POP star Lizzo has claimed plus-size women are being “erased” as society grapples with the impact of the “Ozempic boom.”
The Truth Hurts singer, 37, has lost a lot of weight in recent years but said she is “still a proud big girl” after years of championing the body positivity movement.
Sign up for the Showbiz newsletter
Thank you!
Lizzo has claimed plus-size women are being ‘erased’ as society grapples with the impact of the ‘Ozempic boom’Credit: GettyLizzo has lost a lot of weight in recent years but said she is ‘still a proud big girl’Credit: Getty
In an essay shared on Substack, she wrote: “So here we are halfway through the decade, where extended sizes are being magically erased from websites.
“Plus sized models are no longer getting booked for modeling gigs. And all of our big girls are not-so big anymore.”
But Lizzo, who said she still weighs more than 14 stone, hit out at people who have criticised her for losing weight.
She said: “We’re in an era where the bigger girls are getting smaller because they’re tired of being judged.
“And now those bigger girls are being judged for getting smaller by the very community they used to empower.
“There’s nothing wrong with living in a bigger body.
“There’s nothing wrong with being fat.
“But if a woman wants to change, she should be allowed to change.”
She said she started exercising in 2023 following a lawsuit in which she was alleged to have sexually harassed former dancers, which she denies, and which she said left her suicidal.
Nov. 19 (UPI) — Tech giant Nvidia on Wednesday posted record revenue and strong profit for the third quarter, beating Wall Street expectations, amid exploding growth in artificial intelligence.
Nvidia, which has the world’s largest market capitalization at $4.5 trillion, reported record sales. It said sales grew 62% in one year to $57 billion through Oct. 26. Wall Street had projected a $54.9 billion figure.
On Oct. 29, Nvidia became the first company worldwide with a $5 trillion cap one day before CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump in the White House.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different,” Huang said during a conference call with investors.
Fourth-quarter sales are estimated to be around $65 billion, contrasting with $61.66 billion by analysts.
Profit was up 65% from last year in the quarter to $31.9 billion or 78 cents per share, slightly ahead of expectations. The net income represents 58% of revenue.
NVIDIA will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of 1 cent per share on Dec. 26.
Nvidia builds chips and software platforms for the AI industry. The company, founded in 1993 in the Silicon Valley in California, pioneered the graphics processing unit, initially for 3D video games.
The chips are made in the United States by GlobalFoundries, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung in South Korea. Taiwan’s new factory in Arizona focuses on chips for Nvidia.
Most AI companies’ technology runs on Nvidia’s chip, CNN reported.
Its best-selling chip is the Blackwell Ultra, a second generation. The company is banned from selling the new ones to China.
“Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” Huang said in a statement about its best-selling chip.
“Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference — each growing exponentially. We’ve entered the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast — with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once.”
In October, Huang said there were $500 billion in AI chip orders for 2025 and 2026 combined.
“The number will grow,” Nvidia finance chief Colette Kress said during the earnings call with analysts.
Nvidia said there were $51.2 billion in revenue in data center sales, a 66% rise year-over-year.That includes $43 billion in revenue was for “compute,” or the GPUs. The company said most growth was from GB300 chips.
The stock, with the ticker symbol NVDA, initially traded at $12 per share, through its Initial Public Offering on Jan. 22, 1999.
The strong Nvidia report boosted after-hours trading of tech firms Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
“This answers a lot of questions about the state of the AI revolution, and the verdict is simple: it is nowhere near its peak, neither from the market-demand nor the production-supply-chain sides for the foreseeable future,” Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, said in emailed commentary following the report.
In September, Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI in exchange for chip purchases.
On Monday, Anthropic committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft Azure in exchange for an investment in the AI lab from both tech giants.
Nvidia announced a collaboration with Intel to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products with NVIDIA NVLink.
Nvidia has reviewed plans to accelerate seven new supercomputers, including with Oracle to build the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest AI supercomputer, Solstice, plus another system, Equinox.
Nvidia said it had $4.3 billion in gaming revenue, which is a 30% boost from one year ago.
Despite the boom, CEO of one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organizations warnsthere is a “real risk” because of complacency.
