The way consumers search is changing faster than the industry expected. This holiday season, many shoppers are looking for gifts inside AI platforms, rather than retailer sites or traditional search. They are asking natural questions like:
Find me a cruelty-free skincare gift for sensitive skin under $100. What are good gift ideas for a three-year-old that are safe and durable? What are the safest, nontoxic treats for my Golden Retriever?
This shift is already measurable. Adobe Digital Insights reports a 4,700% year-over-year increase in retail visits driven by AI assistants between July 2024 and July 2025. At the same time, click-through rates from SEO have dropped 34% as users bypass the search results page entirely. eMarketer reports 47% of brands have no idea whether they appear in AI-driven discovery at all.
The platforms know this shift is accelerating. Googles recent decision to add conversational shopping and AI-mode ads just weeks before the holidays shows how quickly consumer behavior is moving. Brands must adjust too.
Despite the complexity behind AI systems, three simple signals determine which products get recommended: trust, relevance, and extractability. These signals are the backbone of how AI decides what to surface, and matter as much as packaging, price, or placement.
1. Trust: The models instinct about which information is dependable
AI systems develop a sense of which sources to believe during training. Domains with consistent verification signals gain more weight because the model has learned they usually publish accurate information.
This is why leading retailers, including Ulta, Sephora, Target, Amazon, and Bloomingdales, rely on independent verification partners for the claims displayed on their digital shelves. Verified domains act as trust anchors. When a model must choose, it selects the product backed by clearer and more reliable sources.
Trust often determines whether you are included in the answer at all.
2. Relevance: How well your product matches the shoppers question
AI assistants answer based on meaning, not keywords. When a shopper asks for eczema-safe moisturizer or gluten-free protein bars, the system retrieves products whose attributes clearly map to those concepts.
Relevance depends on using consistent claims across every channel you sell inconsistency is heavily prioritized. When multiple sources concur, this repeated confirmation strongly reinforces your product is the right choice.
Missing or inconsistent attributes keep your product of the candidate pool.
3. Extractability: How easy it is for AI to read and use your product data
Even accurate information gets ignored if its hard for AI to parse. Clean structure, consistent formatting, and machine readability significantly increase the likelihood your product will be selected.
Brands improve extractability by adding structured markup for details like ingredients, materials, and benefits so retrieval systems can interpret it without ambiguity.
Clear structure anchors the attention of the large language model, giving your product an advantage. Extractability is often the deciding factor when competing products meet the same need.
AI RECOMMENDATIONS SHAPE BEHAVIOR
Algorithms do more than respond to consumers. They influence them.
We see this in language, where content moderation has led millions of people to adopt new vocabulary. The same pattern is emerging in commerce. If AI consistently recommends a certain moisturizer, probiotic, or baby product, shoppers begin to trust those recommendations and carry those preferences into stores.
Optimizing for trust, relevance and extractability goes beyond improving digital performance. It shapes real-world buying behavior.
A PRACTICAL PLAYBOOK FOR THE HOLIDAY WINDOW
Even with peak season here, brands can still make meaningful progress with these four steps:
1. Structure your data for machine and human audiences
Fix blocked pages or missing product schemas, and use standard formats like JSON-LD that AI can parse reliably.
Keep consumer-facing PDPs simple while storing deeper technical details, ingredients, and safety information in underlying schemas.
Clean up formatting and refresh retailer feeds weekly, since AI systems prioritize recency.
Example: A candle brand can keep the PDP simple for shoppers while storing allergen, VOC, and material data in structured markup that AI can read.
2. Align product claims everywhere you sell
Match titles, claims and benefits across DTC sites, retailer PDPs, and marketplaces.
Remove conflicting or outdated language that can weaken trust.
Example: If one PDP says cruelty-free and another says not tested on animals, unify the phrasing so AI sees one consistent claim.
3. Map your data to real shopper intent
Identify the attributes consumers care about most in your category.
Encode those attributes in machine readable fields; add supporting evidence where possible.
Example: For baby toys, encode safety standards like ASTM or CPSC in your structured data so AI can confirm the claim.
4. Build machine-readable authority with credible certifications and verification signals
Encode ingredients, materials, certifications, and testing outcomes in structured fields so AI can verify your caims without guessing.
Keep claim language consistent across channels to strengthen authority.
Use references to third-party standards, testing, or retailer badges. AI gives more weight to claims it can trace back to trusted sources.
Example: A sensitive skin serum should encode fragrance-free, eczema-safe, dermatologist testing details, and any third-party certifications directly in schema.
5. Use a tool that monitors, optimizes, and implements the work end-to-end
Choose a tool that goes beyond generic visibility tracking, looks at each SKU individually, and helps you implement structured data improvements.
