Southern California Edison acknowledged Thursday that videos have suggested a possible link between the utility’s equipment and the devastating Eaton Fire in Los Angeles.

But the company has not identified evidence to confirm this, according to a filing with the California Public Utilities Commission. The Eaton Fire, which is now contained, burned about 14,000 acres, destroyed thousands of buildings, killed at least 17 civilians and injured nine firefighters.

“SCE is undertaking a careful and thorough investigation and does not know what caused the ignition of the fire,” the utility said in its filing. The company has not found broken conductors, arch marks, or evidence of faults on energized lines in the area where the Eaton Fire started.

Southern California Edison believes its equipment may have sparked the smaller Hurst Fire, according to a separate filing with the commission. The Hurst blaze, which is also contained, burned about 800 acres. Two homes were damaged by the fire, according to the utility’s filing. No deaths have been reported.

Shares of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, were trading about 1% lower.

OpenAI said on Thursday that the company is considering building data center campuses in 16 states that have indicated “real interest” in the project, which is linked to President Donald Trump’s Stargate plans.

On a call with reporters, OpenAI executives said it sent out a request for proposals (RFP) to states less than a week ago.

“A project of this size represents an opportunity to both re-industrialize parts of the country, but also to help revitalize where the American Dream is going to go in this intelligence age,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said on the call.

Shortly after his inauguration last month, President Trump introduced Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to bolster U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. Key initial technology partners will include Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as semiconductor company Arm. They said they would invest $100 billion to start and up to $500 billion over the next four years.

The 16 states OpenAI is currently considering are Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Construction on the data centers in Abilene, Texas, is currently underway. In the coming months, OpenAI will begin announcing additional construction sites “on a rolling basis,” according to the presentation. Each campus is designed to support about one gigawatt of power or more.

OpenAI is aiming to build five to 10 data center campuses total, although executives said that number could rise or fall depending on how much power each campus offers.

The company also said it expects each data center campus to generate thousands of jobs. That includes construction and operational roles. But Stargate’s first data center in Abilene could lead to the creation of just 57 jobs, according to recent reports.

When OpenAI executives were asked how much electricity and water the data centers are expected to consume and how many workers they will employ, Keith Heyde, director of infrastructure strategy and deployment, said there were some sites where the company may look to partner with a utility and help develop other power-generation methods.

Heyde also said the company is looking into a “light water-footprint design.” Lehane declined to offer specifics about water usage.

Large-scale data centers have sparked controversy in recent years for their staggering environmental costs. The facilities consume a much as 50 times more energy per square foot than an average commercial office building, according to Energy.gov, and they’re responsible for approximately 2% of total U.S. electricity use.

In 2022, Google said that the average Google data center the prior year consumed approximately 450,000 gallons of water per day for server cooling. At least one data center it built could use between one and four million gallons of water per day, Time reported.

But the pressure to advance AI in the U.S. is picking up due to the speedy pace of development in China.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup lab, saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings after its debut and roiled U.S. markets early last week on reports that its powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has praised DeepSeek’s model publicly, calling it “clearly a great model” at an event last week.

“This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for democratic Al to win,” Altman said at the event, adding that it points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.”

Lehane said it’s all adding urgency to efforts in the U.S.

“Right now, there’s really only two countries in the world that can build this AI at scale,” Lehane said on Thursday. “One is the CCP-led China, and the other is the United States, and so that’s sort of the context that we’re operating in. Up until relatively recently, there was a real sense that the U.S. had a material lead on the CCP.”

He added that reports surrounding DeepSeek made “really clear that this is a very real competition, and the stakes could not be bigger. Whoever ends up prevailing in this competition is going to really shape what the world looks like going forward.”

All Quiksilver, Billabong and Volcom stores in the United States will close after their operator filed for bankruptcy protection. 

Altogether over 100 stores for the brands, that sell apparel for skaters, surfers and snowboarders, will close their doors.

Liberated Brands filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

“The Liberated team has worked tirelessly over the last year to propel these iconic brands forward, but a volatile global economy, consumer spending changes amid a rising cost of living, and inflationary pressures have all taken a heavy toll,” Liberated Brands in a statement, according to Financier Worldwide. “Despite this difficult change, we are encouraged that many of our talented associates have found new opportunities with other license holders that will carry these great brands into the future.”

Todd Hymel, the CEO of the Costa Mesa, California-based company, said in a declaration of support for the bankruptcy filing that a “rapid and dramatic rise in interest rates,” inflation, supply chain delays, a decline in customer demand and shifting consumer preferences cast “significant pressure” on the operator. 

