SAP freezes hiring and travel to shovel cash into AI
SAP freezes hiring and travel to shovel cash into AI

Europe’s biggest software company is tightening its belt to chase artificial intelligence. SAP is freezing most hiring and pausing non-essential travel, all to free up cash for its AI push. The plan landed in an internal email to staff on Wednesday eve…

Dutch military backs Intelic’s drone software with tens of millions of euros
Dutch military backs Intelic’s drone software with tens of millions of euros

The three-year deal aims to let drones from different manufacturers operate under one command system, a lesson the Netherlands says it has drawn from Ukraine. The Netherlands’ Ministry of Defence is putting tens of millions of euros into Intelic, a Dut…

HCLTech wins $1.14bn deal with a European firm, its biggest since 2023
HCLTech wins $1.14bn deal with a European firm, its biggest since 2023

HCLTech has signed a $1.14 billion contract with a major European company, the Indian IT services group said Thursday, in what is its largest single deal since a $2.1 billion agreement with Verizon in August 2023. The client is described only as a Fort…

EU lawmaker who investigated spyware abuse was hacked with Pegasus
EU lawmaker who investigated spyware abuse was hacked with Pegasus

Stelios Kouloglou spent two years on the European Parliament committee set up to investigate governments spying on their own citizens with commercial hacking tools. According to a report published Friday by Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto resear…

Quantum Systems raises $1.2bn and doubles its valuation to $8bn as defence money floods in
Quantum Systems raises $1.2bn and doubles its valuation to $8bn as defence money floods in

Europe has a new defence-tech heavyweight. Quantum Systems, a German maker of autonomous drones, has raised $1.2bn and more than doubled its valuation to about $8bn. It is one of the largest rounds ever for a European defence startup. The Bavarian comp…

Getty scraps its $3.7bn Shutterstock merger after a UK regulator won’t budge
Getty scraps its $3.7bn Shutterstock merger after a UK regulator won’t budge

A $3.7bn plan to merge the world’s two biggest stock-photo libraries has collapsed. The reason is not America, where regulators waved it through. It is Britain, where a single condition proved a deal-breaker. Getty Images will terminate its merger with…

Google loses final appeal over record €4.1 billion EU Android fine
Google loses final appeal over record €4.1 billion EU Android fine

The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed Google’s final appeal against a €4.1 billion antitrust fine, ending an eight-year fight over how the company built Android into a vehicle for its search and browser dominance. The ruling, handed …

Novo Nordisk’s owner backs an Italian fund to grow drug startups beyond Denmark
Novo Nordisk’s owner backs an Italian fund to grow drug startups beyond Denmark

Novo Holdings, the investment company that controls Novo Nordisk and holds the wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, is backing a fund aimed at Italian drug startups, according to Bloomberg. The move extends a pattern that has seen the Danish investor…

China and US risks leave Europe’s chip sector facing a bleak future, report warns
China and US risks leave Europe’s chip sector facing a bleak future, report warns

A new report from the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) and the French think tank Institut Montaigne warns that Europe’s semiconductor sector faces a bleak future, squeezed between Chinese export controls and a growing dependence on US technolo…

AI’s hopes and fears take over the world’s big central-bank gathering
AI’s hopes and fears take over the world’s big central-bank gathering

Every summer the world’s most powerful central bankers decamp to a hillside town outside Lisbon to argue about the economy in relative calm. This year the argument had a single organising subject, and it was not inflation in the usual sense. It was art…