Financial Mindset

Meta will pay for a total of 10 gas-fired power plants—enough to power more than 5 million homes—to electrify its rapidly expanding plans for its massive AI data center complex in northeastern Louisiana, dubbed Hyperion. Meta’s agreement with New Orleans-based Entergy , announced March 27, is to build and finance seven new power plants in Louisiana. That comes on top of plans approved last year to build three gas power plants for the sprawling AI hub. The 10 power plants with 7.5 gigawatts of capacity would represent more than a 30% increase to Louisiana’s entire grid capacity, not even counting up to 2.5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, including battery storage, that Meta also agreed to help fund. Meta initially announced plans for a $10 billion investment in December 2024 for a 2,250-acre data center campus in northeastern Louisiana in rural Richland Parish. But Meta recently, and quietly, acquired an additional 1,400 acres, as Fortune reported in February . In October ...

Airlangga Hartato was all smiles on Feb. 19 as he signed his name to what he called a “win-win” deal. After four trips to Washington, seven formal negotiating rounds, and nine meetings with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Indonesia’s economy minister had finally secured a reduction in U.S. duties on Indonesian goods—from a punishing 32% to a more tolerable 19%. The agreement, grandly titled Toward a New Golden Age for the U.S.–Indonesia Alliance, promised tariff exemptions for key exports like palm oil, coffee, cocoa, and rubber. In exchange, Jakarta pledged to scrap barriers on more than 99% of U.S. imports and commit to some $33 billion in purchases of American energy, aircraft, and agricultural products. The very next day, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs —including the original 32% levy that had forced Jakarta into the talks in the first place—as unconstitutional. (Trump has since followed up with two new trade probes on Indonesia,...

Most working women in the U.S. believe they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages, but many men hold a different view, according to a new AP-NORC poll. Equal pay emerged as a major source of concern for working women in the poll and an area where men and women are far apart in their perception of gender equity. Most women who are employed full-time — about 6 in 10 — say men have more opportunities when it comes to earning competitive wages, according to the survey from  The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research , while about one-third think neither gender has an advantage. About 3 in 10 employed women say they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender. Men who are employed full-time are more divided: About 4 in 10 believe men have an advantage when it comes to wages, while about half think both genders have about the same opportunities and about 1 in 10 say women have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 m...

Iran on Wednesday dismissed an American plan  to pause the war in the Middle East  and launched more attacks on Israel and Gulf Arab countries, including an assault that sparked a huge fire at Kuwait International Airport. Iran’s defiance  came as Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran and as the United States deployed  paratroopers and more Marines to the region . Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview on state TV that his government has not engaged in talks to end the war, “and we do not plan on any negotiations.” That followed a report from Iranian state TV’s English-language broadcaster, which quoted an anonymous official as saying Iran rejected America’s ceasefire proposal and has its own demands for an end to the fighting. Earlier, two officials from Pakistan, which transmitted the U.S. plan to Iran, described  the 15-point proposal  broadly, saying it addressed sanctions relief, a rollback of Iran’s nuclear program, limits on mi...

When Jensen Huang praised OpenClaw last week, the ripples reached Hong Kong within hours. Shares in MiniMax and Zhipu AI jumped more than 20% after the Nvidia CEO declared in a CNBC interview that the rapidly spreading open‑source agent framework was “definitely the next ChatGPT.”  Foreign investors once dismissed China’s AI push as a constrained, second-tier effort. Yet now, strategists argue that the country may be better positioned for AI, thanks to cheaper power, growing capital spending, and a swarm of open-source developers. Those same analysts are also wondering whether the U.S. AI boom, after years of sky-high valuations and data center spending, is running out of steam. “We’ve actually reduced our exposure to U.S. tech,” Mohit Kumar, Jefferies’ global macro strategist, told Fortune at the investment bank’s Asia Forum in Hong Kong last week. “We believe that China is the big winner in this tech war for a number of reasons: valuation, wider adoption of AI, an advantage ...

Lawyers for the Department of War and Anthropic sparred in a California federal court on Tuesday over Anthropic’s challenge to the Pentagon labeling it a supply-chain risk to national security and banning all government contractors from using the company’s sweeping AI tools.  The case—which involves a historic first in that the Pentagon, renamed the Department of War (DOW), labeled a U.S.-led  business as a supply-chain risk to national security—is rooted in a contract negotiation that escalated quickly. The DOW wanted to add a blanket “all lawful use” clause to its contracts with the AI firm so the military could use Anthropic’s Claude tool for any legal purpose. Anthropic balked at the military using Claude for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans. Anthropic, led by founder Dario Amodei, said it hasn’t thoroughly tested those uses and doesn’t believe they work safely. The DOW claimed those guardrails were unacceptable and that military commanders ne...

The year was 1974 and President Richard Nixon had dispatched his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret deal. Three years earlier, in August 1971, Nixon had already administered the “shock” that ended the Bretton Woods system governing global finance since World War II — suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold in a televised address that transformed every major currency overnight. By 1973, the system had fully unraveled. The world wouldn’t know for another 50 years what Nixon and Kissinger replaced it with, striking a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees—a deal that would quietly govern the global economy for the next half-century. The existence of this secret agreement wasn’t even publicly confirmed until...