He noted that during Covid-19 pandemic the brands experienced a boom in business. During that time, Liberated expanded its retail footprint from 67 to 140 stores, Hymel wrote. However, as the pandemic ended and interest rates and inflation went up, customer demand weakened. 

The pandemic also had increased demand for online shopping and led Liberated’s brick-and-mortar retail footprint to impose “a further drag on profitability.” Hymel also said consumer demand toward “fast fashion” contributed to a decrease in profits.

Fans of the labels won’t have to fear, though, as parent company Authentic Brands Group said it will transition to another operator.

President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump will host a weekend show on Fox News, the news channel announced Wednesday.

‘My View with Lara Trump’ is expected to premiere Feb. 22 and air at 9 p.m. ET Saturdays, taking the spot of ‘One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.’ Kilmeade’s show will move to 10 p.m. ET Sundays, Fox News Channel said in a news release.

‘I’m thrilled to bring my voice back to FOX News, talk directly with the American people and highlight what makes this country so great,’ Trump said in a statement. ‘As I cover the success of The Golden Age of America, I look forward to where this time will lead our country and where this opportunity will lead me in the future.’

Fox News said the hourlong show will ‘focus on the return of common sense to all corners of American life as the country ushers in a new era of practicality’ and shed light ‘on the headlines driving the national conversation and affecting families around the country.’

Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott called Trump ‘a gifted communicator who knows how to connect to the viewers.’

Trump, who is married to the president’s son Eric Trump, worked for Fox News as an on-air contributor from March 2021 through 2022. She was also a co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a senior adviser during Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, and she hosts a web series called ‘The Right View.’

The announcement follows former Fox News hosts Sean Duffy’s confirmation as transportation secretary and Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary.

President Donald Trump and his supporters have heralded his use of tariff threats to extract concessions on drug trafficking and border security from Canada and Mexico. 

Yet, experts say, some of the measures agreed to by America’s two largest trading partners and close allies are less substantial than what has been trumpeted. 

Trump announced the 25% tariffs on the two countries Saturday, with the expectation they would take effect Tuesday. By Monday, he said that he had reached an agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 of her country’s national guard officers to the U.S. border to stem the flow of migrants and drugs into the U.S. Sheinbaum said she had agreed to establish a bilateral “working group” with the Trump administration that would tackle security, migration and trade.

The same day, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had agreed to beef up border and drug enforcement, as well as appoint a new “fentanyl czar” and designate cartels as terrorist organizations.  

In return, Trump promised to suspend the tariffs on both countries for 30 days. 

“As President, it is my responsibility to ensure the safety of ALL Americans, and I am doing just that. I am very pleased with this initial outcome,” Trump said on social media. According to The Associated Press, the White House sent out an email that saw 68 Republican lawmakers praising the confrontation.

For Mexico, it was not clear whether the 10,000 troops represented a fresh call-up. The Associated Press reported it appeared the soldiers were merely being shifted from other parts of the country. 

While Trump has praised Sheinbaum on social media, if he decides he is not seeing results from an additional troop deployment, “get ready for a trade war,” said John Feeley, a career diplomat and former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Mexico.

Crossings at the southern border had already begun to plummet in the final months of the Biden administration, reaching fewer than 100,000 per month for the first time since at least 2022. Interdictions of fentanyl have also fallen sharply in recent months.

Although deaths attributed to fentanyl overdoses declined for the first time in five years in 2023, they still totaled more than 100,000 that year, the most recent for which data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is available.

But Trump is looking for headlines, Feeley said, and is unlikely to be persuaded by data showing reductions in migrant and drug flows that were already trending down before he took office.

“You’re mistaken if you think there’s a metric of success for Trump,” Feeley said, referring to quantitative sources of data. “He’s not reading spreadsheets or DEA reports. He’s looking at headlines and social media retweets.”

The Trump administration has faced a blitz of calls from U.S. manufacturers that rely on Mexican imports, especially automakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Kevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Council director, appeared on CNBC on Monday to issue an assurance that the negotiations with Mexico and Canada were about a “drug war” and not a “trade war.” 

A similar situation may be playing out with some of the concessions announced from America’s northern neighbor. While Trump said Canada had agreed to take a more aggressive posture on its U.S. border in exchange for a suspension of tariffs, Canada’s parliament had already passed a new border security and drug interdiction bill in December. Trudeau also agreed to appoint a border czar and designate drug cartels as terrorist groups.    

“This whole thing is strange to me,” said Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. While there is drug activity on the Canadian border, it is much more limited in scope compared with Mexico, she said — with fentanyl comprising a smaller percentage of drug flows (43 pounds was seized there last year, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, compared with 21,100 pounds at the southern border). 

