TheChek News Flow

Virginia’s Loudoun County is a giant data-center market thanks in part to a radio DJ-turned county executive director for economic development

ASHBURN, Va.—Loudoun County’s growth into a mecca for one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in American history kicked into gear when Buddy Rizer taped a list of companies to his office door.

The housing crash was hammering local government finances in 2008. Rizer, a radio DJ-turned county executive director for economic development, bet big on a rebound in the form of a seemingly arcane tech-industry need: data centers.

Rizer jetted to the West Coast with the list as his guide, pitching Loudoun County to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook with a simple but compelling idea. “The first rule is to make it easy for people to spend money,” he said recently.

The door-knocking helped set off the suburban Washington, D.C., community’s growth into the world’s largest data-center market over the nearly two decades since, attracting hyperscalers like Alphabet and smaller developers such as DataBank. As Silicon Valley now funnels untold riches into server farms around the country, Rizer said, “I wait for those guys to call me.”

The race to dominate artificial intelligence has created a financial superstructure of eye-watering corporate valuations, massive capital-expenditure plans, risky Wall Street trades and convoluted debt deals. Much of it hinges on something decidedly low tech: the ability to build data centers as fast as humanly possible—and all the dealmaking, zoning and permitting that it entails.

That has turned the relationships between thinly staffed local governments and the world’s richest corporations into a high-stakes dance. Tax breaks and local revenues are on the line. Data centers’ voracious energy needs hold the potential to upend power markets spanning entire regions and push up residents’ bills. Public opinion in some areas is turning sharply against developers, who create few permanent jobs.

Annual spending on data centers zoomed past $42 billion in recent months, according to the Census Bureau, making it one of the few types of construction set to increase in 2026. In communities striving for investment, the flood of money is adding to local governments’ sense of urgency to decide if the increasingly controversial industry should set up shop.

“It’s the gold rush right now,” said Chris Pumphrey, former president of the Elevate Douglas Economic Partnership, a public-private organization west of Atlanta.

After Pumphrey in recent years helped turn the warehousing hub of Douglas County into a magnet for data centers, he saw a surge in pleas for advice from local officials elsewhere. “Every community is different,” said Pumphrey, who has started informally consulting counterparts on the development. “At the end of the day, you have to have your economic priorities and also know those priorities shift.”

East of Columbus, Ohio, where New Albany has become another data-center hot spot, community development director Jennifer Chrysler last year gave so many presentations to out-of-town peers that it strained her small staff.

Negotiating financial incentives with deep-pocketed developers is a key part of the job. So is ensuring deals align with New Albany’s broader planning standards and goals, she said, adding: “It’s either take it or leave it.”

‘The Godfather of Data Centers’

In Virginia, Rizer has become the poster child of these unlikely power brokers by virtue of Loudoun County’s growth.

A data-center publication in 2024 sold an event as an “unforgettable evening” with Rizer, whom it labeled “The Godfather of Data Centers.” A conference that year advertised a cocktail reception in which the former radio DJ, “for one night only, is trading spreadsheets for beats,” with music “guaranteed to be booming like the Northern Virginia economy!”

There was even an episode of “Law & Order: Organized Crime” about a murder near a Loudoun County data center. A character named “Danny Lizer” made an appearance. So did a face-eating octopus. The money lines: “Whoever is giving out those permits is a VIP…Unless they’re dead.”

“Data-center celebrities are a little different than meeting Steven Tyler or Gwen Stefani or something,” Rizer said. He would know: His team’s 2025 report featured a photo of the Aerosmith frontman mugging alongside Rizer in his past life.

Not everyone is star-struck. As Wall Street and Washington bet big on the AI boom, national Democrats have increasingly viewed the infrastructure build-out with caution. Many communities are considering restrictions on the type of development that fueled Loudoun County’s ascendance.

“Buddy saw an opportunity and took it,” said Virginia Delegate John McAuliff, whose district partially overlaps with Loudoun County.

Elected last year as a data-center skeptic, the Democrat doesn’t fault Rizer for all of the subsequent concerns around data centers, including their potential to boost power costs. Surging demand from server farms has pushed the surrounding region’s electric-grid operator to the brink of a supply crisis.

