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The South Korean government is nearing the announcement of a major energy investment project in the U.S. to support America's artificial-intelligence build-out, a long-awaited development of the trade deal struck between Washington and Seoul last year.

The deal, potentially worth more than $100 billion, envisions South Korea financing the construction of up to eight nuclear power plants and a natural-gas project, according to people familiar with the matter.

President Trump and his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jae Myung, reached a pact last October that saw the U.S. lower most tariffs from 25% to 15%, including on South Korea's automobile sector. In exchange, South Korea pledged $350 billion in U.S. investments, plus another $100 billion for American energy purchases.

No projects had yet emerged, drawing ire from U.S. officials, including Trump, who in January threatened to raise levies on South Korea again. Now the two sides are close to finalizing a pair of deals that could be announced as early as next week, the people said. The talks are continuing. Details of the investments could still change, as could the timeline for the announcement.

The South Korean government this year created a state-run corporation charged with evaluating potential U.S. investments for their commercial viability. A bilateral investment committee then reviews the projects, which would be financed by South Korean state funds, and makes recommendations to Trump. The investments are expected to unfold over a number of years. South Korea's outlays, in any given year, are capped at $20 billion per the two countries' agreement.

One project in final-stage negotiations involves the construction of up to eight nuclear reactors in the U.S., which can help provide the energy needed for data-center expansion, the people said. The investments will stretch into the tens of billions of dollars, and possibly surpass more than $100 billion, they added. The precise timeline for the reactors' construction and their locations haven't been finalized. It is likely they will be built on land owned by the U.S. government. The first reactors would use American firm Westinghouse Electric's AP1000 design, some of the people said. The U.S. has two AP1000s. But the two sides have discussed at least some of the reactors being built in the U.S. with APR1400 designs from a South Korean company, Kepco, they added. Both the Korean and U.S. reactors are large enough to power a city. Kepco said it is unable to comment due to the continuing discussions between the U.S. and South Korea. Westinghouse didn't have immediate comment.

Trump has been eager to jump-start construction of large and small reactors. About one-fifth of U.S. electricity comes from nuclear power, though reactor construction has slowed dramatically in recent decades. The U.S. government has made an $80 billion federal push for new Westinghouse reactors, with some funds coming from the trade deal with Japan.

Another potential investment, at roughly $20 billion, is tied to a natural-gas power plant in Texas, which would power AI data centers, according to people familiar with the matter. Should the deals proceed as planned, South Korea is prepared to make an initial seed payment of more than $2 billion before the end of the month, some of the people said. The White House declined to comment. South Korea's trade, industry and resources ministry said no decisions have been made regarding U.S. investments.

The deal would hand Trump a splashy achievement from last year's tariff blitz. In more than a dozen deals, trading partners such as South Korea, the European Union and Japan agreed with the U.S. to a mix of trade concessions, state-backed investment and market access in return for lower tariffs.

After striking their trade pact with South Korea last October, Trump threatened to revive the 25% tariffs after months of inaction by South Korea's legislature to approve the deal. South Korean lawmakers approved the pact in March.

Of the $350 billion pledged by South Korea, some $150 billion is earmarked for U.S. shipbuilding. Trump, at the recent Group of Seven summit in France, asked Lee if South Korea could help quickly build 10 U.S. warships. The remaining $200 billion could go into strategic industries such as semiconductors, nuclear energy and biopharmaceuticals.

South Korean officials have stressed that the country's potential nuclear-energy investments could help the U.S. create a domestic supply chain to meet its rising power needs as well as foster an export market for reactors.

Oil prices surged fueling a global bond market sell off Thursday, with the 10-year Treasury yield closing in on 5%.

Oil prices topped $102 a barrel in the U.S. and global benchmark Brent hit $107. U.S. wholesale inflation rose 0.4% in August, while existing home sales in August fell to their lowest level in more than a year. But market participants will focus on Friday's consumer price index print. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal are expecting consumer-price inflation to increase 0.4% in August up from 0.1% in July.

The elevated yields put focus on the first Treasury buyback with increased volume. The Treasury Department bought $5.2 billion of longer-term bonds at its afternoon buyback operation—less than the maximum amount of $6 billion that it was willing to buy. Treasury yields extended their gains after the operation. The 2-year yield rose 0.122 percentage point to 4.548%. The 30-year yield rose 0.075 percentage points to 5.360%, its highest yield since June 2004. While the benchmark 10-year yield rose 0.104 percentage points to 4.943%, its highest level since October 2023.

