Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Thursday, July 16th, and this is your FT News Briefing.
Energy companies are raking in cash because of the data center boom, and China's growth is at its lowest in decades.
Plus, the State Department looks a lot different under U.S.
President Donald Trump.
The department is now sort of a shell of itself,
where career foreign service officers describe kind of this culture of fear and silence.
I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
Energy companies that are going public are pulling in a lot of money,
more than at any other point since the start of the century.
Flotations by energy companies raised a little more than $12.5 billion in the first half of this year.
That's according to the data firm DealLogic, and it's the highest level for a half year since the dot-com boom.
Access to energy has emerged as a key bottleneck in bringing data centers online,
and that's what's causing this surge in fundraising.
As we told you a little while back, investors who have been betting on chip makers
now appear to be switching to companies that might be able to power these data centers.
Some of the winners include manufacturers of electrical distribution equipment.
Other companies are using gas, geothermal, and even nuclear power.
China's quarterly growth rate has fallen to one of its lowest levels in decades.
That's the result of weak consumer demand and falling investment.