According to the DEA, 1 kilogram (roughly 2.2 pounds) of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people.

“It’s not as if we don’t have issues — there are illicit flows,” she said, “but comparing between the two borders is an exercise in futility.”

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had been “astoundingly clear” about his rationale for the tariffs.

“The illegal surge of deadly drugs and of human beings that we have seen trafficked over the southern border and northern border,” Leavitt said. “The president is making it very clear to both Canada and Mexico that the United States is no longer going to be a dumping ground for illegal deadly drugs and illegal human beings.”

Trump has also cited drug flows as a reason to impose additional 10% tariffs on China, despite that country posing a host of other security threats to the U.S. On Tuesday, China announced a set of retaliatory measures on U.S. goods and interests, including levies of up to 15% and an antitrust probe into Google — though, for now, analysts have noted many of these measures appear to be largely symbolic, citing the marginal levels of the specific U.S. goods so far singled out by the Chinese levies, as well as Google’s insubstantial presence there.  

Trump has signaled that his approach to negotiations is to keep friends and foes alike off balance. While markets became used to dismissing his threats during his first administration, this time may be different, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.  

“The outlook feels more uncertain and, even with the [tariffs] delay, we think the risks have tilted toward higher tariffs than we had previously assumed,” they wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. “The challenge is that creating uncertainty is likely part of President Trump’s strategy.

In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, the then-candidate was asked whether he would use military force if China invaded Taiwan.

“I wouldn’t have to, because [Chinese President Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f—–g crazy,” Trump responded. 

Yet, the paper’s right-leaning editorial board said this week that the president “blink[ed]” as he brokered truces with Canada and Mexico that were “much less … than meets the eye.” 

Whatever concessions Trump may have won, the board said, have likely come at the cost of greater uncertainty — one of investors’ and economists’ least-favorite trends. 

“Mr. Trump’s weekend tariff broadside against a pair of neighbors has opened a new era of economic policy uncertainty that won’t calm down until the President does,” the board said. “As we warned many times before Election Day, this is the biggest economic risk of Donald Trump’s second term.”

A bipartisan congressional bill is being introduced to ban China’s DeepSeek artificial intelligence software from government devices.

U.S. Reps. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., are introducing the legislation on national security grounds, saying the company’s technology presents an espionage risk.

“The technology race with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not one the United States can afford to lose,” LaHood said in a statement. “The national security threat that DeepSeek — a CCP-affiliated company — poses to the United States is alarming.’

He said DeepSeek’s generative AI program can acquire the data of U.S. users and store the information for unidentified use by Chinese authorities.

The chatbot app, however, has intentionally hidden code that could send user login information to China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications company that has been banned from operating in the U.S., according to an analysis by Ivan Tsarynny, CEO of Feroot Security, which specializes in data protection and cybersecurity. His analysis was published earlier by The Associated Press. 

“Under no circumstances can we allow a CCP company to obtain sensitive government or personal data,” Gottheimer said.

A representative for DeepSeek could not be reached for comment. The bill was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment.

Founded in 2023, DeepSeek entered the mainstream U.S. consciousness late last month amid reports it was able to produce better AI results at a fraction of the cost of what American tech firms have so far been able to achieve. Those fears caused U.S. tech stocks to briefly tumble last week.

There remains debate about the veracity of those reports, with some technologists saying there has not been a full accounting of DeepSeek’s development costs.

“It’s mindboggling that we are unknowingly allowing China to survey Americans and we’re doing nothing about it,” Tsarynny told the AP. “It’s hard to believe that something like this was accidental. There are so many unusual things to this. You know that saying ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’? In this instance, there’s a lot of smoke,” he said.

China has blacklisted the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which could force the company to shut down stores and manufacturing in an early repercussion of President Donald Trump’s trade war. 

China added PVH Corp. to its “unreliable entities” list on Tuesday, which allows the Chinese government to fine the retailer, prohibit import and export activities, revoke work permits, and deny employees the ability to enter the country, among other deliberately vague powers. 

While China’s Ministry of Commerce began investigating PVH in September for allegedly refusing to source cotton from the Xinjiang region, which has become notorious for its Uyghur detention camps, Beijing officially placed the company on its blacklist on Tuesday. The announcement came just days after Trump slapped a 10% tariff on imports from China, and came along with a slew of other retaliatory measures against the U.S., including new duties on energy imports and farm gear. 

“There’s this tit-for-tat trade war going on, and [China] wants to show the United States that it’s going to take action to hurt either big U.S. companies or companies with significant interests in the U.S.,” said Michael Kaye, a partner at Squire Patton Boggs, who has been practicing international trade law for more than 30 years. “They’re being made an example. … My guess is, [China] wanted to pick somebody and they wanted it to be somebody that was high visibility.”

