TheChek News Flow

US power & utilities M&A: $28B (2024) → $141.9B (2025). A 5x jump in one year. Almost entirely driven by data centre demand. This is not slowing down.

Phase 1 — PPAs (2023-24): Long-term contracts. MSFT-Constellation 20yr/$16B to restart Three Mile Island. AMZN-Talen 1.9GW through 2042.

Phase 2 — Acquisitions (2025): Google acquires Intersect Power for $4.75B (Dec ’25). Multiple GW of generation + data centre development. First hyperscaler to OWN power generation. PwC: “I do think you’ll start to see more of that in 2026.”

Phase 3 — Nuclear (2025-26): META signs 6.6GW nuclear deals (Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo, Constellation) — one of the largest corporate nuclear buyers in US history. AMZN invests $20B+ in Susquehanna nuclear campus + backs X-energy for 5GW SMRs. GOOGL backs Kairos Power for 500MW SMRs.

Phase 4 — Full integration (2026+): Hyperscalers stop buying power. They become power companies. Power is the binding constraint — you can buy all the Nvidia GPUs you want, but if you can’t plug them in, they’re paperweights.

• US data centre electricity demand: 19GW (2023) → 35GW (2030E). +84%.

• PJM capacity auction: $29/MW-day → $333/MW-day in two years. Almost all data centre load.

• Constellation acquires Calpine for $29B. NRG buys LS Power for $12.5B. All data centre thesis.

• Big Tech contracted 10GW+ new US nuclear capacity in the past year alone.

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HYPERSCALER CAPEX vs. BUYBACKS — THE PARADIGM SHIFT

If $610B in CapEx is coming regardless of which hyperscaler wins the AI race, the best risk-adjusted play is the infrastructure layer. As we wrote last week: the picks and shovels always get paid. Data centre REITs (EQIX, DLR), power infrastructure (Vertiv, Eaton, Siemens Energy), cooling systems, and networking vendors (Broadcom) benefit from the spending regardless of who captures the AI application revenue. This is CapEx that cannot be cancelled — contracts are signed, land is secured, power is committed. The hyperscalers are competing on who builds faster. The infra names get paid either way. That’s the asymmetry

Courtois is also spearheading the group’s beauty division, succeeding Stéphane Rinderknech.

PARIS — LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has appointed two new members of its executive committee, and simultaneously named a new Perfumes and Cosmetics chief.

Véronique Courtois is now chairman and chief executive officer of Parfums Christian Dior and of LVMH’s beauty division. She has been leading Parfums Christian Dior and joins the group’s executive committee. In her new role, she oversees the activities related to the group’s beauty division — which includes 16 brands, organized under Parfums Christian Dior, Guerlain, LVMH Fragrance Brands and Kendo — while maintaining her position at Dior.

“Building on her rich career within LVMH’s beauty maisons, Véronique Courtois has remarkably developed the activity and desirability of Parfums Christian Dior,” LVMH said in a statement released Monday evening. “Her experience and recognized leadership will be valuable assets for the maisons under her charge.”

Courtois succeeds Stéphane Rinderknech, who, according to LVMH, “has decided to leave the group to pursue new personal projects.”

Rinderknech had also been leading LVMH Hospitality, alongside the beauty division.

“Since joining the group. Stéphane Rinderknech has greatly contributed to the growth of our hospitality division before bringing his recognized expertise to the beauty business,” said Stéphane Bianchi, managing director of LVMH, in the statement. “I am thankful for his contribution and results, and wish him all the best in his future endeavors.”

It was also announced Monday that Antoine Arnault, director of image and environment at LVMH, joins the company’s executive committee. There, he continues to oversee image, communication and sustainable development projects, activities he has led since 2020.

Arnault was the architect of LVMH’s partnership with the 2024 Paris Olympics and created Les Journées Particulières, showcasing the group’s craftsmanship. Arnault initiated major communications campaigns for Louis Vuitton, and LVMH said that under his leadership, Berluti “became the quintessential menswear maison.”

“Particularly committed to sustainability, his unparalleled expertise within the group will be essential for the reputation and continuation of actions aimed at protecting the environment and biodiversity, which are central to the Life 360 roadmap,” LVMH said, referring to the company’s environmental performance plan.

The change at the helm of LVMH’s beauty business comes at a time when the activity has not been growing robustly in a buoyant category.

