TheChek News Flow

The trans-Atlantic relationship is eroding faster than the continent is rearming

President Trump’s administration is withdrawing 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany and not deploying long-range missiles, creating a deterrence gap.

The U.S. decision not to deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles and Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles in Germany is a bigger concern for officials.

President Trump’s increased tariffs on European cars from 15% to 25% will add to Germany’s economic burden, impacting its flagship industry.

BERLIN—German officials shrugged off President Trump’s decision to withdraw 5,000 U.S. troops from the country as symbolic, but analysts warned the broader trans-Atlantic rift risks leaving Europe’s economy and security dangerously exposed.

Trump’s latest increase in tariffs on European cars, his apparent U-turn on plans to station long-range missiles in Germany and the economic and military fallout from the war in Iran will have a bigger impact on the region, they warned.

“All of these are a bigger deal than a symbolic 5K-troop reduction,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a Berlin security think tank. “So is the rapid depletion of U.S. arsenals due to wasting enormous amounts of precious assets in the Iran war.”

Senior U.S. defense officials said Friday the Pentagon would withdraw an army brigade from Germany within six to 12 months, days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. didn’t seem to have an exit strategy in Iran and described Tehran as humiliating America in negotiations.

Germany is the nerve center of the 85,000-strong U.S. troop presence in Europe, where a dense network of bases helps Washington project power around the world. The vast Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany has been a key logistics hub for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and, this year, Iran.

The announced withdrawal would represent about 14% of the roughly 36,000 troops currently in the country—not much more than the normal fluctuation and much smaller than the 12,000 reduction Trump tried to implement in his first term. Most of these troops serve U.S. military operations around the world and aren’t there to protect Germany in case of an attack.

It was “foreseeable that the U.S. would withdraw troops from Europe, including Germany,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Saturday, adding that Europe was already investing to fill the gap. “Germany is on the right track,” he said.

Germany and allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “are working with the U.S. to understand the details of their decision on force posture in Germany,” said the NATO media service on X. The military alliance said the move “underscores the need for Europe to continue to invest more in defense and take on a greater share of the responsibility for our shared security” but NATO can still “provide for our deterrence and defense.”

A bigger concern is the news that the U.S. has decided not to deploy a battalion to operate Tomahawk cruise missiles and Dark Eagle hypersonic missiles in Germany, a deal struck in 2024 by the Biden administration in an effort to deter Russia from an attack on NATO after its invasion of Ukraine two years earlier.

Officials in Berlin had anticipated that the Trump administration wouldn’t honor the deal, having never committed to do so, said Nico Lange, director of Germany’s Institute for Risk Analysis and International Security and a former senior German defense ministry official.

“Still, the fact that now, when we’re facing such a serious threat level in Europe, this conventional deterrence gap isn’t being closed—that is a real problem,” said Lange. “We have troops of our own, but no one in Europe possesses this specific capability yet.”

Another reason to worry: Withholding the battalion is the latest signal of a detente between the Trump administration and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It follows the suspension of oil sanctions against Russia after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. European leaders think the moves are undermining efforts to reach a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia.

Under Merz’s government, Germany has been ramping up military spending and speeding up procurement with the goal of becoming Europe’s largest conventional military force by 2029. It has also entered an agreement with France to supplement the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

Military analysts said Berlin was well on the way to becoming less dependent on America’s military protection but that the Merz-Trump spat was a useful reminder of the urgency of this effort.

Yet the rapid depletion of the U.S. arsenal during its offensive on Iran has created a dilemma for Europe, whose rearmament remains slow and dependent on purchases from America, particularly in crucial areas such as antiaircraft systems and long-range missiles.

“All of this translates into a heightened security risk for Europe,” said Lange.

Economic headwinds from an array of Trump policies that have undermined Germany’s ability to support its huge defense investments are a bigger worry.

German exports to the U.S.—a crucial lifeline to offset a long-term loss of market share in China—have collapsed since Trump started a trade war with Europe last year. An EU-U.S. trade deal agreed last summer has offered little relief to many German manufacturers because separate U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs have hit their products.

