blow

Europe forces Google to open Android to ChatGPT and Claude, but the blow is that it will have to give up its search engine data to the competition

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The European Commission has ordered Google to open two of its greatest competitive advantages– Android’s access to rival AI assistants and the search data that feeds Gemini. They are two binding measures under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)adopted on July 16. Android must be open by July 2027, search data by January 2027, and no resources are stopping those deadlines. In detail. The first measure affects how a rival assistant can live inside Android. Right now, Gemini has privileges that no competitor shares: Keyword activation at the operating system level, not the application level. Access to the home button or navigation gesture as a gateway. Reading content on screen to respond with context. Executing tasks within other applications, such as sending an email or sharing a photo. Priority access to hardware and AI models built into the device. There are 11 points in total. Starting with the next major version of Android, ChatGPT, Claude or any other attendee will be able to claim the same treatment that only they have today Gemini. The second measure is the one that weighs the most for the business: the data of queries, clicks and results with which Google trains a good part of its LLM. From January 2027, rivals such as OpenAI will be able to access an anonymized version, under conditions that Brussels demands are fair and non-discriminatory. Google’s waterline. Between the lines. Google completed a few months ago the transition from Google Assistant to Gemini as Android’s default assistant, just before Brussels opened the file. The order arrived with Gemini already installed as a part of the system and not as just another application. Apple chose the opposite path: it negotiated before launching, proposed a monitored permit system and Brussels rejected it. Siri AI It still hasn’t reached the iPhone in the European Union. Google launched Gemini without asking permission and has discussed the conditions afterwards, with better results. Yes, but. Google, like Apple, alleges security and privacy reasons. Its head of global affairs, Kent Walker, has explained that opening screen reading and the execution of tasks between applications to any external service bypasses the filter that the manufacturers themselves apply today before granting these permissions. And now what. Google will appeal, but the appeal does not give it extra time: from the criteria established in the Apple case, the obligation is fulfilled while it is discussed whether it was legal to impose it. The United Kingdom and Japan, which are preparing their own digital competency frameworks, are presumably taking note of how “fair access” to a mobile is defined here. What Brussels sets about wake words or search data prices will not remain only in Europe. In Xataka | AI has destroyed traditional captchas. Google’s solution requires scanning a QR… and having its services installed Featured image | Xataka

Video game preservation has already been mortally wounded with Sony. The next blow comes from an entire country: Germany

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Many times we have treated video games as if their availability was guaranteed, even when they depended on discs, digital stores and servers that could disappear. What we have seen this week reminds us that preserving them requires more than will: we need supports that survive and organizations capable of cataloging them, maintaining them and opening them to researchers and the public. Sony has decided to close one of those avenues for future releases. Almost at the same time, Germany has dropped one of the most ambitious public projects that existed to prevent that memory from being lost. The closure is already underway. The Internationale Computerspielesammlung, known as ICS, is in the process of dissolution after the public funding that supported it expired at the end of April 2026. GamesWirtschaft points out that The federal government refused to renew its share of support and the partners voted unanimously to dissolve the company. The decision does not erase the existing collections at once, but it does leave the shared database and the infrastructure that allowed it to be consulted without defined continuity, the future of which remains under legal and technical review. An archive of more than 60,000 games. The ICS gathered records and funds provided by institutions such as the Computerspielemuseum of Berlin, the USK, the game association and the DIGAREC research center. The collection encompassed cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, as well as boxes, manuals, associated materials and hardware. Of course, what could be publicly consulted since April 2019 was the digital database, not the games themselves. The physical pieces remain in the hands of the proprietary entities. The ambition went much further. The ICS aspired to gather in one place the funds that were still distributed among its partners and turn the whole into a stable tool for researchers, media and specialists. The plan included facilitating access through automated emulation and creating a permanent public headquarters in the German capital region. The complete leap was never consolidated: a repository already existed, but permanent institutionalization, public headquarters and the access provided through emulation were missing. That second phase remained uncompleted. The money did not find a stable outlet. The aid came from the Berlin Senate and the Federal Commissioner for Culture, but was linked to a temporary phase of the initiative. When the video game policy passed to the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space in 2025, it studied whether it could turn the ICS into a permanent institution. He ultimately concluded that the model was not economically viable due to the scale of the work required. Preserving also means guaranteeing access. The scenario left by these two movements does not only imply that there are fewer objects to save or fewer projects capable of organizing them. It also weakens the ability to consult, study and understand these games decades from now, when they will depend on hardware, documentation and systems that may no longer exist. The coincidence between Sony’s announcement and the fall of the ICS points in that direction: the video game memory does not disappear all at once, but when the structures that keep it available are removed, one by one. Images | Sei In Xataka | ‘Minecraft’ has achieved something revolutionary in the dynamics of the game: allowing its users to sit

