beginning

In 2025, China installed more wind electricity capacity than the US has deployed in its history. And it’s just the beginning

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The world faces a textbook climate contradiction: the planet desperately needs cheap, clean energy, but when someone manages to produce it on a massive scale, Western powers put up barricades. We are witnessing a pattern identical to the one that has already shaken the electric car industry. China leads the most competitive green technology, the West fears it and slows it down with tariffs, and, ultimately, the climate ends up paying the bill for this blockade. The figures speak for themselves. According to the latest data published by Wood Mackenzieglobal order intake for wind turbines reached 215 gigawatts (GW) in 2025. This is the second highest figure in recorded history. And the big winners of this milestone were not going to be anyone else. Yes, we are talking about China. While total global volume saw a slight decline of 8% in 2025 – driven by a strategic pause in the Chinese domestic market – the international expansion of Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) has been relentless. The global consulting firm details that orders from these companies outside their borders skyrocketed by 66% year-on-year, tripling the volumes of 2023. The dominance is almost absolute: eight of last year’s top ten global manufacturers are Chinese, with Goldwind, Envision and Windey crowning the list. But this industrial power cannot be understood without the colossal infrastructure that supports it. China has carried out an engineering feat unprecedented: in 2025 alone, the Asian giant added 542.7 GW of capacity to its electricity grid. In less than half a decade, Beijing has built more energy infrastructure than the United States has deployed in its entire history. From imitation to innovation. The narrative that China only competes by price gouging has expired. The country has made a qualitative leap towards cutting-edge innovation. In these last months we have collected in Xataka the milestones of the Asian country in terms of the construction of large wind turbines in the middle of the sea. This certifies the end of the Western monopoly in emerging markets. While European manufacturers such as Vestas or Nordex maintain leadership in their natural territory, they are losing ground globally to Asian offers with high technical specifications and low costs. For Beijing it is not just about ecology; It is a national security strategy to guarantee the supply of intensive industries, such as Artificial Intelligence, and free ourselves from dependence on imported fossil fuels. This is how they conquer the Global South. Faced with a domestic market that is beginning to mature, the Asian giants have set their eyes on the Middle East, India and Latin America. Finlay Clark, principal analyst of Wood Mackenzie, gives the key to this expansion: Chinese manufacturers are making waves thanks to the rapid deployment of giant platforms of more than 10 MW. These megaturbines allow developers to minimize costs on gigawatt-scale projects. The result is devastating: in 2025, Chinese companies will capture the 95% of regional capacity in the Middle East and Africa. The symbol of this surprise was planted in Saudi Arabia, where the Goldwind company achieved a historic order of 3.1 GW to supply two sites. Furthermore, in its ambition to dominate deep waters—where wind potential is multiplying—China is already manufacturing fully domestic all the key components of its floating platforms. An imminent train wreck. Geopolitics has fully entered the spreadsheet of energy promoters. Wood Mackenzie warns that the policy It is making acquisitions drastically more expensive and complicated. Barriers such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the expansion of US tariffs costs are skyrocketing import of steel and heavy components. The market is facing critical tension. On the one hand, regulatory pressure pushes costs up; On the other hand, the profitability of the projects requires increasingly cheaper turbines. Despite this panorama, there are reasons for optimism in the Old Continent: although the intake of offshore wind orders fell by 17% in 2025 due to the restructuring of European tenders, analysts They predict a strong rebound by 2026, boosted by new grant schemes such as the UK’s round 7 auctions. The Western Counterattack. However, China’s apparent invulnerability has cracks. As we detail in Xataka, Beijing suffers from a silent but critical dependence on Western technology. The Chinese wind industry has the muscle to assemble like a beast, but it lacks the “brain”: it needs to import 100% of the logic modules that control the turbines in real time and 70% of the transistor modules for the electrical grid. However, the real obstacle for the West, experts warn, is no longer just capital, but “human bottleneck”: Decades of offshoring have emptied the United States and Europe of engineers and specialized industrial labor. Condemned to understand each other. The energy transition has ceased to be an environmental mission and has become a total geopolitical battlefield. China dominates scale, speed and execution, while the West still holds the keys to critical technological innovation and capital markets. The great irony is that this trade war of tariffs and blockades risks slowing down decarbonization at the most critical time for the planet. At the end of the day, the interdependence between both blocks is their greatest weakness, but also the only guarantee that, sooner or later, they are condemned to understand each other. Image | Land Rover Our Planet (CC BY-ND 2.0) Xataka | China dominates the world of renewable energy, but it has an Achilles heel: it depends on the West more than it admits

