FTSE 100 Live: Zurich and Beazley £8bn deal gets time; Defence and bank stocks rally February 16, 2026 Good morning and welcome back to the City PM liveblog. The first round of 2026 tech wobbles kicked into action last week and revived fears of an AI bubble. When Anthropic released a new AI tool designed to help in-house legal teams triage agreements and draft routine responses, the reaction trickled down through law firms straight into [...]
One in three founders plan job cuts due to AI February 13, 2026 A third of Britain’s scale-up founders are expected to cut jobs in the next year as AI adoption accelerates, new data suggests. A new report by Helm found 33 per cent of founders expect AI to lead job cuts in their business within the next twelve months. Nearly two-thirds, or 64 per cent, said they [...]
Relx reassures as AI fears hit data stocks February 12, 2026 Relx has sought to steady nerves with Thursday’s trading update, following a week of sharp AI-driven sell-off across legal and data stocks. The digital tool giant reported full-year results this morning showing revenue of £9.59bn for 2025, up from £9.43bn in 2024, representing seven per cent underlying growth. Reported operating profit rose to £3.03bn from [...]
Am I going to be replaced by AI? February 12, 2026 With each passing day it seems another sector suffers an AI-induced wobble on the stock market. We saw the large data companies lose billions in value when a new legal-focused AI tool was launched; we saw the owners of consumer and personal finance platforms take a hit as AI agents upped their game; and yesterday [...]
Court ruling tests Britain’s £1bn data centre power plans – and energy policy February 5, 2026 A High Court challenge to a £1bn data centre beside the M25 has exposed a glaring issue for Britain’s ambitious AI build out. Power hungry projects are effectively being approved before anyone is sure where the power will come from. The government has accepted that planning permission for a 90MW hyperscale facility at Iver in [...]
AMD’s AI push gathers pace behind Nvidia February 4, 2026 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) delivered another quarter of rapid growth, beating Wall Street forecasts on both revenue and earnings. Yet its shares tumbled as investors weighed what the numbers mean in a market still dominated by chip giant Nvidia. The chipmaker reported fourth quarter revenue of $10.27bn (£7.49bn), up 34 per cent year on year, [...]
Musk’s SpaceX swallows xAI ahead of mega IPO February 3, 2026 Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has acquired his AI firm xAI in a deal valuing the combined business at roughly $1.25 trillion (£910bn) as the billionaire tightens control of his empire, ahead of a long-trailed IPO. The all-stock transaction, announced on SpaceX’s own website on Monday, values SpaceX at about $1 trillion, and xAI at [...]
CMA pushes back on Google’s AI overviews January 28, 2026 The UK’s competition regulator has fired an early warning shot at Google’s AI-powered search, in a move that suggests the era of unfettered scraping and summarising may be coming to an end. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Wednesday set out proposed rules that would force Google to loosen its control over how search works in the UK. [...]
Anthropic and OpenAI raise billions as LLM race accelerates January 28, 2026 The AI boom took another leap forward this week as rival labs Anthropic and OpenAI moved to lock in eye-watering sums of funding, as the chatbot race accelerates. Anthropic has closed a funding round of between $10bn and $15bn at a valuation of around $350bn, comfortably overshooting its original target. The round was led by [...]
Whitehall leans on AI to fix failing public services January 27, 2026 The UK government is accelerating its use of AI across public services, as ministers look to modernise creaking systems, boost productivity and strengthen national security. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has announced a new cohort of British AI specialists who will spend the next year embedded in government. They will be backed [...]
