17/02/2026

BIZ & FINANCE TUESDAY | FEB 17, 2026

18

Aussie super funds are M&A blessing and curse

Tech is thriving in New York. So are the rents

NEW YORK: It accounts for more than 200,000 jobs and has colonized entire neighborhoods. In New York, the tech industry is driving local economic growth like never before – but it is also widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots. Ian Amit remembers moving to New York 25 years ago. Back then,“you could probably count the number of tech startups on two hands,“ says the CEO of cybersecurity firm Gomboc.ai. A quarter of a century later, the professional organisation Tech:NYC lists more than 2,000. Every indicator shows that the tech footprint has “grown enormously” in the Big Apple, says Julie Samuels, president of Tech:NYC, who also points to the arrival of major employers in the sector. The most visible among them is Salesforce, with its branded tower near Times Square. But the epicentre of New York tech lies elsewhere. Once known as “Silicon Alley” – a nod to California’s Silicon Valley – and centred around Broadway and 23rd Street, the hub has expanded to cover a vast area known as Midtown South that stretches from Chelsea to SoHo and includes the Meatpacking District. At the heart of this network sits Google, which occupies no fewer than six buildings spanning several hundred thousand square meters. Like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, the Alphabet subsidiary has opted for charming old buildings rather than a gleaming tower. Amazon’s withdrawal in 2019 – under pressure from public opposition – from a mega-project to build a second headquarters in Queens raised fears of a slowdown for New York tech. So did the rise of post-Covid remote work. But the industry has done more than simply recover from both shocks. Despite a recent softening of the tech job market, companies have leveraged the jobs crunch to enforce a return to the office. Last year, new leases were signed for more than 700,000 square meters of office space in Midtown South – a record, according to Peter Johnson of commercial real estate firm Avison Young. “Everything suggests this will continue, or at least hold at those levels,“ he says. The demand is so strong that a growing number of companies are now venturing further south in Manhattan or even across the river to Brooklyn, among them Etsy and Kickstarter. In Manhattan, amid majestic but modestly scaled historic buildings and far from the chaos and skyscrapers of the Midtown business district, “this is where companies want to establish their long-term headquarters,“ Johnson says. More than in San Francisco, the tech capital of the world, “you’re close to your customers” in other industries, notes Amit. “Finance, healthcare, education – everything is here.” What’s more, while startups long had to look to California for funding, dozens of private equity firms are now based in New York. Beyond a desirable work environment, “the young, dynamic people that tech companies are trying to hire”are already here, Samuels adds. This workforce can appreciate New York’s charms all the more because the average hourly wage in tech is significantly higher than in any other sector – including finance. But that is yet another source of pressure on the housing market, with median rents in Manhattan climbing 40% over the past decade to about US$4,500 (RM17,572) per month. “We need to find a way to allow people who grew up here to stay here,“ acknowledges Samuels, “while also allowing people who want to come here to start a business or launch their career to do so. And that’s not easy.” The backlash has already reached City Hall: in 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race on a promise to freeze rents on nearly one million apartments – with many pointing to the tech industry for driving up the cost of living. There are many contributing factors, but if forced to assign blame, “tech wouldn’t be my first culprit,“ argues Amit. – AFP

MELBOURNE: Activists Elliott Investment Management often hog the limelight as makers or breakers of mergers and acquisitions. But in Australia superannuation, or pension, funds do a lot of the heavy lifting. Take yesterday’s agreed A$11.7 billion (RM32 billion) buyout of Qube. Leading the deal is Macquarie Asset Management, whose interest in taking private the container and logistics firm publicly emerged almost three months ago. But it had to contend with a potential spoiler in the form of UniSuper. Ultimately, the investment house, one of the country’s top five super funds with A$166 billion in assets, joined the deal. But the ability of these money managers to be an M&A blessing or curse is only going to increase. In this case, UniSuper quickly increased its stake from 6.5% in November to more than 15%. The worry for the wannabe buyers was that UniSuper would take one of two like

assets, most of it overseen by institutional money managers. The total market value of companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange is A$3.3 trillion. Even though more than half of super assets are invested abroad, that still leaves money set aside for retirees owning a huge chunk. And the power of these funds will continue to grow. First, because companies have to contribute 12% of employees’ total pay to their super accounts; second, because the mostly moribund domestic new listings market combined with their proceeds from a healthy buyout market in recent years means they have even more cash they have to put to work. Sure, they might not quite qualify as traditional activists, but wannabe dealmakers have to accept that it’s mostly semantics. This article is contributed by Antony Currie, a columnist for Breakingviews.

