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In June, Daniel Chu seemed securely in the driver’s seat. The Dallas-based auto business he had co-founded 18 years earlier was growing steadily and had just cleared a new financial milestone.

Chu’s Tricolor Auto Group had recently opened a 258,000-square-foot maintenance center outside Phoenix to repair and recondition the used vehicles it sold to its core market of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The facility—its second, after one in Texas—was to anchor a western-state expansion.

Rating firms had just graded Tricolor’s latest round of securities backed by its auto loans, pushing the total volume of its rated bonds past $2 billion. S&P Global Ratings gave the biggest slice of the security an AA rating, its second-highest ranking.

Previous baskets of Tricolor auto loans were bought by Wall Street giants JPMorgan Chase, Pimco, and AllianceBernstein. Among Tricolor’s backers was BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which had cast the chain’s focus on the Hispanic community as consistent with its social-investing goals. JPMorgan and Barclays had provided the company with a line of credit.

“We have conviction that our differentiated approach enables us to deliver consistent, predictable and positive outcomes,” Chu said in a June 11 statement announcing the Barclays-led securitization.

Less than three months later, his auto empire lay in shambles. On Sept. 5, Tricolor abruptly closed its 65 lots across six states before filing for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. S&P put its auto-loan-backed securities on watch for downgrades before suspending its ratings entirely, and some of the company’s lenders have flagged their exposure in regulatory filings.

As Tricolor benefited from Wall Street’s largess, U.S. banks and ratings firms appear to have missed or overlooked warning signs. So too may have the U.S. government, which awarded Tricolor a special U.S. Treasury certification in 2019.

In 2022, Barron’s found Tricolor was selling cars well above market averages while touting its designation from the U.S. Treasury as a Community Development Financial Institution—a government seal of approval for social lenders.

Tricolor was also repeatedly cited by state motor-vehicle and financial regulators, Barron’s found, for lapses that included delayed title transfers, improper use of temporary license plates, and selling cars for which the company didn’t hold title.

Fifth Third Bank recently disclosed it faced up to $200 million in losses tied to what it said was alleged fraudulent activity at a commercial borrower, which a person familiar with the matter identified as Tricolor. Fifth Third hasn’t disclosed any details of the alleged fraud.

“When you have a fraud, it’s ultimately a client selection issue,” Fifth Third CEO Timothy Spence said at a Sept. 10 banking conference. “We’re not in the business of doing business with people who commit fraud.”

One of Tricolor’s co-founders, Texas businessman Ken Weaver, had served prison time for selling stolen cars, then failed to disclose that history when seeking to run a Texas utility that racked up customer complaints under his watch, according to local news reports.

In a 2022 interview, Chu told Barron’s he forced Weaver out after learning of his past. Barron’s was unable to locate Weaver for comment.

Chu’s own record includes allegations of financial mismanagement and self dealing.

Before co-founding Tricolor, Chu resigned from his role as president at another used-car company after accounting irregularities surfaced, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Chu said he wasn’t involved with the firm’s accounting.

Chu was also sued by partners in a tech business for allegedly giving away their stake in the venture to settle a personal debt, a transaction for which Chu later disclaimed responsibility.

JP Morgan, Barclays, Fifth Third, BlackRock, Pimco, AllianceBernstein, S&P, and the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institution Fund either declined to comment about Tricolor’s history and Chu’s background or didn’t respond to requests.

Chu didn’t respond to requests for comment and has made no public remarks in the weeks since Tricolor’s apparent collapse, but Barron’s spoke to him over multiple conversations lasting several hours for its 2022 report.

At the time, Chu said Tricolor sold cars at lower margins than competing dealership chains, spending generously on presale repairs and reconditioning. Citations from state motor-vehicle and financial regulators were largely due to missteps by outside vendors Tricolor works with, he said. Chu said he believed himself to have been exonerated in the claim by the tech-company investors and had committed no wrongdoing.

“My life as an entrepreneur hasn’t been this easy path,” he said. “There have been a lot of unscripted, unconventional turns.”

Chu, 61, grew up in Dallas, where he attended the St. Mark’s School of Texas, an elite boys’ prep academy. He earned a degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, then studied athletic administration at the University of Miami before becoming head basketball coach at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.

Chu told Barron’s that his coaching career ended when he joined a family friend to launch Paaco, a Dallas used-car chain that, like Tricolor, catered to Hispanic buyers.

The Associated Press reported at the time that he had been fired from the coaching job for violations involving payouts to student athletes, which led to the University of the South athletics program being placed on probation. Chu didn’t respond to questions about this account.

His time at Paaco, where he was president, likewise ended amid controversy. A year after the chain’s 1998 sale to the Crown Group, a publicly traded holding company whose businesses are now part of America’s Car-Mart, Crown disclosed “accounting errors and irregularities” at Paaco. Crown said it “has taken certain steps to ensure the integrity of Paaco’s accounting and reporting procedures” and announced Chu’s retirement.

Chu told Barron’s that he had no role in the firm’s accounting during the period in question and viewed the episode as an opportunity to step away. “Frankly,” he said, “I was ready to get out of the business at that point anyway.”

After Paaco, Chu drew partners into a tech venture that eventually sold for $161 million. Those partners later sued Chu, according to a 2012 court filing, alleging that he diverted their stake to settle a personal debt. In courtroom testimony reviewed by Barron’s, he appeared to acknowledge having made the transfer.

