After Anchorage: What Comes Next — Expectations for Trump and Zelensky’s Washington Meeting

The brief summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage ended without a ceasefire or concrete settlement, leaving a flurry of diplomatic activity and a high-stakes meeting scheduled in Washington between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. With the public record vague and private talks continuing, diplomats and analysts say…

Landmark Climate Ruling Sends a Wake-Up Call to Global Financial Markets

The financial world has been consumed in recent months by corporate earnings reports, geopolitical tensions, and shifting trade policies. Yet behind the noise, a landmark opinion from the world’s highest court has quietly set in motion a potential re-pricing of global assets, raising the stakes for investors, governments, and corporations alike. In July, the International…

Surging AI Infrastructure Orders Push Foxconn to Forecast Record Server Revenues

Foxconn is charting a new course in its corporate history, shifting the balance of its revenue streams toward artificial intelligence infrastructure as demand for AI servers eclipses that for smartphones. The company’s bullish forecast stems from the accelerating global race to build AI-capable data centers, with orders from cloud giants and enterprise clients driving record…

Saudi Wealth Fund Faces $8 Billion Setback as Oil Market Pressures Mount

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has reported an $8 billion hit to its high-profile gigaproject investments in 2024, marking a rare setback for the kingdom’s flagship vehicle for economic transformation. While the fund’s total assets under management surged to nearly $1 trillion, the decline in these ambitious domestic projects underscores the growing financial strain…

Standard Chartered Sees Ether Hitting $7,500 by Year-End on Surging Stablecoin Demand and Institutional Uptake

Standard Chartered has sharply raised its year-end price forecast for ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, to $7,500, up from its earlier target of $4,000. The move reflects growing optimism over Ethereum’s expanding role in the global financial system, the explosive potential of stablecoin adoption, and renewed institutional interest. The new projection represents…

AI Startup Perplexity Launches $34.5 Billion Chrome Bid Amid Antitrust Push and Browser Market Shake-Up

Perplexity AI stunned the technology industry this week with an unsolicited, all-cash $34.5 billion offer for Google’s Chrome browser — a move the startup framed as a bid to accelerate competition in search while securing the distribution channel essential to any company seeking to dominate AI-driven answers. The audacious proposal lands at a moment of…

SK Hynix Cites AI Data-Centre Buildouts, Custom HBM Tech and Supply Dynamics for 30% Annual Growth Call to 2030

SK Hynix’s projection that the market for AI-optimised memory will expand roughly 30% annually to 2030 reflects a convergence of technical, commercial and geopolitical forces that together are reshaping demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Company managers point to surging cloud and hyperscaler AI spending, the trend toward ever larger and more memory-hungry models, bespoke customer…

SoftBank’s surge: how AI bets, portfolio re-rating and stronger profits pushed the shares to a record

SoftBank Group’s shares vaulted to fresh highs in recent trading, capping a rally that has surprised even some long-time market watchers. The leap was not the result of a single development but a confluence of events that together altered investor perceptions of the Japanese conglomerate: a string of large AI-focused investments, a better-than-expected quarterly performance,…