Economics

45 entries

September 17, 2026Economics The Frontier

China's Huawei Moves Its Next AI Chip Up by Nine Months and Says It Cannot Build Enough for China Alone

At its annual conference in Shanghai, the Chinese telecom and chip giant said its Ascend 960DT chip will ship in the first three months of 2027, three quarters earlier than planned, with double the performance of the current generation. It also unveiled a design for wiring up to a million of its chips into one machine. Its chairman told reporters demand inside China already exceeds what the company can make, so it has no plan to sell abroad.

September 17, 2026Conversations Economics

Unsealed Court Papers Show a Microsoft Executive Privately Called AI Training on News Articles 'the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'

The New York Times and four other publishers filed a public version of their argument for winning their copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft without a trial, and it quotes the companies' own internal documents: a Microsoft scientist calling the practice "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions," and the head of ChatGPT writing that publishers face an "existential threat." Microsoft says those were one employee's opinions. The companies argue their use of articles is legal, and the U.S. government sided with them this month.

August 26, 2026Economics

Nvidia's Revenue Doubles Again, to $96 Billion in Three Months

The chip maker reported revenue up 106 percent from a year ago and told investors to expect $108 billion next quarter — well above what Wall Street had forecast. Its chief executive said demand is still accelerating.

August 21, 2026Space Economics

Eight Companies Are Now Trying to Put Data Centers in Orbit

A startup called Starcloud raised another $250 million this week, valuing it at $2.3 billion, with plans for a constellation of 88,000 satellites. SpaceX has filed for up to a million. The pitch is free cooling and constant sunlight; the problem is everything else.

August 4, 2026Space Economics

SpaceX Reports Its First Earnings as a Public Company, With $14 Billion in New AI Contracts

Revenue rose 92 percent to $7.8 billion for the quarter, beating expectations by nearly a billion. Starlink's subscribers doubled to 12 million, and the company disclosed AI-related contracts that were not part of its business a year ago.

July 6, 2026Economics Conversations

More Than 165,000 Tech Jobs Cut This Year, With AI the Most-Cited Reason

Companies are announcing record revenues and large layoffs in the same quarter, naming AI as the cause of both. May was the worst single month for tech job cuts in years.

June 18, 2026Conversations Economics

More Than Half the Traffic on the Web Is Now Machines, Not People

Cloudflare, which handles a large share of the world's internet traffic, reports that bots generate about 57 percent of web page requests. A growing portion are AI systems reading the internet to train on it or to answer questions about it.

June 15, 2026Economics The Frontier

ChatGPT Passes a Billion Users, Faster Than Any Product in History

Three and a half years after it launched as a research preview, OpenAI's chatbot is used by a billion people a month — roughly one in eight people on earth.

June 12, 2026Space Economics

SpaceX Goes Public in the Largest Stock Offering in History

The rocket company raised $75 billion, and its shares rose 19 percent on the first day of trading to close worth about $2.1 trillion — instantly the sixth most valuable public company in America.

June 9, 2026Robotics Economics

China Is Building Most of the World's Humanoid Robots, and Selling Them for the Price of a Used Car

Chinese manufacturers now make an estimated 85 percent of the world's humanoid robots, with entry models starting around $4,000 to $6,000. The harder problem, makers admit, is finding enough customers who need one.

June 1, 2026Economics

Anthropic Files to Go Public at a Valuation Near $1 Trillion

The maker of Claude filed confidentially for an October stock listing, seeking to raise more than $60 billion. Its revenue has gone from about $9 billion a year at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion this spring.

May 26, 2026Conversations Economics

The Pope Issues a Formal Teaching Document on Artificial Intelligence

In a 42,000-word encyclical, Pope Leo XIV warned that mass unemployment from AI could become a 'social calamity,' called for governments to regulate private AI companies, and argued that human dignity cannot be measured by economic usefulness.

May 20, 2026Economics

A Chip Company Built to Challenge Nvidia Raises $5.6 Billion in the Year's Biggest Stock Offering

Cerebras makes a processor the size of a dinner plate — a single chip where competitors use thousands of small ones. Its shares priced at $185 after the company raised more than it originally sought.

