WSJ : Iran’s Attempts to Get Around the Hormuz Blockade Are Hitting a Wall While

Iran’s Attempts to Get Around the Hormuz Blockade Are Hitting a Wall
While Saudi Arabia and others find workarounds, bottlenecks are threatening Iran’s economy

Iran vowed to respond to a U.S. blockade by pushing more trade overland. On the ground, it isn’t going according to plan.

Hundreds of Iranian truck drivers are currently stuck at Iran’s border with Pakistan, unable to send their goods into Tehran’s neighbor. They say they are facing worsening bureaucratic hurdles and costs, many caused by their own government. The same thing is happening at Iran’s land borders with Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dealing Tehran a self-inflicted blow and throttling trade through its few remaining economic release valves.

Tons of stranded apricots have been spoiled because of the delays. Lucrative cargoes of iron ore, cement and bottled gas are stuck at entry points to the Pakistani and Afghan borders, truckers say.

“Neither Iran is taking responsibility for the situation, nor is Pakistan allowing us to unload our cargo,” one driver says in a video posted by the Union of Truckers and Drivers Organizations Across Iran over the weekend.

The economic war in the Persian Gulf is dictated as much by how much the countries in the region can move their exports over land rather than through the Strait of Hormuz. Some have found workarounds. Saudi Arabia is moving more of its oil west across the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. Navy is helping some of the Gulf nations shift their oil through the strait.

Iran’s attempts are faltering. The U.S. is isolating its economy with new sanctions and launching strikes on Iranian tankers in reprisal for Tehran’s attacks on its Navy, collapsing seaborne exports.

In another setback for Iran’s plans to bypass Hormuz, the country’s Mahan Air, which is sanctioned by the U.S., said Wednesday that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey, state-affiliated media in Tehran said. Last week, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies it said were supporting Mahan, which operates cargo and passenger services.

The U.S. blockade has also hurt Iran’s imports of basic goods, 70% of which normally go through the blockaded ports. Though humanitarian goods and food are ostensibly exempt, the reality is that shippers are reluctant to service Iran.

Videos posted on social media last week show cranes at the Port of Shahid Rajaee, Iran’s largest commercial container port, at a standstill. Thousands of containers are stranded in ports in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, transportation professionals in Tehran last month told the Mehr News Agency, which is affiliated with Iranian security services.


Iran has tried to compensate by pushing more trade through other routes. Transits across the Caspian Sea have grown by 70% in the past five months, according to Iranian officials. Iran imports large quantities of its wheat, corn and cooking oil from Russia, according to commodities data provider Kpler and Iranian trading websites.

“We are trying to turn this threat into an opportunity,” Hadi Haghshenas, the governor of the Iranian province of Gilan, on the Caspian Sea, told state news agency IRNA in late August.

A freight railroad from Tehran to Xi’an in eastern China has jumped from once-a-week journeys to every three or four days since the blockade started, according to the state-controlled Tehran Times. Iran imports industrial machinery, electronics and automotive spare parts from China.

But in a sign of how vulnerable the alternative routes are, Iraq over the weekend temporarily closed cargo terminals at the Iran border after alleging Iran had used its territory to attack Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, trucks carrying Iranian onions bound for Iraq were forced to turn back as a result, according to Tehran’s Central Fruit and Vegetable Market.

Iran’s land borders were a mess before these latest closures, though. This summer, for example, the number of trucks going through Pishin, one of the main crossings into Pakistan, increased from about 40 vehicles to as many as 130 vehicles a day, local governor Rahimbakhsh Balidehei told the semiofficial ISNA News Agency. The result is that customs officers across Iran’s land borders are struggling to cope, Ehsan Malekzadeh, chairman of the Iranian International Transport Companies Association, told the Mehr News Agency.

Malekzadeh said 3,700 trucks were stranded on the Iranian side of the crossing to Turkey, with delays reaching 20 days. At the main crossing into Pakistan, 700 trucks—mostly carrying bottled gas and cement—are waiting at any time, but only 40 are allowed to cross, according to the Baloch Human Rights Documentation Network, a local civic group.

One driver told Iran’s official news agency IRNA he was stuck for days at the Pakistan side of the border with meat destined for Iran, where prices are spiraling higher. At the border with Afghanistan, truckers also complain they have to wait for days before being able to export Iranian iron ore, according to Iran’s Truckers’ Union.

