Historic SoftBank deal & starting signal for EU regulation
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
The year 2025 is ending with a historic bang in the tech world. While the world prepares for New Year’s Eve celebrations, contracts for the largest single investment in the AI sector were signed in the early hours of this morning (CET). At the same time, Europe is anxiously awaiting tomorrow, when the strictest regulation in AI history will come into effect.
Here are the top AI news stories of the day:
Sealed: SoftBank and OpenAI finalize $22.5 billion deal
Right on schedule, SoftBank and OpenAI confirmed the transaction this morning. Masayoshi Son is transferring the final tranche of the total $22.5 billion. In return, the restructuring of OpenAI into a „Public Benefit Corporation“ (a for-profit entity with a social mission) has been legally finalized.
As a result, SoftBank receives significant voting rights and a seat on the newly formed board, massively expanding the Japanese conglomerate’s influence on global AI development.
EU AI Act: „Stage 2“ enters into force tomorrow
With the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the second and most critical phase of the EU AI Act comes into force. From January 1, 2026, providers of so-called „General Purpose AI Models“ (GPAI) – such as GPT-5 or Claude Opus – must ensure full transparency regarding their training data and submit detailed risk assessments.
Industry associations warn that some US providers may temporarily restrict their services in the EU to avoid penalties.
New Year’s Eve traffic: AI agents put to the stress test
Mobile network operators and cloud services are expecting a new data record for tonight’s New Year’s Eve. Unlike previous years, traffic will be driven primarily by generative live content rather than videos. Analysts estimate that over 2 billion personalized AI-generated New Year’s greetings (video and audio) will be generated worldwide in real time tonight.
Large data centers are already operating in „pre-scaling“ mode to prevent server outages at midnight.
In retrospect: The „coding crash“ never happened.
A brief year-end review from GitHub analysts reveals today:
The fear that AI would make human programmers obsolete by 2025 has not materialized. While 75% of new code is now generated by AI, the demand for senior software engineers for oversight and architecture planning is at an all-time high. The role has simply shifted from „writing“ to „orchestrating.“
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