Prioritize systems that strengthen your authority signals product by product, not just surface-level optimizations.
Look for tools that measure real outcomes, like increased visibility in AI or higher conversion, so you can measure ROI.
Consumer discovery is changing faster than most brands are prepared for. But there is still time. By reinforcing trust, relevance, and extractability now, brands can stay visible in AI-driven search this season and build a long-term foundation for every channel where AI shapes consumer decisions.
Kimberly Shenk is cofounder and CEO of Novi.
European Union regulators on Friday fined Elon Musk’s social media platform X 120 million euros ($140 million) for breaches of the bloc’s digital regulations that they said could leave users exposed to scams and manipulation.The European Commission issued its decision following an investigation it opened two years ago into X under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act, also known as the DSA.It’s the first time that the EU has issued a so-called non-compliance decision since rolling out the DSA. The sweeping rulebook requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.The Commission said it was punishing X, previously known as Twitter, because of three different breaches of the DSA’s transparency requirements. The decision could rile President Donald Trump, whose administration has lashed out at digital regulations, complaining that Brussels was targeting U.S. tech companies and vowing to retaliate.The company did not respond immediately to an email request for comment.EU regulators had already outlined their accusations in mid-2024 when they released preliminary findings of their investigation into X.Regulators said X’s blue checkmarks broke the rules because on “deceptive design practices” and could expose users to scams and manipulation.Before Musk acquired X, when it was previously known as Twitter, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts.After he bought it in 2022, the site started issuing the badges to anyone who wanted to pay $8 per month for one.The means X does not meaningfully verify who’s behind the account, “making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with,” the Commission said in its announcement.X also fell short of the transparency requirements for its ad database, regulators said.Platforms in the EU are required to provide a database of all the digital advertisements they have carried, with details such as who paid for them and the intended audience, to help researches detect scams, fake ads and coordinated influence campaigns. But X’s database, the Commission said, is undermined by design features and access barriers such as “excessive delays in processing.”Regulators also said X also puts up “unnecessary barriers” for researchers trying to access public data, which stymies research into systemic risks that European users face.“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA protects users,” Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a prepared statement.
Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
FIFA has invited more teams than ever for a World Cup priced largely for fans in the 1%. The process of figuring out which teams in the expanded 48-nation field will play where begins with Friday’s draw at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.Cape Verde, Curaçao, Jordan and Uzbekistan will appear in soccer’s premier event for the first time when next year’s tournament is played from June 11 to July 19 at 16 sites in the United States, Mexico and Canada.“I’m quite optimistic because to qualify you need to beat the other teams of your confederations, and that’s a sign of quality,” former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said Thursday as red carpets were installed at the Kennedy Center. “The teams are not there by coincidence.”President Donald Trump of the U.S. and Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico are expected along with Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney. Instead of soccer gear, the Kennedy Center gift shop still was filled with socks of Shakespeare, Beethoven and Verdi along with shelves of red and white holiday nutcrackers.The world’s top 11-ranked teams have all qualified, with No. 12 Italy among 22 nations competing in playoffs for the final six berths to be decided March 31.Led by captain Lionel Messi, who turns 39 during the tournament, Argentina seeks to become the first nation to win consecutive World Cups since Brazil in 1958 and 1962. Messi will look to extend his record of 26 games played and enters with 13 career goals, three shy of Miroslav Klose’s record.Games will be played at 11 NFL stadiums along with three in Mexico and two in Canada, where construction is underway to add 17,000 temporary seats to BMO Field, raising capacity to around 45,000. Attendance will top the record 3.59 million in 1994.“We basically set the new tone in terms of attendance, in terms of surrounding the tournament with a lot of entertainment and glamor,” said Alan Rothenberg, head organizer of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. “We did a lot of things that kind of broke the ice with respect to how you present the tournament as something other than just a soccer tournament.”FIFA announced initial ticket prices of $60-$6,730, saying they would be dynamic, up from $25-$475 for the 1994 tournament in the United States. It has refused to release a complete list of prices, as it had for every other World Cup since at least 1990. The governing body also is selling parking passes for up to $175 for a single match, a semifinal in Arlington, Texas.FIFA spokesman Bryan Swanson did not respond to a request for FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss ticket prices.Sixty-four nations will participate in the draw, 30% of FIFA’s members, but just 42 countries are assured of sports. Among the playoff teams, Albania, Kosovo, New Caledonia and Suriname are trying to reach the World Cup for the first time.With the expansion, the top two teams in each of 12 groups advance along with the eight best third-place teams. Some nations could reach the new round of 32 with three points.“I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape,” said former U.S. midfielder Tab Ramos, who during his playing days mapped out permutations for advancement. “We have a good team, so I’m not worried as much as I’ve been in the past about about this draw.”Opta Analyst’s computer projects the U.S. has a 0.9% chance of winning the Americans haven’t reached the semifinals since the first World Cup in 1930. Spain tops the forecast at 17%, followed by France (14.1%), England (11.8%), Argentina (8.7%), Germany (7.1.%), Portugal (6.6%), Brazil (5.6%) and the Netherlands (5.2%).In a new twist, FIFA said the top four teams in the rankings Spain, Argentina, France and England will avoid each other until the semifinals if they finish first in their first-round groups.Specific sites for most matchups and kickoff times won’t be announced until Saturday. In 1994, there were just seven night games.
