From: Laurent Chekroun (MAKOR CAPITAL MARKET) At: 10/26/25 19:04:23 UTC+1:00
Subject: The Information : Vinod Khosla Talks AI, Power and Why Businesses Struggle With
Vinod Khosla Talks AI, Power and Why Businesses Struggle With New AI Services
The Takeaway
Enterprise AI adoption struggles due to unqualified internal staff.
AI product margins are expected to increase healthily into the 2030s.
AI’s circular financing deals pose no systemic risk, Khosla says.
Vinod Khosla thinks companies which say they’re struggling to get a return on their spending on artificial-intelligence services may be doing it wrong. In an interview with The Information’s TITV this past week, he said “most enterprises who are executing AI are doing it with their people who are not qualified to execute.” In contrast, when businesses hire an AI specialist firm to help them, “it goes swimmingly well.”
Khosla is one of the most experienced venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, whose firm was a very early investor in OpenAI, among many others. That makes his take on the state of play in AI worth listening to. In the TITV interview, he talked about current developments in AI, the risks inherent in the AI ecosystem right now, power generation and other topics.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview. The full video is here.
Akash Pasricha: Our subscribers at The Information know your career very well. They will know that you are a steadfast optimist, and one of the guiding mantras in your career has been that skeptics never did the impossible. It feels like right now, even for people who are very bullish on AI, the technology, there is enough reason to be at least somewhat skeptical on AI, the business. Is there anything that you are skeptical about right now?
Vinod Khosla: Well, to start with, I think if you’re going to do something significant, you’re going to have to be an optimist. But not only just an optimist, a knowledgeable optimist. There are too many skeptics who live in the past and will extrapolate the past to invent the future. That’s a bad thing to do. Inventing the future you want is the right way, and optimism is key to that.
Having said that, I think the one thing I don’t know and there’s things I can reasonably project and things I can be uncertain about. The thing I’m uncertain about is timing of various breakthroughs that we expect to see in the next two years, five years, ten years. Almost certainly it’s easier to predict AI in 2035 and probably 2030, than it is to predict it today and what will happen next year. So I’m not skeptical, but I’m less certain about the pace of development of certain capabilities that are essential to expanding use of AI.
Right. Well, let’s talk about the current state of play. One of the topics that has been talked about a lot in our coverage are the margins that a lot of these companies have on their AI products, whether it’s cloud services or even AI application companies. And one of the challenges that we’ve highlighted is that margins are slim right now. How do you think this goes in the long run?
Vinod Khosla: I think the way to look at margins is when AI is a substantial business. Yes, it’s [a] large business, tens of billions of dollars, but it’s not hundreds of billions of dollars. And so the question to ask is where will margins stabilize? I think some of it depends on R&D breakthroughs by the various companies and knowing who gets what breakthrough, which is, as I said, uncertain with respect to who and timing. I’m pretty optimistic about what OpenAI is doing. I do think if you provide value and you have differentiated models, you will have good margins. Look, at the pace at which pricing is declining, both in supplying inferencing to the AI companies and the price at which things are sold, it’s hard to predict the dynamics. But it will settle down [with] good returns on capital invested. So I’d be surprised if we don’t have healthy increasing margins well into the early 2030s.
And which of the two levers do you think is more likely to get pulled on most? The idea that costs will go down for these chips that are very expensive right now. Or on the flip side, we had one of your founders on the show, Amjad Masad from Replit. He talked about this idea that the models might not get cheaper, but rather he’s looking to actually increase his prices to widen his margin. So which one of those two levers do you think is most likely to widen margins in the next couple of years?
Vinod Khosla: So there’s a number of ways in which cost of supplying inference will go down. One, chips will become more economical in per inference. I do think the algorithms will get much better, which means the software will get better in the amount of compute needed per inference. So there’s two vectors. You can make the algorithms 10X more efficient over time. I think that will happen. The cost of chips will go down for a given number of inferences. So both those are vectors for cost reduction.