The cell phone on the nightstand is not “frying” your brain, but science is beginning to understand why it prevents you from resting

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It is practically a ritual today: connect your phone to the charger, set the alarm and leave it on the nightstand just 30 centimeters from the pillow to sleep. According to the data, for 95% of adultssleeping with your phone within reach is a logistical necessity; For a growing stream of longevity experts, It’s a biological miscalculation. because we rest less. To do this, we have analyzed the bibliography to know exactly the effect of having your cell phone next to you. The culprit confirmed. Before entering the swampy terrain of the possible problems that radiation can generate when it is around us, we must point out the “elephant in the room.” The most solid evidence we have today does not blame antennas for having a bad sleep, but to the screens and what we do with them. To give us an idea, a meta-analysis over 36,000 participants concluded that excessive use of smartphone increases the risk of having poor quality sleep by 228%. The double responsible. The first is the suppression of melatonin, since the blue light emitted by the LED panels of mobile phones tricks our brain making him believe that it is still day. This delays the release of melatonin and fragments the architecture of sleep. But not only the blue light is information, since responding to a WhatsApp or doing doomscrolling on TikTok before bed keeps the brain alert. A study of medical students suggested that nighttime cell phone use corresponded to poorer sleep. The radiation debate. It has always been a mantra for many: having your cell phone nearby is having a large source of radiation that causes many health problems. In this case, organizations such as the WHO or ARPANSA have traditionally maintained that evidence of damage from low-level electromagnetic fields is “insufficient.” However, it does not mean that it is non-existent. The most recent studies They are beginning to see the non-thermal effects that mobile phones have. One of the most interesting was done with baby monitors that have a frequency of 2.45 GHz, similar to Bluetooth or Wifi, to simulate environmental exposure. The result was that the exposed group, compared to the placebo, showed a worse subjective quality of sleep and alterations in heart rate variability, suggesting that sensitive people do notice the invisible “presence” of the electronic device nearby. Brain wave modulation. Other research on 5G signals found that exposure to 3.6 GHz waves affected sleep spindles during N2 phasethat is, light sleep that accounts for 50% of the total rest time. The curious thing about this study is that the effect depended on genetics: only carriers of certain variants of the CACNA1C gene showed alterations in the electroencephalogram. This qualifies the warnings of some experts, since radiation may not affect us all equally, but for a genetically predisposed subgroup, sleeping next to a continuous emission source could be fragmenting their N2 phase, crucial for memory consolidation. The habit factor. It is often cited Sinha’s studio to demonize radiation, but what this study really measured were habits in a sample of 566 participants. In this case, it was seen that those people with high mobile phone use took longer to fall asleep, their sleep was less efficient, and 22.6% reported worse quality of sleep. In this way, the conclusion was not that the waves prevented them from sleeping, but that the habit of having their cell phone nearby inevitably leads to using. If it’s on the table, you look at it. If you look at it, you become active. It is a behavioral rather than a radiological vicious circle. Hygiene protocol. The question in this case is inevitable: should we wrap the room in aluminum foil? It’s not necessary. In this case, physics works in our favor thanks to the inverse square law: the intensity of the radiation falls drastically with distance. That is why the most important thing is to move the device at least one meter away from the bed, since at this distance the exposure falls to negligible basal levels, making Sleeping with your cell phone under your pillow is the worst possible decision. If we want to go a little further, we can put it in airplane mode, although the best advice, as the Spanish Society of Neurology points out, is to have a sacred hour, where the recommendation is to leave the screens an hour before going to sleep. Images | Nubelson Fernandes In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

We have a problem with AI. Those who were most enthusiastic at the beginning are starting to get tired of it.