A lawyer for the investor group told Barron’s that Chu was dropped as a defendant in exchange for that testimony. Chu said he was cleared because the transfer was directed by others.

By the mid-2000s, Chu was back in the used-car business as co-president of Ole Auto Group, another Texas chain that catered to Hispanic buyers.

His tenure at Ole coincided with a financial scandal involving Philadelphia mob associates who conspired to seize control of the auto seller’s parent, FirstPlus Financial, and siphon off its assets, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal and other outlets. The conspirators later received decadeslong prison sentences for racketeering and fraud.

Chu was dismissed from Ole soon after the mob takeover. He sued FirstPlus’s new leadership in an effort to regain his job but abandoned the case after Weaver, the Texas businessman, invited him to start a new business aimed at the same low-income, Spanish-speaking market, he said. Weaver founded the company in August 2007, with Chu becoming CEO soon after.

Chu said he had been unaware of Weaver’s criminal background, which was exposed by the Dallas Morning News in 2009. Weaver had served prison sentences for crimes including stealing and reselling cars, the paper reported. Weaver omitted that information in his subsequent state application to operate an electric-utility provider for low-income Texans called Freedom Power, which was later cited for consumer protection violations.

Chu said in 2022 that he immediately pushed Weaver out of Tricolor, by recruiting an outside investor to buy out his stake.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Tricolor added several high-profile names to its board: Antonio Garza, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico under George W. Bush; Kathryn Petralia, co-founder of financial-technology firm Kabbage, now part of American Express; and Beth Brooke, a former Ernst & Young executive and Treasury official in the Clinton administration who also sits on the board of the New York Times.

Garza, Peralta, and Brooke didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Chu, meanwhile, in 2022 joined the board of Louisiana’s Origin Bank, which has made $30 million in loan commitments to the auto chain, records show.

The bank also extended at least $17.4 million in mortgage loans to Chu for properties in Dallas County’s Highland Park, the Hollywood Hills, and the Four Seasons Residences at the Surf Club in Surfside, near Miami, according to property records.

Chu resigned from Origin’s board on the day Tricolor filed for bankruptcy.

An Origin spokesperson said the bank “fully complies with all laws and regulations regarding lending.”

Chu told Barron’s in 2022 that he launched Tricolor after seeing the challenges Hispanic immigrants faced in buying cars. Tricolor was also pursuing a social mission, he said, helping low-income customers get to work and build credit histories.

He cast the company as a do-good version of the controversial used-car sales format known as “buy here, pay here.” Such businesses offer in-house financing to customers who don’t have the savings, income, or credit scores to qualify for conventional loans.

In 2019, Tricolor was certified as a Community Development Financial Institution under the U.S. Treasury based on its lending to a target market of low-income Hispanic borrowers.

The program promotes lending in disadvantaged communities by granting CDFI status to qualifying lenders. Most certified entities are nonprofit lenders, community banks, or credit unions, though some for-profit banks and investment firms have also been approved.

Despite the special status, Tricolor used some of the tactics practiced by traditional “buy here, pay here” lenders, such as selling used cars at steep markups, then cycling those vehicles back into their inventories if borrowers defaulted, Barron’s reported in 2022.

Barron’s found that Tricolor had also been the target of more fines and violation notices from state motor vehicle and financial regulators than big, national used-car companies that sell far more vehicles. Some Tricolor customers said in interviews and state complaint filings that they encountered mechanical troubles with recently bought cars that the company couldn’t or wouldn’t fix.

Tricolor had also agreed to pay $83,000 in 2015 to the Federal Trade Commission to settle charges that its loan servicing arm lacked procedures to ensure accurate reporting to credit bureaus and failed to conduct required investigations of borrower complaints.

Chu said the credit-reporting lapses occurred under Tricolor’s then-private equity owners and caused no direct harm to customers.

Tricolor’s CDFI label became a big part of its appeal to Wall Street in an era of sustainable investment initiatives. BlackRock, for one, cited the social-lending designation in its decision to invest in the company through its Impact Opportunities Fund in May 2022.

The fund was created to raise $1 billion for businesses and projects owned, led by, or serving members of minority groups. BlackRock directed some $90 million to Tricolor.

A pivot from videogames to data centers—and a new deal with OpenAI—has the chip designer on the road to a $1 trillion valuation

When Lisa Su took over as chief executive of chip company Advanced Micro Devices AMD 23.71%increase; green up pointing triangle in 2014, the company’s market value was just under $3 billion.

Today, it is worth more than $330 billion, a more-than-hundredfold increase that reflects how deftly AMD has pivoted from a strategy of mainly producing graphics cards for gaming and personal-computer processors to more tightly focusing on the data-center chips that power the artificial-intelligence revolution.

AMD’s share price rose 24% on Monday after the company announced a partnership with OpenAI, maker of the popular consumer AI model ChatGPT. Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will buy tens of thousands of AMD chips to power 6 gigawatts of computing capacity for inference functions, which allow AI models to respond to user queries.

The deal has given rocket fuel to AMD’s share price and the company’s ambitions to compete with rival chip designer Nvidia, which is by far the dominant competitor in the AI semiconductor industry.

Monday’s deal specifies that OpenAI will be issued warrants for 160 million shares of AMD stock, at a marginal price of 1 cent a share, once OpenAI hits certain deployment targets and once AMD’s share price rises.

The final tranche of shares will be granted only if AMD’s stock hits $600 a share, which would give AMD a trillion-dollar valuation.

