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Nvidia’s chief Jensen Huang spent two days — July 15 and 16 — in Tokyo, courting Japan’s industrial and chip-supply elite, weeks after a keynote in Taiwan, and months after a visit to South Korea. He left with deals spanning Japan’s entire tech ecosystem: a national AI factory, partnerships with the country’s leading robotics companies, and agreements with the chip-material suppliers powering Nvidia’s next generation of AI chips. His message was clear. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s biggest manufacturers are joining in. AI’s next chapter, Huang said, belongs to factory floors, robots, and machines, and he wants Japan to build it.

Thirty years ago, a $5 million Sega investment helped keep a near-bankrupt Nvidia afloat; today, Nvidia and Japan’s industrial giants need each other again — this time to build the physical-AI era, starting with these three projects:

Noetra — Japan’s sovereign-AI play. The country doesn’t want to run its factories and robots on American or Chinese AI. So, the government pulled together roughly 44 domestic firms, with SoftBank, Sony, NEC and Honda at the core, to build its own AI for robots, vehicles and factory floors. Tokyo is committing up to 1 trillion yen ($6.2 billion) over five years, a bet on homegrown “physical AI”, foundation models built to run machines. Japan wants to own the software brain. The hardware to build it, though, still comes from Nvidia. The U.S chip giant is building “a Vera Rubin AI factory”, a massive data center packed with its next-generation chips, expected to launch in 2028, with 13,750 Vera CPUs and 27,500 Rubin GPUs, delivering 140 megawatts. Noetra will oversee the effort, with plans to build the data center. Noetra’s plan runs in three stages: a reasoning model heavy on Japanese-language skills starting in fiscal 2026; an omni-modal version handling text, images, video, and audio by 2028; and “Real-world Native AI” built to run robots by 2030, released to outside Noetra developers in phases.

The robotics coalition — Japan’s industrial giants line up behind Cosmos. Nvidia is targeting Japan’s factory floor, and many of the country’s top robotics and manufacturing players are signing on. Fanuc, Yaskawa, Kawasaki Heavy, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Sony, SoftBank, Kubota and robotics group AIRoA say they plan to build on Nvidia’s Cosmos models, an open-model effort Nvidia started in May with a handful of global AI labs. In Tokyo, Nvidia gave them a reason to commit, unveiling Cosmos 3 Edge, a version of the model that runs on its Jetson Thor chips inside the machines themselves. Some are already testing a shared control system; others, like Honda R&D and Omron, are building on the tools now. “The next frontier of AI is in the physical world, and this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Japan,” Huang said in the company’s statement. “Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it has the opportunity to reinvent it for the age of intelligent industries.”

Toyota — cars and physical AI. Toyota uses Nvidia chips across much of its stack. It committed its next-generation vehicles to Nvidia’s Drive platform at CES in January 2025; the newer work extends Nvidia into its manufacturing, where simulations are used to design production lines, into the software that runs its vehicles, and into systems that read road traffic. Toyota’s cars will run advanced driver assistance, which steers and brakes but still requires a driver, a more conservative approach than Waymo and Tesla, which are developing systems that rely less on a human driver.

Huang’s visit put physical AI at the center of Japan’s industrial strategy, and Tokyo is spending to back it. Facing a shrinking workforce, Japan wants 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors by 2040, backed by $65 billion in public and private physical-AI investment.

The longer game is bigger. Japan’s AI Robotics Strategy, released in March, aims to capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, a market Tokyo values at roughly ¥20 trillion, or about $133 billion. METI is funding a domestic foundation model to run the machines, and Noetra’s Nvidia-powered factory is where models of that scale, into the trillions of parameters, would be trained. The wager is that Japan’s factory-floor data and manufacturing base can do for physical AI

Underneath the industrial case is a sovereign one. As the U.S. and China pull ahead in large-scale AI, Tokyo wants its own data, its own compute, and less dependence on infrastructure it doesn’t control. Huang appeared on July 16 alongside trade minister Ryosei Akazawa at the government’s physical-AI launch, with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi joining by video. The Takaichi administration has made AI and semiconductors the centerpiece of a growth plan chasing ¥370 trillion ($2.3 trillion) in public and private investment by 2040. Noetra’s factory — which Nvidia bills as “the world’s first national AI infrastructure” — is the clearest bet yet. Japan’s push for independence, at least for now, rests on American chips.ndence runs on American silicon.

In two days, Huang sat across from nearly every name that matters in Japanese tech — the CEOs of Toyota, Fanuc, Yaskawa, Fujitsu and Kawasaki over lunch, and dozens of supply-chain chiefs over skewers and whisky in a Kanda izakaya.

It’s the same playbook he ran weeks earlier — a homecoming keynote in Taiwan, fried chicken, and a 50,000-GPU deal in Seoul last fall. This time, it was Tokyo’s turn, with the robots, the supply chain, and the chips underneath.

The British runner smashed the world record, achieving the feat in 3:42.66.

Another major running world record has been smashed in London, and Brooks is at the center of the major moment. Josh Kerr ran the fastest men’s mile ever on Saturday, finishing in 3.42.66 at the IAAF Diamond League athletics competition.

