Category: 3. Business

Louisiana regulators approved Entergy Corp.’s plan to build three natural gas plants to power Meta Platform Inc.’s biggest data center.

Meta’s latest and largest data center is a 4 million–square–foot complex in rural Louisiana intended to support the company’s most powerful artificial intelligence models. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said the facility, dubbed Hyperion, will near the size of Manhattan. At full capacity it is expected to consume as much as 5 gigawatts of electricity.

By Saeed Azhar

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Bank of America promoted Faiz Ahmad and Mike Joo to co-heads of global investment banking as part of a broader leadership reshuffle in the business, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Wednesday.

All of the investment bank’s global group heads will now report jointly to Ahmad, who was previously co-head of global capital markets, and Joo, formerly its head of North America global corporate and investment banking (GCIB).

The outgoing heads of investment banking, Alex Bettamio and Thomas Sheehan, become chairs of GCIB, tasked with deepening client relationships globally, according to the memo by Matthew Koder, president of the division.

Bank of America’s global investment banking revenue was ranked third-highest in 2025, according to Dealogic data in mid-August. It had 6% market share, versus 6.1% last year.

The bank fell from fourth to fifth in M&A rankings, the data showed. Its market share in equity capital markets fell slightly, but grew in debt capital markets and loans.

BofA’s investment banking fees slid 9% to $1.4 billion in the second quarter, lagging rivals.

Joo will continue to prioritize BofA’s U.S. middle market presence to improve integration of the business across 97 local markets, the memo said.

Middle market mergers and acquisitions – valued between $500 million and $2 billion – have become an expanding business for investment banks in the U.S.

The bank also named Karim Assef as chair of global investment banking.

It appointed Lisa Clyde as co-head of global capital markets, alongside Sarang Gadkari, and picked Brendan Hanley as head of global corporate banking and leasing.

(Reporting by Saeed Azhar; additional reporting by Tatiana BautzerEditing by Rod Nickel and Lananh Nguyen)

Understanding GenAI’s impact on risk management

By now, most of us have experienced both the power and unpredictability of generative AI. Systems like ChatGPT can produce original content, including text, images, code, and video, by learning patterns from information found online. Naturally, this technology has quickly made its way into the workplace. In some cases, GenAI was introduced thoughtfully with a specific purpose in mind, or through software updates that incorporated GenAI capabilities. As the practice of including GenAI in our workflows and in the software we use everyday increases, we must be aware of the inherent risks that GenAI introduces. Let’s explore the major risk categories, such as strategic, operational, technological, compliance, and reputational risks, that we must address before adopting GenAI into our workplace.   

Strategic risk

While generative AI capability brings immense value, it also carries significant risk. Strategically, organizations may find themselves overly reliant on AI-generated outputs without fully understanding their limitations. Decisions influenced by flawed AI models or inaccurate outputs can misalign with long-term objectives, resulting in costly missteps. Further, the assumption that generative AI will automatically create efficiencies or new opportunities may result in overinvestment in tools that lack sufficient governance or business alignment.

Operational risk

Generative AI tools can introduce hidden vulnerabilities. One of the most pressing concerns is data leakage. Employees may unintentionally share confidential or proprietary information with publicly available AI tools that can retain and use that data to train future models. Additionally, these models are prone to what experts call “hallucinations,” where the AI generates content that appears plausible but is entirely incorrect. In highly regulated industries, such as those in the legal, financial, or medical sectors, this can lead to significant errors, cause harm to individuals, or result in compliance violations.

Technology risk

We also need to understand the risks associated with shadow AI. In some cases, generative AI is quietly introduced through existing software updates without the organization’s knowledge. In other instances, employees may purchase and use their personal GenAI accounts at work. In either case, the pace of deployment could bypass traditional software vetting and change management practices, meaning these tools are integrated into workflows without adequate oversight or testing.

Compliance risk

Governments and regulatory bodies are enacting frameworks governing AI. The European Union’s AI Act, U.S. executive orders, and emerging guidelines from agencies such as the FTC and SEC are placing new obligations on organizations to ensure transparency, accountability, and fairness in their use of AI. At least in part, this is because many generative models are trained on datasets that may include copyrighted material, personally identifiable information (PII), or biased content, raising concerns around intellectual property rights, data protection, and discriminatory outcomes. Organizations using third-party AI platforms must also contend with heightened third-party risk, especially when vendors fail to disclose their training data or model architecture.