routes: force a price increase for a buyout that was already offering a 28% premium; or scupper the deal. There’s precedent for both. In 2023, AustralianSuper, the largest such fund Down Under, successfully opposed a Brookfield-led US$13 billion (RM51 billion) buyout of Origin Energy after bumping its ownership up to 17% from 12%. That’s a crucial level: Australian mergers and acquisitions generally require support from three-quarters of voting shareholders; if, as often happens, a chunk of retail and other investors don’t make use of their ballot paper, a 15% or 17% slug can be enough to stymie the buyers. A couple of years earlier, UniSuper both helped negotiate a higher price for the take-private of Sydney Airport as well as rolling its holdings into the transaction. This time, it just did the latter. What gives it and other super funds such heft Down Under is simple maths. There’s some A$4.5 trillion of superannuation

India hosts AI summit as safety concerns grow NEW DELHI: A global artificial intelligence (AI) summit kicked off in New Delhi yesterday with big issues on the agenda, from job disruption to child safety, but some attendees warn the broad focus could diminish the chance of concrete commitments from world leaders. While frenzied demand for generative AI has turbocharged profits for many tech companies, anxiety is growing over the risks that it poses to society and the environment. Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday inaugurated the five-day AI Impact Summit, which aims to declare a “shared roadmap for global AI governance and collaboration”.

“This occasion is further proof that our country is progressing rapidly in the field of science and technology,“ and it “shows the capability of our country’s youth”, he said in an X post yesterday. It is the fourth annual gathering addressing the problems and opportunities posed by AI, after previous international meetings in Paris, Seoul and Britain’s wartime code-breaking hub Bletchley. Touted as the biggest edition yet, the Indian government is expecting 250,000 visitors from across the sector including 20 national leaders and 45 ministerial-level delegations. Also in attendance will be tech CEOs including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Google’s Sundar Pichai, although unforeseen circumstances have reportedly led Jensen Huang, head of US chip titan Nvidia, to cancel his planned appearance. Modi will seek to “strengthen global partnerships and define India’s leadership in the AI decade ahead” in talks with the likes of France’s Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, organisers say. But whether they will take meaningful steps to hold AI giants accountable is in doubt, Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, told AFP. Industry commitments made at previous events “have largely been narrow ‘self regulatory’ frameworks that position AI companies to continue to grade their own homework”, said Kak, a former AI adviser to the US Federal Trade Commission who is taking part in the summit. The Bletchley gathering, held in 2023 – a year after ChatGPT stunned the world – was called the AI Safety Summit. The meetings’ names have changed as they have grown in size and scope, and at last year’s

Workers install the national flags of participating countries on the eve of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Feb 15. – AFPPIX

platforms to confront the issue. Organisers highlight this year’s AI summit as the first to be hosted by a developing country. “The summit will shape a shared vision for AI that truly serves the many, not just the few,“ India’s IT ministry has said. Last year India leapt to third place – overtaking South Korea and Japan – in an annual global ranking of AI competitiveness calculated by Stanford University researchers. But despite plans for large-scale infrastructure and grand ambitions for innovation, experts say the country still has a long way to go before it can rival the US and China. Seth Hays, author of the Asia AI Policy Monitor newsletter, said talk at the summit would likely centre around “ensuring that governments put up some guardrails, but don’t throttle AI development”. “There may be some announcements for more state investment in AI, but it may not move the needle much – as India needs partnerships to integrate on the international scene for AI,“ Hays told AFP.

AI Action Summit in Paris, dozens of nations signed a statement calling for efforts to flank AI tech with regulation to make it “open” and “ethical”. But the US did not sign, with Vice-President JD Vance warning that “excessive regulation could kill a transformative sector just as it’s taking off”. The Delhi summit has the loose themes of “people, progress, planet” – dubbed three “sutras”. AI safety remains a priority, including the dangers of misinformation such as deepfakes. Last month saw a global backlash over Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool because it allowed users to produce sexualised pictures of real people, including children, using simple text prompts. “Child safety and digital harms are also moving up the agenda, particularly as generative AI lowers the barrier to harmful content,“ AI Asia Pacific Institute director Kelly Forbes told AFP. “There is real scope for change” although it might not happen fast enough, said Forbes, whose organisation is researching how Australia and other countries are requiring