A team’s group play sites will be restricted to an Eastern, Central and Western regional.
The 1994 World Cup draw in Las Vegas was apolitical, featuring performances by Stevie Wonder, Barry Manilow, James Brown and Vanessa Williams plus comedian Robin Williams, who called the draw screen “the world’s largest keno board,” yelled “Bingo!” when Greece was selected.This draw figures to be more akin to the ceremony for 2018 tournament in Moscow, opened by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump, who has campaigned for a Nobel Peace Prize, is expected to be awarded FIFA’s own peace prize that Infantino established after traveling to several events with Trump.But the main event is the pulling of balls from bowls to create groups. Retired tars Tom Brady of the NFL, Shaquille O’Neal of the NBA and Wayne Gretzky of the NHL along with three-time AL MVP Aaron Judge will assist in a ceremony to be run by former England captain Rio Ferdinand.“There is the angst and the looks of sheer terror and disappointment and/or joy and elation from the coaches and from the staffs,” said former U.S. defender Alexi Lalas, now Fox’s lead soccer analyst. “It really gets kind of real for people.”
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Ronald Blum, AP Sports Writer
So far, Nvidia has provided the vast majority of the processors used to train and operate large AI models like the ones that underpin ChatGPT. Tech companies and AI labs dont like to rely too much on a single chip vendor, especially as their need for computing capacity increases, so theyre looking for ways to diversify. And so players like AMD and Huawei, as well as hyperscalers like Google and Amazon AWS, which just released its latest Trainium3 chip, are hurrying to improve their own flavors of AI accelerators, the processors designed to speed up specific types of computing tasks.
Could the competition eventually reduce Nvidia, AIs dominant player, to just another AI chip vendor, one of many options, potentially shaking up the industrys technological foundations? Or is the rising tide of demand for AI chips big enough to lift all boats? Those are the trillion-dollar questions.
Google sent a minor shockwave across the industry when it casually mentioned that it had trained its impressive new Gemini 3 Pro model entirely on its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)another flavor of AI accelerator chips (GPUs). Industry observers immediately wondered if the AI industrys broad dependence on Nvidia chips was justified. After all, theyre very expensive: A big part of the billions now being spent to build out AI computing capacity (data centers) is going to Nvidia chips.
And Google TPUs are looking more like a Nvidia alternative. The company can rent TPUs in its own data centers, and its reportedly considering selling the chips outright to other AI companies, including Meta and Anthropic. A (paywalled) report from The Information in November said Google is in talks to sell or lease its GPUs so they can run in any companys data center. A Reuters report says Meta is in talks to spend billions on Googles TPUs starting in 2027, and may begin paying to run AI workloads on TPUs within Google data centers even sooner. Anthropic announced in October that it would use up to a million TPUs within Google data centers to develop its Claude models.
Selling the TPUs outright would, technically, put Google in direct competition with Nvidia. But that doesnt mean that Google is gunning hard to steal Nvidias chip business. Google, after all, is a major buyer of Nvidia chips. Google may see selling TPUs to certain customers as an extension of selling access to TPUs running in its cloud.
This makes sense if said customers are looking to do the types of AI processing that TPUs are especially good at, says IDC analyst Brandon Hoff. While Nvidias GPUs are workhorses capable of a wide range of work, most of the big-tech platform companies have designed their own accelerators that are purpose-built for their most crucial types of computing. Microsoft developed chips that are optimized for its Azure cloud services. Amazons Trainium chips are especially good at e-commerce-related tasks like product suggestion and delivery logistics. Googles TPUs are good at serving targeted ads across its platforms and networks.
Thats something Google shares with Meta. They both do ads and so it makes sense that Meta wants to take a look at using Google’s TPUs, Hoff says. And its not just Meta. Most big tech companies use a variety of accelerators because they use machine learning and AI for a wide variety of tasks. Apple got some TPUs, got some of the AWS chips, of course got some GPUs, and they’ve been playing with what works good for different workloads, he adds.
