Feature

HORNELL, N.Y.—The future of American high-speed rail is sitting in a building older than the Battle of Gettysburg: a cavernous factory that holds the first shells of a $2 billion fleet of Amtrak Acela trains due to begin running from Washington, D.C., to Boston two years from now.
 Even as Congress moves toward renewed debates over the future of both Amtrak and high-speed rail, the first of 28 new Acela train sets are starting to take shape here. They are the

Cloud computing has been a rainmaker for the semiconductor industry, but there are still some dry patches.
 One seems upon the industry now: Intel Corp., one of the world’s largest chip makers, reported a drop in first-quarter sales for its data-center business and issued a sharp reduction in its forecast for the year. Much smaller Xilinx surprised investors a day earlier with its own disappointing data-center sales.

The Trump administration's aluminum tariffs are aimed at boosting U.S. producers' profits. But another move by the administration — sanctions against Russian aluminum giant United Co. Rusal and its founder Oleg Deripaska — is having the opposite effect.
 The sanctions have pushed up prices for aluminum's key ingredient, alumina, eating into the profits of U.S. producers, analysts and aluminum makers say. It takes about two tons of alumina to make one ton of aluminum, and companies that had purchased the white powdery material from Rusal, which makes 6% of the world's alumina, have scrambled for supplies

Staying competitive in the cloud is expensive. The two largest players in the industry aren't making it any cheaper.
 Salesforce.com and Adobe are the largest software companies that derive all or most of their revenue from subscription-based services. It is hardly a zerosum game at this point; analysts from KeyBanc Capital estimate that less than 10% of total enterprise tech spending currently goes toward cloud software. But both companies are richly valued by investors, with stock prices that have surged more than 50% so far this year on the premise that they can continue to fuel annual growth rates of 20% or more.