Good morning, Quartz readers!
Hereâs what you need to know
Shell is quadrupling its EV charging network. The British oil giant is making the change while getting rid of 1,000 of its 46,000 global retail locations.
Microsoftâs new AI division has a new leader. Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of the startups Inflection AI and DeepMind, was selected to become CEO.
Redditâs IPO goal is measly compared to other social media platforms. The company is worth a lot less than when household names like Facebook and Twitter went public.
Nordstrom is considering going private (again). The retailerâs stock spiked yesterday on the news, which would be its latest attempt to leave the public market since 2018.
Very big lines for very big GPUs
Nvidiaâs âvery big GPUâ Blackwell is here, and itâs big in a lot of ways: speed, efficiency, and price. Naturally, the worldâs top tech companies with the deepest pockets are already lining up to get their hands on it.
Nvidiaâs âWoodstock of AIâ event continues tomorrow, and hereâs what weâll be watching. (Check out our full event rundown here, everything you need to know about Blackwell here, and how Wall Street responded to the new chip).
Wednesday, March 20
â ď¸ Cyber-war. David Reber, chief security officer at Nvidia, will host a panel on what cybersecurity leaders at companies and organizations should know about mitigating risks of generative AI.
đŤđˇ M-ai-s oui. Mistral AIâs chief executive Arthur Mensch will deliver a talk on what the French OpenAI rival has learned while training its generative AI models, Mistral and Mixtral, along with what itâs expecting for the rest of the year.
𫥠Now you see it. Graham Brookie, vice president of the Atlantic Council, will host a fireside chat with Nvidia deputy general counsel Iain Cunningham on the challenges of AI-generated deepfakes and disinformation.
Tail lights once caused a riot
If you think thatâs the only fascinating fact about the lights on the back of our cars, you are truly, flagrantly, wildly mistaken.
The Quartz Obsession podcast is back for season 7, and we kicked off with a surprisingly spicy episode about tail lights. Host Gabriela Riccardi talks to Jason Torchinsky â co-founder of The Autopian â who drives us all down the bumpy road of tail light innovation and introduces us to the beautiful philosophy that all those signals are really a way that human beings care for each other.
Oh, and also thereâs some dramatized noir crime fiction. Youâre going to want to listen.
đ§ Check it out now on Spotify | Apple | Google | Pandora
đ Prefer reading your podcasts? Weâve got the transcript right here.
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đś Starbucksâ strategy on pup cups and free water isnât budging
Surprising discoveries
The Feds have hired a company to figure out if itâs possible to make a railroad on the Moon. One ticket for the Lunar Landscape Express, please.
Starbucks may not be done with its pup cups, but it is done with the metaverse. Caffeine just doesnât hit the same when you canât actually drink it.
Unilever lost its Ben & Jerryâs sweet tooth... The consumer goods conglomerate is getting out of the ice cream biz.
âŚand Subway lost its taste for Coca-Cola. Itâs Pepsi from here on out (at least the next 10 years).
A blueberry the size of a ping pong ball was harvested in Australia. We wouldnât recommend substituting the worldâs biggest fruit of its kind in any game.
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Our best wishes for a productive day. Send any news, comments, leftover Unilever Ben & Jerryâs, and leftover Subway Coca-Cola to talk@qz.com. Todayâs Daily Brief was brought to you by Susan Howson and Morgan Haefner.