FT : US makes fresh push for World Bank to back nuclear power

US makes fresh push for World Bank to back nuclear power
New administration wants Washington-based multilateral lender to help the west compete with China and Russia

The World Bank is facing renewed calls from its biggest shareholder to drop a decades-old ban on funding nuclear power to help the west compete with China and Russia in atomic diplomacy.

French Hill, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has signalled that the new US administration will continue to support the push to fund nuclear projects just months ahead of a crucial decision on the contentious ban.

Hill told the Financial Times last month that World Bank chief Ajay Banga had US backing to end the taboo, as the world’s biggest development fund moves closer to embracing nuclear energy in lending to emerging markets.

“We support both the export of this technology and a much more broad-based approach to financing it,” Hill said.

The World Bank has not financed nuclear power since the 1950s. But it could bring the technology back into the fold within months after a review of energy policies under Banga, people familiar with the matter said.

Banga, a former Mastercard chief executive, has led efforts in the bank to consider how it might factor in technologies that could make nuclear power cheaper, such as smaller modular reactors, people familiar with his thinking said. 

Banga earlier this month again signalled his willingness to reconsider nuclear technology in an address to the European Commission. Germany and a handful of smaller European countries have traditionally led opposition to nuclear power as World Bank shareholders.

The US is especially keen for the topic to be revisited, underscoring alarm in Washington that Beijing and Moscow are winning a race to build a new generation of nuclear plants in Africa and Asia.

“I’m in constant discussions with other governments who are extremely interested in expanding nuclear, but they can’t get the attention of anyone in western countries,” Hill, a Republican representing Arkansas, said.

The World Bank is currently finalising a new energy strategy that “is tasked with exploring nuclear as part of a practical, reliable energy mix”, alongside investments in renewables and natural gas, a senior official said. The bank still needs to determine how projects would be affordable for countries, they added. The review is expected to conclude in the next few months.

US scrutiny of the World Bank’s nuclear policy comes as the Trump administration is in the midst of reviewing ties to international financial institutions, a process that is due to report back by August.

Project 2025, a right-wing manifesto that has shaped the administration’s thinking, labelled multilateral organisations, including the World Bank, “inimical to American free market and limited government principles”.

However, Donald Trump also created the Development Finance Corporation during his first term, displaying an openness to institutions geared towards advancing US national security goals.

Hill tabled a bill last month for the US to lobby the bank to drop the ban.

The bill is “a signal that lifting the nuclear ban is a top priority, something the US would like to see happen,” said Todd Moss, director of Energy for Growth Hub, a think-tank which has called for the bank to build up technical capacity on nuclear power. 

“They want to make sure American nuclear firms are not slowed down by an outdated policy at the most important international financial institution,” Moss said.

The World Bank approved its first — and last — loan for nuclear power in 1959, helping to fund Italy’s first atomic plant. It explicitly excludes nuclear technology from current lending policy, having previously argued that nuclear safety and proliferation risks are not its area of expertise.

An exclusion of nuclear power by the bank’s International Finance Corporation private sector lending arm, in particular, has been followed by many other development lenders in their own policies.

China’s state development banks have, meanwhile, overshadowed the World Bank in financing energy projects across multiple power sources over the past decade.

Most of the sixty or so new nuclear reactors currently being built are in China and other countries in Asia, compared to an existing worldwide fleet of more than 400 reactors.

Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear monopoly, has also pursued agreements with Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and other countries to finance nuclear plants.

Some US firms have won business in the global revival of nuclear power, such as a deal by Westinghouse to help build Poland’s first plant. But official US financing for projects has been scarce.

While historically controversial, support for nuclear power has recently gained momentum in Washington.

Last summer, then president Joe Biden signed legislation directing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to streamline permitting for new nuclear reactors and speed the process for converting retiring coal plants to nuclear power facilities.

The 2025 legislation introduced by Hill and Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, would go further still — mandating US support for a trust fund to pool resources for nuclear projects across the World Bank and other international financial bodies.

Western democracies should offer competitive bids and cheap financing for nuclear energy projects in countries — ideally with American components and help from the US export credit agency ExIm Bank, Hill told the FT.

FT : Virgin Group looks to raise £700mn to fund Eurostar rival

Virgin Group looks to raise £700mn to fund Eurostar rival
Richard Branson’s group is one of several planning a new cross-Channel service

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is looking to raise £700mn to fund its bid to launch new cross-channel rail services to compete with Eurostar. 

Virgin Group told the Financial Times that it intends to raise £300mn in equity and £400mn in debt, and that it plans to be a cornerstone equity investor in the project. 

Its plans are for a high frequency service that would be the first direct rival to Eurostar’s 30-year old network and could launch as soon as 2029. 

The company, which used to run intercity train services in the UK, plans to launch services connecting London with Paris and Brussels, and then to extend to Amsterdam in the future.

Virgin is one of several operators looking at starting a cross-Channel service, following the rapid growth of intercity high-speed train travel on the continent.

London St Pancras High Speed, which owns St Pancras station, Eurostar’s London base, has set out plans to more than double passenger capacity at the UK’s only international train terminal. “Our high speed line has 50 per cent spare capacity . . . There’s a significant opportunity that is sitting there waiting underutilised,” Robert Sinclair, CEO of London St Pancras High Speed, told the FT in December.

Getlink, the owner of the Channel Tunnel, has simplified safety rules and offered €50mn of subsidies to encourage companies to open cross-Channel rail services.

But any new entrant would face formidable challenges, including buying trains that are compatible with the Channel Tunnel’s safety rules, and finding space in congested stations.

Phil Whittingham, rail project lead at Virgin Group, admitted setting up a cross-Channel service would be a “huge undertaking”.

“But we think Virgin is the right brand to signal a new era in cross-Channel travel,” he said. 

Industry executives said that Evolyn, a Spanish-led project, is Virgin Group’s most serious rival to set up a new service. 

But both bids are being held up by a dispute over access to the east London train depot where Eurostar maintains its trains. The depot is the only place where high-speed cross-Channel trains can be parked and maintained in the UK and under rail regulations, any operator should be granted access if there is space.

Eurostar, which last year announced plans for up to 50 new trains, said the depot is in effect full. Virgin and Evolyn have both appealed to the rail regulator to intervene to allow them access.

Without access to the depot, both Virgin and Evolyn have previously said they will struggle to secure funding or order trains for a new service.

This week, UK regulator the Office of Rail and Road published a letter to Eurostar saying an independent study of capacity at the depot that it had previously commissioned “is ongoing and has not yet concluded”.

Eurostar told the FT it welcomed the development of rail services in Europe, adding that “competition in the high-speed rail sector is another example of the growing demand for rail transport in Europe”.

FT : Chinese investors privately take stakes in Elon Musk’s companies

Chinese investors privately take stakes in Elon Musk’s companies
Asset managers have been promoting tech mogul’s ties to Donald Trump to lure capital to xAI, Neuralink and SpaceX

Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funnelling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk using an arrangement that shields their identities from public view, according to asset managers and investors involved in the transactions.

Since Musk was named a key figure in US President Donald Trump’s drive to remake the US government, China-based asset managers have been promoting the pair’s relationship as an enticement to raise capital from rich Chinese. The money is flowing into Musk’s non-public ventures including xAI, Neuralink and SpaceX, the world’s most valuable private company.

The investments are being placed through opaque structures known as special-purpose vehicles, which have the benefit of concealing the investors’ identities, to avoid the ire of US authorities and companies wary of Chinese capital during a nadir in relations between the two countries.

Asset managers behind the deals have told investors that the entities are specifically designed to avoid disclosure.

The use of special-purpose vehicles in financing is commonplace and there is nothing illegal about the arrangements. Still, it raises concerns about the potential for undue influence and conflicts of interest at a time when Musk has unprecedented involvement in US policy, politics and business.