Iranian truckers trying to get into Pakistan say they can be stuck for several days without access to water, food or sanitation as temperatures rise to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, according to footage, published by the Truckers’ Union on its social-media account. The union said some bottled-gas tankers are crossing into Pakistan. But the Pakistani authorities asked Iranian drivers for the equivalent of more than $10,000 each to cross, an unprecedented amount, it said. A spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said he wasn’t aware of any new charges or restrictions at Pakistan’s border with Iran.

Meanwhile, at the border with Turkmenistan, the gateway to China, transporters complain of constraints tied to a lack of warehouses and of a proper registration process to bring goods by rail to China. One businessman complained it was increasingly difficult to bring in automotive spare parts from the Asian powerhouse.

The rising costs are now adding to Iran’s worsening inflation problem.

In some cases, the overland bottlenecks and diversions now contribute as much as a third of the price for common goods once they reach Tehran, Mohammad Reza Khodarahm, an import-sector expert, told Iranian economic daily Donya-e-Eqtesad last week. Majidreza Hariri, the president of the Iran-China Chamber of Commerce, earlier predicted that the U.S. naval blockade would cost $18 billion a year in extra outlays. The cost of transporting one container from China to Iran costs $12,000 via land routes compared with $3,000 by sea, he told KhabarOnline, an independent website close to regime moderates.

Much of these costs are being passed on to consumers, with unpredictable results for the Iranian leadership. Food inflation rose to 128% in August, according to Iran’s official statistics office.

The Information : Why Compute Needs a Big Down Payment

If it suddenly feels like every startup is trying to raise money to throw at some kind of AI infrastructure shortage, you’re probably onto something.

We reported last night that the startup behind AI assistant Instinct is in talks to raise $1 billion, as it faces compute capacity constraints after growing to more than 100,000 users on an invite-only basis. Meanwhile Coatue Management has been discussing a multibillion-dollar joint venture involving chip startup MatX, to finance purchases of memory and logic dies and the reservation of manufacturing capacity.

There’s more going on than simply scrounging up a few spare servers or chip components. Getting access to AI infrastructure increasingly means making big, long-term commitments—it’s cheaper for providers to finance new cloud capacity that way, while manufacturers are more willing to allocate scarce capacity to large, established customers. That’s making it tougher for young but fast-growing companies to get a place in line.

Smaller cloud companies often borrow heavily to finance data center capacity and purchases of graphics processing units, while even the biggest are increasingly using debt to supplement balance sheet cash. On top of that, borrowing costs have risen sharply across the economy, with benchmark yields on both long- and short-term debt climbing.

It’s generally cheaper to borrow money with established, long-term customers lined up, especially ones with good credit ratings, than to finance compute capacity to serve less-proven customers. Iren, for instance, said in August that roughly $3.6 billion in financing for GPUs for Microsoft carried an interest rate of around 6%. But a separate $2.4 billion in financing for GPUs for non–investment-grade customers had a rate around 3 percentage points higher.

Some cloud providers are also demanding more up-front payments, which helps lower the amount they have to raise. Iren said recent customers were paying as much as 55% of the cost of GPUs and related equipment up front. Nebius, similarly, said that the share of deals with prepayments reached an all-time high in the second quarter, with roughly 70% of newly inked deals requiring money up front.

Nebius expects to receive more than $9 billion in prepayments this year, compared with projected 2026 revenue of up to $3.4 billion, and called them the “market standard for securing capacity in a supply-constrained environment.”

Renting GPU capacity as needed from startups like Runpod is another option, while larger providers like CoreWeave are introducing flexible ways to buy inference capacity. But that approach can be expensive, and needed capacity might not always be available. Either way, scaling up can get pricey fast for AI-heavy startups, and they might need to reserve capacity before knowing exactly how usage growth will pan out.

In the pre–AI craze days, a consumer app might chase user growth without worrying about revenue, while computing needs were generally less intensive and cheaper, so didn’t require the same kind of hefty upfront payments. Photo sharing app BeReal, for instance, grew to nearly 8 million daily users within months of taking off in 2022, having raised roughly $90 million, though growth later fizzled.

On the chipmaking side, startups are also facing challenges in securing resources ahead of growth, in that manufacturers are more likely to allocate capacity to customers that can make large commitments and have the financial resources to back them up. The joint-venture financing for MatX, which doesn’t expect to have its chip design ready for trial production until next year, would be aimed partly at helping it reserve capacity like customers such as Broadcom or Marvell Technology do.

It’s not clear how much money Coatue would put into a joint venture, which remains in the early stages of discussion, and whether the venture could also pull in outside financing. But Coatue already has some experience helping finance capital-heavy infrastructure deals on the data center side, sometimes in creative setups.

