Last October, Dubai-based billionaire and Emaar Properties founder Mohammed Alabbar unveiled an audacious $400 billion proposal to help solve America’s worsening housing shortage by building millions of housing units, describing it as both a humanitarian and economic opportunity that could “reshape the U.S. market” and create up to 20 million jobs. 

According to Alabbar, the United States is experiencing a significant housing-supply shortfall, which has led to a crushing lack of affordable housing. Analysts estimate a gap of about 4.7 million to nearly 5 million housing units currently exists in the US. This shortage is the result of many years of underconstruction, soaring costs, regulatory and labor constraints. The effects are broad: higher home and rent prices, fewer first-time buyers, and mobility barriers for workers. In short: a weak supply side has become a drag on affordability, economic growth and inflation control. In response, Alabbar – who now runs the largest real estate developer in the UAE – proposed a $400 billion “fix” at the Reuters NEXT Gulf Summit in Abu Dhabi, capital which he claimed could be raised in as little as one week if the right partners are assembled.

But while Alabbar’s proposal was unlikely to be taken seriously – as it benefits his company as much as it does US homebuyers – the logic behind it is sound – build much more housing – and has seemingly impressed the Trump admin.

It does explains why, as Bloomberg reports, US homebuilders are working on a plan for a massive program to develop up to a million “Trump Homes” that would address the US affordability crisis while allowing private capital to deploy many billions of dollars.

Lennar and Taylor Morrison are among the firms that have worked on the proposal, which calls for builders to sell entry-level homes into a pathway-to-ownership program funded by private investors. 

The size of the program would depend on how many builders decide to participate, though a person involved in the plan said that builders have discussed aiming for as many as 1 million homes. At that number, the program would likely deliver more than $250 billion worth of housing, not to mentions hundreds of thousands of new jobs. 

According to one version of the plan, the investors would rent out the homes to tenants, whose monthly payments would, after three years, be counted toward a down payment if they wished to purchase the home. The drawback is that such a program would be complicated to implement, according to one of BBG’s sources, and it’s possible that it won’t gain enough support to move forward. Even so, it demonstrates builders’ desire to gain the favor – or at a minimum, avoid the ire – of an unusually transactional White House.

The proposal, which some in the industry are colloquially calling “Trump Homes”, could help meet that demand while giving the president a signature program – along the lines of TrumpRx, for addressing the cost of prescription medication, or wealth-building Trump Accounts – that he can use to motivate voters in the coming midterm elections. To that end, Trump has promoted a variety of initiatives, including a plan to drive down mortgage rates by directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase mortgage-backed securities, and a push to ban institutional investors from acquiring single-family rental homes. 

The Trump Homes proposal takes a different approach: increasing housing supply through a business model commonly known as rent-to-own. In past iterations, the model has resembled a standard lease that includes an option to buy, allowing families to move into a home they’d like to purchase before they have saved a down payment. 

A federally backed rent-to-own program could offer solutions to those problems by coordinating the efforts of housing market players, including builders, rental companies, banks and government-sponsored entities.  In January, Pretium Co-President Stephen Scherr sketched out a framework for a federally-backed rent-to-own program in an interview with Bloomberg Television.  

“Imagine a scenario in which rent is paid; money is held back to provide against a deposit account for a down payment,” said Scherr, whose firm is among the largest owners of single-family rentals. “Imagine where we were to link arms with homebuilders who could build smaller, more affordable homes.”

For its part, Lennar has signaled its readiness to increase production once the market improves for buyers.

“We’re very well positioned to provide the affordable supply that the market needs when demand is ultimately activated by either lower interest rates or government-sponsored programs to enable affordability,” Lennar Chief Executive Officer Stuart Miller said on a conference call with investors in December. 

The newst sent shares of Lennar stocks and its peer homebuilders sharply higher. 

While many details of the program have yet to be determined, including the role that federally-backed mortgages should play, the private investors would bear any initial losses. Industry players initially pitched the plan last year to the administration and are continuing to refine the details.

“We are encouraged by the thoughtful discussions between home builders and the administration that could help more Americans step into home ownership,” a Taylor Morrison spokesperson said, adding that it’s “too early to understand any details.”

