Connect with us

Published

on

On what was recently farmland, Amazon data centers have been built as close as 50 feet from residential houses in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood on January 20, 2023, in Aldie, VA.

Jahi Chikwendiu | The Washington Post | Getty Images

In January, Oregon lawmakers submitted a bill to the state’s legislature that sought to curb the carbon output of new data centers and cryptocurrency miners — facilities that have rapidly sprung up across Oregon due to the relatively low cost of power and favorable tax incentives. It would have required new data center and crypto mining facilities to run entirely on clean energy sources by 2040, in line with the state’s climate targets established in 2021.

On Monday, the bill, known as HB2816, died in a legislative committee. Proponents of the measure are pointing to aggressive lobbying efforts by Amazon, which operates several data centers in the state, as a major culprit behind the bill’s demise.

Amazon’s opposition to the clean energy measure is at odds with its broader push to improve its environmental impact. The company has committed to being carbon neutral by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge launched in 2019. Amazon says it’s on a path to using 100% renewable energy across its business by 2025, and is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy.

“From the very first moment we started talking about this bill, Amazon started organizing against it,” said Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, a co-sponsor of HB2816, in an interview.

Representatives from Oxley & Associates, a lobbying firm hired by Amazon, were spotted in the halls of the capitol building, speaking with members of the state legislature committee who would eventually hear the bill, said Marsh, who is a Democrat representing Oregon’s District 5.

AWS spokesperson David Ward declined to comment on the company’s lobbying efforts related to the bill, but acknowledged Amazon’s opposition to the measure, saying it failed to address the build-out of infrastructure that’s needed to bring more clean energy to the U.S. electricity grid.

“Building new renewable projects requires infrastructure investments in the grid and today there are hurdles in key areas like permitting and interconnection,” Ward said in a statement. “Accelerating energy infrastructure permitting and interconnections for renewables like solar and wind would have a greater impact on reducing emissions, bringing more clean energy to the grid, and helping achieve our goal of accessing more clean energy in Oregon.”

Experts have said the nation’s out-of-date electrical grid remains a barrier to accelerating the transition to clean energy sources. Today, over 70% of U.S. transmission lines are more than 25 years old, according to the White House. Building new transmission lines is a lengthy and arduous process, as it requires agreement from multiple stakeholders involved, from utility companies and regulators to landowners.

See also: Wind and solar generators wait years to put electricity on the grid, then face massive fees

Data centers are extremely energy intensive. In 2014, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 70 billion kilowatt hours, or about 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption in that year, according to the Department of Energy.

Amazon relies on huge server farms to power its sprawling cloud computing service, which is the main profit engine of the company. Amazon has pledged to get all of its data centers running on renewable energy, but it has yet to divest completely from fossil fuels.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced it reached an agreement with Umatilla Electric Cooperative, the utility company serving its operations in Oregon’s Umatilla and Morrow counties, to select the energy supply that powers its data centers, including from renewable sources.

Changes to the bill did not appease Amazon, says Marsh

Amazon also argues that lawmakers didn’t engage data center operators and owners in Oregon when they crafted the bill.

But Marsh disputes that contention.

The committee removed a clause that would levy penalties against companies that couldn’t meet the clean energy targets, and added a provision that would let them opt out of the bill. Both actions were an attempt at generating goodwill, Marsh said.

“We said, ‘OK, if it gets to be 2030 and there’s been some major world disruption and you can’t meet your clean energy goals, you can submit this paperwork and you can opt out because something might have happened beyond your control,” Marsh said. “So we made good, strong changes to the bill, but it didn’t change Amazon’s opposition whatsoever.”

Marsh said she became increasingly skeptical of Amazon’s “commitment to clean energy” when it said it planned to power some of its data center operations in the state with natural gas fuel cells made by Bloom Energy.