Government officials and economists had hoped that Berlin’s defense splurge and a separate public-infrastructure investment offensive would bolster growth this year but a sharp uptick in energy prices following the attack on Iran shattered those expectations.

The government has since slashed its stuttering growth forecast for this year and business confidence hit a six-year low this month. Trump’s announcement that he was raising tariffs on European cars from 15% to 25% this week will add to the burden for Germany’s long-suffering flagship industry.

Germany’s continuing economic malaise is also sapping Merz’s political margin of maneuver at home. After a gradual collapse in ratings since he came to office last year, the chancellor has become one of the least popular in postwar history.

Greg Abel to address shareholders at first gathering since he succeeded Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway continued to sell stocks in its first quarter under the command of new chief executive Greg Abel, pushing its cash pile above $380bn as it held off on using its war chest to dive into a volatile market.

The sprawling insurance to industrials conglomerate said its cash and short-term Treasury bills climbed by $7bn from the end of 2025, excluding the value of US government debt it has bought but must still pay for.

That cash has been a focus for investors, given the company has been shedding stocks for more than three years.

Some of it must be held to meet regulatory limits designed to safeguard insurance policyholders, but analysts and investors believe the company still has considerable dry powder that it could use to clinch a mammoth acquisition or buy minority stakes in publicly traded stocks.

Berkshire disclosed that it had sold $24bn worth of stocks, with purchases of $15.9bn, stretching its net sales streak to 14 consecutive quarters.

It marked Berkshire’s largest quarter of stock sales from its $288bn equity portfolio since 2024, when it dumped a large portion of its stake in Apple.

Net income more than doubled from a year earlier to $10.1bn. Berkshire’s preferred measure of profitability, the operating earnings of its hundreds of subsidiaries, rose 18 per cent year-on-year to $11.3bn.

Those figures strip out the price movements in Berkshire’s stock portfolio, which US accounting rules dictate the company must report in its net profit figure.

The results come hours before Abel takes the stage at the company’s annual meeting, an event sometimes referred to as the “Woodstock for capitalists”.

Abel replaced longtime Berkshire chief executive Warren Buffett at the helm of the company earlier this year.

In classic Berkshire style, at this weekend’s gathering the company was selling novelty cards adorned with Abel’s and Buffett’s faces and the phrase “Card Carrying Capitalist”. They cost: $2, with the proceeds going to the non-profit organisation Girls Inc.

The event, which takes over an arena and exhibition hall in downtown Omaha, has attracted tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders.

On Friday afternoon Abel walked through the convention area, where dozens of Berkshire subsidiaries including chocolatier See’s Candies and the BNSF railroad had stands to sell products and meet shareholders.

The company’s rodent control business, Bell Laboratories, was selling limited-edition rat traps branded with the Berkshire Hathaway name.

Security guards flanked Abel as he stopped to take pictures and hear from shareholders.

Dan Sheridan, the chief executive of Berkshire subsidiary Brooks Running, said the question for most of those gathered in Omaha was how the transition from Buffett to Abel was progressing and whether the new chief executive was deviating from his predecessor.

“It’s the question of the weekend: How’s the transition going?” he said. “Greg is his own man. He’s going to make changes. I don’t know what those are, but I can tell you initially it’s been very consistent with how he led in his other roles.”

The Iran war has disrupted the global fertilizer market. Barron’s sizes up where these agricultural stocks could be headed next.

The Iran war has triggered a sharp disruption in global fertilizer markets. Tensions in the Middle East have effectively choked off transportation through the Strait of Hormuz—a route that handles roughly one-third of the fertilizer trade. With shipping curtailed and regional gas infrastructure damaged, both production and transport of key nutrients have been constrained, creating a supply shock in already tight markets.

