Monday, March 30, 2026

"Trump Willing To End Iran War Without Strait Of Hormuz Reopening: WSJ"

Oil dumps, equity (futures) jump.

From the Journal's more technical (analysis) little bro,  Investor's Business Daily, March 30:  

President Donald Trump has told aides he's willing to end the Iran war even if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials.

Dow Jones futures turned solidly higher on the Monday night report that suggests a near-term end to hostilities, even if Iran keeps a chokehold on the strait. Crude oil prices reversed lower.

Trump and his aides believe that military operations to open the Strait would push the Iran conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. The president has military options, but they're not his priority, administration officials told the WSJ.

According to the report, Trump has decided the U.S. should achieve its goals of crippling Iran's navy and missiles, then wind down hostilities while putting diplomatic pressure on Tehran to reopen Hormuz. If that doesn't work, Washington would push allies in Europe and the Gulf to take on reopening the strait....

....MUCH MORE 

Both Brent and WTI are down around 2%, S&P 500 and DJIA futures are up around 1%. 

The Nikkei is up 0.2%. 

Possibly related, March 21:

"Trump Signals Endgame in Iran, Says Hormuz Security Will Fall on ‘Nations Who Use It’"

"Carney’s mega anti-Trump alliance starts quest to save world trade"

Following on the earlier "Germany Drafts Plan to Hit US Companies in Next Trump Clash".

From Politico.eu, March 25:

Nearly 40 nations are hatching a plan to save the World Trade Organization or, if it can’t be salvaged, to build a new order.  

The middle powers that Canada’s Mark Carney rallied in Davos will face a test this week against the “rupture” in global trade opened by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The nearly 40 nations in the EU and Indo-Pacific CPTPP trade blocs are on a quest to save the World Trade Organization at a pivotal meeting in the African nation of Cameroon.

Six years ago, Trump crippled the global trade body’s dispute court. His administration is now pressuring members to change the WTO’s core principles to get tough on China as the White House’s tariffs openly flout the rules, damaging global trade.

Among other squabbles, the WTO, which operates by consensus, has seen its 166 members at odds over whether to make e-commerce and digital trade — including software, cloud services, and music and movie streaming — permanently tariff-free.

On the sidelines of the four-day showdown in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, the EU and the 12-nation CPTPP bloc, which together represent nearly a third of the global economy, will hatch a plan Friday to keep the WTO on the rails.

Or, if it can’t be salvaged, “build a new order” as Carney urged in his address to the World Economic Forum.

“I think Canada has added a bit of oomph into this conversation since Mark Carney’s speech,” U.K. Trade Minister Chris Bryant told POLITICO ahead of the WTO’s 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14), where he is serving as a facilitator, guiding the multilateral reform talks.

Last month, Carney offered to “broker a bridge” between the EU and the fast-growing Indo-Pacific bloc — which comprises Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Brunei, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and, most recently, the U.K. — in the form of a new anti-Trump trade pact that also aims to reform the WTO.

It’s possible the WTO “could become the organization that it really, really wants to be, which is able to make decisions and take things forward,” Bryant said.

A bellwether is the future of the so-called e-commerce moratorium, after the 2024 Dubai ministerial kicked the final decision about barring nations from slapping tariffs on digital trade into this year.

“We prefer to make it permanent,” Bryant said, pointing to a joint statement by the EU and Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) nations.

By our powers combined (Plan A) 
Trade ministers from the EU and CPTPP nations are readying a new joint statement on WTO reform to deploy at MC14 this week, according to two diplomats — one from a CPTPP member and the other from the EU.

It will “almost certainly” contain something on e-commerce, said the CPTPP nation diplomat, noting it’s not yet finalized and discussions about its contents are ongoing....

....MUCH MORE 

Related, Sunday, March 29:

Flashback: Let's Face It, When You Reap The Rewards Of Money And Power, You Want To Keep The Money And Power Flowing

"Enriched uranium hidden deep in Iranian mountains could be key to ending war"

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 27:

Hidden in the mountains of Iran, there is a stockpile of canisters that could determine the future of the war.

The large steel tanks are filled with 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb.

It has been described as the "crown jewels" of Iran's nuclear program.

For years, the regime in Tehran has spent billions of dollars amassing the material and concealing it in a sophisticated tunnel network underneath a remote mountain range.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran last June, with the sole purpose of dismantling its nuclear arsenal, US President Donald Trump said the mission was a great success.

But the enriched uranium survived.

Debate over how close Iran is to a warhead
With Israel and the United States at war again with Iran, both countries have vowed to destroy Tehran's nuclear capabilities.

But experts say that cannot be achieved unless they find and secure control of the enriched uranium.

David Albright is a world authority on nuclear weapons and the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security.

He said that if the US and Israel were unable to seize the material, Iran could race towards developing a destructive nuclear weapon.

"It wouldn't take long, even with a very small clandestine enrichment program, to turn it into weapon-grade uranium," he told the ABC.

"Israel's been going to great trouble to destroy the parts of the Iranian program that deal with making the nuclear weapons themselves.

Mr Albright explained that the material is "60 per cent enriched", which is considered the strategic step before the uranium becomes nuclear grade.

"If you have 60 per cent in enriched uranium, in terms of enrichment effort, you're 99 per cent of the way to 90 per cent, so at 60 per cent it wouldn't take long, even with a very small clandestine enrichment program, to turn it into weapon-grade uranium," he told the ABC....

....MUCH MORE, sidebars, explainers etc. 

"Is Japan nearing an FX intervention? 5 things to know"

From Nikkei Asia, March 30:

Key question is whether the yen’s slide is being driven by speculation

The yen's jittery trade around the 160 level against the dollar on Monday -- after briefly touching the key psychological threshold for the first time in 20 months -- highlights the market's central concern: the risk of currency market intervention by Japanese authorities.

The authorities were ready to take "decisive" action against speculative moves, warned Atsushi Mimura, Japan's vice finance minister for international affairs, on Monday. The warning followed the threat of "bold actions" by Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama on Friday.

The yen's brush with the threshold came amid soaring oil prices driven by the conflict in the Middle East, as investors rushed into the safe-haven greenback. The resulting currency-market uncertainty and the war's economic fallout are complicating policy management for the Bank of Japan as it seeks to navigate an exit from ultra-low interest rates.

Is an intervention possible? Here are five things to keep in mind:

What is currency market intervention?

Market players were reminded of the risk of intervention in January when the U.S. Federal Reserve conducted "a rate check" on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, a move that is considered to be a preliminary step to a possible currency intervention. A rate check literally means currency authorities making calls to ask about the currency rates, but the action implies that the authorities are ready to place orders.

In Japan, the finance ministry is in charge of the currency market, using the BOJ as its agent when it needs to place orders for interventions.

There are two types of intervention -- selling dollars for yen to support a weakened yen, or selling yen for dollars to correct an excessive yen strength.

The source of such operations is the Foreign Exchange Fund Special Account, which the ministry oversees to manage the nation's foreign currency-denominated assets.

According to a 2025 U.S.-Japan joint statement by top finance officials, the criteria for foreign-exchange intervention "should be reserved for combatting excess volatility and disorderly movements in exchange rates."

The last time Japan intervened in the forex market was in July 2024. On the back of a wide U.S.-Japan interest rate gap, the yen fell to the 161.90 range, touching its weakest level in roughly 37 years, prompting authorities to step in and prop up the yen.

Will Japan intervene?

Experts are divided over the likelihood of intervention, with views split on whether or not the yen's weakness is being driven by speculation.

Analysts at Citi Research believe that while there remains room for intervention, the probability is lower now. "We have revised down our subjective probability from around 75% before the Iran conflict started to about 60%," as recent movements suggest that the yen's fall comes not from its principal weakness but "derived more from USD strength."

