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Defense-tech company has agreement with historic Sparrows Point, as Iran war demonstrates utility of unmanned surface vesselsµ

Anduril Industries is in advanced talks with a Maryland port to build out a production site for the company’s drone boats, people familiar with the matter said, a sign of the growing military demand for autonomous sea vessels and the potential for defense startups to revitalize American industrial infrastructure.

Southern California-based Anduril has signed a memorandum of understanding with the operators of the historic Sparrows Point yard, a 3,300-acre industrial site in Baltimore County with a deep-water port and a rich history of shipbuilding and steel manufacturing. Anduril’s investment in building out a portion of the site for unmanned surface vessel, or USV, production could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the people said. The operation would involve manufacturing and testing the boats.

The office of Maryland’s governor, Democrat Wes Moore, has been involved in the discussions, and any deal would likely involve state incentives to offset Anduril’s cost, the people said.

Anduril hasn’t signed a lease, and the people cautioned that deal talks could still unravel. A spokesman for Moore declined to comment. A spokesman for Tradepoint Atlantic, the owner of Sparrows Point, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Investors purchased the site, once home to the industrial juggernaut Bethlehem Steel, starting in 2014 for redevelopment and renamed it Tradepoint Atlantic. The area now houses fulfillment and logistics centers for retailers such as Amazon and Home Depot. Two years ago, it became a hub for rerouting global shipping and recovering wreckage when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed, creating a logistical and cleanup crisis.

A potential Maryland expansion comes as Anduril, fresh off a funding round this spring that values the company at $61 billion, pushes to roughly double capacity across its weapons-systems production. Unmanned surface vessels are one of Anduril’s newest products. It has partnerships with United Kingdom-based Kraken Technology Group and South Korea’s HD Hyundai Heavy Industries to build the boats.

Anduril has revamped a shipyard in Seattle for low-rate production. Prototypes of its boat with HD Hyundai are being manufactured in Korea. A Baltimore-area production site would give Anduril a boat-making presence in proximity to the nation’s capital and the Coast Guard’s largest shipyard, which would allow for easier testing and integration with the Coast Guard fleet, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

Anduril’s entry into unmanned surface vessels brings fresh competition from a deep-pocketed and well-connected military manufacturer to a field of startups all jockeying for Navy contracts, including another Baltimore-based manufacturer, BlackSea Technologies. Anduril has steadily expanded into nearly all facets of defense contracting, from jets to submarines and counterdrone systems.

Anduril’s foray into unmanned surface vessels hit a bump when the company recently lost in a Navy competition for medium-size drone boats. The competition jilted several companies that didn’t make the cut, leading defense-tech executives to complain to members of Congress and sue the government, separate people familiar with the matter said. Anduril isn’t one of the companies suing.

Nevertheless, the era of drone boats appears to have arrived for militaries around the world. Ukraine has used them with great effect against the Russians in the Black Sea. The U.S. military made its wartime drone-boat debut in the war with Iran when autonomous vessels by Saronic rescued two Apache helicopter crew members after their aircraft was shot down, and completed strikes on Iran’s shipping and submarine infrastructure. The primary use of the boats, though, has been surveillance.

The vessels have struggled to perform during military testing, with boats from different vendors at times misidentifying objects, crashing into objects, drifting away or coming to a standstill, according to Wall Street Journal reporting and Navy officials. The officials said the military has had difficulty integrating software that reliably pilots the unmanned vessels on open waters.

The AI Boom Is Transforming the American Economy Beyond Recognition

AI has rapidly become a huge economic factor while affecting everything from capital investment to how much you pay for an iPhone

The U.S. economy keeps putting more eggs in the artificial-intelligence basket.

Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to meet AI computing needs and issuing billions of dollars of debt to help make those purchases.

The rapid data-center build-out is powering construction spending, hiring and municipal revenues. Meanwhile, a stock-market rally fueled by the rise in shares of chip makers and other companies benefiting from the AI boom has led to a massive increase in household wealth. That is helping to bolster consumer spending.

Combined, those factors are likely responsible for roughly one-third of the nation’s recent economic growth, according to Michael Pearce, an economist at Oxford Economics.

But the strength that the economy is drawing from the AI boom is also a vulnerability: What would happen if the boom fizzled out?

“It is very much an AI-driven economy right now,” said Barclays economist Jonathan Millar. “It’s hard to imagine that we would be anywhere near as resilient without that impetus.”

Mapping out exactly how much strength the economy is drawing from AI is less than straightforward, and prone to error. Even so, it appears substantial.

