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This morning, Apple announced its largest spend commitment to date: A whopping $500 billion thats set to be invested in American manufacturing, engineering, and AI efforts over the next four years. The major news comes just days after Apple CEO Tim Cook met with President Donald Trump to discuss the tech giants current manufacturing practices and the presidents tariff initiatives. Earlier this month, the Trump administration moved ahead with a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports and proposed even larger tariffs on Mexican importsboth countries that serve as major manufacturing suppliers for Apples partner, Foxconn Technology Group. After Cook and Trump met on Friday, the president said that Apple planned to close existing plants in Mexico and build more products in the U.S. instead, claiming, They dont want to be in the tariffs. [Cook] is going to start building, Trump told reporters of the CEOs plans for U.S. investment. Very big numbersyou have to speak to him. I assume theyre going to announce it at some point. Now, Cooks plans have come into sharper focus. Heres everything you need to know about Apples supersized American investment: Where will the money go? According to a press release from Apple, the $500 billion investment will be spread across a few major projects and several smaller initiatives. To start, the company plans to begin building servers in the U.S. via a new 250,000-square-foot manufacturing facility. The plant will be located in Houston, Texas, and is slated to open sometime in 2026. Meanwhile, in Detroit, Apple will open the Apple Manufacturing Academy, a tech education initiative. Apple engineers, along with experts from top universities such as Michigan State, will consult with small- and medium-sized businesses on implementing AI and smart manufacturing techniques, the press release notes. The company will also use the new investment to double its existing U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, a program designed to create American manufacturing jobs. Part of that expansion will entail a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMCs Fab 21 facility in Arizona, the release reads. What can Apple users expect? Another core beneficiary of the $500 billion initiative will be Apples U.S.-based research and development (R&D) teams, which are responsible for new product releases like the recent iPhone 16E. Over the next four years, Apple expects to hire around 20,000 new employees, the vast majority of whom will be focused on R&D, silicon engineering, software development, AI, and machine learningeach a subcategory that will presumably shape Apples future product releases. Why is Apple doing this now? As Trump continues to pursue higher tariffs, costs for overseas manufacturing are rising for Apple, especially given that China is the companys largest manufacturing hub. Meanwhile, Cooklike many tech CEOs in Trumps second administrationseems intent on maintaining a strong relationship with the president, including via donations to his campaign and visits to his Mar-A-Lago estate. During Trumps first term, Cook leveraged his connection to the president to secure a tariff exemption for the iPhone. Now, it seems, this unprecedented new investment is part of Cooks plan to shepherd Apple forward in a political climate that rewards American manufacturing while punishing production abroad.
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E-Commerce
After nearly 40 years providing decor for countless birthdays across the United States, Party City is entering its final days of operations. And as the companys last storefronts close their doors, competitors including Five Below and Dollar Tree are vying to move in for majorly discounted prices. Party City filed for bankruptcy twicefirst in 2023 and again this past Decemberbefore ultimately announcing at the end of 2024 that it could not recover its losses and would be permanently shutting down its 800 locations. In a memo sent to employees at the time, the company listed February 28 as its last day of operations (though, since then, some Redditors have noted extensions at their local locations). While most Party City stores are living out their last hurrah this week, the company itself is working down to the wire to sell designation rights for more than 200 existing leases. Discount retailers are stepping up According to documents submitted to bankruptcy court in the southern district of Texas, Party City is currently hoping to secure deals with two new tenants: Five Below and Dollar Tree. Per a memo submitted on February 19, the proposed Five Below deal would include 44 storefronts in exchange for a $2 million upfront payment, followed by an additional $70,000 for each lease agreement signed after 29 leases. Likewise, the proposed Dollar Tree deal (submitted to court on February 21) would include 148 storefronts for a $1 million upfront payment, followed by an additional $65,000 for each lease agreement over 10 leases. In both cases, Party Citys legal representation noted, the company has an urgent need to close the transactions quickly, given that its dwindling budget does not provide for continued payment of rent. Both proposals are expected to be heard in court this week. Fast Company reached out to Party City, Five Below, and Dollar Tree for more information on the deals, and did not hear back from any of the parties involved at the time of publication. Many legacy retailers are struggling in 2025 Party City’s final woes come amidst a larger retail apocalypse affecting stores like 7-Eleven, Big Lots, and Joann Inc. (which also just announced it will permanently cease operations). As inflation persists and e-commerce continues to gain ground as consumers preferred method of shopping, physical retail locations are taking a major hit. According to a report from Coresight Research, this year could be the worst yet for U.S. retailers (including pandemic years), with an estimated 15,000 closures on the near horizon. Based on a report from The Independent, while the Party City corporations days are numbered, the store wont entirely fade into oblivion just yet. Currently, nine franchisees representing 29 Party City locations are planning to run their stores independently for the foreseeable future. A similar phenomenon has kept the last remaining Blockbuster store open years after the company itself died offpreserving a beloved site of retail nostalgia against all odds.
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E-Commerce
Anthropic released on Monday its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which it says returns results faster and can show the user the chain of thought it follows to reach an answer. This latest model also powers a new coding tool called Claude Code that can perform some development tasks autonomously. Claude 3.7 Sonnet offers an extended thinking mode that engages in a more detailed chain of thought reasoning but takes longer to generate a response. For simpler questions it eschews this mode and instead focuses on speed. Other models offer their own versions of thinking mode, but typically the user has to select that feature for harder problems; Anthropic says Claude 3.7 Sonnet is the first publicly available model with the capability to choose the best mode based on the users question. If Grok 3 and DeepSeek-R1 are stick shifts, then Anthropics new model is an automatic. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely, Anthropic says in a blog post. Claude 3.7 Sonnet outperforms other thinking models in some important benchmark tests. On SWE-bench, which evaluates AI models ability to solve real-world software issues, the model beat OpenAIs o1 and o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1 by a comfortable margin. It was the same story on TAU-bench, which tests AI agents on complex real-world tasks with user and tool interactions. However, OpenAIs o1 model still edges out Claude 3.7 Sonnet in math problem solving, visual reasoning, multilingual Q&A, and graduate-level reasoning benchmarks. Anthropic describes the Claude Code tool as an active collaborator that can search and read code, edit files, write and run tests, and commit and push code to GitHub. The company says the tool has already become indispensable for its own coders, completing tasks in a single pass that would normally take 45 minutes or more of manual work. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available on all Claude subscription plansFree, Pro, Team, and Enterprisebut the extended thinking mode isnt available to users of the free tier. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is also available to developers as an API for the same price as earlier Claude models.
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E-Commerce
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