What's up: Mistral boosts business on fears over U.S. AI dominance; SAP's CEOs on enterprise transformation; Oracle targets higher revenue growth; Disney and Universal sue Midjourney.

Good morning. Nvidia this week unveiled perhaps the ultimate generative foundation model, one that enables simulations of Earth’s global climate, the WSJ's Steven Rosenbush reports.

cBottle, part of Nvidia’s Earth-2 platform, debuts at an interesting time for the sector, with climate scientists and key government agencies and departments facing cutbacks. 

The model is capable of making predictions that focus on five-kilometer areas–helpful for predicting certain kinds of thunderstorms. The model may also predict conditions decades into the future with a new level of precision.

Of course, notes Rosenbush, "as is so often the case with powerful new technology, the question is what else humans will do with it.” Read the story.

Nvidia said Tuesday that a number of scientific research institutions and policymakers, including the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology and the Alan Turing Institute of AI, are actively exploring the new model.

Read the story.

Credit JD Vance with helping boost demand in Europe for homegrown artificial-intelligence tools. When the vice president in February told a gathering of world leaders that the U.S. was winning the AI race and intended “to keep it that way,” Europe listened.

“It tremendously affected our demand because European leaders just don’t want to be talked to that way,” Arthur Mensch, chief executive of France’s Mistral AI, tells the WSJ’s Sam Schechner.

With the startup now on pace to earn revenue of more than $100 million a year, Mistral plans to lean into that demand by building its own 40-megawatt AI data center, powered by 18,000 Nvidia chips

Mistral earlier this week released two new reasoning models that it says outperform DeepSeek and are on par with some models from U.S. companies such as OpenAI for some capabilities.

• Nvidia and Perplexity Team Up in European AI Push
• What the Era of ‘Sovereign AI’ Means for Chip Makers

Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit Wednesday against artificial-intelligence provider Midjourney, claiming it illegally made copies of the studios’ copyrighted works, WSJ reports. The suit includes dozens of examples of images generated by Midjourney that depict their copyrighted characters, such as Darth Vader, Homer Simpson and the Minions.

It’s complicated. Using AI was a major hot button during the actors and writers strikes a couple of years ago. While some studios are experimenting with these tools for things such as special effects and mapping out what a scene might look like, they are doing so quietly.

Highlights from this week's WSJ CEO Council Summit in London.

In a wide-ranging interview on AI at the WSJ CEO Council in London Wednesday, SAP CEO Christian Klein told attendees that he’s using AI everyday: from earnings prep, to asking it for a prediction on performance numbers and inquiring about uncertainty in the markets.

“That is, for me, very important to steer the company,” Klein said.

Klein emphasized that the German software giant is integrating AI into nearly every aspect of its operations. AI is already making a lot of predictions at SAP, he said, and AI agents are taking over the work of cash flow and cash conversion.

“In all lines of businesses, agents will now take over many, many tasks of end-users, and will change the way enterprises work,” Klein added.

And as SAP continues to adapt to the AI era, it is going through yet another corporate restructuring—one in which Klein said involves hiring for different skill sets.

Much of tomorrow’s code will be written by AI, he said, and a similar transformation will happen for sales functions. That means SAP plans to hire for skills more akin to AI management—people to manage or oversee AI rather than doing administrative work.

“My CFO and I expect that we will also show our customers that we can run 30% more productive than before,” Klein said.

— Belle Lin

Yuval Noah Harari, historian and bestselling author, calls AI “alien intelligence” and describes it as a species that could one day replace us.

“For the first time, we have real competition on the planet,” he said Wednesday to an audience of senior leaders at the WSJ CEO Council Summit in London.

What makes Harari so cautious about the technology? AI has autonomy and agency, he said, and that’s why it’s more momentous than prior human inventions like the telegraph and printing press.

To ensure that AI remains aligned with the benefit of humanity, humans need to actually model certain principles and goals for AI. It’s not enough to code or train AI with human values, he said, we must actually stop lying and cheating.

On the idea of workforce disruption, Harari warns that AI will end up creating a “useless class” of humans. How should we handle this? To remember that “we do have, still, most of the agency,” Harari said.

— Belle Lin

Oracle logged double-digit revenue growth in its most recent quarter and set its sights on even bigger gains in the fiscal year ahead, WSJ reports. Chief Executive Safra Catz said Wednesday the cloud-services company now expects $67 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026, a 16% jump from the prior year and more than $1 billion higher than Oracle had previously estimated, she said.

China is putting a six-month limit on rare-earth export licenses for U.S. automakers and manufacturers, according to people familiar with the matter, giving Beijing leverage if trade tensions flare up again while adding to uncertainty for American industry.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects the company to launch a robotaxi service tentatively on June 22 in Austin, WSJ reports. The Model Y vehicles will rely on eight cameras that act as eyes for its software to identify obstacles in the road.  Other robotaxis, including veteran Waymo, use a combination of cameras, radar and laser-scanners called lidar.

Musk said some of his posts last week about President Trump ‘went too far,’ after linking President Trump to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Switch 2, Nintendo’s video console refresh, sold over 3.5 million units during its first four days of availability, a record according to the company, Bloomberg reports.

Some bad news, believers. WSJ reports that Area 51’s reputation as a depot for alien technology may have originated in part from a decades-old hazing ritual “that spun wildly out of control.”

CORRECTION: Amazon will invest at least $20 billion in Pennsylvania to boost data center infrastructure. A summary of a Reuters story in Wednesday’s Morning Download incorrectly reported the figure as $20 million.

A London-bound Boeing 787-8 passenger jet carrying more than 200 people crashed near an airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. It was unclear if there were any casualties, according to an officer at the state police. (WSJ)

Fearful of being stopped by immigration officers and squeezed financially by inflation and job losses, many Latinos consumers say they are pulling back, forgoing their regular shopping trips and restaurant meals (WSJ)

The entire board of the Fulbright program, the nation’s flagship academic exchange program, resigned over what they called unprecedented and impermissible political interference from the Trump administration in their operations. (WSJ)

Brian Wilson, the driving creative force behind the Beach Boys who endured abuse, mental illness and deafness in his right ear to become one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, has died. He was 82. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.