Masahiko Loo, senior fixed income strategist at State Street Investment Management, sees FX intervention risks rising if the yen "decisively breaks above 162." But he noted that finance ministry action alone "is unlikely to do the heavy lifting -- making April BOJ hike increasingly necessary to stem further yen weakness."

Some market participants went further and speculated about the possibility of intervention in crude oil futures markets after officials, including Finance Minister Katayama, blamed speculative trading in oil for the yen's weakness.

Unlike currency intervention, "there is no past experience of currency authorities intervening in commodity markets," Citi analysts said. "There are considerable uncertainties and it would not be desirable from the perspective of free market principals."

How far will the yen fall?....

....MUCH MORE

Six months of USDJPY via TradingView. Higher is weaker yen i.e. more yen to buy a buck:

 

"Germany Drafts Plan to Hit US Companies in Next Trump Clash"

Keeping in mind the simple truth that countries do not have friends.

They have interests. 

From Bloomberg, March 26:

The next time Donald Trump tries to push America’s traditional allies into line, the German government intends to be better prepared.

Officials in Berlin have started mapping vulnerabilities in US supply chains to identify points where Germany and its European Union partners could apply pressure, according to people familiar with the effort. Their goal is to create a consensus among EU nations on how they can use their leverage, if and when they get drawn into another dispute with the White House.

The initial findings suggest ways to target the massive US tech firms with close ties to the White House, the officials said. Other options could aim for the AI investment boom that has helped to drive US stocks to record highs this year or push up drug prices for American voters, an issue the president has already shown he’s sensitive to.

“By sticking together, Europeans can prove to Trump that they are prepared to match him,” said Tobias Gehrke, an expert on economic statecraft at the European Council of Foreign Relations. “If Europe can credibly demonstrate that intimidation tactics don’t work, this could, over time, weaken those forces in Washington that support Trump.”

The German exercise is part of an urgent European effort to build a geopolitical framework to manage the increasing hostility of the US and the growing power of China. Yet it’s also a process that is fraught with jeopardy: across the EU, senior officials are painfully aware of how exposed their companies would be should reprisals with the US spiral out of control.

The officials cautioned that no decisions have been taken on activating the plans and their preferred outcome is to rebuild relations with the White House.

A spokeswoman for the German chancellery declined to comment; a spokesperson from the economy ministry said that trade is increasingly being used to advance nations’ own interests.

“The federal government is closely monitoring these developments with a focus on critical supply chains and dependencies,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg. “It considers not only its own dependencies but also those of countries of origin and countries that import goods from Germany and the European Union.”

Tensions between the US and Europe will come to the fore on Thursday when Group of Seven foreign ministers gather near Paris to discuss the fallout from the American-Israeli attack on Iran which has triggered a surge in energy prices around the world.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told German lawmakers last week that Europe needs to learn that the dependencies that emerged during the high period of globalization aren’t all on their side. Other nations rely on the EU for critical supplies, he said, and the bloc should be ready to use that leverage.

“We are identifying our interests,” he said, “and at the same time the means to defend them.”

Trump’s push to take Greenland from Denmark in January changed the thinking in Europe’s capitals, the officials said. For many, that episode proved decisively that the era of mutual transatlantic commitment has run its course. While the US remains a partner in some areas, the people said, it’s also a security risk that Europe must be prepared to counter.

“There will be no going back to the way things were,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Tuesday. “The rift is too deep.”

The work in Berlin is at a relatively early stage, with staff compiling data on European ties to the US, according to government officials. There’s also a parallel initiative taking place in Brussels, where the European Commission is mapping EU vulnerabilities ahead of a new security strategy and, as part of that process, officials have been discussing how the bloc could leverage its choke points over rival powers.

European officials are also discussing compensation mechanisms to support member states that are more exposed to US retaliation should that take place. Everyone is aware that the US still holds the upper hand.

“Germany, as an economic power, cannot afford to hide its own tools of influence,” said Cornelia Woll, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School. “However, such threats should not be used lightly, because in an interconnected world — such actions always result in costs for both sides and can potentially set off a downward spiral.”

US Pressure Points Identified by Berlin:

The Single Market

Europe’s biggest point of leverage is the market power of its 450 million affluent consumers, according to officials involved in the discussions. Restricting access or tightening regulation on American firms represents the bloc’s most potent economic weapon. The major tech firms aligned with Trump and Vice President JD Vance are particularly sensitive to EU efforts to regulate social media.

New taxes, fines or operational constraints on Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. or Meta Platforms Inc. could deliver a meaningful economic hit to profits and, in the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, the EU already has legislation on the books that would allow it to target US tech firms, according to Antonio Barroso, a senior geo-economics analyst at Bloomberg Economics.

Data Centers

Another pressure point lies in supply chains running artificial intelligence. US companies — from OpenAI and Anthropic to Microsoft Corp.’s AI units and Elon Musk’s X ventures — depend in part on European industrial inputs for their data center rollout, according to analysis by German officials. Those components include specialized equipment from firms like Siemens AG, the officials said.

Europe is already adapting its industrial policy to the more confrontational global environment. Through measures like the Industrial Acceleration Act, the EU is prioritizing domestic firms in public procurement and pushing for greater use of European components — going some way to shield its manufacturing base and sideline US and Chinese competitors.

Semiconductors

Export controls would prove to be even more painful weapons against the US, the German officials said. Washington remains reliant on European firms for chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing and Dutch firm ASML and its German suppliers, Zeiss and Trumpf, produce advanced lithography machines essential for cutting-edge chip production....

....MUCH MORE 

Sunday, March 29, 2026

"Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle severely damages Exmouth airport and disrupts LNG operations in Western Australia"

From The Watchers, March 29:

Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle made landfall just south of Coral Bay, Western Australia, on March 27, 2026, bringing destructive winds, heavy rain, and coastal impacts across the northwest coast. The storm caused significant damage in Exmouth, disrupted essential services, and forced the shutdown of major LNG facilities. 

Severe Tropical Cyclone Narelle made landfall in Western Australia on March 27 as a Category 3 system, after passing the Exmouth area as a more intense severe cyclone. ABC reported that winds of around 200 km/h (124 mph) were recorded at Learmonth, while the BoM reported rainfall of more than 300 mm (11.8 inches) at Learmonth air base on Friday night.

Exmouth sustained severe damage as winds of around 200 km/h (124 mph) were recorded at Learmonth. Power and water supplies were cut, and Exmouth Shire president Matthew Niikkula said the airport’s apron and domestic terminal had been “obliterated.”....

....Major Australian gas producers Chevron and Woodside reported cyclone-related disruptions to LNG and gas operations in Western Australia, with the most prolonged impacts reported at Chevron’s Wheatstone facility and Woodside’s Karratha gas plant....

....MUCH MORE 

"Who Breaks First in the Memory Supercycle?" (AI infrastructure and servers/industrial, automotive, and telecom/consumer and cost‑driven electronics)

From EE Times, March 27:

An elasticity lens for 2026–2028 

The semiconductor memory market is once again in an up‑cycle, but it doesn’t look like the familiar boom‑and‑bust pattern veterans expect. Prices for DRAM and NAND have surged on tight wafers, capital discipline, and the gravitational pull of AI infrastructure.

Unlike prior cycles, price escalation in DRAM and NAND no longer spreads uniformly across end markets. What we’re witnessing is a structurally asymmetric supercycle in which memory’s share of the bill of materials (BOM) and an application’s reliance on capacity and bandwidth now determine who absorbs price shocks and who blinks first. In other words, elasticity has become an application‑level variable, not a commodity‑level constant.

By early 2026, DRAM pricing had climbed approximately 80% quarter‑on‑quarter, while NAND and storage pricing rose by roughly 50%. These moves were fueled by supply constraints, cautious capex from suppliers, and sustained demand from AI accelerators and data‑centric workloads. But the “rising tide” hasn’t lifted all boats equally. The divergence across segments exposes the limits of traditional commodity analysis and makes a strong case for a BOM‑centric elasticity framework to forecast behavior through 2028.

