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Big Tech is pouring billions of dollars into GPUs for AI. 95% are inactive

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When the COVID-19 pandemic began, toilet paper and yeast They flew from the supermarket. Paper because it is a basic good, but yeast because everyone was going to make a lot of bread in his house. That was the forecast, but we would really have to see how many of us ended up making bread. Well, something similar is happening in the data centers at the moment. Hyperscalers have spent billions and billions of dollars on GPUs for AI and, according to one report, 95% are idle most of the time. And all because of the fear of being left out. Kubernetes. Before getting into the matter, there is a concept that must be landed on. It is the one of the kubernetes. It is a kind of “operating system” in data centers, the foreman who organizes and monitors all the software that is being used. Imagine that a data center is a supermarket, the shelves are the servers and the products are the apps. Example of a control panel What this foreman does is find the perfect shelf to place the product in the most optimal way possible. In addition, he is constantly monitoring all the shelves at all times with the aim of not missing anything and ensuring that the data flow is perfect. It is, in short, a software that manages many physical servers in a very optimized way and 24/7. What’s happening. That said, the 2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report prepared by Cast AI has just revealed something: the tremendous inefficiency of data centers. They have analyzed about 23,000 kubernetes clusters in giants such as AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft) and GCP (Google) and have discovered that the average GPU utilization of these data centers is just 5%. This translates another way: 95% are inactive most of the time, which implies that these companies are paying to get 20 times more computing capacity than they really need. Right now you might be wondering if it was worth it. destroy the RAM and SSD marketmaking computers, mobile phones, consoles and practically everything more expensive. And it is a question that makes all the sense in the world, but there is another interesting fact. To worse. As we see in TechRadarthose responsible for Cast AI point out that it is “the third year that we published this report and the numbers are getting worse.” Specifically, we are talking about CPU usage falling from 10% last year to 8% currently, while memory usage fell from 23% to 20%. Oversized needs. Something that the report also points out is that, although the use of equipment drops compared to the previous year, hyperscalers continue buying as if the world was going to end. CPU overprovisioning, as they describe it, increased from 40% to 69%. In the case of memory, it went to 79%. FOMO. A few weeks ago, one of the leaders of SMIC, the large foundry in China, already pointed out that Big Tech was buying all the resources that they will need, or that they think they will need, during the next decade… but in just a couple of years. They are investing a fortune in creating wide highways when there are no cars or real demand, and from Cast AI they are pointing in that same direction. Hyperscalers are buying piecemeal due to fear of being left out. It is what is known as FOMO or fear of missing outsomething that applies to many scenarios, but here it has to do with not wanting to come last in the race that is moving many millions from one place to another. This hoarding instinct is fueling a cycle of component shortages that affects consumers, but also the industry itself. According to the report, it makes some sense to want to buy everything as soon as possible because delivery times are long, but they are precisely so because everyone is buying more capacity than they need. Math doesn’t work. In the analysis they also point out that there are clusters that do not have such bad performance and that there are some that are using 49% of their H200 or 30% of their H100, well above the aforementioned 5%, but it is not the norm. And beyond having exploded the components market, the consequence of having so much equipment idle is that they are losing money because they are not profitable. According to calculations, an unused CPU costs a few cents per hour, but an idle GPU costs several dollars. And therein lies another key to this whole matter. Amazon or Azure data centers serve to satisfy the demands of their own companies, but they also rent computing power to whoever needs it. And since having the GPUs stopped costs them money, in recent months it has been reported that the prices of those rentals are multiplying. When will it all end? Cast AI is not optimistic, since they claim that most hyperscalers prefer to assume the costs rather than change their habits for fear that this will take off one day and catch them on the wrong foot. The translation is that… I will never have my Steam Machinesince everyone is focused on making hardware for AI. Image | NVIDIA In Xataka | There are data centers being watched and guarded by robot dogs because apparently the future is already the present

John Deere had been preventing farmers from repairing their tractors for years. Now he will have to pay them 99 million dollars

