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Temperatures underground often hover around 86 degrees in the summer, despite decades of attempts to bring them down

LONDON—A century ago, the London Underground wooed passengers during the summer with the promise it was “cooler below.” That seems like a cruel joke today.

“It genuinely feels like hell down there,” said Hussein Zaaiter, a London-based student. “It’s a free sauna on the Central line,” he joked, referring to one of the Tube’s hottest train lines.

Riding the Tube during the summer has long been an unpleasant, sweaty experience. The bad news for Londoners is that the Tube isn’t just hot, it’s getting hotter. And figuring out how to cool it down presents challenges that air conditioning can’t easily fix.

Engineers have spent decades trying everything from industrial fans to giant blocks of ice to temper the sweltering subterranean climate, but a remedy remains elusive.

Heat has been steadily building below the surface ever since the world’s oldest underground transportation system opened in 1863. Across all lines, average temperatures increased by 1 to 3 degrees Celsius over the past 10 years, according to measurements from Transport for London.

Summer temperatures on the Tube now regularly exceed 30 degrees Celsius, or 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the legal limit for transporting cattle, pigs and sheep in the U.K.

The temperature at the surface doesn’t really affect the temperature in the tube. Throughout the summer, the tube maintains a fairly constant 86 degrees, while the surface wobbles between lows in the 50s at night and as high as 104 degrees during the day.

Zaaiter has ridden the Paris Metro and the New York subway, but “it’s never as bad,” he said.

For Verity Walker, a musical-theater actress in London, the heat underground has a habit of sticking with her. “I’m turning up to auditions, and I’m worried I smell,” she said. “The price should be decreased in the summer because of the conditions.”

Climate activists turned the Tube into their personal sauna, riding around the city in their bathrobes and hair towels to raise awareness about the heat.

Experts pin the Tube’s hot mess on its tight Victorian-era tunnels, which restrict air circulation, especially on deeper lines. Moreover, London’s bedrock is composed of a dense, stiff clay that absorbs and retains warmth.

Every day, friction from accelerating and braking trains generates more heat. Even carelessly discarded newspapers obstruct air vents behind seats and trap hot air in train cars, exacerbating the problem.

In 2003, then-Mayor of London Ken Livingston launched a competition with a £100,000 prize for a tunnel-cooling solution, or about $159,500 at the time. Of the 3,400 entries, many simply suggested riders not wear clothes. Other proposals included handing out Popsicles or putting up pictures of snowmen. No practical designs emerged, and the competition was closed in 2005.

Since then, TfL has spent millions of pounds on initiatives to beat the heat. Early attempts included placing large blocks of ice in refrigeration units under train seats, where the thawing ice would cool air passing over it. Groundwater was also tapped to try to cool the tunnels.

Industrial fans were installed at stations. Even after the TfL discovered they slightly increased temperatures because of the heat generated by the motors, the fans remained. Surveys indicated the fast-flowing air made people feel more comfortable.

“It always perplexed me that boffins could produce mobile phones the size of a credit card yet passengers would emerge dripping with sweat from Tube trains,” Boris Johnson said in 2018 during his stint as mayor.

Air conditioning has now been added to roughly 40% of London Underground trains, but it is hard to install on the smaller, deeper Tube lines. It also isn’t a panacea. AC simply moves heat from one place to another, so while trains may get cooler, platforms and tunnels get hotter.

Engineering experts have proposed various solutions, all to cool reception. Ideas included regenerative braking, where heat from brakes is recovered to use as energy for trains or stations; improved ventilation systems; energy-efficient construction materials; and smart sensor networks to monitor and regulate temperatures in real time.

Even successful solutions, such as using heat pumps to remove excess heat, have proved tricky to employ across the vast network. One London borough uses the excess heat from the local Tube station to warm nearby homes, but expanding the program faces logistical and funding challenges. A citywide heat network is at least a decade away.

TfL, noting the “stop-start nature of funding,” says it’s focused on areas that provide the greatest relief to passengers. Next year, after several delays, it plans to finally introduce the first air-conditioned trains on a deep tunnel Tube line. They will still fit along the Piccadilly line thanks to the AC being placed under the trains, a design that took years to master. TfL said it is also exploring the possibility of cooling panels, subject to funding.

While the heat makes journeys uncomfortable for passengers, it’s a prolonged punishment for staff—even with the cooling systems in drivers’ cabs.

Tube bosses have been encouraging train drivers to drink more water, but union organizer Finn Brennan says that’s an impractical solution. “With more water, we need the toilet more,” he said, adding that drivers are often on a strict schedule with limited breaks. “This isn’t a situation that will get better.”

