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No longer the domain of sci-fi or tech pranksters, translation glasses and earbuds are reality as Chinese firms fuse AI and AR hardware

How close are we to rebuilding the legendary Tower of Babel? China is rolling out a suite of AI tools that may soon make cross-language communication seamless.

In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, humanity came together to build a tower that would reach the heavens. To disrupt their ambitious project, God introduced one simple change: people would speak different languages.

Chaos engulfed the construction site, and the unfinished tower came to be known as Babel – a word derived from the Hebrew for “confusion”.

The metaphor is clear: language barriers hinder human collaboration.

Science fiction author Douglas Adams took the idea further in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when he introduced the “Babel Fish” – a small, yellow fish that, when placed in the ear, could instantly translate any alien language, complete with accents and dialects. With it, interstellar diplomacy and even cross-species romance became possible.

Today, with the rapid advancement of AI translation, the Babel Fish no longer seems far-fetched. Translation apps support most of the world’s languages, while large language models can generate real-time bilingual subtitles for videos.

“What we have now are cloud-based Babel Fish that rely on internet connectivity. But translation models have matured enough to become deployable directly on smartphones, enabling real-time translation during calls,” said an AI expert from Honor AI, who asked not to be named.

His team’s latest research was presented at Interspeech 2025, a top international conference on audio technology held in Rotterdam in August, and has been integrated into commercially available smartphones.

To fit the computational and power constraints of mobile devices, these on-device translation models have been miniaturised, but their performance remains uncompromised, according to the expert.

He said the system, while occupying just 800MB of memory, recognises seven languages in real time – even in low-connectivity environments such as lifts and underground parking garages – and could operate offline for enhanced privacy, making it ideal for call translation.

“The speech model uses an autoregressive reasoning process, predicting the next word based on context. This allows it to perform streaming recognition with almost no delay – unlike traditional translators that require a full sentence before processing.”

Using the analogy of building a block tower, he said that the team modified the model with a multi-head reasoning algorithm. If the original process was akin to building one-handed, the new method used both hands, stacking two blocks at a time.

This accelerated inference, boosting response speed by 38 per cent while increasing accuracy by 16 per cent.

“While most current translation models are designed for call translation – filtering out filler words and casual repetitions – they can also be fine-tuned to learn specialised terminology, idioms, slang, and even perform translations in legal or medical fields.”

According to the expert, the rise of wearable tech was accelerating the trend. Beyond smartphones and portable translators, simultaneous interpretation earbuds and smart glasses are already entering the market.

“Such IoT [Internet of Things] devices can capture subtle visual cues – gestures, expressions and other multimodal signals – that are crucial to communication. When combined with emotional reasoning in large models, they enable seamless, natural exchanges without the need to glance at a screen,” he said.

Viral videos show the human impact of AI-enhanced translation devices, such as a social media post by Chinese-American firm iTourTranslator which shows a Chinese tourist walking into a US store wearing smart glasses that instantaneously project bilingual subtitles from the clerk’s speech.

But what once astonished both parties is now being mass-produced.

At the Beijing Culture Forum on September 23, attendees – including a former French prime minister – tried out a pair of domestically developed augmented reality (AR) translation glasses.

Weighing just 49 grams (1.7 ounces) and produced by Beijing-based LLVISION, the glasses purportedly translate more than 100 languages with a delay of under 500 milliseconds, displaying subtitles directly in the wearer’s field of vision.

Earlier, at the International Association of Science Parks and Innovation Areas (IASP) 2025 world conference on September 17, the same glasses provided real-time translation for 800 participants from 97 countries and regions.

As a fusion of Chinese AI and AR hardware, the product represents a successful example of a Chinese home-grown tech firm exporting innovation abroad, according to the Guangming Daily.

Once AI can accurately convey not only meaning but also emotion and cultural nuance, humanity may, in a sense, speak “one language” again.

Hidden arrangement secured by prominent Chinese insurer connects Tehran with its biggest customer

U.S. sanctions make it nearly impossible to pay Iran for its oil. China has figured out how to do it anyway, in an arrangement that has largely been secret.

The hidden funding conduit has deepened economic ties between the two U.S. rivals in defiance of Washington’s efforts to isolate Iran.

The barter-like system works like this, according to current and former officials from several Western countries, including the U.S.: Iranian oil is shipped to China—Tehran’s biggest customer—and, in return, state-backed Chinese companies build infrastructure in Iran.

Completing the loop, the officials say, are a Chinese state-owned insurer that calls itself the world’s largest export-credit agency and a Chinese financial entity that is so secretive that its name couldn’t be found on any public list of Chinese banks or financial firms.

The arrangement, by sidestepping the international banking system, has provided a lifeline to Iran’s sanctions-squeezed economy. Up to $8.4 billion in oil payments flowed through the funding conduit last year to finance Chinese work on large infrastructure projects in Iran, according to some of the officials.

Iran exported $43 billion of mainly crude oil last year, according to estimates by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Western officials estimate that around 90% of those exports go to China.

China has been the predominant buyer of Iranian oil since 2018, when President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear accord and reimposed U.S. sanctions.

Two weeks after returning to office, Trump ordered the use of “maximum pressure” to force Tehran to curb its nuclear program and end support for allied militia groups. The directive sought to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.

Since then, the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Chinese individuals and small entities, but Iranian exports to China have continued largely unabated.

Beijing also provides political support for Iran. In September, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at a multinational summit and at a military parade attended by the leaders of Russia and North Korea—a group joined in opposition to a U.S.-led world order.

Western nations succeeded recently in reimposing international sanctions on Tehran that were lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal, a European response to Iran’s breaches of the accord. China and Russia said the move was against international law.

China has also deemed Washington’s Iran sanctions to be illegal. But because the sanctions threaten companies that do business with Iran with penalties that include being locked out of the international financial system, Beijing has been wary of exposing its large firms to sanctions risks. China’s customs authorities haven’t reported any purchases of Iranian crude since 2023.

