Metallica’s European Tour Showcases Renewable-Energy Big Rigs

Metallica, the band that blazed a trail for thrash metal with rugged guitar riffs and relentless drumbeats, is trying to do something similar for trucks powered by sustainable fuels.

The group, a rock music mainstay since their 1986 hit album “Master of Puppets,” is looking to burnish its bona fides on social issues by using rigs powered by fuels including biomethane and vegetable oil on its European tour this summer.

Working with European truck maker Iveco, the authors of songs including “Battery” and “Fuel” (sample lyric: “Fuel is pumping engines / Burning hard, loose and clean / And I burn, churning my direction / Quench my thirst with gasoline.”) aim to show that sustainable transportation in heavy-duty trucking is possible on European highways dotted with alternative-fuelling stations.

But the trucks’ limitations and the workarounds the band’s logistics providers are undertaking on the meticulously-planned 7,200-mile journey winding through the continent from Sweden to Spain also illustrate how far trucking is from using cleaner fuels in regular operations.

“You have limited options because of the lack of the infrastructure,” said Natasha Highcroft, a director of Suffolk, U.K.-based Transam Trucking, which provides logistics for Metallica and other bands. “We use alternative fuels as and when we can, as much as possible, but until the infrastructure is there it’s very difficult.”

The trucks run on natural gas, vegetable oil, electricity and hydrogen fuel cells, and will be hauling giant video screens, lighting and instruments across nine countries.

The workhorses of Metallica’s tour will be 10 heavy-duty trucks powered by renewable natural gas—such as methane from landfills—and four heavy-duty trucks running on biodiesel or hydrogenated vegetable oil. The trucks, dramatically decked out in Metallica’s fierce logo, can travel about 1,000 miles between refuelling.

Both fuels provide a significant reduction in emissions compared with regular diesel, although emissions experts say they aren’t nearly as clean as battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell technologies.

The tour was due to kick off this week in Munich, Germany, and over the next two months will cover the continent from Italy and Spain in southern Europe to Denmark and Norway. The longest journey between shows, from Warsaw to Madrid, covers almost 1,800 miles.

Iveco, which is providing the eco-friendly trucks for Metallica’s tour, makes both battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell big-rig engines, the types that governments in Europe and the U.S. are trying to press on truckers as soon as possible. But because of the lack of charging and fuelling stations on the long legs between gigs, the battery-electric and hydrogen trucks will be mostly for promotional use at concerts, said Gerrit Marx , chief executive of the Italian truck maker.

Marx said Iveco wants to highlight that renewable natural gas and hydrogenated vegetable oil are “more available and ready” than batteries and hydrogen while also being “way better than fossil diesel.”

Europe has hundreds of liquefied natural gas and hydrogenated vegetable oil, or HVO, refuelling stations. A representative for British energy major Shell , which is working with Iveco on the tour, said Metallica’s low-carbon journey wouldn’t have been possible even a couple of years ago.

Shell says its customers can access HVO in five European countries and renewable natural gas in Germany and in the Netherlands. That means that when low-carbon options aren’t available, the Iveco trucks will be fuelled with regular LNG and the HVO trucks will be fuelled with regular diesel.

A Shell representative said the Metallica tour will buy carbon credits to offset “unavoidable emissions“ generated by the low-emission trucks.

U.S. companies are also using renewable natural gas and biodiesel to reduce carbon emissions. But trucking specialists say the fuels aren’t available in sufficient quantities to power the world’s fleets, which is why regulators are pushing battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Trucking executives say the costs of operating those technologies are double or triple those of diesel and that they aren’t workable in a highly-competitive, low-margin industry like trucking.

Lars Stenqvist , chief technology officer at truck maker Volvo Group , said it is important that high-profile performers like Metallica amplify the capabilities of sustainable fuels.

Truckers will only adopt the technology when customers demand it, he said, so “This is music to my ears.”

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

Metallica’s European Tour Showcases Renewable-Energy Big Rigs—And Their Limits

The heavy-metal band is using natural gas and vegetable oil to power its 7,200-mile journey, but filling trucks up on sustainable fuels still has a long way to go

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.