“Exceptional results don’t remove the need for discipline,” Nigel Green of deVere Group in Britain said in an email to UPI. “The AI ecosystem is growing fast, but fast growth doesn’t protect anyone from the consequences of over-extension.”
He said the path from deployment to real commercial returns “remains untested” in many industries.
“Investors must examine whether business models can convert this scale of capital investment into sustained earnings,” he said. “Complacency could be a real risk.”
An estimated half a trillion dollars was wiped out from the financial markets this week, as some of the biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Palantir Technologies saw a temporary but sizeable drop in their share prices on Tuesday. It may have been just a short-lived correction, but experts warn of mounting signs of a financial market crash, which could cost several times this amount.
With dependence on tech and AI growing, critics argue that betting on these profits is a gamble, stressing that the future remains uncertain.
Singapore’s central bank joined a global chorus of warnings from the IMF, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and Andrew Bailey about overvalued stocks.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore said on Wednesday that such a trend is fuelled by “optimism in AI’s ability to generate sufficient future returns”, which could trigger sharp corrections in the broader stock market.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley predict a 10–20% decline in equities over the next one to two years, their CEOs told the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong, CNBC reported.
Experts interviewed by Euronews Business also agree that a sizeable correction could be on the way.
In a worst-case scenario, a market crash could wipe out trillions of dollars from the financial markets.
According to Mathieu Savary, chief European strategist at BCA Research, Big Tech companies, including Nvidia and Alphabet, would cause a $4.4 trillion (€3.8tn) market wipeout if they were to lose just 20% of their stock value.
“If they go down 50%, you’re talking about an $11tr (€9.6tr) haircut,” he said.
AI rally: Bubble or boom?
The US stock market has defied expectations this year. The S&P 500 is up nearly 20% over the past 12 months, despite geopolitical tensions and global trade uncertainty driven by Washington’s tariff policies. Gains have been strongest in tech, buoyed by optimism over future AI profits.
While Big Tech continues to deliver, with multibillion-dollar AI investments and massive infrastructure buildouts now routine, concerns are growing over a slowing US economy, compounded by limited data during the government shutdown. Once fresh figures emerge, they could rattle investors.
AI enthusiasm is most evident in Nvidia’s extraordinary stock gains and soaring valuation. The company is central to the tech revolution as its graphics processing units (GPUs) are essential for AI computing.
Nvidia’s shares have surged over 3,000% since early 2020, recently making it the world’s most valuable public company. Between July and October alone, it gained $1tr (€870bn) in market capitalisation — roughly equal to Switzerland’s annual GDP. Its stock trades at around 45 times projected earnings for the current fiscal year.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “Much of this growth is backed by real financial progress, and despite the massive nominal increase in value, relative valuations don’t look overstretched.”
Analysts debate whether the current market mirrors the dot-com bubble of 2000. Nathan notes that many tech companies that failed back then never reached profitability, unlike today’s giants, which generate strong revenues and profits, with robust demand for their products.
Ben Barringer, global head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, added: “With governments investing heavily in AI infrastructure and rate cuts likely on the horizon, the sector has solid foundations. It is an expensive market, but not necessarily a screaming bubble. Momentum is hard to sustain, and not every company will thrive.”
BCA Research sees a bubble forming, though not set to burst immediately. Chief European strategist Mathieu Savary said such bubbles historically peak when firms begin relying on external financing for large projects.
Investments in assets for future growth, or capital expenditures, as a share of operating cash flow, have jumped from 35% to 70% for hyperscalers, according to Savary. Hyperscalers are tech firms such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta that run massive cloud computing networks.
“The share of operating earnings is likely to move above 100% before we hit the peak,” Savary added. This means that they may soon be investing more than they earn from operations.
Recent examples of Big Tech firms turning to external financing for such moves include Meta’s Hyperion project with Blue Owl Capital and Alphabet’s €3 billion bond issue for AI and cloud expansion.
While AI investment growth is hard to sustain, Quilter’s Barringer told Euronews: “If CapEx starts to moderate later this year, markets may start to get nervous.”
Other factors to watch include return on invested capital and rising yields and inflation pressures, which could signal a higher cost of capital and a bubble approaching its end.
