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Greetings! Misery loves company, as they say. Friday’s announcement that two of the three biggest cable-broadband firms, Charter Communications and Cox Communications, are combining is a logical next step in the consolidation of a stagnant but still significant industry. Charter, whose biggest shareholder is controlled by aging cable magnate John Malone, is buying Cox Communications for $34.5 billion in cash, stock and assumption of debt. The resulting company, which will take the Cox name, will be by far the biggest cable-broadband company in the U.S., ahead of Comcast, which is now roughly equal to Charter in subscriber numbers. Why should you care? Sure, if your focus is growth, then Charter, Cox and Comcast are yesterday’s companies. Malone, a star media dealmaker of the 1990s and early 2000s, is all but retired (the man once called the “Darth Vader” of cable last year gave up his nonvoting director emeritus position on Charter’s board). But the big cable companies are still the primary source of internet access for many, if not most, Americans, which makes them a little like the water company—a service people only think about when it doesn’t work. That makes their financial health important, given that they need to maintain the pipes that carry the internet to people’s homes and businesses. The backdrop is instructive. Cable’s original business of selling packages of TV channels has shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Selling internet access, which replaced TV as the industry’s growth engine, has peaked. In fact, Charter and Comcast have lately started losing internet customers, as phone companies like Verizon and T-Mobile have ramped up their internet-at-home services. The cable guys’ growth business now is selling mobile phone service, although they’re doing so by renting Verizon’s cellular network—even as they compete with Verizon and others for customers! The end result is that revenue growth in the past couple of years has been anemic for everyone in the industry, including the phone companies. Charter’s recent financial performance highlights the industry’s challenges. Its free cash flow shrank 30% between 2022 and 2024 as capital expenditures jumped while cash generated from its operations fell. To be sure, before this deal, Charter had forecast that its capex would start declining after this year, as big network upgrades come to an end. But the business is always going to be a capital-intensive one, which isn’t ideal given the lack of growth. Moreover, integrating Cox will eventually require some capital investment, Charter executives acknowledged Friday. The Cox acquisition creates some opportunities for growth. Cox, a smaller company by customers than Charter, hasn’t made anywhere near the inroads into mobile phone service that Charter has, for instance. Charter can change that. Its management hasn’t given up on rejuvenating sales of TV service, either, a business from which Cox has almost disappeared (it has only 1.7 million TV customers compared with 5.9 million broadband subscribers). Charter stock rose 1.8% in response to the deal. The only question is, how long can Charter eke out the gains from this combination? Google’s annual I/O developer conference is next week, and we got a preview of what the company may—or may not—unveil this week with Erin Woo’s report on new products and features it has been working on. Our Free Agents franchise returns, with updates on executives who have recently left Pinterest, Amazon and TikTok. Also on the TikTok front, we broke news about a new photo-sharing feature coming to the app, and how employees have fretted about its potential to create problems. Building artificial intelligence data centers to meet the booming demand for AI services isn’t for the fainthearted, as Anissa Gardizy revealed with this look at the struggles of one upstart, Applied Digital. Meanwhile, Miles Kruppa looked at how data centers are raising money by selling debt backed by rent payments. And on the Chinese data center front, Qianer Liu revealed how the Chinese government is tightening its control of data center development. It’s no secret that Tiger Global Management’s pandemic-era flurry of investments backfired on the venture capital firm. Natasha Mascarenhas provides new details on the performance of its 2021 fund, showing that Tiger managed to soften the blow with AI investments. Not every AI startup raising money at huge valuations is a success. Check out this deep dive into Cohere, whose revenue has fallen far short of where its executives thought it would be by now. One of the big stories of the week was President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East, in the company of many tech executives looking for deals. But as this piece explains, while Trump trumpeted investments in the U.S., in many cases the Saudi money will go to U.S. firms funding projects inside Saudi Arabia. Also this week, fintech Chime filed to go public. Cory Weinberg had this analysis of Chime’s business challenges here. Anita Ramaswamy explained why shares of chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are cheap enough to be a buying opportunity. Start your weekend off with this colorful deep dive into the world of ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. • Logistics startup Stord said Friday it has raised $80 million in equity funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, as well as $120 million in debt financing, likely setting up the company to acquire more U.S. warehousing operations. • OpenAI said Friday it has released an AI coding agent that can automate software engineering tasks such as fixing bugs and answering questions about a code base. The AI company is following the path of startups including Anthropic and Cognition that have released similar coding assistants. • ByteDance is targeting revenue growth of about 20% this year, which could help it catch up to rival Meta Platforms, according to Bloomberg. • Chobani said in a statement Friday it had acquired smoothy and frozen meal startup Daily Harvest, marking the latest dealmaking activity among healthy food startups. 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