The U.S. is facing a power capacity crisis as the tech sector races against China to achieve dominance in artificial intelligence, an executive leading the energy strategy of Alphabet’s Google unit said this week.

The emergence of China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence firm sent the shares of major power companies tumbling in late January on speculation that its AI model is cheaper and more efficient. But Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development, said more power is needed now to keep up with Beijing.

“We are in a capacity crisis in this country right now, and we are in an AI race against China right now,” Golin told a conference hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute in New York City on Tuesday.

Alphabet’s Google unit embarked four years ago on an ambitious goal to power its operations around the clock with carbon-free renewable energy, but the company faced a major obstacle that forced a turn toward nuclear power.

Google ran into a “very stark reality that we didn’t have enough capacity on the system to power our data centers in the short term and then potentially in the long term,” Golin said.

Google realized the deployment of renewables was potentially causing grid instability, and utilities were investing in carbon-emitting natural gas to back up the system, the executive said. Wind and particularly solar power have grown rapidly in the U.S., but their output depends on weather conditions.

“We learned the importance of the developing clean firm technologies,” Golin said. “We recognized that nuclear was going to be part of the portfolio.”

Last October, Google announced a deal to purchase 500 megawatts of power from a fleet of small modular nuclear reactors made by Kairos Power. Small modular reactors are advanced designs that promise to one day speed up the deployment of nuclear power because they have smaller footprints and a more streamlined manufacturing process.

Large nuclear projects in the U.S. have long been stymied by delays, cost overruns and cancellations. To date, there is no operational small modular reactor in the U.S. Google and Kairos plan to deploy their first reactor in 2030, with more units coming online through 2035.

Golin said the project with Kairos is currently in an initial test-pilot phase with other partners that she would not disclose. Kairos received permission in November from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two 35-megawatt test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The goal is to get buy-in from partners like electric utilities to create an approach that can broadly deploy the technology, Golin said.

The nuclear industry increasingly views the growing power needs of the tech sector as a potential catalyst to restart old reactors and build new ones. Amazon announced an investment of more than $500 million in small nuclear reactors two days after Google unveiled its agreement with Kairos.

Last September, Constellation Energy said it plans to bring the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania back online through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft.

Golin said nuclear is a longer-term solution, given the reality that power capacity is needed now to keep up with China in the artificial intelligence race. “Over the next five years, nuclear doesn’t play in that space,” she said.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency through executive order on his first day in office. The order cited electric grid reliability as a central concern.

Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he would use emergency powers to expedite the construction of power plants for AI data centers.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued an order on Feb. 5 that listed “the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy” as a priority.

Prebiotic soda brand Olipop said Wednesday that it was valued at $1.85 billion in its latest funding round, which raised $50 million for the company.

Founded in 2018, Olipop has helped fuel the growth of the prebiotic soda category, along with rival Poppi, which highlighted its drinks with a Super Bowl ad on Sunday. Both have attracted consumers with their claims that their drinks help with “gut health,” one of the latest wellness trends taking over food and beverage aisles.

Olipop’s Series C funding round was led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital’s Growth Equity Partners. The company plans to use the money that it raised to add to its product lineup, expand its marketing and distribute its sodas more widely.

Today, Olipop is the top non-alcoholic beverage brand in the U.S., both by dollar sales and unit growth, the company said, citing data from Circana/SPINS. Roughly half of its growth comes from legacy soda drinkers, while the other half comes from consumers entering the carbonated soft drink category. One in four Gen Z consumers drinks Olipop, according to the company.

In early 2024, Olipop reached profitability, the company said. Its annual sales surpassed $400 million last year, doubling the year prior. In 2023, Olipop founder and CEO Ben Goodwin told CNBC that soda giants PepsiCo and Coca-Cola had already come knocking about a potential sale.

For its part, rival Poppi, which was founded 10 years ago, has raised $39.3 million as of 2023 at an undisclosed valuation, according to Pitchbook data. Poppi’s annual sales reportedly crossed $100 million in 2023. Its appearance during the Super Bowl was the second straight year that it paid for an ad during the big game.

Poppi has also faced some backlash for its health claims. The company is currently in talks to settle a lawsuit that argued that Poppi’s drinks aren’t as healthy as the company claims, according to court filings.