Now that PVH is on the unreliable entities list, China could force the company to shut down the dozens of stores that it operates in the region and forbid it from selling its wares to Chinese consumers online, said Kaye. Its staff — including those who’ve built lives in China — could be effectively deported and sent home, Kaye added.

It is unclear if China would try to enforce actions against PVH in the autonomous region of Hong Kong, where the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters are. In 2020, China passed a law that gave it more power to enforce national laws in Hong Kong, and that is “particularly the case with laws applicable to national security,” which could include the unreliable entities list, said Kaye.

As of Thursday morning Eastern time, the company appeared to be operating its business as usual in China.

China could even prohibit PVH from manufacturing in the region altogether, which could force it to move production to other countries and struggle to meet customer orders. 

It’s unclear which steps exactly China will take, or if the Trump administration will try to convince China not to punish the company.

In a statement, PVH said that it was “surprised and deeply disappointed to learn of the decision from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.”

“In our 20 years of operating in China and proudly serving our consumers, as a matter of policy, PVH maintains strict compliance with all relevant laws and regulations and operates in line with established industry standards and practices. We will continue our engagement with relevant authorities and look forward to a positive resolution,” the company said.

China represented 6% of PVH’s sales and 16% of its earnings before interest and taxes in 2023, but it relies more heavily on the country for manufacturing, which is the bigger risk to its business. PVH has more factories and suppliers in China than in any other region, representing about 18% of production, according to a disclosure it issued in December. 

“This has the potential to be very, very disruptive for PVH,” said GlobalData managing director and retail analyst Neil Saunders. “They would certainly have to scramble to find new capacity. They’d be able to do that in time, of course, but the two things that are at issue are that, because a lot of supply chains are just in time, they would probably find that they did get short on inventory whilst they made the transition. The other issue, of course, is quality.” 

PVH has operated in China for more than 20 years, and while it works with suppliers and factories in more than 30 other countries, the higher-end goods that it makes can be difficult to manufacture elsewhere because of the skill level needed, said Saunders. 

“While you can shift manufacturing capacity reasonably easily, it’s not so easy to guarantee the quality, guarantee the production processes. Those things take time to upskill,” said Saunders. “China has that capacity and has those skills, because PVH has been operating there for ages. Another country, another manufacturing facility, may not have those skills immediately.” 

Plus, PVH has viewed China as a growth market and it will now have to look for new strategies to increase sales and profitability as demand falls for its high-end dresses, intimate apparel and sweaters. 

China’s unreliable entities list is a relatively new law in the country, and experts say it’s deliberately opaque. The government has wide latitude to take action against PVH, but it remains unclear what exactly it will do. Typically, guidance comes within a few days of a company’s placement on the blacklist, said Kaye. 

China could add PVH to the list and do nothing to the company, but Kaye said the chances of that are “very slim” because the government will want to avoid the perception that it’s backing down. China will more likely use PVH as a bargaining chip at the negotiating table with Trump, and use it as an example to show the power it has to inflict pain on other U.S. businesses with major operations and customer bases in China, such as Nike, Apple, General Motors, Starbucks and others. 

“There’s a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over [PVH’s] head, and that is exactly what this is, because this isn’t really about PVH at all. This is about PVH being caught in the spat between China and the U.S.,” said Saunders. “China is using PVH as an example to say, look, if tariffs go ahead, if other restrictions are put in place on China, we can make life difficult for U.S. companies in the country. That’s really what this is about.”

Amazon long ago passed Walmart in terms of market cap, but the e-commerce giant is finally poised to leapfrog its brick-and-mortar rival by another key metric: revenue.

For the past dozen years, Walmart held the distinction of being the top revenue generator each quarter. In 2012, it overtook oil giant Exxon Mobil, according to LSEG senior research analyst Tajinder Dhillon.

Walmart remained in the lead after oil prices tumbled in subsequent years from their previously lofty levels of more than $100 per barrel.

In its earnings release after the close of trading Thursday, Amazon is expected to report revenue of $187 billion, according to analysts surveyed by LSEG. Walmart reports on Feb. 20, and is projected to announce sales of $180 billion.

Walmart, which is often dubbed the world’s biggest retailer, in reference to its revenue, still leads the way when it comes to annual sales. The company has turned in more than $600 billion in sales in each of the past two years. That number is expected to reach nearly $681 billion for the latest fiscal year.

Amazon is catching up. Based on fourth-quarter estimates, Amazon’s full year revenue for 2024 will come in at around $638 billion, marking the first time it’s surpassed the $600 billion milestone.