From commodity lens to BOMcentric elasticity

The core of the framework is straightforward: quantify the memory share of system BOM, gauge performance sensitivity to memory capacity or bandwidth, and assess the room to modify specs without breaking the product’s value proposition or qualification envelope.

These three axes sort applications into low-, medium-, and high-elasticity tiers—each with distinct pricing tolerance, redesign timelines, and cancellation risks.

Low elasticity: AI infrastructure and servers

AI and enterprise servers, along with select high‑end platforms, such as advanced medical imaging, sit at the inelastic end. Here, memory is architecturally inseparable from performance and monetization: High-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks and large DDR5 footprints directly dictate throughput, latency, and accelerator utilization. Even when memory exceeds 40–50% of the BOM, cutting capacity undermines platform economics more than it saves cost.

Typical 2026 AI nodes deploy between 192 GB and 288 GB of HBM per system, with additional DDR5 and 20–30 TB of NVMe, pushing memory content into five‑digit dollars per system. Yet elasticity remains low because any reduction directly degrades accelerator utilization and total cost of ownership. Through 2026–2028, availability rather than price is expected to remain the dominant constraint.

Medium elasticity: industrial, automotive, and telecom

Industrial automation, automotive domain controllers, and telecom RAN compute live in the middle. Memory is important, but not singularly defining. These markets are governed by long qualification cycles, safety cases, and reliability regimes.

These systems operate under long qualification cycles and strict reliability constraints, limiting rapid redesign but allowing gradual adaptation. At the same time, this allows measured adaptation: capacity right‑sizing, phased rollouts, and targeted platform delays.

Typical configurations range from 32GB to 64GB of DDR4 or DDR5 memory paired with moderate storage capacities. Under continued price pressure, OEMs pursue capacity right-sizing, staggered deployments, and selective platform delays rather than immediate cancellation.

High elasticity: consumer and costdriven electronics

Consumer platforms, such as TVs, set-top boxes, and home gateways, treat memory as a cost line. While memory has a meaningful share of BOM, it provides limited differentiation payoff.

Typical configurations include 1GB–2 GB DRAM and 8–32 GB NAND or eMMC storage. Even modest memory price increases trigger immediate de‑contenting, launch delays, or program cancellations. These are the segments that break first when memory inflation exceeds perceived end‑user value.

What the elasticity lens changes in practice...

....MUCH MORE

Also at EE Times:

AI’s Booming Demand Meets a Semiconductor Reality Check

The Great Memory Stockpile

The Memory Supercycle: How Allocation Is Creating New Infrastructure Bottlenecks

Meanwhile, In Canada: Woman Has Back Pain, Goes To Hospital, Is Counseled On Assisted Suicide

From the New York Post, March 28:

Woman visiting ER for back pain stunned after doctor suggests euthanasia program  

Just die already.

A Canadian woman claims she went to the hospital for help with a sudden illness — and was shocked when a doctor offered to help her die instead.

Miriam Lancaster visited an emergency room in Vancouver in April 2025 Canada after waking up with serious back pain, according to the Western Standard.

That’s when a doctor offered Lancaster Medical Assistance in Dying, the country’s voluntary euthanasia program, before any other treatment, 

Lancaster, 84, was appalled.

“All I knew was that I woke up in excruciating pain — so much so that my daughter came running in from another room. She called an ambulance.

“Off I went to the Vancouver General Hospital and I was approached by a young lady doctor whose very first words out of her mouth were, ‘We would like to offer you MAiD,'” Miriam said in a March 18 video posted to X.

“I was taken aback. That was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to find out why I was in pain — I did not want to die.”

The MAiD program in Canada allows eligible adults with a serious, irremediable medical conditions and intolerable, irreversible suffering to receive assistance from a doctor or nurse practitioner in ending their life....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously:

July 2022 - ICYMI: Canada Expanded The Criteria For Euthanasia To Include Those Suffering Soley From Mental Illness

Just like the Nazis.
And then it was a straight line from Aktion T4 to Aktion Reinhard.
From The CBC, March 11:....

*****
....That expanded access also applies to people too poor to live with dignity.

August 2022 - Follow-Up: Euthanasia Is Now The Sixth-Leading Cause Of Death In Canada

Although Statistics Canada does not include MAID deaths in their cause of death stats last year's (2025) 16,499 assisted suicides would rank at #4 leading causes of death, just behind #3, accidental deaths (20,415 in 2024).

October 2022 - Canadian Assisted Suicide As Government Social Safety Net

October 2024 -  "Canadian doctors reveal regret over euthanizing patients who were simply obese or poor"

Flashback: Let's Face It, When You Reap The Rewards Of Money And Power, You Want To Keep The Money And Power Flowing

Originally posted March 6, 2024.

Tuning into the vibeconomy and the vibeocracy it almost feels as though there are tectonic tensions building and building. To outward appearances not much changes from day to day but the entire group of systems that we live with and depend on, economic and social, political and religio and scientific and constructed exist under tension that is increasing.

If the geological analogy is anywhere near accurate the pressure will find a way to release itself. Either bit by bit, deforming human-made institutions but maintaining most aspects of the structure, the way a fault-line slips or the pressure will be relieved catastrophically with unimaginable force and unpredictable first, second, and third order effects.

And like birds or cats human beings pick up on the vibe or piezo-electic effect or whatever it is that is sensed and have a just barely conscious feeling of unease.

From The Philosophical Salon, March 4, 2024:

Trust in Institutions and the War Dividend

Even if almost no one wants to admit it, our “system” is obsolete, and for this reason it is now morphing into a “closed system” – totalitarian in nature. It is equally clear that the few who continue to benefit materially from the capitalist system (the 0.1%) are willing to do whatever it takes to prolong its obsolete existence. At its root, contemporary capitalism works in a simple way: debt is issued from one door and purchased from another through the issuance of new debt in a depressive loop from which most of the destructive phenomena of our time originate.

The facilitators of the “debt-chasing-debt” mechanism are a class of profiteering technocrats whose main psychological trait is psychopathy. They are so devoted to the mechanism that they have become its extensions – like automatons, they work tirelessly for the mechanism, without any remorse for the devastation of human life it dispenses. The psychopathic dimension (uninhibited, manipulative, and criminally antisocial) is not, however, an exclusive prerogative of the transnational financial clique, but extends both to the political-institutional caste (from heads of government to local administrators) and the so-called intelligentsia (experts, journalists, scholars, philosophers, artists, etc.). In other words, the institutional mediation of reality is now entirely mediated by the mechanism itself. Whoever enters the system must accept its rules while also, ipso facto, assuming its psychopathological traits. Thus, blind capitalist objectivity (the drive for profit-making) becomes indistinguishable from the subjects representing it.

Because of their personality disorder, the technocrats in the control room tend to overestimate their ability to enforce a closed system that might conceal the decline of capitalist socialization. First, the tragic pandemic farce, and now the cold wind of permanent warfare, are putting the average citizen’s unconditional trust in their representative institutions to the test. If it was relatively easy to silence doubt and dissent with “humanitarian lockdowns” and emergency rule – which allowed a most opportunistic political class to briefly regain some clout – the complicity in the Gaza genocide coupled with the neo-McCarthyistic construction of the “democratic front against the Russian monster”, with related arms race, are beginning to undermine the old certainties of the silent majority.

