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The British BC Partners plans for a streak of the Edenred group

The investment fund is considering taking control of the meal-voucher leader, a transaction that would lead to its delisting from the stock market. BC Partners first wants to team up with a financial partner. Four funds have been approached, including Canada’s PSP Investments, to form a consortium.

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Possible prototype for Stonehenge discovered near historic stone monument

Timber structure suggests Neolithic people gathered to celebrate solstice on Salisbury Plain earlier than thought

A timber structure aligned precisely with the summer and winter solstices was set up near Stonehenge 500 years before the great stone monument in Wiltshire was built, archaeologists have discovered.

The finding, made by a team from Wessex Archaeology on what is now an Army housing estate at Bulford, suggests the structure might have been an early prototype for the alignment of Stonehenge’s huge stones.

Two tall wooden poles were erected 120 metres apart on the site 5km from Stonehenge in a line that pointed at the rising sun during the summer solstice around June 21 and, in the opposite direction, at the setting sun during the winter solstice around December 21.

It suggests large groups of Neolithic people started to gather on Salisbury Plain to celebrate the longest and shortest days of the year as far back as 3000 BC, much earlier than previously thought.

Phil Harding, who led the excavations and is one of Britain’s most recognisable archaeologists, said: “Discoveries like this only come once in a lifetime. Archaeology always produces interesting new things but for me, after a lifetime in the field, these two holes in the ground constitute the best find I’ve ever had.”

The two holes in question are pits, measuring about a metre deep and 50cm across, in which the solstice poles sat.

Nothing remains of the timber itself but Harding thinks the posts were three to four metres high, cut from ash trees. “One of the post pits had charcoal fragments of ash,” he said. “Ash produces lovely straight-growing wood and it has strong pagan associations.”

The Bulford discovery dates back to the earliest phase of Stonehenge, when the first earthworks — large ditches, banks and enclosures — were built at the site. This was almost 500 years before megaliths were hauled long distances to set up the structure still standing today.

Excavations at Bulford uncovered 48 pits that were radiocarbon dated to between 3000 BC and 2950 BC. They contained pottery, flint tools, charcoal and animal bones including some from aurochs, extinct giant cattle, suggesting large gatherings over a short period to celebrate the solar cycle. “The amount of meat being consumed would have been one hell of a barbecue,” said Harding.

The most remarkable artefact was an extremely rare round flint knife, which the archaeologists said might have been shaped in symbolic reference to the sun’s disc.

The excavations, on Ministry of Defence land, have been covered over and will not be accessible to the public.

Archaeologists have explored the Stonehenge area of Salisbury Plain extensively in recent years, revealing an interconnected ritual landscape with stones, timber circles and extensive earthworks. Neolithic monuments include Durrington Walls, Stonehenge Cursus, Woodhenge and Larkhill causewayed enclosure.

Matt Leivers, senior research manager at Wessex Archaeology, said he believes “the chance of anybody carrying out large-scale archaeological work on the Stone Age landscape for some time in the future is fairly slight”.

“The very extensive programmes of fieldwork carried out over the last 10 to 20 years have all finished and are now in the process of analysis and publication,” he added.

But for now the archaeologists are celebrating their Bulford discovery ahead of the crowds arriving at Stonehenge to mark this summer’s solstice on Sunday.

“When we talk about the solstice, we’re talking about religion,” said Leivers. “About how prehistoric peoples understood the cosmos, the world, and their place in it.”

Young founders backed by Silicon Valley and Trump race to start reactors despite experts’ safety fears

At a factory in Texas, Matt Loszak is building a new type of nuclear reactor he hopes will allow the US to reclaim leadership in an industry dominated by Russia and China.  

“Our goal is to ship hundreds and possibly thousands of reactors every year,” the 35-year-old founder of Aalo Atomics said as he inspected components for the Aalo-X, designed to power AI data centres.

Aalo is one of several US start-ups planning to switch on new reactors this month ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Donald Trump to mark the 250th anniversary of America’s independence.

Antares Nuclear and Valar Atomics have already announced they have achieved “criticality” — the moment a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining. Radiant Nuclear and Oklo told the FT they were in the final stages of receiving safety clearances under Trump’s pilot programme, which aims to have at least three test reactors reach criticality by the target date.