In 2025, the group’s Perfumes and Cosmetics division’s sales declined 3 percent in reported terms and were flat on an organic basis versus 2024 to 8.17 billion euros. That compares to the global beauty market’s sales in 2025 overall, which are estimated to have increased between 4 percent and 4.5 percent.

It was recently reported that LVMH has been exploring a sale of its 50 percent share of Fenty Beauty. That and the sale of KVD Beauty to Windsong Global in September 2025 has raised questions in the industry regarding whether other beauty brands launched with LVMH’s incubator Kendo Brands, including Lip Lab and Ole Henriksen, might be on the block soon.

In March 2023, Rinderknech was named chairman and CEO of LVMH’s Perfumes and Cosmetics division. For decades prior to that, there had been no one executive helming that division. The last person to have done that was Patrick Choël, who held the title of president of the division for six-and-a-half years, until retiring from the role in March 2004.

The grouping of all LVMH’s fragrance and cosmetics holdings under one executive’s purview came at a time when the beauty industry’s competitiveness was ramping up, especially as niche brands became hot commodities. That is true again today, with the ongoing rise of niche and indie beauty labels, as well as emerging geographic markets where domestic players are growing and are becoming competitors on the world stage.

Rinderknech joined LVMH as chairman and CEO of LVMH Hospitality Excellence from L’Oréal in 2022. That branch includes Hôtels Cheval Blanc and Belmond Hotels and trains. A seasoned beauty executive, Rinderknech spent most of his career at L’Oréal, lastly — between 2019 and 2022 — as the company’s president of the North America Zone, CEO of L’Oréal USA and a member of the group’s executive committee.

When Rinderknech stepped into the beauty role, Courtois became head of Parfums Christian Dior. At the time LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault lauded her for having significantly elevated the desirability of the house during the seven years in which she was in charge of its products and image. He underlined the success of Sauvage, the top-ranking fragrance, as an example of her contributions.

Previous to Dior, Courtois developed the house of Guerlain. She started her career at Beauté Prestige International and spent eight years with the Shiseido group before joining LVMH.

Lidar-maker Ouster has acquired StereoLabs, a company that makes vision-based perception systems for robotics and industrial applications, for a combination of $35 million and 1.8 million shares.

The deal is the latest in a march toward consolidation among perception sensor suppliers. Just last month, MicroVision bought the lidar assets of the buzzy-but-now-bankrupt Luminar for $33 million. Ouster itself has played the M&A game a fair amount, too. In 2022, the company merged with rival player Velodyne. The year before that, it bought lidar startup Sense Photonics.

This consolidation is happening right as companies and investors rush to build businesses around “physical AI” — a broad term that encompasses everything from humanoid robotics and drones to self-driving cars and automated systems in warehouses. Even more obscure suppliers are raising big funding rounds as these technologies develop. Some startups are even trying to spin up entirely new sensor modalities.

Ouster co-founder and CEO Angus Pacala told TechCrunch in an interview that he had been eyeing StereoLabs for years. He said he sees lidar as “the core component of safety-critical, capable systems,” but that he wanted to “move up the stack.”

The “obvious additional sensors” to start working with in addition to lidar, Pacala said, are cameras. Pacala said 15-year-old StereoLabs is “best in class” on the hardware side, but he was especially drawn to how the company has been getting the most out of those cameras by being “incredibly savvy in adopting the cutting edge of AI models and edge compute.”

In particular, Pacala highlighted StereoLabs’ development of a foundational AI model that can determine depth of objects from stereo cameras.

“It was a no-brainer for us to go out and approach them and basically pitch this vision of working with us to become a unified sensing and perception platform — a tier one [supplier] for these advanced physical AI systems,” Pacala said.

Despite the focus on integration, Ouster said StereoLabs will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary.

And while the hype has been feverish, Pacala said he didn’t buy StereoLabs simply because of the attention and money being thrown at physical AI. In fact, he committed maybe the gravest sin one can during a hype cycle: he poured some cold water on the buzz, especially around humanoid robotics.

“The business model here is not to just sell the fervor, it’s to actually make working systems that are certified, that are safe, that are really solving customer problems,” he said. “There’s going to be a little bit of disillusionment in physical AI as it turns out that it’s much longer time to market for all these humanoids.”

Pacala isn’t the only one trying to take a realistic view. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos said the sensor industry is “ripe for consolidation” because he believes there isn’t enough revenue to support all the current competition.

“You’re going to get consolidation, or you’re going to get kind of a weeding out of the industry as people fall to the wayside,” he said.