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The Pentagon wants to invest $54 billion in drones. It is more than the entire military budget of countries like Ukraine

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The defense budget that the Pentagon has presented for fiscal year 2027 amounts to $1.5 trillion. It is the largest year-on-year increase in military spending since World War II, but in that colossal figure there is another that deserves special attention. This is the $53.6 billion allocated exclusively to drones and autonomous warfare technologies. That amount alone exceeds the Ukraine’s full defense budget either of countries like South Korea or Italy. Spain is even further away. autonomous defense. The money for this specific program will be managed by the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an agency created at the end of 2025. In the 2026 budget it received 226 million dollars, but in 2027 that figure would be multiplied almost by 240. The United States has realized the relevance that drones have gained in war conflicts and wants to be prepared for this new era of defense. Obsolete investment. The Pentagon itself recognized something striking: the vast majority of the money requested will be used to buy technology that already exists, not to develop future solutions. One of the top officials of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lieutenant General Steven Whitney, admitted that technological evolution on the battlefield currently happens in weeks, not years. It’s like admitting that what you buy now may become obsolete almost immediately. Ukraine showed that change has changed. The urgency of this budget does not come from nowhere. The war in Ukraine has rewritten the rules of modern combat In such a way that there are many countries that are processing how to assume these changes. Iranian Shahed droneswhich cost about $20,000 per unit, have proven capable of saturating air defense systems that cost hundreds of times more. Relatively affordable quadcopter drones have destroyed multi-million euro tanks and armored vehicles. Defense budgets in 2025. The US already spent 921 billion dollars last year, this year it wants to spend 50% more. Everything goes very fast. The speed of tactical adaptation on the Ukrainian front has been so high that innovations and tactics that work in January may be obsolete by March. Not because someone has invented something better, but because the adversary has found a way to counter those strategies. The Pentagon has reached an unusual conclusion: the traditional model of weapons acquisition that operated in cycles of years or even decades is structurally incompatible with the speed at which current war conflicts are developing. The irony of the Shahed. Among the most striking details of the budget is the confirmation that the American army has adapted the technology of the Iranian Shahed dronewhich is the same one that has been attacking cities and energy infrastructures in Ukraine for years. The US has done reverse engineering of your adversary’s design to incorporate it into your own arsenal. This clearly illustrates the current war reality: the origin of the technology does not matter, but its effectiveness. Risks. This tension between “we have to spend more” and the speed at which it is necessary to adapt to this reality poses an enormous risk. Buy en masse what works today guarantees that solutions will be available tomorrow. The problem is that these solutions may be technically inferior to those that the adversary has developed in the meantime. The same thing happens if you decide not to buy anything until you have the perfect technology, because that means arriving late (or not arriving at all). It is a dilemma similar to that of technology companies and their investment in infrastructure: they have to buy solutions now that they know that they will end up being obsolete in the short or medium term. Final approval is missing. The US Congress will have to approve the budget, which introduces an important political variable. Beyond that, there is a fundamental question in those 54,000 million in this budget. If drone technology evolves in weeks, there is no money that will be able to buy that adaptability to the modern battlefield. And that even with this immense budget superiority cannot be guaranteed makes clear the sign of the times. In Xataka | The percentage of GDP that each country allocates to Defense, shown in this graph with an unavoidable protagonist

Amazon is clear about its strategy for the AI ​​war: if you can’t beat your enemy, invest in them

