Good morning. It's Thursday, June 4, and welcome to this week's Business & Finance newsletter. This week, we're covering credit card network Visa, sovereign wealth funds, and, as more and more are being built to support the AI boom, data centers. As always, if you have any feedback for us, don't hesitate to hit reply to this email and send us a note—we love hearing from readers like you!
Thank you for learning about Business & Finance with us.
—Phoebe Bain, 1440 Business & Finance Section Editor
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Editor's Note: Last week, we mistakenly wrote that Estée Lauder had a market cap exceeding $25M as of May 2026. However, its market cap actually exceeded $25B as of May 2026. Thank you to the readers who wrote in pointing this out! |
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The First Credit Card Network |
Visa 101
Visa was the first credit card network—a payment infrastructure that allows a consumer's bank to "talk to" a merchant's bank when a purchase is made. Today, Visa holds more than half the US credit card market share by purchase volume, with a global business that processed about 257.5 billion transactions worth about $14T in 2025.
Bank of America launched the network to facilitate transactions after its famous 1958 "Fresno Drop," when 60,000 people woke up to find a strange rectangular piece of plastic on their doorstep in a stunt the bank pulled to distribute the first credit cards.
Bank of America soon needed to license the network to other banks so they could participate in the growing national credit card system. A Seattle banker named Dee Hock was tapped to organize the increasingly chaotic system. By 1976, Hock had given the network the name "Visa" and had become Visa USA's first CEO.
Today, many other banks (as well as institutional investors) help govern and profit from the network, with Bank of America maintaining a roughly 1.5% share. Visa primarily makes money through fees it collects with each credit card transaction and by charging banks to use its services.
Explore everything else we've found on Visa.
Also, check out ...
> Hear former Visa CEO Dee Hock's eccentric life story. (Listen)
> What actually happens behind the scenes when you tap your credit card? (Watch)
> Why American Express charges merchants higher fees than Visa. (Read)
> The difference between charge cards and credit cards, explained. (Read) |
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In partnership with Shopify |
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Niche Is the New Mainstream of Ecommerce |
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Surveying Sovereign Wealth Funds |
What is a sovereign wealth fund?
First created in 1953 by Kuwait to sustainably grow excess oil profits, sovereign wealth funds are state-owned investment funds that largely invest in foreign assets. Total assets under management ranged between $13T and $15T as of 2025, with SWFs in the Middle East and Asia accounting for more than half of that figure.
Nations with budget surpluses—often driven by windfalls in natural resource profits (like oil and gas) or trade—sometimes create these special-purpose vehicles because their domestic economies are too small to productively absorb the excess capital. While SWFs are usually funded by the state, they're often run independently by fund managers appointed by an investment authority reporting to the government.
SWFs typically invest in higher-risk assets (think: equities, real estate, fixed-income through bonds, and alternative investments) than traditional reserve holdings, maximizing long-term returns while preserving wealth for the nation's future. Each SWF is structured differently to achieve different goals set by the government that owns the fund, not fund managers.
Most countries reveal few details about their SWFs' investment strategies due to national security concerns, making them controversial for those worried about the potential power foreign actors could have to undermine markets.
Explore everything else we've found on Sovereign Wealth Funds.
Also, check out ...
> The world's largest sovereign wealth funds, visualized. (View)
> Why many Gulf States are investing in professional sports through sovereign wealth funds. (Watch)
> Inside the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. (Watch)
> A Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund divested from LIV Golf after pumping more than $6B into the PGA's controversial rival. (Read) |
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🫶 Humankind: A new restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, donated 100% of its first year's profits to charity. |
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Data centers, explained
Data centers are locations that house computing infrastructure, including hardware for data storage and processing and network equipment that connects these components. Serving as the physical backbone of the digital age, data centers provide round-the-clock support for cloud-based applications (e.g., Google Docs), online financial services, streaming platforms, and generative AI systems. As of February 2026, about 37% of the world's 10,974 data centers have been built in the US, with construction largely accelerated by growing AI demands.
The first data centers were room-sized punch-card computers weighing dozens of tons. The development of microchips fueled miniaturization, shrinking these structures to fit in closet-sized server racks for businesses requiring in-house data processing capabilities. The widespread adoption of the internet, mobile devices, and nonlocalized cloud computing created a need for scalable, high-availability solutions to handle skyrocketing data volume. This led to the creation of hyperscale data centers—facilities managed by cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services—offering upgradable computing resources to industries.
Modern data centers rely on power management, backup structures, climate control, and specialized software to ensure uninterrupted service amid changing user activity. These systems require substantial water, electricity, and critical minerals, which have driven up consumer utility bills and electronics costs and raised environmental concerns.
Explore everything else we've found on Data Centers.
Also, check out ...
> Why AI is driving data centers' growth. (Watch)
> Nuclear power could be the solution to the growing AI energy crisis. (Read)
> How one Virginia county became "Data Center Alley." (Watch)
> Track the 25-fold increase in data center investments. (View) |
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One Story We're Taking Stock In |
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On Monday, AI behemoth Anthropic confidentially filed to go public in what could be one of the most lucrative IPOs of all time, seemingly racing competitor OpenAI to the public markets. While these AI company IPOs are sure to have a significant impact on the economy at large, they could also further disrupt an unexpected microeconomic sector: the San Francisco real estate market.
According to a recent feature story (one of our personal favorite reads of the week), the AI boom has already inflated San Francisco home prices, with Bay Area-based companies like OpenAI and Anthropic offering multimillion-dollar salaries to some potential homebuyers who are driving up prices. Since ChatGPT's 2022 launch, for instance, home prices in the Bay Area’s luxury ZIP codes have spiked—and the metro area's median home sale price increased more than 10% in April from a year earlier. These IPOs could prove especially lucrative for employees with company stock, further boosting their homebuying power. |
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> AI boom upends San Francisco housing market. (Read) |
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> The world's most expensive real estate markets, visualized. (1440 Topics) |
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In partnership with Shopify |
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What Golde’s Founder Learned by Slowing Down |
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