Warhound’s training program for the new dogs. The hope is also that when these new military dogs retire, they will enter the Society’s Military Working Dog Reunification Program, which provides homes for retired military dogs — or another program the Society offers to help dogs.

Smart ring maker Oura has sued Indian rival Ultrahuman again, seeking to block U.S. sales of its Ring Pro (pictured above) just months after the redesign helped the Bengaluru-based startup return to the American market following an import ban. The case is the latest in a string of patent disputes Oura has brought against competing smart-ring makers, including Samsung and RingConn.

In a complaint filed Thursday in a federal court in Texas, Oura alleged that Ultrahuman’s Ring Pro infringes two of its patents covering the ring’s design and internal components, including its battery and sensors. Oura is seeking monetary damages and a permanent injunction that would stop Ultrahuman from selling the ring.

Ultrahuman’s redesigned Ring Pro, launched in February, received a favorable ruling from U.S. Customs and Border Protection in March, paving the way for the startup’s return to the U.S. market. The decision followed an import ban on Ultrahuman’s earlier Ring Air, which took effect after Oura secured a patent infringement ruling from the International Trade Commission in August last year.

“Ultrahuman has a history of copying Oura’s innovations, as demonstrated by the 2025 ITC ruling against the company,” an Oura spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Ultrahuman introduced a redesigned ring but failed to address continued infringement of Oura’s patents, seeking instead to capitalize on our innovation and the market leadership we have built.”

Oura argues that the Customs ruling covered only the patent involved in the earlier dispute, not the two patents cited in its latest lawsuit: D804,471 and 12,769,363. “To protect its patent rights, Oura is now forced to file this complaint of patent infringement,” the company said in its filing.

One of those patents, 12,769,363, is also very new. It was issued to Oura on October 20, just two days before it filed the lawsuit. It covers a smart-ring design incorporating internal components such as a curved battery, circuit board, magnets, and sensors.

Oura has also named Texas-based electronics manufacturer SVTronics as a defendant in the lawsuit. The complaint says SVTronics manufactures the Ring Pro at a facility in Plano, Texas, allegedly under Ultrahuman’s direction and control. It also alleges that both companies infringe Oura’s patents through the manufacture, importation, and sale of the device in the U.S.

Ultrahuman co-founder and CEO Mohit Kumar told TechCrunch the startup was confident in the Ring Pro and would fight the new allegations.

“Oura has now chosen to assert different patents, including one that issued just two days before this lawsuit was filed,” Kumar said. “We will address these claims through the appropriate legal process and will defend our position vigorously. There is no court order affecting Ring Pro, and it remains available to customers in the U.S.”

Oura and Ultrahuman have been fighting over patents since 2023, when Oura sued the Indian startup over its Ring Air, which had helped Ultrahuman make a name for itself in the U.S. Oura brought a separate case before the U.S. International Trade Commission in 2024 that helped it secure a ruling last year, leading to the import ban on the Ring Air.

Ultrahuman is not the only rival facing legal pressure from Oura. The company has also pursued patent infringement claims against smart-ring makers including Samsung, RingConn, Circular, and Zepp Health. Some of those disputes have ended in licensing agreements, with RingConn and Circular agreeing to pay royalties to Oura to continue selling their products.

The dispute emerges as the smart-ring market continues to grow. Research firm IDC expects global shipments to rise 12.8% this year to 4.9 million units and reach about 6.3 million by 2030. While Oura remains a leading player in the category, Ultrahuman is among the growing competitors.

The lawsuit also comes just weeks after Oura shelved its $2.2 billion IPO, citing “uncertainty” in the market. The company has continued to add features to its smart rings, introducing new fitness metrics earlier this week that help users track how workouts affect their cardiovascular health.

In September, Ultrahuman raised $70 million from investors including Qualcomm Ventures and Labcorp, valuing the startup at about $365 million. The startup is also working with Qualcomm on a new smart ring that could run more software directly on the device, as it looks to expand beyond health and fitness tracking into areas such as AI interactions and gaming.

Weeks of student-led demonstrations over conditions in schools spiraled into violent unrest across the country

Some of the worst riots in France’s recent history swept across the country last weekend, as weeks of student-led protests escalated into nationwide demonstrations marred by widespread violence and destruction that left hundreds injured and more than 2,000 people under arrest.

Partial curfews imposed in some cities have helped quell the disorder for now. More protests are planned for Saturday, Oct. 24.

Here’s what to know.

What are the demonstrations in France about?

The wave of rioting, arson and looting followed a series of student-led demonstrations over conditions in the country’s schools. Those protests broadened into a wider movement across society against the rising cost of living, cuts to public spending and dissatisfaction with a government that has little bandwidth to respond. France is struggling to contain its public debt as pressure on household budgets and public services deepens. Students have demanded greater investment in education, while other protesters have raised concerns over wages, pensions and living standards.

