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The Vomero 18 has become a top-seller for specialty retailers and a $100 million franchise for Nike.

Nike chief executive officer Elliott Hill told investors in the company’s fourth-quarter fiscal 2025 conference call last month that the worst is now over.

Net income and sales both declined again in the period, but based on Nike’s “Win Now” actions over the prior 90 days, Hill said: “From here, we expect our business results to improve. It’s time to turn the page.” Investors agreed, with Nike shares closing with a 15 percent increase the following day.

One spot where the numbers are already showing improvement is in running. Nike Running grew by “high single digits” in Q4, and Hill called out the success of the Vomero 18, which has already grown into a $100 million franchise after launching at the end of February.

Three specialty retailers who spoke with Footwear News all agreed: the Nike Running comeback is very much on.

Chris Farley, owner and president of Pacers Running, said Nike is outpacing all of its other vendors, with a 20 percent growth in sales so far in 2025. With five stores in Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia, Pacers has seen the Vomero 18 become its top-seller.

The story is the same for Philadelphia Runner and Heartbreak Hill Running Company, which has locations in Boston, Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif.

“I really liked the [Vomero 17], but we did not sell very many of them,” said Philadelphia Runner co-owner Ross Martinson. “The new Vomeros are the best-selling Nike right away. The problem has been the men’s (sizes), we haven’t been able to get enough of them. But that’s sort of a good problem.”

The Vomero 18 has come in the early days of a streamlined new era for Nike Running focused on three franchises: Pegasus, Structure and Vomero. In order, the franchises are targeted toward responsive cushioning, supportive cushioning and maximum cushioning.

Each banner gets three different silhouettes, starting with the numbered baseline model and offering upgrades through the Plus and Premium variants. The Pegasus is the only franchise to see all three of its models come to stores already with the Pegasus 41, Pegasus Plus and Pegasus Premium, the latter of which is Nike’s first sneaker to ever feature a curved, full-length Zoom Air unit.

Nike will follow up the Vomero 18, which uses a combination of ReactX and ZoomX foams, on August 7 with the Vomero Plus, which is boosted by a full ZoomX midsole. The Vomero Premium will then come October 2 with Air Zoom units at the forefoot and heel taking the max-cushioned proposition to the highest level.

Heartbreak Hill Running Co. co-founder Dan Fitzgerald, who’s also a Nike Running coach, said the Pegasus franchise has always sold well in his stores and credits the Swoosh with creating the super shoe. But outside of those areas, it’s been more hit or miss for Nike Running in recent years.

Anecdotally, Fitzgerald points to a personal friend who logs 10 miles a day and runs in On. Having enjoyed the Vomero 18 himself, he was curious what his friend would think of it. “He put them on and he said, ‘Yeah it feels pretty good.’ Then I hit up a week later and he said: ‘I’m actually blown away. That’s my favorite shoe.”

With only five of the nine sneakers from the Vomero, Pegasus and Structure lines having launched, it’s still too early to tell what effect the relaunch will have on consumers. At the very least, though, the new dividing lines does it make it easier for retailers to explain to customers.

“Our staff really dictate the experience on the floor,” Farley said. “I think [the shoes’ purposes] are more clear. A simpler approach has been much better, so they’re more comfortable bringing out, talking about features, benefits and all those things where they may not have been as clear in the past.”

The new silos serve to replace the Infinity and Invincible, the purposes of which weren’t quite as clear and were easy to conflate with each other because they have “In” as prefixes.

There is still some concern that the difference, for example, between a base and Plus model may not be quite as recognizable. “The Vomero Plus looks awesome too,” Martinson said. “I’m curious to see how that affects sales of he regular Vomero because it’s kind of a different feel, but they still look fairly similar. So we’ll see how that goes.”

As promising as this year’s returns have been for Nike Running, as well as the positivity of its forecast, it does indeed still have ground to make up in the sport.

For runners who may go out just once or twice a week, as well as walkers and broader fitness enthusiasts, Farley said Nike still isn’t winning that conversation. With those consumers, Brooks, Asics and Hoka still reign.

