Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Rolls-Royce is preparing to hand its chief executive a lucrative annual pay rise as part of a new remuneration policy following the company’s spectacular turnaround.
Under the revamped policy, Tufan Erginbilgiç’s annual bonus entitlement will increase from 200 per cent of his base salary of just over £1.1mn to 300 per cent. His long-term incentive awards will go from a maximum of 375 per cent of salary to 750 per cent.
As a result Erginbilgiç’s total package of salary, annual bonus and long-term incentive plan could top £13mn. In 2024, he took home £4.1mn in pay and bonuses.
The new policy, which will be presented to shareholders for approval at Rolls-Royce’s annual meeting in the spring, has the backing of the company’s top 20 investors, according to people familiar with the situation.
The consultation with shareholders was triggered in part by concerns over how to retain talent, one of the people said. They added that the aim was to bring Erginbilgiç’s remuneration more closely into line with those of executives at its aerospace and defence competitors. Sky News first reported the details of the proposal.
Since joining Rolls-Royce three years ago, Erginbilgiç has delivered a sweeping restructuring of the company whose engines power many of the world’s biggest airliners as well as submarines and military jets. Shares in the group have increased by more than 1,200 per cent since January 2023, taking its market value from just under £8bn to over £100bn.
The former oil executive is already in line for a share-based reward that could exceed £100mn.
Erginbilgiç received 8.3mn shares when he joined to compensate for lost earnings and bonuses from his previous employer, the private equity firm Global Infrastructure Partners.
The shares, which vest in two tranches in 2027 and 2028, were granted in March 2023 at a price of 90.8p per share. Rolls-Royce shares closed at £12.80 on Friday, giving him a paper gain of just over £106mn. The potential payout would rank among the largest for a UK-listed company.
Although the shares will only vest if Erginbilgiç continues to work at Rolls-Royce, some analysts have questioned how long he will remain at the company after 2028.
Rolls-Royce said the “step-change” in the company’s performance “coupled with competitive pressures in the external environment for world-class talent” necessitated a review of the remuneration policy.
“This is a proactive measure initiated by the remuneration committee with the full support of the Rolls-Royce board,” it said.
Zattura Sims-El sorts through her utility bills in Baltimore, Maryland, on 13 January 2025.
Before she sat down to speak with the Guardian, Zattura Sims-El leaned over to plug a table lamp into the wall.
“I keep everything in this house unplugged when I’m not using it, because I heard that as long as it’s plugged into the wall, it’s costing you,” she said. “The only things I don’t unplug are my stove, my dishwasher, my refrigerator and my washing machine.”
The 76-year-old resident of Baltimore, Maryland, adopted the habit in an attempt to rein in her utility costs. Despite her efforts, her monthly gas and electricity bills last year always topped $500, and one month reached $975.
“It’s obscene,” said Sims-El, who has lived in her home for 46 years. “How is anyone supposed to keep up with this?
During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised that, if elected, he would halve Americans’ energy bills within a year of returning to the White House. He has thoroughly failed to meet that pledge, a Guardian analysis has found.
“Trump is a liar, and that’s something I know from the bottom of my heart,” Sims-El said when asked about the president’s promise.
Zattura Sims-El’s energy bills have increased significantly over the last year, even as she has cut her electricity use.
The average US household paid nearly $116 more for electricity in 2025 than the year before, a 6.7% increase, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Gas prices rose as well, jumping 5.2% on average, federal data shows.
“If they keep rising, who is going to be able to pay their bills?” Sims-El asked. “Certainly not me, not anyone except the super-wealthy.”
Sacrifices
Sims-El said she has had to make lifestyle changes to cope with her energy costs. While she used to buy her groceries at a Giant supermarket nearby, she now drives to multiple stores each week to hunt for bargains – a process that can take hours.
Halfway across the country, Samantha Lott, a resident of Denton, Texas,has found herself tailoring her shopping habits to cope with rising energy costs, too. Last year, after Lott was diagnosed with endometriosis, her doctor suggested she adopt an anti-inflammatory diet. But the cost of energy has made it impossible to afford “anything but the basic groceries that I can find deals on”. And there’s an even more difficult sacrifice she now finds herself making: cutting back on medical appointments.
“It’s really hard, because I have to choose: do I go to the doctor this month and get the follow-up appointment I need, or do I pay for electricity?” she said. “The copay is $70 for an appointment, but I need that $70 to pay my bills.”
Liz Jacob, the lead staff attorney and energy insecurity coordinator at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan, said she has seen many clients pushed to make those kinds of choices, “cutting back on food, toys, resources for their kids and everything they can”. With both gas and electricity prices so high, said Jacob, some are forced to choose between the two utilities.
The Curtis Bay neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.
“Some folks make the choice to cut off their gas service and just keep electric in the winter, using space heaters to heat their rooms that they’re frequenting because they can’t afford to heat the whole house,” she said. “Other folks talk about cutting off their electric service and just going with gas because they need heat, though they then don’t have any access to light in their homes.”