Nvidias big advantage has been that its chips are very powerfultheyre the reason that training large language models became possible. Theyre also great generalists, good for a wide variety of AI workloads. On top of that, theyre flexible, which is to say they can plug in to different platforms. For example, if a company wants to run its AI models on a mix of cloud services, theyre likely to develop those models to run on Nvidia chips because all the clouds use them.
Nvidias flexibility advantage is a real thing; its not an accident that the fungibility of GPUs across workloads was focused on as a justification for increased capital expenditures by both Microsoft and Meta, analyst Ben Thompson wrote in a recent newsletter. TPUs are more specialized at the hardware level, and more difficult to program for at the software level; to that end, to the extent that customers care about flexibility, then Nvidia remains the obvious choice.
However, vendor lock-in remains a big concern, especially as big tech companies and AI labs are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into new data center capacity for AI. AI companies would prefer instead to use a mix of AI chips from different vendors. Anthropic, for one, is explicit about this: Anthropics unique compute strategy focuses on a diversified approach that efficiently uses three chip platformsGoogles TPUs, Amazons Trainium, and NVIDIAs GPUs, the company said in an October blog post. Amazons AWS says its Trainium3 chip is roughly four times faster than the Trainium2 chip it announced a year ago, and 40% more efficient.
Because of the performance of Nvidia chips, many AI companies have standardized on CUDA, the Nvidia software layer that lets developers control how the GPUs work together to support their AI applications. Most of the engineers, developers, and researchers who work with large AI models know CUDA, which can cause another form of skills-based organizational lock-in. But now it may make sense for organizations to build whole new alternative software stacks to accommodate different kinds of chips, Thompson says. That they did not do so for a long time is a function of it simply not being worth the time and trouble; when capital expenditure plans reach the hundreds of billions of dollars, however, what is worth the time and trouble changes.
IDC projects that the high demand for AI computing power isnt likely to abate very soon. We see that cloud service providers are growing quickly, but their spending will slow down, Hoff says. Beyond that, a second wave of demand may come from sovereign funds, such as Saudi Arabia, which is building the Humain AI hub, a large AI infrastructure complex that it will fund and control. Another wave of demand could come from large multinational corporations that want to build similar sovereign AI infrastructure, Hoff explains. There’s a lot of stuff in 2027 and 2028 that’ll keep driving demand.
There are plenty of chipmaker challenges Nvidia stories out there, but the deeper one delves into the economic complexities and competitive dynamics of the AI chip market, much of the drama drains away. As AI finds more applications in both business and consumer tech, AI models will be asked to do more and more kinds of work, and each one will demand various mixtures of generalist or specialized chips. So while there is growing competitive pressure on Nvidia, theres still a lot ofgood reasons for players like Google and Amazon to collaborate with Nvidia.
In the next two years, there is more demand than supply so almost none of that matters, says Moor Insights & Strategy chief analyst Patrick Moorhead. Moorhead believes that five years from now Nvidia GPUs will still retain their 70% market share.
On November 19, Block Inc. held its first Investor Day in three years. Jack Dorsey, the company’s cofounder, chief executive, and “Block Head,” took to the stage and summarily posed what many investors and others in the industry were likely thinking.
Our business is complicated, he said. We want to make it much easier to understand going forward.
Dorseynotably clean-shavenproceeded to summarize the past few years at Block. The company is indeed much more complex now than when it was founded in 2009 as Square, named for the point-of-sale system that was the companys first product.
Four years ago, it changed its name to Block, a much more fitting moniker given its increasingly multidimensional portfolio, which now includes not only Square but also Cash App, Afterpay, Tidal, Bitkey, and Proto.
For Oakland, California-based Block, the growing pains were real as it has evolved from a single-product company to one that now facilitates payments (and buy-now-pay-later features) for both customers and merchants, has its hands in the crypto space, and even offers a streaming platform for musicians and creators.
The numbers bear it out: After going public in 2015, Block saw its stock price peak in 2021 at more than $270.
Like many other tech companies, Block has seen its shares fall from their pandemic-era highs. The stock is down roughly 26% in 2025 and the company fell short of Wall Street’s projections for its third-quarter earnings in November.
But Block has been making some behind-the-scenes moves over the past few years to right the ship. A major philosophical change, key acquisitions, and a renewed focus on simplicity have Blocks leadership excited about the companys future.
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A lesson in shape-shifting
Changing from a Square to a Block required fundamental organizational and philosophical shifts, which have been the most important aspect of Blocks evolution.
