Berkshire Hathaway is betting that the artificial intelligence boom will create opportunities well beyond technology stocks, with CEO Greg Abel pointing to the significant growth potential of data centers and energy business in the massive infrastructure buildout needed to power AI, a Reuters report said citing Abel’s interaction with CNBC.

Abel said that Berkshire sees significant opportunities from the expansion of AI data centers, following its decision to make Alphabet its third-largest common stock holding.

Reuters reported that Berkshire ended June with nearly 106 million Alphabet shares worth about $37.8 billion, behind only its holdings in Apple and American Express.

Abel called Alphabet a “significant player” in AI in his interaction with CNBC. He said he and Berkshire Chairman Warren Buffett had authorized an additional $10 billion investment three months ago to support the Google and YouTube parent’s AI infrastructure expansion.

“We are all seeing and feeling the impact” of AI, Abel said.

For Berkshire, the AI opportunity is not confined to its Alphabet stake. The technology’s growing appetite for electricity could also benefit Berkshire Hathaway Energy, as data centers require large and reliable power supplies.
Abel estimated that data centers accounted for about 8% of Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s load in Iowa last year, underscoring how quickly AI infrastructure is becoming a meaningful source of electricity demand.”I’ve sort of always had the strong view that energy would be the constraint,” Abel said. “We do still see it as a significant opportunity for Berkshire and Berkshire Hathaway Energy.”

That creates an unusual link between Berkshire’s technology investment and one of its more traditional businesses. As Alphabet and other technology companies pour money into AI infrastructure, Berkshire can potentially participate through both the companies building the technology and the energy systems required to keep their data centers running.

Reuters reported that Buffett initiated Berkshire’s investment in Alphabet last year, while Abel took credit for the latest purchase, made at a 6.5% discount to Alphabet’s stock price. Abel, with Buffett’s help, oversees Berkshire’s capital allocation and its cash holdings, which stood at $364.7 billion at the end of June.

But Abel’s outlook is not uniformly bullish. He said U.S. consumers remain under pressure from elevated inflation and mortgage rates, while the housing market faces a difficult period.

Berkshire agreed in June to pay $6.8 billion for home builder Taylor Morrison and already owns stakes in Lennar and D.R. Horton. Abel said Taylor Morrison could become a “very strong asset” over the next five to 10 years as more people seek homeownership, even if demand remains subdued in the near term.

“We didn’t see any sign of immediate recovery,” in housing, Abel said. “It was going to be a bumpy road for a while.”

“There’s a consumer that is still clearly feeling the pain, and struggling, and having to stretch a lot further with that dollar,” Abel said.

Abel made the comments from Tokyo, where Berkshire has built a sizeable investment portfolio through stakes of more than 10% in Japanese trading houses Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. The company also took a 2.49% stake in insurer Tokio Marine in March as part of a strategic partnership.

Berkshire plans to hold its trading house investments for “many decades,” Abel said, adding that Buffett remains a strong supporter of the strategy.

“Warren absolutely loves the Japanese investments,” Abel said. “It wasn’t easy for Warren that off I went to Tokyo.”

The comments offer an early glimpse of how Abel is deploying Berkshire’s vast capital base: leaning into structural growth opportunities such as AI while continuing to build around energy, housing and long-term investments in Japan.

(Disclaimer: This article is based on inputs from agencies. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

Trading Standards officers in Scotland say they need extra powers to help tackle what they describe as an “explosion” of illegal tobacco sales in high street shops.

The products include counterfeit cigarettes or those smuggled into the country to avoid tax.

Trading Standards link the UK-wide problem to organised crime.

The Scottish government said illicit tobacco is a serious issue and that it’s working with partners about how best to deal with it.

The BBC’s Katie Hunter joined Trading Standards officers on raids in Inverness.

Filmed and edited by Morgan Spence

Most video games treat money as a simple convenience. You defeat enemies, collect coins, and hand them to a shopkeeper.

Path of Exile 2, the action role-playing game from New Zealand studio Grinding Gear Games, does something far more unusual, and the result is an in-game economy that economists and business-minded players study almost like a live financial market, complete with reserve currencies, speculation, inflation and periodic resets. For anyone interested in how digital economies actually function, it is one of the most instructive examples in modern gaming.

