Two American tycoons are betting big on a casino revival Caesars and MGM may soon be under new ownership June 4th 2026 Chance plays a big role in Las Vegas. But two events in the space of a week seemed to be more than just coincidence. On May 28th Tilman Fertitta, a hospitality mogul, announced that he had agreed to buy Caesars Entertainment, a chain of more than 50 casino resorts, in a deal valuing the company at $17.6bn. Four days later Barry Diller, the high-rolling owner of People Inc, a publishing business, upped the ante with a bid for MGM Resorts that valued the casino operator at over $18bn. It may seem a surprising time to be betting on the gambling industry, which has been on a painful losing streak. Online gaming has been disrupted by the arrival of “prediction markets” run by firms like Kalshi and Polymarket,
which allow punters to bet on anything from sports results to American invasion plans. Meanwhile, bricks-and-mortar casinos have struggled as consumers have grown anxious about the state of the economy. Las Vegas, where MGM and Caesars operate glittering casino-resorts along the Strip, received 10% fewer visitors last year than at its pre-pandemic peak. Having been dealt such a bad hand, many investors have folded. In the five years up until last week, MGM’s share price had fallen by about 15%; that of Caesars, which is more leveraged and less diversified, had dropped by nearly three-quarters. Messrs Fertitta and Diller, however, seem to have concluded that the market has now reached the bottom. Are they right? Many in Vegas—admittedly the world capital of optimism bias—believe that the industry is about to turn a corner. The city is “hitting an inflection point” in visitors’ perception of the value it offers, says Barry Jonas of Truist, a bank which recently upgraded MGM from “hold” to “buy”. Some long-term trends in consumer behaviour also look to be playing out in casino operators’ favour. One is the growing demand for live entertainment, something on which casino-resorts have placed big wagers in recent years. In the early 1990s gambling accounted for nearly 60% of the revenue of resorts on the Las Vegas Strip. Today it accounts for just over a third, as visitors to Sin City splash more of their cash on concerts, sports and various other diversions. And although online betting has introduced new competition, it also presents opportunities for the gambling industry. MGM and Caesars both have betting apps which they use to acquire new customers, with the ultimate aim of luring them to spend an expensive vacation at one of their resorts. Online gambling is also helping to popularise what was once considered a taboo pursuit. As many as one in six Americans placed a bet on a sporting event last year, twice as many as two years earlier, according to polling by Ipsos. What will MGM and Caesars’ new owners do with the properties? Following Mr Diller’s offer of $48.30 a share for MGM, the price initially rose to over $51, suggesting the market believed he would have to offer more to clinch a deal (though the price has since fallen back). If he does
succeed in taking control, he may keep things at MGM much as they are: Mr Diller’s firm already owns more than a quarter of the casino operator and he has a seat on its board. The media baron, who is busy restructuring the rest of his empire, is said to get along with MGM’s current management. Mr Fertitta’s acquisition of Caesars, which seems like a surer bet to go ahead, may also bring more continuity than change. The buyers have already said that Caesars’ boss will stay in place. But there may be benefits from tying up with Mr Fertitta’s other properties, encompassing the Golden Nugget chain of casinos and his string of hotels and restaurants, including Morton’s steakhouses and the Bubba Gump Shrimp chain. Visitors to Caesar’s Palace might soon be able to celebrate their wins with a fillet steak —or drown their sorrows in a bowl of gumbo. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/04/two-american-tycoons-are-betting- big-on-a-casino-revival
Nvidia wants to supercharge your laptop Jensen Huang is bringing his chipmaker’s AI act to the PC June 4th 2026 For the past few years, whenever Jensen Huang, boss of Nvidia, has taken the stage, he has followed a familiar script, unveiling ever more powerful semiconductors, software and systems for running artificial intelligence in data centres. No wonder: the AI boom has sparked a spending spree on giant server farms, and much of that money has flowed straight to the giant chipmaker. In the past four years, annual revenue at Nvidia’s data-centre division has grown from $11bn to $194bn, pushing the firm’s market value past $5trn, more than any other company ever. But on June 1st at Computex, an annual tech-industry jamboree in Taiwan, Mr Huang did more than refresh Nvidia’s data-centre wares. He unveiled RTX Spark, a chip to be launched later this year for personal computers
(PCs), built in collaboration with Microsoft, whose software they will run. Nvidia is taking on Intel and AMD, the chipmakers that dominate the segment—and is betting that the next phase of AI will play out not just in data centres, but on devices at the edge. In recent years PCs have been one of tech’s backwaters. Evercore, an investment bank, estimates that in the past decade unit sales of chips for desktop computers have fallen by 4% a year, while those for laptops have been roughly flat. What is drawing fresh interest is the rise of “agentic” AI, software that can carry out complex tasks on its own. As it spreads, the number of tokens (the chunks of text processed by AI models) is expected to rise sharply. Model-makers and cloud providers are already straining to keep up. Offloading some work from the cloud to local devices could be cheaper and more efficient. Nvidia argues that this will require a different sort of machine. PCs rely on central processing units (CPUs), general-purpose chips that handle everything from word processing to web browsing. CPUs may co-ordinate the work of AI agents, but the models those agents rely on need another type of chip: graphics-processing units, or GPUs, the market for which Nvidia dominates. With RTX Spark, Nvidia is combining the two types into a “superchip”. The upshot, according to Mr Huang, is that the PC is being reinvented for the first time in 40 years, replacing the old model, in which humans did most of the clicking and typing, with one in which AI agents do much of the work. Success is far from assured. Nvidia is not a stranger to PCs; before the AI boom, it made a big chunk of its money selling GPUs for gaming machines. But in CPUs for PCs, it is a newcomer. Intel and AMD together supply more than four-fifths of all CPUs sold for PCs. As for software, Nvidia says it has worked with Microsoft for over two and a half years on the new chip. Even so, some analysts remain sceptical that developers and users will quickly embrace a new class of AI-first PC. Yet Nvidia has plenty of advantages. For a start, it has piles of money to invest; analysts expect the company to generate roughly $200bn in free cashflow this year. It also has the clout to draw in partners and a brand that may help catch the attention of consumers. A number of the biggest PC-
makers, including HP, Lenovo and Acer, have already signed up to offer the new chip in their devices. Nvidia’s move is another sign of how fiercely contested the chip business has become, with firms venturing ever further from their original turf. In March Arm, a British designer that licenses chip blueprints to others, announced its own CPU for AI data centres; RTX Spark uses Arm’s designs for its CPU. A day after Mr Huang spoke at Computex, Lip-Bu Tan, Intel’s boss, presented his own plans. Among them was an AI chip due later this year, aimed at running models in data centres. Intel, Mr Tan said, was “going to do really well”. Mr Huang is equally confident. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/02/nvidia-wants-to-supercharge-your- laptop
What to read to understand your next employer From Kafka’s “The Trial” to Orwell’s “1984” June 4th 2026 Welcome to Ungoliant! As part of your onboarding process, we encourage you to read a few books before you actually start work. That will give you the best chance of understanding our unique culture. If a reading list seems retro, it’s not. “The Little Prince” has a special place in Netflix lore: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is still quoted in the streaming firm’s culture guide. The US Marines have something called “The Commandant’s Professional Reading Programme”, a kind of book club with bullets; marines are expected to read five titles a year from a list of recommendations on topics such as strategy, warfare and decision- making. “The Looming Tower”, a history of the 9/11 attacks, and (more