The question of pricing on the input side, what customers will pay, will be a function of value. If Amjad—and I love that company and what Amjad is doing—if he keeps adding more and more value, he will be able to charge more. So that’s a question of value addition. And that’s where there’s lots of headroom. You know when you’re kicking something that costs, say, a professional, an accounting professional, for example, or a design product designer, and you’re paying them $100 to $300 an hour and your cost is $1 to $3 an hour, you have lots of pricing room if you can provide more complete solutions. So I do think, price per hour of worker-time equivalent will increase pretty dramatically. Also as well, as well the decline in costs per inference. This business will be healthy starting, let’s say, 2030 and beyond, when scale data centers will be in operation.
How do you square that with this matter of buyers of enterprise software—businesses in general—they are struggling to find the value right now, at least on an ROI basis, for much of this AI software. The reason I’m asking the question is because we’re talking about raising prices. They’re not seeing the value right now. They’re very slow to adopt this AI software. So how do you square those two realities right now?
Vinod Khosla: So you have to look at a couple of factors. One, where is the value being provided great. In software development it’s absolutely great value. So companies like Replit and Cognition, which we are both investors in, Cursor included, all growing very, very rapidly, because they’re adding real value. So there are functions in which the product isn’t complete or mature. And so you need almost so much hand-holding, the economics break down. I would say another factor that most people haven’t considered, most enterprises who are executing AI are doing it with their people who are not qualified to execute. It’s like saying, hey, we have a race car and Joe Blow can go drive it, and he’s not going to get most of that race car.
So they need to hire different people?
I think they need to take a very different approach. They take an online IT software person, say build an agent for me and hope it works great. It’s not the way it’s working. So generally if you take a company like Distyl, which is in our portfolio, if they execute a project for a large Fortune 500 company, it goes swimmingly well. If in-house people in the same company executed, it goes very poorly. So, and each of these, even the in-house people will get better over time, so the third or fourth generation of execution will do better because their people will get trained, but they’re really not qualified to operate in this area. While the AI native companies are able to get real value, and they’re even able to pick the projects that will be valuable and the projects that are more experimental.
I want to pivot to talking a little bit about some of the circular deals that we’ve seen happening in the AI sector. I mean, Nvidia, for instance, has been at the center of some of these circular financing arrangements. Do these concern you at all?
Vinod Khosla: Well, they don’t, they do and they don’t. It’s hard to tell what the details are behind each of these deals. If Nvidia is financing customers to buy their chips, that could be perfectly reasonable. Look, General Motors finances its cars too, when a consumer buys it, it’s just a regularized business. The question is hidden in the contracts that are mostly not publicly available: Who’s taking on what part of the risk? Is it an enterprise? Are you saying a customer you’re financing is viable or not? Are you saying the risk is the customers’ or their customers if they’ve done a contract with somebody else to buy X million dollars of inferencing? So where’s the risk hidden? Well, in fact is the key question before one can opine. And frankly, most of those risks and who takes what risk is in the fine print and not visible to almost anybody outside?
I take your point on the fine print. I guess what I’m sort of trying to assess here is the systemic risk in the circular financing at large. And of course, I take your point about, for example, General Motors financing the purchase of a car. But, you know, in a world where you have a chip company investing in OpenAI, OpenAI buying cloud compute from Oracle, Oracle buying chips from Nvidia. That is a sort of circular loop that I think a lot of people have sort of raised flags about. Does that whole cycle not raise any flags for you or cause any concern?
Vinod Khosla: Well, I would say I don’t care. I don’t care for the following reason. If Nvidia is taking a bad credit risk, that’s their problem, right? But if Nvidia loses $50 or $100 billion, does it kill the company? Probably not. And I suspect [Nvidia CEO] Jensen [Huang] is pretty smart about what credit risks he’s taking, with which customer. Is Oracle taking a larger risk? Possibly. It depends on the details of the contract between Nvidia and Oracle and Oracle and OpenAI or other people buying their cloud service.
So you have to think of it as traditional business and say where does the risk lie? If Oracle goes under, for example, because they took the risk of $100 billion spend and then get that back, then it’s their problem if Oracle disappears from the scene. Do I care? No. I hope they don’t. I think the ecosystem will be healthier, but people are selectively taking risk. You know, Coreweave’s taking a lot of risks with the money that belongs to certain lenders, to Coreweave. Do the lenders have risk? I don’t know. Does Coreweave have risk? And Oracle’s doing the same thing, it’s taking risk. But I don’t know the details of these contracts.
