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It’s a good day to be the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. This morning, the company unveiled its latest innovation in the weight-loss drug wars: the KwikPen. Per a press release , the KwikPen contains a months-worth of Zepbound, Eli Lillys GLP-1 designed to combat obesity, and it’s designed to make taking the medicine more convenient. Alongside the announcement of this new innovation, Eli Lilly’s main competitor, Novo Nordisk, dropped the news that its experimental drug, CagriSema, perfomed worse for patient weight loss in a head-to-head trial against Eli Lilly’s proprietary drug, tirzepatide. A November study from the health policy non-profit KFF found that about one in eight American adults were using a GLP-1 for weight loss or to treat a chronic condition. And as the weight-loss drug market soars, its two most dominant playersEli Lilly and competitor Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempicare battling it out to offer the most convenient, most effective, and least expensive iterations of their respective drugs. Right now, Eli Lilly appears to be the leader in the GLP-1 race amidst multiple difficult headwinds for Novo Nordisk. As of this writing, Novo Nordisk stock is down nearly 16% since market open, while Eli Lilly is up by nearly 5%. Weight-loss drugs take new, more convenient forms Over the past several months, both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have invested in novel drug formats to retain customers and reach new audiences. Back in December, Novo Nordisk received FDA approval for a first-of-its-kind, once-daily pill for weight loss. The pill, which is an oral form of Novo Nordisks GLP-1 Wegovy, offers a less invasive way for users to administer weight-loss drugs, which are typically delivered via an injector. Eli Lilly is currently in the testing phases of its own oral GLP-1, but it does not yet offer anything similar to the Wegovy pill. In the meantime, the KwikPen will presumably make taking Zepbound a bit easier for Eli Lillys customer base. Currently, patients use a separate autoinjector for each of their weekly doses of the drug. Each KwikPen, by contrast, comes pre-loaded with four doses, meaning one pen lasts for a full month. Its available in six strengths, ranging from 2.5 mg to 15 mg. For cash-paying patients, the KwikPen will be available via Eli Lillys direct-to-consumer website, LillyDirect. Eli Lilly pulls ahead Eli Lilly may be lagging behind Novo Nordisk in GLP-1 pill design, but its notched several more significant wins against its top competitor in recent months. Novo Nordisk has been fighting an uphill battle as the weight-loss drug market becomes more crowded, including by the proliferation of compounded (aka copycat) versions of Ozempic and Mounjaro made by smaller manufacturers. In its fourth quarter report, released in early February, Novo Nordisk announced strong revenue of $12.34 billion, but warned that its sales and profit growth would decline by between 5% and 13% in 2026 amidst growing competition and lower U.S. prices. These same struggles have caused the companys stock price to plummet by more than 55% year-over-year. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly has been buoyed by the major success of Zepbound since its 2023 debut, as customers opt for the medicine given its greater effectiveness for weight loss than Ozempic. In its February fourth quarter report, Eli Lilly boasted revenue of $19.3 billion and guided for its sales to grow by a whopping 25% in 2026. The companys stock has risen by more than 25% year-over-year. Now, Novo Nordisk is taking yet another blow, as a Feburary 23 report showed that its new experimental drug CagriSema could not demonstrate non-inferiority against Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide. Based on Novo Nordisk’s report, “if all people adhered to treatment, people treated with CagriSema 2.4 mg/2.4 mg achieved a weight loss of 23.0% after 84 weeks compared to 25.5% with tirzepatide 15 mg.” As GLP-1 usage continues to become more mainstream, pharmaceutical giants will be fighting an increasingly competitive battle for market share.