Newly elected Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger staked her agenda in part on arresting a climb in energy costs. At the same time, McAuliff hopes to increase statewide oversight of deals struck between companies and local officials.

“It’s not their job to think about the state impact of their decisions,” McAuliff said. “That is the way we’ve set up our world, and I don’t necessarily know if it’s the right way.”

“Data Center Alley” didn’t sprout from nothing. Loudoun County was already home to extensive underground cable and an internet exchange point, even drawing AOL’s headquarters in the 1990s. That infrastructure gave data centers the ability to transmit information at high speeds.

The AOL campus has largely been razed, in part to make way for the new digital economy. Nearby streets are lined with about 200 data-center buildings, their roughly 49 million square feet the equivalent of approximately 850 football fields. While the structures have few windows or signs of human life, they are chock-full of computers running AI applications, processing credit-card transactions and churning through other business data around the clock.

Corporate America’s shift to cloud computing and AI has increasingly fueled a construction spree that officials say hasn’t skipped a day in 15 years. So did a Virginia state sales-and-use tax exemption that ballooned to about $1.6 billion statewide last year, according to advocacy group Good Jobs First.

Rizer played down the need for additional incentives in Loudoun County, instead pointing to policies that made it an easy place to build.

A nuance in local laws helped developers construct data centers in areas zoned as office parks without input from the elected board of supervisors. Officials also approved a fast-track process that centralized many permitting powers within Rizer’s office.

“I wanted to control it. I wanted to make sure it was done right,” Rizer said. “We are a department of yes. We’re not a regulator.”

The benefits of the boom are clear. About 45% of county revenue comes from data centers, while Rizer estimates real property taxes are down 48 cents on the dollar.

Even so, as data centers elbowed into residential areas, complaints about noise and more pushed officials to tighten oversight. Projects now face a vote by the county board in an expanded review.

“Standard time, from start to finish, is probably in the neighborhood of two years, which is not a big deal because we’re not going to get power for seven years,” said Board of Supervisors Vice-Chair Mike Turner. The traditional power grid “is never going to catch up,” Turner added, a view Rizer doesn’t share.

Rizer doesn’t believe that data centers’ energy needs are currently pushing up Virginians’ bills, though he allows that they could in the future if not managed correctly. How to meet that demand is one of the key questions for officials elsewhere weighing whether to follow his lead.

While the 64-year-old believes Loudoun County will max out its land available for data centers in the coming years, he isn’t getting out of the game. Last year, he joined developer Avaio Digital Partners as an adviser. Rizer said he would leave the company if it ever had a project in northern Virginia to avoid conflicts of interest.

“I’m an evangelist for smart economic development,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a data-center evangelist in all instances. There are plenty of communities that come and talk to me and I tell them, ‘It’s probably not for you.”

AI leader and its partners hope to make PCs lighter and thinner while keeping long battery life

Nvidia NVDA 1.02%increase; green up pointing triangle chips for laptop computers are set to hit the market this year in products from Dell, Lenovo and others, a return to the consumer PC market for the leader in artificial-intelligence chips.

The world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, Nvidia isn’t expecting big profit soon from getting its chips into everyday PCs, but analysts said it wanted to keep a connection with consumers in an era when every device will be AI-enabled.

“This isn’t just about supplying certain chips or making better parts. Instead, this is about Nvidia becoming more integrated into the next-generation PC ecosystem,” said Jason Tsai, deputy director of Taiwan-based research firm Digitimes.

Nvidia and its partners hope to make PCs lighter and thinner while keeping long battery life. Analysts said that would allow hardware running Microsoft’s Windows operating system to compete more directly with Apple’s latest MacBook models.

For the PC chip, Nvidia has two collaborations: one with Intel, which was announced last year, and a second with Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek, which was informally disclosed by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang during a trip to Taiwan in January.

Nvidia’s new PC processors are designed to be what’s known as a system-on-a-chip. They integrate a central processor with the powerful graphics processing units for which the company is famous. GPUs are the chips that power AI models.

The system-on-a-chip is standard in smartphones such as the iPhone but not yet widespread in PCs. The Nvidia chip aims to provide PCs with the kind of efficiency and battery life typically associated with mobile devices, without sacrificing performance. Huang described it as “low power but very powerful.”