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Just two months ago Amazon announced a astronomical investment of $50 billion in OpenAI. Today he made a movement very similar to the announce which will invest $5 billion in Anthropic and could invest an additional $20 billion “tied to certain commercial milestones) in the future. There are counterparts and some circular financing, of course, but also a clear pattern: Amazon has no winning horse in the AI ​​race, so it is betting on its competitors. More circular financing. Amazon now has alliances in the form of active investment with the two leading AI companies in the world. In return, both OpenAI and Anthropic commit to huge spending on their services on AWS. There is a lot of circular financing here: me I lend you the money so that you spend it on me. Those houses of cards that OpenAI and Anthropic are building have clear risks, but the industry is totally immersed in that maelstrom. In Xataka OpenAI is making the tech industry unite its destiny with yours. For the sake of the global economy, it better work Analysts warn. There are concerned analysts here and others who defend this type of agreement. M. Mohan asked in X why regulators are not on top of these types of financially dangerous agreements: the domino effect if OpenAI or Anthropic fall could be terrible. For others like the well-known Jim Cramer this is not circular financing. According to him, circular agreements are designed to inflate profits, and here no one’s profits are being inflated. Their argument is that Amazon has real computing, Anthropic needs real computing, and the value of the investment is genuine. History repeats itself. The same debate occurred in January with OpenAI, and the conclusion was the same then: the image of circular financing is there but it does not necessarily imply fraud, it implies that Amazon has found a way to monetize the AI ​​​​craze without betting on any particular model. Or for the two who seem to be winning the race. But everyone is doing it. The numbers of the agreement with Anthropic. Amazon puts up $5 billion immediately, taking advantage of the company’s current valuation of $380 billion. It is also committed to investing up to an additional $20 billion linked to “certain commercial milestones” that have not been specified. In exchange, Anthropic commits to using Amazon technology, and specifically its Trainium and Graviton chips, for the next decade. No less than 5 GW of computing capacity is secured, which is more or less the capacity consumed by New York City. This is perfect for Anthropic. He Anthropic statement about the agreement contains an interesting paragraph. In it, the company admits that the demand for AI by companies, developers and users is generating “inevitable tension” in its infrastructure. Or what is the same: they can’t do everything, so they are resorting to measures that “penalize” the excessive use of their AI models. They restrict session limits during peak hours, change the pricing model in companies to a “pay as you go”, or change the level of effort of their models and they sign up for token inflation. The agreement with Amazon makes it possible to mitigate the problem of computing shortages. The race for gigawatts. The truth is that Anthropic has been moving for months to try to avoid more and more problems with the computing capacity they can access. In a few weeks we have seen how Amazon’s 5 GW have been secured and also “multiple gigawatts” computing teams contracted with Google and Broadcom. What Amazon is actually building. Viewed as a whole, Amazon’s strategy is simple and elegant. You don’t need to win the AI ​​modeling race, which is unpredictable and extraordinarily expensive. It only needs that whoever wins it depends on it and its infrastructure. By investing at the same time in two rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI and securing massive spending contracts from both, it achieves something striking. Turn uncertainty into an asset: it doesn’t matter who wins, because she will end up getting paid. This also reinforces the relevance of its Trainium and Graviton chips, something that validates its commitment to its own chips. {“videoId”:”xa4n2g8″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”An initiative to secure the world’s software ｜ Project Glasswing”, “tag”:””, “duration”:”349″} Win-Win. The agreement seems perfect for both parties. Amazon ensures, as we say, consumption in its infrastructure for the next ten years, and Anthropic achieves an investment that increases its market value again. The same happens with OpenAI, and in both cases these agreements and financial support only reinforce expectations about their imminent IPOs. Image | Fortune Brainstorm TECH In Xataka | OpenAI and Anthropic have proposed the impossible: lose $85 billion in one year and survive (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 Amazon is clear about its strategy for the AI ​​war: if you can’t beat your enemy, invest in them was originally published in Xataka by Javier Pastor .

The CNMV has tested AI to invest in the stock market for ten months. The conclusions are very revealing