Coatue’s Next Frontier venture participated in a joint venture with AI infrastructure startup Fluidstack to finance a planned Indiana data center campus. A subsidiary of that JV raised $5.7 billion of debt to help buy land and build the facilities and related power infrastructure. (The financing doesn’t cover chips.) Fluidstack will lease those planned facilities to provide AI cloud services, but there’s yet another company involved—Google, which is guaranteeing Fluidstack’s lease obligations.

The Information : Apollo Backs AI Startups in Bid to Bankroll Hardware Boom

Apollo Backs AI Startups in Bid to Bankroll Hardware Boom

The Takeaway
  • Apollo is investing in Mercor’s $20 billion–valuation round
  • It backed chip startup SiFive and defense tech firm Hadrian
  • Firm sees opportunity in complicated capital needs spurred by AI

Apollo Global Management, known for leveraged buyouts and hefty financing deals, has started investing in AI and related hardware startups with the ambition to lend money to them in the future.

In one previously unreported deal, Apollo has already invested in the low tens of millions of dollars in Mercor’s latest funding round, which is set to value the data-labeling startup at $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. It has also invested in chip startup SiFive and in Hadrian, which says it’s building AI-powered factories, in transactions the companies disclosed earlier this year. It expects to make more investments in these categories, the people said.

Apollo’s forays are the latest attempt by a large financial institution to expand into venture capital investing, with an eye on cultivating relationships for its main business. In this case, Apollo is responding to how the AI boom has rapidly transformed the landscape for financing startups. Model makers like Anthropic and OpenAI have entered into more than $1 trillion collectively in deals for chips, data centers and leases, in some cases involving private equity firms and complicated financing, to power their AI.

Meanwhile, demand for the hardware to run and train AI has given rise to a new generation of startups developing chips or machinery that require debt or other types of financing to expand.

Apollo, which manages around $1 trillion in assets, expects more AI startups will need financing beyond VC before long—unlike the last generation of software startups, which didn’t take on debt until they were much bigger companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

In addition to making equity investments, Apollo executives believe they can provide the startups with debt- or asset-backed financing or help arrange other financing structures that involve a mix of debt and equity or multiple financial backers. Hardware and defense tech startups need more up-front investments to get their equipment and facilities up and running, and it may be years before they start manufacturing in large volumes and commercializing their products.

In one sign of those needs, tech investor Coatue Management is working on a joint venture with chip startup MatX to finance and secure manufacturing capacity for components of the latter’s future chips.

Apollo has already been financing AI startups’ demand for hardware. Earlier this year, Apollo led a $35 billion financing package with rival Blackstone to buy Google’s chips and lease them to Anthropic.

For years, large banks and private equity firms have dipped their toes—with mixed success—into venture investing to knit relationships with founders that could eventually yield blockbuster financing or advising deals.

Earlier this year, Blackstone folded its arm that made venture investments in growth-stage companies into a new AI-focused unit, BXN1, after its first growth fund underperformed funds of the same vintage, according to PitchBook. Thoma Bravo shuttered its growth arm earlier this year to focus on making large acquisitions.

For now, Apollo is taking a slightly different approach to those competitors, which, along with KKR, had set up separate funds focusing on growth-stage startups. Apollo is instead investing in these startups through a range of funds it manages, including its hybrid capital solutions, which makes a mix of debt and equity investments, according to people familiar with the matter. It has not announced any plans to form a separate fund focused on venture investments.

It is also working with 8VC, the venture firm founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Apollo announced a partnership with 8VC last October to put several billion dollars into fast-growing but cash-hungry businesses building what the two firms called the “American industrial renaissance.” That could include AI, robotics, autonomous systems, biotechnology and nuclear energy companies, Lonsdale said at the time.

In January, Apollo invested in SiFive’s $3.6 billion–valuation funding round. The 11-year-old company develops chips using the open-source RISC-V architecture, a technology that competes with Arm’s designs for central processing units. In August, Apollo backed the $7.8 billion–valuation round for Hadrian, which builds advanced factories for defense and aerospace companies and agencies.

Mercor is in the process of finalizing a funding round led by General Catalyst, The Information reported. Mercor helps Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies train their models by providing human contractors that fine-tune responses. The business gives Mercor a front-row seat to the computing needs of the largest AI companies.

