B (3:56)

I'd love to hold these two stocks up against Alphabet, which has seen a huge boost to its share price in the last six months. Why is the Google firm outperforming Meta and Microsoft to such an extent?

C (4:07)

Google's had a lot of things go its way, especially during 2025. A big thing that helped the stock was the company essentially beat the government's efforts to break it up. The stock was really underwater before that. So once the company kind of won those cases and won some very favorable rulings, the stock really started to take off. And then their latest Gemini model ended up testing really, really well, scored really high on all these benchmarks, got a lot of strong buzz for, like, surpassing OpenAI and ChatGPT. And the fact that they were able to train that model on chips that Google itself designed also was a big help for them because it kind of showed just the technical prowess this company has. So Google had a lot of things helping its narrative over the last six months that really helped. It stuck.

B (4:53)

That was WSJ columnist Dan Gallagher. Which company's results are surprising you this earnings season? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, your obsolete tech may be worth more to the US than you'd expect. We're breaking down. Why? That's after the break.

A (5:18)

How can enabling Smarter Water Management help AI scale responsibly. Here's Christoph Beck, chairman and CEO of Ecolab.

D (5:25)

All water of the earth that we can drink is 35 miles wide. That's all we've got for the whole planet. So we'd better find ways to reuse water. That's especially true for AI. But here's the good news. With technology that can reuse water in that process of the chips manufacturing and the technology that we bring is ultimately at every step of the process, in the cheap manufacturing to reuse it.

B (5:51)

Rare earth metals, elements that power a ton of the modern gadgets we use every day usually come from China. The country mines 3/5 of the world's metals and has more than 90% of the world's capacity for refining them. That's not usually a problem. But as geopolitical tensions ramp up between China and the US Unfettered access to rare earth metals is no longer guaranteed. Beijing last year used rare earth export restrictions as a weapon in the trade war with the U.S. some believe the U.S. can gain greater control of its own destiny, not by mining, but by recycling the kinds of technology most of us would consider to be junk. Our WSJ colleague Ed Ballard is here to explain more. Ed, talk us through this recycling option that has been presented. How does that work?

E (6:38)

The basic idea is it's faster than a mine. So to permit and develop a mine after you've determined that there are enough rare earths in a certain place to make it worth building a mine, that can take a decade or more. And so that is really not a fast way if you're trying to rapidly build up your own secure supply chain of rare earths. And so the idea behind the recycling is that you have all of this existing equipment out there in the world that is coming to the end of its life and that is only going to increase that can be harvested. We already recycle all sorts of other metals. Like most of the aluminum in your drinks cans gets recycled. We're good at recycling steel. Most of the US Steel is already recycled, but it's never been economically viable to recycle the rare earths. And that's because, for a start, the actual volumes are pretty small. And also because you're talking about often little bits of equipment where the rads are bound up with other materials, bits of plastic, other metals, and it's just been too fiddly to get these materials out. It just hasn't been economically viable. But now with this emphasis on building up a domestic supply chain, that's sort of increasing the interest in this potential path to improving the supply.

B (8:04)

Can you give us an example of one company in this space and how this recycling process works for them?

E (8:09)

The main startup in the story that we've written is a company called Cyclic. And what they are saying is that they have come up with a cheaper way of doing this. So to take a step back. So what currently happens is when you throw something away, it goes to a recycler and some of the metals are already harvested, but the rare earths themselves probably end up in this waste material called slag. And the idea is that now Cyclic come along and say, no, don't forget about those bits. We will buy those. We will pay more for this equipment. And then using kind of conventional mechanical recycling approaches to remove the rare earth magnets themselves from the surrounding gadgets. And then after that, use basically chemistry, bathing the metal in a kind of bath of chemicals to dissolve the rare earths that you can then refine again. To take one example of how this actually works in practice, one of the big sources of old electronics that they're using is old hard drives from data centers which contain little tiny magnets in the corner of each one. And Cyclic has deals with the recycling companies to take those hard drives, slice off the corners which contain the magnets, and then process those to remove the rare earths so that they can be refined once again into new metal. There are various different approaches out there, but the key is who can do this in a cost effective way.

B (9:39)

And if these companies are successful, do they anticipate that they really could replace the volumes accrued from mining with recycling?

E (9:47)

I would say they're probably. It's not going to be enough on its own to meet all of, say, U.S. demand, because if you think about it mathematically, you can only recycle what's already out there, right? So a lot of, like you think of all the old phones that you might have sitting in a drawer at home, each of those has got a tiny little rare earth magnet in them. And so all of lots of this stuff is never going to be recycled. It's just going to sort of languish. So the amount you can recycle is always going to be less than what's already there. But that doesn't mean it can't be a kind of significant contribution to US Demand.

B (10:21)

That was WSJ climate change and energy transition columnist Ed Ballard. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment today's. Show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Katie Dayton. Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavalle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Jessica Fenton is our technical manager. Our development producer is Aisha Al Muslim. Chris Inslee is the deputy editor and Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of News Audio. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

A (11:03)

How are data center operators working to improve sustainability and water savings at every stage of the data center lifecycle? Here's EcoLabs Christophe Beck with some thoughts.

D (11:12)

The Mach 7 or the Mach 4 are the ones that are really so focused on high tech are the most forward looking. They have the means, they have the mindset, they have the passion for innovation and they're really open to try new things as well because everything is new with AI and with that technology as well. I think even if we're not where we wanted to be with that industry right now, we will be ahead in the next few years because innovation that's coming up right now is working much better than we thought. And it's really thinking in circular ways being in a data center or in a microchip manufacturing plant.

A (11:46)

Learn more About Ecolab@ecolab.com Custom content from.

E (11:50)

WSJ is a unit of the Wall Street Journal Advertising Department. The Wall Street Journal news Organization was not involved in the creation of this content.