Datacenters and gas exports
One driver of 2025’s soaring energy bills was the nationwide proliferation of datacenters for artificial intelligence. In October, PJM – the grid operator covering 13 mid-Atlantic and midwest states as well as the District of Columbia – called datacenters the “primary reason” for the increased price of power. In July, Trump rolled out a scheme to streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.
“They’re going to strain the grid with these datacenters, which are massive developments,” said David Jones, a 45-year-old resident of south Baltimore. “Why should we have to take on the price of that?”
Jones, who lives in Baltimore’s industrial Curtis Bay neighborhood, said his monthly bills in 2025 were “at least $100” more than they were the previous year.
David Jones in his kitchen in Baltimore, Maryland, on 14 January 2026. Average US household electricity bills were 6.7% more expensive in 2025 compared with the previous year.
Amid growing outrage over steep power bills, the president last week announced that he is pressing tech companies to foot the bill for the rising costs associated with their datacenters.
“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”
On Friday, Trump officials also met with current and former governors of east coast states to discuss the energy demands of the AI datacenter boom, then released a plan to urge PJM to make deals with technology companies to ensure that they foot the bill for upping the country’s power supply.
But Trump has not backed away from his unabashedly pro-fossil fuel agenda, which has also pushed up energy costs. His administration’s efforts to increase liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, for instance, cost US households a combined $12bn in the first nine months of 2025, according to a December report from the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen.
Jones cast his vote for Trump in the 2024 election because he felt the US needed a “businessman” in office, and because he could not bring himself to vote for Joe Biden. He still has a fondness for the president, he said. But he believes Trump has been too influenced by donors from big tech and the fossil fuel industry.
“His ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda does a disservice to Americans,” he said. “I know he means well … but if I would have known about a lot of things that he’s done, as far as energy and things like that, I probably wouldn’t have voted for him.”
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said federal officials “will continue to aggressively implement President Trump’s energy dominance agenda because cheaper energy can unleash unprecedented growth in every facet of our economy”.
“Blue states are stubbornly choosing Green Energy Scam policies that are making electricity bills unaffordable,” she said in an email. “Meanwhile, GOP-led states are successfully lowering energy costs for their residents by embracing President Trump’s commonsense ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’ agenda.”
Aid cut
As the Trump administration has presided over rising electricity and gas costs, White House officials have also made it more difficult for Americans to access energy aid.
Last year, the administration eliminated tax credits for cost-cutting home energy-efficiency upgrades. It also attempted to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps 6 million low-income Americans with their energy bills each year.
The program survived, but has been significantly hampered after the administration laid off the entire LIHEAP staff. The cuts and a record-breaking government shutdown caused unprecedented delays in getting energy assistance aid to low-income households.
“Detroit is not even taking aid applications right now because there’s so much backlog from that time,” said Jacob. “They have so many applications to process that they’re not taking new applications.”
Angie Shaneyfelt, a 52-year-old resident of Curtis Bay, Baltimore, has seen her bill shoot up rapidly this year, from less than $300 in December 2024 to $400 last month.
Angie Shaneyfelt, 52, outside her home in Baltimore, Maryland, on 13 January 2025.
Toward the end of last year, she applied for funding from a LIHEAP-funded Maryland program after receiving a gas and electric cutoff notice over a past-due balance. Her application was quickly denied.
“They said that because of the volume of applications – by the time they got to me the funds would be gone,” she said. “The only place I was able to find aid was from a church … and it wasn’t easy. Just finding aid that is available is a full-time job.”
Shaneyfelt averted the cutoff but is still struggling to keep up with her bills, especially because she lost her husband in February. She is considering taking up a second job, even signing up to deliver food with DoorDash last month.
“I’m not young, and I already work full-time, and I think working more would bust my body down,” she said. “But what am I going to do?”
More work hours would give Shaneyfelt even less time with her 13-year-old twin daughters, but with another gas and electric rate hike planned for next month, she may be forced to bring in more income.
“I’ve already slimmed back so much stuff,” she said. “And now I have to give up my time with my family?”
(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis on all things Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it every Friday evening in your inbox.)
Buffett talks about almost everything
Warren Buffett and Becky Quick covered too many topics in the interviews that aired in a two-hour special on CNBC Tuesday evening for me to write a cogent summary.
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” included discussions about his inability to find a big company to purchase for Berkshire Hathaway as its cash pile moves toward $400 billion, new CEO Greg Abel, his company’s future and past, the difficulty of giving away billions of dollars, and the invaluable role of luck in his success. That’s not a comprehensive list.
Here, however, are some brief clips and quotes that caught my attention.
Buffett on what’s needed to find good businesses: “It doesn’t take a genius, and it sure doesn’t take any Greek symbols or anything like that to figure out what a business is worth… If (Greg Abel) quit at high school like some of our managers have, he’d still be as smart as he is.”