The U.S. is facing a power capacity crisis as the tech sector races against China to achieve dominance in artificial intelligence, an executive leading the energy strategy of Alphabet’s Google unit said this week.

The emergence of China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence firm sent the shares of major power companies tumbling in late January on speculation that its AI model is cheaper and more efficient. But Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development, said more power is needed now to keep up with Beijing.

“We are in a capacity crisis in this country right now, and we are in an AI race against China right now,” Golin told a conference hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute in New York City on Tuesday.

Alphabet’s Google unit embarked four years ago on an ambitious goal to power its operations around the clock with carbon-free renewable energy, but the company faced a major obstacle that forced a turn toward nuclear power.

Google ran into a “very stark reality that we didn’t have enough capacity on the system to power our data centers in the short term and then potentially in the long term,” Golin said.

Google realized the deployment of renewables was potentially causing grid instability, and utilities were investing in carbon-emitting natural gas to back up the system, the executive said. Wind and particularly solar power have grown rapidly in the U.S., but their output depends on weather conditions.

“We learned the importance of the developing clean firm technologies,” Golin said. “We recognized that nuclear was going to be part of the portfolio.”

Last October, Google announced a deal to purchase 500 megawatts of power from a fleet of small modular nuclear reactors made by Kairos Power. Small modular reactors are advanced designs that promise to one day speed up the deployment of nuclear power because they have smaller footprints and a more streamlined manufacturing process.

Large nuclear projects in the U.S. have long been stymied by delays, cost overruns and cancellations. To date, there is no operational small modular reactor in the U.S. Google and Kairos plan to deploy their first reactor in 2030, with more units coming online through 2035.

Golin said the project with Kairos is currently in an initial test-pilot phase with other partners that she would not disclose. Kairos received permission in November from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two 35-megawatt test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The goal is to get buy-in from partners like electric utilities to create an approach that can broadly deploy the technology, Golin said.

The nuclear industry increasingly views the growing power needs of the tech sector as a potential catalyst to restart old reactors and build new ones. Amazon announced an investment of more than $500 million in small nuclear reactors two days after Google unveiled its agreement with Kairos.

Last September, Constellation Energy said it plans to bring the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania back online through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft.

Golin said nuclear is a longer-term solution, given the reality that power capacity is needed now to keep up with China in the artificial intelligence race. “Over the next five years, nuclear doesn’t play in that space,” she said.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency through executive order on his first day in office. The order cited electric grid reliability as a central concern.

Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he would use emergency powers to expedite the construction of power plants for AI data centers.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued an order on Feb. 5 that listed “the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy” as a priority.

ScorePlay, an artificial intelligence service for sports clips, has raised $13 million in series A funding, the company announced Tuesday.

The sports storytelling platform’s investors include 20VC venture capital fund founder Harry Stebbings, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six VC firm, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, former Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, and soccer star and former captain of the U.S. women’s national team Alex Morgan.

ScorePlay’s technology is used by more than 200 sports organizations around the world and helps teams streamline their highlights and clips using AI. The company’s clients include NBA and NHL franchises and leagues such as Major League Soccer and the National Women’s Soccer League.

Ohanian told CNBC that he’s not just an investor, but that he uses the technology through his ownership of NWSL soccer and TGL golf teams, in addition to his new track league, Athlos.

“So many people ask how we’ve been able to have so much success in emerging sports across so many different leagues and ScorePlay is the heart of one of the reasons why,” Ohanian said. “The last two years, they’ve just continued to execute above expectations and ScorePlay has just done such a heck of a job growing here in the States.

“I’ve been very happy to keep putting now millions of dollars at work every single round since,” he added.

Venture capitalist Stebbings said as teams and players move toward producing more of their own media and storytelling content, this tool will allow them to engage fans in new ways.

“Speed is crucial in sports media, with the ability to share highlights within an hour and keep up with [the] fast-paced news cycle,” he said.

ScorePlay’s service, created in 2021 by Victorien Tixier and Xavier Green, automatically tags and organizes content, allowing teams to speed up the delivery to everyone from broadcasters and sponsors to the athletes themselves.