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A modern tractor is a computer on wheels: GPS, sensors, telemetry and proprietary software. Buying it costs a lot more money than a normal car, but until now not even that made the farmer its real owner. John Deere has agreed to pay $99 million to close a class action lawsuit in the United States which accused him of monopolizing the repairs of his machinery, forcing thousands of farmers to depend on authorized workshops with inflated prices and waiting times that could ruin an entire harvest. Why is it important. This agreement is not just about tractors. It is the most visible case of a battle that affects phones, cars, appliances and consoles: that of right to repair what you have bought. If a manufacturer can software block access to the guts of a product you already own, ownership becomes a mere pantomime. What John Deere has done with its tractors, Apple has long done with its iPhones and Tesla with its cars. What has happened. The lawsuit was filed in 2022. Farmers Alleged Deere Purposely Restricted Access to Its Diagnostic Softwareforcing them to go to dealerships that charged artificially high prices. Deere has not admitted wrongdoing, but has accepted the following: Create a $99 million fund to compensate those affected who have paid reparations since 2018. Open to farmers and independent workshops the diagnostic tools that until now only their dealers had. Allow diagnostics and reprogramming in offline mode before the end of 2026. Between the lines. The figure of 99 million is not coincidental. Deere has chosen to stay a million short of nine figures, a classic psychological trick to make it sound less serious in the headlines. But the estimated real damages are much higher: the overpricing in repairs has cost farmers between 190 and 387 million, and total losses could reach 4.2 billion. The fund will be distributed among around 200,000 farmers. Each one will receive a symbolic amount. They cost less than $500 each. Yes, but. John Deere has committed to opening up its repair tools, but only for ten years. After that period, nothing prevents you from turning off the tap again. The company already promised to improve access to repairs in 2023 and, according to the plaintiffs, it failed to keep its word. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission, the US regulator, keeps another lawsuit open against Deere by the same pattern of behavior. So this soap opera will have more chapters. The big question. The case of tractors is the tip of the iceberg of something that affects us all. A modern tractor, an electric car or a smart thermostat share the same logic: the software inside can turn the owner into a user with permission from the manufacturer. What has been decided in a US court about agricultural machinery will end up defining the limits of ownership in the digital age. Also in Europe. In Xataka | Every summer fires devastate Spain. There is a common culprit that goes unnoticed: old tractors Featured image | Randy Fath

shoot down missiles for less than a million dollars

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A single advanced interceptor missile can cost more than dozens of drones of combined attack, and in Ukraine and Iran several have been launched to neutralize a single threat. This imbalance has led to situations where protecting a target becomes too much more expensive than attacking it. Therefore, in modern warfare, the key is no longer just who has the best weapons, but who can sustain their use without going bankrupt. The paradigm shift. For decades, intercepting a ballistic missile has been one of the most expensive operations in modern warfare, with systems like the patriot forcing the firing of two or three interceptors worth several million dollars each to ensure a kill. This model has worked in limited conflicts, but recent wars have shown its limits when the volume of threats grows massively. So much in Ukraine as in the Middle Eastair defense has become a cost battle where the attacker launches cheaply and the defender responds expensively. In that context, the idea of ​​shooting down missiles for less than a million dollars is not an incremental improvement, but a radical change in the rules of the game. Ukraine and logic. Since the 2022 invasion, Ukraine has developed a military industry based on economic efficiency, producing drones and missiles at a fraction of the cost of traditional Western systems. Companies like Fire Point They have transferred that philosophy to air defense, proposing a system capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at a much lower cost than the current one. The objective is quite clear: break the bottleneck of extremely expensive operators and systems, and allow a scalable defense in volume. This logic, moreover, comes directly from the battlefield, where survival depends on both effectiveness and cost per unit. The goal: below one million. The goal of intercepting a missile below the million dollar threshold It means attacking the core of the current strategic problem, where each defense costs more than the attack it tries to neutralize. Yes Ukraine achieve this milestone in 2027as indicated this week, would change the economic equation of air warfare, making it viable to respond to massive attacks without quickly depleting resources. Not only that. Even with somewhat lower success rates than systems like the Patriot, simply being able to launch more interceptors at a lower cost could make up that difference. In practice, it would mean that defense would cease to be a scarce resource and become something replicable on a large scale. The context: saturation and scarcity. Let us think that the war in Ukraine and the Iranian attacks in the Gulf have shown a common problem: the shortage of advanced systems and the impossibility of maintaining the rate of consumption. Patriot missiles They are limited, expensive and slow to produce, while threats (whether drones, missiles or swarms) can be manufactured and launched in large quantities. This imbalance has put powers with enormous military budgets in check, forcing them to prioritize objectives and accept vulnerabilities. In that scenario, a cheaper solution is not only desirable, but necessary to sustain any prolonged defense. The global implications. Here may be the real one crux of that announced advance. If Ukraine manages to develop this system, the impact would go far beyond the current front, generating a global demand between countries that cannot afford multi-billion dollar defense systems. This, a priori, would democratize access to air defense, allowing more actors to protect their space without depending exclusively on the United States or limited systems such as the European SAMP/T. Furthermore, it would alter the strategic balance, since it would reduce the effectiveness of attacks based on saturation and volume. In other words, it would make it much harder to win a war simply by launching more missiles. The new balance. Therefore, the real change is not only in the price, but in reversing the economic logic of the conflict, which indicates that defending is no longer more expensive than attacking. If that point is reach next yearmany current strategies would lose meaning, from the massive use of drones to saturation bombings. From that perspective, Ukraine would be on the verge of achieving something truly unprecedented in modern military history, redefining the relationship between cost and power in the war. And that, more than any specific weapon, aims to mark the future of conflicts. Image | Fire Point In Xataka | Ukraine is close to achieving a milestone that no one has achieved: building the largest drone industry without China’s help In Xataka | Thousands of cigarette butts are crossing into Russia without Ukraine being able to do anything. Their goal: to become missiles