Microsoft and Nvidia haven’t said when PCs with Nvidia chips would be available or which brands would sell them.

People familiar with Nvidia’s supply chain said PC makers including Dell Technologies and Lenovo were working with the chip maker on models using the Nvidia-MediaTek system-on-a-chip, which is built on architecture from U.K. chip designer Arm. The first PCs with the chip could come in the first half of this year, they said.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is working with Intel, which controls about 70% of the market for chips running Windows PCs. The chips in the collaboration would integrate Intel’s central processing units, or CPUs, with Nvidia graphics and AI technology.

Fewer consumers are paying attention to PCs these days in a tech world dominated by talk of AI and smartphones, but laptops are still a big business. Nvidia’s Huang has observed that roughly 150 million laptops are sold each year, explaining why the area is worth his attention.

“There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated,” he said last September. “That segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today.”

Nvidia isn’t new to the system-on-a-chip business. Its processors have powered devices such as Nintendo’s Switch videogame console and earlier versions of Microsoft’s Surface tablets.

More recently, Nvidia focused on GPUs for videogames and AI. In recent years, Nvidia’s growth has been driven overwhelmingly by sales of GPUs for training and using AI models.

One target of the Nvidia PC chip will be videogamers, who are willing to pay a premium for hardware and are familiar with Nvidia as a leader in graphics chips.

For the Nvidia-MediaTek collaboration, the challenge will be making the PCs compatible with high-end games and other applications originally designed for the Intel standard.

The Arm architecture used by the Nvidia-MediaTek team has proved troublesome for gamers. In 2024, Microsoft rolled out new AI PCs with chips from Qualcomm using designs from Arm. Many gamers complained they couldn’t play their favorite games on those PCs.

“If this new all-in-one chip can push a standard laptop past today’s top-tier gaming rigs, gamers will be rushing to buy it,” said Larry Xie, a 41-year-old veteran gamer.

Tsai of Digitimes said Nvidia would need to keep the price of PCs built around its chip to the $1,000-$1,500 range. Otherwise, he said, “it may remain a niche luxury product.”

Militant group calls Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa a western ‘puppet without a soul’

Isis has called Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa a “puppet without a soul” controlled by the west and vowed to continue attacks in the country, in a rare audio recording released on Saturday night.

Syria joined the international coalition to defeat Isis last year after Sharaa met US President Donald Trump at the White House. A former Islamist militant group leader, Sharaa has sought to cultivate a broad base of international allies since taking power by toppling the Assad regime in late 2024.

In the recording, an Isis spokesperson identified as Abu Huzayfah al-Ansari called on followers to fight against the Syrian authorities, describing the new government and military as apostates who were ruled by “crusaders”.

“They thought they had turned the page of jihad in Syria . . . rather, Syria has entered a new chapter”, the spokesperson said. He characterised Sharaa’s overthrow of Assad as a Turkish and American farce.

The UN reported in early February that Sharaa was assessed to be a priority target of Isis. It said five assassination attempts were foiled in 2025 against Sharaa and his interior minister and foreign minister.

The unusual audio recording, which was reported by newswires, followed the flight of thousands of Isis-linked detainees from camps in north-eastern Syria this month. Mostly the families of Isis members, they have spread out around the country and are largely unaccounted for.

The US also transferred 5,700 suspected Isis prisoners from Syrian camps to Iraq between January 21 and February 12.

Isis militants were driven out of their last strongholds more than six years ago, having once held a swath of land in Iraq and Syria that was about the size of Britain. But the group maintains cells in Syria that have continued to carry out attacks.

In December, an Isis ambush in the Syrian city of Palmyra killed two US soldiers and an American interpreter. In response, the US said it had launched hundreds of strikes on Isis targets across the country over the past two months.

On Saturday, the Syrian Ministry of Defense said its forces had been targeted by unknown attackers in the Raqqa countryside, killing a soldier and a civilian.

America is becoming a petrostate

The Trump administration’s energy policy will make the country sicker and poorer

The US is once again going where no rich country has gone before. Earlier this month, the White House topped off a year of regulatory rollbacks around climate change by repealing the “endangerment finding,” which is the rule that allows the Environmental Protection Agency to curb carbon emissions because of their health consequences.