Details of last week’s gross domestic product report, which measures economic growth based on what the country produces, showed that business investment in AI-related categories continues to swell. Spending on software, data-center construction and computer and communications equipment, were it to keep the same pace for 12 months, came to about $1.5 trillion. That compared with an annual rate of about $1 trillion two years earlier.

On Monday, the Commerce Department reported that June construction outlays on data centers reached $68.3 billion, at an annual rate, up $21.5 billion from a year earlier. Outlays on all other private construction—everything from houses to shopping centers to hospitals—fell by $101.6 billion over the same period. Also Monday, comments included in the Institute for Supply Management’s July manufacturing report pointed to robust, AI-related demand.

Not all of tech-related spending went toward AI—some of it was devoted to buying computers that sit on white-collar workers’ desks, for example. On the other hand, the AI build-out is also pouring money into other capital-spending categories, like cooling systems and backup generators.

A chunk of what is going into the build-out, such as memory chips, is imported, so some AI spending isn’t directly boosting U.S. production, and therefore GDP. In the first five months of this year, for example, the U.S. imported about $90 billion in computer equipment, semiconductors and other electronic components from Taiwan. That compared with about $20 billion in the first five months of 2024.

Also, inflation is eating away at the value of AI spending. Surging chip prices mean buyers simply aren’t getting as much bang for their buck as they used to.

Even so, Oxford’s Pearce estimates that AI investment alone has been behind nearly a quarter of the growth in gross domestic product recently.

The AI-boosted stock market is the other big source of support.

In the first quarter, U.S. household net worth reached $174 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve, an increase of $13 trillion from a year earlier that was mostly due to stock gains. Since then, the broad S&P 1500 index has risen by about 15%, so net worth is likely trillions of dollars higher now. Those gains have been driven in large part by enthusiasm for AI.

When people’s net worth increases, they spend more freely. Estimates of these wealth effects vary, but economists generally think that for every dollar in stock-market wealth gained, people spend a few cents more. The spending from higher-income consumers, who hold the bulk of stocks, benefits the most.

“Without this investment boom, I think it’s pretty clear the economy would be running cooler,” Pearce said.

To be sure, AI might be sucking up so many resources that it is actually crowding out other parts of the economy. For example, resources that are being taken up by data-center construction—land, materials, skilled labor—might otherwise be put to other use.

“You can’t just take out AI and leave everything else unchanged,” said JPMorgan Chase economist Michael Feroli. “The activity and the financial exuberance associated with AI might be squeezing out activity.”

AI is also feeding into inflation, cutting into consumers’ spending power. The iPhone 18 Pro coming out in September might cost less if it weren’t for the jump in memory-chip prices.

For now, and despite recent selling in some AI-related stocks, the AI spending boom looks likely to continue. Analysts now estimate that capital spending at five of the so-called hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Oracle—will come to nearly $4 trillion over the four years ending in 2029, according to FactSet. That is over $300 billion more than what they estimated about a month ago.

Real trouble in the stock market could disrupt that story. So, too, could problems in the debt markets that are helping fund the boom. Barclays estimates that bond issuance at the five big hyperscalers and AI entrant SpaceX will come to $285 billion this year, versus about $109 billion last year.

“AI is touching so many things,” said Millar, from Barclays. “A lot of the economy is kind of banking on continued strength from the build-out.”

‘Arrogance kills’: Novo chief injects risk-taking into Ozempic maker

Mike Doustdar says he is open to ‘large’ deals and group will suffer ‘failures’ as it tries to cut reliance on weight-loss drugs

One year since becoming Novo Nordisk’s chief executive, Mike Doustdar is betting on the “phenomenal” sales of its weight-loss pill, new drugs and acquisitions to return the drugmaker to growth.

Doustdar, the first foreigner to lead the Danish drugmaker, wants the Ozempic maker to take risks as he pushes to revive its fortunes against a backdrop of stiff competition and disappointing trial results.

“You know, if you do not like failure, then you should not get into a pharma business,” he told the FT at Novo’s headquarters in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

“I actually think success for us will be to have more shots at goal because we’re dealing with science and research that has, inevitably, failure attached to it.”

The 55-year-old has not shied away from tough decisions since becoming chief executive in August 2025. He announced 9,000 job cuts — the most in Danish corporate history — and slashed profit and revenue guidance because of market share losses and pricing pressure for its injectable weight-loss medicine.

While acknowledging the challenging environment — the company has forecast that sales and operating profits could decline by as much as 12 per cent this year — Doustdar said Novo could return to growth under his leadership.