The U.S. Treasury auction of 30-year maturities Thursday afternoon briefly provided some support to the bond market, signaling strong demand. The monthly auction sold $22 billion in bonds. The high yield at the auction was 5.308%, the highest level since August 9, 2001, when it was 5.52%.

Rate hike projections are nearing 70% for the Federal Reserve's interest rate meeting next week, according to CME's FedWatch tool. However, a lower-than-expected CPI print Friday could strengthen the case for holding rates steady. "Barring a surprise in the CPI number on Friday, we expect the economic data to support the case for a hold at next week's Federal Open Market Committee meeting," wrote Grace Zwemmer, U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

Inflation worries also rippled throughout global markets. The European Central Bank raised interest rates for the second time this year, with resurgent energy prices sparked by the war in Iran intensifying price pressures. The 25 basis-point increase was largely what market participants were expecting.

The U.K. 10-year gilt sits around 5.378%, above 5.295%, the highest level since 2007. The German Bund 10-year yield sits around 3.496%, above 3.451%, its highest since 2011.

The increased buyback volume will be in effect for the remainder of the Treasury's current refunding quarter, through Nov. 4. Treasury said it would provide more information about future buyback sizes at the next quarterly refunding, scheduled for Nov. 4.

Oracle posted sharply higher profit and revenue in its latest quarter, with sales from its cloud infrastructure business more than doubling.

The software and cloud-computing company on Thursday said profit for its fiscal first-quarter ended Aug. 31 rose 60% to $4.76 billion, or $1.56 a share from $2.93 billion, or $1.01 a share, in the same quarter a year ago. Stripping out one-time items, earnings came in at $1.92 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet expected adjusted earnings of $1.74 a share.

Total revenue rose 30% to $19.34 billion, ahead of Wall Street estimates for $19.14 billion. Oracle shares rose more than 7% to $164.01 in after-hours trading.

Revenue from Oracle's cloud business jumped 62% to $11.61 billion, with infrastructure sales up 121%. The gain helped offset revenue from the company's software unit, which fell 3% to $5.55 billion, as customers continue to migrate from on-premises software to the cloud.

Oracle said it booked more than $30 billion worth of additional AI cloud contracts during the recent quarter, putting the company's remaining performance obligations at $664 billion, up $209 billion from last year.

For its fiscal second quarter, Oracle guided for adjusted earnings of $1.85 to $1.93 a share, compared with analyst views for $1.89 a share. The company also projected revenue growth between 30% and 34%. Wall Street modeled revenue of $21.18 billion, marking a 32% increase from last year.

For the year, Oracle reaffirmed its outlook for revenue of at least $90 billion. The company now expects adjusted earnings of at least $8.10 a share, up from $8.05 a share. Analysts are looking for revenue of $89.66 billion and adjusted earnings of $8.07 a share.

The company continues to anticipate $90 billion to $95 billion in capital expenditures for the year.

Apple on Wednesday redefined its flagship smartphone with the launch of the Duo, a folding $1,999 iPhone, betting its design and promises of data privacy will let it leap ahead of rivals who have been selling folding phones for years.

The Duo could shake up a category long dominated by Samsung and Chinese companies like Huawei, whose devices have struggled to move beyond a niche audience. Analysts have long said Apple's entry could be the catalyst foldables need, helping bring the form factor into the mainstream much as the company did with smartwatches and wireless earbuds.

The Duo is sized and shaped like a passport, with rounded edges. It opens into a horizontal, 7.6-inch-diagonal (19 cm) screen that also can be viewed vertically. There is a smaller single screen on the front, when the phone is folded. When open, it is Apple's thinnest phone, the company said.

New CEO John Ternus led the event, the most noticeable overhaul of Apple's flagship product since the iPhone X in 2017. The iPhone brought in $209.6 billion, or just over half of Apple's sales, in its most recent fiscal year.

Ternus criticized existing foldables as awkward and poorly suited for common tasks such as scrolling and video viewing, saying the Duo was designed to deliver an iPad-like experience in a pocket-sized device through a custom hinge, dual displays with a consistent aspect ratio, and a new titanium body. "It's entirely new and at the same time remarkably familiar. A similar size to your passport, it feels familiar to hold and comfortable to use with one hand," Ternus said.

It will fall to Ternus, the previously low-profile hardware chief, to persuade Apple's customers that they need a foldable device costing about $2,000, a new high for a global brand that has defined mass luxury. Analyst firms such as International Data Corporation expect Apple will sell every foldable iPhone it can produce and secure a 40% share of the lucrative niche by the end of next year.