Buffett on the Sunday board meeting when directors considered his recommendation they name Greg Abel as next CEO: “(Director) Steve Burke finally said, you know, ‘We don’t need to sit around for three months and peer at our navel or anything on this. This is the right decision.’ And so they voted to do it.”
Greg Abel speaks during the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2025.
CNBC
Buffett on Berkshire’s future: “It’ll always be moving somewhat, but it’ll be mostly expanding. Occasionally, there will be things that disappear … We will have companies that 50 or 100 years from now will not be viable in the economy of that world. But we’ll have a whole lot more that developed over the years. And we can go wherever the country goes, and we can go with capital.”
Why being on a corporation’s board of directors is the best job in the world:
“Being a director. I mean, it’s the best job in the world. You get 250, 300, even up to 500 thousand dollars a year for doing something that’s quite pleasant. Usually they give you the transportation, and they have cars waiting to take you around everything. And everybody’s polite. And everybody’d love that job. I mean, who wouldn’t?”
Why he gave up betting on horses when he was in high school: “One of the first things you learn in horse racing is you can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races… I had a couple of horses in mind, but I lost the money on the first race. And then I did the dumbest thing you can imagine… I just kept betting every race. And when I went home, I was $50 poorer, which was all I’d taken with me… I went to the Howard Johnson’s, and I had a couple of dollars left. I bought myself a fancy meal and just sat there and thought about it and thought about it on the train. And that was the end of horse racing.”
Buffett on running Berkshire for decades:
“Everything I wanted to have happen has worked out… Doesn’t mean that everything we’ve done has worked out. But I couldn’t imagine more fun than I’ve had running Berkshire. And Charlie and I would have more fun out of the things that didn’t work a lot of times than (if they) did.”
On being a teacher on the side: “I loved it. It appealed to my didactic style, and I liked my own ideas… I just had fun teaching. And I still do, except I ran out of gas a few years ago.”
Advice for new parents: “The only piece of advice I give to newlyweds is don’t ever use sarcasm with your children. I mean, it may be sarcasm to you, but it’s a lash across the back to them they’ll never forget.”
“You should be wiser in the second half of your life than the first half. And if you’ve — if things have worked well for you, you should be a better person in the second half of your life.”
On being kind: “I would just ask anybody to challenge me on whether being kind could hurt them in any way, and whether the happiness of the world wouldn’t be better if … every morning they said to themselves, ‘I’ll have things that are good and bad happen to me today, but I can be kind to anybody.’”
Warren Buffett Watch’s exclusive clip
Even though the special was two hours long, there was more interview than time, forcing the producer to make some difficult decisions.
Here for Warren Buffett Watch readers is a clip that she wanted to get into the final cut. Buffett explains why he hasn’t been speaking out on politics in recent years:
BECKY QUICK: You haven’t commented as much publicly lately, either. You basically save it for the annual meeting when all the shareholders come into town.
WARREN BUFFETT: Right.
BECKY QUICK: Why is that?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, for one thing, I made the statement a few years ago —maybe, I don’t know, five or six years ago — somebody asked about taking a political stance. And I said that you don’t put your citizenship in a blind trust. But —
BECKY QUICK: As a CEO.
WARREN BUFFETT: And — as a CEO, yeah.
You have three or four hundred thousand employees, and you have millions of shareholders, but nevertheless you were entitled — I took the position — to speak out.
But I think — I’ve revisited that opinion in my mind, because people will have — gotten so tribal. We saw it on our gifts program at one time.
But there’s no reason why somebody that’s answering a phone at GEICO or waiting on a customer at the Nebraska Furniture Mart should be dealing with people who have a negative opinion of the company because of something I’ve said.
And, you know, here I am — if I want to speak as a private citizen, I should resign from Berkshire.
But I don’t really want — I’ve got identified so much with Berkshire that I — as long as I’m speaking at the annual meeting or anything like that, people will associate it with the voice of Berkshire to some extent.
And the employees don’t deserve that. The companies don’t deserve it. And so I backed away from that.
Buffett’s children on philanthropy and growing up Buffett
Buffett has given his three adult children the extremely difficult talk of unanimously deciding how to give away his enormous net worth after he dies.
When she was in Omaha to interview their father, Becky sat down with Howard, Susan, and Peter Buffett to talk about that assignment, their own philanthropic efforts, and what it was like growing up in Buffett’s famously unassuming house.
An extensive portion aired in the special, but this is the entire conversation:
In this excerpt, they remember how their father got “clever” about giving them an allowance:
HOWARD BUFFETT: You know, we’d earn this allowance for cleaning out gutters and cutting the lawn and raking leaves and stuff.
But he — butWarren got pretty clever and he started giving it to us in quarters. And then he bought a slot —
SUSAN BUFFETT: Dimes!
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yeah.
SUSAN BUFFETT: It was a dime slot machine.
HOWARD BUFFETT: Yeah. And then he bought —
SUSAN BUFFETT: He got it all back.
