Amarone della Valpolicella, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Gewurztraminer d’Alsace. None of these things is what the sommeliers at Danone are sampling when they criss-cross Europe. Instead, the French multinational food corporation has its own in-house specialists trained to sniff out the best in H₂O.

After last week, these so-called water sommeliers, whose palettes are finely tuned to spring minerals that give the otherwise tasteless, odorless liquid some natural pizzazz, are a bit more important. Danone pledged new investments in its bottled water business at a time when its chief rival, Nestlé, is looking to sell off a 50% stake in its equivalent unit.

Oh, Oh, Eau!

It all starts à la maison. Danone told Reuters last week that the European bottled water market grew 5% to $21 billion last year, with growth in motherland France of 7% and neighboring Britain of 9% leading the way. Its own water sales of $5.5 billion, which accounted for 18% of the group’s sales, rose 3.3% on the Old Continent. That outpaced a global 1.9% increase.

Growth in its water business has been uneven in recent quarters, but Danone sent a clear signal that it sees a clear-as-a-crater-lake business path for mineral water, given that consumer tastes around the world are set to continue a years-long trajectory away from sugary drinks. The company said it would invest $23 million to upgrade its Evian bottling facility and $9.2 million to preserve its Evian, Volvic, Badoit and La Salvetat mineral water sites in France. That’s not an especially huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but the symbolic doubling down is especially important:

• That’s because the mineral water industry in Europe has faced something of a crisis of confidence in recent years, as Nestlé’s water unit has faced a torrent of legal, regulatory and political scrutiny over allegations it used unauthorized filtration and treatment methods on water sold as “natural mineral water,” which by law must be untreated (Le Monde journalist Stéphane Mandard cheekily dubbed the all-encompassing scandal “our Watergate”).
• Nestlé, meanwhile, is trying to offload half of its water business in a shift away from capital-intensive, lower-growth segments. The Financial Times reported late last month that private equity shops CD&R, KKR and PAI are among the firms bidding for the stake, which could go for as much as $5.5 billion.

Three-Molecule Tasting: Danone announced its renewed emphasis on its mineral water sites alongside the publication of an impact study touting its positive “economic, social and environmental contribution.” In other words, the company would like to remind consumers its stuff is approved by even the fussiest, most enviro-conscious water sommelier.

On the upside, advanced quantum computers could crack that 12-word seed phrase from 2013 that was scribbled on a piece of paper your mom threw out. But that level of encrypting ability can also unravel cryptocurrency’s core security … womp womp.

Q-Day is the Y2K-esque time when quantum computers become advanced enough to decode all cryptography. Google recently warned it could be coming for cryptocurrency before the decade’s out. In a new paper, researchers wrote that quantum computers would need fewer than 500,000 physical qubits to break through bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — 20 times fewer than previous estimates.

Google researchers noted that 6.9 million public bitcoin keys are already exposed, leaving them wide open for quantum computers to crack at their leisure. There’s also a ~10-minute window when public keys are exposed during transactions, and the researchers said advanced quantum computers will be able to wheedle out a private key from a public one in nine to 12 minutes.

Quantum Safety 101

Google is pushing companies to transition to post-quantum cryptography, which uses algorithms that quantum computers can’t easily crack. In PQC, a quantum computer may have to try to solve for, for instance, a vector in a thousand-dimensional lattice.

Developers are debating how to push crypto toward quantum-proof practices:

• The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-360 aims to provide a way for bitcoin owners with older wallets to opt in to move their holdings to safer addresses. Another idea, the Hourglass proposal, would restrict how quickly older coins can be spent to slow down any Q-Day mass liquidation events. But bitcoin has no central authority, and making changes on this scale is not just difficult but, in some ways, against the crypto’s core ethos.
• The No. 2 crypto by market cap, Ethereum, operates a little differently from bitcoin since its cofounder has remained an active figure developers listen to (no offense, Satoshi). Vitalik Buterin has proposed a roadmap for the crypto’s post-quantum transition with one change that could be rolled out in Ethereum’s next scheduled upgrade this year.

It’s Always Tomorrow: There’s a running joke that quantum computing has been right around the corner since the 1980s, and the crypto industry’s divided about how imminent the threat really is. But more major figures seem to be taking it more seriously, as IBM and Google both aim to build practical quantum computers by 2029. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said last week in response to Google’s paper that “we all need to solve it sooner rather than later.”

If the data center buildout is the modern-day gold rush, then Argan owns the shovels.

Shares of the power plant builder climbed more than 76% through the first quarter of the year, lifted by a blowout earnings report late last month. Meanwhile, a pair of recent plaudits from analysts at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs suggest there’s plenty of room left to grow. For Big Tech, desperate to secure power for its massive data center buildout, the company’s infrastructure expertise has proven invaluable.

Hit the Gas

In a perfect encapsulation of the explosive data center buildout, Argan said in its fourth-quarter earnings report that its order backlog now stands at $2.9 billion, more than double the $1.4 billion backlog at the end of the same quarter a year ago. The boom proved enough for JPMorgan analyst Michael Fairbanks to upgrade the stock from neutral to overweight last month, while raising its price target from $370 to $550; the upgrade came just after Goldman analysts raised their price target from $399 to $518.

Gas-powered plants account for 77% of the backlog, CEO David Watson said in a call with shareholders. It’s hardly surprising for anyone following in the footsteps of Big Tech:

• Through 2025, a full 39% of gas power capacity under development in the US was being designed specifically for on-site data center use, up 5% from 2024, according to non-profit energy project tracker Global Energy Monitor.
• Overall, gas-fired capacity in development in the US (data center-related or otherwise) tripled in 2025, according to Global Energy Monitor. If all in-development gas projects are completed, the US’s gas-powered capacity will increase by 50%.

Private Practice: Increasingly, hyperscalers are going off the grid. By 2030, as much as one-third of data centers will be powered entirely by on-site and off-grid power generation, according to a recent report by Bloom Energy.