Gold Exists, But It is Not The Currency That Matters

The first surprise is that Path of Exile 2 does have a gold currency, yet it plays almost no role in the real economy. Gold cannot be traded between players. It is earned from defeated enemies, chests and vendor sales, and spent only on personal transactions: buying from the game’s own merchants, resetting your character’s skill allocation, and covering the fees on the in-game trade market.

Because gold is bound to each account and never changes hands, it can never become the benchmark that prices everything else. That is a deliberate design decision. By keeping gold out of player-to-player trade, Grinding Gear Games prevents the lazy “sell everything for coins, buy the best item with coins” loop that flattens most game economies, and forces something more interesting to fill the role of real money.

The Real Currency Doubles as a Crafting Tool

What players actually trade with is a family of consumable items called orbs. This is the concept that reshapes the entire economy, because orbs are not only money. They are also the tools used to modify and upgrade equipment.

Each orb has a crafting function: one rerolls an item’s random properties, another adds a socket, another raises an item’s rarity. So every orb a player spends to improve their gear is, quite literally, currency being consumed. That creates a permanent tension that has no equivalent in an ordinary economy: every unit of money is also a productive asset, and spending it to craft means giving up the chance to trade it. That single mechanic is what gives the market its depth, because supply is constantly being burned rather than simply circulated.

It also means prices are quoted in orbs rather than any abstract coin. An item is not worth “500 gold.” It is worth a set number of a particular orb, and which orb sets the price depends on how valuable the item is.

A Market With No Central Authority

The most remarkable feature is that no one sets the prices. There is no official store fixing values and no exchange rate imposed by the developer. Everything is negotiated between players through third-party trade platforms where offers are listed and going rates are checked in real time.

The outcome behaves like any genuine free market. Speculators buy cheaply at the start of a season and sell high once demand builds. Bubbles inflate when a particular character build becomes popular, and everyone chases the same item. Prices collapse when a balance update rewrites the rules and yesterday’s essential item becomes worthless. For a fantasy game about slaying monsters, the volume of authentic economic behaviour on display is striking, and it is why the game attracts a following well beyond typical ARPG fans.

Divine Orbs and The Emergence of a Reserve Currency

Within that system, a clear hierarchy has formed, and it mirrors how real currencies stratify. Common orbs that make minor changes exist in vast quantities and hold little value. Scarcer orbs concentrate the purchasing power, and at the top sits the Divine Orb.

The Divine Orb’s function is to reroll the numeric values on an already-strong item, the final refinement on high-end gear. Because it is both scarce and universally wanted, it has effectively become the economy’s reserve currency, the nearest thing the game has to a gold standard. Expensive goods are priced directly in Divine Orbs, and the Divine’s exchange rate against lesser orbs such as the Exalted Orb rises and falls throughout a season, much as a strong national currency floats against weaker ones. Players track these rates on community pricing tools with the seriousness of a trading desk, and an entire support industry has grown up around the market, from valuation platforms to services where time-poor players can pick up PoE 2 currency instead of farming a stockpile across dozens of hours.

The Scheduled Reset That Keeps The Economy Healthy

The final piece is the league system. Every few months, Path of Exile 2 resets its economy entirely with a new temporary league. Existing characters and accumulated wealth are moved to a separate permanent realm, and the whole player base begins again from nothing at the same moment.

From a business perspective, this is a fascinating mechanism. A periodic, total reset would be unthinkable in the real world, but in a game it solves the problems that plague long-running digital economies. It prevents established players from hoarding an insurmountable lead, guarantees newcomers can enter on equal footing, and forces the market to rediscover its own prices each season rather than calcifying into a fixed hierarchy. It is planned obsolescence turned into a feature, and it is a large part of why the economy stays liquid and active year after year.

Why It Matters

Path of Exile 2’s economy is a case study in deliberate design. Gold is kept personal and untradeable so it cannot dominate; the real currency doubles as a crafting resource, so supply is constantly consumed; Divine Orbs rise to the role of a reserve standard, prices are set entirely by players, and the whole system resets on a schedule to stay fresh. The effect is an in-game market that behaves less like a shop counter and more like a functioning economy, with all the speculation, volatility and opportunity that implies.