Amazon said the fuel cells will serve a small portion of its data center operations in the state. The hope is to power the fuel cells with renewable energies like hydrogen or biogas.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of Amazon tech workers who have previously pressured the company to address its climate record, said they were disappointed the bill stalled. The group supported the measure, and Sarah Tracy, an AECJ member and former Amazon software developer, testified at a public hearing for the bill.

AECJ created a petition in 2019 to push then-CEO Jeff Bezos to rethink its environmental impact. After Bezos announced the Climate Pledge, the group still walked out because they felt the pledge wasn’t strong enough. Two employees who were heavily involved in the group, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, were fired after they repeatedly spoke out about Amazon’s climate and workplace record. Amazon later settled with Costa and Cunningham after a federal labor agency determined Amazon illegally fired them for their activism.

A spokesperson for AECJ told CNBC, “The level of hypocrisy here would be hilarious if it weren’t so disturbing — naming a sports arena after your ‘Climate Pledge’ for clout while lobbying to bypass the basic clean energy requirements that public utilities are held to. It makes me feel bad for the sustainability team here — they’re working their butts off because they know better than anyone how little time we have to switch Amazon and the rest of the economy to renewables before catastrophe hits. But then the company undercuts that mission by building new dirty energy infrastructure.”

While the bill is dead for now, Marsh said conversations continue around compelling data center and crypto facilities to comply with Oregon’s clean energy targets. The bill may come back in a different form in the future, she added.

Continue Reading

Technology

USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Published

on

By

USDC stablecoin issuer Circle files for IPO as public markets open to crypto

Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder and CEO, Circle 

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The S1 lays the groundwork for Circle’s long-anticipated entry into the public markets.

While the filing does not yet disclose the number of shares or a price range, sources told Fortune that Circle plans to move forward with a public filing in late April and is targeting a market debut as early as June.

JPMorgan Chase and Citi are reportedly serving as lead underwriters, and the company is seeking a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to Fortune.

This marks Circle’s second attempt at going public. A prior SPAC merger with Concord Acquisition Corp collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance — including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York City.

Read more about tech and crypto from CNBC Pro

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation.

Circle is best known as the issuer of USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.

Pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and backed by cash and short-term Treasury securities, USDC has roughly $60 billion in circulation. It makes up about 26% of the total market cap for stablecoins, behind Tether‘s 67% dominance. Its market cap has grown 36% this year, however, compared with Tether’s 5% growth.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the company’s most recent earnings call that it has a “stretch goal to make USDC the number 1 stablecoin.” 

The company’s push into public markets reflects a broader moment for the crypto industry, which is navigating renewed political favor under a more crypto-friendly U.S. administration. The stablecoin sector is ramping up as the industry grows increasingly confident that the crypto market will get its first piece of U.S. legislation passed and implemented this year, focusing on stablecoins.

Stablecoins’ growth could have investment implications for crypto exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase as they integrate more of them into crypto trading and cross-border transfers. Coinbase also has an agreement with Circle to share 50% of the revenue of its USDC stablecoin.

The stablecoin market has grown about 11% so far this year and about 47% in the past year, and has become a “systemically important” part of the crypto market, according to Bernstein. Historically, digital assets in this sector have been used for trading and as collateral in decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.

More recently, however, rhetoric around stablecoins’ ability to help preserve U.S. dollar dominance – by exporting dollar utility internationally and ensuring demand for U.S. government debt, which backs nearly all dollar-denominated stablecoins – has grown louder.

A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent crypto-native firms to list on a U.S. exchange — an important signal for both investors and regulators as digital assets become more entwined with the traditional financial system.

Continue Reading

Technology

Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

Published

on

By

Hims & Hers shares rise as company adds new weight-loss medications to platform

The Hims app arranged on a smartphone in New York on Feb. 12, 2025.

Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Hims & Hers Health shares closed up 5% on Tuesday after the company announced patients can access Eli Lilly‘s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform.

