EU Backs $105 Billion Ukraine Loan

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Luke Vargas (0:30)

Europe overcomes some but not all divisions in its bid to support Ukraine's war effort. Plus a test for OpenAI as it plans to tap investors for up to $100 billion to fund its growth plans. And attention American wine buyers, tariffs are about to jack up the price of your favorite old world bottles.

Laura Cooper (0:49)

So for the holidays, if you're picking up champagne or kava, just enjoy the prices while you can.

Luke Vargas (0:56)

It's Friday, December 19th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

EU leaders have agreed to lend Ukraine around $105 billion to help it continue fighting Russia. It is a vital lifeline. By April, the EU had expected Ukraine to exhaust funds for its budget and weapons purchases. Now, according to IMF estimates, the loan will cover two-thirds of financing needs for 2026 and 2027 Reaching agreement wasn't easy, though, with leaders notably failing to agree on tapping a massive pot of frozen Russian assets in order to fund Ukraine. Much of that money is held in Belgium, where Prime Minister Bart De Waver expressed concern about ending up on the hook financially should the loan face successful legal challenge. Failing to tap Russian assets will shift costs to EU taxpayers and deny Europe further resources for future funding. But De Waver said failing to agree on any loan would have been worse.

SPEAKER_4 (2:02)

Had we left Brussels divided today, Europe would have walked away from geopolitical relevance. It would have been a total disaster. And we would have sent a message to the world that Europe can no longer deliver anything. And that would also be a strategic disaster.

Luke Vargas (2:19)

The loan could give Ukraine more leverage in its negotiations with the US as Washington tries to end the war. Without additional funding, European officials said Kyiv might have had little choice but to accept US demands, including withdrawing from eastern regions that its troops still hold.

The man suspected of killing two Brown University students on Saturday and an MIT professor near Boston on Monday night has been found dead in New Hampshire. Authorities say 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown student Claudio Neves Valenti fatally shot himself inside a storage unit. Posting on X, Secretary of Homeland Security Christine Noem said he entered the US through the DV1 Diversity Lottery Immigrant Visa Program in 2017 and said she'd ordered a pause in the program at President Trump's direction. In a closely watched case that had highlighted tensions around the Trump administration's deportation push, a Wisconsin state judge has been found guilty for her role in helping a defendant in her courtroom avoid immigration agents. Hannah Dugan was arrested and charged in April by federal authorities who allege she directed Eduardo Flores Ruiz to leave her courtroom when she knew ICE agents were in the courthouse. Flores Ruiz was facing three domestic assault charges and was in the country illegally. Dugan now faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Attorneys for Dugan didn't immediately return a request for comment. Turning to business news, we are exclusively reporting that OpenAI aims to raise as much as $100 billion to pay for its ambitious growth plans in a market that started to cool on the artificial intelligence boom. The fundraising round is said to be in the early stages and could value the company at as much as $830 billion. CEO Sam Aldman has already scoured the world to build its investor pool, and as the journal previously reported, the company is also weighing a potential IPO. Well, elsewhere, the AI gold rush is showing no signs of letting up, as chip maker Micron's blowout earnings this week proved. The company posted record revenue and operating income for its fiscal first quarter late on Wednesday, and its revenue forecast topped analysts' expectations by a massive 30 percent. But as Journal heard on the street, tech columnist Dan Gallagher told our Tech News Briefing Podcast that good news for investors could mean higher consumer electronics prices next year.

Dan Gallagher (4:53)

AI has created this demand for this very specialized type of memory that works within the AI systems. And so a lot of the production capacity is going towards this very high value memory. And what that does is that leaves less production capacity for the memory chips that go in your phone or in your PC. The short of it is you're probably going to see prices go up for a lot of these types of products. And you also might see products where there's just less memory in them because you're going to see manufacturers make some design tweaks because they can only get so much memory. And so they might just push out more products and have less on more memory for that. Manufacturers are already paying higher prices and they're already seeing a hit to their profit margins on that. And there's only so much they can absorb. If you take a manufacturer like Dell, like HP, that make PCs, they can take some margin pressure, not a lot, they need to pass those costs on.