Category: Semafor

Europeans are driving less and the airline industry is facing a $100 billion fuel hit as the Iran war’s energy impacts expand. Eurozone petrol sales fell 3.5% year-on-year in April, the first drop in almost two years; the UK saw even greater declines. Airlines, meanwhile, warned that margins and profits ...

Armenia’s pro-EU prime minister claimed victory in parliamentary elections, dealing a major blow to Russia’s regional influence. In the years since it launched its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has also sought to exert greater control over Yerevan, spurring allegations of election-meddling and economic coercion. But that has sparked a ...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in North Korea, where he will seek to draw fellow dictator Kim Jong-un closer after years of growing ties between Pyongyang and Moscow. Thousands of North Korean soldiers have fought on the side of Moscow in Russia’s war on Ukraine, while Pyongyang’s arms sales to ...

Ireland will demand that all new data centers in the country “bring your own power,” a sign of a growing backlash against AI infrastructure. Dublin banned new data center construction in 2023, after a huge buildout left the sector using 22% of the country’s electricity: The “BYOP” approach is intended ...

The West is in an age of “hyperpolitics” in which polarization has surged but institutions are incapable of delivering change, a leading researcher argued. Unlike in prior periods of political tension, the Oxford academic Anton Jäger said, people today are able to easily get involved in debates thanks to social ...

The Democrat running to unseat Rep. Bill Huizenga leads the Michigan Republican by three points, according to a new Democratic poll shared first with Semafor. The poll, conducted by Democratic firm GBAO on behalf of Sean McCann’s campaign, is the first to show the state senator pulling ahead of Huizenga ...

Ben’s view At the National Governors Association meeting in Colorado Springs last July, the investor Mark Cuban rhapsodized about the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize education. “You could kind of feel the look of terror on the faces of teachers and parents in the room, myself included,” Utah’s Republican ...

The News MTN Group – Africa’s biggest mobile operator – is leading an industry push to relax national telecoms rules, pitching shared networks as a fix for the continent’s $100 billion digital infrastructure deficit. Senior Vice President Ebenezer Asante told Semafor the old telecom model, in which companies competed to ...

The News Khaldoon Al Mubarak, one of Abu Dhabi’s top money men, visited Washington last week, touting progress one year into the UAE’s decade-long, $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the US. Al Mubarak pledged to accelerate investments in technology and energy infrastructure in the world’s largest economy “despite regional and ...

Wael’s view Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has often been described as the “Warren Buffett of the Middle East.” He has picked winners — including Apple, Amazon, Citigroup, and Twitter — that cemented his status as one of the region’s most successful investors, and he’s touting SpaceX as his ...