Nitrogen fertilizers have been hit the hardest as costs of natural gas—a key input—have soared. Prices have risen 30% to 50% since the conflict began. Phosphate prices have also moved higher, though less dramatically, as exports from the Persian Gulf and the supply of sulfur—critical for phosphate production—have been disrupted. Potash, by contrast, has been largely insulated since it’s mostly produced outside the Middle East.

The shock has rippled through the farm supply chain. Fertilizer producers such as CF Industries Holdings, Nutrien, and Mosaic are the clearest beneficiaries, but the impact isn’t uniform. Each company’s exposure depends on the nutrients it produces and how much input costs eat into margins. That helps explain why the three stocks have diverged noticeably over the past two months.

For other agricultural companies, the picture is more mixed. When fertilizer gets expensive, farmers tend to focus on getting more out of every acre, which can drive demand for higher-yield seeds, chemical use, and precision technologies—benefiting companies like Corteva and. But if rising costs start to squeeze farm income too much, that support can fade, as farmers pull back on other spending to conserve cash.

What’s more, meatpackers like Tyson Foods could face headwinds if higher fertilizer prices lead to more expensive animal feed and increase the costs of raising chickens and hogs. This would come when meat processors are already struggling with losses in the beef business due to record high cattle prices.

Barron’s took a look at six agricultural stocks that could be affected by higher fertilizer prices, and asked Wall Street analysts where they might head to next. Investors should choose with caution.

CF Industries Holdings mainly produces nitrogen fertilizers such as ammonia and urea, whose prices have risen sharply since early March. Compared with producers overseas, lower natural-gas costs in the U.S. have helped the company expand its margins significantly.

But much of the upside may already be reflected in the stock. Shares are up 61% year to date and near record highs. Near-term trading is likely to track Iran-related headlines and energy prices and investors should expect volatility, says Morgan Stanley analyst Vincent Andrews.

Mizuho analyst Edlain Rodriguez believes nitrogen prices likely won’t go up much more from here since farmers won’t be able to afford them. “While it’s thrilling to be on the roller coaster, knowing when to get off is also part of the adventure,” he says.

Nutrien runs a more diversified business, with nitrogen fertilizers and potash each contributing roughly a third of its profits. Its potash supply—largely produced in Canada—has been insulated from the Iran conflict, positioning the company as a relative safe haven.

“Investors are holding Nutrien to avoid exposure to the volatility,” says Oppenheimer analyst Kristen Owen.

The stock has been largely flat since tensions escalated as some investors worry that higher nitrogen costs could crowd out spending on other inputs. Rodriguez believes concerns are overdone, noting that potash demand should remain resilient given its lower cost compared with nitrogen and phosphate.

Mosaic’s core business is phosphate and potash fertilizers, and the stock has lost 16% since the Iran conflict. Although phosphate prices have risen, costs of inputs like sulfur and ammonia have increased as well.

Supply of sulfur—a byproduct of oil and gas production—is particularly tight due to shipping disruptions and reduced production in the Persian Gulf, which came as exports from Russia and Ukraine were already constrained.

“This is something that doesn’t change overnight even if there’s a cease-fire,” Owen says.

Higher ammonia and sulfur costs will weigh on phosphate margins, Andrews says, noting that Mosaic has already shut a phosphate facility in Brazil.

Corteva sells seeds under brands like Pioneer and crop-protection chemicals such as herbicides and insecticides. While there is potential pressure on crop-protection sales due to farmers’ tight budgets, the seed business likely won’t be impacted.

“We tend not to see farmers skimp on seeds,” Andrews says. “If you buy low-quality seeds, you’re putting a ceiling on how productive your land can be.”

Some investors worry that a shift from corn to soybeans—where seed margins are lower—could hurt Corteva. Owen thinks the risk is limited, as many farmers locked in fertilizer purchases last fall and are unlikely to alter planting plans significantly.

Rodriguez believes Corteva is the best-positioned agricultural name due to its seed portfolio. The company’s planned split later this year will carve out its seed and crop-protection units, a move that could unlock additional value of the higher-quality seed business.