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In recent months there has been a recurring discourse that we see on social networks and that sell us again that “get rich quick” message. That message is “use AI to invest in the stock market.” The interesting thing comes when we see how the CNMV has published a study in which it has precisely attempted to analyze that premise. Although this organization warns of the risks of investing with AI, there is another important message in the conclusions: LLMs are not bad investors per se. They are bad at following vague instructions, which is just how most people use them. The CNMV study. Two researchers from the CNMV, Ricardo Crisóstomo and Diana Mykhalyuk, have published a study methodologically serious (but imperfect) and very interesting: they used four AI models for ten months live, from April 2025 to January 2026. They chose ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek and Perplexity as models. The process was simple but demanding: each month they asked each model to identify the five stocks in the Ibex35 index with the best expected performance (to buy) and the five with the worst expected performance (to sell short). Then the real result was measured at the end of the month, and here there was no historical data selected just because: the real market was the only arbiter of all the functioning of the models. The models evolved. One of the most significant aspects of the study is that its creators recognized a methodological problem that was difficult to avoid: during those ten months, the versions of the four models were updated several times. The Gemini of April 2025 was not the same than that of January 2026for example, and that could influence the results. The researchers commented that it was impossible to know with certainty whether an improvement or deterioration in performance was due to the prompt strategy, market conditions in that period, or simply because the model changed. The prompt is everything. Three were also tested prompt types very different, and that gave rise to conclusions that were neither alarmist nor did they create false expectations: they were “it depends.” Thus, their results showed that everything depended on the type of supervision that these models had: If the LLMs were asked generic questions such as “What stocks should I buy?”, they failed repeatedly. There were computational errors, incorrect interpretations and also the famous hallucinations of chatbots. Curiously, the only one that made a profit was ChatGPT. The problem is that people who use AI to invest probably use this mode of action. But if prompts prepared with iterative reviews and human supervision at each step were used, Perplexity achieved a monthly return of 3.5% on the IBEX35. Gemini and ChatGPT also improved their behavior if given more precise instructions, and DeepSeek was the worst ranked overall. There is another finding: when models receive official regulatory documentation or business results reports, their predictive accuracy improves significantly. The LLMs they reason better on concrete and verified facts than generating analysis from scratch on information that they themselves search for on the web. financial hallucinations. The CNMV study points out that financial markets are especially demanding for AI models because they require complex processes. They have to retrieve and collect information dynamically, they have to reason in multiple steps, they have to be numerically precise, and they have to know this market, and all in real time. Chatbots are trained to generate “convincing” textsso the incentive here is that the investment recommendation “sounds good” even though it is completely wrong. The confidence with which AI models present incorrect financial analysis is proportional to the risk they pose to those who use them without checking whether what they say makes sense. In short: do not trust AI to invest right off the bat. The Reddit user’s experiment was equally striking, but hardly conclusive. Source: Reddit. The Reddit experiment. A Reddit user named Blotter-fyi rode in November from 2024 a platform called Rallies.ai which gave several AI agents access to real-time financial data and money to make stock market operations. Four months later, with the S&P index down 7% since the start, five of the models are outperforming that index, although only two have positive returns in absolute terms. The author himself was the first to warn that four months are insufficient to reach a conclusion: it could be luck, the market or simply the prompt. Nof1’s experiment was fascinating, but it made it clear that AI models don’t typically make money investing in crypto. Source: Nof1. Nof1 and crypto fascination. Another particularly striking experiment was the one that the company nof1.ai made with its Alpha Arena. He put six AI models to compete, gave them 10,000 real dollars each and gave them two weeks to trade cryptocurrency derivatives without human intervention. The most striking result was not who won, but who lost: GPT-5 ended with more than 25% losses and Gemini with close to a negative 40%. Meanwhile, the Chinese models Qwen and DeepSeek dominated in terms of good performance. They iterated with other models, 32 in total, and of all of them only six achieved a positive return: the rest lost money. Grok-4.20 was the big winner ahead of GPT-5.1 and DeepSeek v3.1. Maybe you shouldn’t just let AI invest for you. The conclusions after these experiments are clear. Four months of a model outperforming the S&P index in a bear market does not prove that AI is a good investor. Only in that specific period, with that specific marketthat model made decisions that turned out to be less bad than those in the index. To see if this makes sense takes years, multiple market conditions, and many instances of the same experiment running in parallel. The same happens with Nof1 – especially short – and with a more serious and methodical process like that of the CNMV, which was also surrounded by events whose impact on the final result was uncertain. Faced with so many unknowns, the conclusion seems clear: … Read more

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

We have plenty of electricity, but we lack cables to build houses and invest more