March 5, 2026Conversations Economics

OpenAI Signs the Pentagon Deal Anthropic Walked Away From, and Says It Got Better Terms

A week after its rival was barred from military business for refusing to budge, OpenAI announced its own agreement and claimed it had secured every safeguard Anthropic asked for and more. Asked how the terms would be enforced, the company said it could cancel the contract.

February 27, 2026Conversations Economics

An AI Company Refuses the Pentagon's Terms and Is Declared a Threat to National Security

Anthropic asked for two limits on military use of its AI: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon refused, and the Defense Secretary barred every military contractor from doing any business with the company.

February 12, 2026Robotics Economics

Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Get Cheaper Hardware and Aim for a Million Rides a Week

The new version of the company's system uses less than half as much equipment — 13 cameras instead of 29, four laser scanners instead of five — and costs under $20,000 a car, roughly half the previous generation.

February 8, 2026The Frontier Economics

OpenAI and Anthropic Release Rival Coding Models in the Same Week, Then Buy Competing Super Bowl Ads

Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex landed days apart, both aimed at software work, as the two companies' executives traded public insults and took their fight to the biggest advertising stage in America.

November 19, 2025Economics

Nvidia Reports $57 Billion in a Single Quarter and Says the AI Boom Is Not Slowing

Revenue rose 62 percent from a year earlier and profit rose 65 percent, beating Wall Street's forecasts and quieting — for now — the talk of an AI bubble that had built through the autumn.

November 6, 2025Economics

Tesla Shareholders Approve a Pay Package for Elon Musk Worth Up to $1 Trillion

More than 75 percent voted in favor. Musk gets nothing unless Tesla hits a series of targets over ten years, the largest of which would require the company to be worth $8.5 trillion — more than triple the most valuable company today.

October 3, 2025The Frontier Economics

OpenAI Launches a Video App and Says It Will Put Ads in ChatGPT

Sora 2, released as a TikTok-style app of AI-generated clips, let people insert themselves and others into videos, reviving fights over likeness and copyright. In the same stretch, OpenAI signaled it would begin showing advertising — a turn for a company that had sold subscriptions.

September 30, 2025Conversations Economics

The Actors' Union Responds to the AI 'Actress': 'It's Not an Actor'

SAG-AFTRA said Tilly Norwood is a computer program 'trained on the work of countless professional performers, without permission or compensation,' and that it has no life experience to draw from and solves no problem audiences asked to have solved.

September 27, 2025Conversations Economics

A Studio Unveils an AI-Generated 'Actress' and Says Talent Agents Want to Sign Her

Tilly Norwood, a synthetic performer created by a company called Particle6, was presented at an industry event where her creator said agencies were interested in representing her. Actors and their union reacted with immediate anger.

September 18, 2025Economics

Nvidia Puts $5 Billion Into Intel, the Rival It Left Behind

The chip maker that won the AI boom is buying a roughly 4 percent stake in the one that missed it, and the two will design chips together. Intel's shares rose 22 percent, its best day in nearly four decades.

August 18, 2025Economics Conversations

An MIT Report Finds 95 Percent of Company AI Projects Show No Profit

A study from an MIT lab found that the vast majority of business efforts to deploy generative AI had produced no measurable return, even as spending soared. Coming amid record valuations, it sharpened the question of whether AI is a bubble.

August 15, 2025Economics Conversations

The Head of OpenAI Says Investors Are 'Overexcited' and Uses the Word 'Bubble'

Sam Altman, whose company sits at the center of the AI boom, agreed that the market had entered bubble territory — while insisting the underlying technology is real and that OpenAI itself would keep spending enormously. Investors weighed a warning coming from the person with the most reason not to give it.

July 9, 2025Economics

The Chip Maker Behind AI Becomes the First Company Worth $4 Trillion

Nvidia crossed $4 trillion in market value, a milestone no company had reached, on continued demand for the chips that run AI. Eighteen months earlier it had been worth a quarter of that.