But broadly speaking the level of risk that this has has become sort of ubiquitous throughout this AI ecosystem that doesn’t concern you at all?
Vinod Khosla: I would say the fundamental notion of will there be more demand for API inference calls doesn’t concern me at all. The fundamental is how many inferencing calls we’ll see in 2030 and 2035. That generally doesn’t concern me because I believe AI will add a lot of value. Look, US economy’s $15 trillion of labor alone—just labor costs in the US economy $15 trillion. If you could replace 5 trillion of that, there’s plenty of room for inferencing to be paid for, if you can do that. So again I say the fundamental is, is there a demand for AI inferencing the next five years and next ten years, I’m not worried about that. has learned how clever a contract and who takes on risk if demand is slower or faster to emerge? … I’m not responsible for a lender financing a data center. If they fail, their problem, not mine. I care about the innovation ecosystem that drives more API calls in AI.
Who do you think has the best chance of challenging Nvidia?
Vinod Khosla: Well, obviously AMD is trying things, Arm is trying things, Broadcom is trying things. Nvidia is in an unenviable position because they have so many different things they can do in parallel because the cash flow they have right now. Do I know all of Jensen’s plans inside and how many different things he’s trying? No. In fact, nobody outside really knows when he’s going to announce what my bet is he has a pretty precise roadmap to 2030 and beyond. So hard to say.
So there’s no one company that you are really sort of putting your eggs in here in terms of… I think this company is closest on Nvidia’s tail right now.
Vinod Khosla: Well, AMD is doing pretty well by signing, looking at their deals. Broadcom is doing pretty well. But are they going to grab majority share and be larger than Nvidia. I wouldn’t expect that today. Can they take reasonable shares, especially at slightly lower margins? Yes.
And what about all these chip startups that are popping up.
Vinod Khosla: Well I’ve seen a lot of specialized chip startups that do one thing. You can run your whole model locally in your shop. Well that’s that’s a market. It’s not as large as the data center inferencing market. So there’s many submarkets that the chip startups can do ok in.But I haven’t seen the chip startup that could completely blow everybody away. Now, if you have a sudden breakthrough in photonic chips that can do multiply, accumulate inferencing functions, and cut the power consumption by 70% for inferencing, that’s entirely possible, even likely sometime in the next five years.
And I hope some of those show up because it changed the power equation, how much power we need for AI. Frankly, most of the data center investment can be repurposed with a new kind of chip that gets slotted in. Photonics is pretty promising. I suspect digital semiconductor chips are going to be hard to beat Nvidia at, in a massive way. In specialized segments of the market, you can beat them but generally you’d have to have a radical breakthrough in technology. Photonics is one of them. There’s a few others, but I see the most promising candidate for an alternative to Nvidia becoming from photonics if one can scale it, and photonics typically is hard to scale.
I want to close by talking about the energy side of of the AI equation. You, of course, have been an energy for a long time. You’ve made big bets on fusion among many other technologies. And the question that I want to help get your perspective on is this idea that a lot of these energy bets are going to still take years to scale? Meanwhile, the energy demands that AI will need to satisfy, those demands are right now. And so help us reconcile this idea that we need power now, and it’s going to still take several years for many of these new energy technologies to scale.
Vinod Khosla: So the simplest way, very, very short term, to address electricity demand in the country is pricing. This is why the economics of marketplaces work. Prices will go up some, as we consume more pricing for data centers. Data centers themselves can be aggressive sources of power management. You can consume at certain times of the day for training runs and other times of the day for inferencing. You can dial up the performance or dial down the performance. So data center input of electricity itself is a variable that’ll probably be part of electricity trading.
There’s some good startups in that area.
I think there’s a short term solution which I think is super hot geothermal. I think we can get to gigawatt scale. If you imagine a couple of extra gigawatts of demand emerging every year. Some of it will be met through pricing energy appropriately. Some of it will be met through shorter term projects. Geothermal is one that’s much shorter term than, say, fusion, fusion’s a possibility but fusion to me will take the longest…but we’ll have an array of factors. We’ll have more natural gas turbines coming on. We do have companies where you can start with natural gas and switch to hydrogen whenever the economics warrant it. So there’s a number of ways to adjust, but it is a non-trivial problem.