For now, with a market capitalization of $4.5 trillion, Nvidia is nearly 14 times the size of AMD, and most analyst estimates peg its market share for the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that power AI training and inference at more than 75%.

But in addition to AMD, Nvidia faces pressure from companies such as Broadcom, which produces application-specific custom chips for customers such as OpenAI, and even from large customers themselves, some of which have begun designing their own chips.

The OpenAI deal might have shifted the balance in AMD’s favor somewhat. How AMD got to this inflection point is a combination of careful strategic planning and being in the right place at the right time.

“Over the last few years, what’s been important is for us to understand the workloads that would really drive next-generation AI, training and inference,” Su said in an interview. “This deal is a huge expansion of the work that we’re doing.”

For much of the past decade, AMD’s archrival has been Intel, the troubled chip designer and manufacturer that recently received major investments from Nvidia and the U.S. government. On the strength of popular designs for the graphics chips used in the PlayStation and Xbox gaming systems and the CPUs—or main computer brains—used in consumer PCs, AMD has steadily eaten away at Intel’s market share for years.

Intel, meanwhile, was bogged down by a costly effort to turn around its chip-fabrication business. AMD spun off its manufacturing business, now known as GlobalFoundries, in 2009, while Intel has continued to pour money into its unprofitable foundry segment even as it fell badly behind more technologically advanced rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

In 2018, AMD pivoted sharply to cloud computing, launching its Instinct line of data center GPUs, its first chips designed for AI workloads. Since then, AMD has struggled to keep up with Nvidia, which has dominated not just the AI chip space but also the software systems required to run large data-center clusters.

For the past few years, as AI labs rushed to perfect their latest models, demand has surged for powerful chips that can be used to train those models on billions or even trillions of input parameters. Now, however, demand has shifted to inference functions, rather than training, as companies seek AI tools that are more useful in the worlds of business, entertainment and research. These applications tend to be more lucrative, as well.

“Compute has been more skewed toward training in the past, and in the coming years, it’s going to shift much more toward inference, as demand for these AI services grows,” said Jacob Feldgoise, an AI researcher at the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “AMD has been increasingly trying to position itself as a preferred provider of solutions for inference.”

Su, the AMD chief, as well as OpenAI’s top executives, agreed that demand for inference will be the main driver of AI infrastructure, and argued that as the AI industry grows, any company that offers computing power to developers will see big benefits.

AMD has a few crucial advantages that can help in its quest to grab more market share from Nvidia. Its chips are generally less expensive than Nvidia’s, and their efficiency and quality is improving. There is also the question of availability: Because Nvidia’s chips are widely considered the best available, competition to buy them is fierce. The extensive rise in demand opens up an opportunity for AMD to offer its own products as a more affordable and readily available alternative.

“We really believe that the world is underestimating the demand for AI inference and that we’re heading to a world where there just simply is not enough,” said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI. “It’s a very positive-sum market, where people are just not building enough. There’s not going to be enough chips.”

US green energy forecast cut by half under Trump despite global surge in solar and wind

Renewable power held back in world’s biggest economy while growing in India, the Middle East and Africa

The International Energy Agency has cut in half its forecast for renewable energy growth in the US this decade, even as green power surpassed coal globally in the first half of 2025 for the first time on record.

The global energy agency said last year it expected the US to add 500 gigawatts of new capacity — almost all solar and wind power — by 2030. But it now expects it to add 250GW.

The figures are the most comprehensive assessment yet of the effect the Trump administration is having on global efforts to shift towards greener energy to address climate change mainly caused by burning fossil fuels.

The IEA also upgraded its forecast for India’s renewable energy growth by 10 per cent, putting it on track to become the second-largest renewables growth market globally after China.

The forecast for green energy in the Middle East and north Africa was also upped by 23 per cent, helped by Saudi Arabia rolling out wind turbines and solar panels.

Almost 80 per cent of the global growth will come from solar power, the IEA added, propelled by lower costs and quicker permitting.

The IEA forecast comes as a report by energy think-tank Ember found that renewables generated more power than coal globally during the first half of 2025, for the first time on record. 

Renewables supplied 5,072 terawatt-hours and coal supplied 4,896 terawatt-hours, the report said. Sonia Dunlop, chief executive of the Global Solar Council, said it was a “historic shift”. 

But IEA’s slower than previous outlook in the US, and a tempering of the pace of growth expected in China, could not be entirely offset by the upgrades to its expectations for India, the Middle East and Africa.

It means the IEA has lowered it overall expectations for global renewables growth by about 5 per cent to 4,608GW by 2030 — still roughly equivalent capacity to that of China, the EU and Japan today.

One gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of homes, depending on an array of weather and consumption differences.

Under the IEA’s forecasts, total global renewable capacity will reach 9,529GW in 2030, short of an ambitious 11,000GW target world leaders put in place at the UN COP28 climate summit in Dubai two years ago.

“This target can still be brought within reach if countries adopt enhanced policies to bridge gaps in both ambition and implementation,” it added.

The IEA also cautioned on rising instances of negative prices and curtailment — when plants have to switch off because their power cannot be used — as new wind and solar farms are rolled out faster than cables for transmission and batteries for energy storage.

“Policymakers need to play close attention to supply chain security and grid integration challenges,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. 

The IEA said a major factor in the US downgrade was President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has sped up the end of tax credits for green developments. Permits for wind and solar projects on federal land or waters have also been suspended.