The Scottish-born Kerr wore a custom spike and speed suit, created in collaboration with Brooks. The brand said the athlete’s Hyperion 222 shoe was designed for Kerr’s biomechanics, “including his unique foot strike, asymmetrical push-off and demand for an ultra-aggressive ride.”

The style’s name is derived from “Project 222,” the joint campaign between Brooks and the athlete in their quest to break the men’s record for the outdoor mile. (222 is the number of seconds that it took to beat the prior world record of 3:43.13, set by Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.)

The shoe was developed using Brooks’ Run Research Lab and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) data.

Kerr, 28, also sported a speed suit that was “crafted to enhance aerodynamics and breathability, with laser cut perforations that release heat and humidity while enhancing mobility.”

Brooks continues to be one of the running market’s most dominant brands. It began 2026 with double-digit growth in the first quarter as demand remained strong across regions and channels. The company said it delivered its strongest quarter in brand history after a record-breaking 2025.

Kerr’s record came less than three months after Adidas athlete Sebastian Sawe broke the marathon world record in London, finishing the race in under 2 hours.

While the mile run isn’t included in Olympics competitions, it has been a major focus for many brands in the past few years. Kenyan runner Faith Kipyegon, 31, almost made history in Paris last summer in her attempt to run a mile in under 4 minutes. The Nike athlete barely missed the feat, though she broke her own world record, finishing in 4:06:91.

• 1914 – Founded in Philadelphia by John Brooks Goldenberg.
• 1981 – Acquired by Wolverine World Wide after bankruptcy.
• 2004 – Acquired by Russell Corporation.
• 2006 – Russell was acquired by Fruit of the Loom, itself owned by Berkshire Hathaway, bringing Brooks into Berkshire's portfolio.
• 2011–2012 – Brooks became a direct standalone subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, rather than being managed through Fruit of the Loom.

Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”)

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI’s much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public.

“Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on,” Sean suggested. “Which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.”

With all those plans on the line, will OpenAI try to settle this as quickly as possible, or did it learn from its recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk that it can endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial? Kirsten, at least, predicts the latter.

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Kirsten Korosec: Sean, how do you feel about Sam Altman listening to you with a little device maybe in your pocket?

Sean O’Kane: I’m good. Maybe that’s predictable, but I’m good. No thanks.

We’ll get into it, I’m sure, but this is allegedly the first product that OpenAI has been working on in its hardware division with Jony Ive and company. They’ve been really coy ever since that weird video they put out last year of them sitting at that coffee shop or bar in San Francisco and sort of talking very vaguely about hardware and legacy devices, meaning laptops and phones. And so if this is the direction they’re headed in, all power to people who want to have somebody like that always listening to them. This is not going to be for me.

Anthony Ha: Part of what we have to remember about those kinds of devices is also that, depending on how mobile it is, it’s not just listening to you, it’s listening to the people around you. I might be fine with it — I’m not fine with it, but let’s say I was — but then if we met up in-person at Disrupt, then suddenly it might be listening to all of us.

There’s all kinds of social norms that are going to have to be renegotiated if these things become widespread. I think we should make fun of and criticize people who record other people without consent.

Kirsten: Well, I bring up the device that has been speculated about for a really long time, and we’ll see what it really ends up being once it’s officially introduced, but it’s important in the context of this lawsuit that Apple filed last Friday.

It was the biggest news of the week, certainly, and this is a trade secret lawsuit. It has some pretty wild allegations and we should very much emphasize these are allegations that have been filed in a complaint by Apple. But what it is accusing OpenAI of is a pattern of misconduct at the highest levels, specifically directed towards OpenAI employees who used to work at Apple. And in fact they’ve named the chief hardware officer Tang Tan in this lawsuit.

This is all important because Apple is accusing OpenAI of essentially stealing their trade secrets, but in the context of that, this could be then used for a competing hardware product. I’m wondering if maybe we don’t get into whether this lawsuit has merits, because we haven’t gone through full discovery, but what are your initial impressions of the lawsuit aside from the fact that wow, this is going to be entertaining?

Sean: Two things. One, this is a pretty big risk potentially to whatever it is OpenAI is working on. Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on, which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.

The other is that we think that OpenAI is — we know that they’ve filed confidentially for an IPO. We think it might happen as early as the end of this year, or early next year, if you believe Sam Altman’s cautious language around the IPO. And this just raises a whole bunch of questions around that because, on the one hand, we think their business right now is probably overwhelmingly the software; they’re not really factoring in any hardware business into that picture at the moment.

They’re about to go to the markets and they’re going to be pitching bankers and investors on where they think their addressable market should be, and if they have a big amount of that pegged to a potential hardware division and hardware products, this could be a huge risk to that and changes a lot of the calculus of sort of how the IPO gets priced. So that’s where my head’s at.

Anthony: One [allegation] that I assume that Apple must have pretty solid like numbers on is, they said more than 400 Apple employees now work at OpenAI. Granted, both of them are very large companies with many thousands or tens of thousands of employees. So as a percentage, it’s not necessarily huge. But that seems like a lot of people and a pretty serious talent drain.