HOWARD BUFFETT: And then he bought the slot machine, so he would get most of his allowance back. At least with me, he got a lot of it back.
In his Inside Wealth report on Wednesday’s “Squawk Box,” Robert Frank explained why Buffett’s children may have the most difficult job in philanthropy:
If you missed it
“Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” will be shown again on CNBC this coming Sunday, January 18 at 3 PM ET and Monday, January 19 at 7 AM ET.
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (Up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $354.3 billion (Up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire stock repurchases since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise indicated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Jan. 16, 2026
Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on November 14, 2025, except for:
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
If you aren’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can sign up here.
Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
Will the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) lead us to a land of financial plenty – or will it end in a 2008-style bust? Trillions of dollars rest on the answer.
The figures are staggering: an estimated $2.9tn (£2.2tn) being spent on datacentres, the central nervous systems of AI tools; the more than $4tn stock market capitalisation of Nvidia, the company that makes the chips powering cutting-edge AI systems; and the $100m signing-on bonuses offered by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to top engineers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
These sky-high numbers are all propped up by investors who expect a return on their trillions. AGI, a theoretical state of AI where systems gain human levels of intelligence across an array of tasks and are able to replace humans in white-collar jobs such as accountancy and law, is a keystone of this financial promise.
It offers the prospect of computer systems carrying out profitable work without the associated cost of human labour – a hugely lucrative scenario for companies developing the technology and the customers who deploy it.
There will be consequences if AI companies fall short: US stock markets, boosted heavily by the performance of tech stocks, could fall and cause damage to people’s personal wealth; debt markets wrapped up in the datacentre boom could suffer a jolt that ripples elsewhere; GDP growth in the US, which has benefited from the AI infrastructure, could falter, which would have knock-on effects for interlinked economies.
David Cahn, a partner at one leading Silicon Valley investment firm, Sequoia Capital, says tech companies now have to deliver on AGI.
“Nothing short of AGI will be enough to justify the investments now being proposed for the coming decade,” he wrote in a blog published in October.
It means there is a lot hanging on progress towards advanced AI, and the trillions being poured into infrastructure and R&D to achieve it. One of the “godfathers” of modern AI, Yoshua Bengio, says the progress of AGI could stall and the outcome would be bad for investors.
“There is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there’s some difficulty that we don’t foresee right now, and we don’t find any solution quickly,” he says. “And that could be a real [financial] crash. A lot of the people who are putting trillions right now into AI are also expecting the advances to continue fairly regularly at the current pace.”
But Bengio, a prominent voice on the safety implications of AGI, is clear that continued progress towards a highly advanced state of AI is the more likely endgame.
“Advances stalling is a minority scenario, like it’s an unlikely scenario. The more likely scenario is we continue to move forward,” he says.
The pessimistic view is that investors are backing an unrealistic outcome – that AGI will not happen without further breakthroughs.
David Bader, the director of the institute for data science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, says trillions of dollars are being spent on scaling up – tech jargon for growing something quickly – the underlying technology for chatbots, known as transformers, in the expectation that increasing the amount of computing power behind current AI systems, by building more datacentres, will suffice.
“If AGI requires a fundamentally different approach, perhaps something we haven’t yet conceived, then we’re optimising an architecture that can’t get us there no matter how large we make it. It’s like trying to reach the moon by building taller ladders,” he says.
Nonetheless, big US tech companies such as Google’s parent Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are ploughing ahead with datacentre plans with the financial cushion of being able to fund their AGI ambitions through the cash generated by their hugely profitable day-to-day businesses. This at least gives them some protection if the wall outlined by Bengio and Bader comes into view.
But there are other more worrying aspects to the boom. Analysts at Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimate that $2.9tn will be spent on datacentres between now and 2028, with half of that covered by the cashflow from “hyperscalers” such as Alphabet and Microsoft.
The rest will have to be covered by alternative sources such as private credit, a corner of the shadow banking sector that is activating alarm bells at the Bank of England and elsewhere. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has borrowed $29bn from the private credit market to finance a datacentre in Louisiana.
AI-related sectors account for approximately 15% of investment grade debt in the US, which is even bigger than the banking sector, according to the investment bank JP Morgan.
Oracle, which has signed a $300bn datacentre deal with OpenAI, has had an increase in credit default swaps, which are a form of insurance on a company defaulting on its debts. High-yield, or “junk debt”, which represents the higher-risk end of the borrowing market, is also appearing in the AI sector via datacentre operators CoreWeave and TeraWulf. Growth is also being funded by asset-backed securities – a form of debt underpinned by assets such as loans or credit card debt, but in this case rent paid by tech companies to datacentre owners – in a form of financing that has risen sharply in recent years.
It is no wonder that JP Morgan says the AI infrastructure boom will require a contribution from all corners of the credit market.
Bader says: “If AGI doesn’t materialise on expected timelines, we could see contagion across multiple debt markets simultaneously – investment-grade bonds, high-yield junk debt, private credit and securitised products – all of which are being tapped to fund this buildout.”