Responding to Bloomberg, the administration is not actively considering the plan, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

Ultimately, if domestic builders fail to step up, we are confident that the UAE’s developers will be more than happy to take their place. 

Trouble in paradise between Nvidia and OpenAI has intensified, as a new report from Reuters reveals that the ChatGPT maker has been ‘unsatisfied’ with Nvidia’s chips, and has been seeking alternatives since last year. 

OpenAI Ceo Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Getty Images

The news comes on the heels of word that Nvidia’s plans to invest $100 billion into OpenAI were stalled – days after The Information reported that the chipmaker had been in talks to invest $60B more in OpenAI along with Microsoft and Amazon. 

NVidia had announced an agreement with OpenAI in September to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI, along with an investment of up to $100 billion – however CEO Jensen Huang told industry associates late last year that the $100 billion was not binding and not finalized. He also slammed OpenAI’s lack of discipline regarding their business strategy, while expressing concerns over competitors such as Google and Anthropic, the WSJ reported. 

Huang denied the report over the weekend – calling it “nonsense,” but reiterated that the investment wouldn’t exceed $100 billion. 

“We are going to make a huge investment in OpenAI. I believe in OpenAI, the work that they do is incredible, they are one of the most consequential companies of our time, and I really love working with Sam,” he said, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“Sam is closing the round (of investment), and we will absolutely be involved,” Huang added in comments to Bloomberg. “We will invest ‍a great deal of money, probably the largest investment we’ve ever made.”

The $100B deal was expected to close within weeks, however negotiations have been dragging on for months as OpenAI has struck deals with AMD and others for GPUs. 

What could possibly be the source of the confusion…?pic.twitter.com/xzXFpEeyAc

— Compound248 💰 (@compound248) February 2, 2026

Yet, now it’s OpenAI who’s too cool for Nvidia – apparently. 

The ChatGPT-maker’s shift in strategy, the details of which are first reported here, is over an increasing ​emphasis on chips used to perform specific elements of AI inference, the process when an AI model such as the one that powers the ChatGPT app responds to customer queries and requests. Nvidia remains dominant in ‌chips for training large AI models, while inference has become a new front in the competition.

This decision by OpenAI and others to seek out alternatives in the inference chip market marks a significant test of Nvidia’s AI dominance and comes as the two companies are in investment talks. -Reuters

According to a person familiar with the matter, OpenAI’s ‘shifting roadmap’ changed the its computational resource needs and ‘bogged down talks with Nvidia,’ Reuters continues. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been in discussions with various startups, including Cerebras and Grpq to provide chips for faster inference – according to two sources. Yet Nvidia struck a $20 billion licensing deal with Groq that ended OpenAI’s talks. In a statement, Nvidia said that Groq’s IP was highly complimentary to Nvidia’s product roadmap. 

Alternatives to Nvidia

OpenAI has been using Nvidia GPUs because their core design is well suited to crunching massive datasets required to train large AI models like ChatGPT. For a long time, Nvidia was the only game in town, however AI advancements have been increasingly focused on using trained models for inference and reasoning, which ‘could be a new, bigger stage of AI,’ per Reuters. 

The ChatGPT-maker’s search for GPU alternatives since last year focused on companies building chips with large amounts of memory embedded in the same piece of silicon as the rest of the chip, called SRAM. Squishing as much costly SRAM as possible onto each chip can offer speed advantages for chatbots and other AI systems as they crunch requests from millions of users.

Inference requires more memory than training because the chip needs to spend relatively more time fetching data from memory than performing mathematical operations. Nvidia and AMD GPU technology ⁠relies on external memory, which adds processing time and slows how quickly users can interact with a chatbot.

Inside OpenAI, the issue became particularly ​visible in Codex, its product for creating computer code, which the company has been aggressively marketing, one of the sources added. OpenAI staff attributed some ​of Codex’s weakness to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware, one source said.

According to the report, Altman held a Jan. 30 call with reporters where he said that OpenAI’s coding models will “put a big premium on speed for coding work.” 