“How can someone in Musk’s position have so many connections to China but still be a good person to reform the US government?” said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The influx of Chinese money into Musk’s business empire “adds to this picture that he is more interested in his reputation and his brand in China than he is in American interests”.

The opaque nature of the structures makes it difficult to assess the full scale of Chinese capital flowing into Musk’s private ventures. But three Chinese-backed asset managers told the Financial Times that over the past two years, they had sold Chinese investors more than $30mn worth of shares in SpaceX, xAI and Neuralink, three Musk-controlled private technology companies whose valuations have surged.

All told, SpaceX has raised more than $10bn from investors around the world since its inception in 2002, according to PitchBook.

The inflow of Chinese capital into Musk’s business empire is primarily profit-driven and has little to do with technology transfer or influencing public policy, according to people involved in the transactions.

With a sluggish domestic economy, wealthy Chinese are looking abroad for investment opportunities.

But the structure means that Chinese investors receive limited, if any, information about the company’s financials and performance, unlike the details that are shared with main investors.

While Musk enjoys a warm relationship with Beijing, it has been difficult for the company to take direct investment from China, financial advisers said. Beijing security hawks have criticised SpaceX for its ties to the US military.

“It is not easy for Chinese entities to invest in a prominent US high-tech company like SpaceX,” said Kevin Chen, chief economist of Horizon Financial, a New York-based financial advisory group. “Chinese money is not welcome in many sectors.”

Representatives for Musk, SpaceX, xAI and Neuralink did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of Chinese investors tuned in to a webinar to hear a representative from Homaer Financial, an asset manager in eastern China, pitch an opportunity to invest in SpaceX for as little as $200,000 per person.

The Homaer official said she expected SpaceX’s valuation to almost triple to $1.1tn within three years, thanks in part to “comprehensive” support from the US government and military that continued placing procurement orders to the space technology company even “in times of distress”.

China’s wealthy began funding Musk’s private ventures in the late 2010s, when the Tesla founder started building an electric-vehicle factory in Shanghai in 2019 to take advantage of the country’s efficient and low-cost supply chains.

The early investments paid off. Homaer said in a social media post in October that a group of its clients had made a 530 per cent return by investing in SpaceX in June 2018, cashing out six years later. 

An investor in Homaer confirmed the figure, adding that he regretted not having invested more. “I knew Musk was a good businessman,” he said. “But I didn’t expect him to be so successful within such a short timeframe.”

In the past two years, Homaer launched three funds to invest in SpaceX and was able to meet its capital raising targets within a few weeks, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

When Beijing imposed restrictions on private companies — including cancelling Jack Ma’s Ant Group IPO and requiring ride-hailing group DiDi Global to delist in the US — the value of Musk’s ventures continued to grow.

“I have more faith in Musk than in most Chinese start-up entrepreneurs, who are struggling to cope with an increasingly state-dominated economy,” said an investor who bought shares in SpaceX through Homaer last year.

Some Chinese have paid a price for openly buying stakes in Musk’s ventures. Leo Group, a Chinese company, made headlines in 2021 when it announced plans to invest $50mn in SpaceX through Tomales Bay Capital, a California-based private equity fund. Less than a week later, Leo’s US partner revoked the transaction, citing SpaceX’s discomfort with public disclosure of the Chinese stake, according to a subsequent legal battle between the two firms.

In response, Chinese have turned to special-purpose vehicles. Asset managers pool investors’ funds into a Cayman Islands-registered entity, which invests the money in US-based funds managed by western private equity firms, which are already existing investors in Musk’s ventures.

The presence of the Chinese funds is not visible in public records of the holdings.  

A person close to Homaer said the firm asked its US partners if they accepted Chinese money. Typically, the terms also require the US partner to liquidate the investment in extreme scenarios such as a military conflict between the two countries.

“Risks do exist because we are not sure how bad US-China relations will become in the next few years,” the person said.

The uncertainty has not stopped wealthy Chinese from taking the deals. While Beijing’s stringent capital controls have limited Musk’s China investors to those with foreign bank accounts, some wealth managers have found options to overcome the barrier.

“China is facing an oversupply of capital and a shortage of high-quality projects,” a New York investment manager seeking to raise capital from China for such investments said. “That is where we fit in.”