Share prices linked to AI and tech are also playing an outsized role in US stock markets. The so-called “magnificent 7” of US tech stocks – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia – account for more than a third of the value of the S&P 500 index, the biggest stock market index in the US, compared with 20% at the start of the decade.
In October the Bank of England warned of “the risk of a sharp correction” in US and UK markets due to giddy valuations of AI-linked tech companies. Central bankers are concerned stock markets could slump if AI fails to reach the transformative heights investors are hoping for. At the same time the International Monetary Fund said valuations were heading towards dotcom bubble-levels.
Even tech execs whose companies are benefiting from the boom are acknowledging the speculative nature of the frenzy. In November Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet, said there are “elements of irrationality” in the boom and that “no company is going to be immune” if the bubble bursts, while Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has said the AI industry is in a “kind of industrial bubble”, and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, has said “there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now.”
All three, to be clear, are AI optimists and expect the technology to keep improving and benefit society.
But when the numbers get this big there are obvious risks in a bubble bursting, as Pichai admits. Pension funds and anyone invested in the stock market will be affected by a share price collapse, while the debt markets will also take a hit. There is also a web of “circular” deals, such as OpenAI paying Nvidia in cash for chips, and Nvidia will invest in OpenAI for non-controlling shares. If these transactions unravel due to a lack of take-up of AI, or that wall being hit, then it could be messy.
There are also optimists who argue that generative AI, the catch-all term for tools such as chatbots and video generators, will transform whole industries and justify the expenditure. Benedict Evans, a technology analyst, says the expenditure numbers are not outrageous in the context of other industries, such as oil and gas extraction which runs at $600bn a year.
“These AI capex figures are a lot of money but it’s not an impossible amount of money,” he says.
Evans adds: “You don’t have to believe in AGI to believe that generative AI is a big thing. And most of what is happening here is not, ‘oh wow they’re going to create God’. It’s ‘this is going to completely change how advertising, search, software and social networks – and everything else our business is based on – is going to work’. It’s going to be a huge opportunity.”
Nonetheless, there is a multitrillion dollar expectation that AGI will be achieved. For many experts, the consequences of getting there are alarming. The cost of not getting there could also be significant.
Having secured the fully driverless commercial permit in mid-November 2025, the partners have launched fully autonomous ride-hailing service via the AutoGo app.
Initial operations cover Yas Island, with phased expansion planned for Reem, Al Maryah, and Saadiyat Islands.
The launch marks a critical step toward the partners’ goal of deploying hundreds of vehicles by 2026 and building Abu Dhabi’s largest fully driverless fleet.
ABU DHABI, UAE, Jan. 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888) today announced that its autonomous ride-hailing service, Apollo Go, and AutoGo, a leading UAE-based autonomous mobility company, have officially launched the fully autonomous commercial ride-hailing service in the emirate. The launch of the service, now available via the AutoGo app, marks a major milestone in the commercialization of autonomous driving in the Middle East. The service has launched initially on Yas Island, where users in Abu Dhabi can now download the app to hail fully driverless rides.
The AutoGo app, now open to public users
The collaboration between Baidu’s Apollo Go and K2’s AutoGo began in March 2025, when they announced the partnership to build Abu Dhabi’s largest fully driverless fleet. Building on that momentum, the companies secured one of the inaugural permits for fully driverless commercial operation in Abu Dhabi in mid-November 2025 and signed a next-phase agreement to scale the fleet to hundreds of vehicles by 2026. With the service now available to the general public through the AutoGo app, the partners are actively advancing their goal of establishing the emirate’s largest fully driverless fleet.
“Moving from an initial partnership agreement to launching live, fully driverless operations for the public in a span of just a few months is a remarkable milestone,” said Liang Zhang, Managing Director of EMEA at Baidu Apollo. “This speed of execution highlights the technical readiness of Apollo Go, the strong operational capabilities of our partnership, and the steadfast support of local regulatory bodies.”
“AutoGo’s transition to live robotaxi operations marks an important milestone in Abu Dhabi’s autonomous mobility journey,” said Sean Teo, Managing Director of K2. “Launching the service at the start of the year reflects our focus on execution and long-term value creation. By introducing robotaxi services in real urban environments and scaling across key districts, we are moving decisively from development to deployment—delivering autonomy that is practical, safe, and ready for everyday use.”
The initial operation covers Yas Island, a premier leisure and entertainment hub in Abu Dhabi, now designated as a permitted zone for fully driverless operations. This service allows users to simply download the AutoGo app, request a ride, and experience a journey in a vehicle with no human driver behind the wheel.
Following the initial launch on Yas Island, the service will implement a phased geographic roll-out across Abu Dhabi. The expansion will begin with Reem Island, Al Maryah Island, and Saadiyat Island. Over time, the service will continue to expand across additional areas, with the long-term objective of operating across the wider Abu Dhabi emirate.