“But we’re not there yet,” said Savary.
Further concerns and how to hedge against market turbulence
Even as tech companies ride the AI wave, inflated expectations for future profits may prove difficult to meet.
“The sceptics’ main problem may not be with AI’s potential itself, but with the valuations investors are paying for that potential and the speed at which they expect it to materialise,” said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould.
A recent report by BCA reflects the mounting reasons to question the AI narrative, but the technology “remains a potent force”, said the group.
If investor optimism does slow, “a sharp correction in tech could still have ripple effects across broader markets, given the sector’s dominant weight in global indices,” Barringer said. He added that other regions and asset classes, such as bonds and commodities, would be less directly affected and could provide an important balance during a downturn.
According to Emma Wall, chief investment strategist at Hargreaves Lansdown, “investors should use this opportunity to crystallise impressive gains and diversify their portfolios to include a range of sectors, geographies and asset classes — adding resilience to portfolios. The gold price tipping up is screaming a warning again — a siren that this rally will not last.”
Major Latin American banks are racing toward 100% digital models. Despite the rise of fintechs, traditional banks are determined not to be left behind.
Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword in Latin America; it is an existential imperative.
Digital natives like Brazilian neobank Nubank, Argentine fintech Ualá, and regional payments platform Mercado Pago are scaling into super-app ecosystems while giants like Santander and BBVA push forward with their own digital units. The next several years may determine whether traditional banks can reinvent themselves fast enough to remain competitive, or whether the fintech wave will carry Latin America into a new era of finance.
The number of fintechs operating in the region surged from 703 in 2017 to over 3,000 in 2023: a staggering 400% increase, according to a joint study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Finnovista. The explosion of financial startups has upended traditional banking, and is pressuring established institutions to reinvent themselves or risk obsolescence.
Giorgio Trettenero Castro, secretary general of the Federación Latinoamericana de Bancos (FELABAN)
Data from Accenture underscores the challenge: Digital-only banking players have grown revenue by 76% compared to 44% for traditional banks replicating legacy models online. This suggests that simply bolting digital interfaces onto outdated systems yields diminishing returns. Instead, agility and modularity are the new competitive currency.
The rise of digital-only players, the acceleration of instant payment systems like Brazil’s PIX, and the rapid adoption of super-app models are converging to redraw the competitive map. Traditional banks are racing to shed legacy systems and cultural inertia while fintechs expand aggressively into core banking territory.
Constraining the race toward 100% digital banking is a lack of up-to-date basic infrastructure, warns Giorgio Trettenero Castro, secretary general of the Federación Latinoamericana de Bancos (FELABAN).
“Financial services demand that the general public have access to quality, competitively priced internet,” he says. “That is not entirely the case in Latin America, where rural areas face a deeper divide; only 39% of rural populations have internet access. Moreover, Latin America has just 4.8% of the world’s data centers, with Brazil in the lead. This shortage hampers competitiveness and raises costs.”
These structural weaknesses coexist with distinct opportunities. About 57% of fintechs target the region’s unbanked population, according to the IDB and Finnovista report. Currently, around 20% of Latin American adults are not financially included, according to a 2024 study by Mastercard and Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence: a substantial population waiting to be tapped.
Newcomers Reshape The Financial Arena
Traditional banks and fintechs increasingly resemble each other when it comes to their processes.
“In the past, a customer had to bring a pile of documents and meet with a bank manager to open an account and wait several days. Now, everything can be done in minutes on a smartphone: an innovation pioneered by Nubank 12 years ago,” observes José Leoni, managing director at Moneymind Partners, a São Paulo-based financing advisory firm. “Back in the 1980s, the main customer retention tool was automatic debit, clearly a tech innovation for the time. Today, every bank has similar offerings. What makes a bank attractive now are costs, a unified platform for all products, and customer experience.”
Banco do Brasil has put significant effort into customer experience, but despite a technology investment that reached $554 million last year, it still maintains legacy systems.
“Now we have 30% of our applications in cloud computing, so we operate on a hybrid system that has worked well so far,” says Bárbara Lopes, head of Customer Experience for digital and physical channels Banco do Brasil.