“I am very confident in Novo Nordisk’s ability to return to sustainable sales and profit growth over time,” he said. “That confidence is not based on expecting the market to become easier. It is based on the scale of unmet patient need, the strength of our science and portfolio, and the changes we are making to become more focused, faster and more competitive.”

To achieve that goal, he said Novo must take risks and accept that some will not pay off.

The need to handle adversity was on full display during Doustdar’s interview with the FT on Friday, with his staff interrupting to announce that a drug aimed at reducing the risk of heart attacks had failed a late-stage trial, sending Novo’s shares down 10 per cent. The results were a setback to efforts to develop treatment pipelines beyond its blockbuster weight-loss drugs.

“It’s not the first, nor is it going to be the last time we fail, and it doesn’t deviate us from our strategy,” Doustdar said, reiterating the company’s commitment to developing treatments for cardiovascular issues and continuing two other related trials.

Novo pioneered modern weight-loss drugs to become Europe’s most valuable publicly listed company in 2023 before its stock and sales tumbled as US rival Eli Lilly and generic competitors gained market share.

Choosing Doustdar reflected the board’s appetite to shake things up, catapulting the Iran-born, US-raised Austrian national who had quietly risen from office clerk to Novo’s head of international operations over three decades.

During his final interview for the job, armed with a 106-page presentation, he recalls telling the board they should not give him the job if they were not willing to support difficult and unpopular decisions, including potential job cuts.

After slashing jobs and navigating a board revamp, Doustdar received a boost in June when prescriptions for Novo’s Wegovy pill surpassed 3mn less than six months after hitting the market, making it one of the biggest ever US pharmaceutical launches by volume.

“The numbers are phenomenal,” he said. Eli Lilly introduced its own rival pill in April but, rather than hurting demand for Wegovy, Doustdar said sales of Novo’s oral treatment had “accelerated” since then.

The Wegovy pill, an oral version of its injectable obesity blockbuster, has been launched in the United Arab Emirates and the UK and was recently approved by the EU. Novo is also pushing ahead with the next-generation oral pill, Zenagamtide, which is starting phase 3 trials and could be brought to the market before the end of the decade if “everything goes well”.

“We are ahead in our R&D for the next generation, and we are way ahead on what’s happening in the commercialisation of the pill, not just in the US, everywhere we basically are currently present,” he said.

While Doustdar is bullish on the next pill, Novo’s margins have come under pressure. It has been forced to slash prices in the US, its largest market, after President Donald Trump urged the world’s largest pharma groups to reduce prices in America. That price cut, which the Novo boss described as “unprecedented”, has eaten into the company’s margins on its more profitable injectables.

Novo is betting that the rapid growth of pill sales will make up for the reduced prices of its injectables. Medicare, the US health insurance programme for elderly people, began offering expanded access to Wegovy last month, potentially increasing sales.

But the company has yet to win over investors as it prepares to publish half-year financial results on Wednesday. Its shares have fallen more than 8 per cent this year and are trading at less than a third of their 2024 peak.

“I think it’s fair to say investors still have questions about Novo’s path forward,” said James Gordon, an analyst at Barclays. “Investors would like a clearer plan for what the company would be selling post-semaglutide. Because by 2030, semaglutide across the different injectables and oral forms is going to be about 70 per cent of revenues and the follow-on plan beyond 2030 is still a little unclear.”

As Novo attempts to expand its pipeline and diversify its portfolio, Doustdar said he was open to “big” mergers and acquisitions.

Asked whether he would consider transformational deals, he said: “Yes, I would not shy away from going in that direction . . . I’m happy that we have a balance sheet that can accommodate a very large size.”

Doustdar also signalled he would consider far bigger deals than Pfizer’s $10bn acquisition of obesity drug developer Metsera after a takeover battle with Novo, saying that was not a “large” transaction in his eyes.

Speaking before news broke of talks between AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb over a potential $400bn pharma mega-merger, he said: “Probably today we are in more data rooms than ever before looking into anything and everything that is out there.” But he stressed that the company prioritised assets that fill gaps in its portfolio over size.

The Novo chief sees deals as a potential answer to investors’ frequent questions about the company’s ability to diversify. Unlike its biggest competitor in weight loss, Eli Lilly, which also does cancer and neuroscience, Novo generates more than 90 per cent of its sales from its obesity and diabetes drugs.

“I do think that we need to diversify, no doubt about it, but I think we need to have disciplined diversifications around science areas and customer populations that we are synonymous with,” he said.

Some 2bn people suffer from conditions linked to diabetes, obesity and being overweight, and Novo is exploring treatments for cardiovascular, kidney and liver diseases. Trials into some of its Alzheimer’s treatments failed to meet primary goals at the end of 2025.

