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High-level WTO talks in Cameroon end in failure

Mistral raises US$830m in debt for AI data centre in Paris

STOCKHOLM: Europe’s leading AI provider Mistral has raised US$830 million in new debt to buy 13,800 Nvidia chips for a major data centre near Paris, the firm told Reuters, as Europe races to scale AI infrastructure to compete with the US and China. The deal, set to be announced this week, marks Mistral’s first debt raising and underscores growing investor confidence in European AI firms as they seek to challenge the dominance of US tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon in cloud computing and AI services. Mistral’s debt raising was financed by a consortium of seven banks, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC and MUFG, it said. The data centre in Bruyeres-le-Chatel is expected to become operational in the second quarter of 2026. Mistral selected the site for its first data centre in February 2025. Last month, the company unveiled plans for a second facility in Sweden and said it would seek to secure 200 megawatts of capacity across Europe by the end of 2027. “Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,“ chief executive Arthur Mensch said in a statement shared with Reuters. The Paris-based startup, which provides AI models to the French armed forces, has positioned itself as a European alternative to US AI leaders, offering both models and infrastructure services to governments and enterprises seeking greater technological independence. – Reuters DeepSeek chatbot suffers longest outage since viral rise in 2025 BEIJING: China’s popular DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot suffered yesterday its longest outage since the viral rise of its flagship R1 and V3 models early last year. DeepSeek’s status website showed that the chatbot suffered a “major outage” lasting 7 hours and 13 minutes, from the early hours of yesterday morning until 10.33am local time (same time in Malaysia), when the incident was marked as resolved. As per company protocol, no reason was given for the outage. Such incidents can be caused by a wide range of issues, from malfunctioning servers to bugs stemming from an update to the AI chatbot. DeepSeek data shows its API service, a function mostly used by developers to integrate the chatbot into custom applications, saw consecutive day-long outages in late January 2025, at the height of its viral moment. But its webpage where ordinary users can ask the chatbot questions directly had not experienced a major outage longer than two hours until yesterday, according to the startup’s status website. The global AI industry is eagerly awaiting the release of DeepSeek’s next-generation model, but the company has given no indication of a timeline. – Reuters

o No significant agreements reached, e-commerce tariff exemptions set to lapse YAOUNDE: High-level WTO talks in Cameroon ended early yesterday with no significant agreements and a failure to extend a years-long ban on customs duties for e-commerce, after deep divisions blocked a deal. As a consequence, the World Trade Organisation moratorium that since 1998 has exempted cross-border digital transmissions from duties expired yesterday. This does not mean tariffs will automatically be imposed, but it deals a heavy blow to developed countries and the US in particular. Trade ministers and other delegates meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde also failed to meet even meagre expectations on deals towards much-needed reform of the WTO and on agriculture, among other issues. “We worked hard,” WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala insisted as the WTO’s 14th ministerial conference wrapped up around 1am yesterday – more than 12 hours after schedule. “We simply ran out of time.” The disappointment was palpable following the talks, which took place against a backdrop of heightened trade tensions and global economic turmoil linked to the Middle East war. “The failure of WTO members to reach a concrete political agreement in Yaounde is particularly concerning at a time of real strain on the global economy,” International Chamber of Commerce chief John Denton said in a statement. “This is not the outcome we wanted,” British Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle said, decrying “a major setback for global trade”. The four days of negotiations on Saturday entered a phase of intense “horse-trading” on various issues, observers said. Early Sunday, bleary-eyed negotiators had emerged from an all-night session with a draft text in hand, indicating a minimal deal on reform was in reach, according to diplomatic sources and experts. That prospect evaporated when Brazil intervened at the last minute, blocking a text on the e-commerce moratorium to protest the lack of progress in separate talks on agriculture, the sources told AFP on condition of anonymity. “Agriculture is the sector that has seen less

EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic (second from left) speaks during a press conference at WTO ministerial conference in Yaounde. – AFPPIC

exempting electronic transmissions from customs duties. After allowing it to lapse yesterday, countries will continue trying to negotiate a deal on the issue back at WTO headquarters in Geneva. Okonjo-Iweala tried to play down the issue, pointing out to journalists that “this is not the first time that the moratorium has lapsed”. It had happened at the 1999 Seattle ministerial, before the moratorium was reinstated at Doha two years later. But back then, countries did not rush to collect duties on electronic transmissions, she said. “It takes time to set up, so you usually don’t see anything, and then we’re able to restore it.” The United States had even been pushing for the moratorium to be made permanent, something many developing countries – India chief among them – have balked at over fear of losing tax revenues. A US official insisted that Washington was not the one blocking an agreement, saying that two unnamed countries had refused to cooperate. Washington did appear to have lowered its expectations over the course of the talks, with an agreement appearing to emerge on Sunday paving the way towards a five-year extension. But Brazil did not want to go beyond two years, the country’s top diplomat said on X. – AFP

progress during the WTO’s 30 years of existence. We cannot allow this to continue,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira had told the gathering on Saturday. The 166-member WTO has been trying for years to establish a programme of work for negotiations on agriculture, but the issue remains highly sensitive in many countries. Going into Yaounde, countries had set the bar low – only hoping to issue a joint declaration aimed at laying the groundwork for future negotiations. Countries also failed to reach an agreement on the priority issue of WTO reform. Ministers and delegates had been tasked with developing an action plan to revitalise a WTO weakened by geopolitical strains, stalled negotiations and rising protectionism. The organisation, which struggles to reach agreements because of the requirement for consensus, must undergo far-reaching reforms to emerge from a deep crisis that has raised questions over its central role in regulating international trade. But the completion of any agreement on advancing on reform was contingent on resolving another, recurring issue. For nearly three decades, every WTO ministerial – its biennial decision-making body – has negotiated extending the moratorium Insilico shares were trading up 6.5% in Hong Kong in morning trade yesterday, having spiked nearly 15% at the open on news of the deal. “Insilico’s AI-enabled discovery capabilities represent a powerful complement to Lilly’s deep expertise in clinical development,“ a press release on Insilico’s site cited Eli Lilly’s group vice president of molecule discovery Andrew Adams as saying. The pair will collaborate on multiple research and development programmes “focused on targets selected by Lilly”, the statement added. Insilico will receive a US$115 million upfront payment under the terms of the deal, it said. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly international businesses president Patrik Jonsson told the Financial Times that the company wants the UK to regularly raise NHS drug prices and phase out a multi-billion-pound rebate scheme if it is to resume investment. Jonsson said he was in talks with ministers and was “optimistic” about reaching a deal by the summer for the UK to pay more for its medicines.

Eli Lilly signs US$2.7 billion deal on AI drug research HONG KONG: US pharma giant Eli Lilly has agreed to work with a Hong Kong-listed biotech company to use artificial intelligence for drug discovery, according to a stock market filing. It said the value of the deal between Eli Lilly – known for its weight loss jabs including Mounjaro – and AI software firm Insilico Medicine could be up to US$2.7 billion. The discussions also cover “innovative” pricing plans that would link payments for anti-obesity drugs to whether patients become well-enough to return to work, Jonsson said. Medicine prices in the UK had been “far too low for far too long, and even with the current threshold, we are not back to where we started more than 20 years ago,“ he added.

“Everyone deserves access to the best and most innovative treatments, and our changes to medicine pricing will make sure thousands of NHS patients gain faster access to new treatments,“ the British Department of Health and Social Care said. “We remain fully committed to delivering the UK-US Pharmaceutical Agreement, including the changes to the NICE cost-effectiveness threshold.” Lilly raised the UK list price of Mounjaro by up to 170% in August 2025, saying it had initially set prices “significantly below” those in its three other major European markets to prevent delays in NHS access. – Agencies

The pair will use Insilico’s “AI engine to accelerate the discovery and development of novel therapeutics across multiple therapeutic areas”, said the filing, made by Insilico’s parent company on Sunday. The new deal builds on existing collaborations between the two companies, which struck a software licensing agreement in 2023, according to Insilico. The rapidly developing generative AI field holds promise for many sectors including medicine because of its ability to crunch huge amounts of data faster than humans can.