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Nebius Group said on Monday it will provide Microsoft with GPU infrastructure capacity, in a deal worth $17.4 billion, over a five-year term, sending its shares soaring over 47% after the bell. The deal underscores the surging demand for high-performance AI computers, as companies invest heavily to bolster their AI infrastructure. Microsoft may also acquire additional services capacity under the deal, bringing the total contract value to about $19.4 billion. Nebius’ core business involves providing Nvidia graphic processing units and AI cloud as services. Nebius offers AI developers the computing, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their AI models, with the help of its cloud software architecture and in-house designed hardware. Nebius will provide Microsoft access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity from its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey, starting later this year. “The economics of the deal are attractive in their own right, but, significantly, the deal will also help us to accelerate the growth of our AI cloud business even further in 2026 and beyond,” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said. Microsoft is the largest customer of CoreWeave one of Nebius’ competitors which earlier this year denied media reports that said it had seen contract cancellations from the hyperscaler. Amsterdam-based Nebius Group emerged from a deal to split the assets of Russian tech giant Yandex. Juby Babu, Reuters
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A space that once held 5,000 tons of corn, grains, and wheat has just undergone a surgical transformation that’s turned it from an industrial complex into a new hotel. Now open in Bremen, Germany, the John & Will Silo Hotel is a unique repurposing of the silos of a former Kellogg’s cereal factory. Hulking concrete structures that enabled decades of breakfast cereal production are now luxe, if quirky, accommodations for travelers. It’s a strange second life for a former cereal factory, but its also part of a 600-acre urban redevelopment project in the industrial area of Bremen, located along the Weser river. The former Kellogg’s factory, with a silo-topping sign that’s become a local landmark, is the project’s visual centerpiece. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The design comes from Vienna-based Delugan Meissl Associated Architects (DMAA), who worked with the project’s developer to preserve and reuse the factory as part of a new commercial and residential district known as Überseestadt. [Photo: courtesy DMAA] “The possibility of demolishing the building was never up for discussion,” says Eva Schrade, senior project manager at DMAA. She says the idea of converting the structure into a hotel came during an evening brainstorming session with the client, which was considering turning the silos into some kind of sports center, like a climbing gym. The architects offered a more challenging alternative. “The structure of the round rooms is unusual for a hotel, but the task was all the more exciting,” Schrade says. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The 130-foot silo shells now contain 117 circular and semicircular hotel rooms. Winding interior hallways run along their curves inside the structure, and the round walls of the silos frame bedrooms, seating areas, and even showers. Horizontal bands of windows have been cut through the silo walls to give hotel guests wide views of the river and city beyond. The raw concrete of the silo structure lent itself to the minimalist interior design of the hotel, with spare furnishings and steel-framed fixtures. It’s not the first time grain silos have found new purpose. Grain silos in Cape Town, South Africa, have been used for a contemporary art museum. Some DIY designers have even turned smaller-scale grain silos into boutique hotel suites. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] The Bremen project is on a much larger scale, and therefore involved a bigger lift. Physically carving up the building was labor-intensive. The concrete walls of the silos are more than 6 inches thick. To keep the building structurally sound, the architects had to preserve a significant amount of the structure of the silos themselves, both their exterior shells and the partition walls between them. Bracing wall had to be added inside smaller rooms, as well as the insulation that the silos previous life holding corn and grain did not require. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] Despite the significant changes to the structure, the architects sought to ensure the silos still presented as silos. “Inside, all interventions were to remain visible as far as possible. The raw concrete floors were only cleaned and the cuts were left visible,” Schrade says. [Photo: Piet Niemann/courtesy DMAA] Beyond the hotel rooms, many of the building’s original details were kept intact, including steel bracing inside a penthouse bar and the original funnel-shaped outlets of the silos, which hang overhead in the hotel lobby. Another original feature no one wanted to lose is the building’s towering Kellogg’s sign on the roof. “Many Bremen residents have a long-standing connection with the company,” Schrade says. The hope is the hotel conversion will give Bremen a new kind of connection with this building.