In addition to targeting Iranian exports of energy products, Washington has imposed sanctions on most Iranian banks, including its central bank, making it extremely difficult to transfer money to Iran.

The hidden workaround

The system through which Iranian crude is exchanged for Chinese-built infrastructure involves two primary players: China’s large state insurance company Sinosure and a China-based financing mechanism that the officials all referred to as Chuxin. The officials pieced together their understanding of the system through financial documents, intelligence assessments and diplomatic channels.

In the arrangement, some of the officials said, an Iranian-controlled company registers the sale of oil to a Chinese buyer controlled by state-owned oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong, a U.S. sanctions target.

The Chinese buyer, in return, deposits hundreds of millions of dollars each month with Chuxin, officials said. Chuxin then delivers the funds to Chinese contractors that perform engineering work in Iran, in projects whose financing is insured by Sinosure. Sinosure serves as the financial glue that holds the projects together.

Chuxin isn’t named among the nearly 4,300 banking firms registered by China’s top industry regulator, and couldn’t be found on publicly available official lists of financial firms and company registries.

The Iranian crude that reaches China takes an indirect route to mask its origins, involving ship-to-ship transfers and often mixing in oil from other nations, the U.S. government and industry experts say.

Beijing’s underwriter

Sinosure, formally China Export & Credit Insurance, is a financial tool of China’s central government that supports Beijing’s international development priorities—a mandate with particular significance in a politically sensitive location such as Iran.

Sinosure had supported over $9 trillion in trade and investment activities around the world as of the end of last year, according to the company.

In Iran, Chinese infrastructure projects tend to be huge state-directed endeavors, including airports, refineries and transport projects, managed by China’s largest state banks and engineering groups.

China made over $25 billion in financial commitments to build infrastructure in Iran between 2000 and 2023, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Sinosure had a direct role in 16 of the 54 documented deals.

The U.S., which has used targeted sanctions against Chinese firms, hasn’t blacklisted companies for doing civilian work in Iran. Nor has it targeted a large Chinese bank.

No documentation in the public domain could be found directly linking Sinosure with the oil-for-construction arrangement in Iran.

In response to questions, China’s Foreign Ministry said that it is unaware of the arrangement, opposes “illegal unilateral sanctions,” and that international law allows for normal cooperation between nations. Zhuhai Zhenrong and Sinosure didn’t respond to requests for comment about the arrangement.

Officials at the Iranian mission to the United Nations didn’t comment on the payment mechanism or on China’s oil purchases.

China’s framework for doing infrastructure work in Iran likely mirrors a documented Sinosure agreement in Iraq, said AidData executive director Brad Parks. Under that 20-year deal, Sinosure backstops Chinese lending for Chinese projects in exchange for oil.

“Every creditor and every construction contractor has to come under this umbrella,” said Parks.

Chinese infrastructure work in Iran has increased since a 2021 25-year partnership deal. The projects are critical for Iran, which has struggled to maintain basic services, such as water and electricity.

Iran is also able to recover some of its oil sales revenue by buying goods directly in China. It also manages to bring some of the revenue back to its region to use, U.S. officials say.

“Iranian entities rely on shadow banking networks to evade sanctions and move millions,” John K. Hurley, undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, said last month, announcing sanctions on people and entities in the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong for allegedly coordinating the transfer of funds.

Neither Sinosure nor Chuxin has been hit with U.S. sanctions. The Treasury Department declined to comment on the description of the activities of the Chinese entities.

xAI aims to win tech arms race with ‘Colossus’ data centers, thrown up at lightning speed; city divided over massive power and water demands

MEMPHIS—For Elon Musk, ground zero of the artificial intelligence arms race is a 114-acre tract of grass and swamp on the state line of Tennessee and Mississippi.

This once-sleepy plot of land, filled with groves of water-rooted tupelo trees at its western edge, is now part of a growing empire Musk is accumulating in the Deep South, just a few miles from Elvis Presley’s homestead at Graceland.

Labor crews hired by Musk’s xAI were excavating power equipment on the site—a defunct energy plant just over the state line in Mississippi—and preparing to build a new plant capable of generating over a gigawatt of electricity, enough to power around 800,000 homes. Engineering permits show that Musk plans to route transmission lines that will connect the new power plant to a million-square-foot data center that is also under development just north of the border, in Tennessee.

Memphis is the front line of Musk’s costly foray into the AI wars. His artificial intelligence company, xAI, has already built one massive data center here in the Bluff City that it calls the world’s largest supercomputer. That facility, called “Colossus,” houses over 200,000 Nvidia chips and powers the technology behind the AI chatbot Grok. Now, Musk is close to finishing the second facility, which will be even bigger. He calls it Colossus 2.

The AI arms race is shaping up as the most expensive corporate battle of the 21st century, with the belief that the first to the finish line will dominate the market, making speed crucial. Money also makes the difference: The more cutting-edge chips companies have, the smarter their models are. But at this stage it’s unclear if or when the enormous investments will pay off.

Technology companies that are splashing out to hire AI talent are writing even bigger checks to build the infrastructure needed to power cutting-edge AI models. Morgan Stanley estimates companies will spend over $3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028.

Musk, who has been at the forefront of innovation in electric vehicles, rockets and brain-computer interfaces, is in the unusual position of playing catch-up to rivals like Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Finishing Colossus 2 will cost tens of billions of dollars, some AI and data center experts say. The Nvidia chips alone cost a fortune: Musk will need to spend at least $18 billion for the roughly 300,000 more chips he needs to complete the Memphis project, a person familiar with the project’s financials said. Musk said in July that Colossus 2 will have a total of 550,000 chips and has separately signaled it could eventually have a million processing units.

Musk is burning cash at a breakneck clip. Earlier this year, xAI raised $10 billion through a combination of debt and equity. The company was slated to run through about $13 billion in cash in 2025, according to projections shared with creditors a few months ago, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Musk turned to his privately held SpaceX to chip in $2 billion, an unusual move for a company that rarely makes outside investments. Some executives have left xAI after clashing with Musk’s advisers over concerns about the startup’s management and financial health.