We decided to functionalize the company, says Owen Jennings, Blocks business lead.
That meant making big internal shuffles and reorganizing how information moved between engineers, designers, sales staff, and executives. It also meant putting functional leads into positions where they could be most impactful, whether they were working on product development or sales strategies.
We dissolved the business units and brought functional leaders to the top who reported directly to Jack, he says. He adds that the companys multiple business units were siloed and had different goals and models, which were leading to the wrong outcomes.
What became evident was that Block needed to find ways to serve both merchants and customersusing its products to either transact (via Cash App) or process payments (via Square).
The most obvious [thing] we could bring to the world was connecting the two worlds: consumers and sellers, Jennings says. But it wasnt happening based on the structure we had.
Since the reorganization, “it feels like were one massive company,” Jennings adds, but those changes took time to implement.
Functionalization happened within 18 months, says Nick Molnar, Blocks sales and marketing lead and the cofounder of Afterpay, who decided to stay with Block when it acquired Afterpay in early 2022.
Molnar says that while he is a relative Block newbie (Jennings, by contrast, has been at the firm for more than a decade), he’s seen a notable shift at the company. Meanwhile, most people arent even seeing the full results yet.
The back half of this year, youre seeing the work of the previous 18 months,” he says.
Blocks leaders have also married the functional model to the Rule of 40, a metric common in the SaaS sector, which says that a companys growth rate and profit margin should sum up to 40%.
Amrita Ahuja, Blocks foundational lead, says that prior to instituting the Rule of 40 framework, the company had expected that wed advance margins every yearwe wanted to share the trade-offs behind long-term growth and profitable long-term growth.
So we reoriented the company from the inside out,” she added. “That was really a language we built for the company. It helped us move faster and become more efficient, and ensure investments were going to drive growth.
The Rule of 40, paired with the new functional model, also allowed Block to reorient its larger focus on simplicitysomething it had gotten away from over the years as its business and structure have grown more complicated and convoluted.
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Basic building blocks
Ahuja first came to the company as Squares CFO in 2019. The thing that was striking to me, working at my first tech company, was the level of trust and transparency, she says. There was so much information, and everybody had access to it.
But, naturally, things get more complicated as a company grows, as Square did when it contended with the pandemic and then morphed into Block.
Square started with payments, then we built more than 30 products around it, Ahuja says.
It was a similar situation with Cash App. The kernel was around social money, peer-to-peer transactions,” she adds. “Now we have built a dozen products around that.
Over the years, its become increasingly important to get back to basics and “focus on the things that mean the most to our customers, Ahuja says, adding, “Weve already built a lot of depth and complexitynow its about making sure the right product gets surfaced at the right time for customers.
That is exactly what Block is doing now.
In recent months, Block has announced several new products, including new tools and features under its Square AI suite, Square Bitcoin, and Neighborhoods, a new feature for Cash App, which connects customers with local businesses.
With crypto finding wider adoption and a friendly regulatory framework, and AI being basically everywhere and anywhere, developing and releasing these types of products clearly makes sense for Block.
But Jennings says that Dorsey is not merely jumping on trends for the sake of doing so.
Hes willing to be patient for a long period of time to the extent that he has conviction, and hes been proven right many times, Jennings says of Dorsey, who is also a cofounder of Twitter and, more recently, the competing social media platform Bluesky, although he’s no longer involved in either.
“The power of Jack is that when he comes to the all-hands or presents the company strategy, its incredibly simple,” he adds, “and gets to the essence of what were trying to do.”
The big question: Will it all pay off?
A chip off the new Block
Blocks leaders say that the pieces are in place for a sort of corporate renaissance.
I believe that Block has the ingredients it needs to accelerate its growth, that flows through a really strong, profitable business thats growing in line with some of the best companies in the world, says Molnar.
So even as it may seem like the companys been underachievingperhaps in terms of sagging stock and recent earnings missesthose on the inside say they are brimming with confidence.
Were leading, and will continue to lead, says Jennings, who is particularly confident about Square Bitcoin, which offers no-fee Bitcoin payments for sellers around the world through its existing point-of-sale systems.
He thinks Block is well-positioned to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of Bitcoin payments in the years ahead.
As for Blocks broader goals? During its Investor Day 2025 presentations, the companys 2026 guidance showed expectations of nearly $12 billion in gross profit, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
It also released, for the first time, a three-year financial outlook that lays out what Blocks leadership is expecting, a sign that Block is fully grown up out of its startup stage, and that it’s here for the long haul.
By 2028, Block’s outlook shows, the company anticipates gross profit growth will be in the mid-teens, and that adjusted earnings per share growth will be somewhere around 30%, and on track for further revenue growth.