FT : Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or sid

Ferrari aims for ocean-racing records with Hypersail
Company is using technology developed for its cars to build ‘self-sufficient’ 100ft foiling yacht

A year after Ferrari began developing its first electric car in 2021, the carmaker’s executive chair John Elkann floated the question of whether the Italian group could apply its motoring roots and technology to the world of ocean racing.

After months of evaluation, its engineers agreed to venture into new territory with the making of Ferrari Hypersail — a 100ft foiling yacht that is scheduled to launch next year and aims to break records as the fastest to race around the world.

“We realised that Hypersail for us could be a big innovation platform,” says Matteo Lanzavecchia, Hypersail’s chief technology officer who also leads vehicle engineering for Ferrari’s sports cars. “It’s more like a laboratory.”

Hypersail is not a luxury yacht for its ultra-wealthy clients, nor does the company have any current plans to turn yacht-making into a separate business. Instead, Ferrari is building a vessel without a combustion engine that can reach the fastest speed while consuming as little energy as possible.

Designed as a monohull using carbon fibre, the Hypersail is the first yacht of its size to be “completely self-sufficient” using solar panels, wind turbines and crew-generated energy, Ferrari claims.


With its history in Formula 1 racing, the company also has big ambitions in offshore racing. The main goal for the Hypersail is to beat the Jules Verne record for the fastest circumnavigation that the Sodebo Ultim 3 boat achieved in January, having travelled around the Earth in 40 days, 10 hours, 45 minutes. It aims to do this while entirely generating its own electricity during the race.

“Inside the Ferrari DNA is racing . . . and testing new technology in an extreme environment,” says Enrico Voltolini, a professional sailor, naval engineer and Hypersail’s project leader.

Until now, Ferrari — known for the roaring engine noise of its supercars — had never built or designed a yacht in-house but executives say the Hypersail is another chapter of its evolution in energy management technology.

In 2024, Ferrari unveiled its $3.9mn F80, a limited-production hybrid hypercar, after concluding that a fully electric version of the vehicle was not possible with battery technology.

The group then launched the Luce, its first five-seater sports car, in late May, powered by four electric motors, one attached to each wheel. The car was initially criticised on social media for its polarising design. Ferrari’s executive chair Elkann acknowledged at the time that the company’s foray into EVs was “an unnecessary risk” but added: “We have to be able to do something that has never been done.”

While Ferrari has filed for more than 20 patents linked to Hypersail, the yacht is also equipped with many of the technologies that are found in Luce and other Ferrari vehicles. The yacht’s foil and keel are powered by the same rear e-axle — the electric powertrain — used in the Luce. The idea was to use the same technology to make sure it was reliable, chief technology officer Lanzavecchia says, noting the challenge of innovating while ensuring the yacht’s consistent performance in rough seas.

For the winch system — where a rotating drum is used to manually trim sails — Ferrari used technology developed for its 12Cilindri Manuale. The limited edition car with a V12 engine revived the feel of a mechanical gearbox using electronic signals. For the Hypersail’s “winch-by-wire” system, the crew still pulls the lines on the winch, but their muscle power is also converted into electricity to help with sail trimming.

The technology transfer is also not solely from cars to boat. Voltolini says Ferrari is testing materials used for aerospace and military applications that could be used for cars, while power created from solar panels on the yacht could be applied to charging vehicles.

The company developed a simulation tool to evaluate various materials used in the yacht, such as the titanium and carbon fibre in the foils. That same tool is also used to test materials that would, for example, make a car roof strong but light, says Lanzavecchia.

“Innovation is contamination between different worlds,” he says.

The ability to test and apply new technologies is another reason why Ferrari was drawn to offshore racing: rules in boat racing — such as the kind of technology that can be used — are far less stringent than in F1 races.

With construction of the Hypersail expected to finish by the end of this year, a key test is how the yacht performs when it hits the seas in 2027.

Before that, it needs to undergo feasibility tests and training of the crew to ensure they can safely handle the boat.

Despite the cutting-edge technology Ferrari has introduced, there are limitations to how fast the boat can go since the crew needs rest and time to recover while handling the yacht, says Voltolini.

Development of the Hypersail is set to last until 2031 to allow time for testing and refining the design before attempting the Jules Verne record.

“We have four to five years,” says Lanzavecchia, “so we would like to go and try to beat some records and at the same time evolve the boat.”

FT : Google DeepMind offshoot nears $4bn valuation just a month after founding R

Google DeepMind offshoot nears $4bn valuation just a month after founding
Researchers leaving Big Tech group’s London lab close to raising $700mn for new start-up Emulate

A month-old British start-up founded by former Google DeepMind researchers is close to clinching hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding at a nearly $4bn valuation, the latest high-profile offshoot from the London AI lab.