“In typical xAI and Elon fashion, the company’s future is highly unpredictable,” said Dylan Patel, CEO of SemiAnalysis, an independent research company focused on the semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries. “Elon will do everything he can to not lose to Sam Altman.”

Musk’s gamble is playing out in real time in Memphis. Among the locals, his arrival has kindled hopes of an economic renaissance, but it has also stoked controversy. Musk’s data centers will probably bring in only a few hundred jobs to Memphis while consuming millions of gallons of water a day and more electricity than is needed to power all the city’s homes. Natural-gas turbines powering the data centers have brought pollution and controversy over their use—xAI has argued that many of the structures are temporary and don’t require a permit. Some residents question plans for the utility to issue rebates to xAI for building the new power structures it needs.

Musk’s pitch to Memphis is that he is building infrastructure that will benefit the city. The company has promised to construct a giant wastewater recycling facility, to be used in its cooling system, that would help reduce demand on the Memphis aquifer. The company has also donated funds to Memphis schools and other organizations and hired workers to go around the city and pick up trash.

“In one year, xAI has become the second largest taxpayer in the city and county after FedEx,” said Bill Dunavant III, a Memphis businessman who sits on the board of directors of the city’s chamber of commerce.

Critics say the project is a big risk and could leave residents with pollution caused by the natural-gas turbines and higher electricity bills stemming from the extreme demand on power.

“Memphis is desperate,” said Batsell Booker, a 65 year-old retired firefighter who lives in the neighborhood next to Colossus. “And this is not the first time that they have been so desperate for companies. They come in and promise them the world.”

xAI declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, which has acted as a representative for xAI’s activities in Memphis, said xAI has demonstrated “substantial economic commitment to our region, without any tax incentives.”

Memphis city officials didn’t respond to a request for comment. Southaven, Miss., the town across the border that is the location of the power plant for Colossus 2, has called the deal with xAI “a great partnership.”

Courting Musk

Even though Musk has called AI humanity’s “biggest existential threat,” he was a co-founder of OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015. He left after the two had a falling-out after Musk demanded that he should become its CEO or have it merge with Tesla, the electric-vehicle maker controlled by Musk.

He set out to build his own artificial intelligence and got a boost from his acquisition of Twitter in 2022. The never-ending flow of posts on the platform provided a stream of information that, combined with publicly available internet data, could make it a powerful base for training a large language model.

In 2023, Musk incorporated xAI and soon launched Grok. By that point, OpenAI had already vaulted far ahead in the AI race with the launch of ChatGPT. Musk moved to raise $1 billion from investors and contacted existing data center providers, hoping to find a facility that could house 100,000 Nvidia chips and become a hub for AI training. Nothing was available.

“We got time frames from 18 to 24 months. That means losing was a certainty,” Musk said about that time during the launch of Grok 3 in February. “The only option was to do it ourselves.”

Musk and his team looked at eight locations across the U.S. where they could build a data center before turning to Memphis, people familiar with the matter said. Eventually, they zeroed in on the city because of an abandoned factory there that was previously home to Electrolux, a Swedish appliance manufacturer that had closed the facility and laid off around 500 hundred workers a few years earlier.

Musk’s company signed a lease on the building in March 2024. Musk and his staff told the chamber of commerce that xAI had three main concerns when setting up shop in Memphis: power, water and speed.

From the start, local officials were eager to court Musk. Memphis, the seat of Shelby County, was once a prosperous city when it was at the heart of the American cotton industry up through the mid-20th century. But globalization took a toll on the industry, and while some logistics companies such as FedEx have thrived, the region’s economy has struggled. “xAI is going to be a $40 billion or $50 billion investment for our city,” said Dunavant, the businessman on the chamber of commerce’s board.

During one conversation in early 2024, the head of the chamber, local businessman Ted Townsend, teamed up with the head of Memphis’s local utility provider to convince Musk that he would have all the power he needed in the city, people familiar with the call said.

Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the utility, denied xAI was assured they would have all the power they needed. “They were informed that a system impact study would be conducted to determine what would be required to serve the load without adversely impacting existing customers or the bulk electric system,” said a spokeswoman for the utility. If any impacts are identified, xAI would be required to pay for upgrades, she said.

Artificial intelligence requires massive amounts of power. “Each unit is doing a very simple calculation, but there are so many such small units, and overall, the power consumption is really huge,” said Shaolei Ren, professor of computer science at the University of California, Riverside. “A server with 16 chips, smaller than a piece of checked baggage, needs the same power as five to 10 households.”

xAI representatives said they would be willing to build a lot of the infrastructure that xAI would need, including power substations around the former Electrolux factory, and they promised to turn over the works to the city for public use in exchange for rebates on the company’s utility bills.

Representatives from MLGW, the utility, agreed to the rebate programs, which have drawn some criticism from local environmental groups because they believe it is effectively a subsidy for xAI, while the high demand on the power grid and cost of new infrastructure will result in higher bills for consumers.

The utility said that xAI’s construction of a substation wouldn’t impact residential rates, which are set by the utility’s board of commissioners and approved by the city council.

“xAI agreed to build substations to MLGW specifications at xAI’s expense for a reduction in their electric bill for a period of time. It’s not unusual for companies to do this—we’ve made this same agreement with other large load customers,” the spokeswoman said. “It also puts downward pressure on rates because we are not using ratepayer dollars to build infrastructure.”

Colossus erected

While city officials were in the loop, state officials were in the dark as Musk began work on the facility in May. The board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which generates most of the electricity used in the state, wasn’t notified about xAI’s intent to open the data center until the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce announced it publicly in June, people familiar with the matter said. (Musk has since started to work more closely with the governor as one of his other companies, the Boring Company, works on a tunnel connecting Nashville’s downtown to its airport.)

A spokesman for TVA said it believes in the importance of using “American energy dominance to win the AI race” and is working with MLGW and xAI on any additional requests for load.

A spokeswoman for the Tennessee governor didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk went to Memphis himself in the summer of 2024, actually helping to build out cabling to ensure the chips being installed by his team were able to simultaneously process huge amounts of information.