OpenAI is the most successful company on the planet. Also the one that plans to lose 85,000 million dollars in a single year

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Something special is going to happen in 2026: both OpenAI and Anthropic are going public. This will finally mean that individual investors can invest in them and bet on their future with their money. It will be the definitive exam for the credibility of companies that have grown exceptionally in recent years but also They have burned the money as if there were no tomorrow. But be careful, because there is a compelling reality here: they are going to continue burning it in an even more astonishing way. The two sides of the IPO. The Wall Street Journal has had access to the financial documents submitted to investors before the IPOs proposed by both OpenAI and Anthropic. They reveal extraordinarily striking data that have two sides. Amazement and concern with OpenAI. For example, OpenAI has indicated that it will almost double its revenue this year. According to their forecasts, they could become profitable in 2026 if one excludes the cost of training their models (which are stratospheric, of course). But there is the other reality: OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion on computing power in 2028, so even doubling revenue it will lose, attention, $85 billion. No company has ever lost this amount of money and survived, but OpenAI not only promises that it will survive, but that those losses will end up being almost anecdotal. I tell you the truth, but only part of it. Both companies wanted to show two different versions of reality when talking about how they present their profitability. In one, the very expensive model training processes are included, and in others in which these costs are excluded under a heading called “computing for research.” Excluding those costs, OpenAI is on track to achieve a small pre-tax operating profit this year. Anthropic also promises to achieve this if its most optimistic scenario comes true. Excluding the cost of training models, both OpenAI and Anthropic could be “profitable” this year. Source: WSJ. Until 2030, no real profitability. If the costs and investment in model training are included, OpenAI indicates that it will end up being profitable in 2030, a fact that They had already planned a long time ago and that could not hide a forceful reality: the company has not only not stopped spending money until now: it is going to continue spending it, but to an even greater extent with projects like Stargate to the head. Saying that in 2026 they will be profitable if we do not consider training costs is like an airline telling us that it is profitable excluding the cost of fuel. Anthropic, by the way, expects to be fully profitable in 2028. Revenues growing fast, costs even faster. In addition to those training processes, both OpenAI and Anthropic are spending billions of dollars every year in inferencea section that is beginning to be even more important at an operational and strategic level. Currently, these inference costs represent half of each company’s revenue, although inference technology is expected to becomes cheaper and therefore the costs too. Here, however, there are two big differences between both companies: OpenAI: most ChatGPT users do not pay to use the service, so OpenAI assumes these inference costs without making them profitable. According to OpenAI, this facilitates adoption and will allow users to become subscribers in the future, something that is not happening too much at the moment. Anthropic: This startup has managed to win over many companies that pay to use their models, and it is evident that the company is absolutely focused on making you pay to use their models if you want to use them. And if not, Tell OpenClaw. Betting on the future. The companies and venture capital funds that have invested billions in OpenAI or Anthropic have made a bet on the future. They have blind faith that these companies will end up taking over the world, so the fact that today they are still not profitable does not scare them… or not enough to withdraw from this expensive race. Both have experienced spectacular growth that serves as an argument for investors. In addition, the growing interest of companies in integrating AI solutions by paying for them has boosted Anthropic and even caused OpenAI to reorganize and change its strategy. Less fireworks and hypemore focus in what makes money. The IPO as a trick to survive. Both companies are going to continue burning money like there was no tomorrow in the coming years, but now they hope that investors will be the ones to sustain their businesses. The amount of money they will need has made even the Nasdaq make things easier: It will allow newly listed companies to join its renowned index more quickly, giving them access to larger capital reserves. Now it will be the public market and to a large extent the individual investor who will decide whether they want to bet on that future or not. A small survey. Would you invest in OpenAI or Anthropic if it went public? It is evident that both companies generate different impressions, and although their strategies and ways of doing things are different, it is clear that this public sale offer is going to be very striking when it occurs. So, it is a good time to find out a little about what you, the xatakeros, think about this financial movement of these companies. Image | TechCrunch | Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | NVIDIA has so much money that it is becoming something different: the largest startup incubator in the world