President Donald Trump heralds this as great news for the US economy, energy security, the fossil fuel industry and the people who work in it, like the coal miners he welcomed to the White House earlier this month after signing an executive order requiring the Department of War (it pains me to write that) to use more coal power. The truth is that it is none of those things. Trump’s war on clean energy is going to make America sicker and poorer.

Let’s start with the fact that the administration’s sabotage of existing federal tax credits for electric vehicles, clawbacks of already funded grants and loans for clean energy projects, and cuts to federal fuel efficiency mandates are costing Detroit $50bn. That’s the amount of writedowns being taken by the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Stellantis — since they are now being disincentivised to move into EVs.

But that number, large though it is, doesn’t begin to capture all the costs to the federal flip flops on both the demand and investment side of the transportation business, which is the largest single source of greenhouse gas in the US.

The BlueGreen Alliance, an association of labour unions and environmental groups, put out research last year estimating that the repeal of the clean energy manufacturing tax credit alone puts over 2mn jobs at risk in places like Arizona, Kentucky, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia, which were starting to benefit from a clean energy-related manufacturing investment boom.

That boom is already turning to bust. Manufacturing jobs have fallen under Trump, who promised to bring industrial work back to the US. Research firm Rhodium Group estimates that $22bn in planned EV, battery and critical mineral investment has dried up.

Meanwhile, workers in fossil fuel-dependent states who had been successfully and painfully transitioned to jobs in clean tech are getting laid off. This past December, for example, Ford shut a huge battery facility in Kentucky, a coal state, firing 1,600 workers in a place where state and local government had spent $250mn to lure the new business in.

Some workers may get pushed back into coal mining. If so, they will not be protected by the stronger silica standard endorsed by the Biden administration. That was an effort to eradicate the black lung disease that a fifth of veteran coal miners now have from using the more powerful machinery needed to reach coal in mature mines as it becomes harder to extract, kicking up more silica dust.

The Trump administration paused enforcement of the standard amid a restructuring of numerous federal agencies that resulted in thousands of labour and health workers losing their jobs. “The guy who says he’s a champion of coal miners literally doesn’t care whether they live or die,” points out BlueGreen Alliance executive director Jason Walsh.

I could go on, but you get the idea. While the White House lauds the money saved from regulatory cuts, public health and environmental advocates are worried about the hundreds of thousands of premature deaths linked to climate change in the pre-regulatory era we seem to be regressing to. People in Mississippi worried about pollution from an influx of Venezuelan oil expected to hit a Chevron refinery in their community are asking the oil company to buy their homes. As China serves up cheap solar panels to emerging markets, America is becoming one.

The immediate costs I’ve laid out are just the beginning. For the US automobile industry, stagnation is now the best possible outcome. Even if we get a post-2028 rollback of Trump’s rollbacks, that will put America years behind China, which clearly owns the clean energy future.

The legal battles over all this have begun (the first lawsuit over the endangerment rule was filed last week, adding to many others). The lack of certainty resulting from ongoing legal action is itself a huge impediment to foreign investment, not just in the transport sector, but in the supply chain that serves it.

One wonders what risk premium might be put on a nation with less interest in high-growth industries, as well as dirtier water and air, especially at a time when the insurance industry wants to push more costs from climate-related disasters on to companies, banks and governments themselves. Premiums that have already risen by high double digits in some places are likely to rise more. Overall borrowing costs for those investing in the US might too.

Beyond this, I must wonder if America’s utter abdication of any responsibility for global warming will someday come back to bite in the form of retaliatory tariffs or financial sanctions placed on the US by other countries. What’s to stop a group of nations with record climate-related economic losses from eventually penalising the US, just as America has penalised nations that support terrorism? The costs — both human and economic — of the former are already far higher.

China and Russia have forged closer ties with Tehran but have shown little willingness to provide military aid in a conflict with the U.S.

Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward.

Russia and Iran conducted small-scale joint naval training in the Gulf of Oman, a show of force dwarfed by the U.S. firepower assembled in the region.