Apollo Go’s rapid expansion into the UAE is backed by its industry-leading autonomous driving technology and proven real-world operational expertise. As a leading autonomous ride‑hailing service provider globally, Apollo Go has logged more than 240 million autonomous kilometers, of which over 140 million kilometers were completed in fully driverless mode. With a global footprint across 22 cities, Apollo Go’s weekly ride count has recently surpassed 250,000, and the service has completed more than 17 million cumulative rides as of October 31, 2025. Looking ahead, Apollo Go and AutoGo will scale fully autonomous commercial ride-hailing services to reach more users and advance Abu Dhabi’s smart city vision.
About Baidu Founded in 2000, Baidu’s mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under “BIDU” and HKEX under “9888.” One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.
Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale, attends an AI summit in Paris in February 2025.
Getty Images
The founders of some of the world’s most successful startups have been young: Think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom were just 19 when they launched their ventures.
But with the rise of billion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) startups comes a new trend: their founders, on average, appear to be getting younger.
A new report released by global early-stage venture capital firm Antler, found that the age of founders of AI unicorns has fallen from a peak age of 40 in 2021 to 29-years-old in 2024. Antler analyzed 1,629 unicorns and 3,512 founders globally for this report.
However, in other industries, founder age is actually rising. In 2014, the average unicorn founder was 30 at the time of launch, compared with 34 for those who reached unicorn status between 2022 and 2024.
Several AI startups with young founders have been in the spotlight in the past year. Alexandr Wang, co-founder of $29 billion AI data labelling company Scale AI, is only 29-years-old. Wang was poached by Meta in June, in a $14.3 billion deal with the startup, to head up the tech giant’s new AI research unit called TBD Labs.
In fact, Meta’s former generative AI team, which was headed up by 65-year-old AI godfather Yann LeCun, was reorganized after its LLama4 AI model didn’t perform well.
This saw Wang become LeCun’s manager and signaled Zuckerberg’s desire to bring on a scrappier and more entrepreneurial AI lead, so that Meta could move faster in the AI space.
Meanwhile, Mercor, an AI-powered talent and recruitment platform, was also co-founded by Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, all of whom are currently age 22. It was recently valued at over $10 billion.
AnySphere, an AI-assisted coding and developer platform, valued at over $1 billion, is also headed up by 20-something-year-olds.
Fridtjof Berge, co-founder and chief business officer at Antler, told CNBC Make It that the key qualities in founders have shifted to being able to “move fast and break things,” and “continuously iterate and test and improve.”
Berge said: “It’s perhaps even more important now to experiment … while other things which are still important but less important now is having been in an industry for a long time or learn the playbooks for how to traditionally think about scaling a new company.”
Corporate experience ‘matters less’
Fridtjof explained that the expectations for industry experience in founders is now seen as less pivotal than being scrappy and entrepreneurial.
“I think that as I’ve been reflecting on this … the willingness and ability to experiment in the age of AI probably counts as more important than traditional corporate experience or corporate tenure,” he said.
Fridjtoff added that it “matters less” to have lots of experience in traditional company building and that it can, in fact, backfire. “You might not think with a blank-slate state,” he said.
“I think that to be technically fluent with a lot of the really emerging latest and greatest technology, it sometimes helps to be young, because that’s what you’ve learned recently in your training,” he added.
In fact, Antler’s report found that AI startups are indeed scaling two years faster than all other industries, reaching unicorn status in an average of 4.7 years. Examples of rapidly scaling AI startups in 2025 were Mistral, Lovable, and Suno AI.
And as Zuckerberg’s own example proves, executing on a wild idea in a college dorm room can lead to phenomenal success.
“He was extremely young, and definitely has adapted, adjusted, and is now scaling one of the biggest companies in the world,” Berge said.
Venture Capital firm Leonis, released its Leonis AI 100 report in November, and also found that AI startup founders were a median age of 29 at founding. Most founders are in their mid-to late-20s, often coming straight from academia or research labs rather than corporate careers.
Berge noted that while 20-somethings have qualities that allow companies to move quickly, leadership can often change hands as the firm matures.
“I guess it’s nothing new that early or young founders start companies … but it doesn’t guarantee that all of the ones creating unicorns now will be the ones leading those companies in five to 10 years,” He added.
Chocolate eggs are looking smaller than ever this year and it is not just because Easter is still so far away.
Many of the Easter eggs already out on supermarket shelves this month not only cost more, but have been reduced in size or weight as the price of cocoa has driven a new wave of shrinkflation.
Maltesers is living up to its “the lighter way to enjoy chocolate” slogan with its XL egg rather less large this year at 194g in many shops, down from 231g in 2025, while the price charged by Tesco has risen by £1 to £7.
The weight loss is largely down to there being one fewer mini pack of Maltesers inside the box, according to trade journal the Grocer, meaning the price per gram is up 39% to 3.6p.