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The most promising promise surrounding AI at work today It’s not that it’s going to replace us.but it could free ourselves from part of the burden we carry every day. In recent years, much of the technological discourse has insisted on this idea, also driven by the arrival of assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini or the different co-pilots integrated into everyday software: fewer routine tasks, more time to think, create or decide calmly. However, as these tools begin to be truly used in real environments, a question arises that can no longer be ignored: what happens when that promise of relief is confronted with the daily practice of work. Depletion system. The narrative of relief begins to crack when academic research looks at what happens inside companies. A study published by Harvard Business Review describes that, in the observed case, the AI ​​did not decrease work, but rather tended to intensify it, even without explicit orders to produce more. These findings can be interpreted as a sign of an emerging problem, where increased capacity can push certain organizations towards dynamics close to structural exhaustion, more linked to constant acceleration than to the promised efficiency. Where does the data come from?. The aforementioned work was developed for eight months within an American technology company with about 200 employees, combining in-person observation two days a week, monitoring of internal communication channels and more than 40 in-depth interviews with engineering, product, design, research and operations profiles. The company did not mandate the use of AI or set new performance goals, although it did offer enterprise subscriptions to business tools, which allowed it to analyze what happened when adoption arose on the initiative of workers. The pattern behind the promise. Far from a sudden change, the intensification described by the researchers takes the form of a recognizable process. The magazine summarizes its findings in three mechanisms that, combined, transform the daily work experience: progressive expansion of responsibilities, increasingly blurred boundaries between activity and rest, and simultaneous management of multiple tasks supported by AI. The increased activity began, in many cases, with something that at first glance seemed positive: the feeling of being able to do more on one’s own. It was no secret that AI makes it possible to tackle tasks that previously required external support or specific knowledge, gradually expanding the perimeter of its role. However, this growth did not replace previous responsibilities, but rather added to them and triggered new demands for supervision and adjustment within the teams. When the pause is no longer a pause. The study also shows that this dynamic not only arises from doing more things, but from doing them at different times. By reducing the initial effort required to begin a task, AI made it easier for work to slide into spaces traditionally reserved for rest, such as meals, short intervals, or the end of the day. Over time, this barely perceptible continuity transformed the work experience into something more constant and less delimited, decreasing resilience even without formally increasing hours. Fragmentation of care. Harvard Business Review points out that the possibility of executing several actions at the same time, relying on systems that work in the background, pushed many professionals to maintain an increasing number of tasks open simultaneously. This multiplication of fronts generated a feeling of momentum and support, but also required frequently reviewing the results produced by the AI ​​and continuously changing context. As this behavior became habitual, expectations of speed tended to rise within the organization. A possible way out. The study suggests that the problem does not lie in the technology itself, but in the absence of frameworks that regulate its daily use. Therefore, it proposes developing an “AI practice” based on intentional pauses that allow decisions to be reconsidered, work sequencing that reduces fragmentation, and moments of human connection that counteract isolation. In this scenario, the challenge for companies stops being to adopt more AI and becomes integrating its capacity without eroding the balance of daily work. Images | Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | Google is going to borrow money to pay back in 100 years. You have to believe that in 100 years Google will still be there