That would mark quite a turnaround, but Block executives believe they have the team, product mix, and leadership to persevereeven if it takes some time.
Jack is very good at knowing when to be patient and impatient, says Ahuja. From the first day I joined the company, there was a conversation about what his title should be: CEO or editor? Hes the editorhe’s the person who guides us in how we focus our efforts.”
During his comments at Investor Day, Dorsey echoed Ahujas sentiment. Ive never felt more confident that we have all the tools, the structure, the team, and the people to prove this out,” he said.
Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare on Friday said it was investigating an outage that took place in the morning that brought down several global websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and others, the second such crash to affect the company in less than three weeks.Cloudflare said the issue had been resolved, and that it was was “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs,” or application programming interface that allow software systems to communicate with each other.The company said the outage was not due to an attack. A change to how its firewall handles requests “caused Cloudflare’s network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning,” the company said.Users on social media platform X also reported problems accessing the website.Edinburgh airport had to shut down briefly on Friday morning. But the airport later said the outage was a localized issue that was not related to Cloudflare.In November, a Cloudflare outage affected users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game, “League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system.Last month Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of their Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.Amazon also experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October.
This version has been updated to reflect that Edinburgh airport says its temporary shutdown was not related to the Cloudflare outage.
Associated Press
Netflix has announced that it intends to buy legendary Hollywood studio Warner Bros. in a deal valued at approximately $82.7 billion.
The deal, which must be approved by regulators, will further consolidate the entertainment industry and give Netflix ownership of some of the most iconic films and television franchises ever, not to mention HBO.
Heres what you need to know:
Whats happened?
Today, Netflix and Warner Bros announced a deal in which Netflix will purchase the legendary Hollywood studio, along with its HBO Max and HBO divisions, for a total enterprise value of approximately $82.7 billion (which Netflix says has an equity value of $72.0 billion).
The deal isnt exactly a surprise, as Warner Bros had previously put itself up for sale publicly and Netflix was expected to be one of the primary bidders for the companys assets. However, the deal marks a major milestone for the streaming giant, which is not known for large-scale acquisitions.
The news comes after Warner Bros. Discovery, the company’s owner, announced this summer that it would split the current company into two, with the new ones owning its Streaming & Studios assets and Global Networks divisions, respectively.
With todays announcement, Netflix is essentially buying the Streaming & Studios company that will spin off from Warner Bros. Discovery next year.
When the deal closes, Netflix says each WBD shareholder will receive $23.25 in cash as well as $4.50 in shares of Netflix common stock for every share of WBD common stock they own.
Announcing the deal, Greg Peters, co-CEO of Netflix, said, With our global reach and proven business model, we can introduce a broader audience to the worlds [Warner Bros. creates]giving our members more options, attracting more fans to our best-in-class streaming service, strengthening the entire entertainment industry and creating more value for shareholders.
What IP will Netflix acquire under the deal?
Netflixs purchase deal for Warner Bros, HBO Max, and HBO will give the streaming giant ownership over one of the most lucrative intellectual property portfolios out there.
If the deal closes, Netflix will own:
DC Universe
Batman
Superman
Wonder Woman
Friends
Game of Thrones
The Big Bang Theory
The Harry Potter film franchise
Touching on the IP aspect of the deal, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, said, Our mission has always been to entertain the world. By combining Warner Bros. incredible library of shows and moviesfrom timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friendswith our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we’ll be able to do that even better.
What has Warner Bros said about the deal?
In a statement, David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, said, Todays announcement combines two of the greatest storytelling companies in the world to bring to even more people the entertainment they love to watch the most.”
When does the Netflix-Warner Bros deal close?
Netflix says that it expects the transaction to close in the next 12-18 months, putting a likely closing date sometime in 2027.
However, Netflix and Warner Bros can likely expect extreme regulatory scrutiny of their deal. While Netflixs and WBDs boards of directors unanimously approved the deal, it will not be finalized until regulators give the go-ahead.
How have the companies’ stock prices reacted?
Shares in Netflix Inc. (Nasdaq: NFLX) fell in premarket trading on Friday. As of this writing, Netflix stock is down just over 4%.