The start-up, called Emulate, is in advanced talks with prospective investors to raise as much as $700mn, priced at $3.7bn including the capital raised, according to people familiar with the deal. UK-based Index Ventures and Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed Venture Partners are poised to jointly lead the round, these people added.

Emulate, which was incorporated in August, was founded by a group of former Google DeepMind researchers including Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball, who previously helped create its Genie world models.

Genie can generate realistic videos and interactive 3D environments from a short prompt. Its unveiling in January sent shockwaves through the video games industry, wiping billions from the market value of the likes of Take-Two, Roblox and Unity.

World models, which are trained to understand and replicate physical space, are seen as a new frontier in AI research that is less crowded than the large language models that power ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

Emulate’s fundraising comes just weeks after Google DeepMind co-founder Sir Demis Hassabis said he was stepping down as the AI lab’s chief executive to become its chair. Hassabis was seen as playing a vital role in building up Google’s AI research capability in London, after selling DeepMind to the Big Tech group in 2014.

Spinouts led by former researchers at big AI companies — known as neo-labs — have been able to attract billions of dollars in funding this year.

These nascent companies can command huge valuations based largely on the reputation of their founders, often before even building their first products, as investors clamour for exposure to hot AI start-ups.

Several such groups have been launched by former Google researchers. Last month, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean announced his departure from the company to found his own US-based AI start-up, Discovery Loop.

Emulate, which has been operating in “stealth mode” without a public profile, is the third UK neo-lab to emerge from DeepMind’s London offices this year with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, showing how top AI research talent continues to be prized by venture capitalists hoping to back the next Anthropic or OpenAI.

Former DeepMind researcher David Silver raised about $1bn of funding at a $5bn valuation for his start-up Ineffable Intelligence, while a team of former DeepMind and OpenAI engineers raised more than $600mn at a $4bn valuation for their company Recursive Superintelligence.

The two biggest costs for such groups are financing the compute needed to develop AI models and recruiting leading researchers in a competitive market.

Sifted previously reported that Parker-Holder and his team were looking to raise significant capital. Index, Lightspeed and Emulate declined to comment.

FT : EU asks China to voluntarily limit car exports Brussels wants Beijing to re

EU asks China to voluntarily limit car exports
Brussels wants Beijing to restrict sales of Chinese hybrid vehicles to around 15% of the EU market

The EU has asked China to voluntarily restrict exports of hybrid cars as part of a deal to prevent a trade war, as tensions between the two sides increase ahead of crunch meetings next month in Beijing. 

European carmakers are making mass lay-offs as cheaper models made in China flood the market and Brussels wants Beijing to rein in its industry or face higher tariffs, three people familiar with the situation told the FT. 

“If they will not limit their exports to our market then we will,” said an EU official. “This is about stopping deindustrialisation. We have to act. It’s about managed trade.”

Brussels is seeking a commitment from Beijing to restrict sales of China-made hybrid vehicles to around 15 per cent of the EU market compared with more than a third today, the people said.

The official added that Brussels had proposed a number of other products, including chemicals, where it wanted China to show restraint. The bloc also wanted China to buy more European exports, the official said.

The EU in June set an October deadline for “tangible results” in reducing its soaring trade deficit with China, with the two sides setting up the EU-China Trade and Investment Consultations (TIC) forum to try to tackle market access issues.

The EU’s €1bn a day trade deficit with China had “reached a tipping point”, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday. 

The “second China shock . . . is already here”, she said in her annual State of the Union speech. 

“Let me be clear: we will use all the tools at our disposal to rebalance our relationship. Words are good. But deeds are better,” she added.

EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič was due to speak to Chinese commerce minister Wang Wentao on Thursday ahead of a trip to Beijing next month, a spokesperson confirmed.

One of the people familiar with the EU’s position said that by suggesting China voluntarily limit its exports, the bloc is hoping to repeat the type of deal it struck with Japan in 1986, when Tokyo agreed to impose export restraints on Japanese vehicles — a policy that continued until 1999. 

That encouraged Japanese companies such as Toyota and Nissan to invest in the EU or collaborate with domestic producers.

Such restrictions and even price controls were more common before globalisation accelerated in the 2000s with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

One person familiar with the matter said the pressure for the EU to take further action now was “massive” as Chinese imports of hybrid cars to the bloc hit a high in the second quarter. 

