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May 3, 2025

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Data center demand is not slowing down in the world’s largest market centered in northern Virginia, executives at Dominion Energy said Thursday.

Dominion provides electricity in Loudoun County, nicknamed “Data Center Alley” because it hosts the largest cluster of data centers in the world. The utility works closely with the Big Tech companies that are investing tens of billions of dollars in data centers as they train artificial intelligence models.

“We have not observed any evidence of slowing demand from data center customers across our service area,” Dominion’s chief financial officer, Steven Ridge, told analysts on the company’s first-quarter earnings call.

Wall Street has speculated that the tech sector might pull back investment in data centers as President Donald Trump’s tariffs make it more difficult to source parts and raise the risk of a recession. The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI lab sparked a sell-off of power stocks earlier this year as investors worried that its model is more energy efficient.

Dominion has 40 gigawatts of data center capacity in various stages of contracting, Ridge said. Data center customers have not paused spending on new projects in Dominion’s service area and they have not shown any concerns about economic uncertainty, Dominion CEO Robert Blue said.

“We’re seeing continued appetite for additional data center capacity in our service territory,” Blue said. “They want to go fast, they always want to go fast. That’s their business, that’s always been their business. We’ve been effective at serving them thus far. I don’t see any reason why that’s going to change in the future,” he said.

Executives with Amazon and Nvidia said last week at an energy conference in Oklahoma City that data center demand is not slowing. Dominion shares rose about 1% in Thursday trading as the utility maintained its full-year operating earnings guidance of $3.28 to $3.52 per share.

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Shares of Tesla were flat in premarket trading Thursday after the EV maker denied a Wall Street Journal report that its board was searching for a replacement for chief executive Elon Musk.

The report, citing comments from sources familiar with the discussions, said that Tesla’s board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding the company’s next CEO. Shares of Tesla fell as much as 3% in overnight trading on trading platform Robinhood following the news, before paring losses.

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm wrote on the social media platform X that the report was “absolutely false.”

“Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company,” she wrote.

Elon Musk during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday.Evan Vucci / AP

“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”

It comes after a sharp drop in the electric vehicle giant’s sales and profits, with its top and bottom lines missing estimates in the first quarter. Musk has admitted that his involvement with the Trump administration could be hurting the automaker’s stock price.

The mega-billionaire said on a Tesla earnings call last week that he plans to spend just a “day or two per week” running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency beginning in May.

Tesla’s total revenue slipped 9% year-on-year to hit $19.34 billion in the January-March quarter. This falls short of the $21.11 billion forecast by analysts, LSEG data shows.

Revenue from its automotive segment declined 20% year-on-year to $14 billion, as the company needed to update lines at its four vehicle factories to start making a refreshed version of its popular Model Y SUV. Tesla also attributed the decline to lower average selling prices and sales incentives as a drag on revenue and profit.

Its net income plunged 71% to $409 million, or 12 cents a share, from $1.39 billion or 41 cents a year ago.

Since the start of the year, its shares have plunged over 30%.

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares in the company over the next year, according to a financial filing on Friday.

Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 but remains Amazon’s top shareholder, is selling the shares as part of a trading plan adopted on March 4, the filing states. The stake would be worth about $4.8 billion at the current price.

The disclosure follows Amazon’s first-quarter earnings report late Thursday. While profit and revenue topped estimates, the company’s forecast for operating income in the current quarter came in below Wall Street’s expectations.

The results show that Amazon is bracing for uncertainty related to President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs. The company landed in the crosshairs of the White House this week over a report that Amazon planned to show shoppers the cost of the tariffs. Trump personally called Bezos to complain, and Amazon clarified that no such change was coming.

Bezos previously offloaded about $13.5 billion worth of Amazon shares last year, marking his first sale of company stock since 2021.

Since handing over the Amazon CEO role to Andy Jassy, Bezos has spent more of his time on his space exploration company, Blue Origin, and his $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund. He’s used Amazon share sales to help fund Blue Origin, as well as the Day One Fund, which he launched in September 2018 to provide education in low-income communities and combat homelessness.

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Netflix is on a winning streak.

The streaming giant’s stock has traded for 11 straight days without a decline, the company’s longest positive run ever.

Its previous record was a nine-day stretch in late 2018 and early 2019 when the stock traded up for four days, was unchanged for a day and then traded positively for another four days.

The stock is also trading at all-time high levels since it went public in May 2002.

This new streak comes on the heels of Netflix’s most recent earnings report on April 17, in which it revealed that revenue grew 13% during the first quarter of 2025 on higher-than-forecast subscription and advertising dollars.

Netflix has been one of the top performing stocks during the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, with shares up more than 30% since mid-January. The company has been largely unaffected by Trump’s tariffs and trade war with China and is a service that consumers are unlikely to cut during a recession.

Meanwhile, traditional media stocks have been slammed by a tumultuous market prompted by Trump’s trade policy. Warner Bros. Discovery has lost nearly 10% since Trump took office, while Disney is down 13% in that same period.

Netflix continues to forecast full-year revenue of between $43.5 billion and $44.5 billion.

“There’s been no material change to our overall business outlook,” the company said in a statement last month.

As investors worry about the potential impact of tariffs on consumer spending and confidence, Netflix’s co-CEO Greg Peters said on the company’s earnings call, “Based on what we are seeing by actually operating the business right now, there’s nothing really significant to note.”

“We also take some comfort that entertainment historically has been pretty resilient in tougher economic times,” Peters said. “Netflix, specifically, also, has been generally quite resilient. We haven’t seen any major impacts during those tougher times, albeit over a much shorter history.”

JPMorgan said Thursday that it sees more upside for shares.

“NFLX has established itself as the clear leader in global streaming & is on the pathway to becoming global TV…Advertising Upfronts in May should serve as a positive catalyst to shares,” analysts wrote.

While Netflix has hiked its subscription prices — its standard plan now costs $17.99, its ad-supported plan is $7.99 and premium is $24.99 — it appears to have retained its value proposition for customers. But it’s unclear if the subscriber base is growing or shrinking because the company recently stopped sharing details on its membership numbers, instead focusing on revenue growth.

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