In order to get electricity from the local utility, xAI had to first refurbish nearby power substations that could handle the large electric load Colossus would require. The work on the first substation would take nearly a year.

Musk couldn’t wait, so he set up 14 natural-gas turbines as a temporary power source for the data center. To help cool down the processing chips, Musk said he rented about a quarter of the country’s mobile cooling capacity, while the company worked with SuperMicro to procure liquid-cooled server racks for longer-term use. Musk also had a farm of Tesla batteries installed and reprogrammed to help ensure that the power supply to the building was smooth.

By September 2024, after bottlenecks and false starts, the team was ready to put the Memphis supercomputer to work training Grok, using some 42,000 Nvidia chips that had been installed. It had taken 122 days to make that breakthrough. “There is only one person in the world who could do that,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of Musk in an interview with the BG2 podcast.

Musk decided to name the data center Colossus—a reference to a popular trilogy of sci-fi novels from the 1960s by D.F. Jones, in which scientists built a supercomputer named Colossus that gained autonomy and plunged the world into war and chaos.

As more chips came online, Colossus needed even more power. At its peak, Musk had around 35 natural-gas turbines at the Colossus site, capable of producing 420 megawatts of power, enough to power the roughly 250,000 homes in the Memphis city limits.

The turbines were very large and emitted enough nitrogen oxides and other pollutants to require a permit from local authorities, according to an August 2024 letter from the Southern Environmental Law Center to the Shelby County Health Department reviewed by the Journal. But xAI wasn’t required to obtain a permit for them because the setup was supposed to be temporary, health officials said in July this year to the legal nonprofit.

In the poor, mostly Black neighborhoods of South Memphis near the data center, residents said they smelled the pollutants not long after xAI started operations.

Booker, the retired firefighter, said he started smelling gas in the air when he would go out to garden in his backyard. “It had everyone terrified,” he said, saying the neighborhood over the years has had a high concentration of people who have died from cancer and respiratory illnesses. Some public health experts attribute the increased rates to environmental pollutants from nearby industrial sites.

In August 2024, the Southern Environmental Law Center wrote to Memphis city officials to question how xAI was able to get a permitting exception that it said was meant for much smaller turbines. “This was essentially an unpermitted power plant,” said Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney for the legal nonprofit.

Gregg Fortunato, a public health official in the Shelby County Health Department, warned xAI’s power consultants in an October 2024 email that “political pressures” were mounting over the use of the turbines.

In January, after Colossus had been operating for about six months, xAI applied for a permit for 15 of the natural-gas turbines at Colossus. They moved 13 turbines elsewhere, with some going to a storage facility in Mississippi. The permit requires that xAI measure the turbines’ emissions and keep them below a certain threshold.

At Colossus 2, however, around seven turbines—physically located across the state line in Mississippi—are now operating without a permit.

Mississippi approved the use of the turbines in Southaven but “implored” xAI to minimize the emission of nitrogen oxides and other pollutants, according to a July 29 letter to the company from Jaricus Whitlock, the air division chief of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, reviewed by the Journal.

The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said regulations specifically provide for the temporary operation of mobile source turbines, and the agency has ensured compliance with the regulations. Mayor Darren Musselwhite of Southaven said that MDEQ has approved temporary operations, and therefore xAI is currently in compliance with MDEQ standard requirements.

xAI plans to install a total of 18 temporary turbines at the site, according to correspondence between xAI and Mississippi environmental officials reviewed by the Journal. In August, xAI filed an application for a permit to eventually have 41 permanent natural-gas turbines in Southaven that could generate over a gigawatt of power, according to the correspondence.

Transmission lines feed power to the data center on the Tennessee side of the border.

In Memphis, city officials are trying to show citizens they aren’t letting xAI take advantage of its poorest neighborhoods. In June, the city said an air quality test near the data centers found pollutants were “too low to detect or well below established safety protocols.” In August, the Memphis City Council voted to designate 25% of xAI’s Memphis tax revenues for communities near the facilities.

After the first Colossus went online last year, Musk quickly put Grok on the map, impressing AI experts with some of the model’s capabilities. This year, it outperformed models from OpenAI and Google in several advanced tests, including one that asks Ph.D.-level questions about topics ranging from ancient linguistics to gravitational physics. Its popularity also jumped when xAI rolled out a range of avatars that users could speak with directly, including one named Ani, a scantily clad female stylized like an anime character.

But xAI’s chatbot also drew criticism this summer when it started to post violent and antisemitic comments directed at users on X. xAI had to temporarily disable the chatbot on social media and issue a public apology for “the horrific behavior that many experienced.”

In July, Musk said the Colossus 2 facility was getting ready to start training Grok. He also said he is importing a prefabricated power plant from abroad to power the whole operation.

On the financing front, Musk is exploring a way to stock up on $12 billion worth of chips without buying them outright, instead leasing them through a complex financing arrangement with an outside partner, the Journal previously reported. He continues to look elsewhere in his empire for potential financial support: Tesla shareholders will vote in November on a proposal for the EV maker to invest an unspecified amount in xAI, following in SpaceX’s steps.

Musk has said he doesn’t see any limits in the AI race. “I think we’ll see artificial intelligence continue to scale up to where most of the power of the sun is harnessed” for the technology, and “ultimately most of the power of the galaxy,” he said at the All-In Summit last month.

Demand for key energy minerals is set to grow rapidly

Rio Tinto has signed a five-year deal with Canada’s Ideon Technologies to roll out technology that harnesses subatomic particles created by supernova explosions to help find and map deposits rich in minerals faster, cheaper and more accurately.

Under the multimillion-dollar agreement, the world’s second-biggest miner by market value will initially adopt Ideon’s technology at six sites around the world, said Gary Agnew, Ideon’s co-founder and chief executive. That includes at a big U.S. copper mine and within its mammoth iron-ore business in Australia, Rio Tinto’s profit engine, he said.

