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Good morning and happy Monday. 

The tech industry is famous for being fast-moving, but this year actually saw some slow burn. It was a year when energy infrastructure and antitrust enforcement, two notoriously unhurried areas of public life, came to the fore.

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

Big Tech

2024: The Year Big Tech Got into the Energy Game 

Photo of a nuclear power plant
Photo by Lukas Lehotsky via Unsplash

The generative AI craze may have kicked off two years ago, but it wasn’t until this year that tech giants realized if they’re going to stay in the game, they need a hookup.

Big Tech companies poured billions into energy infrastructure and server farms this year to support their AI ambitions. Generative AI sucks up a heck of a lot of power to both build and run, and the race is on to capture future capacity. Whether the grid can cope with that much demand is a whole other question.

The Nuclear Option

Tech’s energy fervor had considerable knock-on effects for broader energy markets as tech companies raced to capture future energy capacity, plus Big Tech busily lobbied to alter the way carbon accounting works.

Every energy sector felt Big Tech come calling. The AI energy gold-rush gave the US coal industry a lift, but Big Tech also signed off on big renewable projects like wind farms. The biggest difference, however, has been felt by the nuclear industry:

  • Companies including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all signed big nuclear power deals this year. One of the deals struck by Microsoft is slated to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the site of an infamous partial meltdown in 1979.
  • Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have had skin in the nuclear game for a little while already, as they are both involved in nuclear power startups. Altman has even backed nuclear fusion as a way to fuel the AI revolution he envisions — though fusion is a long way from being a commercially viable reality. 

Time Constraints: The issue is whether these energy projects will outlast Silicon Valley enthusiasm for generative AI. This year saw AI companies including OpenAI and Google run into some technological speed-bumps. Improving AI products is getting harder, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this month that progress will get harder next year because the “low-hanging fruit is gone” and now the “hill is steeper.” Not only is building nuclear energy plants a slow process, such projects have a history of running over both time and budget targets. By the time Three Mile Island is up and running again, who knows what the hot new tech trend will be. Maybe the metaverse is due for a comeback…

Written by Isobel Asher Hamilton
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Big Tech

2024: The Year the DOJ Cracked Google

The antitrust wheel managed a few rotations this year. 

In August, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Department of Justice in its case against Google’s search business. The judge decided that the DOJ’s argument that Google had illegally struck deals to cement the dominance of its search product was correct. The big question now is what happens next, as the DOJ is pushing for Google to divest its Chrome browser. Plus, Google’s search business was just first on the docket…

Search Warrants

The DOJ’s case against Google goes back to 2020 when, if you cast your mind back, you’ll recall an ensemble cast of Silicon Valley CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai were hauled in front of Congress to answer a raft of questions about their businesses. This ruling in favor of the DOJ is the first bit of domestic antitrust enforcement to come out of that CEO grilling, but it won’t be the last. Google has to go another round with the DOJ over its ad tech business. 

But Google isn’t the only Big Tech company with a severe antitrust headache. Here are a few to watch:

  • The DOJ brought a case against Apple in March saying the company illegally dominates the smartphone market. “Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers,” the DOJ said in a statement.
  • The Federal Trade Commission is still pressing ahead with a case it brought against Amazon Marketplace in 2023. Amazon tried to get the case dismissed this year, but a judge ruled it can proceed.

The Trump Card: It looks like President-elect Trump isn’t going to change tack on the Big Tech crackdown when he takes office next month. He picked Silicon Valley hawk Brendan Carr to head up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which could indicate a degree of frostiness, plus he selected Gail Slater, an old economic adviser to JD Vance — who’s argued in favor of broader antitrust measures against Big Tech — to be head of antitrust at the DOJ. Whichever way the wind blows, tech billionaires were quick to mobilize post-election. Zuckerberg reportedly had lunch with Trump, and Bezos said at the New York Times Dealbook summit that he wants to help Trump reduce regulation. Sorry guys, the post of Trump’s best tech-bro buddy is already taken. For now, anyway.

Written by Isobel Asher Hamilton
Social Media

2024: The Year Reddit Grew Up

This year brought back an old classic we’ve not seen in a while: a social media IPO. 

Reddit, otherwise known as the “frontpage of the internet,” entered its publicly-traded era in March. It had a pretty cushy first year as a publicly traded stock; shares trended upwards gently until the end of October, when they suddenly spiked 72%. By the end of November, the stock had risen 179% since the company went public. So can Reddit keep the magic alive into next year?

Late Bloomer

Reddit came to its IPO a little late in life. Facebook (as it was then known) took 8 years to go public, Twitter (as it was also then known) took 7 years, and Reddit — which was founded around the same time as both those companies — took 19 years to launch its IPO. For all of those 19 years, Reddit never turned an annual profit. That doesn’t make it totally unique among tech IPOs, but it did contribute to a slight sense of urgency. The big jump in Reddit’s share price towards the end of the year was thanks to the company turning its first-ever quarterly profit.

Moving into 2025, Reddit will turn to the classic social-media strategy of increasing its advertising revenue, but it’s also got a chance to make a buck off its most infinite resource — its user-generated content:

  • In February, Reddit struck a deal with Google to license its content for training Google’s AI models. One source told Reuters the license was worth about $60 million per year.
  • CEO Steve Huffman hinted during an October appearance at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference that the company will look for more enterprise deals to monetize its data. “It is an arms race,” Huffman said, adding: “But we’re in talks with just about everybody, so we’ll see where these things land.”

Jolly Good: Reddit saw extraordinarily fast user growth in the UK this year, outpacing 24 of the biggest website publishers, according to the Press Gazette. It’s now the 14th-biggest publisher in the UK, up from number 29 last year. 

Written by Isobel Asher Hamilton
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