They have you in from the beginning

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Betting houses sell a dream in their advertisements: anyone can win. The reality is just the opposite. They are designed to identify those who know what they are doing and neutralize them before they become a problem. A data journalist from The Economist he discovered it the hard way. After building models to detect miscalculated odds, Ladbrokes allowed him to bet exactly five pounds on the NBA MVP award. All other British houses closed their doors to him soon after. Not to make a lot of money, but to show that he knew what he was doing. The algorithm ranks you before your first bet Platforms don’t wait to see if you win or lose to evaluate you. They start much earlier. Do you enter from a computer or from your mobile? Do you deposit with a debit card or electronic wallets? Are you a woman in a sector where 90% are men? Each technical decision feeds a risk profile. An industry consultant explained it this way to The Economist: When you make your first bet, the houses already know with 80-90% certainty how much money they are going to win or lose with you. The initial play confirms or denies suspicions. A normal bettor bet on the Premier League or the NFL half an hour before the game, choosing the winner without comparing the odds too much. And he likes the combined ones: five, six, twelve crossed bets that are much more profitable (and therefore much more complicated to get right). a professional does the opposite. Bet on minor leagues as soon as the odds are published, when they still contain calculation errors. Look for derivative markets, such as how many points will be scored in the second quarter or whether a secondary player will beat a certain statistic, because that’s where the algorithms are least accurate. He never makes combinations. If your first bet captures a clearly mismatched market share, the restriction comes immediately. If not, the system needs less than ten moves to confirm it through the closing-line value: If you consistently bet better than the final odds, the algorithm already knows that you are a problem. Anthony Kaminskas runs ak Bets, a small house with 50,000 accounts. He perfectly remembers that British journalist’s first bet: 25 pounds on a basketball result that would take five months to resolve. Among hundreds of customers betting on the day’s football, that was too loud. He restricted it to 30% of the standard limit on the spot, adding a note: “This user has found a price where he has an advantage.” Whaling is more profitable than expelling ready whales But the system is not designed just to kick out the good guys. Its true function is to distinguish between three types of winners: Those who know. Those who are lucky. And those who are about to lose everything. They treat them depending on which group they belong to: “Those who know” are expelled. They keep the lucky ones close, waiting for their luck to change. AND The “whales” (players with a lot of money who bet badly) are pampered with VIP treatment: trips, five-star hotels, front-row tickets… Everything so that they feel entertained and continue betting happily, even if they tend to win. In 2023, DraftKings identified Felix Baum as a whale. They paid for a trip on the Indiana Pacers plane and a night at the Four Seasons. He turned out to be a camouflaged professional. But the cost of that mistake is pocket change: a year later, PointsBet raised its market share in New Jersey from 11% to 24% after catching a single real whale. The problem is that some professionals specialize in imitating whales: They purposely lose large sums on “silly” bets, such as accumulators in a very popular sport, so that the system raises the limits. When the house lets its guard down, they recover their losses and disappear with a net profit. The best ones even log on at three in the morning when there are games in other time zones, imitating the compulsive behavior of an addict. When all the doors close to you, the black market remains If all platforms restrict you, the options are a little murky: Houses in tax havens accept cryptocurrencies without asking questions, but then cancel winning bets citing “suspicious patterns.” Physical stores accept cash, but only in small amounts, and you have to constantly change hats and sunglasses to avoid facial recognition. The alternative is resort to front men. Family and friends who bet following your instructions. With the right precautions, such as never using the same WiFi or keeping each account on different devices, it is often almost impossible to detect. An attendee at BetBash, a professional betting conference in Las Vegas, explained that he has twenty different iPads and drives around his state so that each bet comes from different locations. Another recruits mules at his church. When the circle of trust is exhausted, there are professional intermediaries who sell access to networks of front men. They keep between 10% and 50% of the profits depending on the volume they move. Meta-fraud is included in the price: they estimate that between 3% and 5% of the mules will disappear with the money. Professionals do not want the system to change Several governments have attempted to ban these types of restrictions. The surprising thing is that professionals do not support these changes. If the houses could not limit accounts, they would worsen the odds for everyone or stop offering exploitable markets. “The restrictions are the best thing that ever happened to me,” says industry veteran Chris Dierkes. “They keep the competition away and make me money”. The entire system works because it benefits everyone who knows how to play: the houses maximize their profits by concentrating on the losers, and the professionals keep the market inefficient. And the casual bettor, convinced by advertising that he can win, keeps turning the crank. In Xataka | “Betting is … Read more

For the first time, electrified cars are outselling gasoline cars. It is the beginning of the inevitable