“With the pushing forward of deadlines, renewable capacity additions are now projected to peak in 2027, then decline in 2028 and remain stable through 2030,” the IEA said. 

Revising down its high growth forecast for China’s renewables growth by 2030 by 5 per cent, the IEA cited policy changes which would limit earnings for new projects. 

But it added that China “continues to account for nearly 60 per cent of global renewable capacity growth” and was on track to meet its target for wind and solar power five years early by 2035.

‘The glory days are over’: consultants in Saudi Arabia curb expansion plans

Hiring booms slows as kingdom reassesses where to direct spending

Foreign consultancies in Saudi Arabia are reining in a years-long boom in hiring, recruiters and analysts say, as the kingdom reviews its priorities and slows parts of its economic transformation plan.

Consulting firms have piled into the Middle East’s largest economy since 2016 when it embarked on several transformational “gigaprojects”, including futuristic economic area Neom with its 170km linear city, The Line. 

But low oil prices that are cutting into government budgets and doubts about the feasibility of some projects have slowed activity this year, as Saudi officials weigh up where to direct spending.

“There’s a bit of a panic, at least within KPMG,” said one former partner at the Big Four firm. “Understandable, considering 60-70 per cent of [advisory] revenue was public sector.”

KPMG said businesses worldwide were “navigating an uncertain economic environment”, and that “many professional services organisations” had been affected. The firm said its Middle East business continued to “align its services to current client demand”.

Dane Albertelli, senior research analyst at consultancy-focused advisory firm Source Global Research, said “there’s definitely been a realignment in the year but it’s becoming even more acute I think in the last two or three months”. He expects “a marked decrease” in the Saudi consulting market’s growth from 25 per cent in 2024 to about 11 or 12 per cent this year.  

Consultants are at a “crossroads because the Saudis are realigning what projects are top of the agenda, and obviously contracts are going to be awarded in different ways because of that”, Albertelli added, saying there would be “losers” as well as winners. 

Jason Grundy, Middle East and Africa managing director at executive recruitment firm Robert Walters, said that with many of the kingdom’s gigaprojects having moved from planning to delivery phase, less consulting was required. “Strategy consultancy firms don’t mix cement,” he added.

Bashar Kilani, United Arab Emirates managing partner at recruitment firm Boyden and a former managing director at Accenture in Dubai, said that what was once rapid-fire hiring by the consulting firms “is slowing and in some cases there are cutbacks”.

“It’s driven by two forces,” he added. “One is the actual reduction in spend [by clients] but the other one is technology,” with artificial intelligence forcing firms to show greater efficiencies.  

An Accenture consultant working in the kingdom added some firms were getting “majorly hit” by staffing cuts as a result of the new environment, while “AI is actually doing many tasks better than humans at analyst level”.

Kilani estimated that in consulting teams focused on banking and finance there had been a “15-20 per cent reduction” in middle management jobs, while in teams focused on construction the decrease was “much higher”.

But curbs on employee numbers come after an “unprecedented” increase in staffing levels for consulting firms in Saudi Arabia since the pandemic, Kilani added. According to researcher Albertelli, “this is a pause rather than a decline”.

The workforce boom had been driven by government entities looking for help from consultancies in accelerating the ambitious projects in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” plan, with outsiders assisting in everything from drawing up strategies to attract tourists to setting up entirely new ministries.

Consulting in Saudi Arabia “is softening back to a real market”, said one retired PwC partner. “It’s been an extraordinary market for the last five years”.

The FT has previously reported downward pressure on fees for consulting services, which some in the sector say have fallen as much as 40 per cent this year. 

Industry insiders report increasing scepticism from government clients about the role of consultancies, as value for money becomes paramount. Officials are concerned about consultants “overpromising on mega-projects, over-optimism”, said the retired PwC partner, as well as “the talent churn inside firms, and . . . conflicts of interest”. 

Companies under the umbrella of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund, which is driving the kingdom’s economic diversification efforts, are also coming under increasing pressure to deliver results. Management teams are facing more scrutiny from their boards, many of them populated by government ministers, to meet targets and tighten their spending, including their outlay on consultants.

It was taking longer for government entities to approve consulting contracts because the agreements were being more closely scrutinised, said Omer Zakaria, Robert Walters’ Saudi Arabia country head. 

“If someone wants to use a Bain or a BCG or a Big Four, they have to go through a process of getting it approved by the main government . . . it’s taking a while to do that,” he added, estimating a four-to-six-month lag. “The Big Four can’t wait and they were already heavily staffed based on the old model.”

However, some consultants say approval processes were already lengthy.

A former local PwC consultant said some government agencies had also become more restrictive about hiring foreign consultants at sensitive ministries over security concerns, limiting work on certain projects to Saudi nationals.

Grundy and Zakaria said there had been a “significant” decline this year in the number of placements Robert Walters makes for senior roles in professional services firms in Saudi Arabia, even as demand has risen in sectors such as healthcare, tourism and law.

The former KPMG partner said he was receiving messages from recruiters “several times per day offering me very senior talent based in Saudi Arabia”. 

Others in the industry said consulting firms were still taking on new staff but that the pace had slowed. While hiring continues because of constant attrition, one strategy consultant said, overall headcount growth was lower than in the past as firms adjusted after a period in which they “overhired”.

While many say they expect the consulting market in Saudi Arabia to weather the slowdown, others are more pessimistic.

