Philippa Kaur

Not since the first world war, when America’s government nationalised the railroad system, has it made the kind of investment it announced on July 10th. For $400m, the Department of Defence acquired a 15% stake in MP Materials, making it the largest shareholder in the country’s sole producer of rare-earth metals. The money will allow the business, with operations including a mine in California and a factory in Texas, to dramatically increase production of the magnets needed for fighter jets, electric vehicles, smartphones and more. On July 15th Apple, the iPhone-maker, joined in with a $500m deal to buy magnets from the company and help build a rare-earth recycling facility. More

When Warren Buffett, a venerable investor, and 3G Capital, a private-equity firm, merged Kraft and Heinz in 2015 to create a packaged-food heavyweight, consumers’ appetite for its colourful condiments, sugary snacks and processed cheeses seemed insatiable. The deal now looks to have been a big fat flop. Kraft Heinz’s market value, at $32bn, is down by three-fifths since the tie-up. The company expects its operating profit to fall by 5-10% this year. It is now said to be exploring a break-up. More

AS A TEENAGER in Oregon, Jensen Huang was one mean ping-pong player. In 1978 his mentor, Lou Bochenski, described him in a letter to Sports Illustrated as “perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis” in the American north-west. Had he been a bit older, who knows, he might well have joined Bochenski’s daughter, Judy, who toured China in 1971 as part of Richard Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy” initiative to improve relations between the capitalist and communist worlds. More

The competition for the world’s best AI talent is frenzied. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, has personally taken charge of efforts to recruit for a “superintelligence” lab. The sums on offer are eye-watering: a rumoured $200m-plus to prise away the head of Apple’s AI models. OpenAI executives are said to be “recalibrating” compensation in order to ward off Mr Zuckerberg. But hiring hotshots makes sense only if you believe that talent is portable, and that superstars will continue to shine in their new organisations. More

PATNA IS A day trip away from Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, and the ruins of Nalanda, an ancient monastery visited by the Chinese monk Xuanzang on his journey to the west. It is the capital of Bihar, a state of nearly 130m people, and a stopping point for pilgrims. Yet until recently it did not have a single premium hotel. More

Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the chief executives of large media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that their businesses faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.” More

Late in 2023 Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, began peddling a new idea. Every country, he said, should have its own artificial-intelligence (AI) system, trained on domestic data, aligned with national values and built using local infrastructure. Appealing to policymakers’ fondness for manufacturing, the boss of the chip colossus described these systems as “AI factories”, ingesting data and churning out intelligence. He called it “sovereign AI”. More

Late in 2023 Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, began peddling a new idea. Every country, he said, should have its own artificial-intelligence (AI) system, trained on domestic data, aligned with national values and built using local infrastructure. Appealing to policymakers’ fondness for manufacturing, the boss of the chip colossus described these systems as “AI factories”, ingesting data and churning out intelligence. He called it “sovereign AI”. More