Brussels imposed anti-subsidy tariffs of up to 45 per cent on Chinese electric cars in October 2024, prompting retaliatory levies from Beijing on EU cognac, meat and dairy exports. 

But while imports of battery EVs subsequently rose gently, imports of Chinese hybrid cars — which only pay a flat 10 per cent EU tariff — soared. Imports of hybrids have grown more than 10-fold from 3,800 vehicles in October 2024 to 50,000 in July 2026 while average prices have fallen.


Companies including VW have been calling for similarly punitive duties against imported hybrid cars.

The Commission hopes Beijing will agree to voluntary restrictions to vindicate its decision to seek a negotiated solution. But a consensus is forming in Europe’s two largest economies, Germany and France, for more forceful action against China after years of division over the issue. 

Šefčovič said on Wednesday that he wants “positive outcomes” on rebalancing trade by the time he departs for China, expected in the second week of October.

Industries including chemicals, cars and steel warn they are facing a tipping point in the face of fierce Chinese competition.  

Beijing has deployed a range of “Made in China” policies to boost domestic products and improve its technological prowess. It denies using subsidies, saying its competitive prices are the result of its efficient companies.

It is pushing for EU countries to drop export controls and sanctions on Chinese companies as part of the talks. 

China’s ministry of foreign affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Commission declined to comment.

FT : Mergermarket owner slashes jobs as pressure mounts on Andrea Pignataro’s em

Mergermarket owner slashes jobs as pressure mounts on Andrea Pignataro’s empire
Largest unit of technology group Ion has stepped up cost-cutting amid scrutiny from creditors

The owner of financial data platforms including Mergermarket and Dealogic has cut over a fifth of its staff this year, as the largest unit of billionaire Andrea Pignataro’s technology group Ion stepped up cost-cutting amid increasing scrutiny from creditors.

Senior staff at the group were asked at the beginning of this year to reduce the business’s existing headcount to 4,500, from more than 6,000 staff at the turn of the year, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. So far the group has managed a reduction of more than 20 per cent to overall headcount, the people said.

The cuts have hit businesses across Ion Platforms, which holds businesses including Mergermarket, Dealogic and Fidessa. In June last year those businesses were consolidated under Ion Platforms, which is one of the largest issuers of junk debt in Europe.

Ion is still hiring, according to one person familiar with the matter, including staff who have signed but not yet joined. The group’s total headcount by year-end is expected to be above the 4,500 target, the person added.

Ion told creditors in the third quarter of last year that it was targeting savings of over $167mn from headcount “synergies”. In an update provided to creditors in June and seen by the FT, Ion said that it had already made changes that would result in a total $158mn of savings, with $9.2mn in “further headcount savings” still to complete.

In the last two decades Ion has become a key supplier of technology and data in the world’s financial markets, using cheap debt to buy dozens of specialist companies like Mergermarket, Fidessa, Wall Street Systems and Dealogic. But credit investors have become worried that higher rates will make its $11bn of debt unsustainable, just as AI threatens to reduce customer demand for some of the services Ion supplies.

Ion’s growth has made Pignataro one of Italy’s richest men and one of the largest players in Europe’s market for junk debt. On top of its publicly traded debt, Ion’s holding company has another $2.5bn of private debt from investors including BlackRock-owned private credit firm HPS.

The price of Ion’s mountain of debt plummeted at the beginning of the year as investors were spooked by the potential impact of AI on its software businesses, sending the price of a $1.5bn bond down to as low as 70 cents on the dollar in April, from about 96 cents in mid-January. 

Ion Platform’s bonds have since recovered slightly. Most of the group’s publicly traded debt now comes with a yield of more than 10 per cent. 

Ion’s financing costs have more than doubled since 2022 to about $800mn a year as central banks have raised interest rates, according to financial information seen by the FT.

The FT reported last month that Ion had missed rent payments on offices in three continents this year, prompting landlords to cut off access or threaten it with eviction.

Employees at Ion’s Sydney office this year arrived at work to find an eviction notice for late payment of about $90,000, while Ion’s staff in Munich were denied access to their office for weeks in July after about $40,000 in rent was not paid on time. 

In Connecticut, the group’s landlord sued in May, alleging that one of Ion’s subsidiaries had failed to pay its rent in March and did not move out of the premises when asked.

The amounts due on the Sydney and Munich sites have now been paid, a person familiar with the situation said, and legal proceedings in Connecticut were withdrawn in July.

