Know what the market loves better than AI? Nuclear-powered AI.

So-called merchant power providers — power producers who create energy and sell it at wholesale market prices at rather than at regulated utility rates — are having a heck of a year in the stock market.

Faring especially well are such power-providers with nuclear assets that appear well positioned to cut deals with the giant tech firms who are rushing to building out power-hungry data centers. We’ve previously spotlighted the run-up in share prices of Constellation Energy and NRG.

But check out the surge in Vistra Corp. It’s now the second biggest riser in the S&P 500 this year, with its gain of roughly 150% putting it right behind market darling SuperMicro Computer.

It got a sharp boost this month even after missing the bottomline on quarterly earnings, as it talked about about the emerging opportunity related to deals that would connect some of its newly purchased nuclear power plants with demand emanating from the AI frenzy.

“We actually have partners, potential partners coming to us directly,” Vistra CEO James A. Burke told analysts. “And speed is really very important to them.”

OpenAI announced that it’ll license data from Reddit, and investors upvoted Reddit’s shares on the news. (Fun fact: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman owns nearly 9% of Reddit’s stock.)

For Reddit, the deal’s an expansion of the 19-year-old social company’s efforts to make its first-ever profit. Though advertising makes up the bulk of its revenue, Reddit’s making moves to expand its data-licensing biz. It already has a partnership with Alphabet that’s worth an estimated $60M/year. Plus, Reddit said the OpenAI deal will let it build some AI-powered features. 

For OpenAI, Reddit’s trove of user conversations could train ChatGPT to sound more human… or just make it really good at identifying pics of bread stapled to trees.

Twitter, or what Elon Musk calls X, now uses the URL X.com. A year and a half after he took the social media company private, its rebrand as X is complete. For what it’s worth, Twitter.com still takes you to what many — most? — of us still call Twitter.

This is not Musk’s first company called X. In fact, he started X.com, an online bank that would become PayPal, back in 1999. Musk bought that url back from PayPal in 2017. In other words, the Gen Xer has long thought calling something “X” was cool.

Anyway, in honor of the URL rebranding, we thought it would be fun to look at where X.com used to bring you at various points in its history, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.