Reputational risk

Perhaps the most difficult category of AI risk to quantify is reputational. A single misuse of generative AI can quickly escalate into a public relations crisis, particularly if it involves customer-facing content, intellectual property, or a breach of trust through the disclosure of confidential information. Trust is hard to regain once lost. Inappropriate, biased, or misleading content generated by AI can damage customer loyalty, investor confidence, and employee morale. Internally, poor communication about AI policies and controls can breed fear, confusion, or resentment among staff, especially if employees view AI as a threat to their roles.

The European Commission is pursuing a €376 million fine against Intel for anticompetitive practices from two decades ago, when the company paid manufacturers to delay products with AMD chips. This enforcement action reveals a fundamental disconnect: while Brussels relitigates decades-old violations against an allied-based company struggling for its very existence, China is investing hundreds of billions to dominate tomorrow’s semiconductor industry.

Intel today bears no resemblance to the dominant firm that committed these purported violations and went from dominance to struggling for survival in the time it took this case to wind through the courts. When these violations occurred, Intel dominated the PC market with over 80 percent share. Today, it has largely surrendered the smartphone chip market to Qualcomm and is struggling to leverage AI opportunities. Nvidia is now worth $3 trillion, while Intel’s market cap has fallen to $110 billion. Even in its core CPU business, AMD continues to gain ground, all the while the world has shifted to the dominance of the fabless business led by TSMC.

The numbers don’t lie. Intel now outsources 30 percent of its chip production to Taiwan’s TSMC, a stark admission of its manufacturing struggles. The company’s stock plummeted 60 percent in 2024, its worst year on record, forcing its CEO to resign and leading to its removal from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Intel is now cutting 25,000 jobs and implementing $10 billion in cost reductions to stabilize its finances.

Yet Intel isn’t finished. The company remains the largest x86 processor maker, retains significant R&D capabilities, and its forthcoming 18A process technology could restore some competitive edge. Intel also plays a critical role in the U.S. and European semiconductor supply chain resilience, something that would vanish if the company fails.

Deterrence matters in competition enforcement, but cases this old do little to shape future corporate conduct, especially in a sector where market leadership can change in less than a decade. At some point, precedent-setting becomes academic while industrial stakes remain real. In this specific case, pursuing a fine for 20-year-old conduct against a potentially fatally weakened company achieves little other than inflicting more harm.

These harms include lessened EU competitiveness. Europe’s semiconductor strategy relies on private partners capable of making multibillion-euro investments. Intel recently canceled its planned €30 billion factory in Germany and a €4.6 billion facility in Poland, citing financial pressures and market conditions. The German government had allocated €10 billion in subsidies for the Magdeburg plant—funding which now sits idle. The €376 million fine adds financial pressure at the wrong moment, when Intel is already struggling to fund European investments.

Doubling down on a large Intel fine also ignores that the EU and the United States are in an industrial competition where China explicitly uses economic policy as a strategic weapon. While the EU is chasing after this old fine, China is pouring massive subsidies into semiconductor manufacturing, backed by forced technology transfer and industrial espionage. Beijing views semiconductors not just as commercial products but as tools of geopolitical power.

A competition policy premised upon uncontested Western technological leadership is inadequate for today’s reality. Enforcement actions that weaken Western industrial capacity while China builds its capabilities directly advance Beijing’s strategic objectives. The Commission needs to recognize this new context rather than mechanically pursuing a case from a bygone era. Antitrust enforcement that damages Western champions only serves Chinese competitors, not consumers.

The Commission faces a straightforward choice. It can continue pursuing violations from 2002, when Intel dominated desktop computing and smartphones didn’t exist. Or it can recognize that semiconductor competitiveness against China matters more than relitigating ancient history. A nominal fine would acknowledge the violations while avoiding damage to Western technological sovereignty.