To that end, OpenAI on Monday announced a new Mac app dedicated to working with its Codex AI coding agent, which is intended to be a ‘command center’ for directing other coding agents, as well as managing coding agents across multiple projects and tasks that run for extended periods of time. 

h/t Capital.news

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Markets have shrugged off heavy metal(s) even though their plunge Friday was staggering. We are up around 5% in gold this morning following reports of queues of Singaporeans buying the dip yesterday. Yet note that this happened to an asset seen as a “safe-haven”, and as the foundation of a new global system – even as nobody anywhere is close to demanding gold as payment for exports, or is able to do so if needed. Indeed, there are whispers that a key driver of, and much of the worst damage from, the pump-‘n’-dump was centered in China (whose neo-mercantilism is ironically a key reason for fractures in fiat currency and the liberal world order). One wonders how long generic ‘markets’ can stay calm in a world in which so many people are so unenamoured of fiat FX; and how metals can cope with “because markets!” HFT speculation that make them trade like an NFT or meme stock.

Then again, markets seem to have put the extraordinary recent volatility in JGBs behind them  when nothing has been resolved there. PM Takaichi seems set for a landslide victory on 8 February that will lead us back to where we were – save the US suggesting there’s no bailout from it coming for Japan. That leaves the world’s third largest economy, the $7.8 trillion JGB market, and JPY all on edge as Tokyo deals with rising geopolitical tensions with China over Taiwan.

Going back to Friday, a meme is that metals were heavy as Fed Chair nominee Warsh was seen as a hawk: yet there’s as much likelihood of that being true as that he was picked for his looks. US rates are going to fall, but Warsh just looks hawkish. Moreover, a hawk/dove framing is arguably now irrelevant. What I dub ‘reverse perestroika’ implies a shift to a Treasury- not Fed-centric system and to industry from financialisation: logically that implies different interest rates by sector, so hawkish and dovish. As @mnicoletos puts it, it means changes to encourage banks to lend more into productive sectors. And as @ctindale points out, it requires abandoning abstract economist models of aggregate supply and demand — useless vs shocks like rare earths — to address specific material constraints in each sector, e.g., funding stockpiles to release rather than raising rates. If Warsh wants a ‘regime change’ at the Fed (as do Bessent and Trump), then that’s the form it will take, comrades, not just ‘hawk/dove’.

That’s too late for those who ended up having to raise rates after cutting them, i.e., the RBA. Australia’s property-addled economy and Reserve Bank are the first to U-turn on “because (property) markets” rate cuts, hiking to 3.85%, because of “materially” higher inflation, rather than the low inflation their abstract model had told them was looming. It looks like another hike is also going to have to follow. As the Aussie financial press put it, “Chalmers and Bullock both messed up on inflation – the RBA is finally trying to fix its inflation mistakes. When will the federal government follow suit?” Equally, when will abstract models follow suit? And when will markets grasp that is what logically follows on from all of this?

Oil slumped 4.5% Monday on the view Iranian threats of regional war are overblown. The US and Iran will talk Friday, yet the US wants a deal to end its nuclear program, which it bombed last year, and its ballistic missile program and support for terrorist proxies; Iran may float handing over enriched uranium, but says it will only act within its “national interests.” Don’t just read the financial press: follow the logistical build-up of US military power; consider reports Trump favors regime change following as many as 30,000 Iranian protestor deaths; and see there is no geostrategic logic in the US moving weapons into place then allowing Iran to carry on (including selling oil to China).

That’s also as the START US-Russia arms control agreement STOPS on Thursday, kick-starting a new nuclear arms race. Europe might have to join this time. In which case, the politics are very complex –as Draghi called for an EU “federation” to avoid being “picked off one by one” by the US and China— and as a nuclear trifecta could cost from hundreds of billions to a trillion euros. Add it to the Strategic Autonomy bill, as Europe finds that: it’s struggling to coordinate defence efforts; even replacing the US-backed internal communication system for defence data will take until at least 2030; and as it was warned that its efforts to diversify critical minerals supplies have “incomplete foundations” due to their “nonbinding” targets.

