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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.
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Core inflation is up, meaning that interest rates are unlikely to go down anytime soon.
The Fed on Wednesday issued a report showing substantial increases in the price of eggs, used cars, and auto insurance — data that could spell bad news for the renewables economy.
Though some of those factors had already been widely reported on, the overall rise in prices exceeded analysts’ expectations. With overall inflation still elevated — reaching an annual rate of 3%, while “core” inflation, stripping out food and energy, rose to 3.3%, after an unexpectedly sharp 0.4% jump in January alone — any prospect of substantial interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve has dwindled even further.
Renewable energy development is especially sensitive to higher interest rates. That’s because renewables projects, like wind turbines and solar panels, have to incur the overwhelming majority of their lifetime costs before they start operating and generating revenue. Developers then often fund much of the project through borrowed money that’s secured against an agreement to buy the resulting power. When the cost of borrowing money goes up, projects become less viable, with lower prospective returns sometimes causing investors not to go forward .
High interest rates have plagued the renewables economy for years. “As interest rates rise, all of a sudden, solar assets that are effectively bonds become less valuable,” Quinn Pasloske, a managing director at Greenbacker, a renewable investor and operating company, told me on Tuesday, describing how the stream of payments from a solar project becomes less valuable as rates rise because investors can get more from risk-free government bonds.
The new inflation data is “consistent with our call of an extended Fed pause, with only one rate cut in 2025, happening in June,” Morgan Stanley economists wrote in a note to clients. Bond traders are also projecting just a single cut for the rest of the year — but not until December.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking committee Tuesday, “We think our policy rate is in a good place, and we don’t see any reason to be in a hurry to reduce it further.”
The yield for the 10-year Treasury bond, often used as a benchmark for the cost of credit, is up 0.09% today, to 4.63%. While this is below where yields peaked in mid-January, it’s a level still well above where yields have been for almost all of the last year. When Treasury yields rise, the cost of credit throughout the economy goes up.
Clean energy stocks were down this morning — but so is the overall market. Because while high interest rates are especially bad for renewables, they’re not exactly great for anyone else.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees U.S. wetlands, halted processing on 168 pending wind and solar actions, a spokesperson confirmed to Heatmap.
UPDATE: On February 6, the Army Corp of Engineers announced in a one-sentence statement that it lifted its permitting hold on renewable energy projects. It did not say why it lifted the hold, nor did it explain why the holds were enacted in the first place. It’s unclear whether the hold has been actually lifted, as I heard from at least one developer who was told otherwise from the agency shortly after we received the statement.
The Army Corps of Engineers confirmed that it has paused all permitting for well over 100 actions related to renewable energy projects across the country — information that raises more questions than it answers about how government permitting offices are behaving right now.
On Tuesday, I reported that the Trump administration had all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects, even for facilities constructed away from federal lands. According to an internal American Clean Power Association memo sent to the trade association’s members and dated the previous day, the Army Corps of Engineers apparatus for approving projects on federally shielded wetlands had come to a standstill. Officials in some parts of the agency have refused even to let staff make a formal determination as to whether proposed projects touch protected wetlands, I reported.
In a statement to me, the Army Corps has confirmed it has “temporarily paused evaluation on” 168 pending permit actions “focused on regulated activities associated with renewable energy projects.” According to the statement, the Army Corps froze work on those permitting actions “pending feedback from the Administration on the applicability” of an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office, “Unleashing American Energy,” and that the agency “anticipates feedback on or about” February 7 from administration officials.
While the statement demonstrates how vast the potential impacts to the renewables sector may be, it also leaves several important questions unanswered. It’s unclear whether each pending permit action that has been frozen applies to its own individual project, or whether some projects have more than one permit pending before the Army Corps, so it is still fuzzy precisely how many projects may be impacted. The Army Corps did not say whether that feedback would lead to the lifting of holds on permitting activity, nor did it explain why the holds were enacted in the first place.
Finally, there’s one big question that still needs answering: The executive order in question focuses on fossil fuel projects and says nothing about renewable energy — no mentions of “renewable,” no “solar,” no “wind.” Why did this order trigger a permitting freeze in the first place? This level of confusion and ambiguity is part and parcel with other statements in the ACP memo, including that guidance and agency perspectives have varied widely in recent weeks depending on who in the government is being asked.
Climate advocates are already pressing the panic button. “This is a 5 alarm fire alert. This could decimate all the clean energy we worked to pass under Biden,” Nick Abraham, state communications director for League of Conservation Voters, wrote on Bluesky in response to my reporting.
I asked the Army Corps for clarity on how the executive order led to a pause on their permitting activity, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
The leaders of both countries reached deals with the U.S. in exchange for a 30-day reprieve on border taxes.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a month-long pause on across-the-board 25% tariff on Mexican goods imported into the United States that were to take effect on Tuesday.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that Sheinbaum had agreed to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, “specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will lead talks in the coming month over what comes next.
“I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a ‘deal’ between our two Countries,” Trump wrote.
In her own statement, Sheinbaum said the U.S. had committed to work on preventing the trafficking of firearms into Mexico.
There has still been no pause on planned tariffs on Canadian imports, which would likely affect the flow of oil, minerals, and lumber, as well as possibly break automobile supply chains in the United States. Canadian leaders announced several measures to counter the tariffs at both the federal and provincial level.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spoken today, and are scheduled to do so again this afternoon. Canadian officials are not optimistic, however, that they’ll be able to get a similar deal, a Canadian official told The New York Times.
UPDATE 4:55 p.m. ET: Trudeau announced that he had reached a similar deal that would stave off the imposition of tariffs for a month. Following a “good call” with Trump, Trudeau said in a post on X that he would deploy personnel and resources to his country’s southern border. “Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border,” Trudeau wrote. He also said that Canada would have a “Fentanyl Czar” and would “launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering.”