David Ellison is not abandoning his quest to build a new Hollywood juggernaut.

Ellison-controlled Paramount disclosed Thursday in a regulatory filing that it was extending the deadline of its tender offer for Warner Bros. Discovery stock. The firm had previously asked Warner stockholders to sell their shares to Paramount for $30 apiece by Wednesday.

The new deadline is Feb. 20.

Paramount faces an uphill battle in its pursuit of its larger entertainment industry rival. Investors so far have pledged 168.5 million of Warner’s shares to Paramount, according to Thursday’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Warner, in a statement, said the response represented only about 7% of its investors.

Paramount also filed proxy materials, saying it would challenge an alternative bid by Netflix at an upcoming special meeting of Warner shareholders to vote on the company’s sale. Warner’s board has not yet set the meeting date but has suggested the pivotal vote could occur by April — pushing the pitched battle for the company into spring.

Warner’s board unanimously agreed on Dec. 4 to sell much of the company to Netflix for $27.75 a share. Before that can happen, Warner must spin off CNN and other basic cable channels into a new publicly traded company called Discovery Global.

The multistep process is giving Paramount a wide window to make its case to Warner shareholders.

Warner Bros. Discovery, in a statement, was dismissive of Paramount’s efforts.

“Once again, Paramount continues to make the same offer our Board has repeatedly and unanimously rejected in favor of a superior merger agreement with Netflix,” Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement. “It’s also clear our shareholders agree, with more than 93% also rejecting Paramount’s inferior scheme. We are confident in our ability to achieve regulatory approval for the Netflix merger.”

Paramount has sued Warner Bros. and its chief executive, David Zaslav, in a Delaware court, but the judge turned down Paramount’s request to expedite the legal proceedings to help Paramount make its case to Warner shareholders.

Paramount hopes that, over time, the proxy battle will be more fruitful. It plans to ask Warner shareholders to vote against the Netflix deal at the special meeting. Paramount has also said it would put forth its own slate of directors to be elected during Warner’s annual meeting with shareholders.

“The consideration payable to WBD shareholders in the Netflix transaction falls well short of Paramount’s $30 per share all-cash offer,” Paramount said in Thursday’s announcement.

Billionaire Larry Ellison and his family took control of Paramount in August, determined to become major players in Hollywood.

The following month, the Ellisons began an audacious pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery. Their goal is to combine two century-old film studios and vibrant television production capabilities and marry such popular TV networks as HBO, CBS, Comedy Central, HGTV and TBS.

Netflix was the surprise suitor after Warner opened the auction to other bidders in late October.

Paramount launched its hostile takeover last month after failing to gain traction with Warner’s board, which remains steadfast in its support for Netflix’s $72-billion proposed purchase of HBO, HBO Max, television production and the Warner Bros. film studio, which led the Hollywood pack in the prestigious Oscar nominations, which were announced Thursday.

Earlier this week, Netflix converted its $27.75-a-share bid to an all-cash offer in hopes of defusing some of Paramount’s criticisms of its deal.

Paramount, which enjoys support from President Trump, has been stressing that Netflix’s regulatory path is uncertain.

Both sides plan to make their case to U.S. and European regulators.

Unlike Netflix, Paramount wants to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including CNN and other basic cable channels. The value of the proposed cable channel company, Discovery Global, factors into the ultimate value that shareholders would receive if the Netflix bid prevails.

Warner’s cable channel spin-off is expected to be completed this summer. The value of the channels is in doubt, giving Paramount ammunition to claim that its $30-a-share tender offer for the entire company was more lucrative than Netflix’s offer for Warner’s studios and HBO.

As the artificial intelligence industry heats up, Karman Industries is trying to cool it down.

The Signal Hill startup says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers, chilling them with less space, less power and no water.

It recently raised $20 million and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year.

“Our high-level thesis is we could build the best compressor out there using the latest and greatest technology,” said David Tearse, chief executive of Karman. “We want to reduce that electrical consumption of cooling so that you have the most efficient way to cool these chips.”

