Business

THE RISE of artificial-intelligence (AI) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, AI can also give a fair bit back, by helping transform ancient, overloaded and dumb electricity networks into something fit for the digital and decarbonised age. […]

ALIBABA USED to be synonymous with the success of Chinese e-commerce. Lately the company has been synonymous with its woes. In 2021 it became the grimacing face of an official crackdown against China’s biggest technology firms, whose growing size and seeming social indispensability must have spooked the Communist Party. It was fined a record $2.8bn […]

YOUNG JOB-SEEKERS are different from their elders. They expect employers to be cuddlier, more forgiving and more generous with perks and pay cheques. The way they go about hunting for work is also distinct. Rather than relying on family and friends, a growing number of Americans are turning to TikTok in search of advice that […]

WHAT IS THE ideal job to outsource to artificial intelligence? Today’s AIs, in particular the ChatGPT-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. […]

Two years ago companies in America were scrambling to plug vacancies from shop floors and call centres to corporate headquarters. Workers laid off during the pandemic proved difficult to lure back, particularly those that had opted for early retirement. Others who spent their lockdowns dreaming of new beginnings resigned en masse once business resumed as […]

BIG TECH wants more computing power. A lot more. According to their latest quarterly reports, Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Amazon and Microsoft—the world’s cloud-computing giants—collectively invested $40bn between January and March, most of it in data centres equipped to deal with growing artificial-intelligence (AI) workloads. Last month Meta, which does not have a cloud business […]

TALK OF TAKEOVER has long swirled around 107-year-old Anglo American, once among the biggest mining companies in the world. On April 25th speculation turned to specifics when BHP, the $140bn behemoth that is today top of the pile by market value, offered to buy its diminished rival (minus Anglo’s South African business) for $39bn. It […]

You are not important enough to turn left on a plane. But you are important enough for the company to want you to have completed a project-risk update by the time you land. You have six solid hours in the air, and the work should take no more than three hours. You are not in […]

When Aravind Srinivas was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to do a PhD, his mother was disappointed. Like many Indian parents, she wanted him to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But things worked out after all; on the west coast he interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, both of which became […]

TO GIRD YOURSELF for Auto China 2024, a nine-day motor show which ends on May 4th in Beijing, get there by car. On the opening day, navigating the human traffic eager to glimpse the mechanical marvels on display required the same tenacity as negotiating the Chinese capital’s gridlocked roads. Helpfully, the ride to the venue […]