In the new totalitarian normal, reality does not quite make it to the newsfeeds or television screens. What we get instead is the hyperreal as theorized by Jean Baudrillard, which is neither real nor fiction, but the narrative container that has replaced both. Thus, the brutal ethnic cleansing of Gaza continues at full throttle along with heart-bleeding humanitarian concerns for civilians, telegenic appeals against all forms of extremism, and cynical warnings of rampant antisemitism. At the same time, we are reminded 24/7 that the Russians (who else?) are preparing for nuclear cyberattack from space and the invasion of Europe. Without even realising it, the conspiracy theory ghostbusters turn into the very thing they love to hate. The resulting maelstrom of infotainment induces a state of collective hypnosis which proves to be more effective than traditional censorship, since it eliminates ex ante the request for a real referent, in all its radical ambiguity.

The hyper-mediation of the world aims to become the only available world. The events narrated by corporate media are no longer thought of as something other than their narration, since, in the hyperreal reversal, it is the narration itself that thinks the subject. Our saturated info-space is in the form of an infinitely malleable self-referential spectacle that a priori sterilizes all critical thought. The official debate on Gaza or Ukraine, for example, is continuously reframed into a debate on the debate itself, strictly demarcated by morally preformatted binary codes (democracy/terrorism, etc.). This tendency to liquidate the referent must be understood in its etymological sense as a tendency to “make it liquid”. It established itself, historically, as a consequence of a process of economic virtualization based on the replacement of the profitability of wage labour (real valorisation) with the simulated profitability of speculative capital.

We live in a world where the stock markets of Japan and the United Kingdom reach record highs as their economies slip into recession, while the United States manages to stay afloat courtesy of a monstrous deficit guaranteed by monetary and military hegemony. Regardless of the crash or drastic correction in the making, the ongoing financial market party (with very few invitees) is inextricably connected with the euphoria of war. Why? First, military production for “long-term security commitments” is now an essential support for increasingly sagging real growth as measured in GDP. For example, 64% of the $60.7 billion allocated to Ukraine in the latest aid package will be absorbed by the US military industry. The source here is not Putin’s TASS but the Wall Street Journal, which also admits that since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, US industrial production in the defence sector has increased by 17.5%.

But, above all, techno-military-industrial excitement continues to function as tailwind for a hyperinflated financial sector now in thrall to AI mania. The current S&P 500 bubble is the result of the hysterical overvaluation of a handful of tech corporations, the so-called Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, which today are actually down to the Magnificent Two: Nvidia and Meta). The strong imbalance closely resembles the dot.com tech bubble of the late 1990s, when the internet excitement led to the overvaluation of Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, eBay, Qualcomm etc. While these companies managed to save their own skins, many start-ups were wiped out by the bursting of the bubble. Ergo, a sensational market moved by the lever of Artificial Intelligence would do better to prepare itself for an equally sensational fall.

Let’s keep in mind that financial risk today is immensely higher than twenty-five years ago. Over the last two decades, the system has made itself hostage to the rather elementary ruse called “creation of liquidity out of thin air” (and related scapegoats), whose purpose is to refinance the mass of outstanding debt which supports state deficits as well as speculative bubbles populated by heaps of zombie companies. A stock market collapse of around 80%, like that of the dot.com at the end of 2000, would now be equivalent to a barrage of atomic explosions – metaphorically and literally....

....MUCH MORE

The above is by Fabio Vighi, one of our favorite Marxist professors.

Here's his latest at The Philosophical Salon, March 9:

Bombs for Bonds: Iran and the Geopolitics of Refinancing

Predictably, Iran is the next crisis in line. No sooner were we told to obsess over the latest unsealing of the Epstein files than our gaze was already redirected toward the geopolitical brinkmanship now threatening to engulf the entire Middle East. It is Iran’s turn, then, in rapid succession after Venezuela, the ongoing strangulation of Cuba, and especially the Gaza genocide – a catastrophe abruptly pushed from the news cycle. The theatre of war must be permanent, and it requires fresh meat. The long-awaited Iranian escalation fits the role: the latest bloodletting in a permanent and carefully curated carnival of violence, chaos, and outrage staged by the custodians of our glorious civilisation. The carnage is real, and so are its victims. But to focus on this theatre alone is to miss the main event, the hidden trigger of the violence now detonating around us. The real story of American power in the twenty-first century is being written in the arcane world of bond auctions, speculative bubbles, repo markets, and the relentless, silent mechanics of debt.

The modern financial system is no longer built on productivity, wages, or shared prosperity. It is built on highly leveraged speculations: an ever-expanding, increasingly abstract tower of claims on future wealth creation that the underlying economy can no longer generate. Since the 1980s, as technological productivity surged and labour’s share of value stagnated, finance metastasized to compensate. Leverage substituted for growth and debt became not just an instrument but the system’s organizing principle. And now, as the United States confronts an unprecedented wall of IOUs that must be refinanced, this foundational reality has come to drive everything else. With almost $39 trillion in federal debt and a maturity profile that demands constant rollover, the United States does not merely prefer low interest rates and exceptional monetary injections – it structurally depends on them. Moreover, it is not only the federal government that is drowning. American private-sector debt – corporate, household, and financial – now runs into the tens of trillions, much of it floating on a sea of opaque leverage and asset bubbles that would burst if interest rates failed to fall or liquidity dried up. In this context, geopolitical dominance should be framed as monetary dominance. Crisis drives capital into Treasuries, suppresses yields, and enables rollover.

Thus, the Iran escalation could paradoxically extend the lifespan of the AI bubble: geopolitical risk boosts defence-AI spending, while an oil shock may crush consumption and suppress core inflation (as the “pandemic shock” did in 2020), opening the door to renewed Federal Reserve easing and the liquidity injections required to keep the debt-driven architecture of U.S. markets intact. The strikes themselves were a joint US-Israel operation, blending American surveillance architecture with Israeli precision targeting. Notably, they were executed through AI-assisted military systems – reportedly involving models such as Anthropic’s Claude, already deployed in earlier operations like the Venezuela raid – illustrating how the very technologies inflating financial markets are simultaneously becoming embedded in the infrastructure of modern warfare. Historically, capitalism’s great technological leaps – from railways to nuclear energy to the internet – have advanced in tandem with the machinery of war. AI proves no exception.

Strip away the geopolitical drama, then, and the real story is financial fragility. The least one can say is that without the weekend bombing of Iran, U.S. market drops would have been more chaotic and disorderly, because investors would have focussed directly on financial fragility. The pressure has been building for months in the sprawling private-credit market, where lightly regulated lenders have pumped hundreds of billions into companies that traditional banks would not touch, from subprime auto financing to leveraged corporate borrowers. Early warning signs – such as the collapsing of Tricolor Holdings and First Brands (both filed for bankruptcy in September 2025, with extremely high liabilities) – suggest that cracks are appearing first in the weakest corners of the credit cycle, precisely where excess liquidity tends to accumulate when expanding. The latest rupture is the collapse of Market Financial Solutions (MFS), a UK property lender forced into administration after creditors alleged that the same collateral had been pledged multiple times, leaving more than 80% of roughly £1.2 billion in debts effectively unaccounted for.

Markets had started to notice, as even Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have seen sharp equity declines of roughly 6%. It is a worrying signal when institutions of systemic importance come under pressure rather than the usual fringe lenders. Against this backdrop, warnings from Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan) about risks echoing the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis sound less like cautious rhetoric and more like a reminder of a familiar pattern: excessive leverage, opaque credit structures and complacent markets suddenly colliding with tighter conditions. If the system begins to buckle, the Federal Reserve will once again be expected to step in.

The financial architecture operates through two interlocking mechanisms, both converging on the same objective: keeping U.S. borrowing costs low. The first is the dollar’s exorbitant privilege as world reserve currency. When the U.S. asserts dominance, global uncertainty rises – but mostly outside U.S. borders. Capital tends to flee the periphery and concentrate in the core. Treasuries absorb this demand, and yields fall. In these instances, American power is rewarded with cheaper financing. This privilege must be actively maintained. Military assertiveness entails permanent commitments, including defence spending, security guarantees, and reconstruction. These are not costs incurred in service of stability; they are the machinery through which instability is perpetuated. We inhabit a permanent state of exception, a system that must manufacture enemies and crises in order to suspend fiscal and monetary restraint. In such a system, the measures justified as temporary quickly become permanent. War-related costs widen deficits, accelerate Treasury issuance, and eventually test the market’s capacity to absorb debt. At that point, the second mechanism begins: central bank intervention. The same state of exception that justified the bombs now justifies the printing press.....