And the other thing I’m wondering is related to Sean’s point. With the context of the potential IPO, how much damage did OpenAI ultimately take from a marketing and brand perspective from the trial it already went through? That it seemed to basically win, but there was a lot of not-terrible-but-kind-of-embarrassing dirty laundry that came out in the testimony. To what extent are they just like, “We do not want to go through that again”? Or did they take the lesson of, “Hey, we went through it and we survived and we’ll be okay if we have to do another trial with Apple”?

Kirsten: I fully predict the latter, by the way.

The agency is using a surging budget to avoid choosing between defense-tech startups and old-school contractors

Since taking the top job at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has rewritten rules and upended traditions that had for decades steered how the U.S. military buys weapons. More than a year into his tenure, he is keeping his promise to shower money on high-tech defense startups—while also unloading ever-larger sums of cash on the traditional vendors he has publicly disparaged as slow and bloated.

Venture capitalists and startup founders have been salivating at what they hope is a true defense reformation that hands power—and billions of dollars—to defense-tech startups that have been excluded from the inner circle of weapons procurement.

Investor exuberance in the sector has sent valuations soaring. Anduril, one of the fastest-growing defense startups, doubled its valuation from $30.5 billion a year ago to $61 billion in May.

But many are anxious that Congress is preparing to slow the fire hose to a relative trickle amid growing scrutiny of Hegseth’s spending and disapproval of the Iran war, a move that could puncture the bubble around defense tech.

Pentagon contract spending on the 15 highest-valued defense-tech startups in the last fiscal year tripled from 2022. Yet they accounted for less than 1% of total dollars for all defense contractors, a rate that has held consistent for years, according to a data analysis from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute’s National Security Innovation Base Report Card.

For many startups, even the scraps from the department’s trillion-dollar budget would spell success.

“We’ve got a shot to disrupt this thing,” said Philong Duong, chief executive officer of startup NODA AI, which has a military contract selling software for autonomous weapons.

Roughly 10,000 new defense companies have entered the market in the past two years, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. So-called nontraditional companies, which include venture-backed startups and also small businesses and commercial tech companies, received over $122 billion in the prior fiscal year, double the amount from a decade prior. But during that same period, the Pentagon also doubled its spending on traditional primes, as the top-tier mega defense contractors are known, to $372 billion, the CSIS analysis shows.

U.S. military spending has climbed in the past few years amid concern over a potential conflict with China over Taiwan and the fragility of overseas supply chains exposed by the Covid pandemic. The battlefield efficacy in Ukraine of drones powered by software and AI has more recently helped trigger a spending spree by a U.S. military still largely reliant on the weapons of yesterday’s wars.

“Warfare is evolving faster than our acquisition system,” said Paige Craig, a defense-tech investor at Outlander VC. He calls the dawning moment the “PC era of war,” meaning “it’s affordable and everyone is going to have fairly equal access to the fundamental means of warfare.”

Reforming the acquisition bureaucracy of the Pentagon is a herculean effort that has been tried time and again, without much success, since 1960. The war with Iran showcases the persistent challenge. The U.S. has brought to bear few weapons systems that are less than 15 years old. The new systems include attack drones re-engineered from the Iranian Shahed drone and drone boats from startup Saronic. Most others are decades old and expensive—the opposite of what Hegseth has said he wants—and Iran’s smaller and lower-cost arsenal has denied the U.S. military total victory.

Many of Hegseth’s reforms are new and must filter through an agency that employs millions. Among his biggest shake-ups: eliminating a requirements process for weapons purchases that was slow and cumbersome; suspending costly and rigorous cybersecurity requirements; and giving lower-ranked officers more power to buy the weapons they want. He also stood up programs catering to startups, and sped up and added flexibility to contracting.

“We’ve been waging a war of attrition against the Pentagon bureaucracy to open up the aperture and make sure competition, speed, innovation and commercial options all have a seat at the table,” Hegseth said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.

Michael Brown, a venture capitalist and an early leader of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley branch, the Defense Innovation Unit, gives the department an “incomplete” grade on its transformation efforts. He said the real test now lies with Congress to pass budgets that will benefit startups, such as the department’s $54.6 billion request for an autonomous warfare unit that would largely be allocated to companies building drones and AI weapons.

Venture-capital investment in defense and aerospace startups reached $16.8 billion for the first half of this year, exceeding any prior full-year investment, according to PitchBook. Some investors are calling a bubble, pointing to soaring valuations. “I am very uncomfortable. I am not enjoying this moment at all,” Trae Stephens, co-founder of weapons maker Anduril Industries and a partner at Founders Fund, said recently on the podcast “Uncapped.” He added, “Prices are untethered from reality.”

The venture-capital flood has propped up more than 400 drone companies in the U.S. “In five years, you’re going to have 10 or 15, and that’s fine. That’s national consolidation,” said William Treseder, co-founder of a startup, Arkenstone, which helps defense companies sell to the government.

An analysis by Howe Wang at Frontier Optic, a market intelligence firm, tracked a cohort of 568 startups, a group meant to reflect the universe of independent, commercial, venture-backed defense companies with contracts. The group received $4 billion in Pentagon contract spending last fiscal year, up from $1 billion in 2022, the analysis showed. That is out of around $506 billion for all defense contract spending.

“Spending on this group has grown very quickly, but the traditional primes are still capturing most of the additional dollars, and growth within the newer cohort is increasingly concentrated among a few large winners,” Wang said.

