Shaking off its defeat in the Warner Bros. bidding war, Comcast is focusing on its big sports bet.

NBCUniversal will broadcast the Winter Olympics, Super Bowl, NBA, Major League Baseball and the World Cup this year.

The Philadelphia giant released its fourth-quarter earnings Thursday and its sports-heavy strategy is revealing both the benefits and costs. NBCUniversal’s new NBA deal has had the hoped-for effect of boosting subscribers to its Peacock streaming service.

Peacock now has 44 million customers and streaming revenue grew 23% to $1.6 billion. But Peacock’s losses swelled to $552 million in the fourth quarter as the streaming service absorbed the expense of NBC’s NBA TV rights agreement and an exclusive NFL game.

Comcast executives said during an earnings call that Peacock reduced its full-year losses by $700 million compared to 2024. Last year, the service lost $1.1 billion and profitability is still a ways off.

Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts noted that the entertainment industry is in the throes of a major transformation and that NBCUniversal has laid the groundwork for its own metamorphosis. His company has made a sharp pivot away from NBC’s 1990s glory days of “Must-See TV” comedies, water-cooler dramas like “ER” and “West Wing,” as well as a fleet of formidable cable channels, including USA and CNBC.

This month, the cable channels were spun off into a new company called Versant.

Comcast entered last fall’s high-stakes Warner auction with hopes of combining NBCUniversal with Warner Bros. to create a new Hollywood behemoth. But Netflix swooped in with a $82.7-billion deal and David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance also made an all-cash bid. Paramount has refused to accept defeat, launching a hostile takeover to attempt to claim its rival — a pursuit that Warner board members are fighting.

“In terms of Warner Bros., what can you say?” Roberts said. “It’s still underway, obviously.”

Marrying NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. would have made a compelling company, Roberts said. But as soon as its competitors turned to all-cash offers, “We were just not interested in these values, stretching our balance sheet to do something like that,” he said.

The longtime cable chief pointed to the silver lining.

Preparing its bid for Warner Bros. “forced us on the journey to really take a good look at what we have and what we’re building,” Roberts said. “We have a wonderful studios business … 2026 should be a great year for the film business. … We have two studios in the television business, which is feeding Peacock.”

NBCUniversal is moving closer to its goal of becoming “an integrated media business that is profitable and [has] got a lot of sports,” a streaming service and Universal theme parks, Roberts said, adding the Warner auction has prompted other firms to discuss possible combinations.

NBC, which turns 100 this year, has long carried live sports.

But it has doubled down and February will be packed with the Winter Olympics in Italy, the Super Bowl near San Francisco and the NBA All-Star game in Inglewood.

In March, NBC and Peacock will begin broadcasting MLB games, including the Dodgers hosting the Arizona Diamondbacks on opening day.

The company’s Spanish-language network Telemundo will broadcast the World Cup this summer, including a stop in Los Angeles.

“We’re very confident and comfortable that we’re in the right part of the industry,” Roberts said. “We hope the Olympic Games can offer a moment of connection for our country and for people everywhere” during such divisive times, he said.

Comcast has been struggling in its core broadband business as cellphone carriers with 5G service have cut into its former dominance. Millions of customers have ditched their cable TV packages.

The company switched up management in Philadelphia in October, installing Steve Croney as chief executive of its connectivity and platforms business. And Comcast has trimmed some of its internet package prices to better compete.

In the fourth quarter, Comcast lost 181,000 domestic broadband customers — more than what analysts had forecast. The company said some of the losses were offset by gaining international customers.

Comcast generated quarterly revenue of $32.3 billion, a slight increase that was in-line with expectations. Adjusted earnings a share decreased 12% to 84 cents, higher than expected.

Net income attributed to Comcast came in at $2.2 billion, which was more than 50% lower than the year-earlier period. The decline reflected a tough comparison to the prior year period, which included a $1.9 billion income tax benefit attributed to an internal corporate reorganization.

NBCUniversal produced $12.7 billion in revenue, a 5.4% increase.

The media unit, which includes television and streaming, contributed $7.6 billion in revenue, a 5.5% gain. (The numbers included results from the profitable cable channels, which became a separate entity on Jan. 2.) Higher advertising sales and Peacock, which began carrying the NBA, helped deliver the gains. Peacock recently raised its monthly fee.

But media earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization tumbled 141% to a loss of $122 million to account for the NBA contract.

Theme parks, which now boast Universal’s Epic Universe near Orlando, produced $2.9 billion in revenue — a 22% increase. It generated $1 billion in profit.

