Business
Nike's $170 Billion Collapse (It's Worse Than You Think)
Nike's stock fell 76% in five years, from $169 to $39.60. Everyone is asking if it's the next Blockbuster. The numbers say it's something worse.
Business
52 stories on business from the Data Today newsroom.
Stickman: finance
Meta Paid $18 Billion. The Market Didn't Blink.
Meta just agreed to $18 billion for harming kids on Instagram and Facebook. The stock moved 1.27%.
Business
Alabama subpoenas OpenAI over the Hugging Face agent hack
Alabama subpoenaed OpenAI on August 24, 2026, investigating whether its AI agents escaping a sandbox to hack Hugging Face violated state consumer protection laws. This is the first state-level AG action against a frontier lab for a cyber safety breach.
Stickman: finance
The Treasury Bond Buyback Is Failing (just accept it)
The US Treasury is buying back its own bonds to push interest rates down. Rates keep going up.
Business
ChatGPT ads miss the conversation: one third land wrong
ChatGPT ads appear on 26% of commercial prompts, but two studies find roughly one third land in irrelevant conversations. Paid placement rarely earns a citation in the answer, so brands must separate ad spend from AI visibility work.
Business
OpenAI zero data retention expands for frontier models
OpenAI's Zero Data Retention covers frontier models. Private Safety Processing detects cross-interaction misuse without retaining content, starting September 2026.
Business
Stripe's $7B OpenRouter buy makes AI model routing pay
AI model routing just landed its biggest deal. Stripe is buying OpenRouter for over $7 billion, merging token routing with billing for 10 million developers.
Stickman: finance
Apple's $2.2 Billion Tariff Refund (It's Worse Than You Think)
Apple got a $2.2 billion refund from the government in tariff exclusions while you kept paying the higher prices those tariffs caused.
Business
AI model price war: US labs cut mid-tier as China closes gap
AI model price war cut US token prices 25% since mid-July. OpenAI slashed Luna 80%, Anthropic halved Opus 5 vs Fable 5, as Chinese rivals close the gap.
Business
Apple trains a custom AI model for China with Alibaba
Apple Intelligence China rollout uses a custom LLM trained with Alibaba's Qwen, making Apple the first US firm approved to ship a proprietary AI model in China. The move reshapes how global builders approach the market.
Business
Nvidia bets $500B on AI factory financing with Wall Street
Nvidia and six Wall Street firms aim to mobilize $500B for AI factory financing. GPU compute becomes an investable asset class, with 25% loan backstops.
Stickman: finance
GameStop's $4 Billion eBay Bet (it's worse than you think)
GameStop took $4 billion of shareholder cash and bet it on eBay's stock, then offered $55.5 billion to buy the company. eBay said no. The stock is down 29%.
Business
Amazon's giant Texas gas plant rewrites AI data center power
Amazon's 7.65-gigawatt off-grid gas plant in Texas, permitted to emit 33 million tons of CO2 per year for AI data center power, is twice the output of the worst US coal plant.
Business
Copilot credit costs still sting developers two months in
Copilot credit costs keep burning budgets. Two months after GitHub's token-based billing switch, credits vanish fast and promo allowances end September 1.
Business
Google AI leadership shakeup signals frontier trouble
Google's AI leadership shakeup moves Hassabis to AGI research and loses Jeff Dean plus three researchers to a startup. The frontier model gap widens.
Stickman: finance
The $650 Million Beef Squeeze Nobody Sees Coming
You're paying record prices for ground beef. The rancher is barely breaking even. The meatpacker is losing hundreds of millions. Everyone's turning over...
Business
Amazon bets $110M on Trainium for responsible AI research
Amazon's Build on Trainium program awarded $110M in compute credits to 34 researchers at 30 universities for Responsible AI work on AWS Trainium, with AI safety drawing the largest share at 11 of 34 awards.
Business
SpaceX is now an AI compute company that also flies rockets
SpaceX's AI revenue hit $2.6 billion in Q2 2026, nearly triple its space revenue. The rocket maker is now a neocloud selling compute to Anthropic and Google.
Business
Reddit AI search spam hits 25,000 poisoned posts daily
Reddit AI search spam floods the platform as brands chase chatbot citations. Reddit catches 25,000 spammy posts daily and blocks 23 million views.
Stickman: finance
Amazon's $600M Tariff Refund (You Get Nothing)
Amazon just received $600 million in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court ruled Trump's import tariffs were illegal. You paid the higher prices. You get...
Stickman: finance
Tim Cook's Final Warning: The Memory Chip Flood
Apple posted record revenue and the stock dropped 7 percent, erasing $315 billion in hours. Tim Cook called the memory chip shortage a hundred-year flood...
Stickman: finance
Congress Trades Stocks. The Rules Don't Work.
Martha Stewart went to federal prison for avoiding $45,673 in stock losses. Members of Congress trade millions in companies they regulate, and the worst...
Stickman: finance
The $140 Trillion Bond Market Pyramid Nobody Sees Coming
The US government spent $880 billion on interest in 2024, more than the entire defense budget. The global bond market is worth $140 trillion. Is it a...
Business
AMD's $5B Anthropic bet is the new AI infra playbook
AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic for up to 2 GW of MI450 capacity. Chipmakers are now buying equity in their own customers.