IN PERSON & ONLINE

>>> Weekend Press Summary

FINANCIAL TIMES
-Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell has reassured US growth amid concerns over Trump's administration's U-turns, disappointing job numbers, and a tumultuous week in financial markets. He said the US economy remained "in good shape" despite the uncertainty arising from Trump's aggressive agenda of tariffs and spending cuts. Powell added that the Fed is not in a hurry to cut interest rates and is "well positioned to wait for greater clarity." The S&P 500 ended the week down 3.1%, its worst run since early September.
-In 2018, the British government and European allies expelled over 600 Russian officials, including over 400 suspected spies, following the attempted poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. This led Moscow to increasingly rely on non-Russian nationals for espionage, as evidenced by the UK's deputy national security adviser, Matthew Collins.
-A proposed €150B injection into the EU's defense industry has sparked a debate between France and Germany over the continent's rearmament drive and whether it should include countries outside the bloc. The European Commission proposed raising €150B to boost capitals' military production. While the idea has received unanimous political backing, details are still being fleshed out, with heavy lobbying over whether the cash could be spent on arms made outside the bloc. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said the initiative should be open to like-minded non-EU partners, such as Great Britain, Norway, Switzerland, or Turkey. French President Emmanuel Macron, who has long supported increasing European autonomy and boosting domestic industrial production, argued that spending should not be for new off-the-shelf kits.
-China has announced tariffs on Canadian agricultural and food products in response to Ottawa's levies on Chinese electric vehicles. The commerce ministry stated that it would impose 100% tariffs on Canadian rapeseed oil and pea imports and a 25% levy on pork and some seafood imports. This comes in response to Ottawa's "discriminatory" tariffs of 100% on EVs and 25% on steel and aluminum. Beijing filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization and launched an anti-dumping probe into Canadian imports of rapeseed products. The tariffs will take effect on March 20 and add uncertainty for Canada's export industries, with the Trump administration threatening blanket tariffs on imports from its neighbor. China is an important market for Canadian rapeseed, making it the second-largest market behind the US.
-Syrian security forces clashed with loyalists of deposed president Bashar al-Assad for a second day, marking the most violent episode for the country's new leaders since the fall of the regime. The clashes began on Thursday when gunmen attacked state security forces and killed an initial 13 people in the coastal province of Latakia. More people were killed as fighting continued throughout the night, including an unknown number of civilians. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that more than 200 people had been killed since the outbreak of fighting, including nearly 50 armed forces members and 45 fighters loyal to Assad. Government forces stormed three villages near the coast in response, killing "dozens of men."
-Donald Trump has threatened Russia with additional sanctions and tariffs as he aims to broker a peace deal in Ukraine. Trump's comments come as tensions eased with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky following a public confrontation in the White House last week. The US suspended military aid and intelligence support to Kiev. US and Ukrainian officials are due to meet next week in Saudi Arabia for talks. Trump has faced criticism from US allies and domestic lawmakers, including some Republicans, for his clashes with Zelensky. Concerns are growing that the White House is handing all the leverage to Russia even before direct talks begin between Moscow and Kiev.
-JPMorgan Chase has claimed to the UK financial regulator that it has evidence indicating former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley was involved in criminality related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's convictions. This revelation highlights how Staley's downfall at one of Britain's largest banks was triggered by the actions of his former employer, the largest Wall Street lender. Staley had a 30-year career at JPMorgan but later fell out with the US bank led by Jamie Dimon. In 2019, JPMorgan offered to hand over a cache of over 1,200 emails between Staley and Epstein, allegedly undermining assurances Barclays made in a letter that year to the UK regulator.
-Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund and PwC have clashed over the Big Four firm's plans to hire a senior executive from one of the fund's most important projects, Neom. The Public Investment Fund imposed a one-year ban on PwC's new advisory work on Neom, a $500B development along the Red Sea coast managed by PIF. This decision dealt a blow to PwC's business in Saudi Arabia, which has been among the fastest-growing in its global network. PwC's attempt to hire Neom's chief internal audit officer, Jason Davies, caused upset inside PIF. Davies, who had been employed by Neom since 2020 and had agreed to move to PwC in mid-last year, caused "friction and angst" between PIF and PwC. Davies, who previously worked at Deloitte and Tesco in the UK, left Neom in September but ultimately did not join PwC.
-Trump's executive order forbidding federal diversity and inclusion (DEI) efforts has led to many private companies scaling back their initiatives to avoid blacklisting for public sector contracts or targeted individually by the administration. Banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, and companies like Pepsi, Disney, Meta, Google, Walmart, McDonald's, and Amazon are among the companies that have been quietly cutting back their DEI initiatives in the US. The pullback may be a validation of the White House view that competent white men must be in charge if things work. However, the story is more nuanced, as women hold jobs disproportionately concentrated in fields predicted to grow fastest over the next several years.
-The US is in discussions with the Democratic Republic of Congo about a possible deal to access critical minerals in the African country. The US has approached the Congo with a proposal for a deal that would offer exploration rights in exchange for support for President Félix Tshisekedi's government. Congolese officials hope the minerals deal will support Tshisekedi as he struggles with armed conflict in the eastern part of the country. The discussions with Washington have grown more serious in recent days, but several obstacles remain. The US is open to discussing partnerships in this sector aligned with the Trump administration's America First agenda, aiming to strengthen both US and DRC economies, create higher skilled jobs, and integrate the country into regional and global value chains.
-The Trump administration has cancelled $400M in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due to allegations of inaction on Jewish students facing harassment. Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated that universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws to receive federal funding. Columbia has been in the spotlight since last year, when pro-Palestinian protests swept US university campuses. The university's former president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in August following months of criticism over her approach towards the demonstrations. The cancellation follows the resignations of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania's presidents, who underwent intense cross-examination in Congress during antisemitism hearings.
-Apple has delayed the release of new artificial intelligence features for its Siri voice assistant, a move to compete with rivals Google and Amazon. The company confirmed that it would take longer than anticipated to deliver the capabilities teased last year when Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, a major push to infuse its popular products with generative AI. Apple said Siri's new attributes would make it smarter, more deeply integrated with the device, and personalized to the user. The tech group has already integrated Siri with OpenAI's ChatGPT and built a dedicated cloud infrastructure for privacy and security. However, other features, such as "on-screen awareness" and the ability for Siri to take actions within apps, have also been delayed.
-Oil prices rebounded on Friday after Russia's deputy prime minister suggested OPEC+ could reverse its plan to increase crude production. Alexander Novak suggested Opec+ could "always play in the other direction" if the market became oversupplied. The price of benchmark Brent crude rose by 2.8% to over $71 a barrel, and was later trading at about $70.20. US energy secretary Chris Wright announced plans to buy $20B of oil to refill its strategic petroleum reserve. Kazakhstan, which has pumped well above its official Opec+ quota, promised to cut production in March, April, and May. Analysts estimate that Kazakhstan's output topped 2mn b/d in February for the first time in over a year.

NEW YORK TIMES
-Europe must judge what constitutes maneuvering on Trump's part and what is a definitive authoritarian American reorientation. A week after the ugly Oval Office blowup with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Trump has agreed to a meeting next week of senior Ukrainian and American officials and threatened to impose further sanctions on Russia if it does not enter peace talks. The biggest danger would be to deny his abandonment of liberal democracies, and Europe must ask: What do we have as a military force and how do we integrate and grow that power with urgency?
-Russia has retaken about two-thirds of the territory Ukraine seized last summer in the Kursk region of Russia, threatening Ukraine's supply lines and its hold on a patch of land it hopes to use as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. Ukrainian soldiers, Russian military bloggers, and military analysts have reported that a new influx of North Korean soldiers and well-trained Russian drone units, advancing under the cover of ferocious artillery fire and aerial bombardment, have been able to overwhelm important Ukrainian positions. If Ukrainian forces were cut off or forced to retreat, it would be a significant setback for Kyiv. The incursion into Kursk was a signature operation that boosted morale and embarrassed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and holding territory in Russia gave Ukraine a potential bargaining chip in any peace negotiations. Pulling out could weaken its bargaining position at a moment when President Trump is trying to force through settlement talks.
-Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk has urged the country to increase its military size and explore opportunities related to nuclear weapons due to a significant change in American geopolitics. He stated that Poland must explore modern weapons and explore options for nuclear and unconventional weapons. Tusk also mentioned that his government is discussing with France about extending the French nuclear umbrella to other European countries and ensuring that all adult men are trained in the event of war. He also emphasized the need for Poland to ensure all adult men are prepared for war.
-Hantavirus is a family of rodent-borne viruses that are often transmitted to humans through inhaling dried mouse droppings. In North America, Sin Nombre virus is the most common form. As of the end of 2022, 864 cases of hantavirus disease had been reported in the United States since 1993. The "classic" case of hantavirus is contracted by someone visiting a rural cabin with a rodent infestation. Hantavirus can cause flulike symptoms that appear one to eight weeks after exposure to infected rodent droppings. Patients often experience shortness of breath and lung or heart failure. The mortality rate from the hantavirus strain in the southwestern United States is between 38% and 50%.
-President Trump has sent a letter to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offering to reopen negotiations over the country's rapidly advancing nuclear program. The letter, which appears to be Trump's opening bid to see if a newly vulnerable Iran is willing to negotiate, suggests that Iran's nuclear capabilities are reaching a critical point. Trump warned that the country would have to choose between curbing its fast-expanding program or losing it in a military attack. He suggested that Iran's nuclear capabilities, which now include enough near-bomb-grade fuel to produce about six weapons, were reaching a critical point. "We're down to final strokes with Iran," he said. "We can't let them have a nuclear weapon."
-The tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese goods and the continuing threat to put them on Mexican and Canadian products may help Tesla by hurting its competitors more. Although there is no evidence that Elon Musk is shaping trade policies, the tariffs are one of several measures adopted by the Trump administration that may benefit Tesla at the expense of its rivals. On Wednesday, Trump paused 25% tariffs on most autos and parts made in Canada and Mexico, but the reprieve expires in a month, leaving automakers in the United States that depend on foreign supply chains in a state of uncertainty.
-Paul D. Clement, a lawyer appointed to offer independent arguments on the U.S. Justice Department's motion to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, has recommended that the case be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the charges could not be brought again. Clement believes that a dismissal without prejudice creates a palpable sense that the prosecution outlined in the indictment and approved by a grand jury could be renewed, a prospect that hangs like the proverbial sword of Damocles over the accused.
-South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon, a convicted murderer, by firing squad, marking the first such execution in the US since 2010. Sigmon was ordered to choose from lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. His lawyer, Gerald King, said he chose firing squad due to concerns about South Carolina's lethal injection process. Sigmon took several deep breaths before the shots were fired, and after being shot, his chest rose and fell about two times, and his arms stiffened. Three reporters who witnessed the execution reported that Sigmon took several deep breaths before the shots were fired.
-The Justice Department has reiterated its demand for a court to break up Google, following a landmark ruling last year that found Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search by paying web browsers and smartphone manufacturers to feature its search engine. The judge is scheduled to hear arguments on proposed solutions from both the government and Google in April. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and a group of states asked Judge Mehta to force Google to sell its popular web browser, Chrome, among other remedies. The government claims that Google's illegal conduct has created an economic goliath that wreaks havoc over the marketplace, forcing the American people to accept the unbridled demands and shifting ideological preferences of an economic leviathan in return for a search engine the public may enjoy.
-The stock market experienced its worst week in months due to policy shifts on tariffs and economic concerns. The S&P 500 experienced a volatile end to a week, with a 3.1% drop, its third consecutive week of losses since early September. The index hit a record high less than a month ago, but investors have become worried about economic growth, worsened by tariffs on imports from the country's largest trading partners. Surveys also show mounting consumer concern, as the market's mood shift since the index hit a record high less than a month ago.
-South Korea's impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been released from detention after a court ruled his detention invalid. The Seoul Central District Court ruled that prosecutors violated procedural rules by holding Yoon in detention longer than legally allowed before indicting him in January. The court rendered Yoon's detention invalid. Prosecutors, who had a week to appeal the decision, requested his release. Yoon's release does not affect his insurrection charge in a Seoul criminal court related to his martial law declaration or the separate proceedings at the Constitutional Court, which is deliberating whether his parliamentary impeachment was legitimate and if he should be formally removed from office. However, it means he will be free while standing trial.

