Femi Otedola, chairman of First HoldCo Plc, has increased his stake in the financial services group to 25.86 per cent after acquiring 1.78 billion additional shares worth about ₦222.20 billion.

In a regulatory filing on Thursday, First HoldCo disclosed that Mr Otedola, through Calvados Global Services Limited, purchased 1,779,094,976 ordinary shares at ₦124.90 per share. The new share purchase represents 3.91 per cent of the company’s outstanding shares.

Following the transaction, Mr Otedola’s total holding in the banking group rose to about 11.8 billion shares, which is equivalent to 25.86 per cent of the company’s issued share capital.

Based on the company’s share price of ₦122.95 as of 11:24 a.m. (WAT) on 30 July, Mr Otedola’s stake is valued at about ₦1.45 trillion.

READ ALSO: FirstHoldCo delivers massive ₦653.5bn profit before tax in H1 2026

Mr Otedola has steadily increased his investment in First HoldCo since emerging as the company’s largest shareholder in 2021.

Most recently, on 22 July, he acquired an additional 706.1 million shares valued at ₦77.6 billion, raising his stake to 21.95 per cent at the time. In June, he also purchased 672.9 million shares worth ₦29.6 billion.

The June acquisition was completed during the ₦45 billion second tranche of First HoldCo’s ₦350 billion private placement programme, in which shares were offered at ₦44 per unit.

The group plans to inject the proceeds from the capital raise into First Bank of Nigeria Limited, its flagship commercial banking subsidiary, as part of its capital restoration and broader balance sheet strengthening programme.

Microsoft is in a unique position as AI overtakes the tech industry. It’s one of the world’s largest cloud providers and software-as-a-service companies, while also holding valuable stakes in the two biggest AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Those incentives are starting to clash as Microsoft posts blockbuster financial results. The company just reported an extremely profitable quarter with $90 billion in revenue and net income of $35.8 billion. For the fiscal year, which ended June 30, Microsoft reported $331.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $133.7 billion for the year.

And CEO Satya Nadella is not about to let the trajectory of Anthropic and OpenAI — which are expanding into applications and agentic infrastructure that could ultimately let them own customer relationships — derail that kind of cash.

Nadella has been preaching to enterprises to use multiple models and to stop relying on the frontier AI labs for the agentic harness/app layer.

Doing so is dangerous, he’s been saying, because it requires companies to share too many of their internal secrets with model makers of dubious trustworthiness. He knows his customers. Enterprise IT fears both data leaks and being locked into a vendor.

Now he has openly told Wall Street analysts during the company’s quarterly conference call Wednesday that this is an opportunity for Microsoft to sell customers its own homegrown models, alongside agents, AI security and more, while promising lower costs.

In other words, he’s pitching Microsoft as an alternative to many of the upscale services that OpenAI and Anthropic are developing for their own growth.

When UBS analyst Karl Keirstead specifically asked Nadella to weigh in on the open vs. closed-sourced debate roiling the AI industry, and how Microsoft will benefit from it, Nadella came out swinging.

“The goal is to have the firm be in control of their own destiny,” the CEO said of enterprises. “We are very, very clear about the architectural sort of design of the platform, which is you got to keep your harness separate from the model … that means any model at any given time is swappable.”

Microsoft, of course, sells a menu of harnesses (aka AI agents), too, under the Copilot name, including its coding agent GitHub Copilot. Coding agents are where much of the AI dollars are being spent today.

And he used the high-profile incident from last week as proof of his warnings.

“If you look even at the Hugging Face incident, the biggest thing that we should take away from that is you can’t sort of depend on any one model,” Nadella said. “You will maybe need multiple models to even remediate some challenges that get caused by one model. Like that’s the way to think about it, right? Which is you can’t be subject to a refusal of one model.”

The incident involved an unreleased model from OpenAI breaking out of its sandbox and successfully mounting a full-scale hack on Hugging Face, all in pursuit of besting a benchmark. Trying to understand what happened, Hugging Face at first tried to use a private frontier model (which it hasn’t named) that refused to help it. So it turned to the Chinese open-source model Z.ai GLM 5.2 to analyze logs and defend its infrastructure. The incident has so shocked the industry that even Sam Altman is now saying that maybe AI development should slow down a bit.

Nadella also made clear that Microsoft is happily selling its own homegrown models, the MAI family, on its own homegrown AI chips, Maya, and pitching them as cheaper alternatives.

“Every customer wants the right model for each task based on quality, latency, cost, and compliance. We offer the broadest model catalog in the cloud with over 11,000 models, including the leads from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, xAI, as well as our own MAI family,” he said.

He added: “We’re also accelerating our own model development. We announced more than a dozen new models across image, voice, transcription, coding, security, including our first reasoning model, MAI thinking one, all with cost-efficient inference at the core for the enterprise use cases. We are co-designing these models with our silicon, and we are seeing 40% better performance per watt when running MAI models on Maya 200.”

As for Mythos? Nadella pointed to Microsoft’s new Mythos competitor announced earlier this week, MAI Cyber One Flash. It “achieves better performance than the much larger Mythos model, but at half the cost when combined with our multi-agent security harness,” he said.

Sure, the Microsoft CEO says that enterprises should use the frontier models that OpenAI and Anthropic offer in their mix. But his bigger message is: don’t trust them enough to rely on them.