Agricultural machinery makers tend to see big-ticket purchases such as tractors and combines shrink as high fertilizer costs eat into farm income. Despite substantial government aid in recent years, surveys suggest farmers are more likely to spend those money on crop inputs and debt repayment than on machinery.

Nevertheless, Owen noted that expensive fertilizers could encourage the adoption of precision technologies that improve efficiency and boost yields, especially those bought separately as a retrofit that costs less than new equipment. AGCO is better positioned, she says, given its focus on retrofit technologies and exposure to the European market, which has seen more stable farm income than the North American counterparts.

Some farmers might reduce fertilizer application due to high costs, which could threaten yields in the fall, driving up crop and animal feed prices. That means meatpackers like Tyson Foods would face rising costs for chickens and hogs, which are primarily fed with corn and soybeans. This could squeeze Tyson’s margins if it can’t pass those costs onto consumers.

The company’s beef segment has already been losing money in recent quarters. Tight cattle supply—driven by years of drought and herd reduction—has pushed up cattle costs sharply, squeezing meatpackers’ beef margins. Chicken has been Tyson’s profit engine; now that might also face margin pressure at an already difficult time.

Apple Boosts Starting Price for Mac Mini After AI Demand Surge

Chief Executive Tim Cook has said desktop computers likely to face supply-demand imbalance for several months

Apple AAPL 3.24%increase; green up pointing triangle raised the starting price of its Mac Mini computer a day after Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company is struggling to meet demand.

The entry level desktop computer now starts at $799, and comes with 512 gigabytes of storage. Previously Apple AAPL 3.24%increase; green up pointing triangle sold a version for $599 that came with 256 gigabytes.

Mac Minis have been flying off Apple’s shelves in recent months thanks in part to demand from AI power users for whom it is the must-have computer for private, “always-on” artificial-intelligence agents, such as OpenClaw. Apple’s website says orders placed today will be delivered in early-to-mid June.

Cook told investors Thursday that Apple has been unable to get as many chips as it needs to make as many devices as customers want to buy. In the March quarter, that was mostly related to iPhone models, he said, but in the current quarter it is having a bigger impact on Mac sales.

“We think, looking forward, that the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance,” Cook said.

While AI demand is helping power Mac Mini sales, it is also cutting into supplies: Rival companies are getting a bigger share of the fastest chips being made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, limiting Apple’s supply and its ability to make iPhones as fast as people want to buy them. Cook said on the earnings call that continues to be a problem after he cited it last quarter.

Removing entry level storage tiers for its devices is a tactic Apple has used to, in effect, raise prices for its products. The iPhone 17 Pro model cost $100 more than the prior year’s Pro model, but came with more storage.

The Mac Mini and more expensive Mac Studio are square desktop computers that have no monitor or attached keyboard.

Besides lack of chip supply, Apple is also contending with skyrocketing prices for memory and storage, which are key components inside its smartphones, computers, and tablets. Tech companies building out massive data centers need both memory and storage to power their AI infrastructure.

Apple said in February that it was working with Foxconn to open a new assembly line in Houston for Mac Mini computers in order to meet local demand.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the removal of the lower storage tier Mac Mini, and pointed to Cook’s comments from yesterday’s earnings call.

Potential presidential candidates are already looking to build a donor network ahead of formally entering the race next year

The 2028 Democratic presidential primary race won’t begin in earnest until after November’s midterm elections. But speed dating is already well under way among prospective candidates and major donors on Wall Street and elsewhere.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are among those who have met with wealthy investors and financiers in recent months.

The flirtations are risky. Wall Street and wealth are viewed with great suspicion among many of the progressives likely to play a significant role in picking the party’s nominee, and taxing the rich and bashing capitalism have become a rallying cry for many of them. Wall Street has nonetheless long been a significant source of money for the party, and that will continue to be the case in this year’s midterm election and in 2028.

With no clear standard-bearer, many Democrats anticipate a crowded primary field that could grow as large as, if not larger, than the 2019-20 lineup of more than two dozen candidates—and potential 2028 contenders are looking for early advantages. The early meetings with donors are happening quietly, including over meals near Wall Street and in Midtown conference rooms. They are also playing out in Silicon Valley and other U.S. wealth centers.