Available for over a year

America’s national debt recently hit a new milestone of $40 trillion. It is estimated that interest payments on the national debt are now the second largest expense in the US government budget, trailing only social security. How was the US able to borrow so much and for so long? One answer, according Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, is the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.

In this episode, Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, explains how the US dollar came to enjoy this hegemonic status, what being the world’s reserve currency actually means in practice, and why he believes the dollar is now in decline.

(Photo: An Asian-American man passes by the passes by the National Debt Clock in New York City, US, 19 August, 2026. It is a digital display screen that shows the National Debt figures 39, 393, 882, 535, 284 against a background of dollar notes. Credit: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

Producer: Valerio Esposito, Aron Keller and Lucy Pawle

Executive producer: James Shield

Sound engineer: Travis Evans

Senior news editor: China Collins

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NEW YORK — Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn and Paralympic track and field champion Ezra Frech will compete on the new season of “Dancing with the Stars,” joining a 16-celebrity field announced Wednesday on “Good Morning America” and giving the long-running ABC series its first pairing of an Olympic gold medalist and a Paralympic gold medalist in the same season.

Glenn, 26, will dance with professional partner Pasha Pashkov. Frech, 21, is paired with Daniella Karagach. Season 35 is scheduled to open with a two-night premiere on Tuesday, Sept. 15, and Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC and Disney+. Episodes are set to stream the following day on Hulu.

The announcement puts two of the most decorated young American athletes of the current Olympic cycle onto a ballroom floor that has long favored gymnasts, skaters and other competitors with elite body control. It also creates a calendar problem for Glenn, who is still listed on the fall Grand Prix figure skating circuit, and a high-visibility platform for Frech as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In the official reveal package, Frech put the ambition in a single line: “I won the gold and hopefully the mirror ball.” Glenn, introduced as the skater who might take a triple Axel from the ice to the studio, answered, “Wait until you see my flare.”

A dream Glenn has talked about for years

Glenn is not arriving as a reluctant celebrity booking. Months before the cast reveal, she said the show had been on her list since she watched ice dancer Meryl Davis win Season 18 in 2014.

“I would love to do ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ Oh my God, it’s been a dream of mine since I saw Meryl do it in 2014,” she said on the “House of Maher” podcast hosted by rugby Olympian and former contestant Ilona Maher. She told Maher she could talk “all day” about the sets, music, makeup and costumes.

“I just have so much respect for it, and it’s so beautiful,” Glenn said. “I’ll listen to songs, and I’ll just see it in my head. Like ‘This would be perfect for that,’ and ‘This would be perfect for this.’”

After the Milano Cortina Games, she was asked about a post-Olympic bucket list. Her answer was immediate.

“‘Dancing with the Stars’ for sure,” she said. “I just love everything about it. The costuming, the set design.”

On the same podcast, she floated Alan Bersten or Ezra Sosa as possible partners and said she was open to a same-sex pairing. Maher told her Pashkov was “hilarious.” She landed with Pashkov.

What Glenn brings from the ice

Glenn, from Plano, Texas, won the last three U.S. figure skating titles and made her Olympic debut in 2026. She helped the United States win team-event gold and finished fifth in the women’s individual competition. She is one of the few women to land a triple Axel in competition and became the first U.S. woman to land three triple Axels at a single Olympic Games.

She is also the first openly LGBTQ+ U.S. women’s figure skating champion and has used that platform to talk about visibility, inclusion and mental health. A free-skate program to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” drew a personal note of praise from Madonna during the Olympic season.

Figure skaters have a strong record on the series. Kristi Yamaguchi won Season 6, Davis won Season 18 and Adam Rippon won the all-athletes Season 26. NBC Sports noted that Glenn could become the fourth skater to take the Mirrorball. It also noted a difference: the 10 previous figure skaters who competed on the show had finished their elite careers, even if some had not formally retired. The last skater in the ballroom was Johnny Weir in 2020.

Glenn has not said how the series will affect her skating calendar. In April she said she did not want to stop competing “as long as my body keeps going and is healthy.” In June the International Skating Union assigned her to Saatva Skate America and NHK Trophy in Japan, Grand Prix events scheduled for November. Recent “Dancing with the Stars” seasons have run into late November or early December for couples who reach the final four.

