Nick Lichtenberg
Nick Lichtenberg covers how large business bets in technology collide with the physical and political limits of building the infrastructure they depend on. At Fortune, he reports on business stories where Big Tech’s long-range investment plans meet local land use, energy constraints, and community resistance.
Big Tech infrastructure and community pushback
Lichtenberg’s coverage examines the friction between trillion-dollar technology ambitions and the towns and cities asked to host the hardware behind them. In his reporting on data centers, he follows how communities are blocking large new facilities even as major tech companies commit extraordinary sums to expand them, treating zoning battles, public meetings, and local organizing as core business storylines rather than side notes. He shows how residents, local officials, and developers negotiate over tax breaks, noise, water use, and power demand, framing these disputes as a material risk to corporate strategies rather than a purely political or cultural clash.
Explaining the stakes in data center expansion
His work on data centers focuses on connecting eye-popping investment figures to the practical conditions that determine whether those projects are built. Lichtenberg writes about Big Tech’s roughly $1 trillion wager on cloud and AI infrastructure through the lens of siting decisions, grid capacity, and permitting timelines, making clear how delays or cancellations in specific projects can ripple through earnings, growth forecasts, and competitive positioning. He highlights the scale of capital committed to these facilities while spelling out the concrete reasons projects stall, from strained power systems to organized neighborhood opposition.
Long-form business reporting on physical infrastructure
Lichtenberg’s reporting style leans on long-form narratives that walk readers through the life cycle of a project, from corporate announcement to local resistance. In his data center coverage, he threads together company plans, community responses, and infrastructure realities, using specific projects as case studies for broader trends in the business of technology. He brings a structural lens to business news, focusing not only on what companies intend to build but on the land, power, and public consent required to make those plans real.
4 more business journalists.
Alex Bronzini-Vender
Alex Bronzini-Vender is a business reporter who focuses on how economic forces and corporate decisions shape specific communities and industries. He covers business for the Washington Monthly, writing reported pieces at the intersection of commerce and public life. His work reflects the magazine’s emphasis on linking markets and money to power, policy, and everyday experience. He treats business not as balance sheets and deals but as choices that affect local realities. In “Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto,” he uses a city tied to the tech sector to examine how a powerful industry influences a community. He grounds his business beat in on-the-ground consequences rather than treating corporate and financial developments in isolation.
Alex Smith
Alex Smith focuses on the business impact of enterprise technology, with a distinctive emphasis on AI literacy and skills rather than technical specifications. They write for Technology Record, covering how artificial intelligence and cloud platforms from major providers are turned into concrete programmes for organisations and governments. Their beat sits at the junction of business strategy, national digital policy and large-scale technology partnerships. They report on national AI literacy programmes and public–private partnerships, showing how policy choices, vendor capabilities and skills gaps intersect. On the business beat, they treat AI and cloud as tools for competitiveness, workforce readiness and participation in a data-driven economy. Their concise, announcement-led reporting highlights who is partnering with whom, what programme is being launched, which technologies underpin it and how it changes capability on the ground for executive readers.
Alison Durkee
Alison Durkee focuses on how law, regulation and politics create business risks for major companies and industries. She is a reporter at Forbes, where she writes news-driven explainers on complex legal and regulatory developments and their impact on corporate strategy, reputation and markets. Her coverage centers on companies under scrutiny, especially in technology and other high-growth sectors, and tracks trials, investigations and fast-changing policy fights. She breaks down lawsuits, inquiries and regulatory moves into clear parts, grounded in timelines, filings and official actions. She reports on generative artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies as tests of legal frameworks and corporate risk management, explaining how issues like intellectual property, safety compliance, consumer protection and governance can reshape product roadmaps, partnerships and investor expectations.
Alyson Shontell
Alyson Shontell covers business through the lens of leadership, using in-depth conversations with powerful executives and founders to show how their decisions shape companies, markets, and public life. She is editor in chief at Fortune, overseeing coverage across the masthead while continuing to write selected high-impact pieces. Her core work is long, reported interviews and profiles of CEOs of large companies, dominant tech firms, and fast-growing startups. She focuses on how leaders think, manage risk, make unconventional calls, and handle crises, culture, and the future of work. Her subjects include corporate chiefs, startup founders, and political figures treated as executives. She probes operating detail, governance, internal culture, and trade-offs around growth, disruption, and workplace models, using concrete examples and direct, accessible prose that foregrounds the subject’s voice while pressing for specifics.