Miners are seeking new ways to bolster production of metals they expect will be highly sought after for a boom in clean energy and data centers. Demand for key energy minerals is set to grow rapidly and there is expected to be a large shortfall of copper and lithium by 2035 based on the existing project pipeline, the International Energy Agency said in a May report.

They are also under pressure to mine more cheaply and efficiently, particularly after recent inflation pressures and lower prices for some commodities eroded profits. Rio Tinto in August installed a new CEO, former iron-ore chief Simon Trott, promising a sharpened focus on costs.

“It’s six sites to kind of get the ball rolling in a meaningful way,” Ideon’s Agnew said in an interview. “Those operations become the poster children of this technology and what it can do, that is then the vehicle for the next phase of sites to adopt.”

Rio Tinto declined to comment on the agreement. Both companies declined to share the specific value of the deal.

Ideon puts sensitive quantum sensors deep beneath the Earth’s surface to help miners map mineral deposits—as well as old mining tunnels, subterranean caves and potentially dangerous air pockets, among other things—using a technique known as muon tomography.

Muons are a type of subatomic particle created in the atmosphere. They constantly hit and penetrate every part of the Earth’s surface. As the muons pass through the ground, they slow and decay. Ideon’s sensors identify fewer muons when the earth is dense, and more when it isn’t.

The startup pairs information from those sensors with other data sets to produce what it says is like an X-ray or CT​—short for computed tomography​—of ​what’s belowground. “We’re ‘X-raying’ the Earth,” said Agnew.

Unlike those medical-imaging techniques, the technology doesn’t emit harmful radiation, using naturally occurring cosmic energy instead, he said. It also scans a significantly bigger area, collecting data from hundreds of millions of cubic meters of earth at any one time, he said.

Ideon’s technology can help miners like Rio Tinto get the most from existing sites, or so-called brownfield expansions, Agnew said. Miners have been spending more exploring near current mining operations rather than on undeveloped land, as new discoveries can be hard to find, take decades to develop and face challenges including huge upfront costs and possible community opposition.

Rio Tinto has already been working with the startup for several years, including testing its technology at the giant Kennecott copper mine in Utah. “Certainly we will be back at Kennecott” under the initial phase of the agreement, Agnew said.

Miners are especially eager to get their hands on more copper, arguably the most essential metal for a clean-energy transition because of its use as an electrical conductor and a market facing big challenges from a lack of new discoveries and falling concentrations of metal in existing pits.

Ideon has been working with several of the world’s biggest mining companies, including BHP Group and Vale, although Rio Tinto is the first major miner to agree to a global rollout, said Agnew.

The CEO of BHP, the world’s biggest miner by market value, last year called muon tomography “cutting-edge” work in a speech to the China Development Forum.

“Muons are a type of cosmic radiation that allow us to scan and map underground deposits faster and more accurately than before,” Mike Henry said, according to prepared remarks.

Ideon is backed by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture-capital firm Playground Global.

Agnew said its technology can reduce drilling by 40% to 80%, lowering costs and environmental impact, and shortening project timelines.

“If you have two drill holes, you’re basically guessing what happens in between,” he said. “We help fill in the gaps.”

Accord capping number of long-range nuclear weapons was due to expire in February but would be extended by a year

President Trump on Sunday praised a Kremlin proposal to continue the limits on long-range nuclear weapons for one more year, which would preserve a main element of the last major arms-control agreement between the U.S. and Russia.

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Trump said Sunday when asked about the Russian offer.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that he was prepared to adhere to the caps in the New START agreement for an additional year after the accord expires in February.

Proponents of the deal say that keeping the weapons ceilings in place will provide a measure of stability when there are sharp tensions between Moscow and the West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and provide time for the U.S. and Russia to negotiate a follow-on accord.

Critics say that keeping the New START treaty, which covers U.S. and Russian strategic forces, will preclude the U.S. from expanding its arsenal to respond to China’s growing nuclear capabilities.

The question over how to limit long-range nuclear weapons has become all the more important as the arms-control framework that has regulated the military competition between Washington and Moscow has crumbled over the past decade.

The U.S. withdrew from the treaty with Russia banning intermediate-range American and Russian missiles based on land in 2019 after accusing Moscow of developing an illegal ground-launched cruise missile. Lesser arms-control agreements have also gone by the wayside

President Joe Biden extended the New START treaty for five years in one of his first major foreign-policy actions. But the treaty was buffeted by tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In 2023, the U.S. accused the Russians of violating the New START agreement by denying on-site inspections, impeding strict monitoring of the treaty. Putin responded by suspending Russia’s participation in the treaty.

Even so, the two sides were careful not to abandon the caps in nuclear forces, which limits each side to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads. It also sets a limit of 700 on the land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and strategic bombers that carry them.

In his comments Sunday, Trump didn’t say if the U.S. was coupling its acceptance of the Russian idea with proposals of its own or whether it had formally responded to the Kremlin offer. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New START treaty entered into force in 2011 and can’t be formally extended a second time. But nothing prevents the two sides from opting to observe its weapons ceilings after it expires.

The idea of prolonging the treaty has drawn criticism from some nuclear-arms experts who say the New START treaty is out of date because it doesn’t apply to Russia’s shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons or cover China’s growing nuclear arsenal.

“China, not Russia, is America’s foremost geopolitical rival, and Beijing is engaging in the most rapid nuclear weapons expansion since the 1960s,” said Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council, who was a national security adviser to the 2012 Mitt Romney and 2016 Marco Rubio presidential campaigns. “Bilateral arms control deals with Moscow alone won’t cut it. It is not the 1970s anymore.”

But other arms-control proponents said extending the New START ceilings would buy time for talks on a follow-on deal.

“Now, the Kremlin and the White House need to formalize the arrangement and immediately direct their teams to begin negotiations on a new more comprehensive agreement or agreements that address difficult issues with which the two sides have long struggled,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Putin’s willingness to adhere to New START limits for another year doesn’t mean that negotiating a follow-on accord would be easy. In his comments last month, Putin also criticized the possible development of U.S. space-based antimissile defenses as a “destabilizing” action.