NEW YORK POST
-A secretive Space Force ship, the Boeing-made X-37B, has returned to Earth after spending 434 days in orbit conducting mysterious tests. Launched by SpaceX in 2023, the X-37B remained in orbit until it touched down at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The US Space Force (USSF) landed the flight to exercise the ship's rapid ability to launch and recover its systems across multiple sites. This is the seventh successful test flight of one of these vehicles, according to Space Force officials. Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said Mission 7 broke new ground by showcasing the X-37B's ability to flexibly accomplish its test and experimentation objectives across orbital regimens. The successful execution of the aerobreaking maneuver underscores the US Space Force's commitment to pushing the boundaries of novel space operation in a safe and responsible manner. Other Space Force officials called the successful test a "significant milestone" in the agency's mission to create a versatile, reusable, and sustainable fleet.
-Gene Hackman, a legendary actor, died of heart problems and advanced Alzheimer's disease after living with his wife's body for a week. His longtime love, Betsy Arakawa, died of Hantavirus, a rare flu-like disease linked to rats, likely on February 11. The "French Connection" star, who died seven days later, is believed to have died seven days later. The tragic timeline ends the mystery surrounding Hackman's death, which was found with his wife on February 26 inside their Santa Fe mansion. Arakawa, 65, last left the estate on February 11, and likely died of the virus that day.
-The US Department of Labor has reinstated around 120 employees who were facing termination due to the Trump administration's mass firings of recently hired workers. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said the probationary employees were reinstated immediately and were being instructed to report back to duty on Monday. The department will use the remainder of the probationary period to determine if the appointment is in the best interest of the public. The Labor Department and White House have not commented on the situation.

>>> Barrons Weekend Summary

Cover:
-Stephen Schwarzman and Larry Fink are increasingly involved in each other's business, as seen in BlackRock's recent Panama Canal deal. Blackstone, founded in 1985 as a mergers-and-acquisitions advisory shop, has grown into the world's largest private-asset firm, while BlackRock, launched inside Blackstone three years later as a bond manager, now runs $11.6T in assets. Both companies have varying business models, but they share a common denominator: their stocks have soared, with Blackstone's stock value being more so than BlackRock's recently. Blackstone and BlackRock, are merging due to inevitability. Blackstone is offering alternative-asset securities, backed by investments in real estate, private credit, and buyouts, to retail investors, while BlackRock is moving beyond selling public-market securities, such as those in its $4.2 trillion iShares exchange-traded-fund business. The converging companies face the challenge of diversifying beyond their origins and navigating the mature core markets of their core markets.

Interview:
-No update

Tech Trader:
-The Magnificent Seven stocks have lost their magnificence, with Tesla's stock falling 45% from its 52-week closing high of about $480, while Apple, Amazon.com, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia are off an average of 16% from their own peaks. Fears include a slowing economy due to uncertain U.S. trade policies, Chinese artificial-intelligence competition, and the impact of CEO Elon Musk's political activity on auto sales. Technical analysis reveals that there is always a bottom, and it's just a question of how far a stock has to fall to reach it. Technicians use price charts to determine where investors may decide to buy or sell stocks, looking for support and resistance. The 50-day and 200-day moving averages are considered particularly important, as they indicate the average of where the stock has traded over a period.

The Trader:
-The residential solar industry has been struggling, with high interest rates making panel installation expensive and some states changing rules to make it less financially rewarding. SunPower, a leading rooftop solar developer, filed for bankruptcy in August, and Sunnova Energy International issued a "going concern" warning due to the deterioration in its cash position. This is not the moment to buy the dip, as pressure on these companies will likely grow in the months ahead. However, large-scale solar installations are still good economic bets, as the US enters a period of higher electricity demand for the first time in over a decade, thanks to new data centers and factories. Solar was the largest source of new utility-scale electricity generation last year and is expected to account for 52% of electricity additions in 2025. Investing in companies deploying all that solar power can be difficult, as many are privately held or small parts of larger energy and investment firms like Shell or KKR. However, there are a few options, such as Clearway Energy, a Princeton, N.J.-based company that owns nine gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery installations around the country and more than two gigawatts worth of natural-gas plants.
-President Donald Trump's trade war has caused a sharp drop in the stock market, with investments like consumer staples stocks, gold, and bonds holding up well this year. However, some sectors of the stock market have fared well amid tariff worries, such as Staples stocks, which finished down 1.7% on Tuesday, and noncyclical sectors like healthcare and utilities, which have also fared well. Jefferies analyst Randal Konik suggests playing defense in a volatile market, focusing on names with secular tailwinds, little fundamental downside, generating lots of cash, and with catalysts ahead. Even some growth stocks can be defensive, with Trivariate Research publishing a basket of "low beta growth stocks" that have posted solid returns in 2025. These stocks have solid prospects for earnings growth and comparatively low volatility. ETFs like the iShares MSCI USA Minimum Volatility Factor can be a broader approach, as they can dramatically outperform during periods of uncertainty.

Features:
-Ford Motor and General Motors have received new Wall Street ratings and price targets, with GM stock adding 0.8% on Friday and closing at $47.44. Analyst Itay Michaeli, who moved from Citi to TD Cowen, remains bullish on GM despite the threat of tariffs and high interest rates making cars less affordable. He believes that the sector has a long history of groupthink and over-extrapolations leading to opportunities, such as GM shares. Michaeli's top pick for GM is based on stock buybacks, strong earnings from the truck franchise, and growing electric-vehicle sales. Ford stock had a better day, with shares gaining 3% and closing at $9.90. However, Ford stock was down 20% over the past 12 months, while GM shares were up 21%. About 63% of analysts covering GM stock have Buy ratings, with an average price target of about $62. About 29% of analysts covering Ford stock have Buy ratings, with an average price target of about $10 a share. The average Buy-rating ratio for stocks in the S&P 500 is about 55%.
-Tesla stock experienced a volatile trading session on Friday, ending in the red despite an unusual upgrade and a call from a long-time bullish analyst. Tesla shares have been in a slump after an incredible run, with shares trading higher shortly after the open but falling as low as $250.73. At the end of Friday trading, Tesla stock was $262.67, down 0.3%. TD Cowen analyst Itay Michaeli upgraded shares to Buy from Hold, with a price target jumped to $388 a share from $180. Michaeli's target price jumped to $208, indicating that the list of potential game-changing level catalysts across EV, autonomous vehicles, and robotics is robust enough to tilt risk/reward favorably.

