IBM To Buy Confluent For $9.3B To Expand AI Services

Accenture and Anthropic have announced a significant expansion of their partnership, forming the Accenture Anthropic Business Group, which will involve training approximately 30,000 professionals to facilitate the transition from AI pilots to full-scale deployment. This initiative was discussed by the CEOs of both companies on Bloomberg's 'The Close.'

David Bailey, CEO and Chairman of KindlyMD, predicts that half of digital-asset treasury firms (DATs) will consolidate by next year, highlighting a significant shift in the cryptocurrency sector. This statement was made during his appearance on Bloomberg Crypto, where he discussed the evolving landscape of digital assets.

Polymarket launched its mobile app in the US after receiving approval from the CFTC, marking a significant step in the evolution of prediction markets. This development follows a surge in trading volumes and interest in prediction markets, positioning them as a lucrative sector for young entrepreneurs.

In 2025, prediction markets have seen significant growth, with Wall Street potentially gaining an advantage over retail investors in prediction bets, as reported by Bloomberg's Lydia Beyoud. This development highlights the increasing integration of traditional finance with emerging market trends, particularly in the realm of cryptocurrency and predictive analytics.

The owner of the data center serving CME Group Inc. began experiencing technical issues approximately 12 hours before a significant cooling system outage that disrupted global markets. This incident has raised alarms regarding the reliability of the infrastructure supporting major financial operations.

The U.S. government has granted Nvidia permission to sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to approved customers in China, effectively lifting a previous export ban that was imposed due to national security concerns. This decision follows extensive lobbying efforts by Nvidia and is seen as a significant policy shift under the Trump administration.

A recent study introduces Guided Query Refinement (GQR), a novel approach aimed at enhancing multimodal hybrid retrieval systems by integrating a lightweight dense text retriever with vision-centric models. This method addresses challenges in scaling query and document representations while bridging the modality gap in current vision-language models.

IBM has acquired Confluent, a data streaming provider, for approximately $11 billion, marking a significant shift towards streaming data solutions over traditional static data approaches. This acquisition is part of IBM's strategy to enhance its capabilities in artificial intelligence and real-time data processing.