An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry. The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the US power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation, and renewables. The $67 billion deal combines NextEra's size and reach with Dominion's positioning as the local utility for the world's largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts. For perspective, only Exxon Mobil and Chevron would be larger based on market value among US-based energy companies. "Mergers are not about consumers; they're about shareholders," said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. "For the Dominion shareholders, they are selling their shares at a premium. The executives are getting massive payouts for facilitating this, assuming it all goes through, and obviously NextEra believes the transaction is going to add value to the company. Ratepayers are all an afterthought." The deal makes financial sense for both companies, said Andrew Bischof, an equity analyst for Morningstar. "We view the transaction as allowing NextEra to accelerate its data center ambitions, which had trailed those of its regulated peers, by using Dominion's expertise and relationships to expedite NextEra's data center hub plans," he said in a note to clients. NextEra, based in Juno Beach, Florida, includes Florida Power & Light, the largest regulated electricity utility in the state, and NextEra Energy Resources, a wholesale electricity supplier that owns power plants across the nation. Dominion, based in Richmond, Virginia, includes regulated utilities serving much of Virginia, parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, and other assets across the country. The company would be called NextEra Energy, and NextEra CEO John W. Ketchum would serve in the same role after the deal closes. Robert M. Blue, Dominion's CEO, would be the CEO for regulated utilities for the merged company. The parties said they expect regulatory approvals to take 12 to 18 months. NextEra shareholders would own 74.5 percent and Dominion shareholders would own 25.5 percent, respectively, of the combined company in the all-stock transaction. "We are bringing NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy together because scale matters more than ever -- not for the sake of size, but because scale translates into capital and operating efficiencies," Ketchum said in a statement. Although the companies claim the deal would produce savings, including $2.25 billion in Dominion customer bill credits, former regulator Marissa Paslick Gillett said she was "flabbergasted by the tone deafness," arguing that major utility mergers rarely deliver the promised "synergies" and often create "a behemoth" that is harder to regulate. Others warned that a larger NextEra could use its political power "to the disadvantage of ratepayers," while climate advocates said expanding methane gas plants to serve data centers would worsen pollution and leave vulnerable communities "at the short end of the stick."

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OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival AI lab Anthropic. "The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent -- and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds," reports Axios. From the report: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research -- an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," Karpathy said in a post on X. Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December -- embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.

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The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some "lower-value human capital" through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. "It's not cost-cutting. It's replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we're putting in," CEO Bill Winters told reporters. "So, the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we're giving every opportunity to reposition," Winters said. Reuters reports: The cuts, alongside higher shareholder return targets announced in a strategy update, come as StanChart is at the tail-end of a decade-long effort to transform itself from a potential takeover target to a steadily profitable lender. Its London-listed shares, which have risen 65% in the last 12 months, fell 0.5% in early trading, as analysts said the new targets were at the conservative end of their expectations. "In a world full of uncertainty, performance may prove more challenging further out," said Ed Firth, analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, citing how the bank has benefited in recent years from high interest rates and huge wealth flows. StanChart's move to streamline operations and rein in costs comes as more global firms slash jobs by deploying AI to improve efficiency. Japanese lender Mizuho in March unveiled up to 5,000 job cuts over a decade. And banks globally are scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats. The most affected roles will be in the bank's back-office centres, including those in Chennai, Bengaluru, Kuala Lumpur and Warsaw, according to Winters. "Of course we're using AI along the way and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that," he added, referring to its ongoing revamp to automate more of its core banking system. StanChart said it would deliver over 15% return on tangible equity in 2028, more than three percentage points higher than in 2025, and building to about 18% in 2030. Meta also announced plans to reassign 7,000 employees into AI-related initiatives, just ahead of layoffs expected to affect roughly 8,000 workers.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta told employees on Monday that it was reassigning 7,000 workers to focus on new initiatives around artificial intelligence, the latest change in a company transformation spurred by the powerful technology. Employees will be moved to four new organizations focused on building new A.I. tools and apps, Janelle Gale, Meta's head of human resources, said in an internal memo. The organizations will use "A.I. native design structures" and have fewer managers per employee than other parts of the company, she said, adding that company leaders will send details about the new roles on Wednesday. The restructuring "will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding," Ms. Gale wrote. Meta declined to comment further on the changes. The move comes shortly before Meta begins laying off roughly 8,000 employees, or 10 percent of its work force. Ms. Gale also mentioned Wednesday's layoffs in her memo. "We know days like this are extremely hard, and we appreciate you showing up for each other," Ms. Gale said. According to the NYT, employees have been asked to work remotely that day and emails about the layoffs would be sent at 4 a.m. local time. Employees in the United States will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, along with two extra weeks for every year they worked at Meta.

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