“The glory days are over,” said one executive. “Now it’s a hard slog with more people in the room.” 

As the Olympics return, Cortina hopes for a new golden age

The 1956 Games sealed the Italian resort’s reputation as the world’s most glamorous place to ski — but it gradually lost its lustre. Can Milano-Cortina 2026 kick-start a resurgence?

At a corner table in the bar of the Hotel de la Poste, Antonio di Franco places his most famous cocktail on the starched linen. The Puccini blends champagne and mandarin juice. “In the 1960s the ladies didn’t want only champagne,” says di Franco, who, having retired only a few weeks earlier, has swapped his white bartender’s jacket for a navy blazer and striped tie. “With the mandarin, they ordered more, because it was like orangeade.”

Di Franco, who is 84, is as much an institution in the Italian mountain town of Cortina d’Ampezzo as the Poste itself, which was established by 1835. He started serving here in 1965, when the resort’s reputation as a glamorous bolt-hole for the international jet set neared its peak. Not long into his six-decade position behind the bar (he never skied: “If you break the legs, you cannot work”), he remembers serving a couple whose drinks required no dilution.

“They ordered langoustine and Chateaubriand,” says di Franco, gesturing across the same table. “It was all here, but they didn’t touch it! They only drank vodka.”

The couple were Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, who were Cortina regulars. The dolce vita was in full swing in the town, which sits in a valley in the Dolomites, about 90 miles north of Venice. Already a magnet for Milanese industrialists and Rome’s political elite — as well as Ernest Hemingway, who stayed at the Poste — the resort was thrust on to the international stage when it hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics. They were the first Games to be televised live, and Cortina sparkled as Sophia Loren watched the events in chic knitwear. Taylor and Burton followed, along with Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Roger Moore, helping put grand hotels such as the Miramonti Majestic and the Cristallo on the map. Cortina became “il salotto dei famosi”, or “the celebrities’ living room”.

“In the ’70s it was impossible to enter here,” di Franco says, his glinty eyes scanning the wood-panelled bar, which has barely changed. At 6pm, after a sunny day on the mountains, there are several empty tables and no one is dressed up. “Now it can be busy sometimes, but it’s not the same. And it’s not the same people.”

Di Franco thinks complacency and competition from other grand resorts dimmed Cortina’s lustre. It never completely lost it, and the rich second homeowners never left. But the 1956 ski jump, the Trampolino Olimpico, that rises above a pasture on the way into town, perhaps symbolises a resort that has traded on past glories; when I arrive in March, the elegant concrete structure, once hailed as a modernist masterpiece and used in a chase scene in the Bond classic For Your Eyes Only, has been left to crumble. Its Olympic rings have almost faded away.

Visitors coming to Cortina this winter can expect a different sight. While the ski jump is no longer viable for competition, it is being restored as a kind of emblem of a new Olympic era for the Queen of the Dolomites, as Cortina is also known. In February and March, the town will co-host the 2026 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games alongside Milan, reprising the role after 70 years with ambitious plans to leap into a new golden age. 

During my visit there are already signs of change further into town, where a big clock counts down to the Games in the Piazza Roma, just outside the Poste on Cortina’s pedestrianised Corso Italia. The cobbled road, which offers tantalising glimpses of the towering Dolomites either side of the Ampezzo valley, is one of Italy’s most famous thoroughfares. In high season, well-heeled shoppers throng its boutiques, but Cortina has always combined the glitz with a laid-back air. You can still get a very fine mortadella focaccia sandwich for €6 at the Bar Sport.

Just past the 18th century white spire of Cortina’s church, The Ancora now stands as another, plusher symbol of Cortina’s hoped-for revival. The hotel just predates the Poste and reopened this summer, having been bought and lavishly refurbished by Italian fashion tycoon Renzo Rosso, who owns Diesel as well as Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander. 

I check in at Hotel de Len, previously the Impero, which sits just off the Corso Italia. Now managed by the Egnazia hospitality group (and a sister to Borgo Egnazia in Puglia), it opened as a 22-room boutique in 2022, three years after the decision to award hosting rights to Cortina and Milan triggered big investment in the town. It is decidedly forward facing and not at all showy, eschewing Alpine kitsch and baubles for minimalist velvets, pines and fir (“Len” means wood in the regional Ladin dialect).

Anxious to get up the mountain the next morning, I take the hotel’s shuttle to the Tofane lift, which rises above the west side of town to the ski area of the same name. Cortina’s 120km of pistes are fairly spread out. The Faloria-Cristallo area to the east feels like its own resort, and doesn’t connect to the others. It makes sense, then, to start at the Tofane, where the more modern gondola rises above the new sliding centre, where all the bobsleigh, skeleton and luge events will take place. (The €118mn venue became an object of national pride after Italy’s populist government agreed to bankroll it, when it looked as if the Games would use an existing course in Switzerland or Austria.)

Higher up, the women’s downhill and paralympic Alpine skiing events will follow the historic Olympia delle Tofane course, which was used for the 1956 men’s downhill and includes the notoriously steep, rock-flanked Tofanaschuss section. I encounter it myself while enjoying Cortina’s miles of mostly more cruisey pistes. As I gaze up at the bright spring sunshine bouncing off the high rocks of the Dolomites, which glow a reddish-pink at dawn and dusk in an event known as “enrosadira” (“turning pink”), I suddenly find myself descending a 33-degree frozen piste.