Many of the founders leading the charge are under 40 and come from outside the nuclear industry, while some have ties to the Trump administration. Backed by Silicon Valley, they say small reactors can help meet soaring electricity demand from AI data centres.

Critics, however, warn that entrepreneurial culture is a poor fit for a sector where safety is paramount.

“There is the real nuclear industry . . . and then there are the ‘nuclear bros’,” said Allison Macfarlane, who served as chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014.

“They are in the start-up model. They move fast and break things . . . They don’t know that is the opposite of what you do with nuclear. If you break things with nuclear, it’s really serious.”

The push comes amid a surge of investment in nuclear, with early-stage companies raising more than $7bn over the past 18 months to design and build small modular reactors.

Tech investors, cloud computing “hyperscalers” and the Trump administration are betting that small reactors can ease an energy crunch that threatens America’s AI ambitions and restore US leadership in the small modular reactor sector, where China and Russia have moved faster.

For Loszak, the mission is not just commercial.

“It’s very important that the country which achieves mass manufacture of nuclear be democratic,” he said. “If China mass produces small reactors, and they get deployed all over the western world, then it’s pretty bad if they have their fingers on the kill switch of our energy.”

Trump has invited nuclear founders to the White House, stripped back regulation and awarded government contracts to start-ups including Oklo, which counted Chris Wright as a board member until his appointment as US energy secretary last year.

“They showed that private industry can move this forward and can move it forward at a pace that we haven’t seen in the past in the nuclear industry,” said Michael Goff, deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy’s nuclear energy office.

But even some industry insiders warn the flood of investment could prove part of an AI hype cycle that risks damaging the wider nuclear sector.

Loszak rejects the claim that nuclear’s new entrants threaten safety, arguing that excessive regulation has held back a technology that could provide abundant low-carbon energy. He welcomes the change in approach under Trump.

“Ten years ago there were anti-nuclear people in charge of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” he said, adding that “keeping nuclear safe is one thing, but actively preventing it from being developed is kind of a different thing”.

Aalo, which Loszak founded in 2023 with Idaho National Labs nuclear expert Yasir Arafat, has raised almost $300mn from investors, including Valor Equity Partners, an early backer of SpaceX and Tesla.

Its Aalo-X design uses liquid sodium to cool the reactor core rather than water, which he says allows for a smaller, lighter machine that operates at normal atmospheric pressure so is less risky than standard pressurised water reactors.

During the tour of Aalo’s plant, he explained his desire to promote an “underdog” technology that could benefit humanity, saying a nuclear rollout in his native Ontario helped clear up his childhood asthma because the technology replaced dirty coal-fired power stations in the early 2000s.

The company is one of 10 selected for the pilot programme, which bypasses lengthy Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing.

It plans to manufacture almost all its components in-house at its Austin factory, and to ship ready-built reactors to customers rather than assemble them on-site — a model Loszak says could unlock the “holy grail” of nuclear economics: factory mass production.

Other young entrepreneurs are also trying to prove nuclear can move at start-up speed.

Isaiah Taylor, a 27-year-old high school dropout, has raised $450mn to fund Valar Atomics — another company selected for Trump’s pilot scheme. His great-grandfather was a physicist on the Manhattan Project during the second world war but Taylor has no nuclear qualifications of his own

“I’m super grateful to this administration. I think they have really done something historic,” said Taylor, who is often photographed wearing a “Make Nuclear Great Again” cap and is a member of the same Christian nationalist church as US defence secretary Pete Hegseth.

Like Loszak, Taylor casts the race in geopolitical terms. “Russia is now the world’s premier nuclear technology exporter,” he said. “I think that’s a very bad thing . . . changing this back to American energy dominance is absolutely a national security issue for us and our allies.”

Taylor says his lack of experience is offset by the team he has assembled. Valar, which is developing a helium-cooled reactor, has hired experienced nuclear engineers, including Sonat Sen, a former Idaho National Lab scientist and lead engineer at rival developer X-energy.