....MUCH MORE 

"Global Helium Shortage Begins to Constrain High-Density Compute and Cooling Systems"

From the high performance computing mavens at HPC Wire, March 27:

The tightened supply of helium due to the Middle East conflict has started to expose a weak link in the AI and data infrastructure stack – helium. While most of the industry stays focused on chips and models, helium plays a small but crucial role in the manufacturing of semiconductors and cooling systems.

When chips are being manufactured, helium acts as a stable gas to keep the process as precise as possible. As helium is chemically inert (does not react with other materials), it creates a clean and controlled environment where even the smallest variations could otherwise ruin an entire batch of chips.

Helium also plays a critical role in cooling. It helps carry heat away from servers and critical components before they overheat. The chemical properties of helium make it more efficient than regular air in removing heat. It is also safer to use in high-density environments such as AI data centers that have sensitive electronics.

Helium is used during wafer fabrication in processes such as plasma etching and chemical vapor deposition. It is also used for heat transfer and backside wafer cooling, enabling uniform temperature control during lithography and other high-precision steps. In simple terms, helium helps keep modern data centers running, from making computer chips to keeping servers from overheating.

Commenting on the supply risk for helium, the Semiconductor Industry Association wrote in 2023 that “helium’s unique properties as an inert gas and a high thermal conductor make it ideal for use in functions that require preventing unwanted chemical reactions and ensuring control and precision of wafer temperatures.”

As HPC systems push toward higher density and performance, even small disruptions in cooling or chip supply can ripple across research workloads, AI training clusters, and national supercomputing facilities. These systems run at extreme power density, where even small inefficiencies in cooling can quickly impact performance and stability....

....MUCH MORE 

 March 21 - Semiconductors: The Helium Shortage Is No Laughing Matter

Saturday, March 28, 2026

"BlackRock’s Larry Fink: AI Is Not a Bubble — Power Is the Real Bottleneck"

From TECHi.com March 27, 2026 · 8:28 PM EDT :

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink just told the world what most of Wall Street is still missing: the artificial intelligence boom is real, it is not a bubble, and the companies that will dominate the next decade are not necessarily the ones writing the algorithms. They are the ones building the power plants, laying the electrical grids, and training the electricians. In his 2026 annual chairman’s letter — released March 23 from the helm of the world’s largest asset manager with $14 trillion under management — Fink laid out a thesis that reframes the entire AI investment narrative. The bottleneck that will determine winners and losers in the AI era is not semiconductor supply, software capability, or even data. It is electricity.

This is a structural shift in how capital markets should think about artificial intelligence. While investors remain fixated on Nvidia’s earnings and the latest large language model, a $7 trillion infrastructure buildout is accelerating beneath the surface — and the companies positioned to capture that opportunity are not the ones dominating the headlines. AI runs on electricity, not just algorithms, and the race to power the intelligence revolution is becoming the defining investment story of the decade.

“This Is Not a Bubble” — But It’s Not What You Think

Fink has been unusually direct in pushing back against the AI bubble narrative. Speaking to CNBC in late 2025, he acknowledged the scale of capital deployment but rejected the implication that it signals irrational exuberance: “There is certainly a skyrocketing amount of capital being put to work. If you put it in a framework of geopolitical positioning, we as a country need these investments if we’re going to be the leader in AI technology.”

The distinction matters. Bubbles are characterized by speculative excess chasing imaginary demand. What Fink sees instead is real demand from the world’s largest technology companies that is outstripping the physical capacity to deliver. Microsoft disclosed an $80 billion backlog of Azure AI orders that it cannot fulfill — not because the software doesn’t work, but because there isn’t enough power to run it. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle are collectively planning over $600 billion in capital expenditure for 2026 alone, a 36% increase over 2025. That is not speculation. That is companies racing to build physical infrastructure to serve demand that already exists.

The Scale of the AI Buildout: $7 Trillion and Counting

The numbers are staggering. McKinsey estimates the total investment required to scale AI data center infrastructure through 2030 at $6.7 trillion — roughly the GDP of Japan and Germany combined. Building a single gigawatt of data center capacity costs between $40 billion and $60 billion, according to estimates from Nvidia and independent research. Global data center demand is projected to grow from approximately 55 gigawatts today to between 170 and 220 gigawatts by 2030 — a near-quadrupling that requires building the equivalent of the entire current U.S. data center fleet every 18 months.

To put this in perspective, Goldman Sachs projects that data center power demand will increase 165% by the end of the decade, requiring approximately $720 billion in grid spending in the United States alone. Hyperscalers raised $108 billion in debt during 2025, and projections suggest $1.5 trillion in total debt issuance over the coming years to finance the buildout. AI capital expenditure now consumes 94% of hyperscaler operating cash flows after dividends and buybacks — an all-in bet on physical infrastructure that dwarfs any previous technology investment cycle.

The capital commitments are accelerating across every major player. Meta Platforms signed the largest single cloud and data center contract in its history — a $27 billion deal with Nebius Group, including $12 billion in dedicated AI infrastructure capacity beginning in early 2027 and an additional $15 billion from Nebius’ broader cloud operations. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged up to $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure projects by 2028 to scale AI capabilities. Nvidia reinforced the trend with a $2 billion investment in Nebius — a signal that the GPU maker sees the “neocloud” infrastructure layer as critical to downstream AI demand. Across the industry, the largest cloud and AI players have collectively invested more than $650 billion in 2026 on facilities and equipment to support next-generation AI applications.

The Power Problem: AI’s True Constraint

This is where Fink’s thesis gets sharp, and where most investors are still behind the curve. The binding constraint on AI growth is not chip supply — Nvidia’s production is scaling. It is not software — the models keep getting better and more efficient. The constraint is power. Reliable, affordable, scalable electricity.

The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity consumption will reach approximately 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 — more than double current levels and roughly equivalent to the entire electricity consumption of Japan. In the United States, data centers are expected to account for nearly half of all electricity demand growth through the end of the decade. Morgan Stanley warns of a 49-gigawatt generation shortfall in the U.S. alone by 2028 — a deficit that cannot be closed by building solar panels or wind farms fast enough.

The grid connection bottleneck is equally severe. Average lead times to connect new power generation to the grid exceed four years in primary U.S. markets. GE Vernova’s gas turbine order book — the fastest path to reliable baseload power — has an 80-gigawatt backlog stretching into 2029. Hyperscalers have responded by going off-grid entirely: one unnamed company is investing $20 billion in an energy park with colocated generation, storage, and computing load designed to bypass the queue. Energy is becoming the new silicon — and the companies that secure power first will have an insurmountable competitive advantage.

China vs. the West: The Geopolitical Energy Race

Fink’s geopolitical framing is not accidental. China is winning the AI energy race, and it is not close. Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2030, China will have approximately 400 gigawatts of spare power capacity — triple the expected needs of the entire global data center fleet. China generates more than twice as much electricity as the United States and has been adding capacity at roughly 6% per year for a decade. Its reserve margins run 80-100%, while U.S. regional grids operate at 15% margins that buckle during extreme weather.

The nuclear contrast is stark. China has 102 reactors operational, under construction, or approved — representing 113 gigawatts — and approved 10 additional reactors in April 2025 alone. Beijing targets 200 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2030 and 400-500 gigawatts by 2050. The United States, by comparison, is celebrating the potential reopening of the Three Mile Island plant by 2028 to serve Microsoft. David Fishman, a Chinese electricity expert who briefed visiting AI industry executives, summarized the disparity: “They’re set up to hit grand slams. The U.S., at best, can get on base.”....