Europe can’t afford to weaken allied chipmakers while Beijing builds and takes tomorrow’s capacity. The question isn’t whether Intel violated competition law twenty years ago. The question is whether the West will have competitive semiconductor manufacturing tomorrow.

The sackings come as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr pushes to significantly downsize department.

At least 600 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States are receiving permanent termination notices in the wake of a recent court decision that protected some CDC employees from layoffs but not others.

The notices went out this week, and many people have not yet received them, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 2,000 dues-paying members at CDC.

The CDC played a crucial role in gathering data and setting health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The terminations come months after Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced efforts to let go of 20,000 employees, downsizing the department by more than 20 percent.

AFGE officials said they are aware of at least 600 employees being cut.

But “due to a staggering lack of transparency from HHS”, the union hasn’t received formal notices about who is being laid off, the federation said in a statement on Wednesday.

The permanent cuts include about 100 people who worked in violence prevention. Some employees noted that those cuts came less than two weeks after a man fired at least 180 bullets into the CDC’s campus and killed a police officer.

“The irony is devastating: The very experts trained to understand, interrupt and prevent this kind of violence were among those whose jobs were eliminated,” some of the affected employees wrote in a blog post last week.

Churchill Asset Management led a roughly $190 million private credit deal to support Shamrock Capital Advisors’s purchase of communications and corporate strategy firm Penta Group, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

PennantPark Investment Corp. also participated in the deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. formed a new “public responsibility committee” within its board to enhance governance and oversight as the embattled health-care conglomerate tries to repair its standing with shareholders, regulators and the public.

The committee “will monitor and oversee financial, regulatory, and reputational risks,” the company said in a filing Wednesday. UnitedHealth also named a new lead independent director, the former Vanguard Group chief F. William McNabb, who has served on the board since 2018.

Microsoft Corp. activist employees and supporters were arrested after returning to the company’s headquarters for a second day to demand that the software maker sever business ties with the Israeli military.

The demonstration followed a protest Tuesday, when participants were warned to leave or face trespassing charges — and quickly did so. When protesters gathered again Wednesday afternoon at the Redmond, Washington, headquarters, they set up tents and chanted slogans.

The Schumpeter Project for Competition Policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the world’s leading think tank for science and technology, appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) Proposed Decision on its Strategic Market Status (SMS) Investigation Into Apple’s Mobile Platform as part of its enforcement of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act of 2024 (the Act), and specifically the CMA’s provisional view that Apple has SMS in the provision of its mobile platform.

ITIF’s Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy promotes an understanding of antitrust law and economics that is designed to maximize dynamic competition and innovation, with a particular focus on promoting sound antitrust enforcement in the digital economy and other high-tech industries. ITIF draws heavily from the work of the Austrian-American economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, who famously described how competition takes the form of “creative destruction” by large firms that have both the incentive and the ability to engage in risk-taking and research and development which are necessary to drive innovation.

Do you have any views on our proposed descriptions of the relevant digital activities, namely the smartphone operating system, the tablet operating system, native app distribution, and mobile browser and browser engine?

ITIF understands that mobile operating systems, native app distribution, and mobile browser and browser engine are three platforms that constitute core parts of a user’s mobile experience and which, in their own way, connect consumers with various types of content and functionalities.

Do you have any views on our provisional conclusion that it would be appropriate to treat those activities as a single digital activity, referred to as a mobile platform, whose purpose is to facilitate interactions between users and providers of digital content and services on Apple’s mobile devices in order to allow users to access, view and engage with such content and services on their mobile devices?

For the purpose of analyzing competition in a particular market, sometimes a group of otherwise distinguishable offerings are “clustered” together. This may occur for products that many customers prefer purchasing together, or if there are considerable economies of scope that make it considerably more efficient to sell the products together, and if entering into competition with the “cluster” is difficult.[1] These conditions do not appear to be met in this case, and competitive dynamics differ substantially depending on whether one is evaluating mobile or tablet operating systems, app distribution, or mobile browser and browser engine.

Do you have views on our provisional finding that the competitive constraint on Apple’s mobile platform from Google’s and other rival mobile ecosystems is limited? This relates specifically to the competitive constraint in attracting end users and content providers.

