Thursday newspaper round-up: Wiz, Port Talbot, John Lewis

Cybersecurity firm Wiz, which last month rejected a $23bn (£18bn) takeover bid from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is to open a European headquarters in London – a move that is a major shot in the arm for the UK’s aspiration to be a global tech hub. The new office, the company’s first in Europe, will be run by co-founder and research and development head, Roy Reznik, who is relocating from Israel to the UK capital to underscore the company’s business ambitions in the region. – Guardian

Uncertainty over the future of Tata Steel in south Wales is already causing job losses in the broader industry, the Welsh secretary has warned, as the government scrambles to reduce the toll of redundancies in Port Talbot. Speaking on Wednesday ahead of announcing the first £13.5m tranche of funding to support laid-off workers, the secretary of state for Wales, Jo Stevens, criticised the former Conservative government for what she said was a failure to prepare for the possibility of thousands of jobs losses at Port Talbot. – Guardian

John Lewis is set to put storeroom workers on its shop floors in a race to improve customer service and win back sales. The company said it will no longer have separate backroom workers and shop floor staff in order to free up more employees to work on checkouts and serve customers in fitting rooms, for example. – Telegraph

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up has unveiled a new chatbot which, it claims, matches the performance of rivals such as ChatGPT. xAI described the chatbot, Grok-2, as a “significant step forward” for the company and said that it was on a par with the AI models of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. – The Times

The Treasury has insisted it remains in “positive discussions” with AstraZeneca over the pharmaceutical company’s planned £450 million investment in a vaccine manufacturing facility in northwest England. Doubts over the investment have surfaced following a report that the Treasury has sought to cut the amount of state support for the project to £40 million, below the at least £65 million Jeremy Hunt, the former chancellor, is understood to have verbally offered AstraZeneca to expand its nasal flu vaccines plant in Speke. – The Times