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We already have the data on car registrations in 2025. And the inevitable has become reality: the electrified car has prevailed. Driven by countries like Germany or the United Kingdom, the alternatives to the combustion car make it clear that the future of the industry depends, yes or yes, on a plug. A discreet recovery. EU registration data for 2025 shows a clear trend: a significant increase in the registration of both electric and hybrid vehicles. Overall registrations rise by a discreet 1.8% but the change is not in the total volume, it is in the type of car that is sold. The data. The pure combustion vehicle is beginning to reduce its share in the European market. HEV (hybrids and microhybrids): 34.5% Gasoline: 26.6% BEV (pure electric): 17.4% PHEV (plug-in hybrids): 17.4% Diesel: 8.9% Others: 3.3% He electric car It already occupies third place in the ranking, doubling sales of diesel cars but below hybrids. Adding figures, the year-on-year variation (YOY) in December 2025 was an increase of 51% for pure electric cars and 36.7% for plug-in hybrids. The key countries. Figures from January to December 2025 show a substantial increase in electric car registrations in countries such as Germany (+43.2%), the Netherlands (+12.6%) and France (+12.5%). The data in countries like Spain is striking, which lead the growth in hybrids (+23.1%) and plug-in hybrids (+111.7%) in the latter case. The decline of combustion. At the end of 2025, gasoline car registrations fell by around 20%, and 24.2% in the case of diesel car registrations. If these figures are sustained in the short term, it will not take long for purely electric vehicles to surpass gasoline vehicles at the European level, placing them in second place in the ranking below HEVs. A bit of a trick. The photograph is clear: the electrified vehicle is growing at a rapid pace, but in cases like Spain there is some fine print. We are the country that has grown the most in adoption of HEVs (hybrid vehicles), but this category also includes MHEV. These are vehicles that combine a combustion engine with a small electrical system (generally 48V) and a low-capacity battery. They never circulate in 100% electric mode, but the small electrical system helps reduce emissions and consumption. Yes, but. It is also worth remembering that the total number of registrations does not only tell us about the preferences of individual users: the data reflects the registrations intended for companies and renters. Specifically, passenger car registrations in 2025 were quite distributed, with 50,213 in the case of channels for individuals and 43,362 for companies. The Transportation electrification is moving companies to buy electrified vehicles in volume, to comply with future European restrictionswho have recently lowered their forecast of reducing carbon emissions by 100% to now talk about 90%. Image | Xataka In Xataka | The Prosecutor’s Office believes that Moeve has saved 7.7 million euros in taxes. And the punishment is clear: dissolution of the company

For the first time in history the possibility of a Mediterranean without wine is beginning to appear on the horizon

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The same week we found out that Nabimia is flooding Europe of grapes grown in the middle of the desert, a map goes viral that says that the continent’s wine-growing areas have been moving north for decades. What’s the point of all this? Is it even possible? Let’s see it. Let’s start with the map. In recent days, the map is by Sebastian Gräff for The European Correspondent and shows how, in Europe, the “wine-growing areas” have been shifting for 60 years due to the effect of climate change. Not only has it gone viral, it has also become very controversial. Just look at the map to see that historical areas full of vineyards (such as the Jerez countryside) do not appear on it. And it is not a specific failure: there are ‘gaps’ of this type in practically all of the countries that come out. And yet, this isn’t exactly a problem. How is that not a problem? Because what the map represents is the Huglin index: one of the many indices that tries to determine the areas with optimal conditions for growing vines. It is based on a viticultural principle: that each grape variety needs a certain amount of heat to be grown successfully. The Huglin index tries to make an estimate, but (due to the nature of meteorological data) it is not useful for concrete detail. The best-known example is the slopes: having one orientation or another can change the average daily temperature of the area by more than two degrees. It is rather a tool to classify areas, predict ripening and plan the cultivation of certain varieties. But a tool that only makes sense in its context. And the map is not its context. I mean, it’s not what it’s intended for, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. At the end of the day, climate change is one of the most important “game changers” in the world of vines: we must not forget that, in 2024, the harvest took place earliest of the Marco de Jerez since there are records and experts fear that, if the trend continues like this, there will come a time when it will not be viable to grow grapes. In the same way, there are huge regions of the world that they are about to be able grow vines: UK wine production has doubled in a very short time and indeed the area planted with vines has increased 75% in the last five years. They are not yet large amounts, but the harvests are getting better and the sector is moving more and more money. And the expectation is that it will go further, of course. Bad omens. All this outlines something that researchers are beginning to take very seriously: the first time, in historical times, the Mediterranean run out of useful vines for wine production. In this sense, the Jumilla disaster of 2024 serves as a warning to navigators. Wine is entering unknown territory and we are going to bear the worst part. Image | Sebastian Graff In Xataka | The oldest wine in the world is “Andalusian” and has been resting for 2,000 years. If it’s good or not, no one wants to know.