how to blow up a bridge without tons of bombs

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In May 1943, the RAF launched the famous Operation Chastise: 19 bombers with the so-called “bouncing bombs” of Barnes Wallis to destroy german dams. It was the most sophisticated solution of its time to a classic problem: how to break a gigantic structure with precision. Eight decades later, that same obsession lives on, only now it fits in an operator’s backpack A bridge as an eternal military obsession. There are few things more valuable in a war than a bridge. Concentrating troops, armor and logistics in an obligatory step turns these structures into strategic arteries, and that is why destroying them has always been a military priority. The problem is that they are hard targets by nature: decades of doctrine taught that to knock one down bombers, heavy artillery or high-cost missiles were needed. An alternative has just appeared in Ukraine that breaks that logic. It is not more powerful or faster, but it is much cheaper and more persistent: dozens of small suicide drones working like a colony of termites until the structure is emptied from within. Solve an old problem with new things. What is really important here is not only that Russia has demolished a bridge with 43 FPV dronesbut it demonstrates something that for years was almost a laboratory hypothesis: that tons of explosives are no longer needed to blow up critical infrastructure. During World War II, sinking a bridge could require hundreds of tons of air-dropped bombs. Then came weapons like the ATACMS either the JDAM to do it precisely. Now the equation changes again: less than 250 pounds of ammunition distributed in small impacts can achieve the same effect. The military obsession of “how to cut off the enemy” has just become radically cheaper. The structural logic of collapse. The key is not to destroy it in one fell swoop, but to understand how does a bridge hold up. Reinforced concrete is strong because it combines two materials with different functions: concrete supports compression and steel absorbs tension. The FPVs they don’t need split the entire column. They just have to go tearing off layers of concrete until the metal skeleton is exposed. At that moment the structure loses much of its load capacity. The steel is still there, but it is no longer enough to support the weight. The bridge begins to collapse on itself and collapse due to structural fatigue. The war of accumulation. This introduces a completely different logic to military destruction. Before, power concentrated in a single blow mattered. Now it matters sum of many blows small, extremely precise and always directed to the same point. The first impacts barely remove fragments of cement. The following deepen the crack. The latter turn the column into an empty shell. It’s something like the industrialization of wear: a slow, but surgical method. What once required an aerial window, tactical superiority, and millions of dollars can now be done with patience, coordination, and a backpack. full of quadcopters. Ridiculous cost, enormous strategic effect. The most brutal fact is economic. The 43 FPVs used in the attack They would have cost less than $25,000. That’s about half of a single American guided bomb and a ridiculous fraction of the price of an ATACMS missile. The comparison is devastating for any classical military planning, because for the cost of a single strategic missile you can launch forty similar attacks. And without exposing pilots, planes or large platforms. It is the democratization of tactical demolition: destroying critical infrastructure is no longer the privilege of those who have heavy aviation. What comes next. Possibly, the big impact of this is not on the bridge in question, but on what it redefines as a viable objective from now on. If a handful of FPVs can knock down a highway structure, railway bridges, overpasses, logistics warehouses and even tall buildings start to come into the equation. Even more so if the drones use linear hollow charges capable of directly cutting steel bars. Systems like Pasikawhich allow a single operator to control entire swarms, further accelerate that process. The question is no longer whether they can do it. The question is how many critical structures in the world are still designed under the old idea that only big bombs can bring them down. Ukraine is showing that that era is over. Image | Rasal HagueDmitro Zavtonov In Xataka | “Speed ​​is not the key”: the trick against all logic of Ukrainian drones to hunt the fearsome Russian shahed In Xataka | “They are preparing the deployment of 80,000 soldiers”: satellites indicate where Russia is heading in Europe after Ukraine

We have been fearing the Apocalypse for 100 days due to the closure of Hormuz. The blow is going to be given to us by a heat wave in China

