The G-20 summit kicks off Tuesday. Here’s what to expect.
Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani (C front) attends the G20 Finance Ministers Meeting in Nusa Dua, on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali, on July 16, 2022.
SONNY TUMBELAKA | POOL | AFP via Getty Images
World leaders are kicking off a meeting Tuesday on the holiday island of Bali, Indonesia as the global economy grapples with a looming recession, central banks’ jumbo rate hikes and historically high inflation.
The annual meeting of leaders from the world’s major economies, known as the Group of 20 nations, is also taking place as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags on and relations between Washington and Beijing remain tense.
The gathering of officials that represent more than 80% of global GDP and 75% of exports worldwide marks the 17th meeting since the the platform kicked off after the Asian financial crisis in 1999 as a meeting for finance ministry officials and central bank leaders.
Who’s attending?
Nineteen countries and one economic region, the European Union, will attend this year’s two-day G-20 meeting.
This year’s in-person attendee list has been in the spotlight as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his unprovoked war in Ukraine.
Putin will not be attending the summit and will instead be represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who walked out of a G-20 foreign minister meeting in July as his global counterparts called for an end to the war in Ukraine. Reuters reported Putin may join virtually.
U.S. President Joe Biden is also scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping ahead of the G-20.
Other attendees include newly appointed U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman, who recently led an OPEC+ initiative to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day to shore up prices.
Expectations are ‘not very high’
Not much progress is expected from Biden and Xi’s meeting, according to Andrew Staples, Asia Pacific director of Economist Impact, the policy and insights arm of The Economist Group.
“Expectations are not very high,” he told CNBC’s Martin Soong, adding that ongoing geopolitical tensions are dragging down global growth. He highlighted China’s stance on the war in Ukraine as one of many signs of eroding relations between the U.S. and China.
“There’s a lot of concern for the business community globally that these geopolitical tensions is impacting negatively … we have in Ukraine, which China has been unfortunately been somewhat ambivalent about when it comes to President Putin, is really damaging the global economy,” he said.
“Finding some floor to this relationship — which is what Biden is looking to do — will be a positive, not only for the business community but for the global economic sentiment as well,” he said.
The role of Russia
Russia’s latest move to constantly flip its stance on the United Nations-led Black Sea Grain initiative is “likely to overshadow all other negotiations in Bali,” Laura von Daniels, head of the Americas research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said in a Council on Foreign Relations report.
The agreement, reached earlier this year, sought to ease Russia’s naval blockade and reopen key Ukrainian ports to deliver crops through a humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea. It expires on Nov. 19.
“To agree would not cost Russia anything,” said von Daniels. “It would, though, allow both Xi and Putin — as leaders of authoritarian states — to be applauded on the world stage for providing food security.”
Reopening strategy
The meeting takes place as a vast majority of the world reopens borders and lifts Covid-related restrictions — leaning into the post-pandemic era with its slogan, “Recover Together, Recover Stronger.”
Members agreed that “policy stimulus needs to be withdrawn appropriately during the recovery,” the Indonesia G-20 Presidency said in a July note released ahead of the meeting. It referred to a survey of member states that it conducted.
It said the potential for longer-lasting impact from the coronavirus pandemic on global growth would be a key topic of the meetings taking place in November.
“Risks stemming from supply disruption, rising inflation, and weak investment are the top three risks to be addressed urgently in relation to scarring from the pandemic,” it said, highlighting the need for global cooperation including the gradual reopening of borders to support revival of trade.
“We’ve all got some version of an inflation problem and rising interest rates as well, so the whole world has an interest in making progress here,” Australia Treasurer Jim Chalmers told CNBC’s Martin Soong. “Conditions are high risk and they are volatile,” he said.
China set a new record for clean tech exports in August 2025, hitting $20 billion, according to new data analyzed using Ember’s China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer. The country remains the world’s largest exporter of electrotech, with surging demand for EVs and batteries leading the charge.
EV exports jumped 26% from January through August compared to the same period in 2024, while battery exports rose 23%. Other sectors saw more modest growth – grid technology up 22%, wind up 16%, and heating and cooling systems up 4% – but those gains were offset by a 19% drop in solar PV export value. EVs and batteries are now worth more than double the value of China’s solar PV exports.
This milestone is remarkable because it comes even as technology prices have fallen sharply. Solar panel prices, for example, have plunged more than 80% over the past decade, making them more affordable and driving up global demand. In August alone, China exported 46 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV – more than Australia’s entire installed solar capacity – setting a record in capacity terms. However, their dollar value remains 47% below their March 2023 peak.
Falling prices have fueled growth in new regions. Over half of the increase in China’s EV exports this year came from outside the OECD, with the ASEAN region emerging as a major growth engine. EV exports to ASEAN surged 75% in the first eight months of 2025, mainly driven by Indonesia. The country saw the biggest rise in Chinese EV imports globally this year, becoming the world’s ninth-largest EV market. Battery electric vehicles made up 14% of new car sales in Indonesia in August 2025, up from 9% a year earlier.
Africa is also rapidly adopting Chinese clean tech. From January to August, EV exports to the continent nearly tripled year-over-year (+287%), albeit from a very low base, with Morocco leading growth and Nigeria’s imports soaring sixfold. Latin America and the Caribbean saw an 11% rise, while the Middle East climbed 72%.
Domestically, China’s own adoption of clean tech is accelerating even faster. EVs accounted for 52% of new car sales in August, and in the first half of 2025, China installed more than twice as many solar panels as the rest of the world combined. Ember’s recent China Energy Transition Review attributes this momentum to consistent policy support that’s reshaping the country’s economy and energy system around electrified technologies.
“Demand for clean technologies continues to skyrocket as more and more countries seek their benefits, from low-cost power to cheaper vehicles,” said Ember analyst Euan Graham. “China’s electrotech is becoming the basis of the new energy system, with continued cost reductions driving faster growth than ever, especially in emerging economies.”
Read more: The era of cheap Chinese solar + storage is ending – here’s why
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Environment
This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers
Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
| EV MODEL | Q3 25/Q3 24 | Q3 25 | Q3 24 | YTD 25/YTD 24 | YTD 25 | YTD 24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Equinox EV | +156.70% | 25,085 | 9,772 | +389.88% | 52,834 | 10,785 |
| Chevrolet Blazer EV | +1.14% | 8,089 | 7,998 | +36.72% | 20,825 | 15,232 |
| Chevrolet Silverado EV | +97.49% | 3,940 | 1,995 | +78.58% | 9,379 | 5,252 |
| Chevrolet BrightDrop | * | 2,384 | * | * | 3,976 | 0 |
| GMC Hummer EV Pickup | +21.86% | 5,246 | 4,305 | +48.65% | 13,233 | 8,902 |
| GMC Sierra EV | +771.84% | 3,374 | 387 | +1,488.37% | 6,147 | 387 |
| Cadillac Optiq | * | 4,886 | * | * | 9,826 | 0 |
| Cadillac Lyriq | +1.18% | 7,309 | 7,224 | -18.17% | 16,626 | 20,318 |
| Cadillac Vistiq | * | 3,924 | * | * | 5,669 | 0 |
| Cadillac Escalade IQ | * | 2,264 | * | * | 6,030 | 0 |
| Total | +109.91% | 66,501 | 31,681 | +137.44% | 144,545 | 60,876 |
Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
Cadillac Escalade IQ review
SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.
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