Anyone in need of a nerve settler can stop right at the bottom of that pitch at the Rifugio Duca d’Aosta, one of the dozens of reasonably priced mountain restaurants dotted around Cortina’s slopes that do delightful things with polenta and casunziei, the region’s renowned beetroot ravioli.

It’s slightly fiddly to get there, but it pays to venture to the edge of the Tofane to take the Skyline gondola (which opened in December 2021, replacing a shuttle bus) over into the Torri-Lagazuoi ski area. It’s here that the mountains are at their most spectacular. Not far from the Rifugio Scoiattoli (also excellent), the Cinque Torri, or five towers, rise in a crown of jumbled rocks, the largest of which resembles a giant’s cracked molar. Sliding beneath them and their shadows is a captivating experience.

I stay a night at the Rifugio Averau, a mountain restaurant with comfortable rooms and bunks, owned by the Siorpaes family. Santo Siorpaes was a pioneering 19th century mountain guide, whose grandson Sergio became an Olympic bobsledder after the 1956 Games. The refuge sits on a shoulder beneath the peak of the Averau, right at the top of the Averau and Fedare chairlifts, offering even piste-dedicated guests, as well as more intrepid ski tourers, the chance to descend after breakfast before the hordes assemble way down in the valley.

Elisabetta Caserini, my mountain guide, says she welcomes any lasting effect the Games might have on Cortina. But, like many of the locals she knows, she plans to skip town before the circus rolls in. “Of course, we will also rent out our homes if we can,” she says, smiling. Cortina locals are buzzing with gossip about the impact of the Games on traffic and parking, and there has been much hand-wringing about construction delays.

Meanwhile, a string of hotel developments and refurbishments that won’t be ready on time includes The First Hotel Cortina, part of the Pavilions Hotels chain, which is replacing the old Splendide Venezia. Most prominently, Cortina’s grand dame, the old Cristallo, which opened in 1901, had been due to open as a Mandarin Oriental after it was sold to a London private equity firm in 2021. It still has no opening date.

But you don’t have to look far to find an irresistible optimism in town. A clutch of new restaurants joining Cortina’s already generous dining options include 1224 inside the Grand Hotel Savoia, a belle époque landmark now owned by Radisson. International twists on Italian classics include Wagyu bresaola. At the southern end of Corso Italia, the informal Roof Cortina, a new all-day bistro and bar, offers panoramic views from the top of La Cooperativa di Cortina, a department store with roots in the 19th century.

Over a drink in Hotel de Len’s low-lit upstairs bar, I talk to Kristian Ghedina, a Cortina native who won 13 World Cup downhill skiing titles, mostly in the 1990s. He’s buzzing with enthusiasm for the town’s second Olympic opportunity, and frustrated by the conservative attitudes of many of his fellow townsfolk — and the way they feed Cortina’s reputation, after the boom years, for lacking drive and ambition.

“Cortina is a brand, and this is a big chance for us,” the 55-year-old says, gesticulating in his red ski gear, which features his own branding (his logo is a silhouette of the 80mph spreadeagle he pulled, for a bet with a friend, in 2004, on the last jump of the notorious Hahnenkamm race in Kitzbuhel). “I travel a lot and it’s like a knife in my heart when people say, ‘Cortina is nice, a beautiful place, but you have a problem with this or that.’”

That evening at the Poste’s bar, Antonio di Franco hasn’t decided what he’ll do during the Games, or whether Cortina can recapture its glory years. But he’s already devised a new cocktail that he may be tempted to come out of retirement to mix behind the bar that he made his own. He says he wanted the drink to honour Milan’s and Cortina’s liquid heritage — perhaps a twist on a Campari spritz with a local prosecco.

“I already know the recipe but I want to keep it as a surprise for the Games,” he says at Liz Taylor’s corner table. “I hope that they can still be serving it here in another 60 years.”

Partners including Nvidia, AMD and Oracle have signed up to Sam Altman’s huge bet on the future of artificial intelligence

OpenAI has signed about $1tn in deals this year for computing power to run its artificial intelligence models, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them.

Monday’s deal with chipmaker AMD follows similar agreements with Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, as OpenAI races to find the computing power it thinks it will need to run services such as ChatGPT.

The deals would give OpenAI access to more than 20 gigawatts of computing capacity, roughly equivalent to the power from 20 nuclear reactors, over the next decade.

Each 1GW of AI computing capacity costs about $50bn to deploy in today’s prices, according to estimates by OpenAI executives, making the total cost about $1tn.

The deals have bound some of the world’s biggest tech groups to OpenAI’s ability to become a profitable business that can meet its increasingly steep financial obligations.

“OpenAI is in no position to make any of these commitments,” said Gil Luria, analyst at DA Davidson, who added it could lose about $10bn this year.

“Part of Silicon Valley’s ‘fake it until you make it’ ethos is to get people to have skin in the game. Now a lot of big companies have a lot of skin in the game on OpenAI,” he added.

OpenAI is burning through cash on infrastructure, chips and talent, with nowhere near the capital required to fund these grand plans.

The deals also involve circular arrangements between the world’s most valuable start-up and its partners, as well as complex financing terms that have in most cases yet to be agreed.

OpenAI’s deals with Nvidia and AMD could cost up to $500bn and $300bn respectively, according to Financial Times calculations, although both include incentives that could also help OpenAI pay for the chips it buys.

