Investors Fall Back in Love With IPOs

For the past two days, I’ve been at JP Morgan’s annual tech conference in Boston. As usual, AI has dominated most of my conversations with investors. But in a change from the past few months, it’s not Anthropic and OpenAI driving those discussions—but hardware and utility companies a few steps removed from what the AI model makers do.

On Monday, for example, NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy agreed to a $400 billion tie-up driven in part by AI’s voracious demand for energy, the two utility giants said. That’s also happening at the chip level: Analog Devices, as we reported Monday night, is buying a startup whose chips help manage power transmission to the semiconductors that handle AI functions.