Ion declined to comment.

FT : ‘Compound crisis’ behind Nepal disaster, scientists report

‘Compound crisis’ behind Nepal disaster, scientists report
Climate change combined with suspected geological weakening identified as UN highlights risk of similar events in areas from the Andes to the Alps 

The consequences of climate change that caused glaciers to thin and permafrost to thaw, combined with suspected geological shifts, were blamed for a disastrous rock and ice collapse in Nepal, a preliminary scientific report found.

Rather than a single extreme weather event, the report by international glaciologists and the World Weather Attribution group of scientists said the disaster in August was a “compound crisis”. 

The scientists behind the report, which is yet to be peer reviewed, said there was certainty about the role of climate change, while the geological weakening role played by the 2015 earthquake was likely but their research could not yet confirm it.

Accelerated global warming had hastened the glacier and permafrost melt, it said, and an abnormal previous season of high snowfall had been followed by rapid thawing during unusually hot weather.

Walter Immerzeel, mountain hydrologist at Utrecht University, said the earthquake in 2015 likely made the mountainside less stable but it was the accumulation of climate change effects that had set in motion the catastrophe.


More than 1,300 people were killed and some 4,000 estimated missing after a section of an overhanging glacier and rock fell from Langtang Lirung mountain on August 26, unleashing a massive flood of water, ice and debris.

“There is absolutely no doubt that human-induced climate change played a role here in the preconditioning of the disaster,” said Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London and an author of the report. 

Climate change had pushed the warming point, which marked the freezing threshold, upwards by about 100 metres of altitude per decade in the area, the report concluded.

This resulted in the substantial glacier retreat and the thaw of permafrost within rock fissures, which typically hold high mountain walls together. The loss of ice destabilised the mountainside and increased meltwater. 

The area had also been hit with abnormal snowfall in October and November last year, adding large amounts of meltwater, while the temperature before the collapse in July and August was the warmest on record for the Langtang Valley.

Otto said the daily maximum temperature anomaly was more than 5C above the average in the three-day period preceding the collapse.

“When you combine high-elevation permafrost degradation with glacier retreat and record summer heat, the structural integrity of these mountain walls is compromised,” said Immerzeel. “The catastrophic impacts of what can then happen are clear for all to see.”

The region had experienced long-term warming of about 2C above the pre-industrial level, the researchers said, far ahead of the global level of about 1.4C.


Scientists have long warned that the Himalayas are deeply vulnerable to climate change.

Madhab Uprety at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre said the cost of recovery from this disaster would be “substantial”. 

“For a nation that’s done virtually nothing to contribute to this problem, it underlines the need to find fairness in helping climate-vulnerable nations cope with the problems they have not unleashed,” he said.

Nepal has requested help from the UN’s so-called loss and damage fund, set up to help countries deal with the effects of climate change. The vehicle, however, has a severe funding shortage. 

A separate report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization released on Thursday outlined widespread glacier loss in 2025 across all regions of the world for the fourth consecutive year.

In the three years to the end of 2025 alone, glaciers lost mass of 1,400bn tonnes, roughly equal to the water required to fill about 560mn Olympic-sized swimming pools, or about one-third of annual freshwater withdrawals, it said.

It identified Asia and Africa as the regions most affected by water-related disasters, and the WMO’s cryosphere or frozen water expert highlighted the risk of similar events to the Nepal catastrophe in places from the Andes to the Alps.

FT : Either Meta Glasses are selling extremely well or this Citi survey might ha

Either Meta Glasses are selling extremely well or this Citi survey might have some issues

Some research from Citi landed in FT Alphaville’s inbox on Tuesday, presenting the bank’s latest consumer survey. Its Global Consumer Electronics team wrote:

We collaborated with Citi’s Research Innovation Lab to survey 4,000+ global consumers ahead of the back-to-school season to explore how purchase behavior and spending intentions for consumer electronics have evolved.

Their main finding is that more Americans and Brits plan to buy technology, like printers, than they used to:


But scrolling through the charts, we found ourselves a little confused about what type of people they’re surveying. Most strikingly, here’s their chart for worldwide adoption of augmented and virtual reality headsets:


The analysts write:

Looking ahead, we expect a continued category shift towards AI glasses. 35% of survey respondents owned Meta Glasses globally, with 25% looking to purchase in 2026, with US penetration the highest of all regions at 45% ownership and 30% planning to buy.… we would expect greater adoption of AI glasses going forward.