The company that earns 2,000 million a month is already worth 852,000 million dollars

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Just a year ago we broke the same news: OpenAI had broken the record for the largest financing round in the history of Silicon Valley. Then it was $40 billion, which raised the startup’s valuation to $300 billion. The curious thing is that today, a year later, history repeats itself, but with much (very much) higher numbers and also more doubts flying over the environment. Add and continue. OpenAI has broken the record again of Silicon Valley’s largest financing round, raising no less than $122 billion, which places its “post-money” valuation at $852 billion. OpenAI claims that this investment will allow them to expand their computing capacity and thus be able to sustain the development of their frontier models. Why it is important. OpenAI is the most valuable private company in the world, ahead of giants such as JP Morgan, Samsung or Visa. There are only 14 companies listed on the stock market that exceed their valuation, but they have also tripled it in just one year. All this happens in the shadow of a possible bubblewith many doubts about your business strategy and, above all, IPO on the horizon nearby. Who puts the money. Already They confirmed it a few days ago: Of the 122,000 million, NVIDIA, SoftBank and Amazon have contributed 110,000. The person who has contributed the most has been Amazon, which has put 50,000 million in OpenAI’s pocket. For their part, NVIDIA and SoftBank have contributed 30 billion each. The absence of Microsoft is striking, especially since they were expected to contribute “several billion more.” The remaining 12 billion come from venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Of these, at least 3,000 million have been raised from individual investors through banks. An act of faith. OpenAI enters 2,000 million dollars per month, is a ridiculous figure compared to all the money that burns. Furthermore, we must not lose sight of the fact that those who are investing the most in the company are the ones who later charge it for using its chips (NVIDIA) and its data centers (Amazon). This circular financing scheme has not gone unnoticed and It is very reminiscent of another bubble from a while ago. Despite everything, investors seem to still have faith in OpenAI’s business model. Refocusing. OpenAI receives this round of funding amid its efforts to reorient its business model. After 2025 in which They have shot at everything that movedit seems that they have finally realized that AI is not won through memes. One of the most forceful steps in its new direction is Sora’s closurebut also They prepare a super app and They plan to double their staff. The underlying reason is that Anthropic is eating their toast in a field that is less viralizable, but much more profitable: business clients. We will see if this new OpenAI can be profitable. Image | Own edition with background Unsplash In Xataka | Here’s a disturbing message for OpenAI investors: Sam Altman’s new priority is finding money

The US has invested 16 years and 8 billion dollars in renewing the software of its GPS network. Result: a failure of epic proportions