“The idea is to maximize the distribution, both on your own social channel, but also distributing the content to your athletes, who are your best storytellers,” Tixier said.

He added that with so many different channels from social to broadcast and digital, it’s important that users are distributing the best content for each platform.

ScorePlay touts threefold year-over-year growth, and the company said it is profitable, with total funding at $20 million.

Previous investors include Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s 35V family office and Eli Manning.

Elon Musk is leading a group of investors in offering to buy control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The bid is for the nonprofit that oversees the artificial intelligence startup, the Journal reported, adding that Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted the offer on Monday.

The WSJ cited a statement from Musk provided by Toberoff, saying, “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”

In a post on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Musk then replied to the OpenAI chief on X calling him a “swindler,” and in a reply to a different user, called him “Scam Altman.”

Musk, who is a top adviser to President Donald Trump, is in the midst of a heated legal and public relations battle with Altman. They were two of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015, establishing the entity as a nonprofit focused on AI research.

OpenAI has since emerged as a giant in generative AI, launching ChatGPT in 2022 and setting off a wave of investment in new tools and infrastructure for next-generation AI products and services. SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment in OpenAI at a $260 billion valuation, sources told CNBC’s David Faber last week.

Musk now has a competitor in the AI market, a startup called xAI, and is suing OpenAI, accusing it of antitrust violations and to try and keep it from converting into a for-profit corporation.

Meanwhile, OpenAI partnered with SoftBank and Oracle in a project announced by Trump right after his inauguration called Stargate, which calls on the companies to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S.

Musk’s offer is backed by xAI, which the Journal reports could merge with OpenAI if a deal were to occur. Other investors in the bid include Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, 8VC and Ari Emanuel’s investment fund, the paper reported.

Toberoff sent a letter to the attorneys general in California and Delaware on Jan. 7, asking that bidding be opened up for OpenAI.

McDonald’s on Monday reported disappointing quarterly revenue, dragged down by weaker-than-expected sales at its U.S. restaurants following an E. coli outbreak just weeks into the quarter.

But shares of the company rose more than 4% in morning trading as executives predicted sales would improve in 2025.

Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Net sales of $6.39 billion were roughly flat compared with the year-ago period. The company’s overall same-store sales growth of 0.4% outperformed Wall Street’s expectations of same-store sales declines of 1%, according to StreetAccount estimates.

But McDonald’s U.S. business reported a steeper-than-expected drop in its same-store sales. Same-store sales at the company’s domestic restaurants fell 1.4% in the quarter; Wall Street was projecting same-store sales declines of 0.6%.

McDonald’s said traffic was slightly positive, but customers spent less than usual during the quarter. Over the summer, the chain rolled out a $5 combo meal to bring back price-conscious diners and reverse sluggish sales. The strategy worked, helping McDonald’s U.S. same-store sales tick up in the third quarter.

However, analysts have warned that value meals only work if customers also add menu items that aren’t discounted to their orders. McDonald’s executives downplayed those concerns Monday, saying the average check on the $5 meal deal is more than $10.

The biggest hit to McDonald’s U.S. sales came in late October, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked a fatal E. coli outbreak to its Quarter Pounder burgers. McDonald’s switched suppliers for its slivered onions, the ingredient fingered as the likely culprit for the outbreak. In early December, the CDC declared the outbreak officially over.

However, in the days following the news of the outbreak, traffic at McDonald’s U.S. restaurants fell steeply, particularly in the states affected.

U.S. sales hit their nadir in early November, but began rising again after that. In particular, demand for the Quarter Pounder, a popular core menu item with high margins, fell quickly in the wake of the crisis.

McDonald’s expects its U.S. sales to recover by the beginning of the second quarter, executives said.

“I think right now what we’re seeing is that the E. coli impact is now just localized to the areas that had the biggest impact,” CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s conference call. “So think about that as sort of the Rocky Mountain region that was really the epicenter of the issue.”

The company hopes value deals, along with key menu additions, will help to fuel the recovery this year. In 2025, the burger chain plans to bring back its popular snack wraps, which vanished from menus during pandemic lockdowns, and to introduce a new chicken strip menu item.

Outside the U.S., sales were stronger. Both of McDonald’s international divisions reported same-store sales increases, bolstering the company’s overall performance.