Some power players in the finance and business world are putting together a new Wall Street-heavy donor group to hold private listening sessions with potential candidates, according to people familiar with the matter.

Centerview Partners co-founder Blair Effron; Joshua Steiner, a partner at investment firm SSW Partners; former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who is now chairman of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus; Blackstone Vice Chairman Tom Nides; and former Oracle President Charles Phillips are among the executives that are part of the group, the people said. One of the goals for some of the organizers is for a younger generation of financiers to have the chance to meet with candidates and for them to potentially help raise campaign cash. The group has been meeting since late last year to discuss the 2028 Democratic field.

Effron, a longtime bridge between Wall Street and Democrats, has played a central fundraising role in multiple presidential elections.

Emanuel, who has had his own stints working for Wall Street, including becoming a senior adviser at Centerview after returning to the U.S. in 2025 from his Japan ambassadorship, has been among the potential presidential contenders already engaging with longtime business community acquaintances about a bid.

During the first half of April, Emanuel huddled with four veteran investors to make his case for a potential presidential run. Over boxed lunches in a Midtown office, he noted that Trump and Republicans’ favorability ratings have tumbled in recent polling. That discontent, he said, could provide an opening for a more moderate voice like his to unite Democrats and defeat the Republican nominee.

Among those at the lunch: hedge-fund manager John Petry and Boykin Curry, a former managing director at investment firm Eagle Capital. Petry, whom Emanuel said he first met about three months ago, is a major Democratic donor who has backed former Vice President Kamala Harris and numerous House and Senate candidates and allied committees.

“John Petry reached out to me and said, ‘I love what you are saying about education. Would you meet?’” Emanuel, a longtime party fundraiser, recounted. He said of the donors he met with for lunch, “I’m the only person they haven’t contributed to.” Petry and Curry confirmed the meeting.

The former White House chief of staff and congressman has also spoken with Avenue Capital CEO Marc Lasry, someone he has been close to for more than two decades, about possibly running for president, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Emanuel, who is flooding his party with proposals as he seeks to influence the Democratic policy debate, has called for, among other things, a mandatory retirement age of 75 for presidents, cabinet officials, members of Congress and federal judges.

Kelly, a former astronaut, sat down recently for a dinner in New York with a party fundraiser and attorney who specializes in corporate bankruptcies, according to a person familiar with the matter. His message was clear: He is seriously considering running for president in a field that is likely to be sizable. A Kelly spokesman pointed to his past remarks about contemplating a presidential bid and declined to comment further.

The dinner, on the sidelines of Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention, is the sort of meeting most of the prospective candidates will need to have in the coming months to build early support for presidential bids likely to be announced during the first half of 2027.

Beshear said in a meeting with a Chicago-based Democratic fundraiser that he believes the 2028 election needs to feature Democrats who better appeal to middle-class voters, adding that candidates need to have concrete policies that can improve people’s lives, according to the person who met with him. The fundraiser, a securities lawyer, said Beshear didn’t rule out running for president.

Beshear has political cover for ramping up his donor meetings. He is this year’s Democratic Governors Association chairman and one of that job’s primary roles is to raise money for his party’s 2026 races for governor. A Beshear aide declined to comment.

Shapiro also met with Lasry last year, according to a person familiar with the matter. An aide to Shapiro, who recently published a new memoir ahead of a possible presidential bid, declined to comment.

Like Beshear, Shapiro has potential reasons besides 2028 to increase his meetings with donors. He is up for re-election this year in a large and costly state and is also working to help other Pennsylvania Democrats running for office.

One potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who might not have to as aggressively court big-donor money is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. The billionaire, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, is running for a third term this year and spent more than $300 million to self-fund his first two gubernatorial campaigns. Aides didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The consternation over Trump’s rise and lingering frustration over Harris’s loss has triggered extensive early planning among wealthy donors ahead of the presidential election.