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The Next-Generation Operational Control System project (OCX) was going to modernize the constellation of the United States’ more than 30 GPS satellites. The company RTX Corporation (previously known as Raytheon) managed to win the project in 2010 with a budget of 3.7 billion dollars. The project was supposed to be completed in 2016, but in reality the US has spent $8 billion and 16 years later has an absolute disaster on its hands. 16 years of broken promises. In 2010 the iPad had just appeared on the scene and cloud computing was a somewhat diffuse concept. The project of the US Government was reasonable, and proposed that the OCX system be operational by the time Lockheed Martin’s new GPS III satellites debuted. The development became a chaos of bugs and requirements changes, and to this day it is unclear when, if ever, it will be completed. In Xataka 90% of Iran’s oil industry depends on a tiny island. One that is already on the radar of the US and Israel A fortune invested. The financial management of the project is the first big disaster. The initial budget was estimated at 1.5 billion dollars, but since the award until today that figure has risen to reach almost 7.7 billion of current dollars, to which another 400 million are added to support an improved version of the satellites, the GPS IIIF. This increase is not due in large part to the project suddenly being much more ambitious or more capable, but rather to the costs of having been fixing everything that has gone wrong since they started working on it. Software costs more than satellites. Every time software fails an integration test, the bill runs into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That has made the OCX system one of the most expensive and least efficient software projects in recent US military history. In fact, it far exceeds the cost of the satellites themselves that it had to control: the 22 GPS III satellites of the contract signed in 2018 have a budget of 7.2 billion dollars. Satellites of the future controlled by a fairground shotgun. Currently the United States has a fleet of GPS III satellites in orbit capable of emitting much more powerful “M-code” signals and interference resistantsomething that among other things allocates them especially for military applications. The problem is that since the OCX software not workingthey are managing them with control systems inherited from the 90s. It is as if we had a VHS video connected to watch movies on an 8K Smart TV: the potential is there, but one of the components is an absolute bottleneck. {“videoId”:”x8wlh9q”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”United States vs. China: The CHIPS WAR”, “tag”:”webedia-prod”, “duration”:”1611″} The cybersecurity nightmare. One of the big problems of this project has been the cybersecurity requirements. OCX was designed to resist cyberattacks from powers such as Russia or China, but that requirement has become a spectacular technical burden. Pentagon standards have evolved so quickly that they have not been able to be adapted to an architecture that begins to become obsoleteand covering successive patches is locking the system in a complex vicious circle: the software is never finished because more and more vulnerabilities appear. Failed tests. The latest report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has been the final straw. During the tests the system again showed once again instabilitywhich has forced the final delivery to be delayed to the end of 2026 or even 2027. Frank Calvelli, of the Air Force, has expressed his dissatisfaction with that unacceptable management of private industry: the strategic advantage that this project should offer at a time like this is inaccessible due to the disastrous progress of the project. It’s not that difficult. for a long time the excuse for justify the delays was that OCX was “the most complex software ever created for space,” but other players in the sector have shown that achieving these types of technical milestones is possible. SpaceX has demonstrated this with technical “miracles” like its reusable Falcon 9 or with the development of Starship, for example, so those arguments are falling on deaf ears now. Waiting for a better GPS. These problems also affect us end users, who will not be able to enjoy the L5 signals for now. This much more robust frequency will significantly improve accuracy in urban centers with many tall buildings. The irony is tragic: we cannot use extraordinary space infrastructure because the base stations cannot cope with it. While waiting for the problems to be resolved, the learning is clear: the software cannot be a monster that takes 16 years to build In Xataka The GPS in the Baltic has been experiencing interference for months and the culprit is becoming increasingly clear: Russia And while as always, China. While the US crashes against its project to renew the GPS constellation, China has once again managed to “become independent” from Western technology. Your satellite navigation system Beidouit does not replace GPS, true, but It already complements it in 140 countries. Once again China’s long-term view has its obvious result: it has taken 20 years in deploying its constellation, but they already surpass the GPS system in metrics such as signal availability or integrated messaging services. Europe, by the way, also has its own alternative. In Xataka |GPS “dead zones” are spreading around the world: jammers are to blame for confusing drones (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news The US has invested 16 years and 8 billion dollars in renewing the software of its GPS network. Result: a failure of epic proportions was originally published in Xataka by Javier Pastor .

Saudi Arabia wants to invest 38 billion dollars to be the capital of gaming. The Iran war is going to ruin everything