Category:
E-Commerce
Boom Supersonic wants to build the worlds first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically fasterup to twice the speed of todays passenger jetswhile also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed to sustain supersonic flight. Though the company has not yet debuted its revolutionary jet, last year it identified a new and potentially lucrative application for its novel technology: generating electricity for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom. Many of these data centers want the kind of flexible, around-the-clock energy associated with combined-cycle natural gas turbines. These heavy-duty machines burn gas to spin turbines and generate electricity, then capture the associated heat and use it to spin the turbines some more. As far as fossil fuel generation goes, they are among the most efficient options for dispatchable baseload power. But with demand for these turbines surging and supply increasingly tight, developers are turning to creative alternatives. The upshot of all this creativity is clear: Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gasand the climate consequences that come with it. Boom Supersonic inked a $1.25 billion agreement with a developer called Crusoe, which is building a suite of data centers for the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI. The turbine company agreed to provide Crusoe with 29 jet-engine gas turbines that the developer could position at data centers across the U.S. The deal is just one example of developers and tech companies straining to find power sources for the data centers sprouting up nationwide. Metas data center in El Paso, Texas, will draw fuel from more than 800 different mobile mini-turbines. Meanwhile, the construction equipment company Caterpillar has supplied gas engines to a data center in West Virginia. And the developer Crusoe used aeroderivative turbines based on airplane models for its massive Stargate data-center campus in Abilene, Texas, where power demand is a whopping 1.2 gigawatts. Its not just the U.S. New proposed natural gas capacity has surged worldwide over the past year. The energy analysis firm Global Energy Monitor reports that projects totaling more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power are now in development worldwidea roughly 31 percent jump in just the last year. The United States leads the pack, accounting for about a quarter of that pipeline. More than a third of the new U.S. capacity will power data centers. The analysis also notes that two-thirds of gas project developers in the U.S. have yet to identify who will manufacture their natural gas turbines. This rush to build out natural gas generation will have serious consequences for the climate. Early boosters of the data center boom suggested that new AI facilities would draw power from renewable sources such as solar and wind farms. While that has happened in some cases, developers are also rapidly locking in years of additional fossil fuel usage. An analysis from researchers at Cornell University found that the build-out could add as much as 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of around 10 million passenger cars. This is a huge proposed build-out, said Cara Fogler, deputy director of research, strategy, and analysis at the nonprofit Sierra Club, which has been tracking gas plant expansions by utilities. Existing coal thats not coming offline and planned gas thats trying to come online are potentially boxing out clean energy. As Silicon Valleys AI boom drives demand for ever more computing power, data center developers have struggled to keep up, largely because securing the massive amounts of electricity needed to run these facilities has become so difficult. The rush has led to long wait times to secure power from traditional utilities. As a result, developers and tech companies are increasingly taking matters into their own hands by generating power on-site. According to an analysis by Cleanview, a data firm tracking the energy transition, at least 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 gigawattsequivalent to that of roughly 27 Hoover Damsare using this behind-the-meter approach, as its known in industry parlance. The chief executive of Bloom Energy, a startup that builds behind-the-meter fuel cells for data centers, said in a recent call with investors that the startups order backlog has more than doubled over the past year. On-site power has moved from being a decision of last resort to a vital business necessity, said company executive K.R. Sridhar. He noted that while most of the companys previous business was in states like California with high electricity costs, now states where we are growing fastest have robust natural gas infrastructure and favorable regulatory and policy frameworks for on-site power generation. One of those states is Texas, which is the epicenter of the build-out so far. Unconventional gas power will anchor campuses like that of Titus Low Carbon Ventures, which is building half a dozen data center parks across the Lone Star State. In September, the company signed a deal with power developer Gruppo AB to source Jennbacher gas generating engines, each of which provides just a few megawatts of power. The company will plug in hundreds of these boxy generators to provide baseload power alongside solar and wind. We couldve elected to go with gas turbines, said Jeff Ferguson, the president of Titus, in an interview with Grist. Instead of sourcing traditional gas turbines, he opted to buy reciprocating engines, which are smaller gas-powered generators that are similar to passenger car engines. We think that reciprocating engines are a better solution for data centers, he said, adding that the difference is in the ability to manage transient loads, or rapid fluctuations in power demand that are very common at the facilities. Not only is it unlikely that 200 generators will ever go offline