And because the super shoe race has become so crowded, Martinson believes it will be more important than ever for Nike to win over the more casual runners and offer the best shoes that won’t be used on race days. “[Nike has] dominated super shoes and still leads it, but where they were 90 percent of those sales, maybe they’re going to be 50 to 60 [percent] going forward,” he said. “So it feels like good timing for them. It certainly feels like a turnaround for Nike or a vibe shift.”

Meta is currently building out a data center, called Hyperion, which the company expects to supply its new AI lab with five gigawatts (GW) of computational power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Monday post on Threads.

The announcement marks Meta’s latest move to get ahead of OpenAI and Google in the AI race. After previously poaching top talent to run Meta Superintelligence Lab, including former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, Meta now seems to be turning its attention to the massive computational power needed to train frontier AI models.

Zuckerberg said Hyperion’s footprint will be large enough to cover most of Manhattan. Hyperion seems to be located in northeast Louisiana, in a town called Richland Parish, according to semiconductor analysts at Semianalysis. In 2024, Meta announced a $10 billion data center development in this town, originally slated to be a two GW super cluster. Zuckerberg noted in his post that Hyperion would scale to five gigawatts over “several years.”

Zuckerberg also noted that Meta plans to bring a 1 GW super cluster, called Prometheus, online in 2026, making it one of the first tech companies to control an AI data center of this size. Prometheus seems to be a network of data centers located around New Albany, Ohio.

Meta’s AI data center build-out seems likely to make the company more competitive with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic in its ability to train and serve leading AI models. It’s possible the effort could also help Meta attract additional talent, who may be drawn to work at a company with the computational needs to compete in the AI race.

Together, Prometheus and Hyperion will soak up enough energy to power millions of homes, which could pull significant amounts of electricity and water from neighboring communities. One of Meta’s data center projects in Newton County, Georgia, has already caused the water taps to run dry in some residents’ homes, The New York Times reported Monday.

Other AI data center projects may cause similar problems for people living near them. AI hyperscaler CoreWeave is planning a data center expansion that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, Texas, according to Bloomberg.

Nevertheless, tech companies are determined to build out massive datacenter projects to power their AI ambitions. Other notable efforts include OpenAI’s Stargate project with Oracle and Softbank, as well as xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.

The Trump administration has largely championed the tech industry’s AI data center buildout. President Donald Trump helped OpenAI announce its Stargate project, and has since spoken about efforts to expand America’s AI infrastructure.

In a column featured in The Economist on Monday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright called for the U.S. to “lead the next major energy-intensive frontier: artificial intelligence.” He noted that AI transforms electricity into the “most valuable output imaginable: intelligence,” and that the federal government would accelerate the production of energy derived from coal, nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas.

With the support of federal officials, the AI industry seems poised to soak up much of America’s energy in the years to come. Experts estimate that data centers could account for 20% of America’s energy consumption by 2030, up from just 2.5% in 2022. Without rapidly increased energy production, that could cause even more problems for communities.

Trade Between the U.S. and EU Is Massive. We Break It Down.

Trump’s tariff threats against European Union hit a bloc that comprises the single-largest U.S. trade partner

President Trump is raising new trade-war threats against Europe, and costs to move products like cars, pharmaceutical products and airplane parts across the Atlantic are at stake.

Trump over the weekend said the U.S. would impose 30% tariffs on the European Union effective Aug. 1, which would replace existing 10% blanket tariffs on most goods from the EU. This follows the president’s earlier threats to impose levies of 20% and 50% against the EU.

How much does U.S.-EU trade matter?

While Mexico ranks as the largest single-country U.S. trading partner, the EU as a 27-nation bloc is larger, and EU trade policy is handled centrally. In 2024, the U.S. imported about $606 billion in goods from the EU and exported around $370 billion. This kind of imbalance is a major sticking point for Trump as he tries to use tariffs to revamp U.S. manufacturing.

Trade in goods and services with the EU accounted for around 4.9% of U.S. gross domestic product in 2024, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. That means trade with Europe is an even bigger part of the U.S. economy than trade with China, which accounted for 2.2% of U.S. GDP last year.

What major products does the U.S. import from the EU?