The latest Stranger Things deepfake is so amazing that it shows that reality is beginning to be optional

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This week, a Brazilian content creator named ederxavier3d published an amazing video on his Instagram account. In it they appeared several of the protagonists of the series ‘Stranger Things’ making just the gestures and expressions that he made in the lower window. He explained that he had achieved it in a simple way and thanks to the new Kling 2.6 and its characteristic Motion Control. This option allows the movements we make in a video to be transferred to any real or fictitious person, regardless of the style in which they are represented (it can be a comic book character) with an amazing result. And in the case of the Brazilian creator’s video it can be clearly seen: these videos could perfectly pass for real in almost all cases. It is true that if you look closely you can sense that something is wrong, but only because the video has been shared making it clear that it was created with AI. This video has once again awakened a debate that has been linked to this type of deepfakes for some time. Justine Moore, partner at investment firm a16z, explained that “we are not prepared for how quickly (video) production flows are going to change with AI. Some of the latest video models have immediate implications for Hollywood. Endless character swaps at negligible costs.” How the story has changed. In April 2023 we proposed a little game to all of you who read us: Would you be able to distinguish a real image from one generated by AI? At that time, AI was already achieving remarkable results—the image of the Pope with the coat proved it—but the feeling was that we could still tell whether an image had been created with an AI or not. With the video things were even clearer.because at that time AI video generation I was in diapers. Three years later things are very different, and there are several AI platforms (I see 3, Sora 2Kling, Runway) that generate videos that anyone could easily confuse without problems. Tell Will Smith. ederxavier3d’s video also demonstrates this, and in fact something unique happened with it: there were rumors that the Stranger Things characters had actually recorded those appearances and the creator had imitated their movements, and then rumors appeared that denied that this was true and that suggested that from the beginning the videos were nothing more than what they seemed: deepfakes created with AI. A priori everything would suggest that this is the case: the Kling 2.6 feature is not at all new and other platforms allow our movements and gestures – and even our voice – to be transferred to a character generated by AI. The problem is that At this point it is almost impossible to distinguish whether that person who appears on the screen is real or not. This technology is extraordinarily striking and causes that “wow effect” that AI companies so seek, but despite the creative options it offers, the risks here seem especially notable. The identity theft It is now easier to achieve than ever, and that will probably mean that we will see many more dangerous cases. It is enough to remind the employee that transferred 25 million dollars believing that the person who told him via videoconference was his real boss. It is not clear how, for example, Hollywood studios will react to this technology, but for now some are already taking action on the matter to try to protect themselves. The best example is Matthew McConaughey, who these days has “patented himself” to have one more legal resource (which we are not sure is necessary) to protect yourself against possible videos impersonating you. The implications are enormous, and we are entering an era in which something disturbing is going to happen: We will not be able to trust what we see on a screen. In Xataka | “Hello, I’m your grandson and I need $3,000”: there are already scams on the elderly with voices generated by AI

The train of storms that threatens Spain is just the beginning of the problem

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What is happening? What is going to happen? As I write these lines, nine autonomous communities they have yellow notices due to rain, wind and other coastal phenomena. And the reason, as we have been repeating for the last few days, is a “train” of fronts that comes directly from the bowels of the Atlantic and will cross the peninsula. The forecast, in data. The models are beginning to converge and the forecasts are quite clear: Waves of up to five meters on the Cantabrian coast and off the coast of Galicia. Winds will easily reach 61 kilometers per hour. No particularly intense rains are expected in the coming days (the peak may be 15 l/m2 in areas of Huelva and Cádiz). Although, yes, those accumulated in Galicia, Zamora, Ávila and Cáceres may be important — above all, in a context of saturated soils. The winds, for their part, will be above 70 kilometers per hour throughout the north of the peninsula. And, with these figures, why is it important? Because of what is known as ‘multiplier risk’: we are not going to face any peak of intense rain, but the recurrence of fronts will increase operational risks. It is the meteorological equivalent of a ‘calabobos’: it seems that it does not get wet, but it ends up with half of Spain completely soaked. The only question is whether an effective “atmospheric river” is formed (or not). That is, if the humid and warm air from the Gulf of Mexico integrates into one of these fronts and a greater blow is produced. A “normal” circulation in an “abnormal” context. Because, as it is worth remembering, the cold days of recent weeks are beginning to not be normal on the peninsula. And, although this relatively active western circulation is, the arrival of successive fronts complicates the situation: there is a lot of water accumulated in the form of snow. So we go back to normal. A normality that is summarized in waiting to see how long it takes for the storm corridor to close and waiting for the swamps to continue filling. Summer will be here sooner than it seems. Image | ECMWF In Xataka | While the snow devours half of Europe, there is a place where it is 27ºC and on the beach in the middle of January: Greece

