Category: Semafor

US inflation surged in March as the war in Iran drove oil and gas prices up. Overall inflation rose to 3.3%, the highest level in almost two years; however, “core” inflation, which removes volatile food and energy prices, only increased modestly — suggesting that the long-term effects of the global ...

There’s been a debate in certain nerdier circles of the tech industry about comparing the revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI and I have at least part of the answer. But first, a word of warning. I’ve been covering the industry long enough that the pattern is clear: The numbers you ...

Back to school. Venture capitalists nearly doubled their spending on new US university spinoffs in 2025 to $690 million after three years of declines, PitchBook data show. They also increased their spending in later rounds of US companies spun out from academia, contributing $6.3 billion to those startups. One such ...

The tech stack is converging. “Our chips business is on fire, changes the economics for AWS, and will be much larger than most think,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in his annual shareholder letter this week. “Virtually all AI thus far has been done on NVIDIA chips, but a new ...

The US warned its citizens against traveling to Nigeria over terrorism, civil unrest, and kidnapping risks. In a Wednesday advisory, the State Department wrote that some regions now carry its highest “do not travel” designation. Washington also authorized the departure of non-emergency embassy staff and their families from Abuja, pointing ...

Yinka’s view China’s state-owned enterprises aren’t just building roads and railways across Africa, they are reshaping markets and, increasingly, the policy environment itself. That was the central warning of a report last month by the US government-backed Africa Center for Strategic Studies. It landed even as Washington scrambles to catch ...

The News Inflation rose three times faster in March than the previous month as the war in Iran spiked fuel prices, the Labor Department reported Friday, providing the government’s first look at the conflict’s economic effects. Energy prices logged their biggest gain since 2005, with gas prices leaping more than ...

An artwork by South African artist Dumile Feni is changing the way viewers understand Pablo Picasso’s famous anti-war painting. , which was drawn by Feni using charcoal and pencil in 1967, is part of a new series at the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, and is on display directly opposite ...

The share of residential accommodation in Cape Town’s central business district that city planners estimate is used for tourist stays rather than long-term housing. The figure, which includes units that are hotel-managed or listed on short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb, has become a proxy for how deeply tourism has ...

Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned Taiwan against moving towards “independence,” telling a visiting opposition politician from Taipei that Beijing wants to deepen cooperation with the island. The remarks during the first visit by a leader of the mainland-friendly Kuomintang party in a decade pointed to China’s attempts to control the ...