🌎 Tech to the trenches

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Here’s what you need to know

Coming this week: Earnings from FedEx, Micron, Walgreens, and Nike; the PCE inflation gauge; and congressional testimony from Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Lowered expectations. A Federal Reserve governor has argued for an interest rate cut — “as early as July” — because he doesn’t expect a tariff-induced inflation spike to stick around.

Trumped by the fine print. A Senate official has ruled that the president’s “big, beautiful” tax bill can’t defund regulators such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Tesla’s power play. The company just inked a $550-plus-million deal with China to build its first grid-scale battery plant (in Shanghai), continuing the car company’s lofty ambitions.

Mission: Implausible? Elon Musk’s Starship rocket had another huge failure — exploding before it was even launched — in the latest setback for SpaceX’s Mars-bound ambitions.

Big Blue skies ahead. IBM got a price target hike, with analysts saying the company is in the “early stages of a renaissance of growth” thanks to AI, quantum, and the cloud.

Deus ex machina. At a conference on AI’s future, Pope Leo XIV said there should be serious reflection on “the inherently ethical dimension of AI, as well as its responsible governance.”

Soldiers of Fortune 500

Once allergic to military work, Silicon Valley is now deploying itself to the front lines. Executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir will be sworn in this week as Army Reserve officers — uniforms and all — while their companies ink billion-dollar defense contracts, build AI combat goggles, and help shape Pentagon strategy.

Meta is collaborating with Anduril to produce augmented reality headsets for soldiers. OpenAI just landed a $200 million military contract. And with President Donald Trump pushing a proposed $1 trillion defense budget, the rush to weaponize consumer AI is no longer theoretical — it’s the business model.

The shift marks a stunning reversal.

Just a few years ago, employees at Google walked out over Pentagon partnerships. Now, the economic reality of building advanced AI — which costs hundreds of millions to train and operate — is making military dollars not just attractive, but necessary. Alongside the government money, though, come eroded safety guardrails and thinning oversight: OpenAI and Google have quietly walked back restrictions on military uses, and the Pentagon has slashed its independent weapons testing staff by more than 50%.

It’s a historic full-circle moment: The internet began as a Pentagon project, and now the platforms it birthed are being reabsorbed into the war machine. Now, the next generation of warfare may be shaped by the same companies that shaped your newsfeed. Quartz’s Jackie Snow has more on the tech bros going tactical.

O’Pharma drama

Less than 25,000 pounds of freeze-dried hormones have tipped America’s trade balance with Ireland into eyebrow-raising territory.

Thanks to surging demand for weight-loss drugs such as Mounjaro and Zepbound, those powdered peptides carry a combined price tag of $36 billion. That’s enough to make Ireland the U.S.’s second-largest goods trade deficit partner, trailing only China. And that number has the White House seeing red (and green).

The drugs, mostly manufactured in Ireland and bound for Eli Lilly’s Indiana headquarters, have been flooding in as companies scramble to stockpile ingredients ahead of Trump’s ever-looming tariffs. The kicker? That stockpiling helped inflate the very trade deficit Trump is now using to justify a fresh round of tariffs under a revived Section 232 investigation.

It’s a pharmaceutical ouroboros: Trump’s protectionist policies set off a buying spree that widened the deficit he now blames on… everyone else.

The Trump administration’s stated goal is to bring drug manufacturing back to U.S. soil — but building advanced pharma capacity isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Ireland has spent decades becoming the world’s pill factory, with tax incentives, talent, and tight regulatory control that make it nearly irreplaceable in the short term.

The result? A bizarre geopolitical collision between obesity, supply chains, and freeze-dried GLP-1 analogs — all now central to one of the most absurd trade spats in modern memory. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on the geopolitical side effects of weight-loss drugs.

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