Trump is mounting a major program to develop space-based and other antimissile defenses, which he has dubbed “Golden Dome.”

Brothers in arms: Spanish defence merger raises conflict questions

EM&E’s co-founder seeks deal with aspiring national champion Indra — whose chair is his elder sibling

A top Spanish defence entrepreneur has made the case for the weapons maker he co-founded to be acquired by aspiring national champion Indra, batting away conflict of interest questions over deep entanglements he and his brother have in both companies.

Javier Escribano, a rough-edged entrepreneur who is chair of EM&E, said his company would give state-backed Indra the industrial “muscle” and technology it needed to rival top European groups.

“In a timeframe of five to 10 years we could be a business with much, much greater volume, which is what the Italian, British, German and French companies have,” he told the Financial Times, referring to the likes of Leonardo, BAE Systems, Rheinmetall and Thales.

The deal would give radar specialist Indra a clearer presence in the world of lethal force. EM&E’s signature weapons systems for tanks combine high-calibre gun barrels with cutting-edge cameras and software for identifying targets and precision firing.

Indra, which is valued at almost €7bn and part-owned by the Spanish state, would also gain a much-needed foothold in Ukraine, where it has not signed any big supply contracts since war broke out with Russia.

Heavy metal gun turrets marked with “UKR” await shipment at EM&E’s factory outside Madrid, where Escribano interrupts a tour to give a corrective tip to an employee shaving a component held in a vice.

But the Escribano family’s objectivity on a potential deal with Indra is in question because of a corporate governance snarl.

Javier’s brother and fellow EM&E co-founder Ángel Escribano is chair of Indra. With a 50 per cent stake each in EM&E, the brothers would be big beneficiaries of a takeover.

In addition, EM&E is already Indra’s second-biggest shareholder, owning a 14.3 per cent stake worth almost €1bn that has given Javier a seat on the bigger company’s board alongside his brother.

EM&E reported sales of €355mn in 2024 and is predicting they will rise to €465mn this year then more than double to €1.3bn by 2030. Analysts say they cannot value the company because it has not disclosed enough about its finances. The Spanish press has suggested a valuation of €1bn-1.5bn.

Javier Escribano, 51, bristled at the suggestion a deal would be a takeover of EM&E by Indra, declaring that it would instead be a “merger”.

He stressed that he and his brother, who is 54, were determined to keep working and would be paid in Indra shares, which he said showed they had no interest in cashing out.

“We’re young, we’re in our early fifties, and if we just wanted to sell our shares [for cash] we could go home or head to the park to feed the ducks in our tracksuits and act like retirees,” he said. “But we’re here giving it our all.”

Escribano said Indra had considered a deal with EM&E under previous chair Marc Murtra, who moved to Telefónica in January and was replaced by Ángel Escribano.

Indra chief executive José Vicente de los Mozos has advocated for acquiring EM&E, arguing that the two businesses together could bid for European contracts for anti-drone and anti-aircraft systems that Indra alone could not win.

“There is a conflict of interest, obviously. I was the first to say it on the very first day,” de los Mozos told analysts in July. “But a conflict of interest does not mean that a transaction cannot take place.”

Ángel Escribano has excluded himself from any discussions on the deal at Indra, as has his brother in his capacity as an Indra director.

The company in July set up an ad hoc committee of four independent directors to evaluate a possible deal to ensure “the proper management of conflicts of interest” and good governance.

On the day the committee was announced one independent director resigned from the board for “personal reasons”. At the end of August one of the directors on the ad hoc committee also resigned for “personal reasons”.

Indra said the committee’s work was advancing but there was no set deadline for it to reach a conclusion. Any deal would need to be approved by the board, excluding the brothers, then Indra shareholders.

Indra’s biggest shareholder is the Spanish state, which owns 28 per cent. Spain’s government is eager for the company to join Europe’s defence big league, although it is refusing to lift the country’s military spending by as much as the Trump administration wants.

Goldman Sachs is advising Indra while the ad hoc board committee has hired Morgan Stanley. EM&E is working with JPMorgan and Santander.

“There could be a conflict of interest if we were playing both sides,” Escribano said. “But think about this: we are not the ones who are going to put a price on the organisation, because top-tier global banks are going to do that.”

Escribano said a weakness of Spain’s defence sector was that most of its companies were suppliers of “subsystems” — mainly radars in Indra’s case — that other companies integrated into armoured vehicles, jets or ships.

EM&E, by contrast, “is a company that sells a weapons system that we send to you in a box. You screw it on, it works, and you fire,” Escribano said. “That is extremely important because I own the intellectual property, I have commercial control of the product, I set the price.”

Its main competitors in weapons systems are Rafael and Elbit Systems, which are both Israeli.

Unusually for European defence companies, EM&E did not grow by serving its own government, because Spain’s defence spending was so meagre for so long. Saudi Arabia was its first big defence client and continues to buy from the company, as does the United Arab Emirates.

With European defence spending now booming, Escribano said EM&E’s ambition was to grab a share of that pie, including in Germany. Another target is the UK, where EM&E is hopeful of signing a deal to sell mortar systems. “Breaking into the British market would give us a stamp of quality,” he said.

On the Indra-EM&E deal, Sepi, the state-owned entity that holds Spain’s Indra stake, said it would “respect the analysis provided by the company on the matter”. Sapa, a defence group that owns 8 per cent of Indra, declined to comment.

Another Indra shareholder Joseph Oughourlian, who owns 7 per cent as founder of investment fund Amber Capital, said: “EM&E has what Indra lacks: production sites. I don’t buy the argument that Ángel Escribano has a huge conflict of interest. The deal makes sense and it should have been done a long time ago.”

The fashion house has reissued its first foray into watchmaking. Will it be second time lucky?

On 9 January 2024 Allan Evensen, Louis Vuitton’s head of watch after-sales, received a WhatsApp message. It was sent from the brand’s sprawling Piscataway warehouse in the US, asking what should be done with an old, tattered cardboard box, a photo of which was attached. 