Beijing shares with Tehran a desire to counter U.S. power but fears that aligning too closely with the Islamic Republic could jeopardize its relations in the Persian Gulf region.

Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.

Russia and Iran conducted small-scale joint naval training in the Gulf of Oman this past week, a show of force dwarfed by the U.S. firepower assembled in the region at sea and on land. An exercise involving ships from China, as well as Russia and Iran, is planned to take place soon in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state media.

Iran has also sought to rebuild its missile stockpile, air defenses and other capabilities with help from both China and Russia, according to analysts, after those elements of its military power were battered in a 12-day war against Israel and the U.S. in June.

But Beijing and Moscow have shown little willingness to provide direct military assistance if President Trump does order an attack on Iran, analysts said.

“They’re not going to sacrifice their own interests for the Iranian regime,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence official and now a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “They are hoping the regime will not be toppled, but they are definitely not going to counter the U.S. militarily.”

For Beijing, aligning too openly with Tehran risks damaging a critical relationship with Trump, who is scheduled to travel to China in March for a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China is Iran’s biggest oil customer and an important market preventing its heavily sanctioned economy from collapsing. Beijing shares with Tehran a desire to counter U.S. power but fears that aligning too closely with the Islamic Republic could jeopardize its relations in the Persian Gulf region, according to analysts.

For Moscow, the calculation is similar but even more urgent: Not alienating Trump and driving him close to Ukraine takes precedence over helping Tehran.

When Trump in his first term exited the 2015 deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program negotiated by the Obama administration, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly endorsed closer relations with Moscow and Beijing. “We should look East, not West,” Khamenei told a group of academics in 2018.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which had emerged as an increasingly powerful voice within the Iranian leadership, saw Russia as a potential supplier of advanced arms and China as a source of technology. But the policy has yielded far fewer security benefits than Tehran had hoped for.

“The Iranians complain about it. They wish that the Chinese and the Russians would do more, but they also have no choice other than sticking with them because they don’t have better alternatives,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, a think tank based in Brussels.

The firepower that America has assembled in the Middle East gives Trump the option of carrying out a sustained, weekslong air war against Iran, instead of something like the one-and-done Midnight Hammer strike the U.S. carried out in June against three Iranian nuclear sites, U.S. officials said.

In contrast, a Russian navy helicopter carrier that participated in the recent drills departed when the exercise came to an end Thursday, according to Iran’s state-run news agency.

Iranian leaders have watched with alarm in recent decades as regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria toppled or nearly fell. It has seen its regional militia allies Hezbollah and Hamas decimated.

Trump is reportedly weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a step aimed at pressuring Tehran into an agreement. It would fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.

If the Iranian regime collapses under U.S. attack, Beijing “will aim to secure uninterrupted oil flows” and “cultivate influence with the successor government, particularly to prevent a realignment toward the United States,” Ryan Hass and Allie Matthias with the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argued in a recent analysis.

Iran is an important partner for Moscow and one that it wouldn’t want to lose, especially after the U.S. deposed Nicolás Maduro, an ally of Russia, in Venezuela last month. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t likely to come to the aid of Khamenei if U.S. strikes appear on the verge of bringing him down.

“These relationships are highly pragmatic, highly transactional,” said Alexander Palmer, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, on Tehran’s security ties to Russia and Iran. “They don’t have a sufficient strategic interest in Iran to be willing to go to war with the United States over the country.”

Iran is flexing its military muscles as well as it can, sending the message that its armed forces have the capability of disrupting the global oil trade and of hitting U.S. interests across the Middle East, even without assistance from Beijing and Moscow.

Naval units of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard were deployed this past week to the Strait of Hormuz. The strategic waterway connects the Persian Gulf to the wider Indian Ocean. Around a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through it.

China has sold Iran ballistic-missile components in recent years as well as component chemicals for missile fuel, according to U.S. officials and analysts. Russia is helping Tehran with equipment for jamming communications, global-positioning satellites and radio signals.

Iran bought a Russian S-300 air-defense system in 2016, but Israel and the U.S. have disabled much of Iran’s missile-defense arsenal in strikes since 2024. There is little indication that Beijing or Moscow have been rushing military hardware to Iran ahead of a possible U.S. attack, analysts said.

