Plus: Crypto stocks gain as bitcoin heads for best week in over two years. And Swedish heating company Nibe Industrier sees sales growth from heat pumps and data centers. Julie Chang hosts.
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[00:00:01] Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Friday, August 21st. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. Private Equity Firms Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman have joined forces with Anthropic to form a roughly 160-person team of AI experts to deploy at businesses. The standalone firm will be called Ode, and the PE executives said it'll help businesses, starting with their own portfolio companies, build new revenue-generating products using AI.
[00:00:31] The $1.5 billion joint venture also includes Apollo, General Atlantic, and Goldman Sachs among its backers. OpenAI has formed a rival venture that would offer consulting services to companies, with a $4 billion investment led by private equity firm TPG. Crypto stocks are rising as Bitcoin is headed for its best weekly performance in more than two years. Shares of Coinbase Global, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., are up more than 7%.
[00:01:00] Robinhood Markets shares jumped nearly 13%. And Strategy, the Bitcoin accumulation firm, is up about 6%. Bitcoin recently traded above $77,000. It has been climbing since the Treasury Department expanded its bond buybacks, a move that continues to weaken the dollar. The largest cryptocurrency is still well below its previous peak above $126,000 in October.
[00:01:26] But its sudden move upward has lifted other digital currencies and crypto-link stocks. And Swedish heating company, Nybar Industrie, reported growth in sales and operating profit in the second quarter amid strong heat pump demand in Europe and the U.S. Net sales jumped 8.7% on-year at fixed exchange rates to $1.14 billion for the second quarter, while operating profit climbed 11%.
[00:01:52] Additionally, sales in the element divisions grew 12%, driven by data center demand. But its CEO said a fresh round of tariffs imposed by the U.S. announced at the beginning of the second quarter will be challenging. And that's your TMB Tech Minutes. Check back Monday for another quick tech update. The