Shares in Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. (Nasdaq: WBD) were essentially flat in premarket trading as of this writing.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning people to stop using certain types of glucose monitor sensors after the company that makes them, Abbott Diabetes Care, said the devices were linked to seven deaths and more than 700 injuries.Certain FreeStyle Libre 3 and FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus sensors may provide incorrect low glucose readings, FDA officials said this week. Such readings over an extended period may lead people with diabetes to make bad treatment decisions, such as consuming too many carbohydrates or skipping or delaying doses of insulin.“These decisions may pose serious health risks, including potential injury or death,” the FDA said in the alert.The sensors are devices that measure glucose levels in fluid just beneath the skin to provide real-time measurements of sugar in the blood. Information from the sensor is sent wirelessly to a device or phone.The warning affects about three million sensors in the U.S. from a single production line, Abbott officials said in a statement. About half those devices have expired or been used, the company added. As of Nov. 14, the company reported seven deaths worldwide and 736 serious adverse events. No deaths occurred in the U.S., where 57 injuries were reported.Abbott has notified all customers of the problem. The company said it has identified and resolved the issue in the affected production lot.The FDA said people should stop using affected sensors and discard them.The problem involved FreeStyle Libre 3 sensors with model numbers 72080-01 with unique device identifiers 00357599818005 and 00357599819002. It also involved FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus sensors with model numbers 78768-01 and 78769-01 and unique device identifiers 00357599844011 and 00357599843014.People can visit www.FreeStyleCheck.com to check if their sensors are potentially affected and request a replacement, the company said. No other FreeStyle Libre products are affected.The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Jonel Aleccia, AP Health Writer
Scented candle lovers, the day you have waited for all year is finally here.
Today marks the kick-off of the annual Candle Day sales event from Bath & Body Works, during which the retailer’s pricey scented wax pillars will go for just a third of their regular cost.
Heres what you need to know about Candle Day 2025.
What is Candle Day 2025?
Candle Day is Bath & Body Works’ annual candle sale bonanza. Throughout the year, many of the companys three-wick candles go for $29.95 each, but during Candle Day, many of those candles can be had for prices as low as $9.95.
Due to the massive savings, Candle Day is a sales event that candle lovers across America look forward to each year.
However, dont let the Candle Day name fool you.
Much like Amazon Prime Day, the title of the event is a bit misleading. As with Prime Day, Candle Day is not actually only a 24-hour event and instead runs across multiple days.
During the event, Bath & Body Works says, over 180 varieties of candles will be on sale.
When is Candle Day 2025?
There are two different elements to Bath & Body Works Candle Day 2025: the online element and the in-store element.
Candle Days deals are available both in-store and online, but the online portion of the sale actually kicks off earlier. For Candle Day 2025, the online (and mobile app) deals began at 10 p.m. last night, December 4.
The in-store Candle Day event officially kicks off this morning at 6 a.m. Candle Day 2025 then runs both online and in-store from Friday, December 5, through Sunday, December 7.
How much are Candle Day prices?
Most three-wick candles at Bath & Body Works cost around $29.95 throughout the year. But during the Candle Day sales event, many of those same candles can be purchased for just $9.95.
Customers will get the same sale price no matter if they shop online, in the mobile app, or in-store.
Are there any new or limited-edition candles for Candle Day 2025?
Yes. This year, Bath & Body Works is unveiling new, limited-time, and limited-edition candles for Candle Day 2025.
The 2025 limited-edition candle is called Holiday Dill-ight, which the company describes as Inspired by the quirky holiday tradition.”
The company is also unveiling several new candle collections.
The Sunday Funday collection includes Neapolitan Ice Cream, Gummy Candies, Glazed Cherries, Butterscotch Swirl, Sugared Waffle Cone, and Hot Fudge Drizzle.
The Perfect Pairings collection includes Coffee & Donuts, Chips & Salsa, Pizza & Ranch, and Popcorn & Slushie.
And the Holiday Bucket List collection includes new candles like Rum Rum Reindeer and Christmas Road Trip, along with returning holiday favorites Sweater Weather, Merry Mimosa, and Vanilla Balsam.
Candle Day 2025 marks the retailer’s 14th Candle Day event. It comes just days after Newell Brands, parent company of Yankee Candle, announced it would be closing 20 Yankee Candle stores this year.
Bath & Body Works has also struggled this year, reporting a 1% decrease in net sales for its third quarter. It expects sales will decline in the “low single digits” for the full year.
Shares in Bath & Body Works (NYSE: BBWI) are down almost 50% in 2025.
The District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virgina (DMV) region is emerging as a national test case for the future of office space.
As cities across the country grapple with persistent office vacancies, D.C. is taking a bold approach: Instead of focusing solely on residential conversions, it is pioneering a broader strategy to convert offices toanything.
While the concept of office conversions isnt new, most efforts have been centered on residential use. D.C.s strategy breaks that mold.
In January 2025, the city launched the Central Washington Activation Projects Temporary Tax Abatement, better known as the Office to Anything program. This policy targets buildings that arent suitable for housing conversion and opens the door to a wider range of uses.