According to Wang’s analysis, Anduril and Saronic accounted for about a quarter of all Pentagon contract spending to the startup cohort last year. The phenomenon of a select few deep-pocketed defense-tech companies gaining bigger contracts has prompted lawsuits and protests by other startups accusing the military of playing favorites, according to documents viewed by the Journal.

But the Pentagon doesn’t get to buy without budget approval from Congress, and elected officials have shown mounting resistance to Hegseth’s request for a staggering $1.5 trillion budget. Officials from both political parties have also demanded scrutiny of the Pentagon’s spending on many loans and equity stakes in startups, many backed by venture capitalists including Donald Trump Jr.

A lot of startup technology isn’t ready for military sales, and even the most established defense-tech company, Anduril, has struggled with dangerous and costly weapons setbacks, the Journal has reported.

“At the end of the day if you are selling something really bleeding edge, you’re going to be told ‘No’ most of the time,” said Mack Ohlinger, chief executive of Dunedain Systems, an AI tool to help with military mission decision-making.

Ohlinger, however, got to yes. His year-old startup is finalizing a nearly $5 million contract with the Army.

“There is a path now, albeit an extremely tortuous one,” he said.

Boeing says it will be ready to fund new plane programme by 2030

US group expects to have firepower to start work on 737 Max successor but warns that demand may be more of a constraint

Boeing expects to have the financial firepower to launch a programme to replace its bestselling 737 Max by the end of the decade, chief executive Kelly Ortberg said, even as he warned that airlines were more focused on fixing problems in existing fleets than pressing for a new aircraft.

Ortberg said the US group was getting its “financial house in order”, which would take “another couple of years”, and would have more resources to devote to a next-generation aircraft once it secures certification for the final 737 Max variants and the delayed long-range 777X.

Speaking on the eve of the Farnborough Airshow, he said Boeing was “spending time and money preparing ourselves to be ready when the market’s ready”, adding: “I don’t see that our readiness is . . . a constraint”.

Ortberg’s comments are the clearest indication yet that the aerospace and defence group is readying itself to launch a new aircraft to take on arch-rival Airbus in the lucrative narrow-body segment of the market.

The European planemaker has said it plans to launch a new narrow-body programme in 2030, with the aim of having a successor for its best-selling A321 family of jets in service in the second half of the next decade. 

Launching a new model would cost billions of dollars. Ortberg, who took the helm at Boeing almost two years ago with a mandate to rehabilitate the company after a series of safety and manufacturing crises, has made financial stability one of its priorities before launching a new model.

Boeing, which reports second-quarter earnings this month, has said it expects to be cash flow positive in the second half of the year as it continues to expand output of the 737 Max. 

Ortberg declined to comment on Boeing’s financials ahead of earnings but said the company would have “more resources available” for a next-generation programme once it secures certification for the latest two 737 Max models as well as the delayed long-range, wide-body 777X. 

Bringing the new models to market is key to generating cash for the group and repairing its balance sheet.

Boeing is in the latter stages of securing certification from regulators for the 737 Max 7, the smallest of the Max models, while the largest, the 737 Max 10, is expected to be certified by the end of the year. It is also still forecasting deliveries of the 777-9, which is in the midst of flight testing and seven years behind the company’s original schedule, to start next year.

“We’ve had a lot of resources applied to those programmes and finishing those up will allow us to transfer resources on to the new aeroplane development work,” said Ortberg. 

The industry veteran, who came out of retirement to take on the Boeing job, last year identified three things that needed to fall into place before the company could launch a new plane: financial stability, market demand and technology. Despite progress on Boeing’s recovery, Ortberg said the market was probably “less ready today than it was a year ago”. 

Airlines, he added, were focused on ensuring that today’s line-up of planes was performing. Carriers have become increasingly frustrated over the durability of aircraft and some of the newest engines, which have led to costly repairs and a shortage of spares, forcing some to ground aircraft.

“I’m not going to jump to something new until we’re sure that we’ve got a mature technology,” said Ortberg. 

The CEO refused to be drawn on what a new plane might look like. However, its current “baseline” scenario was focused on using a traditional, enclosed engine rather than the more radical “open fan” engine developed by CFM International that Airbus is testing.

Ortberg said he was more focused on ensuring Boeing was ready than “the exact timing of the competitor”. 

“This is a long play . . . so whether they start one year or we start one year, I don’t think it’s as important as making sure that we’ve got the right aeroplane for the customer.”

The company, he added, still had “more work yet to do” to regain the trust of stakeholders but he said he was “pretty pleased” with its progress. 

Ortberg pointed to last week’s decision by the US aviation regulator to allow Boeing to issue its own airworthiness certificates for all 737 Max and wide-body 787s — the first time it will be trusted to do so since 2019, after the second fatal crash of a 737 Max.

Ortberg said the company’s immediate focus was on delivering on its backlog of orders. The company delivered 171 aircraft in the second quarter, up 12 per cent on the previous year. It also received 121 gross orders in June, compared with 116 a year earlier. 

“Orders are not our challenge,” he said. “Our challenge is getting these orders delivered”.

Boeing this month officially opened a new production line for its flagship narrow-body 737 Max programme that is critical for Ortberg’s hopes of increasing 737 production from 42 jets a month to 52 and beyond.