A similar move with Cadbury’s Twirl eggs – which now include only two individually wrapped Twirl fingers rather than two full bars – means they have shrunk by 9.5% or 23g to 218g. However, the price in most shops has risen to £7 from £6 last year, leading to a price per gram increase of more than 28%.
Four fewer eggs in a Mini Eggs family pack means the Cadbury’s treat is now 4% smaller at 256g compared with 270g a year ago, while the price has risen to £6.20 at Tesco for those without a loyalty card, compared with £4.85 a year ago. That is equivalent to a 35% increase in price – although the same pack is priced at £5.50 at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose and £4.94 at Asda for those who wish to shop around.
Lindt gold bunnies are now £8.50 at most retailers for the 200g size. Photograph: Piranhi/Alamy
Lindt gold bunnies have held their ground at 200g for the largest option, but are now £8.50 at most retailers (without a loyalty card), a £3 jump from their £5.50 price at Tesco a year ago.
The cost of chocolate confectionery has increased sharply in the past few years as cocoa prices have soared after poor harvests in the main growing regions of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire over the past three years, amid extreme temperatures and unusual rainfall patterns driven by the climate crisis.
With sugar, energy and labour costs also on the rise, manufacturers have turned to a variety of tactics, from making bars and biscuits smaller to reducing cocoa content in an effort to keep the prices paid by shoppers down.
In October, McVitie’s reduced the amount of cocoa in the recipes of Club and Penguin bars so much they are now only “chocolate flavour”.
A spokesperson for the Maltesers owner Mars Wrigley’s UK and Ireland business said: “We understand the cost pressures that shoppers continue to face and always aim to absorb rising costs wherever possible.
“However, ongoing pressures, driven in part by well-documented rises in the cost of cocoa, mean we have had to make carefully considered changes. Decisions around product size are not taken lightly, but they help to ensure shoppers can continue to enjoy their favourite Easter treats without any compromise on the quality or taste they expect from Mars. As with all our products, final pricing remains at the discretion of individual retailers.”
Cadbury’s owner Mondelēz International said it faced ‘significantly higher input costs across our supply chain’. Photograph: Alan Edwards/Alamy
A spokesperson for Cadbury’s owner Mondelēz International said retailers were free to set their own prices, adding: “We understand the economic pressures that consumers continue to face and any changes to our product sizes is a last resort for our business.
“However, as a food producer, we are continuing to experience significantly higher input costs across our supply chain, with ingredients such as cocoa and dairy, which are widely used in our products, costing far more than they have done previously.
“Meanwhile, other costs like energy and transport, also remain high. This means that our products continue to be much more expensive to make and while we have absorbed these costs where possible, we still face considerable challenges.
“As a result, we are having to make carefully considered changes to the recommended promotional price alongside small weight reductions to our Cadbury Twirl Easter Egg (218g), Cadbury Wispa Easter Egg (177g) and Cadbury Mini Egg bags (256g).”
Lindt was approached for comment. Tesco declined to comment.
Shoppers on Oxford Street during the Boxing Day sales
A new year, a new beginning.
The latest monthly figures on the economy hardly confirm a change of gear, but nor do they back up the worst doom-mongers claiming decline and recession. It is neither doom nor boom, but a new year makes an opportunity to wipe the slate clean on policy, on a sense of certainty, and perhaps above all, the vibes in the economy.
There is one chart that might explain quite a lot about both the state of and the prospects for the UK economy. And it might say a fair bit about the political direction of the UK too.
It is consumer confidence. These are the long-running surveys that essentially put the nation on the economic psychiatric couch. How do you feel about the economy’s prospects? Are you likely to buy a major piece of equipment? How are your personal finances?
There is a solid data source of consistently asked questions going back five decades – it is the measure now called the GfK Consumer Confidence Barometer.
I’ve been reporting on this metric for half of its existence. It’s an imperfect science but the basic idea to reach the net confidence number is the optimism score minus the pessimism score.
The patterns then were interesting and consistent. And it was important as a predictor for those in power to stay in power. “It’s the Economy Stupid”, remember.
But has something significant changed in the water? This chart is quite extraordinary and a version of it has been circulated at the top of government.
A quick narration is in order.
This chart breaks down the headline net confidence number by age cohort.
Broadly speaking they used to move together, they were “correlated”.
Younger people have a generally sunnier starting point but that dims as they age – not a great surprise – and all age groups react to events similarly.
Over the past decade you can see correlated declines in consumer confidence across all age groups in reaction to the post-Brexit vote era and the impact of the pandemic.
An interesting takeaway is how devastating the Liz Truss mini-budget in 2022 was for all age groups. A loss of confidence in the 45-day government and in economic prospects.
And up until 2024 all those lines move in tandem.
But what happens in late 2024? Divergence. Big time.
The under-50s’ consumer confidence goes higher, and soars for the under-30s to highs not seen since Brexit.
But take a look at the bottom two red lines. Over-50s’ and over-60s’ consumer confidence collapses toward Truss-era levels.
