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Airline axes services to UAE and other destinations hours after drone attack on Dubai’s main airport

British Airways has cancelled all flights into Dubai until at least June, in a sign the carrier expects disruption in the Gulf to carry on for months.

The airline said on Monday it would not fly to Dubai, Amman, Bahrain or Tel Aviv until after May 31, and Doha in Qatar until the end of April. Flights to Abu Dhabi will be cancelled until later this year.

This is the longest major airline cancellation announced so far in the conflict, which has entered its third week. European rivals Air France and Lufthansa have announced cancellations until later this month.

Travel agencies have also started cancelling holiday packages travelling through the UAE, citing the insurance risk from passengers transiting through its airports becoming stranded, according to people in the industry.

BA’s decision comes hours after Dubai’s main airport was forced into a seven-hour closure early on Monday when a drone attack caused a fire at a nearby fuel tank.

The airline Emirates was forced to reroute flights in mid-air, with services from Heathrow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Dublin among those forced to return to their original departure point.

Carriers based in the region have been increasing services in an attempt to return stranded passengers, using narrow air corridors that are patrolled by military jets.

However, none of the major European airlines has resumed flights to Dubai, with Virgin Atlantic pulling its resurrected service after only a few days.

BA had cancelled its services until later this month, but on Monday said it had extended the period “due to the continuing uncertainty of the situation in the Middle East and airspace instability”.

It will continue to fly to Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, which have been less affected by the airspace closures. 

At Dubai’s main airport — which was the busiest international airport before the war — flights were suspended from about 6am local time after the fire.

Dubai International gradually resumed flights to select destinations later in the day. No injuries were reported from the fire, which authorities said had been brought under control earlier in the day. 

Iranian drone attacks have been decreasing in frequency in recent days but have hit strategically important targets such as the airports, ports and buildings in Dubai’s financial centre.

The drone strike came as Dubai’s airlines had been increasing passenger capacity and restarting destinations to return stranded travellers and resume normal operations. Tens of thousands of passengers had been stranded in the region at the outbreak of fighting.

Emirates on Sunday reached its highest number of services since the outbreak of the war, with 369 flights, about 70 per cent of its pre-conflict levels. Etihad, which operates from Abu Dhabi, passed 100 flights for the first time on Sunday, data from Flightradar24 showed. 

Qatar Airways said it would increase the number of flights from Wednesday, despite its airspace still being closed. “The number of flights that can operate each day is extremely limited under the current operational conditions,” it said. It listed several dozen new destinations including Singapore, New York, Tokyo and Amsterdam. 

Flights in the region have been operating through narrow corridors of airspace, patrolled by local fighter jets. “Each flight requires careful planning and remains subject to regulatory approvals and airspace conditions,” Qatar added. 

The airline has also been running select services between destinations outside the Gulf, bypassing its central base in Doha.

The flights — which require special approval from airports because they break with normal air travel rules requiring airlines to fly in or out of their home market — have allowed the carrier to repatriate some of the tens of thousands of passengers stranded when its regular Doha flight connections were cancelled. 

Other airlines have also added flights between Asia and Europe in an attempt to return passengers. BA said it had added extra services to Singapore and Bangkok to bring passengers back, and would continue to review options to return more customers.

Government-backed venture moves on to commercial footing to tap surging interest in unproved energy source

The UK government plans to attract private investors to the national nuclear fusion developer to which it has pledged £1.3bn in backing, as it seeks to tap surging investor interest in a technology that holds the prospect of eventually delivering abundant clean energy.

Under a new national fusion strategy announced on Monday, UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, the government’s fusion development arm, will be renamed UK Fusion Energy and restructured to operate “more fully as a commercially oriented entity”.

The company “will provide the foundation for the UK to develop first of a kind fusion power plants and directly stimulate the growth of the UK supply chain”, the fusion strategy said. “Working with industrial partners, UKIFS will develop world-leading capabilities as a fusion power plant integrator that can design and deploy fusion power plants globally, with the capability to raise external investment in future.”

The move marks a shift in the UK’s approach to the commercially unproven technology, which has historically relied heavily on public funding.

Private investors have poured billions of dollars into US fusion start-ups in recent years, with China rapidly catching up, betting the technology could one day supply vast amounts of carbon-free electricity.

Tech sector investors have voiced hopes that fusion could help meet the heavy power demand fuelled by the AI boom, which requires huge amounts of electricity for its calculations. Sceptics, however, argue that commercial fusion is decades away.

UKIFS is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Oxfordshire-based national fusion laboratory, and is responsible for developing the prototype Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (Step) reactor planned at the site of a former coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire.

The fusion industry aims to replicate the reaction that powers the Sun by forcing atomic nuclei to combine in a superheated plasma, unlike nuclear fission, which harnesses energy created when atoms are split.

The Step project aims to demonstrate commercial viability by delivering electricity to the grid by 2040, a milestone no fusion reactor has yet achieved anywhere in the world.

According to a government tender notice issued in 2024, the project could cost up to £20bn.

The government did not say when private investors would be brought into the renamed UK Fusion Energy or how much funding the company would seek.

However, progress on the Step programme could help reduce engineering risks and generate technologies that the company could “exploit commercially”, it said.

The UK’s move comes as global competition to develop fusion power intensifies. US fusion start-ups raised $1.6bn in private funding last year, according to PitchBook.

Meanwhile, China has invested between $6.5bn and $10bn in fusion research since 2022, according to estimates by the Special Competitive Studies Project, a US think-tank chaired by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Nebius said it will provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity across multiple locations

Nebius agreed to a five-year deal worth about $27 billion to supply AI infrastructure capacity to Meta as it continues to see surging demand for its data center computing.

Nebius said it will provide $12 billion of dedicated capacity across multiple locations. Meta also agreed to purchase up to $15 billion in additional available capacity over the five-year period, Nebius said.

Nebius added that it will use large-scale deployments of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin AI infrastructure platform, which is expected to be available starting in the second half of the year. Nebius will deliver the capacity beginning early next year, it said.

Meta has been investing heavily to expand its AI computing capacity and has signed partnerships with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices worth more than $100 billion. It also struck deals earlier this year to make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the U.S. needed to fuel its energy-hungry data centers.

Meanwhile, Nebius has seen its position as an AI infrastructure provider surge in recent months as tech companies compete to lock in data center computing capacity to train and run AI models.

In September, it agreed to a $17.4 billion deal with Microsoft to supply AI infrastructure capacity.

Last week, Nvidia agreed to invest $2 billion in Nebius. The two companies will partner to design and deploy large AI data centers and Nebius will gain early access to Nvidia’s latest computing technologies.

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