Fed Holds Rates; Powell's Cautious Optimism

Today's top stories, with context, in just 15 minutes.

On today's podcast:
1) The world’s largest tech firms show no signs of easing up on AI spending, a record wave that’s propelling hardware providers like Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. That’s even as doubts persist about the staying power of artificial intelligence demand to justify all that capital. Meta Platforms Inc. alone revealed ambitions to spend as much as $135 billion this year — one of the biggest planned outlays of the business sphere. Meta, Microsoft and fellow hyperscalers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc., are driving a wave of global spending on chips, servers and computers that’s firing up hardware suppliers around the world, particularly in Asia. A procession of industry linchpins’s results this week further underscored how voracious the appetite for AI hardware has grown — and how that’s likely to extend well into 2026.
2) Tesla Inc. has planned $20 billion of spending this year to streamline its electric-vehicle lineup and shift resources toward robotics and AI, part of a sweeping set of changes pushing the company further from its roots as an automobile manufacturer. The capital expenditure plans laid out Wednesday – roughly twice as much as Wall Street was expecting – will support production expansion at multiple factories, scaling up the nascent robotaxi business and building out AI infrastructure. Tesla also revealed plans to discontinue the Model S and X vehicles and devote that plant capacity to building Optimus humanoid robots.
3) Jerome Powell has two more opportunities to adjust interest rates before his term as Federal Reserve chair ends — and he may not need them. After the Fed kept borrowing costs on hold Wednesday, Powell talked up a “clear improvement” in the US outlook and said the job market shows signs of steadying. It signals a cautious optimism: Fed officials delivered three cuts last fall, and see nothing in the latest data to suggest more are needed to prop up the economy. Futures markets expect no shift in rates before June. By then, Powell’s term as chair will have ended and a new one should be in place — likely opening another phase of President Trump’s campaign for lower rates, which has upended the Fed over the past year. In a potential sign of what’s coming, the only two officials who voted for another cut this week were Governor Stephen Miran — on leave at the Fed from his post as a top Trump aide — and Governor Christopher Waller, one of four names on Trump’s shortlist of potential Powell successors.

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