....MUCH MORE 

"Visiting UAE, Zelensky announces defense cooperation with Abu Dhabi amid Iran attacks"

This could be a big deal.

From AFP via the Times of Israel, March 28:

Deal follows agreement between Ukraine and Saudi Arabia as Kyiv offers anti-drone expertise to Gulf nations facing Iranian attacks; Tehran targets Abu Dhabi, Omani port in latest strikes 

Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to cooperate on defense amid Iran’s drone strikes across the region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

Zelensky’s unannounced visit to the UAE came a day after he announced a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, inked as the Gulf countries face Iranian drones launched by Tehran in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes.

Kyiv has sought to leverage its expertise in downing Russian drones to help Gulf nations and has deployed anti-drone experts to the region, including to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Zelensky said on social media he had met with Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and they “agreed to cooperate in the field of security and defense. Our teams will finalize the details.”

“For all normal states, it is important to ensure stability and protect lives amid today’s threats. Ukraine has relevant expertise in this area,” he said....

....MUCH MORE 

And at Ukrainska Pravda, March 28:

Iranian media reports strike on drone storage site with Ukrainians, Foreign Ministry denies it 

Fars news agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, claimed on the morning of 28 March that Iran struck a storage site for Ukrainian unmanned systems in Dubai along with specialist personnel who supposedly were at the site..... 

"Yuan, Not Dollars: Iran’s Hormuz Toll Booth Picks Its Currency"

From TheDeepDive (Canada), March 27:

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has begun accepting yuan-denominated passage fees in the Strait of Hormuz, routing payments through Chinese maritime intermediaries while Tehran’s parliament advances legislation to make the practice permanent, shipping intelligence firm Lloyd’s List confirmed Thursday.

The system — which maritime analysts have labeled the “Tehran Toll Booth” — runs through IRGC-linked intermediaries that pull vessel identification, full crew rosters, cargo details, and ownership records before passing each file for sanctions screening and what Iranian sources describe as geopolitical review. Cleared vessels are then issued authorization codes and escorted by IRGC pilot boats through a dedicated corridor around Larak Island, well inside Iranian territorial waters.

Continues:

...and anchoring the yuan at a key global chokepoint. It means the US can’t sanction it. 

Lloyd’s List Intelligence, citing three sources familiar with the arrangement, confirmed that at least two vessels have paid transit fees in yuan, with one transit brokered by a Chinese maritime services company that also handled payment to Iranian authorities on behalf of the shipowner....

....MUCH MORE 

"Joining war, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis launch missile attack on southern Israel"

From the Times of Israel, March 28:

Sirens sound in Beersheba as IDF says ballistic missile was intercepted with no injuries; attack comes hours after group warned it was ready to intervene militarily

Yemen’s Houthis launched a ballistic missile attack at southern Israel on Saturday morning, triggering sirens in Beersheba and surrounding areas, in the first offensive from the Iran-aligned group since the start of the war with Iran.

In a statement, the Houthis claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they had targeted “sensitive Israeli military sites” with a “barrage of ballistic missiles.”

The IDF said one missile fired from Yemen was successfully shot down by air defenses.

The strike came a day after the group warned it was prepared to intervene militarily if other countries joined the United States and Israel in their campaign against Iran, or if the Red Sea was used to launch attacks on the Islamic Republic.

“We confirm that our fingers are on the trigger for direct military intervention” if any new alliances join Washington and Israel against Iran and its allies, or if the Red Sea is used for “hostile operations” against Iran, the rebel group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a televised speech late Friday evening.

Saree also said the Houthis were prepared to act if what he called the escalation against Iran and the “axis of resistance” continued, but did not say what form any intervention would take. 

The group’s involvement raises the prospect of a broader regional confrontation, particularly given the Houthis’ ability to strike targets far beyond Yemen and disrupt shipping lanes around the Arabian Peninsula....

....MUCH MORE 

Friday, March 27, 2026

Betting On The Weather, On Catastrophes, On Natural and Unnatural Phenomena

This is pretty much dead-center on our wheelhouse.

From Aeon Magazine, March 27:

Catastrophe markets
Americans love to gamble. But placing bets on wildfires, floods and storms comes with serious moral and social costs 

Will a Category 5 hurricane make landfall in the US before 2027? Will there be a megaquake by 30 June? Will 2026 be the hottest year ever? You can bet on these and dozens of other disasters in the online prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, where users trade ‘yes’ and ‘no’ shares in the outcome of future events in politics, sports, popular culture, business, and weather. Interspersed with trending categories like ‘Ukraine’, ‘Trump’ and ‘Crypto’ are event markets in ‘Hurricanes’, ‘Natural disasters’ and ‘Climate change’.

In January 2025, emergency management officials and insurance companies began estimating losses in the Los Angeles wildfires that ultimately included 440 deaths, of which 31 were direct deaths, and between $76 billion and $131 billion in property and capital losses. Online bettors had been wagering on this event and tallied their winnings or losses in catastrophe markets. By mid-January, Polymarket bets on the wildfires’ spread, duration and political fallout totalled more than $1.2 million. A Polymarket user posted a comment: ‘Volume so high in this market it cause another fire.’

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, The New York Times published an article entitled ‘Catastrophe Markets’ that discussed the short-lived impact of the disaster on stock prices. Today’s online catastrophe markets are markets literally in disaster. People bet on whether disasters will happen and how bad they will be. These catastrophe markets raise some questions, including what, besides money, is at stake? What kind of thinking about risk in society do they promote and preclude?

One aspect of the history of catastrophe markets is very old. Weather gambling was described by one newspaper in 1931 as ‘one of the oldest, most fascinating and uncertain gambles in the world’. In 1886, betting on how long it would rain was ‘in vogue’, and, by the 1930s, office weather pools were commonplace. Weather gambling has taken on different and increasingly organised forms from the 19th to the 21st centuries, from informal wagers to gambling rings and lotteries to gamified forecasting apps like Weather Champs.

Rain betting, the oldest and most common form of weather gambling, was often tied to local community traditions. It flourished in Calcutta and Bombay in the 1880s and ’90s. Crowds gathered to gamble on whether a rain gauge would overflow, confident that cheating was impossible because there was no ambiguity in a downpour. As one newspaper remarked: ‘When it rains in India it rains; there is no half-way business about it.’ This assumption that the natural world defied market manipulation was echoed by accounts imagining rain betting as a model for speculation in the US because of its distance from volatility in railroad stocks and market swings in general.

Capitalism turned the uncertainty of the weather into a calculable risk and source of profit

So-called ‘pools on the weather’ in the early to mid-20th century signalled the growth and bureaucratisation of weather gambling, made possible in the US by government weather data. With the rise of government forecasting in Europe and the US, meteorological data became a steady stream in what the philosopher of science Ian Hacking called the 19th-century ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ produced by European state bureaucracies, and it led to the systemisation and scaling up of weather gambling in the 20th century. As a Texas newspaper observed in 1915: ‘Gambling on the weather has become an institution throughout a great part of the United States.’ Large syndicates in cities in the US and Canada were well organised, lucrative, and illegal. In 1950, St Louis police raided what newspapers called a ‘weather-betting racket’ that pulled in a reported $2.6 million annually. Some lotteries were pure chance, while others involved forecasting skill and judgment. Some cities had pools on the temperature at a specific hour the next day or on other combinations of weather data.  
Gamblers attempted to bribe US weather officials to falsify temperature figures and tampered with government weather reports en route to newspaper offices. In St Louis, extra security measures were implemented to prevent this manipulation, and the national weather service stressed its commitment to keeping weather data, a public good in the US, accessible to the public.