The talks among wealthy Democratic donors about the state of the 2028 race were top of mind earlier this year during Democratic National Committee’s spring donor retreat in Park City, Utah, according to an attendee.

At the meeting, wealthy donors started putting together a list of potential candidates based on private conversations and public comments. With no incumbent or obvious front-runner, the future field could include as many as two dozen contenders, ranging from governors to former cabinet secretaries and members of the House and Senate.

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate.

At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?

We also talked about Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers.

On the question of independence, Masad was firm. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if he stopped short of ruling out a sale entirely.

The following has been edited for length and clarity:

TC: Cursor’s reported SpaceX deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you make of it?

AM: It’s kind of hard being an independent, smaller AI company that’s building on foundation models, especially if you’re burning a ton of cash. Part of the reporting suggested Cursor has negative 23% margins, and if you’re also wanting to invest in training models, that makes it incredibly hard to stay independent.

For us at Replit, partly because we target a different customer set, we’ve been able to run the business more rationally. We’ve been gross margin positive for over a year. We’re slightly more expensive, but we provide a lot more. Our audience tends to be mostly non-technical users who previously haven’t been able to create any software. We provide an end-to-end platform — from the prompt all the way to a deployed application that can scale. We handle security, databases, database migration. And we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve built a lot of those primitives into the platform.

Is Replit for sale? I would assume you are talking with potential acquirers all the time; it’s your fiduciary responsibility.

Yeah. We have amazing partners, and they sometimes bring up these topics. But we’re going to try to stay independent. I would love for us to remain an independent company. We’ve been around for 10 years, before it was even accepted that you could make apps just from ideas. We were talking about creating a billion software creators back in 2018 at YC, and people sometimes actually laughed at that dream. Now that dream is possible, and we kicked off this revolution with our agentic coding experience in September 2024. It just feels like we can take it much further.

You work closely with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. If you had to rank them — who’s doing it best?

Anthropic is still undefeated on the core agentic loop. They have the best tool calling; the agent can stay coherent much longer. GPT-5 is catching up quickly. Google’s Flash family of models is just amazing on price-performance. If you want something fast and cheap, they’re actually beating open source right now. We use all three, and honestly I wouldn’t discount the newer labs either. Reflection AI is coming out with open-source models we’re hearing great things about. And the Chinese models are impressive — Kimi is as good as an Anthropic-generation model from January, so it’s only about three months behind.

When you’re in a bake-off for an enterprise deal, what wins it for you?

Most of our sales are inbound or organic — very product-led. We’ve acquired customers like Zillow and Meta purely through people adopting the product and then raising their hand to buy an enterprise plan. When it does go top-down and there’s a formal bake-off, we usually win on product. But even in cases where we might be missing a feature, once it hits the C-suite and the IT group, Replit wins on security. A lot of vibe-coding tools will generate a website and connect it to an external database — great products, but it makes security much harder, because the database is open to the public and you need to configure row-level security, which is especially difficult for non-technical builders. Replit being full stack, with the database built into the project and not open to the public — that makes the app inherently more secure.

We also spent 10 years battling crypto scammers and hackers, so our cybersecurity function is as good as a dedicated cybersecurity startup. Every time you deploy an app on Replit, we create an entirely new isolated project on Google Cloud. We inherit Google’s security model.

Can we talk about churn? How long do you hold onto customers if the best prototypes eventually get rebuilt into a company’s existing stack?

Churn is very, very low, and net retention is incredibly high — 300% in some cases. What we actually hear from customers is that when engineers get nervous and try to rebuild an app into their own stack, they often make it worse. Once enterprises get comfortable with the full Replit stack — especially when we set up a single-tenant environment for them — they keep the apps on Replit. Bain & Company, for example, replaced Tableau and Power BI with Replit and Databricks.

There’s a growing concern about AI bloat — non-technical users generate far more code and burn through far more tokens. That’s good for you [given your usage-based fees]. What about your customers?