Europe:
-The European Central Bank (ECB) has reduced its benchmark lending rate by a quarter-point, marking the sixth reduction since lowering borrowing costs in June. This brings the deposit rate down to 2.5% from 4% when the cuts began. The ECB started cutting earlier than the US Federal Reserve (Fed) due to weak economic conditions and weakening inflation. The ECB's decision comes amid global financial turmoil as President Trump imposed tariffs on the biggest US trading partners, China, Canada, and Mexico. Investors now expect the Fed to cut three or four times this year due to concerns about the growth outlook. Germany has also announced plans to lift government spending on defense and infrastructure, which is expected to boost Europe's largest economy. ECB President Christine Lagarde said it is too soon for the central bank to change its outlook due to the recent market shift.

Emerging Markets:
-No update

Commodities:
-Wheat prices are expected to rise due to unfavorable weather conditions and dwindling Russian wheat inventories. The Russian-Ukraine war has already raised wheat prices by 55% over the past 2½ years. Russia, the world's largest wheat exporter, is expected to export 46M tonnes when the next harvest occurs, down from 55.5M tonnes last year. The US and Ukraine, leading wheat exporters, are expected to export 23M and 16M tons respectively. Canada's retaliatory tariffs on US wheat imports will likely lift wheat prices, as will higher Canadian fertilizer costs due to US tariffs. Russia's inventory levels at the beginning of the season have dropped 19% versus last year's stockpile, while Ukraine has been hit with a 76% drop in its stockpile. These falling grain inventories make the financial markets more sensitive to weather-led crop damage. The US weather system started gently for the wheat crop, with snow and cold temperature keeping it dormant and not vulnerable.

Streetwise:
-The S&P 500 index has seen a slight decline year to date but has more than tripled investor money over the past decade. However, there are concerns about the S&P 500 Equal Weight index doing better than the regular index, which is dominated by tech companies. Defensive sectors are rallying, with healthcare being the best performer this year. Value stocks outperformed growth by 3.9 percentage points in February, making it one of the top 5% of months for relative value returns since 1979. Europe and China are outperforming the US. This leaves indexers torn over whether to adjust their fund mixes. Three UK professors have released a report that offers clues on how investors should think about long-term returns. The report, Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns, presents evidence on the exploits of stocks, bonds, bills, currencies, and consumer prices across countries and time periods.

WSJ : How Overlooked European Defense Stocks Became a Hedge-Fund Home Run

How Overlooked European Defense Stocks Became a Hedge-Fund Home Run
Drastic shifts in the global security environment have sparked a sector rally

Hedge-fund honchos entered this year betting big on America, expecting President Trump’s promised tax cuts and deregulation would lift everything from U.S. stocks to the dollar.

Turns out, an old-school industry in Europe was really the place to be.

European defense has emerged as one of the biggest winners in global markets this year, outpacing buzzier bets like artificial intelligence. Companies including Germany’s Rheinmetall, Italy’s Leonardo and France’s Thales have gained 67% or more, far ahead of any S&P 500 stock.

The rally is enriching a clutch of hedge-fund managers who bet on these stocks before the Trump administration started remaking the global security landscape. That includes such firms as New York-based Sachem Head Capital Management and Chris Hohn’s London-based TCI Fund Management, one of the largest hedge-fund firms in the world.

Deem Global, a London-based firm that oversees nearly $600 million, also made money on the sector, owing to its “longstanding thesis of geopolitical reordering” and a “structural megatrend” of increased defense spending, the firm wrote in an investor letter seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Its main fund returned 9.6% in February, the letter said, helped by options tied to European defense stocks. A more concentrated version of the fund gained 40%.

That reordering is unfolding rapidly. Since taking office in January, Trump has pushed for a swift end of the war in Ukraine, embracing Russia in the process and clashing publicly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This past week he ordered pauses to all military aid and intelligence sharing with the embattled country, denying Kyiv the resources it needs to fight Russian forces.

At the same time, Trump has pressed for Europe’s rearmament, suggesting that the U.S. might not defend North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies if they don’t increase outlays on arms, troops and equipment.

The issue took on new urgency following Trump and Zelensky’s Feb. 28 Oval Office blowup, which triggered a scramble by the U.K. and France to broker a compromise. Germany upped the ante days later, exempting military spending from its strict fiscal rules, and European Union leaders convened in Brussels to discuss a defense plan for the continent. Europe faces a “clear and present danger,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“The defense paradigm has shifted materially,” said Andrzej Szczepaniak, senior European economist at Nomura. “Obviously, if you want to become security-independent, you have to rely more on your own production. And from that perspective, that underscores why we’ve seen such a rally in European defense stocks.”

Until recently, European defense stocks were unloved for a simple reason: The continent wasn’t spending heavily on security. When the Cold War ended, governments slashed military budgets in favor of social programs.

While Europe’s defense spending has risen in recent years, it remains lower than that of the U.S. It equated to 1.9% of the EU’s economic output last year, according to the European Defense Agency, while defense spending equaled 2.3% of U.K. GDP. The U.S. outlay was equivalent to nearly 3.4% of its GDP, NATO estimates show.

The sector was also dented by the environmental, social and corporate-governance investing movement, which spurred some investors to dump shares of companies tied to war and weaponry, and other industries considered not socially responsible. Sentiment toward the sector began to change in 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In general, betting on European defense hasn’t historically been popular with hedge funds, according to bankers and others familiar with firms’ positioning. But that has started to change. Hedge-fund clients of JPMorgan Chase bought a higher-than-average amount of European defense stocks on a net basis this past week, said Eloise Goulder, head of the data assets and alpha group at the bank.


Deem, the firm whose main fund surged last month, was founded in 2022 by 32-year-old Asfy Nadeem, an alum of the macroeconomic trading giant Brevan Howard. His firm’s bread and butter is trading on major thematic shifts through interest rates, stocks and other assets classes.

Last year, the firm began accumulating options positions in European defense stocks, said a person familiar with the matter, reasoning that the longstanding alliance between Europe and America could shift if Trump were to win the November election.

Other hedge-fund firms have held positions in European defense stocks for even longer. Hohn’s TCI has been a major investor for more than a decade in Safran, a French aerospace-industry supplier, and Airbus.

TCI unveiled a stake in Safran in 2012. Five years later, the hedge-fund firm ran a fierce campaign against Safran’s purchase of another aerospace company, arguing that Safran was overpaying significantly. Eventually, Safran lowered its offer, and the deal went through. TCI remains a major shareholder, owning over 5% of the company.

Sachem Head, the New York activist hedge-fund firm, was also early to the sector. In early 2023, it scooped up shares in Leonardo, the Italian aerospace and defense manufacturer, betting that the company and the broader industry was poised for growth, according to a person familiar with the firm’s thinking.

Back then, Sachem Head believed Leonardo’s true value was obscured by a loss-making segment of the business that manufactures aircraft components. It also thought broader defense spending would need to increase in Europe after decades of underinvestment.

Leonardo’s shares traded around €10 when Sachem Head bought in. They closed Friday above €43. It remains one of the firm’s largest positions, the person said.

WWD : Bode Celebrates Paris Boutique Opening During Fashion Week

Bode Celebrates Paris Boutique Opening During Fashion Week
The interior of the New York-based brand's first international retail location takes design cues from fly fishing, and is filled with antiques and family photos.

The Bode store in Paris.

Two years after holding a fashion show in Paris, Emily Bode Aujla has now opened the first store location for her namesake brand outside of the U.S. in the French capital.

The LVMH Prize winner has four retail stores in New York and one in Los Angeles. She explored other international cities, but Paris felt like the most natural fit, in part because many of her early collections were made with antique French textiles. “It was the most natural next step,” she said in an interview.

