Business

The city of Hangzhou in southern China is one of the country’s leading technology hubs, and home to the groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek. Think of Hangzhou as a Chinese version of Silicon Valley. The headquarters of DeepSeek is on the twelfth floor of a modern office building. Image: The headquarters of DeepSeek are

Octopus Energy Group is wading into the battle for the future of Britain’s biggest water company as part of a consortium which includes the French infrastructure giant Suez. Sky News has learnt that Octopus Energy – which recently overtook British Gas as Britian’s biggest household gas and electricity supplier – has struck an agreement that

It is nearly five years to the day since Bernard Looney, the then new chief executive of BP, set out a radical strategy for the oil major to go net zero by 2050. Under that strategy, BP would invest more in low carbon energy sources and less in oil and gas, even to the extent

A member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting committee has made a case for a steeper cut to interest rates on expectations that an inflation “hump” ahead will be temporary. Catherine Mann, an American economist, told an audience in Leeds that she currently did not see a repeat of an extended period of inflation in

Valentine’s Day might be a gift-giving occasion your wallet could do without, but it’s thousands of pounds cheaper than being alone. Being single costs £2,533 more a year, Sky News can reveal. Suddenly, that box of chocolates doesn’t seem so expensive. Single people are forced to spend 22% more on rent or mortgages, council tax

Apple has reportedly been ordered by the UK government to allow it access to encrypted data stored by the company’s users worldwide in its cloud service. At the moment, only the Apple account holder can access such data – not even the US technology giant can see it. Apple, which makes iPhones, iPads and iMacs,

The private equity backer of one of Britain’s oldest industrial manufacturing groups is in talks to sell an advanced defence technology business that will bring its parent’s dismantling close to completion. Sky News has learnt that Advent International, the buyout firm which bought Cobham for £4bn in 2020 and then swooped on London-listed Ultra Electronics

The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs. There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)

The Bank of England has cut interest rates by another quarter percentage point, bringing down the cost of borrowing to 4.5%. And in a sign that households can expect more cuts in the months to come, two members of the Bank‘s Monetary Policy Committee said they would have preferred to reduce rates even more, by

Tesco has expressed interest in acquiring more than 100 Crown Post Offices whose future has been placed under review as the state-owned company explores shifting them to a franchise model. Sky News has learnt that Nigel Railton, the Post Office chairman, told a group of MPs this week that Britain’s biggest retailer had informed it

An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI. Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris

The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department. Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since

What if Britain has, almost entirely by accident, navigated itself into about the best possible position it could be in, as Donald Trump embarks on a trade war with nearly all his economic partners? I realise this might, at first, sound a little odd. After all, when the world is facing economically-destructive measures (blanket tariffs

Donald Trump has ordered sweeping tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, kicking off a trade war that will affect the globe. Here we look at the tariffs and what they all mean for the world: What did Trump announce? The US president has confirmed that goods from Mexico and Canada will face 25% tariffs, while

Thames Water will seek High Court approval for a £3bn rescue plan in a four-day hearing beginning at the Royal Courts of Justice on Monday. The indebted utility is seeking a judge’s approval for a restructuring plan centred on an emergency loan it says it needs to avoid running out of cash by the end

Barclays says an IT glitch that left some customers locked out of their accounts has been resolved after the disruption entered a third day. The bank said the “technical issue” has been fixed and delayed payments processed. In a statement on Sunday, Barclays said: “We are working on bringing balances up to date for some

Barclays has advised customers to seek help from friends and family or even contact food banks after a major IT glitch left some locked out of their accounts. Hundreds of people reportedly claim they are experiencing interrupted services and missing funds after the issue struck on what was payday for many British workers and the

Barclays has advised customers to contact food banks after a major IT glitch left some locked out of their accounts – with the disruption likely to continue today. The bank has warned that some customers may see an outdated balance, and payments made or received may not show following the initial outage on online and

Donald Trump has said he will place 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on goods from China from Saturday. The move raises fears of price increases for US consumers as the US president suggested he would try to blunt the impact on oil imports. He has been threatening the tariffs

The UK’s benchmark stock index has reached another all-time high, in a month of record breaking. The FTSE 100 index of most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange closed at 8,666.65, breaking the record set on Thursday night after four consecutive days of rises. January has been the best month in more than two