Philippa Kaur

The factory floor of Schneider Electric’s plant in Conselve, Italy, hums with urgency. Workers at the power-equipment company’s facility, which is in the midst of a major expansion, are busily assembling advanced cooling systems for the data centres underpinning the development of artificial intelligence (AI). “The key is the integration of grid to chip and chip to chiller,” says Pankaj Sharma, an executive at the company, referring to a new design it recently developed with Nvidia, an AI chip giant. More

What do Sam Altman and David Sacks have in common? Certainly not politics. Mr Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, is part of the transition team of Daniel Lurie, the Democratic mayor-elect of San Francisco. David Sacks, an entrepreneur and polemical right-wing podcaster, will on January 20th become Donald Trump’s crypto and artificial-intelligence (AI) tsar. Yet both have the distinction of being among Silicon Valley’s best spotters of entrepreneurial talent. According to data from TRAC, a venture-capital (VC) firm, few are as good at picking promising startups at the very earliest stage. More

Managers are better equipped than ever to make good decisions. They are more aware that human judgment is fallible. They have oodles of data about their customers and products. They can use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse, summarise and synthesise information with unprecedented speed. But as the pendulum swings inexorably away from gut instinct and towards data-based decisions, firms need to be alive to a different set of dangers. More

FOREIGNERS ARE taking good American jobs. Some of the very best, frankly. Five of America’s eight trillion-dollar technology giants are run by people born in other countries. Jensen Huang of Nvidia hails from Taiwan; Hock Tan of Broadcom, another chip titan, comes from Malaysia. Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, are run by two Indians, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai. Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, is South African. More

The HOLIDAY season is a time for family, food—and, at least for some people, American football. As in previous years, teams in the National Football League (NFL) played on Christmas day, watched live by millions. Unusually, though, the broadcaster this year was Netflix, which live-streamed two games (and a musical interlude by Beyoncé). More

No American president has been as ostensibly pro-pot as Donald Trump. During the campaign he declared support for various cannabis-reform measures, and said he would vote in favour of recreational use in a November ballot in Florida. Yet despite his victory, weed stocks continue to perform poorly. What killed the buzz? More

In a SMALL shop in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei, one of the rarest pieces of technology in the world is on display. The quantum computer in the showroom of Origin, a Chinese startup, looks ready to be plucked from the shelf and fired up. Only 20 such devices are produced globally each year. It is unclear what in Origin’s showroom is for sale, but none of it is supposed to be seen by foreigners. During your correspondent’s visit, which was agreed on in advance, the company panicked at the sight of a foreigner, abruptly cancelled interviews and notified the police. More

From the dining room on the ground floor of “Carl’s Villa” in Copenhagen, guests are treated to views of a charming garden adorned with classical statues. The art nouveau house was built in 1892 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg. Since then the brewer, which now uses the house for meetings, has become one of the biggest in the world. Sitting across the table Jacob Aarup-Andersen, Carlsberg’s current boss, admits that the company’s success is part of a bigger puzzle about Danish businesses. Just last night at dinner, he says, someone asked him how a country so small could produce so many large companies. More