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Over the last decade, Spain has accelerated the installation of wind and solar farms, especially in “emptied Spain”, with the promise of becoming Europe’s green laboratory. However, upon reaching 2026, the system has hit an invisible but insurmountable wall: the cables. The reason is a “broken bridge”, since clean energy is born in the countryside, but does not reach the cities or factories because the transportation infrastructure does not exist or is saturated. The situation is critical. According to advance The Economistthe Spanish electricity grid has administratively “collapsed” and, for practical purposes, is closed to new projects. There is no longer room to accommodate new connection requests, which means that thousands of homes, data centers and industries are receiving a “no” answer when asking for a plug. Red Eléctrica’s technical documentation confirms this paralysis with endless lists of nodes submitted to a capacity contest, from Algeciras to Arrigorriaga, evidencing a blockade that runs through the entire peninsula. The “D-Day” that never came. The trigger for this crisis has a date and time. The electricity sector was anxiously awaiting February 2, 2026, the day on which the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) was to publish the new access capacity maps, the “traffic light” that indicates where there is more consumption. But the maps did not arrive. In a last-minute maneuver, the CNMC has postponed the publication until Monday, May 4, 2026. The decision responds to a critical alert launched by the system operator (REE) on January 26: under the new and strict technical criteria, “approximately 90% of the nodes in the transportation network would have zero access capacity.” The problem is deeper. On the one hand, the application of the “dynamic criterion” has revealed that more than 9 GW of already authorized demand—mainly data centers and electrolyzers—might not be sufficiently robust against “voltage dips” (sudden drops in voltage), which forces the tap to be turned off for safety. On the other hand, consensus is non-existent: Red Eléctrica and the distributors they have only achieved agree on the reference values ​​in 26% of the interconnection nodes, a figure that in the case of some distributors plummets to just 11%. A traffic jam with real consequences. Far from being a mere dispatch procedure, it has devastating consequences for the real economy. The energy plug has become the new brake on brick: Last year only 12% of connection requests for new urban developments were granted. The Asprima employers’ association estimates that some 350,000 homes are at risk of not being able to be built, not due to lack of land or money, but due to the simple lack of electrical power. The impact has specific faces. An example that they expose in The Economist is that of the Costa del Sol, where the delay in the construction of a substation in Estepona and its associated line keeps the quality of supply and the connection capacity of a total of 72 families in suspense. The investment war. There is a chronic lack of investment in basic infrastructure. While Europe invests on average 70 cents in networks for every euro of renewable generation, Spain remains at just 30 cents. This has unleashed an open war. The large electricity companies (Aelec) accuse Red Eléctrica (Redeia) of having invested below what was planned, causing the current precariousness. Redeia defends himself forcefullyensuring that it has quadrupled its investment to exceed 1.5 billion in 2025. In addition, the system operator uses devastating quality data to deny the poor state of the network: the average annual interruption time is just 0.46 minutes, a value 30 times better than the 15 minutes required by regulations. The speculative bubble. Amidst the chaos, speculation flourishes. The CNMC is finalizing a complete report—a kind of “forensic” audit—to put order in the system. According to Expansionthere are access requests for 67,100 MW, an exorbitant figure that is equivalent to half of all the installed power in the country. The regulator suspects that there are massive duplications and “ghost” projects that hoard nodes for the sole purpose of reselling permits, blocking access to real industries. Three months of heart attack. Given the seriousness of the scenario, the sector now faces a three-month truce, until May, to try to avoid the total closure of the network. Express legal route. The recent Sustainable Mobility Law has introduced an “emergency mechanism” which allows changing the purpose of positions in substations. That is, unlock spaces reserved for generation that are not used and assign them to consumption quickly. “Amnesty” for Data Centers. To prevent the flight of digital investment, the Government has activated a grace measure for 2026: has eliminated the requirement that forced data centers to consume in “off-peak hours” (at night) to receive aid, recognizing that solar energy has changed the reality of prices and that said requirement no longer made technical sense. Cost for the citizen: fixing the network it won’t be free. The proposal for 2026 includes an increase in tolls (4%) and charges (10.5%) in the electricity bill to finance these investments and the “reinforced mode” of operation, necessary to guarantee stability after the incidents of 2025. Crisis of institutional trust. Despite the extension, legal uncertainty is latent. Electricity companies fear that industries that already had access granted they can lose it when applying the new, more restrictive criteria. Óscar Mosquera, sector expert, warns on LinkedIn about a “regulatory breakdown.” “The network is no longer just infrastructure, it is an institution,” says Mosquera. His diagnosis is lapidary: “A system that invites investment and then does not connect is not prudent, it is incoherent. That is the true country risk.” While the administration looks for solutions, real demand does not wait for the bureaucracy. Joaquin Coronado highlights that the electricity demand It has grown by 3.7% at the start of January 2026, exceeding the official forecasts of the CNMC itself. The Spanish economy tries to accelerate, but physical reality prevents it. A country disconnected from its own future. Spain finds itself at an ironic and … Read more