Pharmaceuticals are the single largest EU-produced product shipped to the U.S., totaling $127 billion in 2024. Europe is home to pharma giants like Bayer and Sanofi, but that is only part of the story. A number of U.S. pharma companies have factories in Ireland, where taxes are low. In 2024, Ireland exported more goods to the U.S. than Italy and France.

Other top imports from Europe are cars ($45.2 billion) and various types of machinery. The U.S. also bought $5.4 billion worth of wine and $4.4 billion worth of perfume from the EU last year.

What are the top goods exports to the EU?

Europe is a big buyer of U.S. oil, gas, cars, airplanes—and human blood products like plasma. The U.S. shipped $32.3 billion worth of airplanes and airplane parts, plus $12.4 billion worth of vehicles to the EU. Many of the cars shipped across the Atlantic are European brands, like BMWs and Mercedes made in American factories.

The U.S. sent $5.2 billion in blood products to the EU last year.

How do services factor in?

While the U.S. ran a goods-trade deficit of $235.6 billion with the EU in 2024, including services shrinks that deficit to $161 billion, according to BEA data.

Counting services isn’t as easy as counting goods—work like business consulting and banking doesn’t go through ports and customs. The U.S. says it exported about $277 billion in services to the EU last year and imported $201 billion in 2024. The EU has hinted in the past that it might go after U.S. tech companies—a major source of services exports—in retaliation for tariffs.

How did the last U.S.-EU trade war end?

In 2018, during his first term, Trump slapped 10% tariffs on aluminum and 25% tariffs on steel. The official justification: national security. The EU hit back with tariffs on more than $3 billion worth of U.S. exports, including jeans, bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

In 2021, the Biden administration reached a deal with the EU that effectively ended the spat. The U.S. agreed to let a quota of European steel and aluminum into the country duty-free, and in return the EU suspended its retaliatory tariffs.

Saudi Arabia to boost renewable energy with $8bn investment

ACWA Power leads consortium that will build five solar and two wind projects in the kingdom

A consortium led by Saudi utilities giant ACWA Power is to invest $8.3bn to build 15 gigawatts of solar and wind farms in the kingdom as it accelerates its push into renewables.

ACWA Power, owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is joined by Aramco Power, part of Saudi Aramco, in the consortium that has signed power purchase agreements with the state-owned electricity buyer to build five solar and two wind projects in four regions across the kingdom.

The deals mark a significant step forward in the country’s ambition to generate half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 as part of a plan launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to diversify the Saudi economy away from its dependence on oil revenues. The world’s biggest oil exporter also wants to cut its carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2060.

The kingdom had about 4.34 gigawatts of solar capacity as of the end of 2024, according to the Energy Institute’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy, but wants to have up to 130GW of solar and wind capacity by the end of the decade.

A rough rule of thumb is that one gigawatt can potentially supply electricity for about 1mn homes. Almost all of Saudi Arabia’s electricity is currently supplied by oil and gas-fired power plants.

The Saudi government described the agreements as “among the world’s largest” at prices that are “the lowest globally”, according to an official statement. It went on to say that they were a result of “the efficiency of the kingdom’s financing and development models and the growing confidence in the kingdom’s investment environment”.

Prince Mohammed’s older half-brother Prince Abdulaziz, who serves as energy minister, attended the signing ceremony for the deals in Riyadh on Sunday. The Water and Electricity Holding Co, controlled by the Public Investment Fund, is part of the consortium.

Solar power is growing rapidly in the Middle East thanks to its abundant sun and the falling cost of solar panels, and as Gulf countries look to free up more oil and gas for export.

The Financial Times reported in January that, from a low base, the Middle East is the fastest growing region outside of China in terms of adding new renewable electricity capacity.

The central Riyadh region will have two solar and two wind projects, while the remaining solar projects will be in the regions of Mecca and Medina, as well as Aseer province. The projects should be up and running by 2028, according to a joint statement from ACWA Power and partners.

ACWA Power is one of the largest renewable energy companies in the Middle East, with operations in 14 countries across the region, Africa and Asia. The company has recently announced its entry in China as it seeks to expand its footprint despite concerns over trade tensions with the US.

“We decided to enter China because it’s the biggest market in the world in renewables, by far. So it makes sense when you want to grow to do it where there is growth,” chief executive Marco Arcelli told the FT this year.