How can it be that the over 50s, and pensioners in particular, are living through another collapse in economic confidence, and yet the young adult population is much more positive?
Well the dotted line is the 2024 General Election. And while correlation does not mean causation, that is when this age-related break occurs.
Votes affecting vibes
A possible explanation from political economy is this – the flow of causality from economic sentiment to political sentiment has reversed.
Where how you felt about your finances influenced how you voted, now how you voted influences how you feel about your finances and the economic outlook for the country.
Young people broadly on the liberal left are now happier after enduring a rolling series of crises so far this decade, and with a government they largely voted for in 2024.
The older, who voted Conservative and Reform predominantly, are unhappy and unconvinced. They think the country has gone to the dogs even more than usual.
One possible factor is the tone set by social media and the emotive doom-scrolling and rage magnets embodied in their algorithms. Is this demographic seeing the Mad Max-style dystopia presented on their social media feeds and responding with this negative outlook?
There is also some evidence in the US of respondents to one consumer sentiment survey exhibiting a political tint on their sense of economic confidence. In the transition between the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations at the end of 2020, Democrats respondents’ economic confidence surged from 67 to 96, while Republicans’ crashed from 100 to 59.
The Biden administration then bemoaned what staffers called the “Vibecession” – the subsequent sense of economic malaise not really reflected in good economic numbers.
Rates a double-edged sword
There are other economic factors at play.
This rebound in confidence for the young coincides with when the Bank of England started cutting interest rates. Rate cuts are good for young home seekers and jobseekers, but bad for older savers.
There are significant economic consequences if this picture is correct too.
It might help explain the curiously high and nearly double-digit UK savings rate. That looks like a pandemic-style aberration. Older Britain is sat on its savings, despondent about the country and the economy, refusing to spend its money and weighing down GDP, even as pay rises for workers remain higher on average than the rate of inflation.
The takeaways from this chart are also well-reflected in the early financial results we are getting from businesses.
Many retail results have defied the gloom. Some bosses that complain the most about National Insurance rises seem to be reporting healthy sales and profits having basically paid for the tax.
Pub chain Mitchells & Butlers “traded very strongly across the festive season with like-for-like growth of 7.7%”. Fullers had an “outstanding five-week Christmas and New Year season across all parts of the estate”, 8% up on an already strong festive period last year.
Obviously challenges remain in the level of price rises. But inflation is on its way down to the 2% target, with a conscious attempt from government to limit regulated price rises for rail and water.
More rate cuts will come slowly, and the impact of previous cuts will also filter into the household sector.
A mortgage price war may be on its way to help a housing market rebound after months of Budget uncertainty.
The government will hope to draw a line under a tumultuous 2025, with what they hope is an investment boom typified by recent announcements on Heathrow and on a new northern train line.
So there’s a platform to defy the doom. But could people’s now politically charged perceptions of economic confidence be a brake on all that?
The estate currently has a mixture of 91 council and 17 private homes
Residents who campaigned against the full redevelopment of a council estate have learnt that it will be partially rebuilt with 134 new homes.
Cambridge City Council voted to knock down the majority of the council homes on the city’s Ekin Road, near the cemetery and airport, in June 2024.
A planning application has been submitted. The council had already agreed to retain 14 of the 122 existing houses.
Maurice Chiodo, whose home is not among those being demolished, said: “We are very happy that we are still here. We have had 18 months of calm after over two years of basically battle.”
Maurice Chiodo said the campaign to save some homes had been “traumatic”
Chiodo ran the Save Ekin Road Campaign Group and was told his home would be saved last year.
“We couldn’t laugh two years ago… we weren’t in a position to do that. It was still so raw, so traumatic,” he said.
The council had originally planned to demolish all 122 homes on the estate, which date from the 1950s and 1960s.
However, it confirmed it would adapt its approach and retain 14 of the existing houses.
It said the project was part of the Cambridge Investment Partnership (CIP) programme — between the council and the Hill Group — and would deliver 78 allocated council houses and 56 private homes.
The proposal offers a mix of homes with one to five bedrooms, including the first five-bedroom houses delivered through CIP.
Cambridge City Council
An artist impression of the plans submitted for new buildings on Ekin Road
Gerri Bird, cabinet member for housing and CIP board member, said: “Doing nothing was not an option at Ekin Road because of the serious issues in the buildings, meaning our tenants were living in accommodation that didn’t meet our standards.
“We’ve worked closely with existing residents who have had to move out of the estate in order for the new homes to be built.
“This is obviously a major upheaval in people’s lives, but we really do everything we can to help them consider their rehousing options.”
The new area would feature play equipment and seating areas, which the council said was highlighted by residents as an important aspect of the project.
It said traffic-calming measures would also be introduced to reduce vehicle speeds and prioritise pedestrians at key junctions and crossings.
Chiodo said residents had written a letter to the council asking when and how construction work would take place.