With London enduring repeated summer heat waves, some train workers are planning a “heat strike” if temperatures rise above 96.8 degrees.

TfL has sought to reassure the public, saying it has “a comprehensive hot weather plan in place” to get through the summer.

Its enduring advice: “Please carry water with you.”

Shanghai-based MiniMax, valued at around $4 billion after a recent financing round, is targeting a stock market debut as soon as this year

MiniMax has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the matter, signaling the onset of a race among China’s generative AI startups to tap public markets.

Shanghai-based MiniMax, which was valued at around $4 billion after a recent financing round, is targeting a stock market debut as soon as this year, one of the people said. The company has also filed its Hong Kong listing plan with China’s securities regulator for review, another person said.

The move comes as China seeks to bolster its homegrown artificial-intelligence industry with state funding and policy stimulus. Chinese leaders have made AI a national priority, incentivizing faster adoption of the technology among government agencies and companies.

Beijing-based Zhipu AI, another large-language-model developer, has also been preparing for a public listing. The company has hired banks but is still weighing the listing location, people familiar with the matter said. Both MiniMax and Zhipu count Alibaba and Tencent as investors.

Cantor Fitzgerald close to $4bn Spac deal with bitcoin pioneer

Brandon Lutnick in late-stage talks with Adam Back in latest move to use blank cheque vehicles to buy the cryptocurrency

Brandon Lutnick, son of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, is nearing a roughly $4bn deal with an early bitcoin supporter to buy billions of dollars in the digital tokens using a vehicle backed by Cantor Fitzgerald.

Cantor Equity Partners 1, a blank cheque vehicle that raised $200mn in cash in an initial public offering in January, is in late-stage talks with Adam Back, founder of crypto trading group Blockstream Capital, to buy more than $3bn in the digital currency, according to two people briefed on the talks.

The deal, which mirrors a $3.6bn crypto buying venture Brandon Lutnick struck with SoftBank and Tether in April, would advance Cantor Fitzgerald’s strategy of using publicly listed shell companies to buy bitcoin as it aims to take advantage of a surge in digital currency prices amid US President Donald Trump’s deregulatory push. Howard Lutnick handed control of Cantor Fitzgerald to his children in May.

Back is in discussions to contribute as much as 30,000 bitcoin to Cantor Equity Partners 1, worth more than $3bn. It would be part of a broader deal with the blank cheque company in which it would raise as much $800mn in outside capital to make further purchases of the digital currency, putting the overall deal at more than $4bn.

Back and Blockstream Capital would contribute their bitcoin in exchange for shares in the Cantor vehicle, which would be renamed BSTR Holdings.

A deal could come as early as this week, said the people, who cautioned that terms could still change. If completed in the coming days, it would come during what Republican lawmakers have dubbed “crypto week” as they debate legislation tied to digital currencies.

The deal would make Cantor one of the world’s most active crypto buyers. It is using blank cheque vehicles led by the younger Lutnick, 27, who was named chair of the brokerage in February when his father was confirmed to be Trump’s top trade official.

Cantor’s combined crypto purchases between its two vehicles, BSTR Holdings and Twenty One Capital, could reach nearly $10bn this year.

Cantor and Blockstream did not respond to requests for comment.

In the Blockstream deal, Cantor would partner with one of the crypto industry’s earliest supporters. Back is an early cryptographer whose work developing the Hashcash cryptographic proof was cited by the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, in his bitcoin white paper.

The Hashcash proof-of-work system Back proposed in 1997 became the foundation for bitcoin mining — the process by which new bitcoins are created and verified. He is also the co-founder of California-based blockchain company Blockstream, which was founded in 2014 and is backed by Khosla Ventures and Baillie Gifford, among others.

Back has personally funded several companies that have stockpiled bitcoin this year, including Paris-listed The Blockchain Group, which announced on Tuesday that he had invested €5mn as part of an equity raise. Last month, he also funded a Skr150mn ($15mn) convertible bond for Swedish health technology and bitcoin treasury company H100 Group.

The Cantor deal would mark the latest in a series of high-profile deals where special purpose acquisition companies are used as vehicles to buy bitcoin, as investors seek to emulate billionaire bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s company, called Strategy, in hoarding the digital currency.

Other groups that have recently gone on crypto-buying endeavours include Trump Media & Technology Group, the media and crypto trading company created by Trump and his family, and a blank cheque vehicle led by digital currency promoter Anthony Pompliano.