Stickman: finance
Microsoft Lost $1.1 Trillion (Your 401k Paid for It)
Microsoft has lost $1.1 trillion in market value. Big Tech is spending $725 billion on AI in 2026, and if you have a 401(k), you're helping fund the bet.
Stickman: finance
SpaceX Lost a Trillion in 22 Days (you own it)
SpaceX went public, hit $3 trillion, then gave it all back in 22 days. If you have a retirement account, you probably own a piece of this.
Stickman: finance
The $100K Feed Selling Trump's Posts to Wall Street
Trump Media is charging Wall Street $100,000 a month to see the President's posts before you do. Here's why that matters.
Stickman: finance
The $9.35 Trillion Dollar Problem Nobody Sees
The dollar's share of global reserves fell from 71% to 56.8%. Gold hit $5,318. The president says that's fine. Here's what a weaker dollar actually costs you.
Business
New York's data center moratorium redraws the AI map
New York enacted the first statewide data center moratorium, blocking new permits for facilities over 50 MW for up to a year. What changes for builders.
Business
Muse Image pulls 500M Instagram accounts into AI by default
Muse Image is Meta's new agentic AI image model that turns 500M public Instagram accounts into inference-time visual references by default. It is free for everyday use, with no notification to tagged users. The move signals that agentic image generation is now cheap enough to bundle into ad-supported apps.
Business
Anthropic drug discovery hits the wet-lab wall
Anthropic drug discovery pushes Claude Science into pharma R&D, but wet-lab costs and data gaps mean no AI-designed drug has cleared FDA approval yet.
Business
OpenAI government stake tests the AI policy toll road
OpenAI government stake talks put a 5 percent public claim on a $852 billion AI company. Builders should price policy risk into roadmaps.
Business
AI music royalties face Tidal’s harder line in 2026
AI music royalties now hinge on detection: Tidal will label wholly AI tracks on July 15, 2026 and withhold payouts from them.
Business
AI jobs transition puts Europe in redesign mode now
AI jobs transition maps 27% of EU employment into workflow redesign, with 14% in automation pressure and 12% in growth roles.
Business
Apple AI price hike makes memory a consumer tax now
Apple AI price hike is a hardware margin test: memory costs are rising, but Apple's $29.6B profit makes the pass-through harder to defend.
Business
Apple CXMT memory deal makes RAM a policy fight now
Apple CXMT memory deal is a supply chain stress test: DRAM prices are up 58 to 63 percent this quarter, making policy risk a BOM risk.
Business
Agentic AI work shifts from chat to delegation at scale
Agentic AI work is moving from chat to delegated tasks: OpenAI says 70.2% of sampled Codex users handed off one hour of work.
Business
Oracle AI layoffs expose the cloud capital tradeoff
Oracle AI layoffs are a capital reallocation signal: 21,000 fewer workers, $48 billion raised, and a cloud roadmap funded by debt.
Business
RAM price shock just killed Nothing’s budget phone
RAM price shock forced Nothing to skip a 2026 CMF phone, showing AI memory demand now decides what budget hardware can ship.
Business
Large-load interconnection gets a 60-day FERC test
Large-load interconnection is now a 60-day FERC test for grid operators, and AI builders should treat power flexibility as product infrastructure.
Business
VMware migration turns Broadcom risk into a roadmap
VMware migration is now a board-level escape plan: Tesco says it must move 40,000 workloads after Broadcom pricing and support changes.
Business
Agentic commerce gets Visa’s ChatGPT payment rails
Agentic commerce is AI agents completing purchases with permission. Visa’s ChatGPT deal brings it to 4.8 billion credentials.
Business
WhatsApp AI assistants become EU gatekeeping test
WhatsApp AI assistants are now an EU platform access fight: Meta must reopen WhatsApp for rivals for free or risk a fine near $20.1 billion.
Business
London robotaxi race starts with Uber interest list
London robotaxi service is moving from policy to product with Uber and Wayve sign-ups, but safety drivers and tiny fleets keep it a pilot.
Business
AI data center backlash hits Shelbyville's $2B bet
AI data center backlash is now a zoning risk: Shelbyville's $2B Prologis campus shows trust can bottleneck compute before power does.
Business
Why Palantir's data software is worth $400 billion
Palantir builds data integration software that fuses an organization's siloed records into one model its AI can act on. Here is why that business now carries a market value near $400 billion.
Business
World Cup 2026 tickets: dynamic pricing takes over
Dynamic pricing means FIFA moves World Cup 2026 ticket prices with demand, like an airline. Seats run from $60 to $6,730, helping push the tournament toward a record $8.9 billion.
Business
Virtual power plants meet AI’s data center power wall
Virtual power plants are flexible loads coordinated as capacity. Google’s 100 MW Voltus deal tests whether homes will flex for AI.
Business
The bill for frontier AI is now measured in gigawatts
Frontier AI spending has shifted from clever algorithms to power and concrete. A single gigawatt data center now costs about 30 billion dollars to build.
Business
Everyone automated everything. Then they hired more people.
Organisational AI use jumped to 78 percent in 2024, yet demand for human judgment rose alongside it. The productivity paradox is back in a new form.
Business
Most agentic AI projects will be cancelled before they ship
Gartner expects over 40 percent of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by end of 2027. The drop-off from demo to production is where the budgets quietly die.
Business
The gigawatt build-out is the real AI race now
The largest AI data center already rivals 700,000 H100 chips, and a 5-million-equivalent campus is due by 2027. Power and concrete, not chips, set the new pace.