Meanwhile, the start-up’s investors include Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey, Palantir Technologies chief technology officer Shyam Sankar and Riot Ventures general partner Stephen Marcus.

Taylor has also become a lightning rod for critics of the atomic energy upstarts after suing the NRC and making claims about nuclear safety that experts have derided as false.

Two experts last year challenged his assertion on X that holding some of Valar’s spent fuel for five minutes would only expose a person to radiation equivalent to a CT scan.

Nuclear engineer Gavin Ridley said such a dose would be lethal within 85 milliseconds, while whatisnuclear.com founder Nick Touran lambasted the statement as “dangerously wrong”.

Taylor said his post had been misunderstood and later published an analysis defending his claim, while Touran told the FT the two had resolved their dispute and that he was cheering Valar on despite doubts about the commercial prospects for the small modular reactor sector.

“We can’t ignore the fact they have hired a pretty capable team,” Touran said.

Valar is one of several reactor developers and US states challenging the NRC’s authority, alleging that the regulator’s licensing process for small reactors is too restrictive and should not be a federal matter.

Their campaign has gained momentum since Trump last year criticised the agency’s “overly risk-averse culture”, removed its chair and installed a team from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) to restructure it.

Taylor believes the Trump administration’s efforts to improve the NRC’s effectiveness are bearing fruit.

“There absolutely is a sort of cultural speed of an organisation that the NRC needs to improve,” he said. “But I think that we’ve kind of figured out the right path to do it . . . I think it’s headed in the right direction.”

However, the campaign has alarmed some atomic energy experts, who warn that pressure on the NRC risks undermining people’s trust in nuclear oversight.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on the independence and scientific integrity of the agency could have far-reaching implications.

“It is clear political considerations are prioritised over the commission’s role in providing independent, science-based safety reviews,” he said. “This hurts public confidence.”

Meta’s AI gamble: Dina Powell McCormick opens door to Wall Street

Former Goldman Sachs executive explores financing once alien to Silicon Valley for $600bn infrastructure push

In mid-March, Meta president Dina Powell McCormick hosted a dinner at The Grill in New York for some of the most important money managers in the world.

Those present at the swanky Midtown steakhouse included Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Brookfield Asset Management chief Bruce Flatt, BlackRock board member Adebayo Ogunlesi, Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman and president Jonathan Gray.

Powell McCormick convened the soirée, which capped a packed day of meetings across Wall Street, to deliver a message: Meta’s radical plan to become a leader in AI will require vast amounts of external capital and her door was open to discuss innovative financing structures and partnerships.

Since joining Meta in January, the former Goldman Sachs executive has quickly become one of Silicon Valley’s most important power brokers as she helps oversee one of the largest capital deployments in corporate history. The social media company plans to invest $600bn in the US alone by 2028.

Powell McCormick — who also boasts Republican credentials from her time serving in Donald Trump’s first administration and deep sovereign-wealth relationships — has been exploring complex off-balance-sheet arrangements and structured finance once alien to Meta’s C-suite, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

For most of its two-decade history, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been able to fund Meta’s growth from the vast horde of advertising cash generated by Facebook and Instagram. But the spiralling costs of building and powering data centres, acquiring sought-after chips and an AI talent war have required a new direction.

Alongside chief financial officer Susan Li, one option Powell McCormick is considering is raising tens of billions in new equity, following Google’s successful $85bn stock sale, the FT reported earlier this month. Meta said in response it was exploring “flexible ways” to finance its AI ambitions.

Powell McCormick is also part of the senior group debating even more profound changes to strategy, including radical ideas such as whether the $1.5tn company should set up a cloud-computing business to rival Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

“This is a new Meta and she’s bringing forth this type of connectivity,” said BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink. “The speed with which we have done a number of transactions in the last four months is the sum of everything we’ve ever done in all our years with Meta.”

“Mark [has] recognised the importance of compute as foundational for everything Meta is going to do,” said Blackstone president Gray. “If Dina Powell is in the room, something’s going to get done.”

She faces steep challenges. Meta is smaller than other hyperscalers, leaving it in a more precarious position as it issues increasing debt and free cash flow compresses. The company is also lagging rival AI labs in the race to build state of the art models, with many industry insiders doubtful that it can become a leader.