“All of this is below the threshold that would tilt the military balance meaningfully in favor of Iran,” said Vaez. “Once the conflict starts, they’ve demonstrated that all they’re willing to do is send their thoughts and prayers.”

Groups unable to cash out while other forms of dealmaking have returned

Top private equity buyout groups have been unable to sell Chinese portfolio companies for the second year in a row, as they struggle to cash out of their earlier investments in the world’s second-largest economy.

Ten of the biggest buyout firms with investments in China including KKR, Blackstone and CVC had zero publicly disclosed complete divestments from mainland Chinese portfolio companies in 2025, according to data from providers PitchBook and Dealogic.

Private equity globally has struggled to sell its investments and reap the blockbuster gains of the past as higher interest rates depress valuations and firms face a more mature, competitive industry.

This means companies have been unable to exit their investments and generate returns for the pension funds, family offices and sovereign wealth funds whose money they manage.

“There’s huge pressure on exits globally and the China teams are under pressure to contribute to that return of capital, so there is a backlog,” said Matthew Phillips, mainland China and Hong Kong financial services leader at PwC.

The dearth of exits underlines how China remains a challenging business environment for global investors, despite efforts by Washington and Beijing to cool tensions over trade. The stalled pipeline for private equity exits also makes it difficult for investors to recycle funds into other markets.

The data from Dealogic and PitchBook covers TPG, Warburg Pincus, Carlyle Group, Bain Capital, EQT, Advent International and Apollo as well as KKR, Blackstone and CVC — 10 of the largest buyout groups. The data does not include Blackstone real estate deals. 

Three private equity groups, one of them Warburg Pincus and two others that did not want to speak on the record, told the FT they had made partial sales of Chinese assets that were not made public in 2025. They did not provide the names of the companies. The other companies declined to comment.

Some private equity sales may not be public and the data from PitchBook and Dealogic excluded returns from venture capital-style deals in which funds took small stakes in companies that later launched initial public offerings in Hong Kong.

Given the struggle to return capital to their investors, private equity has been forced to come up with more innovative ways to “realise” gains on their investments including selling companies to themselves. Investors have also increasingly looked to sell their stakes in PE funds, in a process known as “secondary sales”.

“The China private equity ecosystem is still suffering from a severe liquidity gap,” said Paul Robine, chief executive of TR Capital, an investment firm that buys private equity funds and portfolios in Asia on the secondary market.

Asset valuations in China have sunk in recent years due to low demand, a weaker economy and fewer western investors, making it tough to realise gains on investments.

“Discounts of 40-50 per cent in Chinese funds have been common over the past two years in particular,” Robine noted. The average discount for secondary sales of European assets was 14 per cent, compared with 12 per cent for North America and 44 per cent for Asia as a whole, according to a report from Jefferies.

Yet simultaneously some of the world’s largest firms have also raised fresh pan-Asian funds. EQT said it expects its latest fund to invest across Asia to raise $14.5bn in 2026.

Buyout groups have been energised by opportunities in Japan, where corporate governance and regulatory reforms alongside a weak yen have made foreign investment more attractive, as well as in India.

There are some signs the market could turn this year, with investors keen to gain exposure to China’s roaring AI trade.

Bain in January completed the sale of its China data centre business Chindata at a valuation of $4bn to a consortium led by a Chinese industrial company and some local government funds, marking the first portfolio sale by one of the major global PE houses in at least two years.

The resurgence of interest in the Hong Kong stock market — about $35bn of listings in 2025 — has helped private capital groups including Sweden’s EQT, Warburg Pincus and Carlyle exit some smaller companies they took venture capital-style stakes in, rather than buyout investments.

EQT last year said it fully exited investments including in JD Industrials, while Carlyle recouped funds from the IPO of autonomous driving company WeRide. Both listed their shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange last year.

“I’m bullish on China and very bullish on Hong Kong,” EQT Asia chair Jean Eric Salata said at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s annual investment conference in November. 

But some market participants have expressed scepticism that PE groups can ride the IPO wave in Hong Kong to sell large companies. “I do think that for buyout deals, the capital market is not the best way to exit . . . in China,” said Stephanie Hui, head of private equity in Asia for Goldman Sachs at a private equity event in Hong Kong organised by the Hong Kong Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.