Years of searching and seeing nearly 50 storefronts later, Bode Aujla discovered an old restaurant on the quiet street of rue de Valois. Its expansive windows look out on the Ministry of Culture and sits just steps from Palais-Royal.

Bode Aujla calls it her “dream location,” close to the Rick Owens flagship and the vintage treasure trove that was the recently shuttered Didier Ludot.

But ultimately the size of the space is what won her over. At 2,500 square feet — a rare expanse among bite-sized Paris boutiques — the brand can house its full range of men’s, women’s and children’s collections in the store.
While the New York retail locations offer separate categories, bringing everything together under one roof was a key takeaway from the success of the L.A. store.
“Going into a new market, we really wanted to be able to have it all together under one base,” she said.
Tables from the Banque de France inside the Bode store in Paris.
Cerruti Draime/Courtesy of Bode

Interiors were overseen by Bode Aujla’s husband, Aaron Aujla, under his Brooklyn-based interior design firm Green River Project.

They added archways to divvy up the space and created a cozy central living room. Couches and armchairs are made with the same striped French silk that Bode Aujla uses for her shirting, while English waxed cotton that Bode uses in jackets lines the ceiling. Hand-painted plywood gives the walls a vintage burled feel.

The furniture and objects were scouted through vintage dealers and antique markets in Europe and the U.S., including sturdy wood tables from the Banque de France national bank, a massive café mirror and stained-glass doors plucked from a Belgian church that now make up the dressing rooms.

Other touches include vintage calendars, personal family phot
os in antique frames and silver plates serendipitously engraved with the initials “EB.” Dresser drawers are filled with chocolates.
“Little things like that make it feel like we’re hosting people,” Aujla said of the homey feel.

“We’re inviting people into these really intimate interior spaces rather than just like a place to shop,” Bode Aujla said.
Family photos and drawers filled with chocolates inside the Bode store in Paris.
Cerruti Draime/Courtesy of Bode

Guests might miss a bamboo fishing rod hung above a central archway, but the piece lends its lore to the store’s decor.

The whole concept was inspired by a cross-Atlantic love of fly fishing, stemming from the historical pedigree of their current home in Connecticut. The pair began to research and discovered that Charles Ritz, son of hotel founder César Ritz, spent time in New England learning the sport. He was such an avid fisherman that upon returning to Paris he opened his own rod store on Rue Saint-Honoré.


Fly fishing lures sourced from Paula Rubenstein are used as wall coverings in another room, and the space is infused with an overall vintage lodge vibe.
A vintage calendar from 1940 sits next to the checkout inside the Bode store in Paris.
Cerruti Draime/Courtesy of Bode
Nine years on from founding her brand, Bode Aujla believes the time was right for international expansion.

“We have enough of a footing through our retail partners overseas that we know that there’s interest,” she said. “I’m a firm believer in retail and what that can do for business. The best expression of the brand is our retail environments — the sights, the smells, the way it’s decorated, the way it’s merchandised, the way our staff wears it.”
Bode anticipates the Paris location to be popular with locals as well as with tourists. The brand is popular in Japan and South Korea, who have sought it out Stateside and flocked to the New York and L.A. locations. Now she believes they will turn out in Paris.
“That’s the beauty of having a retail space is that it is a place where people can come and explore the brand who haven’t really been able to see it in its full iteration,” she said.
Since launching women’s in 2022 sales have steadily progressed, Bode said. The brand now has “two kind of different female customers,” continuing to appeal to the woman that buys from the men’s line, and a new customer attracted to the more feminine pieces, such as chiffon dresses.
Bode just had a big fashion moment with her first destination show, a runway for the Bode Rec. line during the Super Bowl in New Orleans, as well as dressing Samuel L. Jackson for his role in Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance.
“This is the first time a lot of these football players have ever engaged with fashion on this level,” she said. The sport has been a consistent source of inspiration, both in her family and in her line — from jerseys to themed prints — and she has done extensive research into how football shapes American culture and politics.
“It ended up being kind of a perfect full-circle moment that was actually extremely successful — it resonated back in L.A. at our store and in New York,” she said.


Vintage stained-glass church doors in the dressing room area of the Bode store in Paris.
Cerruti Draime/Courtesy of Bode
When she opened in L.A., Bode Aujla predicted more casual clothing such as shorts would be popular, but discovered that evening and outerwear were bestsellers. She believes that Paris will unlock its own similar surprises.
She’s made Paris-specific products from antique European textiles, including linens, lace and piano shawls, and will highlight pieces made with French fabrics. Bode also wanted to play on the souvenir shop aesthetic, seen on cotton lingerie with Eiffel Tower appliqués, berets made with a French milliner and neckties studded with hand-tied fishing flies. There are Paris-specific fringe tops and t-shirts.
A return to Paris Fashion Week is in the works for a future date. In the meantime, the brand plans to use the store to host events, including talks with artists or authors surrounding the Bode Birdsong Poetry Prize launched last September.
“It’s important to also be able to have a footprint to engage with the community in your space,” Bode Aujla said.
After an opening fete Friday night, the store will host the launch party for Bode Rec.’s collaboration with Nike Astrograbber on Sunday.

WWD : Hudson’s Bay in Canada Files for Bankruptcy, Initiates Restructuring Proce

Hudson’s Bay in Canada Files for Bankruptcy, Initiates Restructuring Proceedings
Through its long history, the department store underwent numerous repositionings, remerchandisings and ownership changes, but never recovered from the pandemic.

Hudson’s Bay Company, the Toronto-based department store chain and website, disclosed Friday that it is restructuring its business and has been granted protection from its creditors by a Canadian court.

The Canadian retailer said it has commenced proceedings under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) pursuant to an initial order for creditor protection from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

While not calling the maneuver a bankruptcy, it’s similar to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the U.S. involving restructuring a business with the intent to keep it operating. Like in a typical Chapter 11, Hudson’s Bay will be examining its store fleet, payroll and other operations and assets to determine what should be kept or disposed. Alvarez & Marsal Canada Inc. has been appointed as the monitor to oversee the CCAA proceedings.

Restore Capital, an affiliate of Hilco Global, together with other lenders, have committed to providing interim debtor-in-possession financing for Hudson’s Bay with a $16 million (Canadian) advance that has been approved. But more financing will be sought to fund the business during the proceedings.

The company has said the money enables it to keep operating for 10 days, at which time it must present a restructuring plan to the court or request an extension.

“Hudson’s Bay has been a vital retailer to Canadians for generations, and this decision was made with the best interests of our customers, associates and partners in mind,” Liz Rodbell, president and chief executive officer of Hudson’s Bay, said in a statement Friday evening. “While very difficult, this is a necessary step to strengthen our foundation and ensure that we remain a significant part of Canada’s retail landscape, despite the sector-wide challenges that have forced other retailers to exit the market. Now more
than ever, it is critical that Canadian businesses are protected and positioned to succeed.”

Rodbell added, “Earlier this year, we worked with potential investors to refinance a portion of our credit facilities to improve our liquidity and support our business plan. However, the threat and realization of a trade war has created significant market uncertainty and has impacted our ability to complete these transactions.”

While pegging the bankruptcy on sector conditions and the trade war with the U.S., Hudson’s Bay has been struggling on and off for years. The company has undergone multiple restructurings, ownership changes, and strategic shifts to stay afloat. Executives from Hudson’s Bay acknowledged to WWD last August that the company did not rebound after the pandemic the way U.S. retailers did. They also said that heavy investments in digital capabilities and inventory in Canada did not pay off, and that Hudson’s Bay had to clear merchandise more aggressively than it wanted, particularly when Nordstrom liquidated in Canada and Bed Bath & Beyond went bankrupt. The situation was further complicated when discretionary spending, even in the luxury sector, weakened. A few years ago, Hudson’s Bay split its store operations and e-commerce operation into separate companies. That apparently did not work out because about two years ago, the company reengineered back into a single entity.