With this program, D.C. is positioning itself as a laboratory for alternative office conversions, from data centers to hospitality and mixed-use spaces. As federal workforce reductions continue and General Service Administration (GSA) leases expire, the DMV faces mounting vacancies. This presents a rare opportunity for other cities to watch D.C.s approach in action and consider how similar policies could reshape their own urban cores.
WHY D.C.S OFFICE MARKET SIGNALS A NATIONAL SHIFT
The DMV is ground zero for federal downsizing, with one-fifth of all federal workers, according to Brookings, and 46 million square feet of office space leased by the government. With our Federal Property Pulse (FPP) tool, we are tracking these GSA leases and cancellations across the U.S. Since January 2025, 24 leases in the region have been canceled, contributing to 1.9 million square feet of vacant office space. This is over 4% of the total space leased by the GSA. The FPP shows that another 9.98 million square feet of space could enter the already struggling DMV office market in the next year.
This is a critical moment for the region. As the structure of the federal government continues to evolve, so must the economic core.
Brookings DMV Monitor reported a mismatch in displaced federal government workers and available private sector positions. While there are new jobs entering the market, many of these are unsuited to the 17,000 displaced federal government workers, as the new roles are concentrated in construction, hospitality, and healthcare sectors.
As GSA lease expiries and cancellations increase and federal workforce reduction continues, D.C. could become a case study for the role of office conversions in supporting a shifting economic core.
FEDERAL LEASE EXPIRIES: A TICKING CLOCK FOR OFFICES
A wave of expiring federal leases is approaching. As part of the effort to cut government spending, the GSA will reduce its leased footprint by allowing expiring leases to lapse without renewal. With the GSA leasing 145 million square feet of office space across the U.S., the DMV will not be the only region affected. Of that space, 51.4 million square feet are already in holdover, soft-term, or nearing soft-term.
While we can predict an influx of former GSA-leased properties will enter the market, lease terms make it difficult to know exact timing. GSA leases typically include a noncancellable hard-term followed by a soft-term, where leases can be terminated with 120180 days notice. This creates uncertainty around when properties will re-enter the market.
UNLOCK NEW USES FOR OFFICE SPACE
The initial hype around office-to-residential conversions was driven by a rise in vacant office properties in favorable downtown neighborhoods. These properties helped address housing shortages, but many of the most viable buildings have already been repurposed.
With residential conversion options narrowing, cities must assess market demand and local economic drivers to identify alternative uses. The D.C. Office to Anything policy seeks to reposition underutilized office assets into higher-performing uses based on zoning, market demand, and building characteristics. Key alternative uses include small-scale industrial, data centers, hospitality, and mixed-use spaces.
Looking beyond the office-to-residential model could offer cheaper conversions and shorter timelines. Small scale industrial and logistics conversions come in around $100-$150 per square foot with timelines of 6 to 12 months, while residential conversions cost $250-$400 per square foot with 24-to-36-month timelines. Not only do industrial uses offer lower conversion costs, but shorter timelines could also result in quick returns on investment.
It isnt only a matter of cost and timelines; alternative office conversions are better suited to meet the needs of an individual market. For some cities, data centers are emerging as an opportunity for conversion. With a projected shortfall of over 15 gigawatts of processing power by 2030, vacant office properties located near economic and urban centers could help to curb demand. In particular, offices can be converted to edge computing facilities that distribute processing and data storage, keeping these capabilities closer to data sources.
WHAT MAKES CONVERSIONS WORK?
Successful conversions depend on two things: physical feasibility and financial viability. Local government support is key to improving the viability of conversions through streamlined approval processes, zoning flexibility, and financial support.
Zoning is one of the first, and more formidable hurdles that office conversions face. If a commercial property cannot be rezoned, the entire viability of the project falls apart. Downtowns with zoning flexibility will see the most success in the long run. In Texas, statewide zoning flexibility is enabling office conversions in cities like Dallas.
Local government can also play a major role in determining the financial viability of a conversion project. Without tax incentives or subsidies, the cost of conversions could be prohibitive. This is part of what makes D.C.s Office to Anything conversions so appealing. Providing a 15-year temporary property tax freeze, the policy improves viability. Combined with the potential for lower conversion costs for nonresidential uses, these projects could become more appealing for developers.
SCALE THE STRATEGY
The DMV isnt alone in facing office vacancy challenges. Across the U.S., millions of square feet in GSA properties stand to enter the market. D.C. can show us what to do with that vacant space. Office conversions dont have to mean housing, they can mean anything. As cities continue to rethink their economic cores, the success of D.C.s Office to Anything strategy could redefine how we use space.
Mark Rose is chair and CEO of Avison Young.