“The analogy is, if you sell on the capital markets, you actually need a lot of people to agree on that pricing,” Hui said. “But if you sell into the strategic market or even to sponsors [other private equity firms], it’s kind of like art. You just need one or two people who would like that particular price,” she added.

The bank’s settlement with a former analyst shortly before trial resolves a case that was set to examine the responsibilities of one of finance’s most-grueling jobs

Boutique investment bank Centerview Partners settled a lawsuit with former analyst Kathryn Shiber shortly before trial.

Shiber alleged Centerview illegally fired her due to a disability after she received an accommodation for mood and anxiety disorders.

The case was set to interrogate whether being available at all hours is an essential function of the demanding analyst role.

Boutique investment bank Centerview Partners agreed to settle a lawsuit with a former analyst shortly before trial, resolving a case that was set to examine the responsibilities of one of the most grueling jobs in finance.

The terms of the settlement couldn’t immediately be learned.

Plaintiff Kathryn Shiber alleged in the lawsuit, which she initially filed in 2021, that Centerview illegally fired her because of a disability. Centerview had previously moved to dismiss the case, arguing in court filings that there was no reasonable accommodation that would have allowed Shiber to perform the essential parts of the role.

The trial had been set to begin Monday and was expected to feature testimony from senior executives at Centerview, including the firm’s co-president Tony Kim, as well as Shiber. Bankers across Wall Street have been following the lawsuit and anticipating the trial and its implications for the industry.

“There is a genuine dispute of fact whether the ability to be available at all hours of the day and to work long, unpredictable hours is an essential function of the analyst role,” Judge Edgardo Ramos wrote in an October opinion detailing why the case would go to trial.

In a statement Saturday, Centerview said it believed the lawsuit’s legal claims had no merits and that it had been confident it would prevail at trial.

“But we are nonetheless happy to put this distraction behind us and focus on delivering for our clients,” the statement from a spokesman said.

“Ms. Shiber is pleased to close this chapter and looks forward to what comes next,” said Brian Heller, a lawyer for Shiber.

Shiber at one point sought up to $20 million, related to lost potential earnings, emotional impact and punitive damages against the firm.

A settlement between the two parties comes just a few days after the judge seemed to cast doubt on Shiber’s ability to claim the millions of dollars in compensation. During a pretrial conference Thursday, the judge said at one point that it would be improper for the jury to consider what she would have earned had she stayed at Centerview beyond the three-year program.

Entry-level investment banking positions, especially at top banks like Centerview, are coveted roles on Wall Street among recent college graduates and can act as steppingstones to long careers in financial services. But they demand long hours—sometimes over 100-hour weeks—spent doing basic tasks, like formatting slide decks or filling in spreadsheets. In exchange, analysts in their first years on Wall Street routinely make well above six figures.

The unforgiving conditions for young Wall Street bankers, long seen as rites of passage for those looking to strike it rich in finance, have drawn renewed scrutiny after the deaths of multiple young bankers at other banks in the last several years. Guardrails meant to protect young bankers are often ignored, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Centerview is one of the dominant boutique investment banks on Wall Street, booking roughly $1.9 billion in revenue in 2024, the Journal has reported. Founded in 2006 by a group of rainmaker bankers, the firm in recent years has regularly ranked in the top 10 banks by total merger value advised on.

Shortly after Shiber started in Centerview’s three-year analyst program in 2020, she was assigned to work on a large merger, code-named “Project Dragon,” which entailed working until 1 a.m. for multiple days in a row, according to her lawsuit. Shiber was granted an accommodation to help her manage unspecified mood and anxiety disorders: a window from midnight to 9 a.m. in which she would not have to work, the lawsuit said.

Roughly two weeks after that accommodation was granted, Shiber was terminated. An executive told Shiber she couldn’t perform the essential functions of the analyst role if she wasn’t available at any hour, according to the lawsuit.

Centerview in court filings has argued that being available at all hours and working unpredictably during an active deal is a basic requirement of the investment banking analyst job. Shiber, the bank’s lawyers argued, was unable to meet those requirements.

