FTI Consulting News Bytes – 07 March 2025

FTI Consulting News Bytes

This week in TMT news, Anthropic triples its valuation following its latest fundraise of $3.5 billion. In policy news, the UK government prepares to debate a proposed bill to limit the harms of smartphone use amongst children and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) drops its probe into Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. Autonomous driving software startup, Wayve, has its sights set on global expansion as it launches a new facility in Berlin. Lastly, throughout the course of this week it has been a busy week over in Barcelona as, tech enthusiasts from across the world gathered at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona – so we share what our client, Nokia, has been up to at this must-attend industry event.

This week’s news

Anthropic’s valuation triples to $61.5bn in bumper AI funding round

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup launched by a group of former OpenAI employees in 2021, has raised $3.5bn following a Series E fundraise, tripling its value to an immense $61.5bn. The Financial Times reports that the investment comes a week after the startup launched its “most intelligent” model to date, named Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and will be spent on fuelling its AI ambitions which include computing resources to develop new models. The startup will also target international expansion in Asia and Europe.

Bill to limit harms of smartphone use among children to be published

A bill which proposed the banning of “addictive smartphone algorithms” for teenagers has been diluted following opposition from Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle and Education Sectary, Bridget Phillipson. The Guardian reports that the legislation, which was set to exclude under 16’s from algorithms and ban smartphones in schools will instead commit the government to researching the issue further, rather than call for immediate change. Whilst these elements of the bill are to be challenged, supporters hope that the call for further research will encourage the government to back other elements of the bill including increasing the internet adulthood age from 13 to 16.

CMA drops investigation into Microsoft’s $13bn stake in OpenAI

No doubt a sigh of relief for Microsoft this week as The Times reports that the CMA has ended its investigation into the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, the developer of Chat-GPT. Following an initial consultation, the UK’s competition watchdog has concluded that despite Microsoft investing billions of dollars into OpenAI and having exclusive uses of some of its AI products, “Microsoft did not have the level of control over the maker of Chat-GPT that would warrant further enquiries” and is therefore not subject to review under the UK’s merger rules.

UK AI startup Wayve accelerates global expansion plans

Wayve, the London-based autonomous driving start-up, is accelerating its international expansion after raising more than $1bn from investors including SoftBank, Microsoft and Nvidia. Alex Kendall, Wayve’s co-founder and CEO, told the Financial Times that  2025 will be a “year of global expansion”, confirming Wayve is testing its self-driving cars in Germany and the US, and setting its sights on Japan. The FT notes that Wayve is seen as Europe’s “best hope in autonomous driving”, adding it has emerged as one of the UK’s highest-profile AI companies at a time when British and European leaders are “anxious” to ensure the continent is not left behind by the US and China. Kendall commented that global expansion is important for Wayve as car manufacturers need their assisted driving features to work globally, not just in one city; the company’s system reportedly only took a “couple of weeks” to adapt from London’s streets to driving around San Francisco.

Nokia launches first mobile network on the moon at Mobile World Congress

From Tecno Mobile’s launch of the ‘slimmest phone in the world’ to Lenovo unveiling a laptop whose screen can fold in half, MWC this week was full of exciting announcements and technological innovations. One announcement stood out above all others – Nokia announcing the first-ever mobile network on the Moon. As part of a collaboration with a NASA space mission, Nokia’s lunar network went live yesterday . The Standard reports this was part of the ongoing Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission, named Athena, which aims to measure the “potential presence of resources from lunar soil that could be extracted and used to produce fuel or breathable oxygen” in the lunar south pole region. Using Nokia’s Lunar Surface Communication System (LSCS), the lunar network will operate as a “network in a box” – a compact unit containing everything needed for a 4G network. Instead of using satellite communications, the lunar network will use similar cellular technology to that on Earth, allowing future space missions to communicate seamlessly in real time. 

Top Tweets of the Week

• Department for Science, Innovation and Technology: This global network will enhance science diplomacy and increase collaboration on tech like AI that significantly improves our lives ✅ Lord Vallance gave a speech at the launch event to mark the occasion.
• Jonathan Gray, COO at Blackstone on Bloomberg Live: On AI and data centres, “I think margins and companies are going to expand dramatically. I think we’re going to use these bots to help us do so many things in our lives. I think the infrastructure spend against this will be quite significant.”
• Kai Nicol-Schwarz, Senior Reporter at Sifted: Unicorn femtech Flo is on the hunt for startups to acquire, as it looks to expand into new health verticals and ramp up revenue in the wake of a record 2024 fundraise.

Number of the week

£3bn The UK is reportedly missing out on over £3bn of consumer spending a year due to the rising popularity of digital nomad schemes.