Weather data also enabled the financialisation of catastrophe, another precursor of catastrophe markets. In his speech on ‘New England Weather’ (1919), Mark Twain catalogued weather varieties, including ‘weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest.’ Twain’s satirical assetisation of the weather was prescient. Speculative financial instruments designed to manage weather-related risk – rain insurance, flood insurance, weather derivatives, and catastrophe bonds – emerged during the 20th century. Through insurance and reinsurance, capitalism turned the uncertainty of the weather into a calculable risk and source of profit. This process of taming weather-related risk hinged on the assumption that the stochastic nature of rain, hurricanes and other natural hazards could be rationally managed, like an asset, with market logic. But insurance agents, energy traders and hedge fund managers were only ever partially successful. The uncertainties of bad weather and natural hazards always persisted....

....MUCH MORE 

I will note that, at least as far as fires go, the concept of insurable interest, i.e. who can bet on the event, should be structured to prevent the arsonist from participating in the payoff, perhaps by public execution. 

If interested see:

"Early abuses in life insurance markets"

On moral hazard:

Pro forma, I'm Miss America 
Warren Buffett: Avoid States With Large Unfunded Pension Liabilities

And the conceptually related:

Perversity and Credit Default Swaps

And many, many more. 

Opportunity: "Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC 800-volt DC power delivery: will enable next-gen AI data centers"

Change equals opportunity. 

From IEEE Spectrum, March 24:

Last week’s Nvidia GTC conference highlighted new chip architectures to power AI. But as the chips become faster and more powerful, the remainder of data center infrastructure is playing catch-up. The power-delivery community is responding: Announcements from Delta, Eaton, and Vertiv showcased new designs for the AI era. Complex and inefficient AC-to-DC power conversions are gradually being replaced by DC configurations, at least in hyperscale data centers.

“While AC distribution remains deeply entrenched, advances in power electronics and the rising demands of AI infrastructure are accelerating interest in DC architectures,” says Chris Thompson, vice president of advanced technology and global microgrids at Vertiv.

AC-to-DC Conversion Challenges

Today, nearly all data centers are designed around AC utility power. The electrical path includes multiple conversions before power reaches the compute load. Power typically enters the data center as medium-voltage AC (1 to 35 kilovolts), is stepped down to low-voltage AC (480 or 415 volts) using a transformer, converted to DC inside an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for battery storage, converted back to AC, and converted again to low-voltage DC (typically 54 V DC) at the server, supplying the DC power computing chips actually require.

“The double conversion process ensures the output AC is clean, stable, and suitable for data center servers,” says Luiz Fernando Huet de Bacellar, vice president of engineering and technology at Eaton.

That setup worked well enough for the amounts of power required by traditional data centers. Traditional data center computational racks draw on the order of 10 kW each. For AI, that is starting to approach 1 megawatt. At that scale, the energy losses, current levels, and copper requirements of AC-to-DC conversions become increasingly difficult to justify. Every conversion incurs some power loss. On top of that, as the amount of power that needs to be delivered grows, the sheer size of the convertors, as well as the connector requirements of copper busbars, becomes untenable. According to an Nvidia blog, a 1-MW rack could require as much as 200 kilograms of copper busbar. For a 1-gigawatt data center, it could amount to 200,000 kg of copper.

Benefits of High-Voltage DC Power

By converting 13.8-kV AC grid power directly to 800 V DC at the data center perimeter, most intermediate conversion steps are eliminated. This reduces the number of fans and power-supply units, and leads to higher system reliability, lower heat dissipation, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller equipment footprint.

“Each power conversion between the electric grid or power source and the silicon chips inside the servers causes some energy loss,” says Fernando.

Switching from 415-V AC to 800-V DC in electrical distribution enables 85 percent more power to be transmitted through the same conductor size. This happens because higher voltage reduces current demand, lowering resistive losses and making power transfer more efficient. Thinner conductors can handle the same load, reducing copper requirements by 45 percent, a 5 percent improvement in efficiency, and 30 percent lower total cost of ownership for gigawatt-scale facilities.

“In a high-voltage DC architecture, power from the grid is converted from medium-voltage AC to roughly 800-V DC and then distributed throughout the facility on a DC bus,” said Vertiv’s Thompson. “At the rack, compact DC-to-DC converters step that voltage down for GPUs and CPUs.”

A report from technology advisory group Omdia claims that higher voltage DC data centers have already appeared in China. In the Americas, the Mt. Diablo Initiative (a collaboration among Meta, Microsoft, and the Open Compute Project) is a 400-V DC rack power distribution experiment.

Innovations in DC Power Systems.... 

....MUCH MORE 

Nvidia has been planning for this for over a year. 

Also at IEEE Spectrum:

A Cold War Kit for Surviving a Nuclear Attack 

Maybe not so much "Opportunity", more of a "News you can use" sort of article. 

Fortune Exclusive: "Anthropic acknowledges testing new AI model representing ‘step change’ in capabilities, after accidental data leak reveals its existence"

 From Fortune, March 26:

AI company Anthropic is developing, and has begun testing with early access customers, a new AI model more capable than any it has released previously, the company said, following a data leak that revealed the model’s existence.  

An Anthropic spokesperson said the new model represents “a step change” in AI performance and is “the most capable we’ve built to date.” The company said the model is currently being trialed by “early access customers.”

Descriptions of the model were inadvertently stored in a publicly accessible data cache and were reviewed by Fortune.

A draft blog post that was available in an unsecured and publicly searchable data store prior to Thursday evening said the new model is called Claude Mythos and that the company believes it poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks.

The same cache of unsecured, publicly discoverable documents revealed details of a planned, invite-only CEO summit in Europe that is part of the company’s drive to sell its AI models to large corporate customers. 

The AI lab left the material, including what appeared to be a draft blog post announcing a new model, in an unsecured, public data lake, according to documents separately located and reviewed by Roy Paz, a senior AI security researcher at LayerX Security, a computer and network security company, and Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge. 

In total, there appeared to be close to 3,000 assets linked to Anthropic’s blog that had not been published previously on the company’s news or research sites that were nonetheless publicly accessible in this data cache, according to Pauwels, whom Fortune asked to assess and review the material.

After being informed of the data leak by Fortune on Thursday, Anthropic removed the public’s ability to search the data store and retrieve documents from it.

In a statement provided to Fortune, Anthropic acknowledged that a “human error” in the configuration of its content management system led to the draft blog post’s being accessible. It described the unpublished material that was left in an unsecured and publicly searchable data store as “early drafts of content considered for publication.”

As well as referring to Mythos, the draft blog post also discussed a new tier of AI models that it says will be called Capybara. In the document, Anthropic says: “‘Capybara’ is a new name for a new tier of model: larger and more intelligent than our Opus models—which were, until now, our most powerful.” Capybara and Mythos appear to refer to the same underlying model.

Currently, Anthropic markets each of its models in three different sizes: The largest and most capable model versions are branded Opus; while slightly faster and cheaper, but less capable, versions are branded Sonnet; and the smallest, cheapest, and fastest are called Haiku. However, in the blog post, Anthropic describes Capybara as a new tier of model that is even larger and more capable than Opus, but also more expensive.

“Compared to our previous best model, Claude Opus 4.6, Capybara gets dramatically higher scores on tests of software coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity, among others,” the company said in the blog.

The document also said the company had completed training Claude Mythos, which the draft blog post described as “by far the most powerful AI model we’ve ever developed.”

In response to questions about the draft blog post, the company acknowledged training and testing a new model. “We’re developing a general purpose model with meaningful advances in reasoning, coding, and cybersecurity,” an Anthropic spokesperson said. “Given the strength of its capabilities, we’re being deliberate about how we release it. As is standard practice across the industry, we’re working with a small group of early access customers to test the model. We consider this model a step change and the most capable we’ve built to date.”