And so all these data centers that companies like OpenAI are springing up very quickly. I mean, the simple question I wanted to get your take on is, do we have enough power for these facilities?
Vinod Khosla: Well, first thing to keep in mind, it takes a couple of years to build a data center. There’s a few hacks, but fundamentally, if you’re trying to add a gigawatt of data center, which is about $30 billion of spend, it’ll take a couple of years. I don’t think that’s a six month or 12 month or even an 18 month project.
Then there’s demand-based electricity consumption as a tool. And then I think things like geothermal and other technologies will come along. Some of them will be natural gas fired. I hope there’s no more coal facilities. Mainspring installs capacity for data centers that can switch seamlessly from natural gas to hydrogen when you want to go clean, so you can decide how much you want to pay for power and what carbon reduction you want, and increase the carbon reduction over time. So that’s one solution. All I’m saying is there’s an array of tools …not non-trivial. This will be a serious issue. And policy is trying to address it. But I do think there’s many solutions.
Last question for you. You know, you wrote this op ed for us a couple months ago in The Information, about the bonkers valuations in AI right now. And one of the things that you mentioned in the piece was that you think that venture capital as an asset class is likely to shrink over the coming ten years. And I wanted to ask you what the repercussions of that are in your mind. The obvious one that I thought was perhaps startups might actually get better because there’s less capital to go around and the better ones would get picked. Is that the main repercussion of this, or what are the other repercussions that you see happening?
Vinod Khosla : I think that op ed was misinterpreted a little bit. What I said was AI valuations in general are bonkers. For the best companies they’re not bonkers and if as a venture capitalist, you have access to those two, three, 4% of the startups, there will be huge wins. You will do well. You will have great returns. The people who are plowing money in without having special access to these opportunities for whatever reason, will suffer in venture capital as a class, I think broadly, for funds raised in ‘24 and ‘25 will have decreasing returns, returns lower because they’re not getting access to good deals early. They’re paying higher prices much later. Some of the robotics valuations are getting bonkers. I would venture to guess 95% of those startups will lose money.
So the take home here is we need special access to deals essentially to be successful?
Vinod Khosla: It’s more than that. I think I like to say most AI startups will lose money, but more money will be made than lost. That means it’ll be highly asymmetric: 2 or 3% of the startups will account for 85-90% of the valuation by 2035 of market cap of companies. So that asymmetry, which has generally been true in venture capital, but will be significantly more asymmetric in AI because of this valuation wave, I think is the reason we will see average returns decline and the best returns for the top firms will do okay, will do well, in fact, because AI is such a large opportunity.
LVMH’s Art Foundation Brings Caillebotte Masterpieces to New York
The two paintings will remain on show for three weeks at Louis Vuitton's temporary flagship on 57th Street.
Gustave Caillebotte's "Boating Party," circa 1877-1878
PARIS — Louis Vuitton’s temporary flagship on 57th Street in New York City boasts special features including a restaurant and towers of trunks — and for the next three weeks, it will also host a couple of museum-grade paintings.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton has partnered with Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for an exhibition of two major works by French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte, underscoring the growing synergies between fashion and art, even as public funding for culture dries up on both sides of the Atlantic.
Visitors can book free tickets to view “Boating Party,” held in the permanent collection of the Musée d’Orsay, and “Young Man at His Window,” acquired by the Getty museum in 2021.
The exhibition will run from Tuesday until Nov. 16 in a temporary Espace Louis Vuitton gallery space located on the fifth floor of the Vuitton mega-store, which opened last November while the brand’s historic Fifth Avenue flagship undergoes extensive renovations.
It comes on the heels of the “Caillebotte: Painting Men” exhibition, which bowed at the Musée d’Orsay in 2024, before traveling to the Getty museum and then the Art Institute of Chicago, where it concluded its run on Oct. 5.
Jean-Paul Claverie, adviser to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman and chief executive officer Bernard Arnault, said the institutions joined forces to present the paintings in New York, where Caillebotte’s work does not have a major museum presence, before they return to their respective homes.
“It’s a gift to the people of New York and to anyone visiting the city,” said the executive, who oversees the group’s arts and cultural patronage.
