Good afternoon folks, and happy Wednesday. The presses are churning at a rapid clip this morning as regional M&A headlines and (even more) AI drama kick off your news and views roundup for today.

THE BIG STORY TODAY

#1- Gov’t to release all cars held at ports over ACI violations: The Egyptian Customs Authority is releasing passenger vehicles that have been held at ports for violating the registration rules of the Advanced Cargo Information (ACI) system, according to a decision by the authority yesterday. Owners of the cars must pay owed customs and fees plus up to EGP 10k in fines per vehicle to take advantage of the new policy.

Background: Cars had been piling up in Egypt’s ports over the past few months after the authorities refused to release cars whose owners had tried to dodge the ACI’s passenger car registration restrictions by registering their passenger cars under other categories.

#2- EFG Hermes-backed K-12 operator Spark Education Platform (SEP) inked definitive agreements to acquire a majority stake in Riyadh’s Qimam El Hayat International School, it said in a statement(pdf). No publicly available information has yet been released about the transaction size.

Remember: SEP is backed by the USD 300 mn Saudi Education Fund (SEF), which was launched in November 2024 by our friends at EFG Hermes. SEF plans to deploy its capital over the next three years, with a primary focus on the Kingdom, alongside its ventures in the UAE and Bahrain. The fund has previously acquired seven schools under the Britus Education brand, four of which are in the Kingdom.

What’s next? The move includes relocating the school to a new fit-for-purpose campus and boosting the K-12 institution’s student capacity by over 50%, including by adding two new buildings.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD

AI continues to dominate the int’l headlines this morning, with OpenAI claiming that it has evidence that Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek used OpenAI’s proprietary models to train DeepSeek’s newly released R1 model, the Financial Times reports.

The company behind ChatGPT has said that it has evidence that DeepSeek used “distillation” — a process by which a developer uses output from a large model to improve the performance of a smaller model — to develop DeepSeek R1, which surprised many with its sophistication despite a relatively low investment cost. While distillation is a common industry practice, using it to build one’s own model is a violation of ChatGPT’s terms of service, opening DeepSeek to claims that it breached OpenAI’s intellectual property.

And over in India, dozens have been killed in a stampede at the Hindu Maha Kumbh festival in northern India this morning, Reuters reports, with authorities yet to officially confirm the full casualty count. The tragedy occurred as tens of mns gathered to bathe in what are considered sacred river waters on the most auspicious day of the six-week festival, this iteration of which only occurs once every 12 years.

** CATCH UP QUICK on the top stories from today’s EnterpriseAM:

• Universities will bear costs of scholarships for USAID-funded students following Trump foreign aid freeze.
• Concentrix to invest USD 1 bn in Egypt expansion: Global outsourcing giant Concentrix will invest USD 1 bn over the next four years to expand its operations in Egypt under an MoU inked with the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA).
• Egypt issues USD 2 bn in eurobonds: Egypt has officially returned to international debt markets with its first USD bond issuance in nearly two years, issuing USD 2 bn in 5- and 8-year bonds. The bonds carry an initial trading range of 9.75-10%, with the price expected to drop 1 to 2 percentage points below the indicative yield at trading.

☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Another day, another continuation of the morning chill tomorrow, with the mercury set for a high of 21°C and expected to dip to 11°C at night, according to our favorite weather app.