Ken Herbert, an analyst at RBC, stressed that with a backlog of almost 7,000 unfulfilled orders, “the primary focus for investors will remain on the state of the supply chain and delivery schedules”.

Ortberg acknowledged that Boeing, which is also one of the world’s biggest defence companies, would have to align with the changing defence climate in Europe, where governments have put more emphasis on bolstering indigenous capabilities.

The company, he said, would “probably move from selling directly to selling through partnerships and aligning with in-country suppliers”, including potentially setting up co-production facilities.

The company has teamed up with Britain’s BAE Systems and Sweden’s Saab to mount a joint bid for the Royal Air Force’s next fast-trainer jet. It also has a joint venture with Germany’s Rheinmetall to offer the MQ-28 Ghost Bat uncrewed combat aircraft to the German Bundeswehr.

Asked about Boeing’s relationship with President Donald Trump, who has used plane orders as leverage in trade deals and called himself the greatest salesman in the history of the group, Ortberg said “he’s been very helpful to the industry . . . He is an aeroplane fanatic. He knows a lot about aeroplanes.”

Home construction is nearing a standstill, thanks to a toxic mix of Byzantine regulations, increased building costs and politics; ‘It’s strangling the city’

LONDON—Shoreditch Works is the kind of real-estate project big cities say they need: It aims to revitalize a rundown block in east London, delivering about 80 new homes, retail space for several thousand workers, a green tech incubator and new pedestrian lanes and public space.

Developers have spent four years trying to convince authorities to approve their plan, submitting more than 9,000 pages in documentation. Local planning officers denied the bid earlier this year, saying it lacked detail. Among the other reasons noted: Tearing down two drab office buildings would “erase an interesting period in industrial history.”

The U.K. capital is at a crisis point. Home construction is nearing a standstill, thanks to a toxic mix of Byzantine regulations, increased building costs, high interest rates and politics.

London has an official annual target of 88,000 new homes. It broke ground on just 4,170 housing units in 2024-25, according to data from the Centre for Policy Studies, a center-right think tank. During that period, the population grew by around 100,000.

Even among older cities in industrialized nations, where it’s often hard to find the space to build, London stands out. It would need to build 1.1 million more homes to reach the western European average of homes per capita, according to the CPS. Last year, Vienna built three times more houses than London, despite being a much smaller city.

The failure to build doesn’t just hold consequences for the livability of a city. It has knock-on effects that can distort the economy, politics and social mobility. The capital city, one of the few bright spots in the U.K. economy, is dimming under the strain.

Economic growth and productivity have taken a hit. Construction employment in London has weakened by 21% since 2017, according to government data. In the last quarter of 2025, work stopped on more than 5,000 homes at some 50 development sites, often because the building contractor went bust. Sky-high prices have weakened demand, while construction costs continue to climb.

“It’s holding London back, which is holding back the entire country,” said Anthony Breach, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities think tank.

Cities across the Western world are struggling to address housing and affordability crises, squeezing residents and developers alike and breeding discontent.

Swelling anger in New York over rising living costs propelled the city’s first Democratic socialist mayor into office. Barcelona residents took to spraying tourists with water guns as Airbnb rentals exacerbated a housing shortage.

In London, the crisis has had far-reaching consequences. “It’s strangling the city,” said Paul Rickard, CEO of property developer Pocket Living.

London once attracted young graduates with good career opportunities and the chance to scale the property ladder, starting with a tiny apartment and upgrading when a promotion or baby arrived. For many, that’s now unattainable. More 20-somethings are choosing to move to more affordable cities like Manchester, which has a pro-development approach, Rickard said.

Housing prices in London have trended lower over the past year thanks to higher interest rates, but the lack of new supply is keeping prices higher than they should be.

First-time home buyers now pay an average of half a million pounds, or around $672,000—that’s 10 times the average annual salary, up from about 7.5 times in 2010. And the amount of space they get to enjoy ranks last among wealthy Western cities, with fewer square feet per person than Manhattan.

Those who can’t afford to buy spend years paying artificially high rent—renters today spend 42% of their income on housing costs, up from 15% in the 1950s and ’60s—delaying their ability to save or start a family, leaving many feeling alienated and disillusioned. The U.K., meanwhile, spends roughly £18 billion a year subsidizing rents for low-income families in London, according to the CPS.

Like many people his age, 34-year-old Nye Jones shares an apartment in London, and sees little prospect of being able to buy a place of his own. He pays around £1,000 in rent each month, excluding bills, and has to be careful about how he spends his money if he wants to save anything.

“In the winter it means trying to avoid putting the heating on to help with bills,” he said.

Jones, who grew up in London, always thought he’d own a home by the time he reached his 30s. Instead, he worries about a sudden rent increase. “I can’t really afford to pay any more.”

High rents have forced Laurence Fredricks, 25, to move six times in three years.

“I was briefly homeless because there was nowhere available to rent that I could afford,” said Fredricks, a Cambridge graduate who works as a researcher. Friends, meanwhile, are considering leaving the U.K. because they’re priced out.

The discontent over housing and broader economic malaise is also pushing voters away from the political mainstream. The populist Green Party has surged in popularity among London’s youth, in part by pitching strict rent controls. Older voters, meanwhile, are flocking to Reform UK, which blames immigration for increasing housing demand in an already tight market.