The initiative stems from Vuitton’s ongoing partnership with the Musée d’Orsay. The French luxury brand is helping to fund a three-year renovation program at the museum, and has supported exhibitions including the Caillebotte show, reflecting its broader ambition to position itself as a cultural entity.
Vuitton has also used the museum, known for its vast collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, for several runway shows by Nicolas Ghesquière, its artistic director of women’s collections.
The New York exhibition underscores parent company LVMH’s role as a major player in the art world, with a 30-year history of patronage including a 43-million-euro donation that allowed the French state in 2021 to acquire “Boating Party,” classified as a national treasure.
“The acquisition of the Caillebotte was a major milestone. It is the most valuable ‘national treasure’ ever acquired for France’s public museum collections,” said Claverie.
Recently, LVMH also contributed to the appeal launched by the Louvre to acquire “The Basket of Strawberries” by Jean Siméon Chardin, which had a starring role at Jonathan Anderson’s first menswear show for Dior in June.
A Funding Crisis
Paul Perrin, director of conservation and collections at the Musée d’Orsay, said the resources at LVMH’s fingertips dwarf the museum’s 3-million-euro annual budget for acquisitions — making the luxury conglomerate a formidable ally for France’s cultural sector.
“The relationship goes both ways: for luxury brands, it adds to their cultural cachet, while for museums, it’s an opportunity to connect with broader audiences and to highlight the enduring relevance of historical art,” he said.
“The fashion sector gets a huge amount of media attention and is closely followed by younger generations in particular. Presenting a Chardin painting in a fashion show is a way to reaffirm the importance of art and museums, and of introducing the world of museums to audiences who might not typically engage with it,” he added.
Perrin noted that the Musée d’Orsay was satisfied that the Espace Louis Vuitton meets all the safety criteria for displaying “Boating Party” — a sensitive point given the recent high-profile robbery of priceless jewels from the Louvre.
“Whenever we exhibit works from the Musée d’Orsay in a new venue, we never do so without first conducting a full site assessment to ensure that the location meets all the necessary criteria,” he said. “Even if this venue was not originally designed for museum exhibitions, it checks all the boxes.”
Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, said she carefully weighed the pros and cons of teaming with the luxury group, though she emphasized that the partnership is with the Fondation Louis Vuitton, not the brand.
“Obviously the thing you want to be attentive to, if you start partnering with luxury, is the fact that it starts to feel elite and starts to therefore feel exclusive — but if you look at it in another way, you’re actually reaching whole new audiences,” she said.
As a nonprofit operating foundation based in California, the J. Paul Getty Trust is self-financing and also hands out grants. It has partnerships with institutions including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, which is temporarily closed due to the U.S. government shutdown.
“We’re acutely aware of the fact that the sector, especially the publicly funded sector, is under a lot of duress right now, and we’ve had conversations about what that implies for the way we do our own work,” Fleming said.
With the Trump administration imposing restrictions on grants awarded by federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, demand for private funding has sharply increased.
“One of the things that’s really creepy about this moment is that the well-intentioned impulse is to say, ‘Oh, well, those who have the means should run in and plug the gaps.’ But really, the only message that that will convey is that the private sector should be taking care of this, and there is no obligation whatsoever from the public sector,” Fleming remarked.
“In the short term, it feels like a smart thing to do, but in the long term, it really isn’t,” she added. “We’re trying very hard to stick to our own very carefully thought-through strategies, without having our head in the sand.”
A Long-term Vision
In France, the private sector’s involvement in the art world is more recent than in the U.S.
Since its opening in 2014, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has emerged as a key player in the local museum landscape, with its recent David Hockney retrospective drawing almost one million visitors.
Corporate and individual donors in France are entitled to generous fiscal deductions, which has led critics to complain that private art foundations and major acquisitions are in fact heavily subsidized by taxpayers — a source of growing controversy given the political chaos triggered by President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to push through austerity measures.
“Of course, we’re sensitive to these concerns. It’s a lot of money, and 43 million euros for a painting can seem like an absurd sum to many French people,” acknowledged Perrin. “It does mean an effort on the part of all French citizens, but without this system, we couldn’t afford this type of acquisition. That’s why it’s important to explain how it works and why it matters.”
