Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Bank said on Monday that an independent board committee has concluded that HSBC’s $13.6 billion proposal to take the lender private is fair and reasonable, urging minority shareholders to vote in favor of the deal in what would be a major consolidation move in the city’s banking sector.

Under the proposal, HSBC is seeking to acquire the remaining 36.5% stake in Hang Seng that it does not already own, a transaction that would bring one of Hong Kong’s most established financial institutions fully under the control of its largest shareholder. HSBC already holds a controlling interest in the bank and has been closely involved in its strategic direction for decades.

The board committee’s endorsement marks an important step in the process, providing reassurance to minority investors that the offer adequately reflects Hang Seng’s value amid a difficult operating environment. The recommendation comes as Hang Seng, like several Hong Kong lenders, faces mounting headwinds from prolonged weakness in the property sector, rising credit risks, and a slower economic recovery in both Hong Kong and mainland China.

HSBC has positioned the deal as part of a broader effort to simplify its structure and strengthen its core Asian franchise. When the transaction was announced, HSBC chief executive Georges Elhedery told Reuters that the group continues to pursue selective acquisitions while divesting non-core assets, aiming to deploy capital more efficiently and focus on businesses where it sees long-term strategic value.

The pressures have been building for Hang Seng for years. The bank has relatively high exposure to Hong Kong and mainland Chinese property developers, many of which remain heavily indebted after a prolonged downturn. With bond maturities for property firms expected to jump by nearly 70% next year, lenders and creditors are bracing for intensified financial stress, raising concerns about asset quality, loan impairments, and earnings volatility.

Analysts say taking Hang Seng private could give HSBC greater flexibility to manage these challenges. Full ownership would allow HSBC to absorb potential short-term losses, restructure exposures, and pursue longer-term adjustments without the scrutiny and market pressure that come with a publicly listed subsidiary. It could also enable closer integration of Hang Seng’s operations with HSBC’s wider Asia strategy, particularly in retail banking, wealth management, and digital services.

Hang Seng Bank, founded in 1933, is one of Hong Kong’s largest and most recognizable lenders. It serves about 4 million customers through digital platforms and a network of more than 250 branches across the city, according to the bank. It is a principal member of the HSBC group and has historically been seen as a bellwether for Hong Kong’s retail banking sector.

The deal also reflects a broader trend of global banks reassessing their structures in Asia amid shifting growth dynamics, regulatory demands, and geopolitical uncertainty. For HSBC, consolidating ownership of Hang Seng could help reduce complexity while reinforcing its long-standing commitment to Hong Kong, even as the city’s economy adjusts to higher interest rates and a structurally weaker property market.

While the transaction still requires shareholder approval, the backing of Hang Seng’s independent board committee is likely to influence the outcome, particularly for minority investors weighing the certainty of HSBC’s offer against the risks tied to prolonged property-sector stress and an uncertain regional outlook.

U.S. drug distributor Cencora said on Monday it will take majority control of cancer care network OneOncology in a transaction valued at about $5 billion, marking a major step in its strategy to deepen its role in oncology services and specialty drug distribution.

Under the terms of the deal, Cencora will buy most of the remaining shares in OneOncology from private equity firm TPG and other investors for roughly $3.6 billion in cash, while also assuming and paying down about $1.3 billion of the oncology group’s debt. The transaction values OneOncology at approximately $7.4 billion and will give Cencora majority ownership of a business it already partly controls.

The acquisition accelerates Cencora’s push beyond traditional drug distribution into higher-margin, service-oriented segments of healthcare, particularly oncology, where demand continues to rise as cancer treatments become more complex, personalized, and costly. By consolidating control of OneOncology, Cencora is positioning itself closer to the point of care, strengthening its ability to integrate drug distribution, data, practice management, and clinical services for cancer clinics across the United States.

OneOncology operates a network of independent oncology practices, providing them with operational support, clinical pathways, data analytics, and access to specialty medicines. For Cencora, full control of the network is expected to create synergies in the distribution of specialty drugs used to treat complex conditions such as cancer, an area that offers structurally higher margins than traditional pharmaceuticals and has been growing faster than the broader drug market.

Investors initially welcomed the move. Shares of Cencora rose about 1% in morning trading, reflecting confidence that the deal strengthens the company’s long-term growth profile even as it increases near-term leverage.

Analysts broadly described the acquisition as a logical next step. Michael Cherny of Leerink Partners said the accelerated purchase completes an expected move to increase exposure to faster-growing oncology assets, reinforcing Cencora’s strategic focus on cancer care as a core growth driver. J.P. Morgan analyst Lisa Gill also viewed the transaction positively, pointing to operational and commercial synergies that come with full ownership of OneOncology rather than a minority stake.