The company’s international developmental licensed markets segment, which includes the Middle East and Japan, reported same-store sales growth of 4.1%.

McDonald’s international operated markets division, which includes some of its biggest markets, reported same-store sales growth of 0.1%. The company said most markets reported same-store sales increases, but the United Kingdom and some other markets saw same-store sales shrink in the quarter. One bright spot was France, which saw its same-store sales turn positive during the quarter after months of weak demand.

McDonald’s reported fourth-quarter net income of $2.02 billion, or $2.80 per share, down from $2.04 billion, or $2.80 per share, a year earlier.

Excluding gains tied to the sale of its South Korean business, transaction costs for buying its Israeli franchise and other items, McDonald’s earned $2.83 per share.

Looking to 2025, the first quarter is expected to be the low point for McDonald’s same-store sales, CFO Ian Borden said, citing a weak start to the year in the U.S., among other factors. Winter storms and wildfires in California weighed on restaurant traffic across the industry in January.

For the full year, McDonald’s plans to open roughly 2,200 restaurants. About a quarter of those locations will be in the U.S. and its international operated markets. The rest will be in the company’s international developmental licensed markets, including about 1,000 new restaurants in China.

Including its investments in restaurant openings, McDonald’s plans to spend between $3 billion and $3.2 billion this year on capital expenditures.

The company is also projecting a headwind of 20 cents to 30 cents per share to its full-year earnings due to foreign currency exchange rates.

Shares of GameStop and MicroStrategy were on the rise Monday after Ryan Cohen, CEO of the video game retailer, posted a photo with Michael Saylor, co-founder and chairman of the largest corporate holder of bitcoin.

GameStop, day traders’ favorite meme stock, climbed more than 7%, while MicroStrategy, which recently rebranded as “Strategy,” saw shares rising as much as 4%. Cohen uploaded the photo over the weekend on X, sparking speculation that GameStop is plotting another strategy around crypto. MicroStrategy shares last traded up 1%.

The video game company had expanded into digital services in recent years by offering crypto wallets that let users manage their crypto and nonfungible tokens. However, the firm shut the service down in 2023, citing “regulatory uncertainty.”

Cohen, co-founder of Chewy, bought shares in GameStop in 2020 and joined the board in 2021 as GameStop became one of the key stocks in the WallStreetBets meme trading mania.

His e-commerce experience fueled hopes that he could help modernize the brick-and-mortar retailer, but the company still struggles to adapt to changing spending habits by gamers. Trading in the stock remains highly volatile and speculative as meme stock personality “Roaring Kitty” continues to spur buying from retail investors.

Saylor’s Strategy also has a fan base of retail investors as the firm touted its aggressive bitcoin-buying strategy. In the past year, the firm has raised billions of dollars through the sale of stock or convertible bonds for the sole purpose of purchasing more bitcoin.

Last week, Strategy said it’s almost halfway to its ambitious capital-raising goal as it went on a buying spree throughout the postelection rally. As of Monday, Strategy holds roughly $47 billion worth of bitcoins on its balance sheet, about 2.5% of the total supply.

With a Grammy win for best new artist, Chappell Roan is at a career high. A few years ago, she was one of the millions of Americans without a job or health insurance.

“I told myself that if I ever won a Grammy and got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels, and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists, would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists,” she said at the Grammy awards show in Los Angeles on Feb. 2.

“When I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt. And like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance,” she said in her acceptance speech.

“If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I could’ve been provided care by a company I was giving everything to. So, record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection.”

Roan, whose given name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, was released from her record label in 2020. That’s the same year a huge spike in unemployment resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to 3.3 million people losing coverage through their employers, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

At the time, coverage expansions put in place by the Affordable Care Act acted as a safety net for those experiencing coverage disruptions.

That government-backed aid significantly lowered the costs of coverage for people buying health insurance plans on the ACA marketplace. Those customers include anyone who doesn’t have access to a workplace plan, such as self-employed individuals like musicians, as well as students and the unemployed, among others.

