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Trade Wars
Companies Are Converting Aircraft Engines To Land-Based Natural Gas Turbines For Power Generation In The AI Boom
Jet engine leasing and repair company FTAI Aviation plans to start selling a modified version of the engine used in the Boeing 737 to power data centers this year. Others pursuing this conversion include private equity-backed ProEnergy, which sells natural gas turbines that are adapted from the same engine that powers the Boeing 747. Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic in December said that it will start selling a modified version of its engine as a natural gas power turbine. AI data center startup Crusoe is its first customer and is expected to get its turbines in 2027.
Jet engines are a natural fit. Power equipment giants GE Vernova, Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries already sell power turbines—known as aeroderivatives—that are modeled after these very jet engines. Aircraft engine companies such as GE Aerospace GE, Howmet Aerospace and Woodward also sell land-based aeroderivative turbines or components. There are two main modifications to convert an aircraft engine to a land-based natural gas turbine for power generation, according to Mark Axford of Axford Turbine Consultants. One is replacing the fuel nozzles to utilize natural gas instead of jet fuel. The other is replacing the large fan on the front of the flight engine with a much smaller fan that is better suited for power generation.
Read more at The WSJ
Genuine Parts To Split Into Industrial And Auto Businesses; Sees Weak FY26 Profit
Automotive and industrial parts distributor Genuine Parts will separate into two independent companies, it said on Tuesday, months after a deal with activist investor Elliott Investment Management. The move follows a comprehensive strategic and operational review of market opportunities, in-flight initiatives and the company’s structure, it said. The separation into two publicly traded companies – Automotive Parts Group and Industrial Parts Group – follows a settlement late last year with shareholder Elliott.
Founded in 1928, Genuine Parts now has a market value of roughly $20 billion as its Automotive Parts Group distributes replacement parts around the world, primarily under the NAPA brand name. Its Motion Industries unit supplies advanced engineered components and technical services to manufacturing and industrial customers across the U.S. Separately, Genuine Parts forecast full-year 2026 profit below Wall Street estimates. It sees adjusted EPS between $7.50 and $8.00, while analysts expect $8.44, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Read more at CNBC
Micron Is Spending $200 Billion to Break the AI Memory Bottleneck
Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips—the tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers. Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to avert the biggest supply crunch the memory industry has seen in more than 40 years. In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending $50 billion to more than double the size of its 450-acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories, or fabs. The first fab’s inaugural silicon wafers are expected to roll off the factory line in mid-2027, making DRAM, a type of memory used to make the high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM, that are increasingly essential to advanced artificial-intelligence computing. Both plants should be in production by the end of 2028.
Each fab will be 600,000 square feet—the size of more than 10 football fields—making them some of the biggest “clean rooms” ever built in America. To prepare the site, engineers have already blasted through more than 7 million pounds of dynamite. An army of construction workers, building contractors and architects have set up a small city’s worth of trailers so they can work around the clock. That’s not all. Near Syracuse, Micron just broke ground on a $100 billion fab complex that represents the state of New York’s largest-ever private investment. Late last year, Micron announced a $9.6 billion fab investment in Hiroshima, Japan, while competitor SK Hynix announced in January that it would build a $13 billion fab in South Korea, in addition to a $4 billion manufacturing complex it is building in Indiana.
Read more at The WSJ
Gene Editing Has Struggled To Go Commercial. This Nobel Laureate Has A $1 Billion Plan To Fix That.
Soon after KJ Muldoon was born in August 2024, he was lethargic and wouldn’t eat. His worried doctors realized his ammonia levels were scarily high. Further tests showed the infant had a rare metabolic disorder—the kind of diagnosis that’s often a death sentence. A team of researchers from Crispr pioneer Jennifer Doudna’s Innovative Genomics Institute and doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine began sprinting to create a custom treatment to fix Baby KJ’s DNA, using Crispr-based gene editing. Within just six months, they designed the therapy, got lightning-fast approval from the FDA and manufactured it. Baby KJ received his first infusion on February 25, 2025, and today is a healthy one and a-half year old.
It was perhaps the most significant milestone yet for the relatively new field of gene editing, which Doudna helped originate more than a decade ago. But even she was floored by how quickly the team of physicians and scientists were able to spin up the life-saving treatment. Doudna’s next act is trying to make sure that Crispr’s potential finally pays off. “I don’t want it to be a curio, a topic of academic interest that maybe impacts a few people on the planet, but for the most part doesn’t intersect with the real world,” she said. Core to her plan is the IGI: Doudna plans to raise $1 billion for the institute to support a budget of $100 million a year for the next 10 years to set up the next generation of scientists. With that funding, she hopes to start making personalized gene editing a more widely available treatment, to use Crispr to create therapies for common diseases like cancer and even to find applications in agriculture and the environment — all in a way that’s cost-effective.