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At the end of February, the clocks in the financial markets seemed to stop. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz was not a simple geopolitical skirmish; It meant amputating, from one day to the next, the main energy artery of the planet. Classical economics manuals dictated that the abrupt disappearance of 20% of the world’s crude oil would trigger industrial paralysis, widespread shortages and an imminent recession. However, more than one hundred days after the start of the blockade, Western economies are still standing and the barrel of crude oil, far from reaching the catastrophic 200 dollars that some investment funds even predicted, has been contained below the $100 barrier. We have survived what, on paper, is the greatest threat to energy security in history. The question that now resonates in the European chancelleries is unanimous: how have we achieved it and, above all, how long will the truce last? The architecture of an unexpected rescue The fact that the world has not collapsed is due to a complex network of counterweights that have absorbed the blow. The first revealing data it is provided by the agency Reuters: The production of OPEC countries has fallen this May to its lowest level since 2000 (16.13 million barrels per day) as a direct consequence of the siege of Iran. Despite this massive hole in supply, global supply has been reorganized in record time. The analyst Javier Blas unfolds in his column of Bloomberg the keys to this logistical miracle. The main lifeline, paradoxically, has arrived from Beijing. China has plunged its oil imports by ship to decade lows (nearly 40% less than last year’s average). According to Blas, this unexpected destruction of Asian demand has acted as a huge escape valve: “If Beijing were buying the same amount of oil as in the past, global inflation would be out of control.” Added to Chinese containment is a tectonic shift in energy hegemony. As documented Reutersthe United States has taken advantage of the chaos to become the largest oil exporter in the world, overtaking Russia and Saudi Arabia by shipping nearly 10.5 million barrels per day in May. Furthermore, the Gulf countries have not sat idly by. The producers They are using a network of pipelines less known through Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that circumvent the Hormuz bottleneck, keeping some five million barrels a day alive, in addition to maintaining “hot” extraction infrastructures for an eventual rapid restart. The silent blow The fact that there are no kilometer-long lines at service stations has generated a false sense of immunity. Hormuz’s economic blow is landing, but it is doing so through the financial system. The war conflict has blown up the roadmap by Christine Lagarde and the European Central Bank (ECB), since the sustained rise in fuel prices has caused eurozone inflation to rise to 3.2% in May. Given the fear that this extra cost will permanently spread to the shopping basket, the ECB has been forced to resume raising interest rates this June, placing them at 2.25%. The true price of the Iran war is already being paid by European households and companies through more expensive mortgages and restricted credit. And the scenario continues to be a powder keg: the extreme volatility of the markets after the latest crossed attacks between the United States and Iran, which have kept Brent crude stressed above $95. The Asian thermometer: the great threat to Spain While the global macroeconomy deals with interest rates, at the local level a perfect storm is brewing for the Spanish consumer in the coming months. And the trigger will not be military, but climate. According to the forecasts of the consulting firm Tempos Energía, collected by Europa Pressthe price of electricity in Spain this summer will not depend on what happens in the Strait of Hormuz, but on the temperatures in Asia. Until now, Europe has been importing American liquefied natural gas (LNG) without much competition because China was not demanding it. However, the general director of Tempos Energía, Antonio Aceituno, warns of an imminent reversal: “When the heat arrives and the thermometer soars in Shanghai, American freighters will be divided between demand from Asia and Europe.” If the Asian market absorbs the supply to feed its air conditioning networks, Europe will be left without cheap alternatives to cover its own summer demand peaks, and with tanks at less than half capacity. The consulting firm’s forecast for Spain is severe: if China breaks into the purchasing market, the electricity bill for July and August could rise to the range of 88 to 95 euros per megawatt hour. This represents an increase of up to 40%, which “would be equivalent to paying double what was paid in 2019.” A truce with an expiration date We have managed to avoid the precipice thanks to the inertia of pre-war inventories, a historic deployment of emergency reserves and the forced reconfiguration of the global market. If diplomacy triumphs, Blas explains how the intact infrastructure of the Gulf would allow 50% of production to be recovered in a matter of days. However, trusting economic stability to an imminent diplomatic agreement is a dangerous game. Emergency reserves are not infinite and the capacity to cushion shocks has a limit. The world has shown astonishing resilience in surviving without its main oil route, but the armor is cracking. If the situation continues and summer demand tightens, the apocalypse that we avoided in spring could arrive in the form of unaffordable bills and an induced recession. The Hormuz bill, sooner or later, will have to be paid. Image | Unsplash 1 and 2 Xataka | Ukraine turned drones into hunters. A helicopter shot down in Hormuz has transformed them into a Spielberg film