Gains in Medicaid and marketplace coverage have contributed to significant declines in the uninsured rate, according to KFF, a nonprofit formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

“With the Affordable Care Act, there’s a health care safety net for artists who previously had none,” said Larry Levitt, KFF’s executive vice president for health policy. The ACA also guarantees insurance for pre-existing conditions and subsidizes premiums based on income, he said.

Yet, there can still be challenges for artists in getting health insurance if their recording labels don’t provide it, according to Levitt.

“If income is volatile, premiums can fluctuate and be unpredictable because subsidies are based on actual income for the year,” Levitt said. “So an artist who has no income for a period of time can be left with no viable health insurance options.”

“It makes it really hard, especially for starving artists,” said Carolyn McClanahan, a physician and certified financial planner based in Jacksonville, Florida.

Jeff Rabhan, the former chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, said in a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter that “Roan’s call for record labels to pay artists a livable wage and provide health care was noble — but also wildly misinformed.”

In the column, published Feb. 5, Rabhan said “if labels are responsible for artists’ wages, health care and overall well-being, where does it end and personal responsibility begin?”

“Should artists have better health-care options? Absolutely,” Rabhan said in the column. “Sounds like a union thing to me. Most independent managers don’t have insurance, either — it’s a flaw in the industry at large, not just on the label side.”

Since those in the music industry are often paid as independent contractors, that makes it more likely they will forgo coverage, according to McClanahan, founder of Life Planning Partners and a member of the CNBC Financial Advisor Council.

“Unfortunately, many are not part of a union and are on their own in getting health insurance,” she said. “Sadly, many self-employed people don’t understand the Affordable Care Act and how to obtain insurance on their own.”

Even today, there are about 25 million uninsured Americans, KFF research shows.

“Most of the country is involved in [an] employer/employee relationship where the company is responsible for their wages, health care, and some care about your well-being. However, most artists don’t have this luxury and don’t understand they are basically running their own business,” McClanahan said.

“At least give them the tools.”

CNBC’s attempts to reach Roan for comment were not successful, but Roan responded to Rabhan on Instagram by saying she donated $25,000 to support “struggling dropped artists.”

Advertisers shelled out up to $8 million for a spot during Super Bowl 59. Ad industry executives still consider the price tag worth it, and argue it’s even a bang for their buck.

The NFL’s championship game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will air this year on Fox Corp.’s broadcast network, as well as on Fox’s free streamer Tubi. It’ll likely be the biggest audience watching live television at the same time this year.

“The scale and buzz factor still delivers a punch,” said Amy Leifer, DirecTV’s chief advertising sales officer. “Where else can you get 100 million viewers at once, right? Especially in this fragmented landscape … there’s virtually few places you can go to get that type of scale.”

Last year more than 123 million people tuned into the Super Bowl. The 2024 game racked up estimated ad revenue of about $550 million for in-game placements, according to GroupM, WPP’s media investment group.

While advertisers have been spending more on digital, social media and streaming platforms, traditional TV is still considered the most “effective” form of advertising, meaning it has the biggest impact and results for brands due to the large audiences watching at once.

The ad market for traditional TV programming has slowed down as the cable bundle bleeds customers. Still, media companies with rights to live sports — as well as news and other live programming like awards shows — are able to nab a bigger chunk of ad dollars than peers without sports.

While it appears the ad market is stabilizing after a slowdown, networks and streamers with sports are sure to fare better than those without this year.

Sports have taken over the conversation at the advertising industry’s Upfronts presentations each spring, when media companies make their pitch to advertisers. Fox sold most of the ad inventory for this year’s Super Bowl during its Upfront last spring, CNBC previously reported.

The Super Bowl remains about three times as effective as the average primetime programming for advertisers, according to EDO, an advertising data company. The NFL’s big game last year was 224% more effective than average primetime programming, the data firm said.

EDO likened the audience and engagement that comes with a Super Bowl game to an advertiser buying hundreds of spots on primetime. Based on last year’s Super Bowl audience, EDO equated one ad during the big game to roughly 450 spots during primetime programming in terms of viewer engagement.

“It’s a fair and rational price based on our data, which is that this has been one of the most consistent performers over time,” said Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO. “And there’s room for the price to go up based on our data. But the important thing is, it matters a ton how a brand executes on their creative idea.”