LVMH often finds itself in the crosshairs of public debate, but Claverie — who has worked alongside Arnault since 1992 — insisted the billionaire’s approach is both long-term and disinterested.
“His vision was rooted in the belief that the group’s success — whether in France or abroad — also depended on the enduring prestige and worldwide influence of French culture,” the adviser said. “Our commitment to cultural patronage has never been driven by tax benefits. We do it out of a genuine passion for culture.”
Claverie sees no contradictions in the marriage of art and commerce. There are six Espace Louis Vuitton galleries worldwide, with current exhibitions including works by Wolfgang Tillmans in Munich, Andy Warhol in Tokyo and Yayoi Kusama in Osaka.
“I really think art can be everywhere,” he said. “The Louis Vuitton flagship in New York is more than a store — it’s a place of emotion and discovery.”
Bloomingdale's x Burberry's year-long partnership culminates in a festive takeover of Bloomingdale's 59th Street flagship and Lexington Avenue windows for the holidays.
Bloomingdale’s is getting ready to usher in the holiday season with a campaign titled “Happy Together,” which will run the gamut from the flagship’s windows and immersive in-store experiences to exclusive collaborations and curated gifts.
At the heart of the season is Bloomingdale’s x Burberry, a yearlong collaboration culminating in a takeover of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street flagship. The partnership features an exclusive Burberry takeover of The Carousel, the retailer’s revolving pop-up shop, which goes in Nov. 6. Merchandise will be showcased across the store with dedicated capsules in each category. Every element in the shop will reflect Burberry’s craftsmanship and British sensibility, from ready-to-wear to accessories and gifting.
“The holidays at Bloomingdale’s are defined by a sense of magic; of excitement and inspiration,” said Olivier Bron, chief executive officer of Bloomingdale’s. “This season, our collaboration with Burberry brings that spirit to life — uniting two icons with a shared passion for craftsmanship, storytelling and innovation. Together, we’ve transformed our flagship into an experience that celebrates heritage, connection, and the joy of the season in a distinctly Bloomingdale’s way.”
Josh Schulman, CEO of Burberry, said, “We’re thrilled to partner with Bloomingdale’s to create festive experiences that capture the magic of the season. Together, we will be lighting up New York with a giant Burberry check scarf across the iconic facade and curating exclusive capsule collections. With over 70 years of shared history, this partnership is a celebration of craftsmanship and festive joy. It’s a privilege to bring the essence of timeless British luxury to such an iconic destination in the heart of New York City.”
Bloomingdale’s will also offer guests an immersive brand experience, providing a destination to discover Burberry’s signature outerwear and essentials. Another key feature is a red-check capsule collection. The flagship’s Lexington Avenue windows and facade will be designed in collaboration with Burberry, and will be “steeped in tradition, wrapped in warmth, and infused with the magic of the season,” according to the retailer.
A 360-degree digital campaign will aim to drive awareness and engagement for Bloomingdale’s x Burberry, featuring a full wrap of The New York Times in print, a homepage takeover, media placements, including out-of-home, and a multipart email series that celebrates Burberry’s heritage and holiday storytelling.
Discussing how the Burberry partnership came together, Bron told WWD, “We’re actually celebrating 70 years of partnership with Burberry this year so it’s been a long-lasting relationship. We share the same creative vision and respect for craftsmanship and innovation. There’s this balance between innovation and heritage, and I think that’s very Bloomingdale’s. It’s a very natural collaboration. We love their values that are very aligned with ours.”
Under Schulman, Burberry is reinventing itself, modernizing the brand and building a new era, said Bron. “I think our stories are very much aligned, and we have a very close relationship. We’re very excited about the partnership,” said Bron.
According to Bron, Burberry fits well with the “Happy Together” theme. The brand will take over the Lexington Avenue windows, will do visual moments in the store, the Carousel moment, and exclusive collections. “It’s very special because it’s a very inclusive, very immersive experience of Burberry within our stores and across all platforms,” said Bron.
Bloomingdale’s will also do a Burberry light-up bow in the classic Burberry check on the facade. Bron noted that there will be a window unveiling on Nov. 19 for top clients, partners, and New Yorkers. The Grammy-nominated, Brit-Award winning artist Raye will perform as part of the 2025 holiday window unveil.