We found this statistic perplexing. At the start of this year, Ray-Ban Meta Glasses maker EssilorLuxottica reported it had sold 7mn of the controversial eyewears in 2025, on top of 2mn sold across 2023 and 2024. Around the same time, Bloomberg reported the company was looking to increase production capacity to 20mn pairs by the end of this year.

Although impressive in its own disturbing way, we were sceptical that could translate to a third of the global population, perhaps 2.9 billion people, owning the “pervert glasses”. There is no way that is what Citi intended to imply.

Confused, we asked Citi about their methodology. They told us it was an online opt-in survey, conducted by WPP / Kantar agency, of 1,000 people from each region who own or plan to buy “at the least” one device from the following list: “smartphone , computer, tv set, video game, computer accessories, tablet, ar/vr glasses, smartwatch”. We assume the “plan to buy” respondents were in an internet café or borrowing someone’s phone.

Still confused, we asked whether that means it’s 35 per cent of this device-minded cohort who own Meta Glasses. We were told “obviously” they meant 35 per cent of the subset of respondents who already own AR/VR/smart glasses, despite that not being indicated anywhere in the note.

Still confused, we asked how big that subset is. We were told “22% have an AR/VR/smartglass device and/or plan to buy one at a global level”. That’s a wider cohort than initially indicated (since it includes plan to buys), which makes it all the stranger. Based on the 35 per cent Meta Glasses ownership figure, that would translate to about 8 per cent of all humans who are engaged with basically any form of computer technology, which realistically will mean the majority of humans. In this context, the numbers would be skewed by all the respondents being from developed countries, but even if we imagine that number is a conservative 6bn, it would translate to about 480mn people owning Meta Glasses.

Still confused, we checked that 8 per cent figure with Citi, who to our mild surprise told us “yes”, and that penetration was “higher” in the US.

Still confused, we asked Citi if they meant to imply hundreds of millions of people own Meta Glasses. They noted that the questions are “framed more as [household] penetration”, and said that “if the avg. HH size is ~4 people, then that suggests personal Meta glasses device penetration closer to ~2%”.

Right. Let’s run those numbers in an extremely generous fashion. Using that ~4 person average household size figure (the reality is likely to be about 2.5 people per household across those particular four countries, and might be different for the type of households where somebody owns Meta Glasses) to create a 2 per cent penetration rate, and then applying it to only the combined populations of the UK, US, China and Japan (about two billion), that still translates to about 40mn Meta Glasses sold. Extrapolating it to the global population gives a figure of about 160mn. EssilorLuxottica’s next earnings report is next month. If those numbers are true, it might be quite the event.

Still confused, we asked Citi one more time if they felt these numbers are realistic. A spokesperson told us:

The team does this to show from a time series perspective how the overall responses have changed and moved up/down. They are looking at it more directionally versus a point in time.

Still confused, we gave up and filed this piece.

>>> US After Hours Summary: FLNC -16.8%, BCBP -3.8%, LEN -2.6% lower on earning

After Hours Summary: FLNC -16.8%, BCBP -3.8%, LEN -2.6% lower on earnings

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news:GNRC +35.0% (Enters long-term Amazon supply agreement for up to $8 billion in generator purchases, with $2.4 billion expected in 2027-2028.), VICR +11.3% (Granted an unnamed AI OEM a non-exclusive Vertical Power Delivery license; financial terms were undisclosed.), VITL +7.0% (Weighing strategic options, including a potential take-private transaction.), IPHA +6.5% (Finalized Sobi partnership, triggering a $75 million upfront payment and launch of lacutamab’s confirmatory Phase 3 study.), MPT +2.1% (Sold two Idaho hospitals for $413 million, generating $371 million cash and a $130 million gain over book value.), VTS +1.9% (Closed a $26 million Denver-Julesburg Basin asset acquisition expected to be immediately accretive to earnings and cash flow.), CACI +1.1% (Wins USCENTCOM contract with a $1.5 billion ceiling, expecting to book $1.2 billion.), AGNC +1.1% (Will join the S&P MidCap 400 before the September 21 open.)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance:FLNC -16.8%, BCBP -3.8%, LEN -2.6%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news:DSP -11.2% (Launches 8.5 million-share secondary offering, with underwriters eligible to buy 1.275 million additional company shares.), HALO -2.3% (Launches $1.05 billion convertible senior notes offering due 2033, with an additional $150 million purchaser option.), AWK -1.2% (Acquired Venice’s wastewater system for $770,000, adding about 500 customers and planning $2.6 million in investments.)