By contrast, President Trump will launch Project Vault –$12bn in seed capital, $1.7bn private, the rest from a 15-year US Export-Import Bank loan– to build a US strategic critical minerals stockpile. This is separate from the Pentagon’s and is for the civilian economy. The intention is to insulate it from wild price swings in key inputs –something China has long done for key goods, but which the West has eschewed because of its brilliant intellectual conceit of “because markets” as the answer to everything — as well as economic coercion – which China has again been able to threaten in rare earths “because markets.”

Trump also struck a trade deal with India, reducing reciprocal tariffs to 18% and dropping the additional 25% after claiming India would stop buying Russian oil in favor of Venezuelan, showing how geopolitics links up. This isn’t the FTA the EU just signed, but let’s see which proves more important over time: as a well-placed Indian source noted to me, there‘s no growth in Europe vs. the US. The fact the US will insist on the same no-transshipment rules for Chinese goods that it has with other trade partners is a blow to Beijing; equally, it blows up European hopes of building a trade coalition without the US (and in India frictions will continue, i.e., the EU agreed on green tech collaboration with Delhi, but the US said it is going to sell it more coal). The defense component will also be key. Europe now has a strategic partnership with India in that regard, but national governments hold sway there: will they want to see their defense industries moved to South Asia(?) By contrast, the US is able to move faster, though we shall see what they are prepared to share with India. Delhi at least gets to play both sides off against the other.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday will take up a bill to fund several sectors of the federal government as a partial shutdown enters its fourth day.

Many Democrats – including leaders – have vowed to withhold support from the package.

On Monday evening, the House Committee on Rules advanced the measure – which would fully fund five sectors of the government while extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Jan. 13 – in a party-line 8–4 vote following a more than four-hour committee hearing.

As Jopseph Lord and Nathan Worcester report for The Epoch Times, with Democratic leaders indicating that they won’t give their backing to the measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need to rely mostly on his narrow Republican majority to pass the measure.

In a full vote of the House, Johnson can spare only one defection in a party-line vote, though some Democrats are expected to back the measure.

However, some issues with the Senate proposal could lead Republicans to oppose the measure.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime budget hawk and a particular opponent of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which falls under DHS, voted against the previous funding measure due to its funding for CISA, and could oppose the stopgap measure as well.

Other Republicans have pushed leadership to attach the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the measure.

Leadership has resisted these demands, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says would make the bill dead on arrival in the upper chamber. The bill reported out of the Rules Committee didn’t include the SAVE Act.

Nevertheless, the passage of the legislation through the Rules Committee—which includes conservative skeptics of the bill such as Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—is a good sign for Republican leaders on the funding package’s prospects.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) downplayed the difficulties in comments to reporters on Monday.

“They all come down to the wire, and then we get our business done,” Scalise said.

The bill at issue would provide full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats are demanding reforms to DHS and its subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies before they’ll support a full-year funding measure, though many House Democrats—including leadership—have expressed opposition to extending DHS funding at all before these reforms are addressed.

Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, voiced opposition to the measure at the hearing.

“I will not vote for business as usual while masked agents break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referencing ongoing disputes related to the executive branch’s use of self-issued administrative warrants, rather than court-issued judicial warrants, to enter homes.

However, one Democrat—House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—indicated at the hearing that she would break with her party to back the measure.

“I will support this package,” DeLauro said at the hearing, referencing the five full-year funding bills attached to the package that have Democratic support.

She said that without the funding extension for DHS, Democrats “won’t be able to bring the kinds of pressure” needed to add reforms to the full-year DHS funding package.

McGovern explained his opposition in response to a question from The Epoch Times outside the hearing room.

“Personally, [I] cannot bring myself to go for one more cent for ICE without some serious guardrails put in place, and I think the leverage we have is now more so than two weeks from now,” McGovern said.

Johnson has said he is “confident” that the partial shutdown will end with the Tuesday vote, despite indicating that House Democrats haven’t given their support to pass the Senate-passed measure.

“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson told NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

House Democratic leadership has not indicated support for the measure publicly, despite it having been backed by Schumer and other Senate Democrats.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s clear that the “Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”

“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”