Intensifying that generational divide, longtime homeowners are staying put in their homes as they increase in value.

Jones says most of his peers feel demotivated. “Why should we work hard when we get to keep so little?”

The root of London’s stagnation lies in a 1940s-era system designed specifically to curb the city’s expansion.

Unlike the zoning-based models used elsewhere across the developed world, London planning operates on a case-by-case system that is largely up to a small group of bureaucrats in each of the capital’s 32 boroughs and the City of London. They consider a range of subjective criteria: whether a proposed project is out of character with existing buildings, or out of scale, or blocks too much light.

Local authorities set their own framework for development, designed to set the tone for all planning decisions. “But in practice, on the ground planning systems are often made by elected councillors whose main objective is usually to get re-elected, not to follow the plan,” said Sam Long, senior analyst at research firm Molior.

On top of that, rising construction costs have made it difficult to build a profitable high-rise, he said. A shortage of planning officers, meanwhile, means local authorities can’t keep up with the backlog.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” said Nicholas Boys Smith, chairman of Create Streets, a London-based think tank specializing in urban design.

He attended the February council meeting on Shoreditch Works, which went late into the evening. The majority of council members tried to persuade the planning officers it was a good development, he said, but to no avail.

“The development was better than most I’ve seen in London,” said Boys Smith. “I still don’t understand why they disliked it so much.”

A Hackney Council spokesperson said large projects like Shoreditch Works require careful consideration to ensure they meet policies around affordable housing, workspaces and impacts on neighboring buildings. “It is important these are properly assessed so that we can secure the best outcome for Hackney’s economy and our residents.”

The bid, after another raft of changes, now sits in the mayor’s office awaiting a final decision.

Fredricks, the researcher, says building in the city needs to be easier. “We treat developers like public services instead of businesses, layering on expectation after expectation,” he said.

The rate of refusal for residential projects across the U.K. has increased over the past two decades from 20% in 2000 to more than 30% in 2024, according to research published by the University of Warwick.

In London, 37 building projects with more than 20 units have been rejected since the start of 2025, according to data from Molior. After an application is turned down, the developer can choose to adjust the proposal and resubmit it, or submit an appeal. Three of the 37 subsequently made it through the appeals process.

Some London councils, like Croydon, briefly experimented with deregulation to spark a building boom, only to retreat following a political backlash from residents. “One distinctive feature of the British planning system is the degree to which it empowers local opposition,” said economist Christian Hilber.

In Lewisham, one recent development in Blackheath (population 17,000) was derailed by 1,000 objections, including a public campaign fronted by celebrities such as Jude Law.

The regulation has undoubtedly preserved London’s charm and character. One 1937 policy, known as St. Paul’s Heights, forbids any building from obstructing views of the cathedral’s dome from vantage points up to 10 miles away. The protected vistas have forced modern developers to shave the tops off skyscrapers or adopt slanted silhouettes. The city today consistently ranks among the world’s most visited, drawing millions with its historic buildings, abundant parks and rich culture.

But the lack of new homes hurts its residents. Waiting lists for social housing are at their highest level in more than a decade, with 336,000 households registered—a quarter of the national total. One not-for-profit social-housing provider said an eight-month delay to one of its regeneration projects resulted in a £2.2 million increase in building costs. Another developer said current approval rates have increased the financing costs of a £100 million project by £5 million.

Many blame the growing crisis on a lack of support from national and local leaders.

Andy Burnham, set to become the U.K.’s sixth prime minister in seven years, said he would launch the biggest social-housing building program in 70 years.

In late March, the government unveiled an emergency plan to spur home construction in London, including fast-track planning for sites delivering at least 20% affordable housing and removing guidelines holding up delivery of homes already earmarked for development.

Berkeley Group, London’s biggest house builder, welcomed the changes—but still warned it was scaling back its business in response to the “unprecedented increase in cost and regulation” in recent years.

As if to emphasize the point, a month later, the company’s application to convert a shopping center in southeast London into almost 900 homes was rejected for a second time. The planning officer acknowledged the critical need for new homes in London but ruled the harm to heritage buildings in the area outweighed the benefits of the development.

The local authority celebrated a “great day for Peckham” when the verdict came out. Berkeley Group is considering seeking a judicial review.

Still, the company hasn’t given up on the capital. “It offers security, heritage, and innovation in an uncertain global environment,” it wrote in an April letter.

There are success stories London could follow.

Auckland, New Zealand, made its planning rules more flexible in 2016, and doubled the rate of construction, which decreased rents and home prices over the following decade, according to the Centre for Cities. Vancouver, British Columbia, after revamping its regulation, exceeded its annual target by 54% last year. Austin, Texas, recently loosened its planning system and is now building 32,000 homes a year—the per capita equivalent of London building 113,000 a year, according to the CPS.

But getting there won’t be easy or quick.

The last time London got close to meeting its official target of 88,000 new homes a year was in the 1930s, when planning rules were simple.

Back then, planning permission took just three weeks to obtain and usually involved a dozen or so pages, according to Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, a campaign group focused on promoting economic growth. Now, it usually takes years.

