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On Wednesday morning, the cancer diagnostics biotech firm Caris Life Sciences rang Nasdaq’s opening bell in New York, marking the company’s awaited initial public offering. The diagnostics company’s IPO follows the successful debut of fintech companies like Chime Financial and Circle Internet Group, and will test whether investors are ready to embrace biotech companies despite declines in the sector for the last six months. Here’s what to know about the listing. What is Caris Life Sciences? Founded in 2008 by David Dean Halbert, the healthcare company utilizes next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for precision medicine. Through molecular analysis, Caris specializes in cancer diagnosis and treatment. According to a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Irving, Texas-based company currently has over 1,700 employees and over 100 biopharmaceutical partners. The company incurred net losses of $281.9 million and $341.4 million in 2024 and 2023, respectively, on revenue of $412.3 million and $306.1 million. It is expecting additional losses in the future. When is Caris Life Sciences’s IPO? Caris Life Sciences shares are expected to begin trading on Wednesday, June 18, with the offering expected to run through June 20. What is Caris Life Sciences’s stock ticker? Caris Life Sciences will trade its stock under the ticker CAI. What is the IPO price for CAI? CAI shares were priced at $21, above their previously planned range. The IPO price was planned between the $19 and $20 range, up from the previous $16 and $18 planned price. The current pricing would value Caris Life Sciences at around $5.9 billion. What exchange will the stock trade in? CAI will trade its shared on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. How many shares are available? Caris Life Sciences’s IPO will offer 23,529,412 shares. Founder and CEO Halbert is also set to retain 41.7% of ownership following the IPO.
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E-Commerce
The world’s three best-selling makers of bitcoin mining machinesall of Chinese originare setting up manufacturing footholds in the United States as President Donald Trump’s tariff war reshapes the cryptocurrency supply chain. Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT build over 90% of global mining rigsessentially computers dedicated to number-crunching that produces bitcoin. Establishing U.S. bases could shield them from tariffs but risks stoking security concerns the U.S. has with China in areas as varied as chip making and energy security. “The U.S.-China trade war is triggering structural, not superficial, changes in bitcoin’s supply chains,” said Guang Yang, chief technology officer at crypto tech provider Conflux Network. Moreover, for U.S. firms, “this goes beyond tariffs. It’s a strategic pivot toward ‘politically acceptable’ hardware sources,” Yang said. Bitmain, the biggest of the three by sales, started U.S. production of mining rigs in December in a “strategic move” following Trump’s presidential electoral win a month earlier. Canaan started trial production in the U.S. with the aim of avoiding tariffs after Trump on April 2 announced his so-called Liberation Day levies, senior executive Leo Wang told Reuters. The initiative is exploratory as the volatile tariff situation precludes heavy investment, he said. Third-ranked MicroBT in a statement said it is “actively implementing a localisation strategy in the U.S.” to “avoid the impact of tariffs”. The trio dominate a sector analysts estimated to be worth $12 billion by 2028. It is the upstream of a business chain that extends through the energy-intensive process of mining bitcoin, the supporting IT infrastructure and the trading platforms. U.S. rival Auradinebacked by top bitcoin miner by market value, MARA Holdingshas been lobbying to restrict Chinese supplies to stimulate competition in hardware. “While over 30% of global bitcoin mining occurs in North America, more than 90% of mining hardware originates from China representing a major imbalance of geographic demand and supply,” said Auradine’s chief strategy officer, Sanjay Gupta. Consultancy Frost & Sullivan estimated the top three held 95.4% of the hardware market in terms of computing power sold as of December 2023. When it comes to Chinese mining rigs, “hundreds of thousands of them connected to the U.S. electrical grid” is a security risk, Gupta said. Canaan’s Wang said mining rigs do not threaten security because “they are useless if not applied to bitcoin mining”. Still, manufacturers could suffer “collateral damage” from U.S. restrictions on high-tech sales to Chinese firms, he said. Underscoring the risk, Bitmain’s AI affiliate, Sophgo, has been blacklisted by the U.S. government on security grounds. Bitmain did not reply to a request for comment. FIRST-MOVER China once dominated the entire bitcoin value chainfrom rig-making through mining to tradinguntil its