Not usually consulted on the company’s trash management, Evensen nevertheless opened the image. What he saw astonished him. His thumbs danced quickly across the keypad of his phone. The message to Jean Arnault, the watch director, was concise. “Hello! Look what I found.” 

Evensen was witnessing the rediscovery of one of horology’s most unlikely cult objects, buried for more than three decades in a New Jersey warehouse. The cardboard box contained 66 original Louis Vuitton Monterey watches, untouched since 1991, still in their white transport boxes with original price stickers.

If you don’t count the travel clocks that Louis Vuitton made during the 1920s, the Monterey marked LV’s debut on the watch market. It was designed by Italian architect Gae Aulenti, manufactured in collaboration with IWC and launched in 1988. That it was discontinued in the early 1990s suggests it was – how does one say this delicately? – somewhat ahead of its time. 

There were two versions. The first, in gold, featured world time, moonphase and alarm, along with time and date. The indications were arranged on concentric scales with a moonphase at the centre of the dial. It looked bewildering. The second, in a ceramic case, was a little less busy, with a date indication and alarm. Both featured the crown at 12 o’clock and the same pebble-smooth design; rather than lugs, there were two openings on the caseback through which the strap was fed. 

At the time I remember thinking it looked like a stopwatch and came to regard it as one of watchmaking’s dead ends. By the early 21st century, when LV launched its Tambour watches, no one talked about the Monterey any longer. 

It was only a couple of years ago that the Monterey started showing up again: on the social media feed of vintage Rolex expert James Dowling and, inevitably, the wrist of American rapper Tyler, the Creator. At the beginning of this year, those who attended Louis Vuitton’s AW25 runway show in Paris would have noticed the models wearing the – so I mistakenly thought – extinct timepiece.

“I would be lying if I said that I was fascinated with the watch ever since I started at LV,” admits Jean Arnault, who took over the brand’s watch division in October 2022. However, having bought one on eBay, he became “intrigued” and started to discuss it with Matthieu Hegi, the watch division’s creative director.

“What I didn’t like about the original was that it was quite busy,” explains Hegi. “For me, what is very important is that the watch be easy to read.” His solution for the Monterey 2025 has been to maintain the signature elements of the case and the distinctive syringe hands, but remove the clutter. “I don’t want it to be a fashion statement. I want it to be, before all, a watch rooted in savoir-faire,” says Arnault. As such the Monterey 2025 is an exemplar of the company’s transformation into a vertically integrated “manufacture”. “The way we want to do it is to make it the hard way, which is in-house movement, in-house case and enamel dial,” says Arnault. “This brings something different to the table.”

The 2025 version is limited to 188 pieces cased in gold. And as it will be produced at a rate of only 10 per month, don’t expect to get one in a hurry. Even so, at the time of writing, half of the watches have already been allocated.

Europe cannot rely on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, top investor warns

Revolut backer Balderton Capital says continent needs to accelerate development of space and defence industry

One of Europe’s top tech investors has urged the continent to accelerate development of its own space industry to reduce reliance on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and open up a new frontier in the booming industry of defence start-ups.

Bernard Liautaud, managing partner at Balderton Capital, the investment group that has backed successful European tech groups such as Revolut, said a growing part of “military supremacy” will be fought in space.

But he added European countries are “too dependent” on the US, where SpaceX has come to dominate both the launcher and communications satellite markets. That creates a “huge risk”, Liautaud said. “We need to be more self-sufficient.”

European investment in defence tech start-ups has rocketed this year, as Nato countries have hiked defence spending in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

That has driven the creation of dozens of new start-ups developing drones, battlefield software and other military technologies.

However, Liautaud said that Europe needs to build much stronger capabilities to launch satellites and build space-based defences, a sector in which Elon Musk’s SpaceX has become the “dominant force”.

Balderton was founded 25 years ago as an offshoot of US VC firm Benchmark and became fully independent in 2007.

It has backed more than 250 start-ups including fintech Revolut, robotics start-up Wayve and mobile games developer Dream Games. Lately Balderton has stepped up what it describes as “sovereign” European bets, including nuclear fusion venture Proxima Fusion and drone maker Quantum Systems.

Last year Balderton co-led a $160mn funding for Franco-German space start-up The Exploration Company alongside VC firm Plural.

The Exploration Company is building space vehicles, including a capsule for transporting cargo to the International Space Station, a rocket and a lunar lander.

Hélène Huby, a former Airbus executive who founded The Exploration Company in 2021, said at the Italian Tech Week event on Thursday that space was a “huge market”, thanks to drivers including telecommunications, earth imaging and defence, but warned: “We are quite weak right now in Europe regarding this space-based infrastructure.”

European groups face an uphill battle. The main challengers to SpaceX, which was recently valued at $400bn by investors, are other well-backed US players such as Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.

Even in a venture capital industry where the majority of tech start-ups are expected to fail, backing defence and related companies requires a different attitude to risk, said Suranga Chandratillake, another Balderton partner.

The fact that start-ups are being more actively included in government defence procurement programmes is a testament to how far the European tech ecosystem has matured, Chandratillake added.

“Twenty-five years ago, in trying to solve these problems, one of the last things that Europe would have done would have been to turn to start-ups,” he said. “Today that is a key ingredient of what the solution looks like.”

European private capital firms target €17bn in data centre deals

Oaktree Capital, Partners Group and EQT among those seeking to cash in on AI boom

Private capital firms are seeking to cash in on the US-driven artificial intelligence boom, launching €17bn of European data centre sales in a matter of weeks.

Oaktree Capital Management has started a process to offload part of its European and Middle Eastern data centre business Pure DC, which is valued at up to €5bn in total, while Swiss private equity investor Partners Group is seeking as much as €4bn from a sale of Nordic data centre operator atNorth, people familiar with the proposed transactions said.

Swedish buyout firm EQT has already launched a sale of GlobalConnect, its Nordic superfast broadband network and data centre business, at a potential valuation of €8bn. The pace of dealmaking is picking up as the prospect of long-term contracted revenues draws investors, while the assets’ owners seek funding for infrastructure upgrades.

The potential transactions come as BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners is in advanced talks to buy Texas-based Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie, in a deal that could be valued at nearly $40bn.

Other European groups selling down their data centre holdings include Deutsche Bank’s asset manager DWS, which wants to raise about €2bn from the sale of its data centre business NorthC. Telecoms group Orange is looking to sell a stake in several data centres in France, according to people familiar with the process.

Burkhard Koep, JPMorgan’s head of media and telecoms for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the general interest in data centre deals showed that “some of these platforms are outgrowing their existing owners and new investors with deeper pockets are stepping in to fund their multibillion cloud and AI infrastructure pipelines”.

Oaktree has not yet determined the size of the stake it will sell in Pure, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, while another person said it was too early to put a valuation on the data centres being offloaded by the French group Orange.

There have been 162 data centre-oriented M&A deals worth more than $46bn that have closed across the world this year, while another 45 worth about $35bn have been agreed but not yet completed, according to Synergy Research Group.

Last year, 287 deals closed worth more than $77bn, eclipsing all previous years, according to the research firm. That record could be matched as cloud providers and companies race to capitalise on the opportunity to sell assets. Deals in Europe, Middle East and Africa typically account for 10 to 15 per cent of the global total value.

“We do not forecast this M&A activity, but it is certainly possible that deal value in 2025 could match or come close to the record level seen in 2024,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst. 

“What’s driving it? The usual — an insatiable appetite for data centre capacity, the need to keep on building new data centres, and the inability of current data centre operators to fund those investments internally.”

He added that potential buyers viewed data centres as “a safe bet for investments, so money is flooding into the market.”

Orange, Oaktree, Partners Group, atNorth and Pure all declined to comment.

Kremlin-backed crypto coin moves $6bn despite US sanctions

A7A5 token enables Russian financial flows after Washington cracks down on related exchange

A Kremlin-backed cryptocurrency operation appears to have succeeded in circumventing US sanctions, moving at least $6bn since August when some of its entities were blacklisted — highlighting the limits of western efforts to curb Russia’s financial flows.

More than 80 per cent of A7A5, a stablecoin at the heart of Russia’s growing cross-border payments empire, was swiftly destroyed and recreated to be cleared of links to a crypto exchange that had been just sanctioned by Washington, according to a Financial Times analysis.

A7A5 is part of A7, a growing cross-border payments system built as an alternative to the US-led financial system, from which Russian lenders were cut off after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Washington added Grinex, a Kyrgyzstan-based exchange, to its sanctions list in August, the latest step in its attempt to curb Russia’s crypto infrastructure. Grinex is an alleged successor of Garantex, which US law enforcement took down in March for “hacking, ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking”.

Grinex denies any connection to Garantex.

According to the FT analysis, starting the day after the August designation A7A5 administrators deleted the contents of two wallets connected to Grinex, which were carrying a total of 33.8bn tokens worth $405mn. That represents more than 80 per cent of the total number of A7A5 in circulation.

The wallets’ account balances were set to zero using an instruction called “destroyBlackFunds” that designates their tokens as “dirtyShares”.

But soon after, tokens worth the same amount were created in a new wallet, in effect moving the funds and giving them a clean slate.

Unlike a regular transfer, this method breaks the link between the old and new accounts, making it harder to establish a connection between the tokens that had been targeted by sanctions and the newly-minted ones.

This wallet, named TNpJj, was involved in $6.1bn worth of transactions since August, the FT found.

Activity on the new wallet mirrors patterns observed on its predecessors. The wallet has shared 11 counterparties and executed transfers during Moscow working hours. Activity peaks between 10am-12pm local time, with little movement overnight or on weekends.

A7A5’s chatbot offers customer support “weekdays from 10am to 8pm Moscow time”. Clients can also buy the token in cash at their “over-the-counter section of Grinex” housed in a Moscow skyscraper. Garantex shared the same address — Federation Tower, 14th floor.

Setting up the new wallet suggests the operators of A7A5, which trades on Tron and Ethereum blockchains, have drawn lessons from the takedown of Garantex. Back then, Tether, the issuer of the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDT, froze $28mn held in wallets linked to Garantex.

A7A5 is registered in Kyrgyzstan, a jurisdiction Moscow designates as “friendly”, unlike most western countries. The coin’s registered issuer is a Kyrgyz company called Old Vector, which was also blacklisted by the US in August.

Russian authorities last week granted A7A5 formal digital financial asset status. This allows exporters and importers to use it officially through a platform owned by Promsvyazbank, which backs each token with a rouble, according to the A7A5 issuer.

A Russian state-owned defence lender under western sanctions, Promsvyazbank also holds a 49 per cent stake in the A7 cross-border payments network that is rapidly expanding, including to Africa.

The bank’s chief executive Petr Fradkov last month told Russian President Vladimir Putin “we are creating a system of cross-border settlements based on A7”. The network has also received significant loans from Russia’s VEB, a state development bank which traditionally supports the Kremlin’s priority projects.

VEB and Promsvyazbank did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A7 claims to have moved more than $86bn in 10 months, according to its majority owner and chief executive, Ilan Șor — a fugitive Moldovan oligarch living in Moscow.

Overall, A7 may now account for a large chunk of Russia’s cross-border payments market, two financial professionals involved in that market told the FT. In addition to crypto, the A7 network also offers more traditional services, including payments via promissory notes.

“A7 is expanding at rapid pace funded in large part by loans from Russian state institutions,” the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a London-based non-profit research group, noted in a report. Russia’s worsening war economy was likely to increase the “political significance” of the network in enabling exports, it added.

A7 and A7A5 did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In June, an A7A5 representative told the FT they had only “co-operated with the technical team of A7 at the early stage”, and then “decided to separate completely” in May.

“We’ve created a transparent and honest business: we pay taxes and operate openly,” A7 owner Șor told the Kommersant newspaper last month, noting other countries were showing interest in this “alternative payment system that is “beneficial” for the Russian state.