Wegovy’s main ingredient, semaglutide, has also been shown to reduce alcohol and drug use, or could help sleep apnoea and skin issues, Doustdar said.

He leads a company that was formed by a merger in 1989 of two rivals, Novo and Nordisk. The predecessor companies extracted insulin from pig pancreases in a country known for having more pigs than people.

The company is now barely recognisable from those days but Doustdar said he resisted some of the comforts typically enjoyed by the bosses of large multinationals.

He works at an open-plan desk at Novo’s headquarters, using a small telephone-booth-style room for private calls. His desk is surrounded by pictures of his wife and two sons, with a sign that warns: “arrogance kills”.

His proudest possession, however, is a mammoth tooth, said to have been won by the seafaring father of the company’s first CEO at a poker game in Russia and then handed down from one generation of leaders to the next.

“It’s a reminder to you every day that I’m here for a short period of time and that I have a responsibility to pass the baton to someone else after me,” he said. “And when I do, I’d like it to be in a better shape and form than when I got it.”

Inside Google’s $200bn Wall Street finance machine for Anthropic

Private credit, chip leases and data centre guarantees underpin a vast new model for AI spending

Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programmes in history to sell more than $150bn of AI chips destined for Anthropic.

The effort brings together Google, Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and a slew of crypto miners in a web of transactions that stretches from chip manufacturing to data centre development, according to people involved in the project and corporate filings reviewed by the FT.

The arrangements, which tie together contracts worth about $200bn, have not previously been reported in full. They reveal how Big Tech is creating funding models for AI that reach far beyond traditional corporate spending and tie more of the financial system to the industry’s growth.

At the centre of the project are Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs — AI chips it has co-developed with Broadcom since 2016. Once used largely inside Google’s own data centres, the chips have begun to be sold externally, challenging Nvidia’s dominance of the AI processor market. Google sells them in “pods” — server racks taller than a person that connect thousands of chips into a single computing system.

“AI chips are some of the most valuable goods ever produced,” said a senior banker close to the deals. “It’s a scale like we’ve never seen before because it’s a product we’ve never seen before.” 

Surging demand from Anthropic has required a sprawling financing operation to support sales to a start-up without a credit rating. To support that expansion, Google, Broadcom and Wall Street investors have each taken on different pieces of the financial risk. 

Google, which is also an investor in Anthropic, guarantees the data centres. Broadcom commits to buying the chips and helps finance them. Apollo and Blackstone provide much of the private-credit capital that purchases the hardware before leasing it to Anthropic.

“This is each of us putting our balance sheet to work,” said a Google executive involved in the effort. “We’re doing it on the data centre side, [Broadcom’s] doing it on the chip side.”

The web of contracts underpinning these arrangements adds up to about $200bn, with roughly four-fifths tied to the chips themselves, making it one of the largest infrastructure financings ever assembled.

A programme of that size posed a problem: none of the companies involved wanted to carry tens of billions of dollars of AI chips on their balance sheets.

Google, which is already funding record capital spending, would prefer not to add them. So Broadcom agreed to buy the AI hardware from it. But Broadcom, too, would rather deploy its capital elsewhere.

“Broadcom is the financing provider, but they don’t want to be in the financing business,” said one person familiar with the effort.

That challenge produced an unusual solution. Morgan Stanley helped arrange a private-credit vehicle, funded by outside investors, that buys the chips and leases them to Anthropic in an adaptation of the vendor-financing model Boeing and GE built to sell aircraft and engines.

In June, the first tranche of TPU hardware passed from Google through Broadcom into this financing blender. A special-purpose vehicle known as Compute SPV paid $35bn for roughly 1GW of the AI hardware, representing around 1mn TPUs, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The SPV’s cash came from three tranches of debt anchored by Apollo and Blackstone. Broadcom, in effect, guaranteed the two senior tranches by agreeing to cover any shortfall if Anthropic stopped paying and the SPV could not sell the hardware for enough to make the senior investors whole.

The arrangement, known as residual value support, covers about $30bn of the $35bn financing, with Broadcom’s exposure declining as Anthropic makes its lease payments.

That structure is the template that is expected to finance TPUs worth hundreds of billions more. The largest deal yet came together in April when Google agreed to sell another 3.5GW of TPU hardware to Broadcom for deployment by Anthropic.

Broadcom’s filings disclose $128bn of purchase commitments, with $55.2bn of deliveries scheduled for its 2027 fiscal year and $72.9bn for 2028. People familiar with the arrangements said those commitments relate almost entirely to its agreed purchase of 3.5GW of TPU hardware from Google.