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E-Commerce
Spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are used worldwide to organize and analyze data, but getting the right information into them isnt always straightforward. Businesses often need engineers to write code that pulls information from cloud systems and databases, then clean and process it before its ready for Excel. AI spreadsheet company Sourcetable is trying to simplify that process with what it calls Superagents: AI tools that connect to different systems across the internet, fetch relevant data, and make it ready for analysis. Technically, Superagents manage a collection of AI agents that link to databases and cloud services like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Stripe. Once connected, Sourcetables agents can answer questions directly, such as analyzing customer spending data from Stripe or website traffic from Google Analytics. They can insert raw or processed data into a Sourcetable spreadsheet, which users can work with just like Excel. To do this, the system can run Python number-crunching libraries on a virtual machine, avoiding the math errors that generative AI often produces. “There’s a full Python ecosystem under the hood,” says Sourcetable cofounder and CEO Eoin McMillan. “Basically every data science library you could possibly want or ask for is just embedded in the product, just rolled in for free.” McMillan says the idea came from his experience at startups, where accessing and analyzing data was always a heavy lift. “The conclusion that I came to was that everybody was trying to patch a broken ecosystem for data, and the reason for this was because Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets were not built correctly for the modern information environment,” he says. Despite its advanced features, Sourcetable still looks like a traditional spreadsheet and supports hundreds of familiar formula functions. It can import and export Excel files, too. Earlier this year, the company launched an autopilot mode that lets users ask the AI to answer questions, generate graphs, or build visualizations. McMillan says this helps spreadsheet users who’ve struggled with more complex features, like those pesky pivot table operations and VLOOKUP, or vertical lookup, functions. “Most people in the world use spreadsheets, but they don’t know how to use VLOOKUP or pivots, and having a spreadsheet that can combine data, and summarize data, and analyze data for them is a huge unlock in terms of this new capability they have,” he says. For power users, the built-in Python libraries can replace hours of manual spreadsheet work or external coding, producing results in seconds. While the product is most popular with operations and analysis teams, McMillan says its also used for everything from scientific research to fantasy football, where Sourcetable even built specialized tools. In a demo for Fast Company, McMillan showed how Sourcetable could pull data from the web, downloading and processing a sitemap file listing each of the Sourcetable website’s individual pages, then visiting each page and cataloging page titles and descriptions in a spreadsheet. While the platform includes prebuilt connectors for popular cloud services and databases, the AI can also fetch data from other systems using standard API documentation. Generally, connections to outside services cost $100 each per month, though one per organization is included with Sourcetable’s $20-per-user-per-month “Pro” plan and five per organization with a $200-per-user-per-month “Max” plan. A promotion celebrating the launch of Superagents makes connectors added the week of September 8 free forever. Currently, users can edit the SQL code Sourcetable generates but can only viewnot rewritethe Python scripts. McMillan says that will likely change in the future. For now, if Python doesnt produce the desired results, users must re-prompt the AI. The AI also asks permission before overwriting spreadsheet contents. It can, in some cases, push data back to cloud systems, but McMillan stresses thats still a beta feature. In the future, Sourcetable will likely allow outside systemsincluding other AI agentsto connect proactively as well. Sourcetable, which has raised $5.5 million in funding, isn’t the only company trying to use AI to modernize the spreadsheet (Excel and Google Sheets each offer their own AI features). But McMillan says Sourcetable has an advantage in being created with AI and integration with online data in mind, rather than having such features added on well into the product’s life. However, he says, the AI chat interface alone is unlikely to replace the tabular spreadsheet format that people have been using for thousands of years. “The reason why Sourcetable is powerful, McMillan says, is because you have this Excel-like spreadsheet interface, which is the data tool that everyone knows how to use.
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