The document Fortune and the cybersecurity experts reviewed consists of structured data for a web page, complete with headings and a publication date, suggesting it forms part of a planned product launch. It outlines a cautious rollout strategy for the model, beginning with a small group of early-access users. The draft blog notes that the model is expensive to run and not yet ready for general release.

Significant new cybersecurity risks...

....MUCH MORE 

"Australia rare-earth stocks soar as China clamps down on exports"

Lynas is our preferred rare earth name, despite MP getting most of the attention (and U.S. government money). 

From Nikkei Asia, March 27: 

Market cap triples in year for Lynas, largest rare-earth separator outside China, on Japan, US deals 

Rare-earth stocks in Australia have risen sharply over the past year amid growing demand from sources other than China for the metals, found in everything from mobile phones and cars to modern weapons.

Lynas Rare Earths, the world's largest commercial rare-earth separator outside China, announced this month it had locked in purchase price guarantees with a joint venture co-owned by Japanese trading house Sojitz. It marks the first time a Japanese client has committed to a price floor for a rare-earth deal.

"The implementation of fair market pricing will reduce price volatility for Lynas and enable continued growth and investment in our operations," Lynas CEO Amanda Lacaze said in a press release.

The sides have agreed to a minimum price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium, which is used to make magnets for vehicles, among other applications. Lynas is entering into a similar deal with the U.S. Defense Department.

Lynas' market capitalization reached 20 billion Australian dollars ($14 billion) as of Friday, roughly tripling in value over 12 months. The company has surpassed the $9.4 billion market cap of its largest U.S. rival, MP Materials, and is gaining ground on China Northern Rare Earth Group High-Tech, the biggest Chinese player with a market cap of $24 billion....

....MUCH MORE, an excellent overview. 

China Northern is an old friend formerly known as "Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co., Ltd." As noted in a 2024 post on Baidu: 

....China has a communist government, they pick winners and losers in business, that's what communists do.

We first became aware of how important this understanding is in the case of the Chinese rare earth companies. Here's a snip from a 2009 post, "Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co., Ltd. UP 10% Wednesday (600111: Shanghai)", this is a couple years before the twenty-tweens rare earth mania:

....China's moves to tighten control on the mining and export of a class of metal ores called rare earth are aimed at attracting high-tech manufacturing to Inner Mongolia, and not at dominating the market, a senior Chinese official said.

Wednesday's comments by Zhao Shuanglin, vice chairman of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, appear aimed at quelling concerns that China is trying to dominate the global market for rare-earth resources, used in some environmentally friendly technologies. Rare-earth metals greatly improve batteries made for hybrid cars....

...China also is taking steps to consolidate its rare-earth industry. Mr. Zhao, who said he runs the region's industrial policy, said Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare Earth Hi-Tech Co. would lead that consolidation. The move is aimed at creating a group of rare-earth miners and processors in the region's western parts. Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare Earth's stock rose 7.6% in Shanghai trading Wednesday.

"Most of the consolidation is complete," Mr. Zhao said. "We want to build Baotou into an international rare earth production base."....

By November 2010 the story was:
"Rare Earth: Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare Earth Hi Tech Co. Ltd. Reports 369% Increase in Q3 Net":
This is the big dog.
And one that the Chinese government says will be on top of the mandated industry consolidation.

IMBSREHTCL was chosen to succeed.

In the case of artificial intelligence it was apparent by 2017 that Baidu, known in the West as a search engine, was the anointed one for machine learning and such.

Some more 2009 posts on "IMBSREHTCL":

Again, years before the mania and "Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co., Ltd." being on everyone's lips and our chosen tagline coming from one of the best books on investing ever written:

"...Words like 'uranium', 'rare earths', etc. seem to be magic to
 those unsuspecting who are often fleeced..."
Gerald M. Loeb
The Battle for Investment Survival
Simon & Schuster, 1935

Rabobank: "Logic, Logistics, And At Least Another 10 Days..."

Michael Every at Rabobank via ZeroHedge, March 27:

Thursday was a rocky day in markets ahead of today’s deadline for the US to shift from bombing Iran’s nuclear, missile, drone, military-industrial, and regime sites to destroying its electricity grid, potentially taking out its power generation for a generation, and unleashing an Iranian response against the broader region’s power, water, and energy infrastructure.

Given that backdrop, some TACO the view it was logical Trump subsequently extended the deadline to 8PM EST on Monday 6 April, because “talks are ongoing, and despite erroneous statements to the contrary from the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well.” Is this true, is Trump pulling a head-fake ahead of an impending strike, or did he just ramp the markets looking for an off-ramp?

Supporting a ‘deal ahead’ view, Israel is shifting from hitting regime to military-industrial targets and is back to 24-hour attack runs despite the incredible strain it puts on its pilots and fighter jets. Yet there are other logics derived from logistics.

The official Iranian position is that the US proposal to end the war is “one-sided and unfair.” Indeed, Iran’s hardline new leaders are calling for a rapid move to gain a nuclear bomb, and it is already recruiting children as young as 12 to man checkpoints in Tehran, according to Al Arabiya, and is using civilian shields around regime targets. Iran also says Yemen's Houthis may cut off Saudi Oil flowing from its Red Sea back-up pipeline and target the key trade route between Asia and Europe.

The Pentagon is reportedly choosing ‘final blow’ options if talks fail. There are strong suggestions that if the US steps up its attacks, the UAE and Saudi Arabia will move from defence to offence alongside it, which would change the regional dynamic – they, like Israel, are not able to ‘go home’ afterwards if they fail. This morning also sees news the US may send an additional 10,000 ground troops - and most of those forces could only arrive by next weekend, just ahead of the new Monday deadline. (Also note in 1991’s Gulf War 1, the US sent 650,000 troops at its peak, and in 2003’s Gulf War 2, around 450,000.)

However, that decline is part of the logic arguing why the US is acting – both to deal with Iran’s nuclear threat and to keep control of key commodity supply chains while it still can. Indeed, it’s reported US plans may include seizing key Iranian oil assets, either strategic islands in Hormuz or the oil hub of Kharg. Trump floated the US controlling Iranian oil yesterday, as it de facto does Venezuelan. If the US were to take the mouth of the Strait it could lock Iranian oil in, throttling the regime, while letting others’ out, albeit under some fire.

In short, we have an extension of the war until at least April 6 as the financial press say ‘24 days to disaster: Trump’s new deadline won’t change oil shock maths’. Oil already at sea pre-war will have been used up by then, revealing the true supply shock. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks have taken 40% of Russian oil export capacity out, there was a strike against a Turkish tanker carrying Russian oil yesterday, and a major cyclone just forced Australian LNG shutdowns. Vietnam and the Philippines are asking Japan to help them from its own oil reserves. Expect more such pleas.

We also have conflating geopolitical shocks that will echo after the war is over. Trump scorched NATO for failing an Iran ‘loyalty test’ and seems to be flirting with dumping the alliance again, despite Secretary General Rutte saying, “NATO is safer under Trump.” Europe still insists, “This isn’t our war.” Trump literally replied, “Ukraine isn’t ours.” Yet that’s as Russia admits it is helping Iran militarily, as Iran helped Russia fight until now…. and as the German Armed Forces Association called to prepare for a war economy.

Potential geoeconomic shocks are also clear beyond those from energy. Though the EU parliament approved the US trade deal yesterday, avoiding the US threat to use LNG exports as an economic weapon, there were caveats. The updated agreement allows for its suspension if: (1) the US undermines the deal's objectives or discriminates against EU economic operators - which implies there cannot be higher tariffs for different sectors, which the US is going to insist on; (2) if the US threatens the territorial integrity of member states - which implies Greenland, which the US is likely to return to after the Diego Garcia debacle with the UK, Spain’s restriction on allowing the Pentagon to use its airbase there, and some EU countries not allowing US planes to overfly them; (3) if the US engages in economic coercion – which is always a risk with economic statecraft....

....MUCH MORE