For instance, when brands launch a new product during a Super Bowl commercial, consumers continue to engage with the brand via online searches or app visits even after the Super Bowl ad first aired, said Krim. He noted three recent brand launches during Super Bowl commercials — automaker Kia launching the EV6 in 2022, and Reese’s unveiling its Big Caramel Cup and Popeye’s promoting its new wings in 2024 — which led to a lift in engagement for each brand when the ads aired thereafter.

Even localized ads that are sold at a lower cost than national ads and only shown in certain markets experience a Super Bowl lift. Zeam, a hyperlocal streaming platform, aired a spot starring actor John Stamos in select markets last year.

The app had “millions of downloads” following the commercial, said Jack Perry, CEO of Zeam Media.

“It was good enough for us, and it’s not cheap for us to buy those available spots. There’s a very limited number of local spots during the game,” said Perry.

Zeam will run another commercial with Stamos this year.

The placement of a commercial during the game, sometimes as specific as what time during a certain quarter the ad is shown, can make a difference, too, according to Andre Banks, founder and CEO of NewWorld, an ad data firm.

“If a brand wants to drive high-impact results, they must align their spots with when their target audience is most engaged, not the spot that receives higher viewership,” said Banks.

He noted a portion of the Super Bowl audience each year tunes in specifically for the Halftime show, which this year features rapper Kendrick Lamar, and then turns their attentions away once the moment passes.

Banks also noted that social media plays a big role during the Super Bowl, with viewers turning to varying tech platforms during the game. Social media should be key for advertisers during the Super Bowl, too, he said.

“With so many viewers scrolling on social channels during the game, there’s also a massive opportunity for brands to optimize for second-screen engagement,” Banks added.

Ad spending on tech and social media platforms far eclipses traditional TV. GroupM estimates that ad revenue for “pure-play digital,” which excludes digital extensions of media companies like streaming, will grow 10% to $813.3 billion globally in 2025. By comparison, TV ad spend is expected to grow nearly 2% to $169.1 billion. Media companies have even recently come together to launch an ad platform with the aim of taking back share from tech players.

Some say brands’ focus on spending big on the Super Bowl and the idea that traditional TV is the most effective form of advertising may lie in the past.

“I don’t necessarily think when someone says it’s still the most effective, that’s what it is. I think what people are saying is it’s the only place left where there is a really large, captive broadcast audience watching something,” said Shoshana Winter, CEO of Converge, a performance marketing agency. “When it comes to this particular thing, we are holding on hard and fast.”

New Orleans is preparing for an estimated 125,000 visitors and a presidential visit during the weekend of Super Bowl 59, as the reigning champion Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles at the Caesars Superdome.

Local businesses are ready, and hotel demand is surging.

Tripadvisor said demand for hotel rooms in New Orleans surged 637% this week as fans of the competing NFL teams scurry to find lodging. Interest from travelers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey has increased more than 14 times, and interest from people in Kansas and Missouri is up 8.5 times since the division championship games in the last week of January, the travel site said.

As of Thursday morning, the average hotel room was going for $650 per night, according to Hotels.com, which is owned by Expedia.

Caesars has the spotlight, however. Along with naming rights to the New Orleans Saints’ stadium, where the NFL championship will be played, Caesars also holds lucrative status as the only casino in New Orleans.

The company has rolled out the red carpet with a nearly half-billion-dollar overhaul of what was formerly a Harrah’s-branded property, and it is using the big game to introduce the brand to new customers.

The biggest football game of the year comes just weeks after a New Year’s Day attack that took place in the city’s French Quarter and killed 14 people, putting New Orleans on high alert.

Security around town is tight. State police, city police and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security all have a heavy presence.

At an NFL briefing on Monday, law enforcement said more than 700 different types of Homeland Security officials will be on the ground during the Super Bowl, and that was before President Donald Trump indicated plans to attend the game.

“I am confident that the safest areas to be in the country this weekend is under the security umbrella our team has put together,” said Cathy Lanier, the NFL’s chief security officer.

Since the Jan. 1 attack in New Orleans, NFL Executive Vice President Jeff Miller said the league has redoubled its safety efforts.

“We added resources, and we feel really good about where we are,” Miller told CNBC.