Oracle’s deal will cost OpenAI another $300bn, while data centre group CoreWeave has disclosed computing deals with OpenAI worth more than $22bn.

OpenAI also launched an initiative with SoftBank, Oracle and others in January known as Stargate that pledged to invest up to $500bn in US infrastructure for OpenAI. It is not clear how the Nvidia and AMD deal will fit into the Stargate plans.

The ChatGPT maker has not disclosed whether it will buy chips directly or through its cloud computing partners, and is expected to lease some Nvidia chips.

OpenAI has secured significant financial incentives from its suppliers in return for its chip purchases.

Nvidia plans to invest $100bn in OpenAI over the next decade, providing cash OpenAI can use to buy Nvidia’s chips for its AI data centres.

AMD will give OpenAI warrants entitling it to buy up to 10 per cent of the company for just a cent a share, depending on their project hitting certain targets, including some linked to AMD’s share price.

AMD shares were worth nearly $204 when markets closed on Monday. If they keep rising, OpenAI could sell its stock to fund its spending on AMD’s chips.

“It’s a pretty innovative structure, which didn’t come lightly,” AMD chief executive Lisa Su said on Monday.

Deals with OpenAI have also given an immediate financial boost to the start-up’s partners. Oracle’s market value jumped $244bn after its deal was made public last month. AMD shares jumped almost 24 per cent on Monday, boosting its market value $63bn.

Their circular relationships have added to concerns about a bubble in AI, at a time when investors are worried that spending on AI data centres is propping up US economic growth.

To fund its expansion, OpenAI has raised huge amounts of equity and started to tap debt markets. It secured $4bn in bank debt last year and has raised about $47bn from venture capital deals in the past 12 months — though a significant chunk of that is contingent on a tricky negotiation with Microsoft, its biggest backer.

OpenAI — valued at $500bn this month — is also preparing to raise tens of billions of dollars of debt to fund infrastructure, said people close to the company.

The start-up’s perceived credit risk has prompted concern. Moody’s flagged how much of Oracle’s future data centre business relies on OpenAI and its unproven path to profitability.

OpenAI’s arrangement with Nvidia is likely to help investors get more comfortable making large loans.

The chip giant, which recently surpassed $4tn in market cap, has routinely used its mammoth balance sheet to invest in companies within its supply chain or among its top customers.

The beneficiaries of these deals in turn use the new liquidity to buy more Nvidia chips or borrow money.

Nvidia has invested in CoreWeave, which is also a customer and supplier. CoreWeave has also raised raise more than $12bn of debt secured against its Nvidia chips.

Beyond Nvidia’s support, OpenAI’s partners and investors have bought in to its promises of future growth and a path to profitability.

OpenAI expects to multiply its revenue from its current level of $12bn in the coming years by rolling out new products and doubling the number of paying subscribers for its core product ChatGPT.

Chief executive Sam Altman on Monday said becoming profitable was “not in my top-10 concerns”.

“But obviously someday we have to be very profitable, and we’re confident and patient that we will get there . . . Right now we are in a phase of investment and growth and if we can deliver all of this value,” he added.

OpenAI and its growing number of partners are betting AI usage will keep growing exponentially. If growth plateaus, or even slows, the investor enthusiasm that has boosted share prices on the back of these deals could quickly falter.

One Silicon Valley investment veteran said: “The company is in a far more capital-intensive business than Google or Microsoft ever was, and was born with no cost discipline.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Oracle founder Larry Ellison “only found religion” and drastically cut business costs, “after nearly going bankrupt”, the investor added.

Harrods managing director Michael Ward said that since the store's redress scheme was launched on March 31, more than 100 survivors of Mohamed Al-Fayed's systematic abuse have entered the process.

LONDON — Last year was a difficult one for Harrods, which saw its top line flatline and its bottom line dented by payments to survivors of former owner Mohamed Al-Fayed’s rape and sexual abuse.

Harrods released its accounts to media this week before their publication on Companies House. The store’s managing director Michael Ward described the 12 months to Feb. 1, 2025, as a “stable year for trade,” and added that “significant exceptional costs” related to redress payments to survivors hit the bottom line.

In the year to Feb. 1, Harrods said gross transactional value, excluding VAT, decreased by 2.4 percent to 2.2 billion pounds, while turnover rose 0.6 percent to 1.1 billion pounds. The company recorded a loss for the year of 36.5 million pounds compared with a profit of 76.7 million pounds a year earlier.

Ward said that despite difficult trading conditions in luxury, Harrods outperformed the industry as a whole.

Operating profit before exceptional items fell to 177.7 million pounds from 213.9 million pounds due to “ongoing investment in employee salaries and increased distribution costs,” but the number still reflected “the strength of the fundamentals of our business,” Ward said.

Exceptional items were linked to the store’s ongoing digital transformation “and a provision for redress and associated costs for survivors of historic abuse perpetrated by Harrods former chairman and owner Mohamed Fayed.”

In the statement, Ward noted that since the Harrods Redress Scheme was launched on March 31, “more than 100 survivors have entered the process.” The scheme will run until March.

Over the past year Harrods has been dealing with legal action by former female employees who accused the late Al-Fayed of systematic abuse at the store, and in his other properties around the world. At the time, Ward apologized for the behavior of his former boss, who owned Harrods from 1985 until 2010.

Ward said Al-Fayed “operated this business as his own personal fiefdom. It is now clear that he presided over a toxic culture of secrecy, intimidation, fear of repercussion and sexual misconduct. The picture that is now emerging suggests that he did this wherever he operated.”

