Two years ago, when Nvidia first joined the club of trillion-dollar firms, plenty of investors worried that its shares were beginning to look pricey. Yet those who happened to buy a slice of the artificial-intelligence (AI) chipmaker at the time would since have quadrupled their money. On July 9th Nvidia became the first ever company to reach a market value of $4trn. More
Even by the mind-boggling standards of the artificial-intelligence (AI) boom, the growth of CoreWeave is striking. Two years ago the so-called neocloud, which rents out access to AI computing power, was a scrappy startup generating about $200m a year in revenue with a small fleet of data centres. Today things look rather different. Analysts expect it to make over $5bn in sales this year. As of January it operated 28 data centres, with ten more being added this year. Since it listed in March, its market value has rocketed by over 300%, to around $75bn (see chart). More
The Empire State Building, finished in 1931, was erected in just 410 days. That same year construction began on the Hoover Dam. It was meant to take seven years, but was built in five. Such feats now seem hard to imagine. Last year half of America’s construction firms reported that commercial projects they were working on had been delayed or abandoned. In 2008 Californian voters approved a high-speed-rail line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, to be finished by 2020. It will be at least a decade late. More
MID-JULY is the time to bare it all. On the beach, this involves swimwear that, au fait with the latest fashion, varies in skimpiness from extreme to disturbing. In the boardroom, it consists of a ritual of corporate exhibitionism known as the summer earnings season. Results from the second three months of the year will trickle out over the next few weeks. Back in April it looked on course to be a distinctly awful quarter. President Donald Trump had just launched his trade war, sending stockmarkets down and bond yields up. Bottom lines were imperilled by rising costs and slowing economic growth. Think walking around in tiny Speedos makes you feel naked? Try fielding analysts’ questions about plunging profits on an earnings call. More
Cognac producers had at least one thing to toast this week. After a months-long dumping investigation into European brandy, the Chinese government announced that 34 producers—including the three biggest, LVMH, Pernod Ricard and Remy Cointreau—had agreed to minimum prices, and so would be exempt from new duties. A 35% tariff for the next five years will apply only to a dribble of producers. More
When a company accidentally lavishes praise on Adolf Hitler, it may not be surprising that its chief executive promptly decides to step down. Yet in a testament to the turbulence of Linda Yaccarino’s two years at the helm of X, once known as Twitter, this was only one possible reason for her resignation on July 9th. More
“This isn’t just about productivity metrics,” Dara Khosrowshahi, the boss of Uber, told employees recently, after the ride-hailing company said they should all work from the office at least three days a week. “It’s about building the culture that will drive Uber’s next phase of growth.” Mr Khosrowshahi is not the only boss to appeal to such fuzzy ideas while herding workers back through the turnstiles. In January staff at Amazon were required to return to the pre-pandemic norm of working five days a week from the office. “People riff on top of one another’s ideas better when they’re together,” Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, told the Harvard Business Review when asked about the policy. More
There is a locked room in Lego’s corporate museum, in Billund in Denmark, which is called the Vault. It is a large space, filled with shelves that are arranged in chronological order, starting in 1958 and stretching away towards the present day. Between them, the shelves contain around 10,000 sets of Lego. More