Investors are beginning to bet more and more on Chinese firms

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Things would have to be twisted a lot for The United States does not end up winning the AI ​​race. Has the most capable models and the most powerful chipsand has also prevented China, its biggest rival, from having access to its technologies. So how is it possible that more and more investors are putting their money in Chinese companies? what’s happening. They count in Reuters that many international investors are beginning to diversify their bets in artificial intelligence companies towards Chinese companies. Shares of Chinese companies listed abroad such as Alibaba, Tencent either Baidu have grown significantly in recent months. It’s not that investors have stopped believing in big tech Americans, they are covering their backs. Why is it important. He fear of the AI ​​bubble has been taken seriously by many investors and firms are recommending reducing exposure to a possible blowout. Furthermore, China’s efforts to create your own chips and be self-sufficient have caused a change in perception: one in which China is closing the technological distance with the US. This is what the British financial company Ruffer says: “the gap may not be as wide or as deep as many think. The competitive landscape is changing.” A smaller, but safer bet. The Swiss firm UBS Global Wealth Management recently published a report titled “look for opportunities in China” in which they highlight that “China’s domestic technological innovation is accelerating.” AI in China receives more political supportis cheaper and they are managing to monetize it much faster than the American one. Perhaps it is not presented as such a lucrative bet, but it is more reliable. National chips. The US blockade left China unable to use its chips for AI and Beijing’s response was to make it technological self-sufficiency was a national priority. The push to manufacture our own chips is bearing fruit and recently two companies dedicated to the task have had a spectacular debut on the stock market. One of them was Moore Threads, known as Chinese NVIDIA, which had a growth of 500%. Shortly after I followed in his footsteps MetaX and increased its shares by 688%. They are not the only companies looking for the holy grail of chips, there is also Cambricon, Biren Technology and of course Huawei and SMIC, which are also squeezing all the possibilities to get the best chips with the technology they have. At the moment China is still behind when it comes to technology, but the prudent bet for an investor in the face of uncertainty is to diversify. Image | Karola G, Pexels In Xataka | Thousands of trucks saturate the Vietnam border: it is the back door through which China avoids US tariffs

In 2024 a package bomb arrived on a plane. It was the beginning of the great threat to Europe: that of a “ghost” crossing the red lines