May 28, 2025Economics Conversations

The Head of Anthropic Warns AI Could Wipe Out Half of Entry-Level Office Jobs Within Five Years

In an interview, Dario Amodei said AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar positions and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent, and criticized his own industry and government for not being honest with the public about it.

January 27, 2025Economics

Nvidia Loses $600 Billion in a Day as a Cheap Chinese AI Rattles the Market

The chip maker's stock fell 17 percent — the largest one-day loss of value for any company in history — after DeepSeek's cheap, capable model made investors question whether AI really needs as many expensive chips as they'd assumed.

January 21, 2025Economics Conversations

OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle Announce a $500 Billion Plan to Build AI Data Centers in America

Standing beside President Trump at the White House, the companies said they would invest up to half a trillion dollars over four years in the computing infrastructure to run AI, starting with a campus in Texas. The scale of the number drew immediate skepticism.

January 20, 2025The Frontier Economics

A Chinese Lab Releases a Free Program That Reasons Like OpenAI's Best — and Says It Cost a Fraction to Build

DeepSeek's R1 shows its step-by-step thinking, matches OpenAI's o1 on math and coding tests, and can be downloaded by anyone. The company says it trained the underlying model for under $6 million, a claim that unsettled assumptions about who can build frontier AI and at what cost.

December 5, 2024Economics

ChatGPT Now Has a $200-a-Month Tier

OpenAI's new Pro subscription, ten times the price of the existing one, offers unlimited use of its most capable reasoning program and a version that thinks longer on hard problems. It's aimed at researchers and engineers, and it's a sign of what the programs cost to run.

September 20, 2024Economics Conversations

Microsoft Will Pay to Restart a Reactor at Three Mile Island to Power Its AI Data Centers

The reactor that shut down in 2019 for lack of business — next to the one that partially melted down in 1979 — will come back online by 2028 under a 20-year deal. Microsoft will buy all of its electricity.

July 23, 2024The Frontier Economics

Meta Releases a Free AI Program as Powerful as the Ones Companies Charge For

Llama 3.1, in its largest version, matches OpenAI's and Anthropic's best on standard tests, and anyone can download it. Mark Zuckerberg says open AI is 'the path forward' and compares it to Linux.

June 5, 2024Economics

The Chip Maker Behind the AI Boom Passes $3 Trillion, Overtaking Apple

Nvidia's stock has tripled in the past year on demand for the chips every AI company needs. It crossed $1 trillion twelve months ago, $2 trillion in February, and $3 trillion today — the fastest climb of any company in history.

February 27, 2024Economics Conversations

A Payments Company Says Its AI Assistant Is Doing the Work of 700 Customer-Service Employees

Klarna, the Swedish 'buy now, pay later' firm, said the chatbot it built with OpenAI handled two-thirds of its customer chats in its first month, resolving issues faster and with fewer repeat contacts than human agents. It expects a $40 million profit improvement this year.

January 14, 2024Economics Conversations

The IMF Says AI Will Touch Almost 40 Percent of Jobs Worldwide — and 60 Percent in Rich Countries

The International Monetary Fund's analysis finds that about half the affected jobs will be helped by AI and half hurt, and that the technology is likely to widen the gap between countries and between workers.

December 27, 2023Economics Conversations

The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Using Its Articles to Train AI

The newspaper says millions of its articles were copied without permission to build ChatGPT, which now competes with it for readers, and it wants billions in damages and the destruction of any program trained on its work.

November 22, 2023The Frontier Economics Conversations

Sam Altman Returns to OpenAI, Five Days After Being Fired

After nearly all of OpenAI's 770 employees threatened to quit and Microsoft offered to hire them, the board that removed Altman agreed to reinstate him and to replace most of itself. The people who fired him have largely left.

November 17, 2023The Frontier Economics Conversations

OpenAI's Board Fires Sam Altman, the Executive Who Made It Famous

In a statement on a Friday afternoon, the company said its chief executive 'was not consistently candid in his communications' and that the board no longer had confidence in him. Even OpenAI's biggest investor, Microsoft, learned minutes before the announcement.

July 18, 2023The Frontier Economics