NBCUniversal’s studio business generated $3 billion in revenue, a decline of 7.4%. It notched $351 million in earnings, a decline of 38%.

Although shut out of the Oscar nominations, Universal Pictures’ “Wicked: For Good” roared at the box office. The two-part “Wicked” franchise has fetched $1.3 billion in global ticket sales.

Comcast shares were up 2.9% to $29.24 on Thursday.

California quantum computing company D-Wave is moving its headquarters to Boca Raton, Fla., and opening a new research and development facility.

In an announcement this week, the Palo Alto company said its new office will be housed in the Boca Raton Innovation Campus before the end of this year. The 1.7-million-square-foot office facility, previously used by tech company IBM, is the birthplace of the personal computer, according to the campus’ website.

“The state offers a rich scientific and educational environment, a growing pool of highly skilled tech talent, and a vibrant spirit of innovation that made it attractive to D-Wave,” Chief Executive Alan Baratz said in a statement.

The company is among businesses that have recently opened new offices or moved out of California, underscoring the competition the state faces to attract more jobs.

California, home to companies such as Google, Apple and Meta, is known for being a major hub for the technology industry. California cryptocurrency startup BitGo recently said that it was moving to South Dakota.

The announcement comes after business leaders criticize a proposed ballot measure to tax billionaires to mainly fund healthcare. Under the Billionaire Tax Act, Californians worth more than $1 billion would pay a one-time 5% tax on their total wealth. The initiative still needs enough signatures to make it on the November ballot, but it’s already prompting criticism from some of California’s wealthiest residents who have urged companies to move.

D-Wave, founded in 1999, describes itself the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers. It also provides quantum computing systems, software, and services. Quantum computers are able to solve complex problems more quickly than a classical computer.

A company spokesperson said its decision to move its headquarters to Florida wasn’t related to the proposed billionaires tax and its executives haven’t publicly commented on the idea. D-Wave will still have a Palo Alto office and it also has a presence in Marina del Rey.

Cities try to lure companies to relocate their operations by offering tax breaks.

In January, the Boca Raton City Council approved a resolution that would allow a tech company — referred as Project Vernon — to be a “qualified applicant” for economic development incentives.

The resolution said that once the company, which turned out to be D-Wave, revealed its identity the city would move forward with completing an economic development agreement.

D-Wave would receive up to $500,000 as part of a relocation incentive. The new headquarters would result in the creation of 100 new jobs over the next five years in Boca Raton. The average annual salary for the jobs shouldn’t be less than $125,000, according to the resolution.

The company also considered relocating its headquarters and R&D facility to Tennessee and North Carolina along with staying in California, the resolution said.

The new Florida site will provide D-Wave a “bicoastal presence for system redundancy in the case of disaster recovery,” according to the news release about the new headquarters.

The company said it will install a quantum computer at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca Raton campus as part of a $20-million agreement.

D-Wave has more than 200 employees, according to its website.

The quantum market is projected to grow. It could reach roughly $100 billion by 2035 with most of the revenue growth coming from quantum computing, according to a 2025 report from McKinsey & Company.

A former software engineer at Google has been convicted of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets for the benefit of China, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

A federal jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding, 38, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets after an 11-day trial in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

The verdict marked the Justice Department’s first conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges, according to a statement from Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence and espionage division.

Ding’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday.

Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google’s AI trade secrets from the company’s network and uploaded them to his personal Google cloud account between May 2022 and April 2023, according to evidence presented at trial.

At the same time, he secretly worked with two Beijing-based technology companies, staging discussions with one early-stage company to be its chief technology officer, and later acting as founder and chief executive of a second startup, prosecutors said. He told potential investors that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying Google’s technology, court documents state.

Ding downloaded the trade secrets to his personal computer less than two weeks before he resigned from Google in December 2023, prosecutors said. He also applied for what prosecutors described as a Chinese government-sponsored “talent plan” intended to attract people to contribute to the country’s economic and technological growth.

His application stated that he planned to “help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level,” prosecutors said.

“This conviction reinforces the FBI’s steadfast commitment to protecting American innovation and national security,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Sanjay Virmani said in a statement.

“The theft and misuse of advanced artificial intelligence technology” to benefit China, Virmani added, “threatens our technological edge and economic competitiveness.”

Ding faces a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison for each count of theft of trade secrets and 15 years in prison for each count of economic espionage. He’s next due in court Tuesday for a status conference.

“We’re grateful to the jury for making sure justice was served today, sending a clear message that stealing trade secrets has serious consequences.” Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president of regulatory affairs for Google, said in a statement.