Dark painting of an empty data center hall in the English countryside at dusk, rows of server racks inside with a single amber light glowing on wet ground

Sunday Brief: Microsoft Exits Nscale’s Essex Site, MSG Splits the Knicks and Rangers, China Guards Its Solar Know-How

October 18, 2026 Aaron Harme

Microsoft has pulled out of its deal to anchor Nscale’s first British data center, in Loughton, Essex, while the AI computing company prepares to go public. Madison Square Garden Sports sets the list of holders for its Rangers spin-off at Tuesday’s close, the same night the Knicks raise their championship banner.

China’s commerce ministry proposed export controls on 12 technologies used to make solar equipment, reaching the crews that install factory lines abroad. The Wall Street Journal traced nearly all recent trading on ADI Predictstreet to a small network of linked accounts, and New York’s restaurant count posted its biggest net yearly drop in at least 36 years of federal data.

In this Brief

Nscale’s confidential IPO prospectus lists five working data centers, and Loughton has lost its anchor customer
MSG Sports holders get one Rangers share for every two they own when the split closes Oct. 26
China’s proposed solar export bans are set as technical thresholds and cover overseas installation work
The Journal’s analysis says nearly every ADI Predictstreet transaction since late August came from linked accounts
New York’s yearly restaurant gap widened to a net 1,928 places in the first quarter of 2026

Microsoft walks away from Nscale’s Essex anchor deal

Microsoft recently told Nscale it was pulling the plug on its agreement to be the anchor tenant at Loughton, the Telegraph reports. An anchor tenant is the big customer whose signed lease lets a developer borrow to build. Microsoft’s backing for the site was part of the £22 billion in UK investment it promised last year, and the Telegraph names Anthropic as another major Nscale customer.

Nscale confidentially filed its IPO prospectus last month, and it lists five active data centers with 55 megawatts between them and 12 more in development, the Observer reports. Australia’s Firmus, another company that rents out AI computing, pulled its own IPO earlier this month.

MSG Sports puts the Knicks and Rangers in separate companies

Madison Square Garden Sports’ board approved a tax-free spin-off of the Rangers, which hands shareholders stock in a new company carved out of the old one. Holders of record at Tuesday’s close get one MSG Rangers share for every two MSG Sports shares, according to the company’s SEC filing, with the shares distributed Oct. 26, and a holder who sells in the regular market before then sells the new shares along with it. The deal still needs final NHL approval.

Sportico traces a line of Dolan family splits behind this one: Madison Square Garden left Cablevision in 2010, the MSG Network went its own way in 2015, and the teams separated from the venues in 2020. By that count this is the fourth split since 2010, and the first to put the Knicks and the Rangers in different public companies. Our longer read has the Rangers’ playoff-year profit and the family’s voting control from the spin-off filing.

China’s proposed solar curbs reach the installers

China’s commerce ministry proposed export controls, government bans or licenses on selling know-how abroad, on 12 technologies used to make solar equipment, citing national security, Reuters reports. The proposal sits inside a consultation on 40 technologies across solar, AI and biomedicine that runs until Nov. 15, pv magazine reports.

The bans are written as thresholds, such as processes for tandem cells that layer perovskite, an emerging solar material, on silicon and reach 30% efficiency, and wafers 70 micrometers thick or thinner. pv magazine lists the routes these would cover: technology licensing, installing production lines overseas, equipment exports and on-site technical support. A factory planned outside China on one of those processes would need Beijing’s approval, or face a ban, for the people who install the line as well as the machines, while exports of finished cells and modules would not be directly affected.

The Journal counts the traders behind ADI Predictstreet

Since late August, nearly every transaction on ADI Predictstreet, the Abu Dhabi-backed prediction market that paid FIFA about $150 million to be its World Cup partner, has come from a small network of linked accounts, the Wall Street Journal reports from an analysis of public data. A prediction market is an exchange where people buy contracts that pay $1 if an event happens. The Journal says the pattern, the same group of accounts trading with each other, suggests most of the volume is inauthentic.

Three Harvard students found it, Brazil’s Money Report writes in its summary of the story. The FIFA deal bought exclusive advertising during World Cup matches. Three months after the final, DefiLlama’s dashboard ranked it ninth by customer money on deposit among the prediction markets it tracks as of Saturday, with 0.3% of the category’s $416.23 million.

New York’s restaurant gap widened all year

New York State had a net 1,928 fewer restaurants and bars in the first quarter of 2026 than a year earlier, closings minus openings, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ quarterly census of employers. Bloomberg’s Nacha Cattan reports it is the biggest net yearly decline in at least 36 years of BLS data. The 2026 figure is preliminary, so BLS can revise it.

The yearly gap opened in the second quarter of 2025 and ran at a few hundred places a quarter, 323, then 470, then 453, before the first quarter of 2026 came in a little over four times wider than the fourth quarter’s. A year earlier, the count had grown by 111. Our longer read breaks out the jobs by borough, where Manhattan holds up the statewide jobs number.

Also noted

The CFTC’s proposal to write event contracts, including ones on sports, politics, culture and weather, into its definition of a swap publishes in Monday’s Federal Register with comments due Nov. 18, and a companion interim final rule keeping casino-style gambling out of that definition takes effect the same day; we covered both on Oct. 12.
Alphabet president Ruth Porat said the company will spend “significantly more” on capital projects in 2027, after a second quarter in which its free cash flow, the cash left after running the business and paying for those projects, turned negative for the first time since its 2004 IPO, Fortune reports; our longer read sets her case against Jefferies’ Chris Wood.
SoftBank Group is in early talks, far from certain, to buy security-guard company Allied Universal at up to about $18 billion before debt, the Journal reports, and Reuters reports SoftBank would look to eventually replace some guards with robots; that price is about 3.3 times the $5.4 billion SoftBank agreed last year to pay for ABB’s robotics business.
OpenCode said on X a breach tied to a “large scale distillation attack” hit 1.4% of its Console users, and its email to them, as Notebookcheck describes it, tells affected users to revoke and replace the OpenAI, Anthropic and other provider keys stored in their workspaces.
The Clippers are their own TV channel again for one season after Main Street Sports stopped paying: ClipperVision carries 77 games, per Sports Video Group, at $14.95 a month or $89.95 a season to stream directly, and SBJ’s industry sources expect $16 million to $18 million in carriage fees against a roughly $17.5 million rights fee from Main Street.

Sources

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