According to the BBC, which broke the story in its Panorama television program in September 2024, Harrods has set aside more than 60 million pounds to compensate alleged victims of historical abuse through the redress scheme.

Looking ahead, Ward said the current domestic and global economic environment means that trading conditions in the luxury sector remain challenging. “However, we remain confident in the strength of the business, and the resilience of the luxury sector, and that we will continue to drive progress toward longer-term growth and performance objectives,” he said.

Matthieu Blazy set the French fashion house on a new orbit with a collection that offered a complex, layered interpretation of its brand codes.

The planets aligned for Chanel in Paris on Monday night.

After months of excruciating buildup, Matthieu Blazy delivered a case study in brand rejuvenation with a show at the Grand Palais that managed to feel both spectacular and unexpectedly intimate.

Newly (re)minted brand ambassador Nicole Kidman, flanked by her daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, joined celebrities including Margot Robbie, Penélope Cruz, Ayo Edebiri and Pedro Pascal inside the recently renovated glass-and-steel building, which had been transformed into a planetarium symbolizing the “Universe of Chanel.”

The giant orbs, reflected in a glossy black floor marbled with colored pigment, made for an otherworldly backdrop reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld’s most spectacular show sets.

At 8:14 p.m. precisely, it was time for fashion’s equivalent of the moon landing. (That’s only a mild exaggeration, considering that Blazy is just the fourth official creative director in the history of the 115-year-old brand.)

The designer had teased the show with a handful of black-and-white images by veteran photographer David Bailey that suggested he would take the house in a starkly minimal direction. It turned out that was only part of the story.

His first look was a checked wool pantsuit with the jacket chopped off. The idea was inspired by founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s habit of borrowing clothes from her boyfriend Arthur “Boy” Capel.

Both were clients of Charvet, so Blazy tapped the French heritage shirtmaker to help him develop items like an oversized white tuxedo shirt that he paired with a swooping black skirt, or a striped men’s shirt that was cropped and worn with a scarlet ballgown covered in feathery tendrils.

“I was interested in the revolution she brought, and there was no way back,” an elated Blazy explained after the show. “She decided for herself what she could be, and she could be both faces of the same coin.”

Chanel’s androgynous leanings were balanced by a highly seductive approach to eveningwear, he found. Blazy channeled it through silky separates and slithering gowns in a graphic palette of beige, ivory and black, which resonated with the French capital’s celebration of the centenary of Art Deco.

Chanel’s minimal perfume packaging, inspired by her childhood spent in an orphanage in the Cistercian abbey of Aubazine, was echoed in a drop-waisted tunic with a full midi skirt. Knits, conversely, were dense and textural, with skirts the color and texture of straw, and tops that looked like shredded paper.

Blazy said he was inspired by wheat sheaves, one of Coco’s many lucky charms. Gold versions dangled from a black sack dress, and they appeared as fuzzy allover embroidery on an oatmeal tweed coat.

That not all of it was easily digestible worked in Blazy’s favor. Under his predecessor Virginie Viard and the studio team that succeeded her, Chanel relied on brand codes writ large — witness the giant pearl necklace handbags of its last collection. Blazy literally squished those codes, proposing a complex, layered interpretation that promises to give the brand fresh cultural relevance.

Describing his first season as a “rollercoaster,” he said he was initially overwhelmed by the archive. “It was too much beauty, almost, and I didn’t know where to take it from,” he recalled. “The good thing with the codes of Chanel is that you can also reduce them. They still look like Chanel.”

A case in point: the brand’s iconic quilted handbag, known as the 2.55, which he put through the wringer, stripped of its chain, or made in the burgundy leather traditionally used for its lining.

“I didn’t know what to do with it. I started to play with it, change the chain, embroider, change the leather. It didn’t work,” he recalled.

“And suddenly I thought, how can we take this bag, not just explode it, but almost make it like it’s been borrowed from your great-grandmother, and then passed through generations, and you went to a party in the Lower East Side or in Paris at Pigalle — something lived, something cherished,” Blazy said.

His ultrasoft take on the brand’s signature two-tone flats, meanwhile, was inspired by a chocolate praline.

Blazy’s greatest challenge, perhaps, was the tweed suit. He offered frayed and fringed versions in cozy blanket textures, which took their cue from Chanel’s offhand approach to her own clothes, which she shared with another lover, the Duke of Westminster. “She saw him as the chicest man on earth, because he liked to wear his clothes worn and used,” he said.

Some came in inflated proportions that were technically intriguing, though not always flattering. Among the most alluring were the checked versions with low-slung wrap skirts, which he said were inspired by an archival suit.

“There are Chanel women all around the world, and I saw that suit from 1964 and what was so mesmerizing about this suit is that I couldn’t tell where it came from,” he said. “It could have been French, but maybe from other horizons.”

Back to that cosmic show set. Blazy said he wanted to convey an idea of freedom and borderless dressing. “We all look at the same sky. We all see the stars. There is something universal. It should also be beautiful and enjoyable, and this is what we have to propose also in fashion,” he said.

Model Awar Odhiang closed the show in an ivory silk T-shirt, slit open in the back, worn with a ball skirt covered in multicolored flowers. As she clapped her hands and danced towards Blazy, the audience rose with a roar of approval. By reaching for the stars, the designer just set Chanel on a new orbit.