Marketplace Tech

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolling in computer and information science decreased this past fall from the year before. That's at both the graduate and undergraduate level and the first drop since 2020. Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association says there's been a decline in a number of computing-related majors. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kari George, Senior Research Associate at the CRA's Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline to learn more.

Caterpillar, which manufactures heavy duty equipment like asphalt pavers, diesel engine locomotives, and industrial gas turbines, has been around for 101 years. And now, the company seems to be one of the big winners of the AI infrastructure build out.

Big tech companies are working as fast as possible to get their data centers up to power artificial intelligence. Some are building their own natural gas plants to provide electricity for those data centers. Enter Caterpillar, maker of electric generators. Marketplace’s Dan Ackerman has been reporting on this.

This week, we look at Spotify's stellar quarter. Plus, there's a new AI-only social network called Moltbook. But first, Alphabet, parent of Google, went to the debt markets this week, raising tens of billions of dollars to fund its AI spending.

One of the bonds Alphabet is offering, issued in British pounds, has a maturity date of 100 years from now. This is very unusual in the corporate world. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, about what she makes of Alphabet doing this kind of borrowing.

Cryptocurrency is being used more frequently in illegal transactions — about $158 billion was used in illicit crypto activity last year. That’s an all-time high, according to a new report from the startup TRM Labs. This comes as the overall crypto ecosystem is growing and, it should be said, legitimate uses of crypto are growing at a faster rate than illegitimate ones. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs and one of the authors of the new report, to learn more.

NASA’s Artemis II mission, which will send humans around the moon for the first time in over five decades, could launch as early as March. This is part of a larger campaign to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually prepare for human space flight to Mars.

Meanwhile, China also has a goal of landing humans on the moon by 2030, setting up a kind of modern space race. One reason for the rush: It's like a game of finders keepers, said Saadia Pekkanen, a professor focused on space law and policy at the University of Washington.