Financing the chips solved only half of Google’s problem. The company also needed enough powered data centres to house them. “We have a schedule and we’re looking for capacity that will fit the schedule,” the Google executive said. “Crypto miners with excess capacity were helpful.”

It has helped transform several crypto miners with secured power into a new breed of AI infrastructure developers, with a small outfit called TeraWulf the first to land a Google backstop to add a 360MW data centre on its campus in upstate New York. 

Google guaranteed the lease payments on the Anthropic-bound site, which Morgan Stanley packaged into a construction bond that in October raised $3.2bn to get it built. In return for the backstop, Google took penny warrants that gave it a stake in TeraWulf.

Google’s team rapidly replicated this approach in the following months, helping crypto miners like Cipher Digital and Hut 8 build data centres in Texas and Louisiana. The FT identified five projects with 1.4GW of power, which have raised $15bn of debt with the support of Google’s backstop.  

People familiar with the matter said the Big Tech company had so far backstopped 10 developments with 2.4GW of power for TPUs. Google’s guarantees put it on the hook for as much as $44bn if all the leases go bad, though it marks the liability at $815mn on its balance sheet. It could also step into the leases itself.

The Google team is now racing to put together additional data centre projects with enough power to ultimately house all of the 4.5GW of TPU hardware they’ve agreed to sell. “We’re spending a lot of time on [power] right now — all of our time,” said the Google executive.

By this spring, Google’s financial heft had already begun to reshape the economics of AI infrastructure. Data centre projects backed by Google borrowed at a median rate of 7.1 per cent, compared with 9.3 per cent for the neocloud operators building around Nvidia’s chips. Jefferies analysts called this gap “a structural cost-of-capital disadvantage” for those in Nvidia’s orbit.

For Google’s project, the risk is big if concentrated: $200bn of contracts tied to Anthropic’s ability to pay its chip and data centre leases. It is one piece of a larger dilemma, with demand across the industry resting on a handful of large hyperscalers and frontier AI labs.

“There’s a whole world that’s been built underneath those companies, and if their appetite to invest decreases, all of it sees a slowdown,” said Jefferies analyst Jonathan Petersen. “That’s the big macro risk.”

Cecil Wright alleges billionaire went ‘behind its back’ to avoid paying €17.5mn commission on luxury vessel

Revolut founder Nik Storonsky is being sued for €17.5mn by one of the world’s top luxury yacht brokers, which claims that he went “behind its back” to avoid paying commission on a €350mn superyacht.

Cecil Wright & Partners has filed a claim in London’s High Court against the billionaire over his purchase of the yacht in January this year, court documents show.

An adviser to Storonsky’s family office initially approached the luxury broker in October 2024 to help build a yacht, then asked in 2025 if there was a vessel that Storonsky could buy in the meantime, according to the court filings.

Cecil Wright claims that it suggested Storonsky buy the 102-metre boat, which was then being built by German superyacht yard Lürssen. The yacht in question has a 25-foot glass-bottomed infinity pool, a beach club and a gym with a cryotherapy chamber, according to the luxury magazine Robb Report.

However, in January 2026 Storonsky’s adviser told Chris Cecil-Wright, the brokerage’s founder, that Storonsky had bought it directly from the seller, Canadian businessman and former ice hockey player Patrick Dovigi.

Cecil Wright’s legal filing claims that it is entitled to a 5 per cent commission on the sale under a brokerage agreement as the sale’s “effective cause” even though it was ultimately cut out of the deal.

A spokesperson for Storonsky’s family office said the claim was “without merit and will be defended”.

The yacht’s ownership history was complex from the start. It was commissioned by Dovigi, then sold to an unnamed “Brazilian owner” who was arrested in connection with allegations of fraud in November 2025.

Brazilian bank executive Daniel Vorcaro was arrested in November as part of an investigation into an alleged R$12.2bn (US$2.3bn) fraud involving Banco Master, which collapsed last year. Vorcaro has denied wrongdoing and is co-operating with authorities, according to his lawyers.

After the arrest, Dovigi bought back the boat, then sold it to Storonsky.

Cecil-Wright has worked on the builds of some of the world’s largest and most expensive yachts.

These include the 99-metre Madame Gu for now-sanctioned Russian billionaire Andrei Skoch, and Tango, which has been seized by Spanish authorities as it belonged to sanctioned Russian-Israeli oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.

Chris Cecil-Wright told the FT: “It’s very rare for brokers to find themselves in this situation and it’s the first time I have done so, but I feel strongly about it, hence am taking action.”