government banned cryptocurrency activity on the Chinese mainland in 2021 citing risk to financial stability. Miners, traders and exchanges moved abroad. Shielded by their role as technology manufacturers, however, Bitmain, Canaan and MicroBT continued to dominate in hardware. They fended off Western rivals partly due to first-mover advantage in developing high-performance chips tailor-made for mining. Canaan has since moved its headquarters to Singapore from Chinathough it still has Chinese operationsand set up a pilot production line in the U.S., a market that contributed 40% of revenue last year. “The rationale is to try to reduce the cost for both us and our customers,” said Wang, Canaan’s vice president of corporate development and capital markets. The prospect of tariffs means “we have to explore all alternatives”. The U.S. this year imposed a 10% baseline tariff on imports from many countries plus an extra 20% on imports from China. It has also said it could increase tariffs for Southeast Asian countries where Chinese rig makers have set up assembly plants. CHOKE POINT Trump has promised to be the “crypto president” who popularises cryptocurriencies’ mainstream use in the United States. Son Eric Trump together with energy and technology firm Hut 8 launched miner American Bitcoin with the goal of building a strategic bitcoin reserve. The president’s crypto-friendly policies, however, can only highlight China’s outsized role in bitcoin infrastructure, potentially putting rig makers in the crosshairs. China’s hardware dominance “creates a choke point for U.S. miners,” said John Deaton, a U.S. crypto-law attorney. “If China restricts exports or manipulates supply . . . it could disrupt bitcoin’s network stability and affect U.S. users and investors,” Deaton said. The biggest miners by market valueMARA, Core Scientific, CleanSpark, and Riot Platformsare all U.S.-based, so over-reliance on hardware of Chinese origin “is potentially problematic”, said Ryan M. Yonk, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research. Chinese rig makers might be setting up shop in the U.S. but in the short term, U.S. miners will still buy rigs from China and be stung by higher import costs, said Kadan Stadlemann, chief technology officer at crypto platform Komodo. “But this isn’t about hurting the industry. It’s about forcing a long-overdue shift,” he said. Samuel Shen and Vidya Ranganathan, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Malaysia is expected to add 68 gigawatts of gas-fired power by 2030 to address growing electricity consumption driven by demand from data centres, an industry official said. The country is expected to see the fastest surge in data centre power demand in southeast Asia, with its share of electricity consumed by data centres in the region to triple to 21% by 2027 from 7% in 2022, a joint report in May by Bain & Co with others including Google and Temasek showed. Rising gas demand could see Malaysia, the fifth-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), start importing the super-chilled fuel in four to five years, the head of state energy firm Petronas told the Energy Asia conference this week. Megat Jalaluddin, CEO of state utility Tenaga Nasional Berhad, said he expects Malaysia to add 68 gigawatts of gas-fired power by building new plants and extending the life of existing ones as it looks to cut dependence on coal. That represents a 4054% increase from the current 15 GW of gas-fired capacity. Total power consumption in Malaysia is on track to increase 30% by 2030, and Malaysia has already invited industry proposals for supply, he said. “We want to phase out coal responsibly. Then the next best option that can basically take the place of coal is gas,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of the Energy Asia event. Malaysia could also add as much as 10 GW of renewable capacity by 2030, more than doubling the 9 GW currently, as data centres push for access to cleaner sources of power, he said. In the last two years, Malaysia has turned to its coal-fired power plants to address surging demand which grew at the fastest pace in 14 years in 2024, according to energy think-tank Ember. Data centres are expected to require 19.5 GW of power generation capacity by 2035, accounting for 52% of Peninsular Malaysia’s electricity use, from about 2% now, Deputy Prime Minister Fadillah Yusof told Reuters. Technology giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet’s Google and ByteDance have announced billions of dollars in investments in Malaysia since the beginning of last year, powering an infrastructure boom. Malaysia’s southern state of Johor has emerged as Southeast Asia’s hottest data centre hub due to its proximity to Singapore, relatively cheap land and power and faster approvals, real estate consultancy Knight Frank said in a report. Sudarshan Varadhan and Ashley Tang, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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