“The blow will travel far beyond the Pacific Ocean”

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On June 2, Celeste Saulo, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, took the floor in front of media around the world and confirmed what we all feared: it is not only that, in a few weeks, the probability that The Child be strong or it has been triggered very strongly, it is that it is going much faster than normal. There is an 80% chance that we will enter a warm phase before summer. We have been saying the same refrain for decades (“it seems that El Niño is coming, we have to prepare”); Well, this time it seems that we won’t have time. What does all this mean? Although the WMO still does not use the term “SuperChild” (because it is not part of their official terminology), but the data speaks for itself: Tropical Pacific ocean readings “6 degrees above average.” It is true that these readings refer to the subsurface anomaly of the Kelvin wavebut the 0.9 of the Niño 3.4 index are not normal either (taking into account that we have been in a neutral phase for a very short time). But we had already read this, what has changed? What are we leaving behind? the main problem for prediction models: spring. June is the key moment because the models we have suddenly gain reliability and the image they give us is much more precise. That is, until now we were speculating. We had really surprising and worrying graphs, but we were aware that all this could end up in many ways when spring passed. The news is that this “landing” is being much more abrupt than we thought. If at the end of last year someone had told us that we would have a warm phase in summer, we would not have believed them. If they had also told us that it was this size we wouldn’t have even listened to it. To be clear: in just a few weeks, the picture has changed massively. What can we expect? Luckily, we have a clear precedent: The 2023-24 El Niño was the fifth strongest on record and generated an estimated $103.3 billion in damage. It was also a key factor in 2024 being the warmest year in the series. This gives us the keys to understand what impact we can expect: as Saul said“El Niño’s impact will travel far beyond the Pacific Ocean, affecting agriculture, energy, trade, water resources, supply chains and livelihoods of entire regions.” And in Spain too? THE same day that Saluo set off all the alarms, AEMET He came forward explaining that, indeed, “it is very likely that El Niño will manifest itself in these coming months” and the data confirm that it could reach “moderate or strong intensity after summer.” The good news is that “there is no clear and direct correlation between the occurrence of El Niño and its effects in” Spain. It is true that some studies point to a somewhat rainier end of autumn/beginning of winter, but the agency itself insists that “this is not always the case” and that there is no systematic correspondence. In summer, according to the agencyEl Niño would have “hardly any influence” in Spain. Tranquility, then. That is the message from AEMETalthough the truth is that this tranquility only affects the direct impacts. In a world as interconnected as ours, we will not be able to escape the indirect consequences of the largest El Niño ever recorded. So what the Agency tells us is not that we should not prepare, but that we should focus on what is truly relevant to us. The question is whether there is anyone out there listening. Image | BemBaso In Xataka | The super Niño of 1877 wiped out 4% of the world’s population. The one that is already beginning to form promises to be worse, but what does that mean in 2027?