Read more at Forbes
Rolls-Royce Is Leading Europe's Small Nuclear Reactor Race
Rolls-Royce has been selected as the UK's preferred bidder for its first small modular reactors (SMRs), backed by $3.3 billion of public investment, with the first project planned for the decommissioned Wylfa site in Wales. Rolls-Royce is collaborating with Canada’s BWX Technologies (BWXT) on the design of its first SMR and will procure steam generators from the firm. BWXT has also agreed “to support future manufacturing and related activities” in the U.K., Czech Republic, and other parts of Europe, to secure a supply of parts including pumps, valves, heat exchangers, and tanks.
Beyond its European SMR expansion in countries like Czechia and Hungary, Rolls-Royce is also developing a nuclear micro-reactor with a lower power output, which it aims to send to the lunar surface by the early 2030s. The deployment of SMRs on a commercial scale across Europe could rapidly boost the region’s nuclear power capacity, as SMRs can be rolled out at a faster pace than conventional nuclear reactors, thanks to their efficient modular design. SMRs can be produced in factories before being transported to site to be assembled, where more SMRs can be added to boost output as required.
Read more at Oil Price
Ford Unveils New Details On Its Cheaper EV Platform. First Up, A Midsize Pickup.
Ford’s first-gen EVs — think the Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning pickup — gave the automaker valuable insights into what customers want, as well as the difficulties in manufacturing EVs from scratch. The big problem for Ford and other non-Tesla automakers was that customer demand was nowhere near the excitement levels projected by the industry, and the costs associated with the program were massive, to the tune of $19.5 billion in write-offs for Ford.
As a result, Ford pivoted its EV plans, but it's not giving up. The company's focus is on a new universal electric vehicle (UEV) platform built from the ground up with a "skunkworks" team in California. The first product will be a midsize EV pickup costing around $30,000, targeting profitability from the start. Ford said the UEV platform reduces total parts by 20% compared with a typical Ford vehicle program — for example, incorporating 25% fewer fasteners throughout the vehicle. On the factory floor, Ford eliminated 40% of process workstations compared to current production. Using fewer parts and redesigning the build process makes a truck that's cheaper to manufacture.
Read more at Yahoo Finance
The 500-Year-Old Beretta Gun Dynasty Is Betting Big on the U.S.
For 500 years the Beretta family has made guns in this Alpine valley. Now the world’s oldest defense company is taking aim at America’s largest firearms maker. The Italian company, run by the 15th generation of the founding family, has amassed a near 10% stake in rifle maker Sturm, Ruger & Co. as part of a broader strategy to win more business in the U.S. The company’s interest in Ruger marries the Beretta survival playbook of continuous, long-term investment with its more modern interest in the U.S., the world’s largest gun market.
Beretta got its start in October 1526, when Italian merchant Bartolomeo Beretta sold 185 gun barrels to the city of Venice. The business went on to supply Napoleon’s forces and later the Italian army. Today, its pistols, shotguns and other weaponry are used by militaries and hobbyists around the world.Beretta is riding a wave of rising military spending in Europe that is boosting sales across the arms sector. But the company also wants to keep growing its business catering to hunting and sport to protect against the ups and downs of military spending.
Read more at the WSJ
Bayer To Make $10.5 Billion Push To Settle Roundup Cases
Bayer is planning to announce a $10.5 billion settlement push to settle current and future cancer lawsuits over its Roundup weedkiller, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the plan. Bayer did not immediately comment on the report. The German chemical giant is set to propose a $7.5 billion class-action settlement through cases filed in state court in Missouri designed to resolve Roundup suits that already have been filed and potential claims that could be filed over a 20-year period, Bloomberg reported.
Bayer is also preparing to announce $3 billion in settlements of existing U.S. cases in which former Roundup users blame the herbicide for causing their non-Hodgkins lymphoma, it reported. The company has paid about $10 billion to settle most of the Roundup lawsuits that were pending as of 2020, but failed to get a settlement covering future cases. New lawsuits have continued to pour in since then. Plaintiffs have said they developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and other forms of cancer due to using Roundup, either at home or on the job.
Read more at Yahoo Finance
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