The deal comes against the backdrop of Cencora’s broader investment push in the U.S. healthcare supply chain. In November, the company pledged to invest $1 billion through 2030 to expand its U.S. distribution network, aligning with calls from the White House for pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors to strengthen domestic production and supply resilience. Greater control of oncology services fits into that strategy, giving Cencora a more integrated presence in a critical segment of the healthcare system.

Cencora said the transaction is expected to close by the end of its second quarter of fiscal 2026 and will be financed with new debt. While the company maintained its fiscal 2026 earnings forecast, it acknowledged that the decision to halt share buybacks ahead of the acquisition makes results more likely to land at the lower end of its previously guided range of $17.45 to $17.75 per share.

At the same time, management raised its long-term adjusted profit outlook, citing expectations that OneOncology will increasingly contribute to earnings as it is more fully integrated into Cencora’s U.S. healthcare operations. The company believes the deal will enhance its ability to serve oncology providers over time, even if it temporarily pressures capital returns to shareholders.

For OneOncology, the transaction represents a shift away from the private equity ownership model at a time when exit routes such as initial public offerings remain uncertain. IPO markets have stayed uneven, prompting many healthcare startups to opt for strategic sales to larger industry players rather than risk subdued public debuts.

Taken together, the deal underlines how large drug distributors are moving closer to patient care, betting that scale, data, and tighter integration with clinics will be key to capturing growth in oncology — one of the most lucrative and rapidly evolving areas of modern medicine.

Nvidia has announced the strategic acquisition of SchedMD, the developer behind the widely adopted open-source workload management system, Slurm.

NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD — the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI — to help strengthen the open-source software ecosystem and drive AI innovation for researchers, developers and enterprises.

NVIDIA will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software, making it widely available to and supported by the broader HPC and AI community across diverse hardware and software environments.

HPC and AI workloads involve complex computations running parallel tasks on clusters that require queuing, scheduling and allocating computational resources. As HPC and AI clusters get larger and more powerful, efficient resource utilization is critical.

This move is a significant affirmation of the chip designer’s commitment to strengthening its grip on the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, not just through hardware, but through control and enhancement of the essential software layers that enable the efficient use of its high-performance chips. The acquisition, for which financial details were not disclosed, comes as Nvidia faces intensifying competition and strategically doubles down on the importance of the open-source community.

SchedMD’s flagship product, Slurm (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management), is a sophisticated, vendor-neutral software that serves as the de facto cluster management and job scheduling system for large-scale computing environments globally.

Slurm’s importance in the current AI landscape is profound. The product is designed to schedule and manage enormous computing jobs, such as those required for training large foundation models and performing generative AI inference. It ensures the efficient allocation of vast shares of a data center’s server capacity and, crucially, excels at managing and optimizing the use of high-value resources like GPUs alongside CPUs across massive computing clusters.

This directly maximizes the return on investment for customers purchasing Nvidia hardware.

Slurm is a cornerstone of the global supercomputing community, currently acting as the scheduler for more than half of the top 10 and top 100 supercomputer systems on the prestigious TOP500 list, demonstrating its unmatched scalability and efficiency in distributed environments. Its customer base spans major institutions and private firms, including the cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

The integration of SchedMD and its Slurm technology directly supports Nvidia’s strategy, which views its proprietary CUDA software ecosystem as the critical moat protecting its market dominance. While Nvidia builds its reputation on fast chips, the software stack is what locks developers into the platform.

Nvidia gains the ability to accelerate the development of the scheduler itself by acquiring the team behind Slurm. This allows the company to ensure that Slurm is optimized at the most fundamental level to meet the rapidly evolving demands of next-generation AI and supercomputing, maximizing the throughput and efficiency of its newest hardware generations, such as the NVIDIA GB200 systems. This deep integration is vital for foundation model developers who need highly efficient resource management for distributed training jobs.

Additionally, this acquisition helps neutralize the efforts of rival chip makers, such as AMD, who are actively building competing GPU platforms and often rely on Slurm integration to appeal to customers. By owning the leading open-source scheduler, Nvidia can directly influence its future, making it strategically more challenging for competitors to offer a truly seamless and optimized experience on alternative hardware stacks, thereby maintaining its overall control of the AI infrastructure.

Despite taking ownership, Nvidia has made an explicit and crucial commitment to maintain and distribute Slurm as open-source, vendor-neutral software. This dedication reassures the existing ecosystem of supercomputing centers and AI labs that rely on Slurm for flexibility and multi-vendor compatibility.

The move strengthens Nvidia’s overall open-source push, which also includes the recent unveiling of its new Nemotron 3 family of open-source AI models, all aimed at cementing its influence across the entire AI stack, from silicon to scheduling.

The acquisition of the 40-person company, which was founded in 2010 by Slurm developers Morris “Moe” Jette and Danny Auble, reinforces Nvidia’s strategy of making targeted, high-impact investments in the software layers that control how its accelerated computing platform is utilized, ensuring its hardware remains the indispensable component in the global AI infrastructure.