a blow to European railway monopolies

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The European Commission has presented a legislative package that forces large railway operators to open their sales platforms to other companies. And Renfe, the main operator in Spain, is in the spotlight. Platforms. Buying a train ticket in Europe continues to be, in many cases, an odyssey. Especially when the trip crosses borders or involves combining different operators. The European Commission esteem that on average it takes 70% longer to book a train journey than to do the same with a flight. And part of the blame lies with the large historical operators, such as Renfe in Spain, Deutsche Bahn in Germany or SNCF in France, which control their own sales platforms and have few incentives to give visibility to their rivals. What exactly does Brussels propose? The Commission has presented a legislative package that directly targets this dominant position. The rule obliges any operator that has a market share equal to or greater than 50% in the national railway market to open its digital ticket sales platform to other companies that request it. In practice, whoever enters the Renfe website should also be able to see the Iryo and Ouigo tickets, not just the Renfe ones. The same would happen in the rest of the countries with their own dominant operators. But not only that. Large operators will also have to share your ratesdiscounts and schedules dynamically and in real time with travel agencies and digital platforms such as Booking, Omio, Trainline, eDreams, and must do so under fair and non-discriminatory commercial conditions. Until now, according to the Commission itself, these platforms only had access to the most expensive rates, not the complete catalog. Why Renfe is in the center. It is not the first time that the Spanish operator appears in this debate. In 2023, the European Commission opened a formal investigation to assess whether Renfe could have abused its dominant position in the Spanish market by refusing to provide its real-time data to competing ticketing platforms, according to share from El Diario. The new regulation would settle this type of situation generally for all of Europe. The Commission emphasize that the operators with greater brand recognition, the heirs of the old railway monopolies, have become the usual reference for the traveler, which gives them a structural advantage to exclude competition from their ecosystem. The other side of the coin. The change is not only against Renfe in Spain. And if the Spanish operator must open its platform to Iryo and Ouigo, it would also have the right to have its tickets appear on the dominant websites of other countrieslike SNCF Connect in France (as much as it has resisted until now). That could facilitate its expansion in the European market. Even so, the impact for historical operators is double and not at all comfortable. And just as they point out in El País, on the one hand, they must show their commercial strategy in advance to their direct competitors. On the other hand, more competition in ticket sales increases pressure on margins and commissions. The single ticket, the great novelty for the traveler. Along with the opening of platforms, the Commission proposes to create a single ticket that covers routes operated by different companies in a single transaction. A trip from Madrid to Brussels with Renfe, SNCF and SNCB would have a single document. And if there is a delay in one of the sections, the passenger would be covered, since the company responsible for the incident assumes the assistance, the transportation alternative and the corresponding financial compensation. There is an important nuance: if the problem is not caused by the train but rather that whoever sold the ticket did not respect the minimum connection times, the responsibility falls on the sales platform, which must refund the entire ticket and compensate the passenger. up to 75% of its price. What happens now? This proposal is, for now, just that, a proposal. The negotiation still remains to be concluded between the Commission, the European Parliament and the Member States. If the process progresses without major obstacles, Brussels estimates that the changes could be operational in less than twelve months from the entry into force of the regulation. The European Commissioner for Transport, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, was one of those in charge of presenting the initiative together with the executive vice-president Raffaele Fitto, counting that “we went from building networks to serving passengers.” Cover image | Jose Garcia In Xataka | If the question is what Renfe can do to stop Ouigo and Iryo, the answer is not in the prices

Apple is clear that the memory crisis is about to hit harder. No more cushioning the blow

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With the launch of iPhone 17e and of macbook neoit seemed that Apple was one of the few untouchable companies due to the component crisis that we are experiencing. Although prices increased in the United States, they remained the same in Spain and the MacBook neo was launched at a price to eat the market. The problem is that time has shown that not even Apple is untouchable. And Tim Cook affirms that the worst is yet to come. The Mac Mini. This was, along with the MacBook neo, one of the best options when buying a computer. Not from Apple: in general. An interesting price for a team with enormous potential in a very small size. It had one drawback: it started with 256 GB of storage for a price of 719 euros, but it was interesting because using Thunderbolt you could expand with external SSDs. Now, that basic option does not exist. Apple has deleted the ‘cheap’ Mac Mini and now we can only buy the device with 512 GB base at a price of 969 euros. This is a mandatory price increase that suggests that the 256 GB option was the best-seller and Apple ran out of stock. Cushioning the blow. This price increase occurred hours after Tim Cook, in a call to investors to present quarterly results, will aim that the company has had the best starter of the year in its history, with 17% year-on-year. How well the iPhone is working in China, the services and equipment like those mentioned Mac Mini and MacBook neo have contributed to this. However, he left another message: the global chip crisis is about to hit the ship much harder. In the earnings presentation, he noted that things will get considerably worse due to “significantly higher memory costs” in the coming quarters. The rest of the industry has already been experiencing that blow, but Cook detailed that, so far, Apple has been partially protected and isolated because it has been selling inventory accumulated in advance. The problem is that, as reserves have been depleted, they have had to resort to the only two options: eliminate the best-selling options (we just saw this with the Mac Mini, but We saw it recently with the Mac Studio) and raise prices. Curves are coming. The current CEO pointed out that Apple is considering a range of options to manage this impact, although he has not given more details. Really, there aren’t that many: price increases in basic equipment, configurations with less RAM and less storage, eliminating options that, for the user, are still an increase and something that is more complicated: taking the hit. What is clear, as we read on CNBC, is that Apple expects that this increase in costs will have “a growing impact on our business”, leaving a message to John Ternus who will become CEO of Apple next September 1: “we have the right leader to take on the role.” The truth is that Ternus is going to arrive at a sweet time for Applebut in one where the industry is on fire. The 256 GB version is over. Now starts at 512 GB for 969 euros Tsunami. This time we focus on Apple, although Cook has not really said anything that any other executive from the main technology companies would not have commented before. With SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron turning to the NAND chip market for data centers, the consumer market has been left to its own devices and the consequence is what we are now seeing with Apple. As we say, the company has dodged the first blow because they had accumulated stock, but now the hard part will come for users. From Samsung, in the also recent presentation of results, already they warned that there will be “significant shortages” in products that need these types of chips and that they expect the situation to continue until at least 2027. It is an ambitious estimate, since SK Hynix believes that things will return to normal in 2030 and Nvidia is even more pessimistic. If you need something…Buy now. It is the best warning because things do not look like they are going to improve. If you think you are going to need a device, you better buy it as soon as possible because the price will continue to rise or, simply, that device will stop selling. The mobile industry has been warning for weeks that prices are going to rise, the same thing happens with computers and even with hard drives with which you can make a NAS. And a personal example: when the crisis was beginning to be critical, at the end of January of this year, I bought a 2 TB T7 SSD from Samsung for 160 euros. Today, that same one is for about 229 euros, which is not even close to its fair price. And how says Samsung itself, things are going to get worse. Images | Xataka In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

The most unexpected blow of the Iran war is not the price of oil. It’s the one with the chips

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The Strait of Hormuz does not manufacture semiconductors or host data centers. However, its closure effective March 4 threatens to destabilize the heart of the global technology economy. Taiwan, which through TSMC manufactures around 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, runs on imported energy, and a large part of it flowed through that strait. The connection between a conflict in the Middle East and the price of a GPU It is not metaphorical. It is totally physical. Why is it important. What Trump has described as a “minor excursion” began on February 28 as a military intervention against the Iranian leadership and has led to the almost total closure of the passage that connects the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean. 20% of the world’s natural gas and 25% of the global oil usually pass through there. Now, practically nothing happens. Between the lines. The problem for the chip industry is not oil, but two much less visible resources: The LNG. The Middle East supplies 37% of the fuel that powers the Taiwanese electrical grid, and that electricity is what TSMC’s factories consume with an energy hunger that demands continuous supply. And helium, which is even more delicate: it is essential in the process of photolithography and has no viable substitute. Taiwan only has LNG reserves for 11 days without external imports. South Korea has 52; Japan, three weeks. The contrast. South Korea and Japan have been building energy security buffers for years precisely because they know how much they depend on abroad. Taiwan, on the other hand, has historically prioritized cost over resilience: its LNG storage capacity is much lower than that of its neighbors, and that is now taking its toll. It’s not just a matter of reserve days. The thing is that Samsung and SK Hynix operate in a country with more robust emergency infrastructure, while TSMC, the company on which practically the entire global technological ecosystem depends, turns out to be the most exposed of all. Yes, but. Companies are not sitting idly by: TSMC has secured LNG supplies until mid-May. As for helium, Australia and the United States have the capacity to partially compensate for Qatar’s decline. Morgan Stanley estimates that several additional shipments are already heading to the islandalthough Taiwan has probably paid a notable premium for them. That premium will most likely translate into a price increase. The big question. The real risk is not the immediate cut, but how long this lasts. Consumers expecting GPUs for gaming They will be the last in line. In Xataka | Chinese airlines are the only ones still flying over Russia. And that is why they are the winners of the Iran crisis Featured image | Xataka

Iran is planting sea mines in Hormuz. And what threatens to blow up is not ships: it is the world economy

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On the maps it looks like just a gap of water between deserts, but it passes through that narrow corridor every day. a gigantic portion of the energy that moves the planet. So narrow that in some sections the ships navigate in maritime lanes of just a few kilometers, constantly monitored by radars, drones and military fleets. For decades, any tension at that point in the Persian Gulf has been capable of shake up prices of oil in a matter of minutes. Imagine if will plant mines. A war also at sea. As bombings and missiles focus attention on the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, a parallel battle has begun to unfold in the Persian Gulf. From the start of the warUS intelligence services They detected signs that Tehran could try to disrupt maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz by deploying naval mines and small fast boats. The threat is serious enough to have triggered public warnings of Washington and preventive military operations against Iranian ships suspected of participating in these maneuvers. In this context, the control of this narrow maritime corridor has become one of the strategic points more delicate of the conflict, because any disturbance there has immediate repercussions on the global energy supply. The strait, the global energy artery. There is no doubt, the tension is explained by the central role that Hormuz plays in the global energy system. Approximately a fifth of the oil consumed by the planet circulates through this strait of just a few dozen kilometers, in addition to a similar proportion of the international trade in liquefied natural gas. Every day they go through it in normal conditions about twenty million of barrels of crude oil from the producing countries of the Gulf heading to Asia, Europe and America. Powers like China, India, Japan or South Korea depend largely of this step to secure its energy supply, which turns any threat in these waters into an immediate global problem. It is no coincidence that even rumors or minor incidents in the area provoke immediate reactions in the oil markets. The new war. In that scenario it has begun a new phase of the conflict: that of oil tankers navigating between the risk of mines capable of shaking the planet’s economies. American intelligence reports indicate that Iran has begun deploying dozens of these explosives in the strait and keeps intact most of its fleet of small boats capable of planting hundreds more in a short time. The Revolutionary Guard controls much of the area next to the Iranian navy and has a combination of speedboats, minelayer boats, drones and coastal missile batteries that can turn the sea passage into a navigation trap. The goal would not necessarily be to sink large numbers of ships, that too, but to create enough uncertainty enough to paralyze global energy traffic, raise transportation costs and trigger a shock in international markets. In other words, a well-placed mine in these waters can have an economic impact that goes much further of the ship that hits it. First shocks. Faced with this threat, Washington has chosen for acting before mine deployment reaches a larger scale. The US military has confirmed (with videos included) a few hours ago the destruction of at least sixteen Iranian vessels involved in mining operations near the strait, in what US officials describe as pre-emptive strikes based on intelligence about Tehran’s operational plans. These actions seek to prevent Iran from turning the strait into a practically closed area to navigation before the deployment of explosives multiplies. At the same time, the White House has warned that any attempt to block the flow of oil will provoke a much more forceful military response than the operations carried out so far. Trapped oil and markets in panic. The economic consequences are already beginning to become visible. Since the start of the war, oil transit from the Gulf has seriously upsetwith millions of barrels per day that cannot leave the region normally. Countries like Iraq or Kuwait depend almost exclusively of this route to export its crude, which amplifies the potential impact of any interruption. Energy companies have started diverting ships or to look for alternative routeswhile Saudi Arabia tries to compensate for part of the problem by increasing the use of its oil pipeline to the Red Sea. In parallel, the International Energy Agency studies a massive liberation of strategic reserves to contain the impact of the energy crisis. A few kilometers to shake the world. The fragility of the situation is also explained by the geography of the enclave itself. At its narrowest point it barely has 34 kilometers wide and the navigation lanes through which the ships circulate barely exceed three kilometers in each direction. This narrowness makes the place extremely vulnerable to mines, drone attacks or coastal missiles. It is not the first time this has happened, in fact, since how do we countduring the so-called “tanker war” in the eighties, Iran already used mines in these same waters to pressure its adversaries during the conflict with Iraq. History, therefore, suggests that these types of tactics can be surprisingly effective in destabilizing global trade. A planetary blow. The extreme sensitivity of the energy markets to any news coming from Hormuz was fully demonstrated very recently, when a wrong message on social media suggested that the US Navy had successfully escorted a tanker through the strait. The simple rumor caused an immediate collapse of crude oil prices and a shake-up in financial markets before authorities clarified that no such operation had occurred. The episode illustrates the extent to which the world watches every movement in these waters with nervousness. In a global energy system so dependent on a few strategic corridors, the mine threat in the Strait of Hormuz has opened a new dimension of war: one in which fate of the world economy it may depend on a maritime corridor just a few kilometers wide. Image | nara, Picryl, naraNZ … Read more

Spain had a completely saturated electrical grid. And then data centers arrived to blow it up even more

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Imagine a highway on which not a single vehicle can fit anymore. But the problem is not that there is a lack of asphalt, but that the cars do not know how to drive efficiently and keep kilometer-long safety distances. The Spanish electrical grid was exactly that. It had been operating for years at the limit of its administrative capacity, and suddenly, a convoy of trucks of industrial tonnage and voracious appetite has arrived at the access ramp: data centers. These megainfrastructures, pillars of artificial intelligence and the cloud, promise to water the economy of millions, but their brutal need for supply threatened to burst the seams of an already saturated electrical system. To avoid collapse and not let the reindustrialization train escape, the Government has had to react and radically change the technical rules of the game. Cascading capacity collapse. To understand the collapse we have to look at how our way of consuming energy has changed. The energy transition is profoundly reconfiguring the model throughout the national territory. Requests to connect to transportation and distribution networks have skyrocketed. In addition to the electrification of industry and renewable hydrogen, there is now massive consumption associated with data centers for artificial intelligence. The problem broke out when the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) established a “dynamic criterion” to calculate how much access capacity was available in the areas shared by several network nodes. As detailed by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO) in his press releaseapplying this criterion means that a single access requested at a node can cause a “cascading effect that drains capacity in the rest of the nodes that share the area”, blocking requests from dozens of kilometers away. Basically, a large data center asks for passage and, automatically, the system administratively blocks neighboring nodes as a precaution, even if physically the cables have plenty of space. Investments in the air and the ghost of the blackout. The consequences of this traffic jam directly affect the real economy and national security. Real estate and industrial paralysis. The situation is so critical that, as we already mentioned in our previous coverage citing the Asprima employers’ associationlast year only 12% of connection requests for new urban developments were granted. There are 350,000 homes at risk simply due to lack of electrical power. The risk of an electrical “zero”. The Official State Gazette warns that the increase in installations that are not able to withstand “tension gaps” poses a very high risk. If there is a disturbance and these generators are massively disconnected, exchange flows are produced that are incompatible with Spain’s limited interconnections with Europe. As the diary recalls The Countrythe objective is to avoid at all costs a repeat of massive blackouts like the one suffered by the Iberian Peninsula on April 28, 2025. It is not enough to put more cables. In areas limited by this dynamic criterion, it is no longer possible to enable new capacity simply by investing money in reinforcing the network with “more copper.” The expert in the sector Joaquín Coronado sums it up perfectly: the demand must be 100% active; It must provide flexibility and commit to the stability of the system. The Government’s emergency surgery. To unclog this Gordian knot, the Government and regulators have launched a three-way shock plan: The new Royal Decree of MITECO. The Ministry has been brought to public hearing (until March 16) a standard that updates the technical requirements to connect to the network. The master key is that now it is required that the demands “withstand voltage gaps”, do not introduce adverse oscillations and maintain the quality of the wave. By forcing installations not to disconnect in the event of small disturbances, the number of nodes affected in shared areas is reduced. This simple technical measure could bring out 50% more capacity in about 900 knots of connection to the high-voltage network. The “flexible permits” of the CNMC. To put an end to the binary model (either I give you all the capacity or I deny it), the CNMC has proposed four new types of permits, as we already broke down in Xataka. These range from allowing consumption only in certain time slots, to “dynamic” permissions where the operator can remotely disconnect a data center if there is an emergency on the network. The “technical amnesty” for data giants. In parallel, the Ministry of Industry has been urgently removed the “off-peak” requirement. Previously, to receive aid, you had to consume at night, an absurdity for a data center (which operates 24/7) and for today’s Spain, where solar energy has brought down prices at midday. The citizen cost and the fine print. The Government’s maneuver not only responds to a national emergency, but also places Spain as a pioneer on the continent. The country is anticipating the update of the European network codes, deploying a battery of technical specifications simultaneously that is already considered a milestone worldwide, as detailed The Country. In this deployment, the new regulations also settle a historical debt with energy storage: batteries will finally have their own specific regulatory framework, no longer being administratively treated as simple “generation by analogy” facilities. However, this deep digitalization so that the network supports such a complex mode of operation will not come for free, and the bill for modernization will end up looming in the consumer’s pocket. Forecasts for 2026 They already estimate direct increases in citizen receipts, with a 4% increase in tolls and a not inconsiderable 10.5% in electricity system charges. And while citizens assume the technical cost, the data giants – recipients of this regulatory red carpet – prefer to remain cautious in the face of the eternal Spanish bureaucratic obstacle. The technology sector warns that a key piece of the puzzle is missing: If the Government does not expressly include the National Code of Economic Activity (CNAE) corresponding to “Data Processing” in the official list of sectors entitled to receive the million-dollar electro-intensive aid, all … Read more

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