Category: Semafor

The Iran war is fundamentally reshaping the oil industry, as geopolitical volatility rattles traders and derails expectations of a Middle East drilling boom. US President Donald Trump’s policy swings on the conflict, delivered via social media, have transformed the way oil markets behave, Citadel’s head of commodities told the Financial ...

Germany is taking steps to privatize the division of Russian gas supplier Gazprom that was seized by Berlin in 2022. The company, now called Sefe, was nationalized in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has played a central role in Germany’s energy transition away from Russian gas. Its CEO ...

Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s profit fell more than 70% as the company leaned aggressively into AI, underscoring the financial challenges facing the country’s tech scene amid intensifying domestic competition. ByteDance, which owns TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, spent much more on computing power, AI infrastructure, and research, according to ...

Supply disruptions from the Middle East are forcing Asia to put a greater focus on energy self-sufficiency. Mitsubishi recently began operating a power plant in Vietnam that only sources coal from nearby countries, helping Hanoi — which gets 80% of its crude oil imports from Kuwait — reduce dependence on ...

China exported 18.8 gigawatts of solar panels to Africa last year, 48% more than in 2024, according to new analysis from the energy think tank Ember. That is equivalent to more than three times the capacity of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the continent’s largest hydropower project, The Wire China ...

High oil prices sparked by the Iran war are accelerating Latin America’s oil boom, though the growth risks exacerbating economic inequality across the region, analysts said. Latin America is forecast to make up around 50% of global oil production growth through 2030, according to Rystad Energy, lifting the prospects of ...

Algeria launched an oil and gas licensing round as it looks to boost output and attract investors amid the global energy crunch sparked by the war in the Middle East. The government said prospect sites are estimated to contain hundreds of millions of barrels of crude and vast amounts of ...

Consumers are feeling the effects of the AI compute crunch, as supplies dwindle and prices rise. The Mac Mini computer, previously a niche product, is now all but out of stock, The Wall Street Journal reported, because the no-frills, high-powered machine is the most cost-effective way to run locally hosted ...

Blue Origin reused a launch booster for the first time, although the mission it was used on was unsuccessful. Landing and reusing a rocket — something only SpaceX had done before — is a major milestone for the Jeff Bezos-backed space company, but an unspecified malfunction with the craft’s upper ...

Nawaf’s view Whatever becomes of the ceasefire, one fact is already fixed: Relations between the Gulf and Iran will not return to what they were before this war. That does not mean the Gulf is entering some permanent, dramatic rupture with Iran. Serious states do not have the luxury of ...