The high-end, expensive chips that power AI can slow down or shut off when they overheat. They can reach more than 200 degrees, but need to be below 150 degrees to work best.

Cooling warehouses packed with tens of thousands of them can require fields full of equipment and huge quantities of water.

Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company’s efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%.

Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat.

A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city.

As AI has super-sized data centers, adding more and more chips, they have needed increasing amounts of space and power for cooling.

“It’s kind of a losing battle, especially when you keep densifying your chips,” said Tearse.

Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center’s power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day.

Nearly 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity will be added by 2030 and energy constraints have become the biggest barrier for expansion. U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Communities across the U.S. have begun protesting data center construction, fearing that the power and water needs could strain infrastructure and boost costs to consumers. The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year.

Big tech companies and venture capital investors are spending billions of dollars to replace old-school technologies with energy-efficient solutions. Microsoft announced a new data center design that uses zero water for cooling. It recently vowed to ensure its data centers don’t increase the electricity costs or deny water to nearby communities.

The data center-cooling market is projected to grow from about $11 billion in 2025 to nearly $25 billion by 2032.

To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute — nearly 10 times faster than traditional compressors — to move heat.

“Three or four years ago, it was very challenging to do just because the motors didn’t exist. Automotive components are getting up to those speeds,” said Chiranjeev Kalra, co-founder and chief technology officer of Karman.

About a third of Karman’s 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors.

The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy.

Karman’s heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation.

One of the potentially biggest selling points for the systems is that they don’t require water, which will enable data centers in spots where water is scarce.

In really hot places such as Texas and Arizona, cooling systems struggle, either using excessive water to cool or having to throttle the chips to stop them from overheating.

Karman’s latest funding round brings the total money raised to more than $30 million. Major participants included Riot Venture, Sunflower Capital, Space VC, Wonder Ventures, and former Intel and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Karman said it will begin customer deliveries in the summer of 2026 from its Los Angeles manufacturing facility that is designed to make 100 units per year. The plan is to eventually quadruple capacity.

If successful, Karman could dent the market share of Trane Technologies and Schneider Electric, the leaders in heat rejection systems.

A rather peculiar red phone booth appeared outside a San Francisco tattoo parlor this week, urging residents in one of America’s most liberal cities to “call a Republican.”

Its counterpart, a blue phone booth, sits outside a bookshop in the staunchly conservative town of Abilene, Texas, where it encourages locals to “call a Democrat.”

Together, the phone booths form a social experiment: When someone picks up the line in San Francisco, it rings in Texas, and vice versa, cultivating a unique opportunity for passersby to chat with a stranger who holds a vastly different outlook on politics and life.

The initiative, dubbed the Party Line project, is the brainchild of Matter Neuroscience, a mental health startup focused on researching the science behind happiness and creating tools to battle major depressive disorders.

Neuroscientists know that fighting with people who hold different views leads to the release of cortisol in the brain, which increases stress, Matter co-founder Ben Goldhirsh explained. On the other hand, engaging in non-hateful, human-to-human conversation activates happiness-boosting neurotransmitters such as dopamine and cannabinoids, he said.

“We wanted to see what would happen when people had the chance to connect with people directly — would they choose to argue and fight, or would they choose to find common ground?” Goldhirsh said. “[Would they choose] the release of cortisol or the release of cannabinoids?”

Much to researchers’ delight, the vast majority of callers have chosen to seek common ground. The project launched lateSunday afternoon, and by Thursday evening researchers had recorded more than 150 conversations and voicemails.

So far the topics callers have discussed have run the gamut, including hobbies, culture and world events, Goldhirsh said. Many callers are rejecting the dichotomy of Republican and Democratic labels and are finding they have similar concerns about the state of the nation and economy.

In one recording, Steve — a San Francisco man who identifies as a liberal — asks, “Are you a Republican?” to a mother of four in Abilene.