Bárbara Lopes, head of Customer Experience for digital and physical channels Banco do Brasil
While part of its infrastructure remains on-premises, Banco do Brasil considers itself 100% digital, as 94% of clients using its app carry out their transactions through digital channels. Of its 86 million total clients, 31 million are active digital users, a number that continues to grow yearly.
“Our goal is to provide a good, customized experience with AI to serve all our different audiences,” Lopes says: “young people, vulnerable populations, agribusiness workers, and entrepreneurs.” Competition is massive, she notes, and personalizing customer experience is one of the most important strategies for retaining clients.
Banco de Inversiones de Chile (BCI) has adopted a similar strategy, stressing investment in technology as critical to keeping up with trends and delivering a better customer experience.
“Innovation and data management are fundamental pillars of BCI’s growth strategy,” says Claudia Ramos, manager of Innovation and Data Analytics. “That’s why, in recent years, we invested $100 million in our app, which delivered benefits representing nearly 20% of our EBITDA. Today, all our customers use digital channels.”
BCI’s road to digitalization began in 2015; two years later, it launched Machbank, a fully digital neobank offering investment solutions to improve customer experience and broaden inclusion. Machbank now has 4.2 million clients, with a youthful, userfriendly profile, out of a total of almost 6 million at BCI. The bank continues to offer a strong digital value proposition across its 183-branch network, where all customers now use digital solutions.
The latest trends point to interactions driven by massive use of technology, Ramos argues: “Simplicity, transparency, and more objective experiences are the best proposals for financial inclusion. Our next step is to further leverage AI to enhance user experience.”
Challenges Ahead
For incumbents, the challenge is often less technological than cultural; resistance within teams and reluctance to change entrenched routines often slow progress. At BTG Pactual, Marcelo Flora, managing partner and head of Digital Platforms, says he struggled for years to convince his colleagues to embrace digital transformation.
Following the example of Goldman Sachs, BTG Pactual built its reputation on asset management, wealth management, and investment banking, generating comfortable profits of R$4 billion per year ($736 million) in 2014.
“We were victims of our own success,” says Flora: why change a model that was working so well?
Once fintechs emerged and incumbents started to lag, however, BTG Pactual prepared itself for the next wave. The results were striking; profits quadrupled in 10 years, from $736 million to $2.9 billion.
“Now we have the speed of a fintech and the credibility of an incumbent,” Flora says.
Most banks established before the rise of digital players have faced similar hurdles.
“The main challenge is usually not technological, but cultural and organizational,” agrees Andrés Fontão, CEO of Finnosummit, organizer of the annual Latin American fintech conference. “Many institutions carry inherited structures and processes, and if senior management is not fully aligned with the digitalization mission or able to transmit that vision downward, change stalls.”
Digital banking lowers the barriers that traditional models raise: fewer documents, no need to visit a branch, simpler interfaces. This opens doors for previously excluded populations.
“In Mexico, only about 55% of adults had an account in 2023,” notes Fontão. “Other reports indicate just 49% are banked, leaving about 66 million people without access. But between 2017 and 2021, Latin America saw the largest increase in financial inclusion globally—19%—thanks to innovations such as digital payments, online commerce, and digital subsidy distribution.”
That does not mean branch banking is going the way of the dodo.
“Although neobanks are cheaper to operate because they don’t maintain physical branches and promote digital inclusion, in Latin America, the belief in bank branches remains strong,” says Francisco Orozco, professor at the Center for Financial Access, Inclusion and Research of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. “Reputation is essential, and even though young people are digital natives, there is a kind of inherited financial habit. Most people still want to use cash and visit branches.”
Leveraging this predilection, Nu Mexico signed an agreement with the OXXO convenience store chain in January to expand its cash deposit and withdrawal network.
“This is a way to promote digital inclusion,” says Orozco.
Beyond Branches And Borders
Latin America’s transformation could point the way for other developing regions. It combines massive unmet demand, agile fintech innovation, and regulatory experimentation. If incumbents can overcome cultural inertia and infrastructure gaps, they may leapfrog into a model of fully digital, inclusive, and interoperable banking.