Who’s been demonstrating?

France is no stranger to mass protests, but the scale of the violence this time has been extraordinary.

The government has blamed organized radical left groups for instigating much of the violence, accusing militants of deliberately attacking police officers and government buildings. Officials say opportunistic criminals then took advantage of the chaos to loot stores and vandalize property. Supporters of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, have also joined the protests. That movement’s stand against fuel taxes in 2018 developed into a broader revolt over economic inequality.

Authorities have acknowledged shortcomings in the police response. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said security forces were insufficiently deployed to contain the unrest and that police had lost control of the situation in several major cities.

What damage has been done?

Rioters damaged or looted at least 3,000 businesses across France over the weekend of Oct. 17-18, according to government estimates. The French retail federation estimated losses running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Rioters from Paris to Bordeaux targeted supermarkets, electronics retailers, banks and luxury boutiques.

The violence also caused extensive damage to historic and public buildings, including the 19th-century town hall in Limoges, a town in central France known for its porcelain. Across the country, rioters also torched vehicles, erected barricades and damaged bus shelters, street furniture and other public infrastructure.

Who has been arrested over the riots?

More than 2,500 people were taken into police custody nationwide after the weekend unrest. About 95% were male and 70% were adults, with some suspects as young as 13. Many were already known to police or judicial authorities.

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said on French TV network CNEWS that those involved came from a range of backgrounds. Police have arrested immigrants and French nationals, he said.

What is Macron’s government doing about it?

Authorities have imposed partial curfews in several cities, including Paris, Lyon, Lille, Nice and Marseille, to prevent further violence and looting. The restrictions, some of which apply only to minors, have coincided with a return to relative calm. In Marseille, authorities have extended a nighttime curfew to adults in designated areas over the coming weekend.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government has also moved to ban or restrict some demonstrations ahead of further planned protests. Authorities have prohibited gatherings in Marseille, Lyon, Nice and parts of Lille, while allowing a union-organized march in Paris.

The government has promised a tougher crackdown on rioters and plans to deploy 20% more police and gendarmes than last weekend, backed by soldiers, elite tactical units, armored vehicles and water cannons. Soldiers from Opération Sentinelle, France’s domestic counterterrorism mission, will also guard sensitive sites, freeing police and gendarmes to focus on crowd control.

Meanwhile, authorities are continuing to pursue those responsible for the violence so far. Lecornu has promised further arrests as police comb through footage of the riots. In the Paris region alone, some 200 investigators have been assigned to examine security camera footage and videos posted on social media.

What has the opposition said?

The riots have sparked a political blame game, with opposition leaders on the right and left accusing Macron’s government of failing to contain the violence, while clashing over who bears responsibility.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has accused the government of losing control of the country, describing the unrest as evidence of a deep crisis of authority. She has blamed radical-left militants and looters, accusing Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party of helping fuel the disorder. Jordan Bardella, president of Le Pen’s National Rally party, has also linked the violence to immigration, claiming that many of the looters came from foreign backgrounds and calling for a halt to immigration.

Mélenchon, the veteran radical-left politician, has rejected accusations that his party encouraged the violence. He has condemned looting and vandalism while accusing the government of inflaming tensions through its policing tactics and failure to address protesters’ demands over wages, education and public services.

How are markets reacting to the protests?

French borrowing costs—already the highest among the big economies in Europe —soared after the protests.

The yield on 10-year French government bonds briefly climbed above 5% for the first time in 24 years this week, as the riots added to concern about the country’s fiscal and political woes.

Are more protests planned?

Further nationwide protests are planned for Saturday, Oct. 24, with student organizations and yellow-vest activists separately calling for renewed demonstrations over education conditions and the rising cost of living. Trade unions have also called for strikes on Nov. 5. Authorities have warned that additional curfews could be imposed to prevent further outbreaks of violence.

Is this the same as yellow vest protests?

Not quite. Yellow-vest activists helped mobilize Saturday’s demonstrations, tapping in to renewed anger over fuel prices and affordability. But unlike in 2018, the latest wave of unrest began with student protests over deteriorating conditions in schools, before expanding to include trade unions, left-wing activists and other groups dissatisfied with the government.

The result is a more diverse and loosely organized protest movement. It remains unclear whether the disparate groups can sustain the mobilization that made the original yellow-vest movement such a challenge for Macron.

Is it safe to travel to France?

The State Department’s travel advice, last updated in May, says those going to France should avoid demonstrations, which it adds are common in the country and on rare occasions turn violent. The official advisory remains at Level 2, “Exercise Increased Caution.” It warns that police may use tear gas and water cannons to disperse violent crowds.