Frech’s path from the track to the ballroom

Frech is a Los Angeles native born May 11, 2005, with congenital limb differences. He was born without most of his left leg and without several fingers on his left hand. He received his first prosthetic as an infant and later had surgery to amputate the lower portion of the left leg. He competes in the T63 classification.

At the 2024 Paris Paralympics he won gold in the 100 meters and the high jump. He also competed at the Tokyo Paralympics as a teenager and is aiming at the 2028 Games in his hometown. He has competed for the USC Trojans and works as a model, motivational speaker and disability-rights advocate.

He is co-founder of Angel City Sports, which provides adaptive sports training, equipment and competition in Southern California and hosts the Angel City Games. In a 2024 interview with the Los Angeles Times he described that work as a responsibility.

“I feel I have the beautiful burden to share my story and inspire the next generation because this community means the world to me,” Frech said.

He is the first Paralympian on “Dancing with the Stars” since alpine skier Danelle Umstead in 2018 and only the second Summer Paralympian and Paralympic gold medalist after swimmer Victoria Arlen in 2017. Snowboarder Amy Purdy, a Paralympian, reached the Season 18 finale.

Karagach, his partner, was a Season 34 standout with Dylan Efron. Adaptive athletes have succeeded on the show when choreography is built around a prosthetic, a sit-ski background or a different center of gravity rather than treated as a limitation. Frech’s events — sprinting and jumping off a blade — reward timing, air awareness and explosive power, traits producers have sold for years as transferable to Latin and ballroom.

A crowded Season 35 field

Glenn and Frech are two names in a large cast that mixes athletes with actors, reality television personalities and working dancers.

The full lineup announced Wednesday includes Jenna Dewan with Val Chmerkovskiy, Julia Stiles with Ezra Sosa, Harry Shum Jr. with Jenna Johnson, Tatyana Ali with Jan Ravnik, chef Giada De Laurentiis with Alan Bersten, Hanson singer Taylor Hanson with Britt Stewart, “Bachelorette” alum Tyler Cameron with returning pro Sharna Burgess, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez with Witney Carson, Savannah Bananas player Jackson Olson with Emma Slater, “Summer House” star Ciara Miller with Brandon Armstrong, “Love Island” and “The Traitors” personality Maura Higgins with Mark Ballas, comedian Connor Wood with Rylee Arnold, “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” personality Conner Leavitt with new pro Adele Zaikman, and Sarah Jane Nader with newly promoted pro Hailey Bills in a same-sex pairing.

Dewan and Shum Jr. arrive with professional dance credits. Stiles starred in “Save the Last Dance.” Ali’s sitcom run overlapped with co-host Alfonso Ribeiro’s. That depth of performance experience is why athletes are rarely automatic favorites after Week 1. Judges score technique, timing and characterization, not medals.

Olympians have still been a constant on the series since Season 1. Speedskater Apolo Ohno, gymnasts Shawn Johnson and Laurie Hernandez, and several figure skaters won the trophy. Last season, gymnast Jordan Chiles reached the finale. Rugby player Ilona Maher became one of the show’s most-watched recent athletes. Glenn has already said she studied that lane.

What the booking signals

For ABC and Disney, the pairing is a straightforward ratings play: a freshly minted Olympic champion and a Paralympic star from Los Angeles, announced 13 days before premiere week. For U.S. Figure Skating and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, it is another prime-time window in a non-Games year.

For Glenn, it is the entertainment project she has described in public for months, slotted against a Grand Prix season she has not abandoned. For Frech, it is a national stage between Paris and Los Angeles, consistent with the advocacy he has done since childhood.

Neither has to win for the booking to matter. The Mirrorball is decided by judges’ scores and viewer votes. History says skaters can go far if they translate edge work into footwork. History also says a 16-couple season is long, unforgiving and often kinder to contestants who can act a story than to contestants who can only jump.

The first live scores arrive Sept. 15. Glenn will be judged on whether ice quality becomes ballroom quality. Frech will be judged on whether a sprinter and high jumper can make a prosthetic and a partner look like one instrument. Both already said, in different words, that they came for more than a cameo.