Some planning experts argue that slow construction is the result of nonregulatory complications, such as skill shortages, high material costs from postpandemic inflation and supply-chain shortages and higher interest rates that make financing more difficult.

“Regulation is one part of a complicated process, but a part that everyone seems to focus on,” said Hugh Ellis, director of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association. He says that without regulation, you end up with homes that flood, overheat, have space challenges or, worse, lead to another Grenfell disaster.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people, is the deadliest blaze in modern British history. It was blamed in part on the building’s highly flammable cladding and lack of alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. Checks on other housing around England revealed hundreds of fire-safety failures.

Planning rules implemented in London after the fire, however, are so detailed that seven in 10 projects have since failed to get a green light, creating a bottleneck, according to the CPS.

One rule introduced this year requires any building taller than 18 meters, or about six stories, to have two independent staircases to improve fire safety and evacuation. Even projects that were close to being completed had to be redone to comply retroactively. The government’s own analysis found that the costs were 294 times greater than the safety benefits.

A spokesperson for Mayor Sadiq Khan said he is “using every power available to accelerate housebuilding despite the perfect storm of Brexit, high interest rates, increased building costs and global instability.”

Britain’s departure from the European Union, which promised to free the country of additional regulation, hasn’t eased the burden on developers. The U.K. has instead retained some of the most stringent EU environmental directives even as it added more of its own. Britain requires detailed environmental assessments for projects of just 150 homes, while in many EU nations, the threshold is 2,000.

“It’s a huge risk to get something through the planning process, and many projects become unviable,” said Phil Irwin, a London-based developer. In 2025, London had 281,000 unbuilt homes—houses that were conditionally accepted but never built, often because the developer decided the conditions were too arduous.

Irwin spent £40,000 on a planning application in 2024 to convert a small derelict building in east London’s Hackney into two modern apartments. The council said the decision would be made within eight weeks. It’s been two years.

The council repeatedly asked for new reports—arboricultural, sustainability, sunlight analysis. Each time, the project had to go back to public consultation, Irwin said.

“Councils can drag everything to a glacial pace, just going round and round in circles,” he said.

The delay cost him nearly £100,000, covering the interest on the loan to pay for the site, security and insurance.

Irwin said he’s been chasing the council on a weekly basis. Twice his application was given to a council officer who proceeded to leave during the process, which cost months. He estimates that by the time he gets the green light, it will have cost him more than £200,000.

Massive investment plans lead to investor fears of a new boom and bust in memory chips

A relentless run in semiconductor stocks has ground to a halt as investors begin to debate an old hazard: the risk of another glut in the notoriously cyclical memory chip industry.

Samsung Electronics is down by a third from its June high, despite stronger than expected quarterly guidance; SK Hynix had a successful US stock offering, but its South Korean shares are off nearly 40 per cent; and Micron has dropped more than 30 per cent.

The share price volatility illustrates the high-stakes race playing out between demand for memory chips from AI data centres on one hand and the colossal investments being made to increase supply on the other.

With semiconductor companies now some of the largest in the world by market capitalisation — as well as the best performing over the past year — the outcome of that race will affect returns for millions of investors.

Kwon Seok-joon, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, said expansion plans from the big memory chipmakers could push the industry into oversupply by 2028 if AI demand disappointed.

“Chipmakers are making these plans on the assumption that demand from AI data centres will remain strong for the next two to three years,” he said. “But memory demand will fall if returns on AI investments fail to meet expectations.”

Michael Burry, the investor made famous by The Big Short, said the spending surge was “the beginning of the end” of the current upcycle.

Writing on his Substack account, he disclosed a short position in Micron, arguing the company remained a textbook cyclical stock.

“When times are good, the stock gets pumped more than it should,” he wrote. “When times are bad, it gets dumped more than it should.”

Dynamic random-access memory, or DRam, is the short-term memory computers use to hold information as they carry out calculations.

Memory chips have emerged as an important bottleneck in AI data centres, with demand running ahead of supply and big short-term profits at the main producers.

But DRam is a highly cyclical industry, prone to booms and busts. Today’s three dominant suppliers are the survivors of a market that had about 20 players in the 1990s. Most fell by the wayside as the capital investments needed to stay competitive ballooned.

In recent weeks, all three companies have announced some of the largest investments the industry has ever seen, including what the South Korean government dubbed a “Great Leap Forward” — a combined investment by Samsung and SK Hynix that aims to double South Korea’s DRam output within five years.

Although most of the new facilities are unlikely to come online before 2030, the expansion would involve investments of more than Won2,000tn ($1.5tn) over the next 15 years, stoking fears of another boom and bust.

As well as these additions to supply, the sustainability of DRam demand has come under question, with investors wondering whether so-called hyperscalers can sustain their aggressive AI spending.

Reports that Meta plans to sell excess computing capacity have fuelled concern that demand could slow once the first wave of AI infrastructure is built.

Some analysts, however, argue this cycle differs from previous ones. “Experience is your number one enemy because every cycle is different,” said Daniel Kim, an analyst at Macquarie in Seoul.

“HBM’s wafer consumption penalty is getting worse, while DRam scaling is becoming more difficult technically,” he said, referring to the larger number of silicon wafers needed to make high-bandwidth memory, the variety most in demand for AI.