all at once, but the engines are also much faster to start up and stop than turbinesthey can come online in around a minute, as opposed to an hour for a traditional power plant. Ferguson likened it to the difference between accelerating in a Corvette and a jet plane. But experts say these substitute gas sources are even worse for the climate than traditional power plants, which use more efficient combined-cycle turbines that employ both gas and steam. The worst offenders are not turbines at all but rather internal-combustion engines like the ones in most automobiles. Internal combustion [engines] have better ramp up/down time[s] but are less efficient when compared to a gas turbine, said Jenny Martos, a researcher who runs the gas plant tracker for Global Energy Monitor. All gas-power technologies produce emissions, but generally engines produce more emissions than the others. Texas has almost 58 gigawatts of natural gas power in various stages of planning and construction, according to the latest estimates from Global Energy Monitor. Thats more than the next four states combined, and more than every country on Earth except for China. Nearly half of the power plants under construction in Texas will provide power exclusively to data centers, without connecting to regional energy grids. hese projects span the state, from OpenAIs Stargate campus in central Abilene to Metas data center in El Paso, where the company has contracted with a Houston-based microgrid developer to set up 813 modular generators. The projects are also popping up in rural areas of the country with few other economic development prospects. A developer called BorderPlex is proposing a $165 billion data center campus called Project Jupiter in southern New Mexico, powered by two microgrids that operate on simple-cycle gas turbines, which just burn gas to generate energy without capturing and deploying their waste heat. The projects 2,880 megawatts of generation are more than the entire generation capacity of central New Mexicos main utility. Ive never seen something quite this big before, dollar-wise, scale-wise, said Colin Cox, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which is opposing the project. To call this a microgrid defies common sense. Remaining behind the meter allows the project to avoid seeking approval from regulators who would enforce compliance with the states climate lawseven though Project Jupiters carbon emissions alone could outweigh the actions that New Mexico has taken to lower emissions over the past several years. The projects developer has promised jobs and tax revenue to rural Doa Ana County, but the future is murky. It remains unclear whether demand for artificial intelligence products will keep up with the historic capital expenditures being made by companies like OpenAI. If the bubble were to pop, the state would be left with a gas turbine that didnt serve any usersan asset that the state would not need and that, under its climate laws, it would not be allowed to use. Theyll just be stranded assets, said Cox. You cant do anything with a gas turbine besides run gas through it to make it spin.
Category:
E-Commerce
If Domino’s earnings on Monday prove anything, it’s that people are still eating pizzaeven if fast food sales, in general, are slumping. “There seems to be a narrative out there that pizza is a challenged and declining category,” Domino’s CEO Russell Weiner said in an earnings call on Monday. “That is just not true, looking back to 2019, you’ll find a category that has generally grown approximately 1-2% each year, including last year 2025.” Weiner did, however, acknowledge the market was “mature.” The pizza giant reported strong fourth-quarter earnings results, with revenue coming in at 1.54 billion, beating estimates of $1.52 billion. It also reported a 15% quarterly dividend hike, but missed earnings estimates, posting adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $5.35 for the fourth quarter, compared to estimates of $5.39. The Ann-Arbor based company also said its New York Style Pizza and Parmesan Stuffed Crust were massive hits in 2025. Shares of the Domino’s Pizza Inc. (DPZ) rose 6.4% in morning trading on the news, and were up 2.2% by early midday trading at the time of this writing. “In 2025 we demonstrated that when we execute our Hungry for MORE strategy it delivers MORE sales, MORE stores, and MORE profits,” Weiner also said in an earnings release. Domino’s same-store sales in the U.S. grew 3.7% for the fourth quartera 3% growth for fiscal 2025. In the earnings call, Domino’s chief financial officer Sandeep Reddy also mentioned how the company plans to capitalize on its competitor’s recent store closings. “We opened 25 [stores] with a massive gap against all of our competitors including the bigger national competitors,” Reddy said. “Guess what’s happened since that time? One of our national competitors has announced that they’ve had a negative same store sales in the mid single digits. And they also talked about closing a number of stores up to 250 stores in the first half of the year.” (As Fast Company previously reported, Pizza Hut has said it is closing 250 restaurants this year.) “All this plays into our strategy to continue to gain market share because we will go into that one to 2% growth in the industry with less doors outside, which we can actually take share from effectively and grab those sales,” Reddy added. Meanwhile, good news for fast food lovers: Domino’s is also expanding quite a bit. The chain reported it opened over 700 stores globally and in the U.S. last year. Founded in 1960, Dominos Pizza is the largest pizza company in the world, with more than 22,100 stores in over 90 markets across the globe. It posted global retail sales of over $20.1 billion in 2025. The company had a market capitalization of $13.36 billion at the time of this writing.
Category:
E-Commerce
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