Company executives have also blamed Hudson Bay’s difficulties for “triggering” slowed payments to Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks Off 5th vendors, but last December, Saks Fifth Avenue purchased the Neiman Marcus Group and in the process formed Saks Global. Hudson’s Bay is not part of Saks Global. Through a license agreement, Hudson’s Bay has a small footprint of three Saks Fifth Avenue and 13 Saks Off 5th stores in Canada, which the company said will continue to operate.

One source close to Hudson’s Bay said, “This is not a Nordstrom or Target situation. Hudson Bay plans to restructure and emerge from this.” Nordstrom and Target both rolled out stores in Canada, only to close them years ago. Another source in Vancouver said, “I was at the store last week to buy some bedding. There were almost no employees around. It was not a happy environment to buy anything.” She didn’t buy bedding.

Hudson’s Bay operates 80 stores. It’s expected that certain stores will close, but it’s too early to announce any. WWD has reported that the Hudson’s Bay store in Toronto is expected to be shuttered; however, the company is not commenting on that.

“Hudson’s Bay remains deeply connected to Canada and is focused on the
future. Our goal is to reestablish our foothold and ensure the company’s long-term place in the evolving Canadian retail market,” Rodbell stated. “As we go through this process, we will continue to show up for our customers and communities, as we always have.”

In its announcement Friday, Hudson’s Bay listed several reasons for restructuring, citing “ongoing trade tensions with the U.S., including the new and wide-ranging tariffs on exports to the U.S., together with retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada on U.S. imports.”

Hudson Bay said the situation has created economic uncertainty, directly
impacting refinancing efforts and limiting access to the capital needed to support the
business.

Hudson’s Bay also cited “post-pandemic shifts” — in particular work-from-home policies — reducing the size of populations in downtown areas, and rising costs of living, higher mortgage rates, and a weakening Canadian dollar straining household budgets, and reducing discretionary spending. Hudson’s Bay’s Toronto flagship is located on Queen Street, which is in the heart of the city.

Hudson’s Bay is considered North America’s oldest company, founded 355 years ago.

The Information : Inside the Start of Project Stargate—and the Startup Powering

Inside the Start of Project Stargate—and the Startup Powering It
Crusoe is little known outside data center land, but it’s fast growing. Its young, Musk-loving, Everest-climbing CEO has positioned the company to define the $500 billion binge on AI.

On the barren outskirts of Abilene, Texas, traffic had snarled to a crawl: It was shift-change time at Project Stargate, and as several hundred workers drove off the 800-acre site that contains the debut Stargate data center, plumes of dust from the red clay dirt followed the caravan of pickup trucks out of sight. Even without the oxidized haze, no one would’ve had their windows open. On this early evening in February, the thermometer hovered around 90 degrees.

Regardless of time or temperature, work here goes on 24/7, which is exactly as Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller wants it. “This was all trees and shrubs back in June last year. And since then we’ve had 1.2 million man hours worked on the site,” Lochmiller said. “There’s a lot of activity here.”

Off in the distance: a pair of H-shaped buildings, each partially completed—the actual $3.4 billion data center Crusoe has custom-designed for Oracle and OpenAI as part of Stargate, an initiative that will involve a $500 billion expansion in AI infrastructure that the companies announced with Donald Trump at the White House on the second day of his new administration. Lochmiller anticipates they’ll have the power at the site fully turned on by June, concluding in about a third of the time that many such projects can take. (His co-founder, Cully Cavness, has considered whether they might somehow qualify for a Guinness World Records entry.)

To traverse the site, we sat scrunched together in the back seat of a little dune buggy, the quickest way to get around. (“Just like ‘Jurassic Park,’” Lochmiller had remarked when we’d set off an hour or so earlier.) When a brief pause in traffic came, the driver, Lionel Branscomb, the site’s chief superintendent, darted the buggy forward. A few minutes later, we came to another halt. We had taken a wrong turn, Branscomb admitted.

“One of the problems about having a project moving this quickly is that getting around the site changes,” Lochmiller said. “If you leave for a week, the roads are different.”

More broadly speaking, Lochmiller and Crusoe certainly do find themselves at a unique intersection, where many of the pivotal elements of this era of technology have come together: artificial intelligence, data centers, crypto, energy and Trump—to assemble just a short list. And as such, Lochmiller presents a rather distinctive personification of this heady moment in time.

Crusoe’s specialty is designing, building and managing data centers in out-of-the-way places near untapped energy sources. Initially, Lochmiller, 38, and Cavness, 37, built data centers and used them to mine bitcoin. Now companies like Oracle want Crusoe to construct data centers for them; Crusoe will own the centers, and the companies will lease them. As Crusoe’s focus has shifted, the startup has become highly valued, fetching a $2.8 billion price tag in its latest funding from December that attracted a slew of boldface investors, including Founders Fund, Nvidia, Fidelity and Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. And Crusoe is growing fast. It finished 2024 with nearly $300 million in revenue—roughly tripling its sales from a couple years ago—and expects “significant growth” this year, Lochmiller said.

Those numbers could get much larger if everything goes according to plan in Abilene. Data centers are as essential to AI as Henry Ford’s assembly line was to the explosion in automobiles a century ago. And Lochmiller envisions Abilene as a new model for the entire industry: a showcase of how to build a data center at a breakneck pace near a source of affordable power in parts of the country that are happy to host new-age industrialists in their backyards.

Should Lochmiller pull it off, Crusoe could have a defining role in the AI boom—and a chance to drink heavily from Stargate’s deep well of funding.

Just the scale of economics around Abilene is enormous, and Lochmiller made sure I understood that by comparing it to a familiar sight: Marc Benioff’s billion-dollar skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. “In the Bay Area, the Salesforce Tower defines the city skyline, right?” he said. “You take three Salesforce Towers, and that’s the amount of work that’s going on here.”

Ever since President Trump and Oracle Chair Larry Ellison highlighted the Abilene data center at the Stargate press conference in January, Crusoe has faced the burden of sudden fame: a steady stream of curious onlookers arriving, hoping for a better view of what the president and the billionaire had talked about.

“The project was kinda under wraps, then this big thing happened at the White House,” Lochmiller said wryly. “And suddenly Abilene was catapulted onto the front page.” (Work and planning at Abilene obviously began much before the public Stargate announcement.) More interest came after Sam Altman tweeted a drone-shot video of the site. As a result, Crusoe had to tighten on-site security, and an unexpectedly locked gate was partly the reason we’d gotten turned around in the buggy.

Why exactly did Crusoe pick this spot in West Texas? Well, once completed, the data center can house 100,000 Nvidia-made GB200 chips, the lifeblood of artificial intelligence. They require an enormous amount of power, and in total, the data center will guzzle 300 megawatts of electricity. That’s several orders of magnitude more energy than data centers required a decade ago—back when older, less sophisticated chips needed far less power. At the moment, the AI industry has an unquenchable demand for these data centers, without which it can’t develop projects like ChatGPT. And the ability to construct these centers quickly has turned into a matter of national importance as America races to maintain its dominance over AI.

So given that great demand for massive power pronto, a place like West Texas makes sense. While data center construction can sometimes encounter a mountain of red tape that takes years to clear, local and state officials couldn’t have been happier to see Crusoe arrive in Texas. “Texas is a place that’s very pro business: They’re easy to work with, invited us in and helped us move through the process,” said Cavness, the Crusoe co-founder. “And there is abundant energy.”

The Abilene data center will draw from the main Texas energy grid, and Crusoe plans to take a portion of that energy from local wind farms, which tend to have an abundance of unused power. (Lochmiller wouldn’t comment on precisely how much.) In some cases, these farms have previously faced such a supply-and-demand imbalance that they’ve sat unused for lengthy periods of time to avoid operating at a loss.