We don’t have a lot of regrettable spend. Enterprises are very ROI conscious, and they tell us about the returns they’re getting. For the most part they feel the investment is totally worth it — often one, two, three orders of magnitude. If they spend $100,000 a month with Replit, they’re usually generating $2 million, $3 million, $10 million in some kind of return.

Let’s talk about Apple. Another rival, Lovable, just got an app-building app approved by the App Store this week. Replit has been in App Store purgatory, with Apple blocking your updates for months. How much does that hurt you?

It’s not life or death — we could lose the app and it wouldn’t do anything meaningful to our business. But it’s an app people genuinely love. We’ve been on the App Store for four years. Kids in underprivileged communities learn to code on Replit on their Android devices. Executives use it in meetings.

The reason Replit got blocked when others weren’t, we believe, is that Replit makes iOS apps. When we launched that capability in December, there were charts going around showing how many apps were getting into the App Store through us. We think Apple feels threatened by that.

Apple’s stated reason is that you’re downloading new code to the device [after the approval process], which violates their guidelines.

That’s a lie. And we can prove it in court if we have to.

Is that going to happen?

I hope not. I’m a fan of Apple, and I’d love to collaborate and build something great together. We’re happy to send customers to Xcode [Apple’s own development environment]. But you can’t run a marketplace that a billion people have access to and make decisions that are discriminatory or based on whims.

Just wondering if, like Nvidia, OpenAI and others, you’re thinking about investing in your own customers in exchange for equity.

We’ve thought a lot about it, and it is a consideration. I’ve personally invested in a few startups that started on Replit before they made any money. Some of them, like Magic School — a teacher decided to take his time during COVID to learn a little bit of vibe coding and built an AI app for other teachers. He found this problem that in America, we burn out a lot of teachers. He wanted to use AI to reduce the workload. He did that, and he made $20 million in the first year. Other companies that started on Replit, I think, are valued at half a billion dollars. The entrepreneurship happening on Replit right now is genuinely exciting. We integrated with Stripe a few months ago, and the transactions flowing through Replit are growing triple digits month over month. Pretty soon, our customers will be making more revenue than we are.

Meta has acquired humanoid robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI) for an undisclosed sum, the social media giant said.

“We acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a company at the frontier of robotic intelligence designed to enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human behaviors in complex and dynamic environments,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in an emailed statement.

ARI’s team, including its co-founders, will join Meta’s AI unit, the Superintelligence Labs research division. ARI had raised an undisclosed seed round from AI seed firm AIX Ventures.

The startup was building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform all types of physical labor such as household chores. Co-founder Xiaolong Wang was previously a researcher at Nvidia, and an associate professor at UC San Diego, with a list of prestigious awards to his name. Co-founder Lerrel Pinto, who previously taught at NYU and co-founded the kid-size humanoid startup Fauna Robotics before Amazon snapped it up last month, has also won a string of prestigious awards.

ARI will help Meta with its humanoid ambitions. “This team, led by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang, will bring a deep expertise in how we can design our models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole-body humanoid control.”

Meta researchers have been working on humanoid robotics tech for years. A leaked memo from a year ago discussed Meta’s ambitions to build such a robot, including AI models and hardware, aimed at consumers.

Even if Meta never releases a consumer humanoid product, many AI experts these days believe that the path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the theoretical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human-level intelligence across all domains — will require training AI models in the physical world, where robots learn through direct interaction rather than data alone.

The ARI and Fauna deals reflect a broader industry sprint — one where forecasts vary wildly, from Goldman Sachs’ projection of $38 billion by 2035 to Morgan Stanley’s estimate of $5 trillion by 2050 — a spread that reflects both the enormous potential and the uncertainty around tech that’s still finding its footing.

Although the U.S. already has 3,000 data centers, more than 1,500 new ones are in various stages of being built, according to Pew Research, most of them in rural areas. The frenzy is enticing land speculation and data center financing projects from lots of players, ranging from Blackstone to Kevin O’Leary from “Shark Tank.”