Apple positioned the iPhone Duo as a business productivity device, showing how it would manage Zoom calls with multiple participants and a broader view of the Slack messaging app. The Duo's larger screen will support multiple app windows at once, a move aimed at productivity that Apple has made with some of its iPads.

Apple said the iPhone Duo will feature the A20 Pro chip to drive its displays and also a new C2 modem chip designed by Apple, part of its move away from Qualcomm's wireless data chips. Its battery supports 24 hours of mixed dual-screen use and can charge to 50% in about 20 minutes.

"Apple has created a new premium growth opportunity, opened up another revenue stream and injected fresh momentum into the iPhone business," PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore said. Shares were up less than 1% after the presentation.

Former CEO Tim Cook handed over the leadership baton to Ternus at the start of the presentation with a video about how to start the event. The video ended with a closeup of Cook, who said, "Not me. That's your guy," pointing back toward the new CEO.

Ternus touted the iPhone platform as a personal AI hub that focused on privacy, saying that others wanted to collect and store personal data. "Honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control," he said. "That's why Apple Intelligence runs on device whenever it can."

Apple's Lilian Rincon, who oversees AI products for the iPhone maker and was recruited from Google earlier this year, described an updated Siri assistant. Executives also showed off the iPhone 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max handsets that are the latest versions of Apple's well-known line, which do not fold.

Apple also unveiled a feature aimed at addressing growing concerns over AI-generated and manipulated images. It introduced a new standard it calls "Apple Reference Image" to prove the authenticity of the images taken with the new iPhone 18 Pro cameras and said it will also support the emerging SynthID standard for identifying images that have been created or edited with AI. The Apple Reference Image feature will not be available in the EU or China.

Bending Spoons is continuing its trend of buying once-sought-after software companies for pennies on the dollar. This time, the Italian company is buying Miro for $1.36 billion in cash (equity value of $1.79 billion), a mighty dip in valuation for the once-hot workplace collaboration startup that was awarded a price tag of $17.5 billion in late 2021.

Founded in 2011 as a whiteboarding tool called RealtimeBoard, Miro found great fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies moved to remote work en masse, and found their employees wanting to replicate the experience of collaborating on a physical whiteboard. Miro quickly capitalized on that momentum by building a platform that could integrate with more than 250 apps, and struck partnerships with Atlassian, Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. The company also started letting its users build integrations with common tools and customize the base product to meet their needs.

Today, it calls itself an "AI innovation workspace" that offers AI assistants for its whiteboard tools, AI workflows, prototyping tools, and AI connectors that pull context from various platforms like GitHub, Jira, and Slack.

By 2022, Miro had grown from five million to about 30 million users within a scant two years, and its paying customer base had expanded by 550%—factors that likely contributed to its immense valuation at the time. By all indications, the company has continued growing, though not at that blistering pace. Today, Miro has more than four million paying users and 100 million total users.

Bending Spoons said Miro now has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue, of which 90% comes from businesses and enterprises. The company also has about $435 million in net cash, and is profitable.

Still, the 92% dip in Miro's valuation is illustrative of just how much software-as-a-service (SaaS) multiples have unwound since its heydays of 2021. By 2022, the dying pandemic tailwinds spurred companies to tighten spending by cutting down on duplicate apps and licenses. Miro, competing with much-better funded rivals such as Canva, Figma, and Microsoft in the workplace collaboration space, likely found itself shoved aside as businesses started preferring suites of various products instead of individual collaboration tools.

Miro, which had about 1,200 employees in 2022, cut jobs twice, laying off 119 staff in February 2023 and reportedly another 275 people in October 2024.

Bending Spoons, however, is probably happy it is able to snap up a company that's been doing quite well for a smidgen of its former, arguably inflated, value. In that way, Miro is pretty similar to Airtable, which was valued at over $11 billion in the boom days of 2021, but sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 billion last month.

The Italian serial acquirer of software companies seems to be exploiting a specific change: Large, recognizable SaaS companies that were priced in 2021 as if they'd become software giants, but matured into slower-growing but still substantial businesses with decent recurring revenue and established user bases.

Still, it's curious why Miro's board and investors agreed to sell at that price now, especially seeing that the company didn't apparently need the cash. Has confidence in SaaS companies being able to go public or find a comparable exit really plummeted that low?