Want to make money? Start building your data center. Or you could build batteries to power your data center. Or: Pivot to defense.
This is not financial advice, but it seems to be on the minds of public markets and individual investors recently. Ford’s nascent energy storage business (which is very small compared to Tesla’s and won’t be ready until next year) has helped its stock price jump more than it has in years. Redwood Materials’ pivot to data center energy storage has raised $425 million from blue-chip companies like Google and Nvidia. Cerebras just pulled off one of the hottest IPOs of 2026.
Investments in defense startups continue to pour in, with Anduril raising another $5 billion this week. It seems like every company with the slim chance of landing a government contract is trying to do just that.
Introducing GoPro.
Action camera companies have survived a lot over the years. For a while in the 2010s, the term “GoPro killer” was as common as “Tesla killer” or “iPhone killer.” People have been claiming that everything from TomTom action cameras to Google Clips (remember them?) will take down the California company that invented the category.
But survival doesn’t necessarily mean success, and GoPro has been struggling lately. Sales are down, losses are up, and the stock price remains where it was at about $1 two years ago. Surprisingly, last month GoPro announced plans to “explore defense and aerospace market opportunities.”
It makes some sense for a company that combines top-notch image quality with enough durability to withstand a motorcycle crash or a fall from space. and pivot was It can nearly double a company’s stock price in a matter of days. But it too fell back to Earth. In the end, the “defense-focused” idea doesn’t seem to be as perfect as the GoPro cameras.
You can guess where this is going. On Thursday, GoPro announced that it had hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey to evaluate “potential divestitures and other strategic alternatives.” The company’s board of directors said it had recently “received several unsolicited inbound strategy inquiries from parties in a variety of fields, including defense, consumer, and finance,” which may actually be too many to say “uh-oh.”
This isn’t the first time GoPro has considered selling. Founder and CEO Nick Woodman was briefly the subject of discussion in 2018.
But now the company’s situation has become more serious. In addition to its worsening financial situation, the company announced last month that it was laying off a quarter of its staff. The number of employees has already been reduced to around 600 after once employing around 1,500.
GoPro was a technological genius 15 years ago. But like many of us, we are now navigating a more volatile world. It’s no surprise that a massively increasing Pentagon budget seems like a viable path to overcome the exodus.
If you purchase through links in our articles, we may receive a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