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Europe lives a strategic transformation that few had imagined possible in such a short time. What began as a series of “flats” (intermittent blackouts, suspicious fires, minor incursions) has become a coherent pattern: a campaign of directed hybrid war that is no longer limited to destabilizing, but rather deliberately explore the thresholds of what it can inflict without provoking a direct military response. It all started a year ago. The silent climb. The plot is explained more clearly from July 2024when several DHL packages exploded in centers logistics from the United Kingdom, Poland and Germany, devices powerful enough to shoot down a plane if they had detonated in mid-flight. The episode, an infiltrated bomb at the heart of the European air system, marked a before and after, because it showed to what extent Moscow was willing to strain continental security and because it exposed the fragility of an Old Continent trapped between an increasingly aggressive Russia and a United States whose commitment has stopped being reliableand. Since then, Europe no longer sees hybrid warfare as a peripheral nuisance, but as a structural threat which targets critical infrastructures, social cohesion and the European institutional framework itself. In Xataka Mercadona has found a vein to grow beyond its white label and prepared food: tourism The Russian laboratory. I counted this week the financial times that the Russian campaign has been refined in breadth and depth. European intelligence services have disabled plots to derail trains full of passengers, set fire to shopping malls, damage dams or contaminate water in urban areas. The attacks are not isolated improvisations: they respond to a “gig economy” model of sabotage in which young recruited by Telegramlocal criminals or foreigners with residence permits act as expendable pawns for unknown objectives. Plus: they are difficult to detect, impossible to anticipate and legally ambiguous, since they rarely there is a direct connection with Russian intelligence that allows them to be accused of espionage. The case of frustrated railway sabotage in Poland (an explosive planted on the Warsaw-Lublin line that came within seconds of causing a massacre) exposed that pattern in its clearest form: unimpeded entry and exit, cryptocurrency financingfalse identities issued by Moscow and a diffuse chain of command that leads to intermediaries as Mikhail Mirgorodsky or even networks managed by former Wagner members. And there is more. Yes, because each cell discovered suggests others not yet detected, and what is worrying is not the errors of saboteurs (sometimes incapable to delete videos of its own attacks) but the scale that this model offers to a Russia resentful of decades of diplomatic expulsions and doctrinally rearmed to a pre-war period. The doctrine that returns. The ISS analysts They recently reported that the archives of the KGB and the StB (Czechoslovak intelligence) reveal parallels disturbing differences between the sabotage manuals of the Cold War and what Europe witnesses today. The objectives listed decades ago (military bases, energy infrastructures, dams, communication systems, transportation) match almost exactly with the whites of the last two years. Equally revealing is the doctrinal sequencing: during times of peace, minor attacks with the appearance of accidents, in pre-war phases, massive sabotage, increased risk tolerated and increasing willingness to cause civilian casualties, and in open war, total activation of clandestine networks for lethal operations. The prelude to something more fat. It we count very recently. If you will, Europe seems to have entered fully into a intermediate stage: a pre-war phase where each incident also functions as offensive reconnaissance, a permanent exercise by razvedka boyem to measure Western reaction capacity, locate vulnerabilities and exploit any weaknesses. The episode of the unidentified drones airports and military bases European operations illustrate this dynamic: cheap raids, of uncertain origin, that revealed systemic failures in the continental air defense and that, due to their replicator effect (copies, jokes, hysteria, false alarms) multiply the psychological and financial wear and tear. A continent without a network. I remembered the new york times This morning an added problem for Europe: that if the Russian threat escalates, the other half of the problem is the growing disconnection with the United States. For the first time since 1945, Europe perceives that Washington is not unequivocally on your side in a matter of war and peace. The Trump administration is not only pressuring kyiv to accept an agreement In Moscow’s terms, it also redefines Europe as a suspicious actor, criticizes the democratic integrity of its governments and promises to openly support the European extreme right. The result is an unprecedented scenario: a Russia that intensifies its hybrid campaign, a Ukraine that depends almost entirely on continental support and a Europe that must finance your own safety while compensating for the withdrawal of US capabilities (satellites, long-range missiles, command and control) that it cannot replace before 2029the year that NATO considers the limit to have a credible deterrent. European leaders also face depleted budgets, electorates hostile to increased military spending, and a rising far-right that Moscow sees as a strategic multiplier. {“videoId”:”x8j6422″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”Declassified video of the clash between Russian fighters and the American drone”, “tag”:”united states”, “duration”:”42″} The battle of money. The internal European debate on how to finance the resistance Ukrainian reflects the magnitude of the challenge. To support kyiv for the next two years, about $200 billion is needed, an unaffordable figure without activating the 210,000 million euros on Russian assets frozen in Europe. The problem? Right now it takes the name of Belgiumwhich guards the majority through Euroclear, and which fears retaliation from Moscow and the possible erosion of the credibility of the euro as a safe haven. Washington, despite its strategic ambiguity, is also pressing for these funds to be don’t touch each othersince its eventual return is part of the US scheme for a peace agreement favorable to Russia. One more thing. And yet, without that money, Europe would have to coordinate (outside the EU framework) a colossal loan and politically explosive. The crossroads are so profound that in Berlin and Paris they are … Read more

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