One big reason Amazon has shot up the charts is its cloud business, Amazon Web Services. Revenue at AWS has more than doubled since 2020 and now accounts for about 17% of total sales.

The Covid pandemic also dramatically altered consumer behavior toward online shopping, which has helped Amazon’s annual North America sales increase more than 100% since 2019, the year before the pandemic.

Very few companies ever even reach $100 billion in revenue in a quarter. In addition to Walmart and Amazon, Apple has done so, but only during the holiday quarter, its key iPhone selling period. Last week, Apple reported revenue for the latest quarter of $124 billion.

The newest member of the exclusive $100 billion club is UnitedHealth, which saw its top line climb past that mark in the first quarter of last year and then again in the third and fourth quarters.

The two companies closest to joining the group, with a little bit of growth, are CVS Health and McKesson. CVS exceeded $95 billion in revenue in the September quarter, while McKesson hit $94 billion.

Chipotle Mexican Grill said Tuesday that it does not expect costs to rise much if tariffs on key imported ingredients go into effect next month, noting that only about half of its avocados come from Mexico.

A day earlier, President Donald Trump paused his plans for 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports. If implemented after the one-month suspension, imports such as avocados and beef would be more expensive for restaurants, which would likely try to pass on the increased cost to their diners.

But Chipotle executives shook off the tariff fears during the company’s earnings conference call on Tuesday. If tariffs aimed at Mexico, Canada and China all go into effect, Chipotle expects that its cost of sales would rise about 60 basis points, or 0.6 percentage points, according to Chief Financial Officer Adam Rymer.

Chipotle only sources about 2% of its sales from Mexico, importing produce such as avocados, tomatoes, limes and peppers, Rymer said.

In fact, while Mexico supplies roughly 90% of the avocados eaten in the U.S., Chipotle buys about half of its avocado supply from Colombia, Peru and the Dominican Republic, according to CEO Scott Boatwright. In recent years, Chipotle has taken steps to buy more of its avocados outside of Mexico, he told analysts.

Looking beyond Chipotle’s guacamole supply, less than 0.5% of Chipotle’s sales are sourced from Canada and China. Trump has already imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese imports.

In recent quarters, Chipotle has shown that it has pricing power, even as diners become more value-conscious.

For the fourth quarter, the company reported same-store sales growth of 5.4%, fueled by a traffic increase of 4%. Chipotle’s earnings topped Wall Street estimates, but a conservative forecast for its same-store sales growth sent shares down 5% in extended trading.

The outlook did not include the effect of any tariffs.

Mattel could soon raise the prices of toys such as Barbie and Hot Wheels in response to new tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, executives said Tuesday. 

The toy giant, which manufactures about 40% of its toys in China and less than 10% in Mexico, told analysts it will look to move around its supply chain to mitigate the effect of tariffs, but it is also considering price hikes.

“Certainly against the tariff, we have a range of mitigating actions,” said finance chief Anthony DiSilvestro on the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call. He said those actions include leveraging Mattel’s supply chains and “potential price increases.” 

“We do work closely with our retail partners to achieve the right balance and always keep consumers in mind when we consider pricing actions,” he added. 

The comments come after Trump imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods this week. He also paused planned 25% duties on imports from Mexico and Canada for 30 days.

Economists on both sides of the aisle have agreed that the levies will likely lead to price increases for consumers. There is no guarantee Trump will impose the tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as he has often used the threat of duties as a negotiating tactic to bend foreign governments to his will. 

Shortly after Trump announced the 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico, both countries announced they would bolster security at their respective borders, leading Trump to suspend the duties. The two nations had already been enhancing border security before Trump’s threat.

China and the U.S. have yet to come to a similar agreement to avoid the tariffs. If the 10% duty remains in effect, it will have a significant effect on the toy industry, which sources about 80% of its goods from the region. 

While companies such as Mattel have said publicly that they plan to leverage their supply chains and work with suppliers to mitigate the effects of the tariffs, executives have admitted privately that they are loath to take on the cost themselves and reduce profits. If they are not able to pass on the entire cost of the tariffs to suppliers, some plan to have consumers pay the rest through price hikes.

Some companies with diversified supply chains such as Mattel, which operates its own and third-party factories in seven different countries, have more flexibility to move production and lean on suppliers to lessen the hit to profits. It also does about 40% of its business outside of North America, where tariffs are not being imposed in the same way they are in the U.S. 

By 2027, Mattel expects sourcing from Mexico and China to represent more than 25% of total global production, down from about 50% now. It does not currently source from Canada.