The ability to identify parts of the country with underutilized energy sources is one part of Crusoe’s appeal to Oracle (which will lease the data center from Crusoe and provide OpenAI with access to the servers). Another part is even more straightforward: The startup promised to finish the data center quickly. Plenty of companies in America can build a data center, but the large cloud firms such as Amazon and Microsoft just “aren’t as nimble,” said Bob Wobschall, who tracks the data center world as an executive vice president at CBRE, the real estate services firm. “They might have the budgets for massive capital deployment, but they don’t have the speed.”

Some of Crusoe’s speed comes from the fact that it can supply many of the components needed for the center itself—like the switchgear that acts as a giant power panel and the telephone booth-size power distribution centers, which help regulate energy flow—through its own manufacturing facilities in Tulsa, Okla. (This helps it avoid at least some of the supply-chain kinks that can plague data centers.) As much as possible, Crusoe has assembled the center modularly, prioritizing finished components that can arrive ready to fit together “like Lego blocks,” Lochmiller said.

For much of Crusoe’s operations, Lochmiller has drawn inspiration from one chief source: Elon Musk. He idolizes Musk as some young film director might worship at the altar of Spielberg or Tarantino, and he has closely studied how Musk’s companies operate, a reflection of what could be one of the most durable elements of Musk’s legacy—his status as a lodestar for an entire generation of young entrepreneurs eager to emulate him.

Initially, Lochmiller had hoped Musk’s xAI would be the one to join Oracle at the Abilene data center. The conversations ended abruptly last year after Musk broke them off; in turn, he rapidly converted an existing industrial building in Memphis into a data center in 122 days.

The scuppered deal hasn’t altered Lochmiller’s admiration for Musk, and in Abilene, he has instilled Musk’s around-the-clock attitude toward work. While some competitors’ employees might do a 10-hour day, “we’ll use the other 14 hours, too,” he said with obvious pride. “We’ll be pouring concrete at three in the morning.” And while a rival might work five days a week, “we work the other two days,” too, he said.

Internally, the original name for the Abilene center was Project Ludicrous—because Lochmiller wanted to operate at “ludicrous speed,” he said. The name is a reference to the 1987 comedy “Spaceballs,” a favorite of Musk, and Lochmiller chose it as a nod to Musk, not because he has any special fondness of his own for the movie. “Haven’t seen it since high school,” he conceded.

For the past several years, JB Straubel, a Tesla board member and the company’s former chief technology officer, has been a Crusoe investor and has counseled Lochmiller on the business and how to emulate Tesla. “I love that whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs being underdogs and trying to do crazy things,” Straubel said. “It makes me happy we could be a beacon.…I feel an almost parental source of pride.”

Even the Abilene site’s chief superintendent, Lionel Branscomb, comes from Musk world, having spent several years at Tesla in Texas. He thinks Lochmiller has embraced just the right amount of Musk ethos. Undiluted Elonism has some drawbacks, he acknowledged. “Elon is really high intensity—high expectations,” which can motivate people, Branscomb said. “But it comes at the expense of your sanity.”

Lochmiller even approaches his chief pastime with Musklike intensity. A Colorado native, Lochmiller is a fanatical hiker, and he has completed five of the Seven Summits, the world’s tallest peaks. Everest took him two tries: His first failed in 2014, and then after quitting a quantitative-trading job, Lochmiller tried Everest again four years later. For the trek, he brought along a Kindle stocked with a Haruki Murakami novel; Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which he found “pretty weird,” he said; and Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity Is Near,” which he liked quite a lot. Lochmiller, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford, returned home with his thoughts dwelling partly on Kurzweil’s prediction that humanlike AI would arrive imminently.

Still, such a scenario wasn’t happening the very next day, and on another hiking expedition across two of Colorado’s 14,000-foot-plus peaks, Lochmiller and Cavness, whom Lochmiller had known since high school, discussed a concept for a company that could take immediate advantage of immense advancements in chips and computing. Cavness had studied the economics of the energy industry at Middlebury College and later at Oxford University, and he and Lochmiller thought melding their backgrounds together would make a fortuitous combination. The talk of a startup dominated their trip.

“By the end of climbing those mountains, we were both pretty excited,” Cavness said.

No matter what they did with the chips, they would need access to power, and Cavness suggested they take advantage of the leftover natural gas often burned off in flares in remote locations. Since the natural gas producers had no use for it, they’d be willing to sell the energy for cheap. Cavness and Lochmiller figured they could use the power and the chips for bitcoin mining, and if they could set up the chips within small, modular data centers close to the turbines fueled by flared natural gas, they’d have lower costs than other miners.

Their first such data center roared to life in North Dakota around 2019, much to the shock of the local gas-field roughneck who helped them get up and running. “He looked around at all of our computers, and then looked at us and asked, ‘You’re not Russians, right?’” Lochmiller recalled. During the couple years of crypto mania that followed, Crusoe expanded to nearly 100 of these natural gas–powered data centers, attracting investors like the Winklevii and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, which especially appreciated Lochmiller’s and Cavness’ desire to go beyond bitcoin.

“Back then, you might’ve concluded, ‘Oh, this is a bitcoin company,’” said Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon. “And, ultimately, that would’ve been wrong.”

A couple years ago, Crusoe began selling cloud computing services from its modular data centers, and the diversification of that revenue helped cushion the blow dealt by the downturn in bitcoin prices. Ultimately, the combination of experience in both hunting out unique energy sources and data center construction made Crusoe an appealing partner for Oracle several years later. As Dumas put it: “A great company is always a combination of foresight of where the world is heading, lots of luck and riding the wave.”

When I arrived in Abilene late on a Sunday, I didn’t notice a soul anywhere downtown, and when I asked the receptionist at the DoubleTree hotel whether I could leave my car parked on the street, she couldn’t help but laugh: Yes, this was a quiet part of a quiet city. “But this is a town that’s about to boom,” she said with sunshiney brightness. Her optimism caught me slightly by surprise, and I asked what made her so confident.

“Well, the big data center they’re building,” she said.

The exchange underscored a relatively little-discussed element to Stargate specifically and the entire AI infrastructure boom more broadly. Obviously, it could have profound significance for the technology industry. It could also bring tremendous economic development to areas of America that have seen little of it in generations—especially if Crusoe’s model prompts other projects in frontier corners near large supplies of energy.

Lochmiller envisions Stargate and Crusoe ushering in “a new version of the New Deal,” he said. “There is a really cool story here around just what AI means for the blue-collar economy. We have 1,000 people onsite every day. Those are all new jobs that are entirely created by the AI revolution.”

In Abilene, the project could add about $1 billion in tax revenue to the area over several decades, according to an estimate by local officials. Some of those dollars, of course, will get distributed in small ways: In November, for instance, Crusoe had a celebratory topping-off ceremony—a longheld custom in construction to mark the placement of the site’s highest beam—with a party that concluded late into the evening at the Ugly Lime.

“A funny little dive bar,” Lochmiller said. “Plenty of tequila.” (As one other Crusoe executive recalled: “All the expensive stuff has dust on it.”)

Within a year, Crusoe hopes to expand the Abilene center’s power capacity to more than 1 gigawatt—roughly enough power for four Abilene-size cities—and work has already commenced on a natural gas turbine to make that increase possible. Lochmiller has already received interest for data centers as large as 5 gigawatts, and it has prompted him to think even more imaginatively about where to find that energy, including possibly hydroelectric power.

I started to do the mental math on how much money a 5 gigawatt data center would cost. Before I could finish, Lochmiller assured me it would be entirely doable—especially given Stargate’s ambitions. “Well, I’ve heard that someone’s got $500 billion for me,” he said.