DRam shortages have been so great that customers have signed multiyear supply agreements with Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, reflecting a focus on securing supply.

An executive in the memory industry said these new types of contracts, involving upfront payments that lock customers into multiyear commitments and pricing floors, reflected a mutual interest in avoiding the “volatility of an industry where we end up with massive oversupply and undersupply”.

Analysts note that new factories typically take years to build. Construction of SK Hynix’s Yongin project was announced in 2019; it is expected to begin limited production only at the end of 2027. Nomura estimates any acceleration of existing construction plans would still take at least five years to affect supply meaningfully.

Building new factories is not merely a question of investment, but securing permits, skilled engineers and construction workers. In the US in particular, Micron is competing for resources with the very AI infrastructure clients it serves.

Kwon of Sungkyunkwan University said oversupply was less likely in HBM because the chips were highly customised. Conventional DRam, however, could face excess capacity from 2029, he said.

The biggest uncertainty is China. ChangXin Memory Technologies is preparing for a $9.8bn listing that could fund further capacity expansion, helping it break the longstanding dominance of the three main players.

Morgan Stanley estimates China will account for about 30 per cent of net DRam wafer additions through 2028, second only to South Korea.

“China will be the decisive variable,” said Kwon. “Korean companies say they will adjust their investments depending on market conditions. But they will find it harder to control supply if CXMT expands more aggressively than expected.”

Beijing pushes technology transformation of its grid and Chinese suppliers take 90% of U.S. market, generating geopolitical concerns

Imagine a group of battery banks that together have enough power to keep all of Texas and California going on a peak summer day. That is what China has built in the space of just five years—and it is just getting started.

With the artificial-intelligence boom straining power grids, Beijing is betting on large-scale battery storage banks the size of shipping containers to help manage the load. The technology is particularly valuable in China because the country is heavily investing in solar and wind power, which can’t produce 24-hour-a-day power. Battery storage soaks up excess electricity during sunny and windy days and releases the juice later when it is needed.

As recently as five years ago, all the storage batteries in China had capacity of less than 4 gigawatts, little more than a rounding error in the country’s huge grid. As of the first quarter of this year, the country’s nonconventional energy-storage capacity—mostly batteries—soared to around 155 gigawatts, and Beijing said in June that it was targeting 300 gigawatts by 2030.

And Chinese batteries dominate the U.S. energy-storage market too, generating concern in Washington about how to avoid reliance on its rival.

With the help of battery storage, solar and wind power account for 22% of China’s electricity supply. Still, China generates more than half its power by burning coal.

Beijing wants non-fossil energy to become the primary source of electricity generation by 2030. The government is requiring all new data centers to derive at least 80% of their power from renewables.

In the late 2010s, local governments in China began mandating that power producers pair renewable projects with energy storage. Thousands of companies piled into the business. That has driven down costs but also pushed some companies to the brink in another instance of the hypercompetition sometimes blamed for afflicting China’s economic health.

Last September, Robin Zeng, founder of the world’s biggest battery maker, took aim at what he called “vicious price competition.” He said hard-pressed suppliers were cutting corners on quality.

Zeng’s company, China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, expects its energy-storage business to account for half of its global revenue by 2030, up from 15% in 2025, according to people familiar with the company.

Where the U.S. stands

The U.S. is second in battery storage after China, with 57 gigawatts as of the end of last year—a figure that Wood Mackenzie estimates could reach 200 gigawatts in five years.

The U.S. has also been ramping up investments. States including California and New York have set storage targets, and the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022 expanded federal tax credits for investing in energy-storage systems.

The challenge for Washington is that Chinese companies dominate the supply chain for energy-storage batteries. They control the processing of key raw materials including lithium, cobalt and graphite. And the world’s largest battery-cell makers and storage-system sellers are almost all Chinese.

Since 2023, Beijing has tightened export limits on some battery materials and advanced battery technologies in the wake of geopolitical tensions with Washington.

In the first quarter of this year, the world’s top 10 battery-cell suppliers of energy-storage systems were all Chinese, capturing 90% of the global market, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The No. 2 company on the list, Hithium, opened a factory last year in Mesquite, Texas.

Last year, more than 90% of the battery-storage systems installed in the U.S. used Chinese cells, according to Benchmark.

Even Tesla, the leading U.S. storage-system seller, is enmeshed in the China supply chain. At its Shanghai factory, Tesla produces Megapack energy-storage systems for markets outside the U.S., using battery cells and components from CATL among others.

Ford licenses CATL’s technology to produce energy-storage products in the U.S.

Iola Hughes, head of research at Benchmark, said Chinese battery makers have focused on lithium ferrophosphate, or LFP, batteries that use inexpensive iron and are suited to energy storage.

“No matter which market you’re in the world, the obvious choice would be to go for these batteries which the Chinese players had mastered,” she said.

The U.S. is expanding domestic manufacturing with help from companies based in allied nations such as South Korea’s LG Energy Solution and Samsung SDI.

President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports have eroded the cost advantage long enjoyed by made-in-China batteries. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Congress last year after a push by Trump, storage projects that use components from Chinese suppliers can’t receive tax credits.

“If it weren’t for these policy constraints, Chinese companies would still be gaining market share,” said Zheng Jiayue, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie.