TheChek News Flow

It’s no secret that AI is a hog, consuming energy and water like no digital technology before it. Now we know just how much Big Tech’s pursuit of AI is costing the environment.

Both Google and Amazon released their sustainability reports this week, and the numbers aren’t pretty. Each company has pledged to zero-out its carbon emissions in the coming years, but AI has made those goals a lot harder to hit. Google’s total carbon emissions are up 25% since last year, Amazon’s are up 16%.

A close reading of the reports suggests that both Amazon and Google will have to make some serious, and potentially costly, adjustments to their businesses if they’re going to achieve their net-zero targets.

Neither company comes out and blames AI directly for the rising emissions, but there’s plenty of indirect evidence.

AI at the center of it all

Both Amazon and Google acknowledge their energy use has increased significantly in the last year as use of AI has risen. Both talk about carbon intensity — essentially, how much pollution a company generates for every dollar of revenue it brings in — a metric China has used over the last several years when negotiating climate treaties even as its emissions were skyrocketing. And both devote several pages touting how AI can benefit the environment, a case of “protesting too much,” to borrow some Shakespeare.

The picture gets clearer the deeper you dig into the data. Both companies are actually doing OK when it comes to carbon pollution from energy purchases. Years of buying renewable power have helped keep a lid on things, though that may change in the near future as tech companies, including Google, have begun to invest heavily in natural gas power plants to keep pace with AI’s power demands.

Rather, most of Amazon’s and Google’s growing carbon footprint comes from so-called Scope 3 emissions — a catch-all category covering pollution a company doesn’t directly control, like the goods and services it buys or the products it sells. For companies like Amazon and Google, Scope 3 includes things like GPU purchases and the use of a company’s products, like phones and tablets.

Google lumps together two categories of Scope 3 emissions — capital goods and use of sold products —though it admits the latter is small enough to not be material. (Most of Google’s hardware products are small devices that don’t consume a lot of electricity.) That likely leaves data centers as the main driver. Last year, Google’s Scope 3 emissions increased by 2.1 million metric tons, which means they’re now double what they were in 2019, the year Google uses as its baseline when assessing its performance.

Amazon’s rising Scope 3 emissions mostly come from capital goods and fuel and energy. The former can include data centers and warehouses, which can help explain why Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions spiked higher than Google’s. Still, a good chunk is probably data centers. “To meet strong customer demand, in 2025 we added more data center capacity globally than any other company, including more than 1.2 gigawatt (GW) in Q4 alone,” Amazon wrote in the report.

Hitting a wall

That kind of spending helps explain why decarbonization is suddenly getting so much harder. For years, the biggest contributor to their carbon footprints was energy for offices and more modestly sized data centers. That could easily be canceled out buying renewable power.

AI has upended that approach. While tech companies could still use renewables plus batteries to power their data centers, they’re starting to fall back on fossil fuels. It’s a trend that will make their net-zero pledges that much harder to deliver, but it’s not irreversible.

The more pernicious emissions come from the construction and outfitting of data centers themselves. The steel and cement industries are both heavy polluters, and while startups are working on low-to-zero carbon approaches, they’re still not ready to deliver at the scale that tech companies need.

Then there are the GPUs and memory chips powering the AI boom. Semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of energy, and many of the world’s leading-edge chip factories are located in Asia, where the electrical grids remain dominated by fossil fuels. Making matters worse, many of the chemicals used in those factories are also potent greenhouse gases, capable of warming the atmosphere thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of CO2. The bingeing on chips has probably inflated both Amazon’s and Google’s carbon footprints.

None of these problems are intractable, though Amazon, Google, and their peers have their work cut out for them. To deliver on their net-zero pledges, they’ll need to ramp up their renewable energy purchases, invest heavily in advanced steel and cement manufacturing, and buy many millions of tons of carbon removal credits. It’s still possible, but their embrace of AI hasn’t made it any easier.

Hands up if you’ve got a neocloud going up in your backyard! I’m joking, of course, but it almost feels like some people must be putting AI chip servers in their gardens, given the rush of people wanting to start a neocloud business. (That’s the tech world’s term for firms that rent AI servers to others.)

SoftBank on Thursday announced the creation of a U.S. neocloud venture, joining hundreds of other firms now crowding the sector. Funding still appears to be plentiful: A bunch of the younger neoclouds have raised venture funding in recent days, most recently Together AI’s $800 million fundraising unveiled on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Nvidia, which makes the dominant AI chip, is promising to financially backstop younger cloud firms in exchange for a share of their revenues, we reported on Wednesday night. Nvidia’s move raises the question of why neoclouds need a backstop if demand for computing capacity is so intense.

The answer is straightforward: Nvidia, conscious that Amazon and Google are offering alternatives, wants to ensure that demand for its AI chips remains robust. And many of the younger neoclouds are too small to borrow money on their own. The issue is that Nvidia’s financing efforts may be increasing the risks of overbuilding, at least for smaller players.

Long-established cloud firms Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, plus newer players like CoreWeave, are experiencing so much demand they’re spending a fortune to build more capacity. Other big firms, such as SpaceX’s AI unit, have joined the market. Meta Platforms has signaled in recent months it might also jump in, at least temporarily. Is there enough demand to go around for all these firms plus hundreds of tiny ventures?

There’s a good chance some of the newer entrants will stumble, if only because they’re inexperienced and will struggle to deliver a service at the standard customers expect. Those most at risk of losing money may be the venture backers of smaller firms. Ironically, CoreWeave, which is financing its expansion with debt, has less risk given that its financing is tied to customer contracts.

While venture investors may stand to lose the most, Nvidia is arguably taking on unnecessary risk. Sure, it has deep pockets and probably can reallocate its chips if necessary. But could it be going overboard in its efforts to ensure demand for its chips remains alive and well?

Wary of a prolonged redemption cycle, more fund managers are rationing withdrawals

The giant sucking sound in private-credit funds got louder in the second quarter as investors tried to pull more money out and got less back.

Investors asked to withdraw $15.6 billion from widely held private-credit funds in the second quarter, up from the roughly $13.9 billion they tried to pull from those funds in the prior quarter.

Despite the rising requests, fund managers returned $5.9 billion in the second quarter, down from the $7.4 billion they agreed to pay out in the prior period, according to data from investment bank Robert A. Stanger.

The tallies highlight two clear trends:

• Individual investors have awakened to the fact that they can’t exit from the funds—called business-development companies—as quickly as they entered, prompting more of them to start withdrawing.
• Fund managers are battening down the hatches for a prolonged period of elevated withdrawals. While some big firms like Blackstone opted to honor all redemptions during the first quarter, they have now capped withdrawals at 5% to preserve capital for future investor requests.

Mixed bag

Redemption requests jumped for most of the big fund managers, including those that were less affected in the first quarter such as Apollo Global Management, Ares Management ARES 2.88%increase; up pointing triangle and HPS, BlackRock’s private-credit unit.

Blue Owl, the bellwether for selling private-credit funds to individual investors, got some relief. Redemption requests for its biggest BDC fell to 19% of shares outstanding from about 22%. But that is still more than any of the firm’s large competitors.

One bright spot: Redemption requests dropped sharply for a fund managed by Oaktree Capital Management, falling to 4.5% of shares from 8.5% in the first quarter. The fund was one of the few BDCs to report rising net-asset value and no nonperforming loans in the first quarter, according to research from Raymond James.

Bad to worse

While the acceleration of outflows from the BDCs was bad this spring, the slowdown of money going into the funds was even worse. New fundraising for the entire industry was about $500 million in May, the smallest inflow in at least 18 months and a roughly 75% drop from already-depressed levels in January.

If new sales stay this low, they will hurt fund managers, who depend on fund growth to boost their stock prices. The sales results could also drag on the economy. Private-credit funds mostly invest their money by making loans to companies with low credit ratings that many banks are hesitant to serve.

If the funds can’t raise new money to replace the capital being withdrawn, they will be less able to keep lending. That would hamper investment and expansion for stronger borrowers and potentially trigger defaults in weaker ones, such as software companies facing replacement by artificial intelligence.

How Bezos Learned to Love Trump—and Win More Contracts for Blue Origin

Space company has booked rapid growth under this administration, after founder spent president’s first term being ‘hated’

In Donald Trump’s first term, the president called an aide into his study off the Oval Office to assign a new target.

“Can we break up Amazon AMZN 0.40%increase; up pointing triangle?” Trump asked in July 2017. “I hate this son of a bitch Jeff Bezos and I hate the Washington Post,” he said, referring to the billionaire founder and the newspaper he owned, according to the former aide, Anthony Scaramucci.

Few relationships have changed more for the president than that with Bezos, who has gone from an avowed enemy of the president to an energetic ally.

By early this year, when Trump spoke to the Alfalfa Club, an elite Washington group, the president annoyed some attendees with what they felt was a rambling, 45-minute speech that was too long and too vituperative. Bezos was sitting in the front, laughing uproariously.

Trump hosted Bezos for a private dinner in the Rose Garden last year, frequently asks whether he will be attending other events and talks and texts with him regularly.

In recent months, Trump has told advisers that he wanted to see Bezos get to the moon with his rocket company Blue Origin and make sure it gets related contracts, people familiar with the remarks said.

The company’s federal contracting work has accelerated sharply in Trump’s second term, a Wall Street Journal analysis of contracts awarded to the company and its affiliates shows, even though its rivals’ total contracts remain much larger.

Much of Blue Origin’s growth is being driven by earlier, broad NASA awards paying out as the company reaches key milestones as well as new contracts from the Defense Department—a market it had little presence in before Trump’s return to office.

In April 2025, Space Force, the branch of the military that protects U.S. interests in space, approved the company to launch seven military and intelligence-related missions valued at up to $2.4 billion. In October, Blue Origin won a three-year, $78 million defense contract to expand capacity for space vehicles at the force’s spaceport in Florida.

This year, in January, the government approved the firm to compete for work to support the Pentagon’s $151 billion missile shield project known as Golden Dome. And in May, NASA awarded Blue Origin a $188 million contract to deliver payloads to the moon’s South Pole ahead of human arrival—part of the long-term Artemis program that will take astronauts to the moon and potentially beyond.

Part of Bezos’ turnaround was a recognition, people close to him said, of the warm relationship with Trump that his primary rival in the space business, Elon Musk, had built. Musk, with his company SpaceX, could box Blue Origin out of the government contracts it needed unless Bezos made his own inroads with Trump’s team, the people said.

“You tell me what you would have done in October, November, December 2024 when your largest competitor was the main backer of the next president of the United States,” said Barry Diller, a friend of Bezos who is chairman of media conglomerate People Incorporated, formerly known as IAC. “This company depends on the government.”

Amazon gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund and an undisclosed amount to help fund Trump’s ballroom, and it struck a $40 million deal to license a documentary about first lady Melania Trump.

People close to Bezos said Bezos came away from some of his one-on-one conversations with Trump thinking the president was less extreme and more charming than his public persona. “Trump has lots of good ideas,” Bezos said in an interview this May on CNBC from his space company. “He’s been right about a lot of things.”

Trump’s own clashes with Musk in mid-2025 led the president to turn toward Bezos, people close to him said.

After the public feud with Musk last year, Trump told allies and White House advisers that he wanted to see space contracts increasingly go to other companies instead of SpaceX, according to two people who heard the comments. The president told one of those people that he wanted to see Bezos benefit.

NASA administrator and former SpaceX pilot Jared Isaacman has publicly described Blue Origin as a key partner and counterbalance to Musk: “The best thing for SpaceX is a Blue Origin right on their heels, and vice versa,” he said at a confirmation hearing in December. Musk had recruited Isaacman for the NASA role, telling his friend—who flew to orbit with SpaceX and invested in the company—that they could make NASA great again and work toward their shared ambition of getting humans to Mars, the Journal has reported.

After Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on the launchpad near Cape Canaveral, Fla., in May, Trump told aides he was surprised and disappointed, asking if the launchpad was damaged, why the uncrewed rocket exploded and whether the problems could be fixed for future flights, a senior administration official said. Space Force officials said at the time the program would work with Blue Origin to identify and correct the problem, and they immediately announced expanded work for the company.

Government decisions are also breaking Amazon’s way—Bezos is still the company’s executive chairman and largest shareholder. Contracts to Amazon Web Services’ cloud business reached a record $389 million during the first year of Trump’s term, up about 54% from Biden’s final year in office. Pentagon contracts drove the increase, accounting for nearly 80% of the year’s total.

Much of the first-term feuding between Trump and Bezos revolved around the Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013. Trump accused him of using the paper to unfairly assail his presidency. More recently, Bezos ushered in dramatic changes at the paper that included scuttling an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president and laying off one-third of its staff, which changed the dynamic between the two men.

“Amazon is the source of his wealth, and Blue Origin is the object of his passion, and the Washington Post is neither of those,” the former executive editor of the paper, Martin Baron, said.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump wasn’t giving Bezos special treatment. The president is “committed to working with every American business and business leader,” Desai said, adding that Trump is a friend and ally to industry leaders in a range of industries, including automobiles, pharmaceuticals and tech.

Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t comment, and NASA declined to comment. A Defense Department official referred to announcements of Blue Origin contracts, which said the deals would expand capabilities and drive down technology costs related to cloud services.

Faster growth

During Trump’s first term, Blue Origin was still working on building its New Glenn rocket program—the future basis for the company’s planned efforts to launch satellites and Pentagon payloads into space and land craft on the moon.

New Glenn didn’t achieve its first launch until 2025. Even so, Blue Origin landed big wins during President Joe Biden’s administration. NASA awarded Blue Origin one of its largest contracts, worth up to $3.4 billion, to design and develop a lunar lander.

SpaceX also won a contract eventually worth up to $4.1 billion for the moon program, among other contracts, during the Biden years.

During the 2024 campaign, Musk became a prominent proxy for Trump, camping out in Pennsylvania to gin up votes and getting name checked during Trump’s rallies. During the transition, Musk sat in on meetings and interviews with candidates for cabinet positions, joined Trump’s calls with foreign leaders and recruited friends and allies for crucial positions in the government.

SpaceX had a sizable lead in the industry, and Blue Origin executives worried it would only continue to grow under Trump at their expense. Musk’s company was also adding big Pentagon projects.

But even though Blue Origin’s total contracts are much smaller, they have grown faster in the past year than those of its rivals, according to the Journal’s analysis of federal contracts.

In the space business, broad contracts can be announced with ceiling values often set intentionally high to support future modifications of the deal, with actual payouts dependent on individual contracts for portions of the program that can be negotiated later. For its analysis, the Journal looked at what are known as obligations, or the specific contracts that lock in precise payments—a more concrete way to measure the revenue a company can bank on.

Measuring those payments, Blue Origin’s average annual contracts under Trump grew 177% from the annual average under Biden.

SpaceX’s annual average under Trump grew 13% compared with the Biden years. The annual average fell for another Blue Origin competitor, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing known as the United Launch Alliance, or ULA.

Blue Origin’s overall obligations under Trump’s current administration have reached $1.1 billion, compared with nearly $1.2 billion during the entire four-year Biden administration.

Still, SpaceX has won much more in total so far under Trump—$4.6 billion—and has a substantial lead in total obligations since 2008.

Blue Origin is also far behind SpaceX in actual launches—11 flights last year, predominantly tourism flights that didn’t reach orbit, compared with SpaceX’s 161 flights that mostly delivered satellites to space.

Evolution of a friendship

In his first term, Trump called Bezos “Bozo” and publicly pushed the U.S. Postal Service to raise Amazon’s rates. Amazon alleged he intervened to block the company from securing a cloud computing contract. Those clashes prompted a joke that spread in Washington circles that buying the Post didn’t cost Bezos $250 million but really cost him $10 billion plus $250 million.

The Pentagon at the time said there were no external influences on the decision.

Early in 2017, Bezos met with some of the Post’s top political reporters at the newspaper’s headquarters. When a reporter asked Bezos about Trump’s threats to hurt his businesses, Bezos told the journalists not to worry about it. “I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself,” Bezos said, according to Baron, the former Post editor.

In 2018, Bezos faulted NBC’s news programming for being what he viewed as weak on Trump. At an Oscars party that year, he approached NBC’s then-chairman Andrew Lack and said to him: “When are you guys going to stand up to Trump?” according to Lack. He asked what Bezos was referring to and the billionaire responded: “Come on, you’re letting him off the hook!”

A spokesman for Bezos said that Bezos denied this interaction with Lack and that the last time Bezos watched NBC, Tom Brokaw was the anchor. In response to Bezos’ denial, Lack said: “I think that was the last time he read the Washington Post, too.”

At the time, Bezos told others in private that he knew Trump’s attacks were costing him money. He would ask advisers how to respond to Trump’s taunts online and generally decided to avoid them entirely. He expressed displeasure with Trump’s governing style.

After Trump lost in 2020, Bezos was rarely spotted at Washington functions. He grew frustrated with the Biden administration, which, as many other tech CEOs did, he viewed as antibusiness.

Bezos was largely shunned by the Biden White House—one clash was Bezos’ antiunion stance, which conflicted with the Biden agenda, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Bezos called that “nonsense” adding that “Biden stiff-armed the entire Fortune 100, rarely engaging with business leaders.”

Bezos wasn’t invited to roundtables and other White House events. Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, had penned a viral law review article as a student that argued Amazon was a monopoly.

A spokesman for Bezos declined to comment on how Bezos identifies politically. He was one of the major funders of Barack Obama’s presidential center, according to a person familiar with the matter, cutting a $100 million check. “I’m on the side of America,” Bezos said in his May CNBC interview, adding that he has worked with every president going back to Bill Clinton.

Last year, he married Lauren Sánchez, a former television news anchor who as of 2023 was registered as a Democrat in California. Before their affair became public in January 2019, Bezos had a conversation with Sánchez and her brother, which was recorded, where they discussed the potential that the media would reveal it.

Referring to David Pecker, the then-publisher of the National Enquirer, Bezos said: “He probably hates me. He probably thinks I’m a left coast liberal, and I’m not,” according to a recording reviewed by the Journal. Pecker has been a close Trump ally.

Bezos told a friend he didn’t think Trump was coming back after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, and that the country was moving on. But after Trump was shot in a 2024 assassination attempt, Bezos called him to tell him he was a “badass” and told others Trump would likely win.

That fall, the Post decided not to endorse a presidential candidate and scuttled the piece backing Harris. Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos, one of the people said.

Bezos and Sánchez have struck up a friendship with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Bezos and Sánchez have dined with the president and the first lady at Mar-a-Lago, and they attended the inauguration alongside other prominent technology CEOs.

“I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term,” Bezos said in the CNBC interview.

His seeming closeness with the president has caused problems at the Post. During a meeting with some Post editors and reporters at his home in March, Bezos explained his relationship with Trump and talked also about his ties with President Obama, according to people familiar with the meeting. He said he had worked well with every president but Biden.

Bezos also said he didn’t regret blocking the presidential endorsement at the Post and would do it again, but should have announced his decision sooner and communicated better, the people said. He said he had rejected multiple offers to sell the paper.

When Trump had dinner with Rupert Murdoch earlier this year, he asked the founder of News Corp if Bezos could actually save the Post, a person at the dinner said. News Corp is the owner of the Journal. A News Corp spokesman declined to comment.

He also asked Murdoch if he would be interested in buying it, and Murdoch said he wasn’t, the attendee said. Bezos was a friend, but he was having a difficult time managing the Post, Trump said.

China Resources New Energy, one of the country’s biggest renewable energy providers, raised Rmb24.5bn ($3.6bn) in a listing in Shenzhen yesterday. Shares rose as much as 198 per cent, triggering a brief trading halt, before settling up about 150 per cent. In China, shares of companies cannot rise more than 10 per cent in a day except during the first five trading days after a listing.

The company is the clean energy spin-off of China Resources Power, a Hong Kong-listed group whose ultimate shareholder is China Resources, a sprawling state-owned conglomerate with business interests ranging from beer to property.

China Resources New Energy develops and operates wind and solar power plants across 31 provincial-level divisions, with a total capacity of 41.6GW, larger than the power capacity of Norway, according to 2024 data from the US Energy Information Administration. In the first quarter it reported revenues of Rmb6.2bn and net profit of Rmb1.6bn.

The issuance attracted strong interest from retail investors and came amid signs that mainland China’s equity capital markets are recovering after a prolonged period of slow approvals from regulators.

Iran readies mega-funeral for slain supreme leader

Six-day ceremony for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei anticipated to be largest of its kind and provide clues of regime’s strength

On a hot summer day, millions of Iranians converge on Tehran to bury the man who remade their country. What begins as a carefully choreographed state funeral dissolves into chaos as mourners surge through security lines.

The coffin bursts open in the crush, sending the white-shrouded body into the crowd below. Security forces struggle to recover the remains as people tear at the shroud in search of relics. The burial is abandoned, the body flown away by helicopter before returning under heavy guard to be placed in a locked coffin.

That was 1989, when Iran buried the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in one of the largest funerals of the 20th century. Iranian officials estimated that more than 10mn people attended, reportedly eclipsing the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Now Iran’s leaders are preparing what they hope will be an even larger display for Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled for nearly four decades before he was killed in February during the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Determined to avoid a repeat of the disorder that engulfed Khomeini’s burial, authorities are meticulously planning for what they say could be 12mn to 15mn visitors across six days of ceremonies that start on Saturday. Khamenei’s body will be transported across Iran and through neighbouring Shia-majority Iraq in a route designed to project his standing across the Shia world.

For the country’s new leadership, headed by Khamenei’s 56-year-old son and successor Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the funeral will be not just an act of mourning but a show of strength. It will provide the first nationwide test since the war of whether the Islamic republic can still mobilise mass public support.

“The funeral has symbolic importance in every respect and could become the biggest in human history,” said Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst in Tehran. “The country needs to declare victory and demonstrate the republic’s pillars of legitimacy once again.”

Laylaz said the ceremonies, like Khomeini’s funeral, could also play an important role in smoothing the ascent of the new supreme leader. “Khamenei’s 37 years of leadership will effectively be put before the public for judgment, almost like a referendum,” he said. “Then the new chapter will begin.”

The funeral comes after an extraordinary delay in a country where Islamic tradition generally calls for burial as soon as possible.

Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo of the war alongside his daughter, son-in-law, Mojtaba’s wife, and the late supreme leader’s 14-month-old granddaughter, when US and Israeli strikes hit his residential and official compound in central Tehran. Mojtaba was also injured in the attacks and has not appeared in public since.

Khamenei’s funeral was postponed during the 40 days of war and fragile truce that followed, with authorities deciding to go ahead after Washington and Tehran last month signed a ceasefire agreement designed to allow the countries to negotiate a broader deal.

Authorities have offered few details about the state of Khamenei’s remains, with Mojtaba saying only that his late father’s hand was clenched into a fist.

Khamenei’s coffin and those of his family members will lie in state for two days in Tehran’s Mosalla prayer complex, where mourners will be asked to remain for no longer than 20 minutes. State media have shown a segregated, climate-controlled viewing area designed to prevent physical contact with the body.

The coffin will then be carried through the streets of the capital on Monday, before the funeral procession heads to the Shia centre of Qom and on to Iraq, where it will pass through the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

Khamenei’s body will return for burial on Thursday at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, his hometown and one of Shia Islam’s most important sites. Authorities said his body would be carried by air during the funeral ceremonies in Mashhad.

Pilgrims are expected from Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere in the region. Iran’s foreign ministry said dignitaries from 100 countries will attend a ceremony on Friday, without giving any details. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is expected to travel for the funeral.

Officials are planning one of the largest security operations in Tehran’s history. The metro will operate around the clock free of charge, while thousands of volunteer food stations, or mookebs, will distribute meals and water in a format similar to the Shia ceremonies of Ashura in Iran and the Arbaeen pilgrimage in Iraq.

Whether turnout matches official expectations may provide a hint as to the Islamic republic’s ability to reassert itself after the bruising conflict, which both US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially said they hoped would lead to the regime’s collapse.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former reformist vice-president, said a large turnout could prove a double-edged sword by tying Iran’s new leaders to Khamenei’s hardline agenda of opposition to the west.

“It could increase pressure on the new leadership to pursue Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s policies more forcefully and oppose the agreement with the US,” he said. “Or it could become a symbol of national unity and support for the negotiators. It will probably move towards the latter while also signalling to Washington that there is domestic opposition to the deal.”

Much attention will focus on whether Mojtaba makes his first public appearance. Officials say the new supreme leader has recovered from his injuries but have not confirmed whether he will appear at the funeral.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Wednesday that the funeral should be “a symbol of unity and national solidarity”. But ultra-hardliners in Iran’s parliament who oppose making a deal with the US argue that the legacy of the late leader — and the authority of his successor — have been undermined by the latest round of Iran-US negotiations.

Last week, authorities shut down a gathering in Tehran where supporters of the ultra-hardliners, dressed in burial shrouds to signal their willingness to die for political Islam, called for revenge over Khamenei’s killing and denounced the talks.

“They could be tolerated during the processions because emotions will be high,” Abtahi said. “But the most important thing for the political elite is that this ceremony should become the social foundation of support for the post-succession leadership.”

Adidas is outplaying Nike in the global sportswear competition

The momentum is finally with the German group under the leadership of Bjørn Gulden

Adidas, sponsor of defending champion Argentina, is not the clear favourite at this football World Cup. As usual, the German sportswear giant is up against old rival Nike. But the financial face-off is closer than it has been in a long time.

Just look at the number of teams sporting Adidas’s three-stripe logo on their sleeves. The company’s total of 14 out of 48 compares with 12 for Nike — which includes likely winner France — and 11 for third-placed Puma. In 2022’s World Cup, Adidas notched up seven teams and Nike 13.

Whoever hoists the trophy, the tournament looks like proof of Adidas’s resurgence. Last year, the gap between Adidas’s operating profit and Nike’s shrunk to its smallest in 25 years. While Nike’s revenue is still about a third bigger than that of Adidas, the match momentum is finally with the German side under the leadership of Bjørn Gulden, formerly of Puma.

Nike’s troubles play a large part in that switchover. Even though the US maker of the famed swoosh reported better than expected sales and earnings on Tuesday, the company lowered its near-term sales forecast, and chief financial officer Matt Friend warned it had been a struggle to sell products at full price.

Shares in both Adidas and Nike have slumped as investors worry the trainer trend is losing speed. That increases the relative appeal of less sports-focused ranges. Japanese peer Asics recently carved out lifestyle brand Onitsuka Tiger into a separate subsidiary, distinguishing it from the group’s running shoes. Adidas, with its ubiquitous Sambas and Spezials, can at least claim products with a similar cachet.

China, where regional tweaks within Adidas’s Originals brand have proved a hit, also sets the two apart. Analysts expect the German group’s Greater China sales to grow 13 per cent in quarterly financials due on July 30, according to FactSet. Nike’s Greater China sales, on the other hand, fell 17 per cent year on year in its latest three-month period, excluding currency movements.

The World Cup should add a tangible boost: about half of all the tournament’s viewers plan to buy team merchandise, according to a Citigroup survey conducted earlier this year. Adidas expects a lift from the event equivalent to about 4 per cent of sales in each of two quarters.

Despite this, Adidas is still priced like an underdog. It is trading at 23 times earnings for the past 12 months, versus 27 times for Nike according to FactSet. That should further burnish its appeal. In World Cup terms, if Nike and Adidas were once England vs Panama in 2018 (6-1), they’re now England vs Panama in 2026 (2-0). Same winner, but the gap is closing.

World Cup goals spree by star players proves costly for gambling companies

Performance of top strikers and victories for popular teams have cost DraftKings as much as $50mn

High-scoring star players and victories for popular teams have made the opening stage of the World Cup costly for gambling companies, which are hoping the tournament will attract a lucrative cohort of new customers.

US sportsbook DraftKings, one of the world’s largest online betting brands, lost as much as $50mn in the group stage of the tournament, according to estimates by Bank of America. 

The estimated losses come after gambling companies invested heavily in novel in-play bets and promotions around the World Cup, as they battled to make the most of an expected football betting bonanza and defend their turf against the rise of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi.

Jordan Bender, an analyst at investment bank Citizens, said sports betting groups, brokerage companies and prediction markets were “all converging to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire customers” during the World Cup.

Popular multi-leg bets — known as accumulators in the UK and parlays in the US — proved particularly costly when Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé scored twice each on last Tuesday, analysis by Bank of America found. 

Parlays, which deliver a big payout if a punter makes a series of correct predictions, are typically very profitable for gambling companies because there is a low likelihood of all legs of the bet coming good for the customer.

Betting on all three star players to score was a popular parlay, according to Bank of America. Gamblers who bet all three would score at least twice — an outcome priced at a probability of around 1 per cent — netted a particularly large windfall.

DraftKings declined to comment on the estimated losses. Chief executive Jason Robins had previously told the FT that the tournament would be “a huge focal point for customer acquisition”.

Sportsbooks employ teams of analysts to calculate probabilities and profit by building a margin into the odds they offer to consumers. They tend to make the most money when favourites underperform, as casual bettors generally back their home teams and wager on star goalscorers.

Bettors also tend to back their own national teams, meaning the performance of squads from large betting markets such as the US and England is particularly significant. The strong performance of the US team so far was “the biggest liability” for most sportsbooks in America, said Bank of America analyst Julie Hoover.

England’s 4-2 victory over Croatia, which drew the highest stakes in the tournament’s group stage, was costly for DraftKings’ major rival Flutter, which owns brands including Paddy Power, Sky Bet and FanDuel. Flutter’s UK customers won £4.1mn on the match, but the company said England’s 0-0 draw against Ghana “more than balanced the books”.

Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon said the tournament would likely not be “a near-term revenue driver”, but believed companies could still benefit from expanding brand awareness in order to ultimately “cross-sell into higher-margin products like [online casino]”.

Flutter chief executive Peter Jackson told the FT in May that his company had benefited from the 2022 World Cup despite “losing a lot of money” when Argentina beat France on penalties in the final. “Even now, when I think about the impact that competition had for us, I don’t think about that money we lost, because actually, we provided great entertainment.”

Engineers are still finding ways to use AI models despite stringent restrictions

Anthropic is moving to shut loopholes that have allowed Chinese companies to circumvent the AI company’s stringent restrictions on unauthorised use in the country.

People familiar with the matter said that Chinese companies including Ant Financial have accessed Anthropic’s AI tools such as Claude Code through workarounds that include cloud providers and overseas subsidiaries.

The people said that Ant had provided employees with corporate Claude accounts that were accessed through the company’s intranet, which is connected to its Singapore-based entity.

ByteDance does not facilitate access to Claude but this year introduced a reimbursement scheme allowing engineers to put personal subscriptions for the platform on their expenses, according to five employees of the TikTok owner. The engineers access those subscriptions using VPNs.

Such workarounds do not violate US or Chinese law, but they breach Anthropic’s terms of service, which specify that Chinese companies and foreign entities owned by them are banned from using its models.

Anthropic has one of the strictest bans among US AI companies on usage in China, requiring user verification and banning payment from Chinese banks.

By contrast, Chinese users find it easier to access OpenAI’s tools through VPNs, which are widely used in the country. The company does not require the same user verification as Claude.

The efforts to access Claude from China illustrate the continuing value of leading US AI products to Chinese engineers despite growing access restrictions and the increased competitiveness of domestic models.

Anthropic’s coding tools are particularly popular among Chinese software engineers and AI start-ups because their outputs can be used for “distillation”, in which smaller models are trained to mimic more capable ones.

Ant and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment.

Anthropic had stepped up efforts to detect and close down Chinese use through the loopholes, which had proven difficult to police, people familiar with the matter said.

Routes used include accessing Claude through Microsoft’s Azure cloud services via foreign subsidiaries.

Microsoft sold application programming interface access to Chinese companies with Singapore-based entities, allowing engineers based in mainland China to use Claude through their companies’ internal networks, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

A person familiar with the practice said companies using overseas entities to access Claude was “a known issue” and “not limited to any one provider”.

Microsoft said: “Anthropic monitors use of the service and enforces their terms and conditions, with Microsoft’s support.”

As part of its efforts to crack down on unauthorised access, Anthropic has targeted “transfer station” services, which relay requests from users in mainland China through Claude accounts registered overseas before returning the responses.

However, larger Chinese AI groups generally avoid transfer stations because the services’ operators are widely suspected of storing or reselling prompts. Executives worry rivals could analyse those requests to understand how they are using advanced models to improve their own systems.

Anthropic said it also constantly updated its tools to identify and take enforcement action as Chinese users developed new evasion techniques.

Previously, it has used Claude Code to look for clues such as the computer’s timezone that a user was actually working from mainland China.

“We explicitly prohibit accessing or facilitating access to Claude in unsupported regions, including China,” it said. “Anthropic is the only frontier AI company that restricts sales to PRC-controlled companies, including subsidiaries incorporated outside China.”

The company added that it “enforces this policy through continuous, evolving detection systems, working alongside our partners to identify and ban accounts that violate our policies”.

Beijing has banned its companies from using overseas models hosted in data centres outside the country to develop consumer applications because of restrictions on cross-border data flows.

But the regulation does not restrict Chinese AI labs from using foreign models for internal research and development purposes.