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First it was footballafter video games. Saudi Arabia wants to become the world capital of entertainment at the stroke of a checkbook (and at the same time whitewash his authoritarian regime). Now their plans are in jeopardy because of the war in Iran. 38,000 million. This is what Saudi Arabia plans Invest to become a gaming powerhouse. However, the conflict in the region and Iran’s attacks have put their plans in check. In an interview during the Game Developers Conference echoed by Bloombergthe CEO of Savvy Games has said that “This escalation clearly does not benefit the region and will likely change or cool the perception of it as a stable and calm place where people want to go.” He hopes that the war will end soon and they can continue with their business plans. Entertainment capital. Savvy Games Group, subsidiary of the Saudi Sovereign Fund (the same as bought Electronic Arts for 50,000 million), has very ambitious plans for the region, such as the esports district in Qiddiya Citya megaproject focused on entertainment where there is giant amusement parksstadiums for video game competitions and much more. Their plans go beyond buying companies, they want to hold events that attract gaming enthusiasts. In 2025, Rihyad hosted the Esports World Cup, an event that lasted seven weeks and featured events related to up to 25 esports. They also want to attract foreign investment and large video game companies to move there. It sounds great, until the threat of Iranian drones appears and the dream is shattered. Vision 2030. All this is part of a long term plan promoted by Prince Mohamed bin Salmán since 2016, whose main objective is to diversify its wealth beyond oil and turn the country into an attractive destination for investors. This serves another purpose: to project a more moderate image beyond its borders. Iran attacks. Iran has targeted key infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, such as the Ras Tanura refinery and the Shaybah sitemilitary bases with American presence such as Prince Sultan and, on the rebound, even residential neighborhoods and diplomatic areas of Riyadh. Several of these attacks were intercepted, but it is clear that Saudi Arabia is a target for Iran. There are other companies concerned, such as Wynn Resorts, which is building the country’s first casino on the artificial island Al Marjan. They had to stop the works a few days ago due to the conflict, but They have already resumed work. Image | Wikipedia In Xataka | The US has turned off the tap on satellite images of the Iran war. A Chinese startup has left it open

Dubai was a mecca for expats. Now they are driving 10 hours and paying thousands of dollars for a flight to escape from there

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Iran has shown it needs very little to upend Middle East air traffic and hit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where it hurts the most: the image of reliability that has been built for years at an international level, with great benefitsby the way. The wave of attacks launched by Tehran to neighboring countries that facilitate US military deployment in the region, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the UAE itself, has affected thousands of flights and left a curious image: expats desperate to leave Dubai. There are those who are shelling out large sums to fly on private jets and those who have even driven 10 hours to get to Riyadh and get on a plane there. What has happened? If Tehran wanted to damage the image of stability of neighbors like the UAE, it was completely right. Although the country managed to intercept most of the drones and missiles launched by Iran, the truth is that some of the projectiles reached Dubai, the tourist and financial heart of the region. In practice, this translated into fires in luxury hotels, towers with windows shattered by explosions, a knocked out airport and, above all, considerable reputational damage for a city that has spent years building the image of a safe and comfortable destination for expats. Sums it up beautifully Elizabeth Rayment, a consultant caught off guard by the Iranian attack in Palm Islands: “You never expect to hear missiles flying overhead in Dubai.” Have there been more consequences? Yes. The most serious are undoubtedly the victims. Arab News I was talking yesterday about three deceased and 58 injured in the United Arab Emirates. There are not many if you take into account that the country’s authorities claim to have detected a total of 156 ballistic missiles and several cruise missiles, in addition to more than half a thousand drones, most of them intercepted and destroyed. The other consequence is the chaos generated in air traffic in the Persian Gulf, where some airports and airlines have had to suspend their operations, affecting both customers in the region and others who had planned to pass through Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Qatar to take connecting flights between Europe and Asia. Have many been cancelled? FlightAware estimates that around 2,800 operations and on Sunday more than 3,1500. Added to these are the flights canceled and suspended today by Gulf airlines. For reference, Financial Times assured this morning that more than half of the services that had been booked for today in the region have been cancelled. The Iranian attacks have altered to a greater or lesser extent the programming of Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways and the airports of Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi, as well as other terminals in Kuwait and Bahrain. The BBC has chatted with travelers who have found flights canceled upon arriving at the terminal. There are those who already talk about the biggest crisis aviation since the pandemic. How do I leave the country? That is the question that expats and tourists have been asking themselves since Saturday. The Iranian attacks have surprised them in the region and now they find that there are few (or no) regular flights that take them to other parts of the globe. Faced with such a scenario, there are those who have armed themselves with patience, those who have drawn on their checkbook and those who have resigned themselves to traveling kilometers and kilometers to reach airports with flights. So I told it a few hours ago FTwhich speaks of “tens of thousands of passengers” stranded in the region and assures that there are Dubai residents who have traveled to neighboring Oman to get a flight. What’s more, some have even driven 10 hours to get on a plane in Riyadh. They don’t have it easy. Most scheduled flights these days between Muscat (Oman) and Europe are reserved. And what do they do? The wealthiest, pull out their checkbook and try their luck with private jet companies. EnterJet, which is dedicated to intermediating between customers and available planes, says that reservations have skyrocketed 40% since the weekend. The problem is that the sector also has its limitations. Its founder explains to Financial Times that “the only viable option” to operate is the Muscat terminal, which makes it difficult to obtain landing slots. Added to this are the difficulties in finding ships. The businessman hopes that as traffic recovers in the Gulf, private flights will increase. Are they very expensive? The situation in the Gulf has caused a curious effect: while the price of airlines such as International Airlines Group or Air France-KLM they resent the price of private services skyrockets. The JetVip agency (Oman) explains to Guardian that a flight to Istanbul on a small Nextant jet costs around 85,000 euros, about three times the normal price. The same media reveals that seats on private charter flights to Moscow are paid for about 20,000 euros… per person. Rates vary depending on the company, but they usually always range in the five digits, or even more. It may sound strange, but we must keep in mind that Donald Trump has hinted that the offensive against Iran could continue even further. “four weeks” and the question remains as to how Tehran will respond. Added to this is that over the last few years the UAE has managed to position itself as a priority destination for thousands of expatsa position largely based on reliability and stability that Tehran has now managed to damage with missiles. Images | Michael Ranzau (Flickr) In Xataka | The arrival of the B-2s to Iran can only mean one thing: the search for the greatest threat to the United States has begun

The Winter Olympics leave Italy with a debt of 7.8 million dollars. Not to organize them, to win them

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Italy can be satisfied with the Winter Olympic Games, held in its own home. It has gone well. Very good, in fact. Thirty medals in total: 10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze. If we talk about metals in general only there are three nations with a better balance, the powerful Norway (41) and the United States (33). The most curious thing is that this balance is so damn good that now Italy will have to assume a debt of almost eight million of dollars. Success also pays. What has happened? That Italy will have to face a debt of 7.8 million dollars for the Winter Olympics that it just hosted. So far nothing extraordinary if we take into account the large investment carried out by the country to host the Olympics and that a large part of these funds were financed by the Executive itself. The curious thing is that those almost eight million have nothing to do with its status as host or the infrastructure necessary for the tests. The debt has another reason: the sporting successes achieved by Italy. Country Golds Silver Bronze Total Norway 18 12 11 41 USA 12 12 9 33 Italy 10 6 14 30 Germany 8 10 8 26 Japan 5 7 12 24 Debts to earn? Yes. The news (and the calculations that support it) has revealed them Forbeswhich on Sunday echoed the peculiar scenario that Italy faces. In his day the Italian National Olympic Committee He decided to encourage his athletes by promising them huge bonuses if they made it onto the podium. To be more precise, he offered 213,000 dollars in exchange for gold, 106,000 for silver and 71,000 for bronze. What has happened? That incentive seems to have worked and has now generated a million-dollar commitment. Its status as host nation opened the doors to automatic qualification for Italy, but its sports teams have demonstrated a more than notable performance: they achieved 30 medals (10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze), ten more than those achieved in 1994which had been his best winter Olympics until now. In fact, in the global ranking it is only surpassed by Norway, with 41 medals, and the USA, with 33. It is also one of the best positioned in gold medals. It occupies third place in the ranking, shared with the Netherlands. Does it only happen to Italy? No. Although it is true that your case is peculiar. For your report Forbes He contacted 37 delegations who confirm having offered incentives to those athletes who reached the podium. Among those groups, Italy was one of the most generous. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, Poland and Kazakhstan surpassed it, which motivated their sports teams with bigger prizes. For reference, Singapore ‘tempted’ its athletes with $787,000 in exchange for gold in individual sports. Hong Kong paid it at $768,000. What happened in Italy? That the claim worked as well for none of those delegations as it did for Italy. According to the calculations of Forbesthe host country is the one that will have to pay the most now: 7.8 million dollars, well above the second on the list, the United States, with just over three million. Third on the list is Switzerland (1.5 million) and fourth is Poland, whose incentives total 1.24 million. In general, the incentive system varies greatly from one country to another. Not only for its rewards. There may also be differences in how these bonuses are financed (with public funds or with sponsors), in the maximum number of bonuses or if the prizes extend beyond the podium, also rewarding athletes who return home with Olympic diplomas. Italy has also decided to offer bonuses to its para-athletes, so the amount it owes to its most successful athletes could increase not much. In this case, the bonus amounts to $118,000 for those who win the gold, 65,000 for those who win the silver and 41,000 for the bronze. Is it the only relevant figure? At all. The bonus debt is curious, but it is by no means the only relevant figure associated with the Winter Olympic Games that Italy has just organized, with distributed headquarters through Milan, Cortina d´Ampezzo, Verona, Valtellina and Val di Fiemme. Another key data is the investment mobilized by the competition. S&P estimates that the total cost of the Winter Games comfortably exceeded 5,000 million euros. A good part of this spending (about 63%) was public and was dedicated mainly to investments in infrastructure. The other fundamental data is the economic return for the country: some estimates speak of the generation of some 5.3 billion eurosa good part of them thanks to tourism boost. Images | Eric Salard (Flickr) and Simone Ferraro/CONI Via | Forbes In Xataka | The Winter Olympics are facing the most unexpected technological doping: penis punctures