Zepbound, Mounjaro and liraglutide are part of the class of weight loss medications called GLP-1s, which have exploded in popularity in recent years. Hims & Hers launched a weight loss program in late 2023, but its GLP-1 offerings have evolved as the company has contended with a volatile supply and regulatory environment.

Lilly’s weekly injections Zepbound and Mounjaro will cost patients $1,899 a month, according to the Hims & Hers website. The generic liraglutide will cost $299 a month, but it requires a daily injection and can be less effective than other GLP-1 medications.

“As we look ahead, we plan to continue to expand our weight loss offering to deliver an even more holistic, personalized experience,” Dr. Craig Primack, senior vice president of weight loss at Hims & Hers, wrote in a blog post.

A Lilly spokesperson said in a statement that the company has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers and noted that Zepbound is available at lower costs for people who are insured for the product or for those who buy directly from the company. 

In May, Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s GLP-1 weight loss medications Ozempic and Wegovy. The offering was immensely popular and helped generate more than $225 million in revenue for the company in 2024.

But compounded drugs can traditionally only be mass produced when the branded medications treatments are in shortage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that the shortage of semaglutide injections products had been resolved.

That meant Hims & Hers had to largely stop offering the compounded medications, though some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable. 

During the company’s quarterly call with investors in February, Hims & Hers said its weight loss offerings will primarily consist of its oral medications and liraglutide. The company said it expects its weight loss offerings to generate at least $725 million in annual revenue, excluding contributions from compounded semaglutide.

But the company is still lobbying for compounded medications. A pop up on Hims & Hers’ website, which was viewed by CNBC, encourages users to “use your voice” and urge Congress and the FDA to preserve access to compounded treatments.

With Tuesday’s rally, Hims and Hers shares are up about 27% in 2025 after soaring 172% last year.

WATCH: Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

Hims & Hers shares tumble over concerns around weight-loss business

Continue Reading

Technology

Meta’s head of AI research announces departure

Published

on

By

Meta's head of AI research announces departure

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds a smartphone as he makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta’s head of artificial intelligence research announced Tuesday that she will be leaving the company. 

Joelle Pineau, the company’s vice president of AI research, announced her departure in a LinkedIn post, saying her last day at the social media company will be May 30. 

Her departure comes at a challenging time for Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI a top priority, investing billions of dollars in an effort to become the market leader ahead of rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Zuckerberg has said that it is his goal for Meta to build an AI assistant with more than 1 billion users and artificial general intelligence, which is a term used to describe computers that can think and take actions comparable to humans.

“As the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work,” Pineau wrote. “I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world, and to responsibly bring them into the lives of billions of people.”

Vice President of AI Research and Head of FAIR at Meta Joelle Pineau attends a technology demonstration at the META research laboratory in Paris on February 7, 2025.

Stephane De Sakutin | AFP | Getty Images

Pineau was one of Meta’s top AI researchers and led the company’s fundamental AI research unit, or FAIR, since 2023. There, she oversaw the company’s cutting-edge computer science-related studies, some of which are eventually incorporated into the company’s core apps. 

She joined the company in 2017 to lead Meta’s Montreal AI research lab. Pineau is also a computer science professor at McGill University, where she is a co-director of its reasoning and learning lab.

Some of the projects Pineau helped oversee include Meta’s open-source Llama family of AI models and other technologies like the PyTorch software for AI developers.

Pineau’s departure announcement comes a few weeks ahead of Meta’s LlamaCon AI conference on April 29. There, the company is expected to detail its latest version of Llama. Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, to whom Pineau reported to, said in March that Llama 4 will help power AI agents, the latest craze in generative AI. The company is also expected to announce a standalone app for its Meta AI chatbot, CNBC reported in February

“We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “She’s been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them.” 

Pineau did not reveal her next role but said she “will be taking some time to observe and to reflect, before jumping into a new adventure.”

WATCH: Meta awaits antitrust fine from EU

Meta awaits antitrust fine from EU

Continue Reading

Trending