Taking on a broad newly created role, she must also navigate internal politics at Meta, where the upper ranks are typically made up of longtime Zuckerberg acolytes. “There is a little resistance,” said one insider. “They don’t always like the questions [she asks].”

Powell McCormick, who moved to Texas from Egypt aged 5, joined Meta’s board of directors a year before she took the helm as president, forming a close working relationship with Zuckerberg.

A former deputy national security adviser under Trump, her appointment was publicly praised by the president and she joined his China business delegation in May. She is married to Republican senator David McCormick.

Her shift to Meta’s executive leadership team, a rare banking veteran appointment in clubby Silicon Valley, has coincided with Zuckerberg’s own overtures to the president and the company’s costly and tumultuous attempt to centre its focus on developing “personal superintelligence”. 

Meta has forecast AI-related capital expenditures will jump to as much as $145bn this year and even higher in 2027. Zuckerberg is offsetting the spending spree with rounds of lay-offs, sending morale to all-time lows. 

Powell McCormick is co-head of a new initiative called “Meta Compute”, alongside the company’s longtime head of global infrastructure Santosh Janardhan and entrepreneur Daniel Gross.

Zuckerberg has said the initiative will build “hundreds of gigawatts” of AI infrastructure over the coming decades. A single gigawatt of data centre capacity costs tens of billions of dollars to build and can consume power comparable to a nuclear reactor’s output.

Delivering on the ambitions requires Meta to secure permits and energy deals while embracing more adventurous financing through bond and private capital markets. In October, it raised a $27bn bond via a joint venture with private capital firm Blue Owl to build a huge Louisiana data centre dubbed “Hyperion”. 

Ahead of the March dinner, Powell McCormick and the Meta Compute executives met Blackstone, Brookfield, KKR, BlackRock and another of her former employers BDT & MSD Partners to discuss what one person familiar with the meetings described as “the art of the possible”. 

Her colleague Gross said she had brought “finger tips feeling” — or an intuitive flair — to Meta’s dealmaking. “Dina knows how to shimmy, but she does it in a very charming way,” said Dame Jane Fraser, Citigroup’s chief executive. “Behind the charm, there’s a steeliness.”

Meta had already explored AI partnerships in the Middle East before Powell McCormick joined, according to people familiar with the discussions. But as the former head of Goldman Sachs’ sovereign wealth business, Powell McCormick is well-networked in the region.

She counts Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan among her contacts, according to people who know her.

“Dina has an extraordinary network of relationships across the government, particularly in Republican circles, and very powerful ties with capital allocators and big sovereigns around the world,” said David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’ chief executive. “When you look at the capital needs for the AI acceleration at Meta, Dina can play a valuable role.”

The push comes amid stiff competition for capital, as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI also seek funding from IPOs. When the FT reported earlier this month that Meta had been discussing a potential share sale, its stock fell more than 5 per cent. 

It is also unclear how much demand for computing power there will be in the future, leaving Meta’s longer-term infrastructure strategy in flux. 

Until recently, Meta executives have focused on building capacity primarily for its own AI operations, while retaining the option to sell any excess. Powell McCormick and other leaders are discussing whether the company could build data centres to proactively sell computing capacity as a cloud provider, several people said. 

Such a push would require high upfront costs to compete with well-established rivals and setting up large enterprise sales relationships.

“Can they run data centres as an independent operator that’s leasing it to third parties?” said Naveen Sarma, a managing director at credit rating agency S&P Global. “It’s a good question.”

Outside Meta, she has quickly become a buffer for criticism, casting the AI boom as “another industrial revolution” and spearheading the launch of a new “workforce academy” that will train workers to build data centres.

At the Economic Club of New York last week, Powell McCormick dismissed concerns about data centre disruption and argued Meta’s grid investments can lower local electricity costs.

“We’re smack dab in the middle of what is a controversial area around the impact that AI is going to have on society,” said Peggy Alford, a Meta board member and eBay’s chief financial officer. “She saw a real opportunity to both help individuals and small businesses not be left behind, but also make it part of how Meta is talking about what they’re doing this for.”