ITIF does not agree with the provisional finding that Google poses only a limited competitive constraint on Apple in the mobile space when it comes to competing for end users and content providers given the vigorous competition that occurs between them, and particularly in terms of differentiated platform design and other feature-based competition. Indeed, courts in the United States have explicitly found that Apple competes directly with Google, which is it’s “main competitor.”[2]

Do you have views on our provisional finding that there are high barriers to entry and expansion for mobile platforms?

Mobile platforms typically benefit from network effects that enhance the value they provide: The more users a particular platform attracts, the more valuable it becomes to application developers seeking to engage with users; conversely, the more developers mobile platform has, the more valuable it becomes to users. As such, a mobile platform that enjoys network effects is not by itself a basis for concern, but merely a feature of how it creates value by connecting users and developers. Indeed, the CMA’s own consumer survey noted that 24 percent of Android users and 15 percent of iOS users considered switching or actually switched to iOS or Android respectively, which is consistent with consumers viewing barriers to entry and other switching costs as not prohibitive. Furthermore, a lack of very high rates of switching does not by itself imply that barriers to entry are high—as the survey acknowledges, consumers are generally satisfied with their smartphones, and thus have little incentive to switch. And even a lack of very high levels of switching concomitant with high prices is consistent with the incumbent-driven innovation and feature competition that helps to explain the high levels of satisfaction consumers enjoy.

Do you have views on our provisional finding that the competitive constraint on Apple’s mobile platform from alternatives to content distribution within Apple’s mobile ecosystem, and alternatives on non-mobile devices is limited?

Single-brand markets should not be used to assess the competitive constraints on Apple’s mobile platform, including those related to content distribution (e.g., iOS app distribution). Indeed, this was the conclusion reached by courts in the United States which found “no evidence regarding whether consumers unknowingly lock themselves into Apple’s app-distribution and IAP restrictions when they buy iOS devices.”[3] Additionally, users also can and increasingly do get content directly from their mobile browser (e.g., web apps).

Do you have views on our provisional conclusion that there are no expected or foreseeable developments that are likely (whether individually or in combination) to be sufficient in scope, timeliness and impact to eliminate Apple’s substantial market power in the provision of its mobile platform over the next 5 years?

Like many digital markets, the mobile space has been defined by innovation and feature competition that tend to limit the prospects for substantial and entrenched power.[4] Going forward, this can include disruption by cloud-based platforms and super apps that act as middleware and circumvent parts of Apple’s mobile ecosystem—as alleged by the U.S. Department of Justice in its lawsuit against Apple.[5] Indeed, with respect to mobile gaming, U.S. courts have found that technological changes are rapidly reshaping the market in a way that is likely to make substantial and entrenched market power difficult to maintain over time.[6]

Do you have views on our provisional conclusion that Apple has substantial and entrenched market power (SEMP) and a position of strategic significance (POSS) in respect of its mobile platform?

While ITIF recognizes the critical importance that mobile platforms play in the modern economy, it does not believe Apple enjoys substantial and entrenched market power in its mobile platform. Indeed, substantial and entrenched market power—so defined, dominance or monopoly power—plainly does not exist given the robust competition between Apple and Google for mobile consumers. Indeed, the CMA itself has characterized the mobile ecosystem as a “duopoly,” which is incompatible with any type of monopoly or dominant-fringe market structure. Moreover, with respect to app distribution and browsers, the alternatives mobile consumers have to Apple and Google’s respective solutions are considerable.

Do you have any other views in relation to the assessment/evidence set out in the proposed decision?

In its Roadmap of possible measures to improve competition in mobile ecosystems, the CMA notes that it “will explore the factors likely to be of particular importance for the development of AI services on mobile with a view to considering whether measures are needed such as greater interoperability, and improved choice architecture.” While ITIF broadly agrees with the CMA that AI is likely the most disruptive trend in the mobile space going forward, and additionally submits that AI is already positively disrupting to the mobile status quo, such as through mobile AI chatbots, the dynamic and rapidly evolving nature of AI markets belies the existence of any sort of market failure that could justify application of the Act in the foreseeable future.