Creating a C compiler cost 2 million dollars and took 2 years. Claude Opus 4.6 did it in two weeks for $20,000

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We are facing a technological inflection point. Uo in which software engineering, one of the most complex and demanding technical tasks in history, little by little It is becoming the “killer app” of AI. It is clear that generative AI models are not perfect, but we continue to see extraordinary evolution. The latest example? The C compiler that Claude Opus 4.6 programmed all by himself. what has happened. Nicholas Carlini, researcher at Anthropic, I counted yesterday how “I’ve been experimenting with a new way of monitoring language models that we’ve called “agent teams””. What it has done is ensure that several programming agents work in parallel using the recently released Claude Opus 4.6, and thanks to that it has developed something exceptional with 16 of these agents: a C code compiler. Hello CCC. At Anthropic they have called it Claude’s C Compiler (CCC), and they have published the code, completely generated by Opus 4.6, on GitHub. The project consists of 100,000 lines of Rust code that were generated in two weeks with an API cost of $20,000. And it works: with it they have compiled a functional Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V. Before it was (at least) two million dollars and two years. What this experiment has achieved is to demonstrate how software development can be much cheaper and faster thanks to the use of these agents. Although there is no readily available data on how much time and money compilers cost in the past, the size of these products was enormous, as is the case with Microsoft Visual C++For example. It is difficult to know how much it cost, but it is estimated that it involved 15-20 people working for five years. That’s a lot of man hours and a lot of money to develop and polish that compiler. The estimate of two years and two million dollars may in fact be overly optimistic. another example. Historically, building a C compiler from scratch was considered one of the pinnacles of systems engineering. Not only was in-depth knowledge of processor architecture required, but thousands of man-hours were required to manage optimization and machine code generation. In the 90s the company Cygnus Solutions (clue in compiler development gcc) came to invest more than 250 million in a decade to maintain and port build tools. The real cost was not just in the final lines of code, but in countless hours analyzing CPU and memory patterns to make the resulting binary efficient. Far from perfect, but… Carlini himself explained in the post that this compiler had serious limitations and for example “it does not have a 16-bit x86 compiler which is essential to start Linux outside of “real mode”, and it does not have its own assembler nor its linker“. It is probably far from mature compilers, but even so the achievement remains exceptional and points to that future in which even very complex developments can be supported with AI. They will be expensive, no doubt, but their total development will probably be a fraction of what they cost a few years ago. Cursor already demonstrated it. Before Anthropic launched its AI-programmed compiler, Cursor completed a similar project, combining GPT-5.2 agents into its development platform to create a working browser in a week. In total the AI ​​programmed three million (!) lines of code in Rust, and although it was again far from being perfect or competing with Chrome, it demonstrated the current capacity of these agentic programming systems. Turning point (especially for Anthropic). For the SemiAnalysis experts Claude Code, current leading exponent of this new era of AI-driven programming, is a paradigm shift: “We believe that Claude Code is the turning point for AI agents and is a glimpse into the future of how AI will work.” This prestigious newsletter predicts an exceptional 2026 for Anthropic, and so much so that they believe it will “dramatically surpass OpenAI.” You ask, the AI ​​programs. If you have tried the vibe codingI’m sure you agree with me: AI allows you to do things you would never have dreamed of. What I did a few weeks ago with Immich made it clear to me, and I continue experimenting with AI and programming “custom” things that solve real problems and needs for me. Yes, for now they are for me and therefore they are not large and complex systems that need to be put into production as happens in professional environments, but I am clear that this is being done little by little and more will be done. In fact, both OpenAI and Anthropic have stood out how in the development of their latest models part of the work has been done, paradoxically, by those same models, which have fed back to each other. And the result is in production and used by millions of people. Something is changing. And it’s something big. In Xataka | OpenAI has a problem: Anthropic is succeeding right where the most money is at stake

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