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Feb 25, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! The Pentagon gives Anthropic Friday deadline to abandon ethics rules or face contract termination. Meta and AMD reach a mega compute deal. Larry Ellison and his son David move closer to winning control of Warner Bros. Discovery.
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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth threatened on Tuesday to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to let the Pentagon use its AI models for “any lawful use,” if Anthropic does not agree to those terms voluntarily by Friday, according to a person familiar with a meeting attended by Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Hegseth also threatened that Anthropic could be designated a supply chain risk, meaning that Anthropic’s models could not be used by the Pentagon or any contractors doing work for the Pentagon, the person said. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, which the Pentagon is threatening to terminate unless Anthropic agrees to widespread use of its models. The two sides have clashed over Anthropic’s refusal to allow its AI models to be used for mass domestic surveillance
or autonomous weapons use without humans involved. Amodei reiterated those holdouts to the Pentagon in the Tuesday conversation, according to the person familiar with the meeting.
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Meta Platforms struck a deal to buy enough AMD’s AI chips to power six gigawatts of data center capacity over several years, the companies announced Tuesday. In exchange, Meta stands to get 10% of AMD, currently worth $34 billion, if it buys all of the chips. Six gigawatts is an enormous amount of capacity: for context, a traditional data center typically consumed up to 50 megawatts of power. The deal is a big legup for AMD, which badly trails Nvidia in the AI chip market. The Meta-AMD deal follows last week’s announcement by Meta and Nvidia of a long term “strategic partnership” in which Meta committed to using millions of Nvidia chips across its own data centers and through cloud providers. Terms of that deal weren’t disclosed. As part of the AMD
deal, Meta will receive warrants to buy 160 million shares of AMD, or 10% of its outstanding shares, for a penny each if it buys all six gigawatts of capacity. The deal is almost identical to the one that OpenAI and AMD struck last year. The deal further illustrates how the tech industry’s insatiable appetite for chips has been a boon to both Nvidia and AMD, neither of which can supply enough chips to meet the growing demand for AI apps and services.
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Larry Ellison and his son David suddenly have moved into pole position to win control of Warner Bros. Discovery, outmaneuvering Netflix. WBD’s board announced Tuesday that it had “determined” that the latest offer from the Ellison-controlled Paramount Skydance “could reasonably be expected to lead” to a “superior proposal,” which would force WBD to cancel its Netflix deal and agree to be acquired by Paramount. The WBD board said, however, that it hasn’t made that determination yet and it needs to talk further with Paramount to decide. If that happens, the board said Netflix would have four business days to up its offer. Netflix has offered to buy WBD’s streaming operations and film studio for $72 billion in cash, while Paramount has offered to buy the entire company in a deal worth more than $108 billion. Paramount has raised its offer to $31 a share, from $30, agreed to pay a $7 billion termination fee if the deal is blocked by regulators as well as the $2.8 billion fee that WBD would have to pay to Netflix on cancellation of their deal. WBD’s change of heart comes after months of back and forth with Paramount, as the iconic entertainment company has stuck by Netflix. Shares of Netflix rose on the news, signaling how disenchanted Netflix shareholders have been with the idea of the WBD transaction.
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CoreWeave is nearing a deal to raise $8.5 billion in debt backed by its AI chips and contracts from Meta Platforms to purchase cloud services, said a person with knowledge of the deal. The cloud company expects to pay an interest rate of about 6% for the debt, which it expects will receive an A- rating from the credit rating agencies, the person said. That would make it the first of CoreWeave’s chip-backed deals to receive a credit rating, an important stamp of approval for some lenders. CoreWeave, which reports earnings results this week, has continued borrowing heavily as it tries to compete with more established cloud providers and a growing number of copycats renting AI chips to developers. The new debt is cheaper for CoreWeave than its previous offerings, which carried interest rates stretching into the double
digits. Morgan Stanley and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial are purchasing a portion of the CoreWeave debt and selling the rest to other firms, said the person with knowledge of the deal. CoreWeave and Meta spokespersons declined to comment. Representatives for Morgan Stanley and MUFG did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg first reported on the offering.
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Payments fintech Stripe is considering a whole or partial acquisition of struggling rival PayPal, according to Bloomberg. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment on any expressions of interest the company may have made for all or parts of PayPal. The publicly-listed PayPal has a market capitalization of more than $40 billion, although the company’s share price has fallen more than 80% since 2021. Stripe’s 2024 acquisition of stablecoin company Bridge, at a valuation of $1.1 billion, was the company’s largest acquisition to date.
Separately, Stripe on Tuesday said it had signed agreements with investors for a share tender offer that values the startup at $159 billion. In the company’s annual letter, Stripe said it processed $1.9 trillion in payments volume last year, an increase of 34% compared to a year earlier.
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Shein’s elusive founder Xu Yangtian made a rare public appearance on Tuesday in a forum hosted by the government of Guangdong, and pledged to invest 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in the Chinese province in the next three years. In a short speech, Xu said that Guangdong is where Shein has its roots . The remarks marked a departure from Shein’s attempt to deemphasize its China ties in the last few years as it sought to expand to the U.S. and other countries. Shein was founded in Nanjing in 2012 and later built a supply chain base in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong. The company moved its legal headquarters to Singapore in 2021 as it was geared up to go public in New York. The attempt failed amid backlashes against the company’s alleged involvement in forced labor and intensifying U.S.-China tensions. Shein
later applied to list in London, then Hong Kong, but so far has not received Chinese regulatory approval of the listing applications.
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