She quickly responds “Yes, I am,” but then a moment later says, “Well, no, hmm, ummm, [I’m] probably an independent I would say as I’ve gotten older.”

Steve then asks her if she sees the world as being as crazy as he does, to which she says, “I do. It’s really worse and worse every day.”

“See? We have so much in common!” he responds.

This type of dialogue doesn’t surprise UCLA political science professor Chris Tausanovitch, who wrote a book on the polarization in American politics.

He said that while people often assume they won’t get along with a member of the opposite political party, the average American holds more moderate political views than their elected representatives.

“A lot of the dislike of the other party arises because we don’t like the public stances of whichever party we’re not aligned with,” he said. “If you’re a Democrat, you associate Republicans with the stances of people like Donald Trump, but it turns out that most people are not as extreme as the stereotype of their political party would suggest.”

Addressing the problem of polarization in politics will require significant effort from both parties, Tausanovitch said, but experiments like the phone booth are a fantastic way to get people talking across the aisle.

“There’s a good feeling from talking to another human and realizing they’re human,” he said, “and you actually can learn that there’s a tendency for people not to be as different as you assume that they are in terms of real policy and beliefs.”

From a mental health expert’s perspective, Goldhirsh said he was not surprised that the majority of the conversations have been positive, inquisitive and often led to heartwarming discoveries of shared interests and experiences.

“People are complex, nuanced individuals,” Goldhirsh said, “and really enjoy engaging as such and do it with a real sort of kindness and curiosity when given that chance.”

In one dialogue shared on Matter Neuroscience’s Instagram, Shane, a correctional officer in Texas, chats with Chris, who works at sandwich shop and DJ studio in San Francisco.

Shane opens up about the good and bad aspects of his job, sharing the horror of watching an inmate be murdered and the fulfillment he recently found chatting with inmates about the Bible.

The pair quickly find common ground — Shane’s brother is called Chris and Chris’ mother lives in San Antonio.

“I love this experiment here,” Shane says at the end of the conversation. “We’re already connected, dude,” Chris adds.

The San Francisco phone booth is set up outside of Black Serum Tattoo studio in the Mission District. Owner Brucius von Xylander said he agreed to let Matter Neuroscience set up the phone outside of his studio because he thought it would be a great medium for people across the political spectrum to engage in civil discourse.

“It seemed like a good idea to me, because it’s fun connecting with a stranger somewhere knowing that they might talk about something that is hard to speak about on social media or elsewhere,” Von Xylander said.

Von Xylander said the response to the phone had been overwhelmingly positive both online and in person.

Meanwhile, some 1,600 miles away in Abilene, the owner of Seven and One Books, Arlene Kasselman, also has been delighted with the response to the phone outside her store.

When she first saw the bright blue phone with the “Call a Democrat” sign, she was a little nervous about how the conversations would go. But so far they have been amazing, she said, as people discuss baking, basketball, politics and more.

From her perspective, the goal is to see what it looks like to “not just be a keyboard warrior in the comments section, but to view people as human.”

“We are certainly biologically more similar than dissimilar,” she added. “So how can we reach across the aisle?”

In our increasingly polarized society, Kasselman said she’s excited to facilitate an experience in which people can have positive interactions with strangers from different backgrounds.

Tausanovitch believes meaningful conversations across party lines, in which people connect over shared interests, can wake voters up to the price they are paying because of our extreme political climate. He said everyone suffers when parties are more focused on winning an election than they are on working together on policies that benefit all Americans.

“This kind of thing can help people see that [polarization] is a race to the bottom and a problem that is worthy of being addressed directly,” he said.

Goldhirsh also is delighted with the initial response and said Matter Neuroscience had been flooded with requests to bring the phone booths to other parts of America. For example, Los Angeles rapper the Game sent a message saying the team should install phones in Bloods and Crips territories, allowing members of the enemy gangs to converse.

“We’re going to continue pushing for dialogue,” Goldhirsh said, “because connecting on common ground is better for happiness than, you know, finding joy in the cortisol of the fight-or-flight experience.”