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Featuring China, fossil fuels, and data centers.
Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Coastal Virginia wind project is already halfway done — but that hasn’t stopped the administration from seeking to interrupt it.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees U.S. wetlands, halted processing on 168 pending wind and solar actions, a spokesperson confirmed to Heatmap.
The leaders of both countries reached deals with the U.S. in exchange for a 30-day reprieve on border taxes.
PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
It’s not just AI companies taking a beating today.
It’s not just tech stocks that are reeling after the release of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, which performs similarly to state-of-the-art models from American companies while using less expensive hardware far more efficiently. Energy and infrastructure companies — whose share prices had soared in the past year on the promise of powering a massive artificial intelligence buildout — have also seen their stock prices fall early Monday.
Shares in GE Vernova, which manufactures turbines for gas-fired power plants, were down 19% in early trading Monday. Since the company’s spinoff from GE last April, the share price had risen almost 200% through last Friday, largely based on optimism about its ability to supply higher electricity demand. Oklo, the advanced nuclear company backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, is down 25%, after rising almost 300% in the past year. Constellation Energy, the independent power producer that’s re-powering Three Mile Island in partnership with Microsoft, saw its shares fall almost 20% in early trading. It had risen almost 190% in the year prior to Monday.
“DeepSeek’s power implications for AI training punctures some of the capex euphoria which followed major commitments from Stargate and Meta last week,” Jefferies infrastructure analyst Graham Hunt and his colleagues wrote in a note to clients Monday. “With DeepSeek delivering performance comparable to GPT-4 for a fraction of the computing power, there are potential negative implications for the builders, as pressure on AI players to justify ever increasing capex plans could ultimately lead to a lower trajectory for data center revenue and profit growth.”
Investors fear that the proliferation of cheaper, more efficient models may hurt the prospects of technology companies — and their suppliers — that are spending tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence investments.
Just last week, both Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Meta, announced huge new investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Altman’s OpenAI is part of Stargate, the joint venture with Microsoft and SoftBank that got a splashy White House-based announcement and promises to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure. There was already some skepticism of these numbers, with Altman-nemesis Elon Musk charging that certain members would be unable to fulfill their ends of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told CNBC from Davos, “I’m good for my $80 billion.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said late last week that his company was building a data center “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” which would require 2 gigawatts of electricity to power. (For scale, reactors 3 and 4 of the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia are a little over 1 gigawatt each.) He also said that Meta had planned up to $65 billion of capital expenditure this year.
These escalating announcements have been manna to investors in any company that provides the building blocks for large artificial intelligence systems — namely chips and energy, with companies like Nvidia, the chip designer, and power companies and energy infrastructure companies posting some of the best stock market performances last year.
But exactly how cheaper artificial intelligence plays out in terms of real investment remains to be seen. Late Sunday night Redmond, Washington-time, Nadella posted a link on X to the Wikipedia page for Jevons Paradox. The idea dates from 19th century Britain, and posits that increased efficiency in using a resource (in Jevons’ case, coal) could actually accelerate its depletion, as the resource becomes cheaper for the same economic output, encouraging more use of it (in Jevons’ case, iron).
“Jevons paradox strikes again!,” Nadella wrote. “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.”
Investors in chips and energy companies are hoping that’s the case; at least so far, the market doesn’t appear to agree.
The president is on his way to Los Angeles next.
On his fifth day back in office, President Trump is making the rounds to recent disaster zones —- North Carolina, which is recovering from Hurricane Helene, and later Los Angeles, where fires are still burning. In the immediate aftermath of both catastrophes, Trump was quick to blame Democrats for their response. Touching down in North Carolina earlier today, he sounded the same tune as he proposed overhauling or even eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for disaster preparation and recovery nationwide.
On the tarmac, Trump told the press that his administration was “looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” saying he would rather states be solely responsible for disaster recovery. Later, at a hurricane recovery briefing, Trump said that he planned to sign an executive order that would “begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA — or maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Trump dodged questions on details of the order or a timeline for implementation.
While speaking to a group of North Carolina families at a separate event, Trump told them, “Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.” False claims about the hurricane response, stoked by Trump during the final month of his campaign against Kamala Harris, led FEMA to put up a “myth and fact” response page on its website to debunk swirling rumors.
It is true, however, that earlier this month, FEMA informed thousands of displaced North Carolina residents that their vouchers for temporary housing were about to expire for one of three reasons: their homes had been deemed “habitable,” the residents had not approved a FEMA inspection, or the agency couldn’t get in contact with them. Speaking to the families, Trump said this was unjustifiable given that “your government provided shelter and housing for illegal aliens from all over the world.” He claimed he would “surge housing solutions” to the state that went beyond FEMA’s temporary measures, but did not provide more details as to how.
After arriving in Los Angeles, where large swaths of the city have been devastated by still-active wildfires, President Trump met with Governor Gavin Newsom on the tarmac, striking a conciliatory tone as he said he wanted to “work together” to help L.A. recover. This disaster also prompted a flurry of misinformation when fire hydrants in the city temporarily ran dry. While the city’s water infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to put out numerous simultaneous historic blazes, Trump put the blame squarely on Newsom and his previous opposition to a policy that would have redirected water from a river delta in Northern California to farms in the Central Valley and cities in Southern California, endangering a fish species called the Delta smelt.
Experts say this has nothing to do with the fires or the ability to put them out, as all water storage tanks were full and the blazes were due to a combination of drought and extreme winds. Yet Trump has continued to hold up the protection of the smelt fish as all that’s wrong with California’s fire response, even making it a feature of his recent executive order “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism To Provide Water Solutions To Southern California.”
After a tour of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and a photoshoot with L.A. firefighters, Trump met with city and state leaders and pledged to declare a national emergency that would allow him to waive all federal permits for rebuilding. “The federal permit can take 10 years. We’re not going to do that. We don’t want to take 10 days,” Trump said to applause. “I’d ask that the local permitting process be the same.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass agreed that she wanted to expedite the process but reiterated that before rebuilding efforts could begin in earnest, all the fire debris needed to be cleared. That’s an arduous process that the Army Corp of Engineers estimated could take 18 months to complete. While Bass vowed to speed up this timeline, Trump claimed that “the people are willing to clean out their own debris.”
Trump also repeated his promise to “open up the pumps and valves in the North,” though again, there’s no evidence that more piped water would have done anything to prevent these fires. “We want to get that water pouring down as quickly as possible. Let hundreds of millions of gallons of water flow down into Southern California, and that’ll be a big benefit to you.”
And he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention the smelt once more, telling the assembled leaders “it’s in numerous other areas. So it doesn’t have to be protected. The people of California have to be protected.”
Editor‘s note: This story has been updated to reflect Trump’s visit to Los Angeles.