Kevin Harter, vice president, integrated marketing and fashion office at Bloomingdale’s, said the red-check capsule will run the gamut from accessories and women’s and men’s apparel to kids’, along with two different holiday teddy bears, one of which is wearing a Burberry cashmere scarf, that will benefit the Child Mind Institute. In addition to the Carousel’s Burberry merchandise, there will be a Burberry pop-up shop on the fourth floor that opens Nov. 6, as well as in 12 branch stores.
Bron said he’s optimistic about holiday. “We are feeling pretty good. First, because the current trend of the business is extremely strong. So that’s good. We think it will keep going during this holiday moment. Holidays are always a very special moment, particularly at Bloomingdale’s. So we feel very optimistic about what’s coming. We also think these collaborations around this ‘Happy Together’ theme will very much resonate with our customers and ecosystems. This excitement and energy and the traffic we’re seeing in the store during this period is actually tremendous. So we’re feeling very excited about what’s coming in the next few weeks.”
The Third Avenue windows are also built around the “Happy Together” theme.
Other activations at Bloomingdale’s include Studio 59 by Baccarat, an in-store bar experience; Alice + Olivia x 40 Carrots, a festive takeover once again of Bloomingdale’s cafe; a Canada Goose pop-up with personalization and discovery elements, and “Gift Yourself” presented by Bloomingdale’s American Express Card, a gifting activation for shoppers.
Another key activation is Santaland: Happy Together, featuring Burberry bears and interactive holiday moments.
Bloomingdale’s annual philanthropic partnerships include No Kid Hungry, where customers can contribute by rounding up their in-store purchases to the nearest dollar or by adding a donation at online checkout. (Nov. 1 to Nov. 30). To kick off the campaign, No Kid Hungry chefs and restaurant partners will host special cooking demonstrations in select stores, helping to raise both awareness and funds for the cause. In addition, Bloomingdale’s is supporting Child Mind Institute. Throughout December, shoppers can round up in-store purchases or add a donation at online checkout.
China EV Maker Seres Plans to Raise Up to $1.7B in Hong Kong Offer
Seres, which is already listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, expects to finalize the offer price by Nov. 3
Seres Group aims to raise up to $1.70 billion in a Hong Kong stock offering, selling 100.20 million shares.
The company’s 2024 revenue was $20.37 billion, a 306% increase from the previous year, and it achieved profitability.
Hong Kong’s equities market saw HK$182.9 billion raised in the first nine months of 2025, a significant increase.
Chinese automaker Seres Group 601127 -0.64%decrease; red down pointing triangle aims to raise up to $1.70 billion in a Hong Kong stock offering, joining the ranks of companies looking to list in one of the world’s most active equity fundraising markets.
The company, focused on new energy vehicles, is planning to sell 100.20 million shares at a maximum offer price of 131.50 Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to $16.92 per share, Seres said Monday.
Seres, which is already listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, expects to finalize the offer price by Nov. 3, with shares expected to start trading on the Hong Kong exchange from Nov. 5
Hong Kong’s equities market has emerged as one of the most active for listings this year. Funds raised through initial public offerings and secondary offerings in the first nine months of 2025 totaled HK$182.9 billion, a sharp increase from the HK$55.6 billion raised in the same period last year, according to Hong Kong stock exchange data.
The EV company has already secured commitments from cornerstone investors who have agreed to subscribe to over 45% of the offer size.
Some of the cornerstone investors include state-owned Chongqing Industrial Parent Fund, Hong Kong-listed China MeiDong Auto, a unit of the U.K.-listed Schroders, and South Korea’s Mirae Securities.
Securing cornerstone investors before a listing lets companies market their offerings more effectively to institutional and individual investors. That is especially important during periods of heightened market volatility.
Seres is a technology company focused on new energy vehicles, including research and development, manufacturing, sales, and services.
Its revenue in 2024 was 145.1 billion yuan, equivalent to $20.37 billion, a 306% increase from a year earlier. Additionally, Seres turned profitable in 2024, reporting net income of CNY5.9 billion.
CICC and China Galaxy International are acting as joint sponsors for Seres’s Hong Kong offer.
