Oil giant Shell raises dividend and launches $2 billion share buyback as commodity prices soar

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4 years ago

July 31, 2021

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A Shell logo seen at a petrol station in London. A court in The Hague has ordered oil giant Shell to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% compared to 2019 levels by 2030, in what is widely seen as a landmark case.

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LONDON — Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday reported stronger-than-expected second-quarter earnings, lending further support to the energy major’s plans to reduce net debt and reward investors.

The Anglo-Dutch company reported adjusted earnings of $5.5 billion for the three months through to the end of June. That compared with $638 million over the same period a year earlier and $3.2 billion for the first quarter of 2021.

Analysts had expected second-quarter adjusted earnings to come in at $5.1 billion, according to Refinitiv.

Shell boosted its dividend for the second consecutive quarter and announced the launch of a $2 billion share buyback program that it aims to complete by the end of the year.

The dividend rose to 24 cents in the second quarter, up 38% from the first three months of the year. It comes a year after the company moved to cut its dividend to shareholders for the first time since World War II.

“We have to make sure that our current shareholder base is pleased with what we do in terms of payouts,” Shell CEO Ben van Beurden told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday, reflecting on the firm’s plans to step up its shareholder distributions.

“We have to have a strong cash generative business that also funds the company for the future, but at the same time we have to build a business that is future-proof.”

The results reflect a broader trend across the oil and gas industry, as energy majors seek to reassure investors they have gained a stable footing amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. France’s TotalEnergies and Norway’s Equinor have also announced share buyback programs.

Share prices of the world’s largest oil and gas majors have not yet followed an improvement in the earnings outlook, however, and the industry still faces a host of uncertainties and challenges.

Shares of Shell were up over 3% during morning trade in London. The oil and gas company has seen its stock price rise more than 17% year-to-date, having collapsed almost 45% in 2020.

Investor skepticism

Shell’s financial results come as oil and gas prices took another step up in recent months. International benchmark Brent crude futures rose to an average of $69 a barrel in the second quarter, up from an average of $61 in the first three months of the year. The oil contract was last seen trading at $75.38.

Oil prices have rebounded to reach multi-year highs in recent months and all three of the world’s main forecasting agencies — OPEC, the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration — now expect a demand-led recovery to pick up speed in the second half of 2021.

It follows a year in which the head of the IEA had suggested may come to represent the worst in the history of oil markets. The oil and gas industry was sent into a tailspin in 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 coincided with a historic fuel demand shock, plunging commodity prices, unprecedented write-downs and tens of thousands of job cuts.

Ahead of this earnings season, analysts had warned that while energy companies were likely to try to claim a clean bill of health, investors were expected to harbor a “tremendous degree” of skepticism about the business models of oil and gas firms over the long term. This was predominantly a result of the deepening climate emergency and the urgent need to pivot away from fossil fuels.

Court ruling

Earlier this month, Shell confirmed its intention to appeal a landmark Dutch court ruling ordering the company to take much more aggressive action to drive down its carbon emissions.

“We agree urgent action is needed and we will accelerate our transition to net zero,” Shell’s van Beurden said in a statement on July 20. “But we will appeal because a court judgment, against a single company, is not effective.”

“What is needed is clear, ambitious policies that will drive fundamental change across the whole energy system,” he added.

Members of the environmental group MilieuDefensie celebrate the verdict of the Dutch environmental organisation’s case against Royal Dutch Shell Plc, outside the Palace of Justice courthouse in The Hague, Netherlands, on Wednesday, May 26, 2021. Shell was ordered by a Dutch court to slash its emissions harder and faster than planned, dealing a blow to the oil giant that could have far reaching consequences for the rest of the global fossil fuel industry.

Peter Boer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The Netherlands court ruled on May 26 that Shell must reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels. That’s a much higher reduction than the company’s current aim of lowering its emissions by 20% by 2030.

The court ruling also said Shell is responsible for its own carbon emissions and those of its suppliers, known as Scope 3 emissions.

The verdict was thought to be the first time in history a company has been legally obliged to align its policies with the Paris Agreement. The accord, ratified by nearly 200 countries in 2015, is seen as critically important in averting the worst effects of climate change.

Environment

IONNA and Casey’s to bring more fast charging to the US Midwest

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12 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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IONNA and Casey’s to bring more fast charging to the US Midwest

Charging network IONNA is partnering with Casey’s, one of the US’s largest convenience store and pizza chains, to bring DC fast charging to EV drivers across the Midwest.

Starting this year, Casey’s customers can plug into IONNA’s 400 kW charging stations while grabbing a slice or stocking up on road-trip essentials. Eight “Rechargeries” are already under construction in six states and are expected to open in 2025:

Little Rock, Arkansas
Vernon Hills, Illinois
McHenry, Illinois
Terre Haute, Indiana
Parkville, Missouri
Kearney, Missouri
Blackwell, Oklahoma
Waco, Texas

The Casey’s deal pushes IONNA past 900 charging bays in construction or operation — more than double what it had just three months ago. IONNA says the partnership will “expand,” but doesn’t provide specifics.

“This partnership with Casey’s is key to expanding our presence in America’s heartland,” said IONNA CEO Seth Cutler. “With a shared respect and commitment to delivering quality customer experience, we are pleased to add Casey’s to our growing network of partners.”

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IONNA is a joint venture backed by eight of the world’s biggest automakers – BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota – working to rapidly scale a DC fast-charging network in the US.

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Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Published

14 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Google, Anthropic agree to cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.

While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.

Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.

Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.

According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

Anthropic takes a page from Palantir as AI battle with OpenAI goes global

Claude’s breakneck revenue growth

Anthropic’s escalating compute demand reflects its explosive business growth.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.

While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.

Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.

AWS outage ripples across internet, puts pressure on Amazon ahead of earnings

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”

Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Environment

JB Straubel’s Redwood snags $350M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Published

14 hours ago

October 23, 2025

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JB Straubel’s Redwood snags 0M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Redwood battery storage — Photo: Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO and cofounder JB Straubel, has raised $350 million in new funding to scale its US-made battery storage systems and critical materials operations. The company is ramping up to meet surging demand from AI data centers and the clean energy sector.

The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Eclipse, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and other new strategic investors.

As global supplies tighten, the US is racing to secure domestic production of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. In July, Redwood and GM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to turn new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems. Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems.

Redwood says large-scale battery storage is the fastest and most scalable way to enable new AI data center rollout while unlocking stranded generation capacity and stabilizing the grid. Battery storage also helps industrial facilities electrify and balance renewable energy output. The company aims to deliver a new generation of affordable, US-built energy storage systems designed to serve the grid, heavy industry, and AI data centers, reducing dependence on imported Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.

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Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.

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