These are some of America’s 154 female billionaires. Though they are far fewer in number than the country’s 981 male billionaires, these women have roughly the same size median net worth as the men do at just over $2 billion, according to data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm.

There has been a striking jump in the number of women who are self-made, meaning they got at least some of their wealth from a significant enterprise they launched on their own. Far more women—about 60%—were at least partially self-made in 2024, compared with five years earlier, when only about 40% fell into that category. The rest owe their wealth to inheritance. Nearly all male billionaires are at least partially self-made.

The richest Americans control a historically large share of wealth today. The number of billionaires in the U.S.—male and female—keeps growing, and many of them are getting wealthier.

Altrata evaluates public and private data to determine wealth, and evaluates the wives and daughters of living male billionaires individually. These wealth figures are based on estimates of assets that they hold in their own names—whether or not that was derived from family wealth or business. Altrata looked at where an individual’s primary business is located.

For example, Susan Dell, the wife of Michael Dell, is worth $5.8 billion, in part because she owns millions of shares of Dell Technologies in a trust. But Lauren Sánchez Bezos, wife of billionaire Jeff Bezos, doesn’t appear on the list because available data doesn’t show that she has large investments like an ownership stake in Amazon.com.

The Journal analyzed Altrata’s data for a look at some of America’s wealthiest women, where their money comes from, and how they spend it. The data is from between 2024 and early 2026.

Many of the women at the top of the billionaires list inherited their wealth from fortunes that their parents or grandparents built. The women in this category often keep a low public profile. Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is the richest woman in the country with a net worth of $138 billion. (Each of her two living brothers has a similar net worth).

Some of these women are actively involved in the companies that are responsible for their vast wealth. Helen Johnson-Leipold, an heir to the S.C. Johnson fortune, runs publicly traded Johnson Outdoors, so her wealth is considered a combination of inheritance and self-made. A number of the Mars heiresses have held top roles at the candy and pet-food company.

Some built careers outside their family empires. Ronda Stryker, whose grandfather founded the medical-device company that shares her last name, worked as a special-education teacher for years. Oil magnate H.L. Hunt’s daughter June Hunt has hosted a Christian call-in radio show for decades.

Others started firms that are giants in their sectors. Judy Faulkner started privately held healthcare software company Epic Systems, where the company’s internal “10 commandments” include “do not go public.” Diane Hendricks co-founded roofing firm ABC Supply with her late husband Ken Hendricks.

Some operate major companies that prior generations of their families started, making their wealth part inheritance and part self-made. Abigail Johnson runs financial firm Fidelity Investments, founded by her grandfather. Lynsi Snyder is president of In-N-Out Burger, the fast-food chain her grandparents started in the 1940s.

Some of the most philanthropic billionaires are the ex-wives and widows of famous male billionaires. Melinda French Gates, who used to be married to Bill Gates, has given away at least $31 billion over the past decade. French Gates’s philanthropy is now focused on women’s rights and young people.

Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, has given away billions to causes from higher education to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, often with no strings attached.

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s widow Miriam Adelson has given at least $961 million to philanthropic causes, including many Jewish and pro-Israel organizations. She’s also a major political donor, backing Republicans including President Trump.

Altrata tracked public donations over the past decade. The analysis doesn’t include all donations from foundations or contributions from donor-advised funds. It doesn’t include donations below $1,000.

Celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Rihanna and Taylor Swift make up a handful of the self-made women billionaires, though they tend to clock in on the lower end of the billionaire scale. (Altrata notes that billionaires globally who are worth less than $2 billion have a roughly 10% chance of losing their billionaire status in a given year based on fluctuations in the value of their investments and other assets).

Some of them have amassed wealth by starting successful companies after reaching celebrity status. The bulk of Rihanna’s $1 billion net worth comes from her stakes in Fenty Beauty, estimated at $690 million, and her lingerie brand, estimated at $300 million, according to Altrata. Properties in Los Angeles and her native Barbados are worth at least a combined $43.5 million.

Taylor Swift’s $1.8 billion net worth include earnings from her monster Eras tour, which helped bring her estimated cash and other assets to $1.7 billion, according to Altrata.