Amazon is negotiating to invest 50 billion in OpenAI. The money would go in through the door and out through the window.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is in talks with Sam Altman to close an investment of up to $50 billion in OpenAI. He has revealed it The Wall Street Journal and has confirmed it CNBC referring to his own sources. The deal could close in a matter of weeks as part of a record $100 billion funding round that would skyrocket OpenAI’s valuation to $830 billion. Today there are only fourteen listed companies in the world with a higher valuation. And none among the unlisted ones. Why is it important. Amazon would become the largest investor in the round, surpassing the 30 billion negotiated by another old acquaintance of technological mega-investments, SoftBank. And it does so just two months after OpenAI reached a valuation of half a billion dollars. Between the lines. Amazon has an important alliance with Anthropic from 2023that is, with the direct rival of OpenAI. AWS is its primary cloud provider, and in October inaugurated an 11 billion data center campus exclusively for Anthropic in Indiana. Betting at the same time on two companies that are so competitive with each other sounds like a paradox, but it is not so much if we think of Amazon as one of the sellers of picks and shovels in the AI ​​gold rush. They don’t care who finds the nuggets because they charge for the tools. The money trail. In addition to Amazon’s 50 billion, NVIDIA is negotiating to invest 20 billion and Microsoft “several billion more.” The three companies sell OpenAI just what it needs to exist: chips and computing capacity in data centers. Yes, but. This circular scheme is not going unnoticed and has raised more than one eyebrow: Amazon basically ensures itself many years of guaranteed income (at least as long as OpenAI does not go bankrupt, something no one can afford) while diversifying risks by also betting on Anthropic. Just in case. In detail. Although nothing has been leaked that could take it for granted, this investment could perfectly include clauses for OpenAI to adopt the AWS own chips. Or that Amazon sells ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions to its enterprise customers. It will be through parallel business channels. OpenAI has insane costs with the dark clouds caused by the arrival of Gemini 3 and its great reception. So they are considering ways to sustain capital-devouring growth, such as the much-rumored IPO. The context. a few days ago, Amazon announced the layoff of 16,000 employees “office”, not warehouse or logistics. It is their second round of layoffs for them after 14,000 in October. In total, 30,000 casualties. Meanwhile, it has projected investments that already total 125 billion by 2026 in data centers alone. There is no other large technology company with such a high spending projection. It is a contradiction that has an overwhelming logic: if with AI you are going to be able to do more with fewer jobs, you choose to cut salaries to allocate them to investment. Go deeper. This movement is another nail in the… pattern: big technology companies no longer compete so much to develop the best AI but to control the infrastructure that supports it. Whoever has control of data centers and chips will have control of the business. Regardless of which chatbot succeeds. Featured image | Dima Solomin In Xataka | There was a time not too long ago when the future of supermarkets seemed like Amazon Go. Now Amazon Go is dead

invest a million in an infrastructure that has been ruined for decades

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The capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces has left to Donald Trump’s administration as de facto “guardian” of the richest oil sector —and at the same time more punished. In this new geopolitical board, Repsol CEO Josu Jon Imaz was selected to participate in a key meeting in the East Room of the White House along with other oil giants. According to BloombergRepsol is now seeking urgent licenses to resume the export of crude oil, an activity that was frozen after the trade embargo of March 2025. The slogan so that Repsol can fulfill its strategic plan and take its business to the stock market upstream (exploration and production) on Wall Street, needs its Venezuelan assets to stop being a risk accounting entry and become real barrels. Resuscitate a “broken” industry. During the meeting, Trump has asked the oil companies a joint investment of 100 billion dollars to revive an obsolete industry. But the infrastructure it’s so deteriorated that the state-owned PDVSA has gone so far as to dismantle oil pipelines to sell the metal as scrap. Even so, as RTVE has explainedRepsol has promised to triple its production, going from 45,000 to 135,000 barrels per day within three years. titanic challenge. Venezuelan crude oil is “extra heavy”, thick as tarand arrives at the refineries “dirty”, loaded with salt and metals. Only companies with historical roots such as Repsol (present in the country since 1993) have the know-how to process this “heavy food.” But the problem is not just oil. 90% of what Repsol produces in the La Perla field It’s natural gasa resource that powers 33% of Venezuela’s electricity supply. Without Repsol gas, the country goes out; But for this gas to be profitable and exportable, the company needs to build liquefaction plants that simply do not exist today. “Pragmatism in the face of the Trump environment”. To facilitate the disembarkation, Washington has declared a “national emergency” that allows the US Treasury to shield Venezuelan oil revenues in US accounts. This measure, qualified by Expansion like an unprecedented movementseeks to prevent funds from being confiscated by the thousands of creditors waiting at the door, offering the “total security” that Trump promised executives. While Repsol declares itself “ready to invest strongly,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods threw a cold bucket of water on the White House itself. According to the Financial TimesWoods affirmed that Venezuela remains “uninvestable” without drastic changes in the legal framework and recalled that its assets were confiscated twice in the past. On the horizon. Repsol walks through a financial minefield. Still carries a property debt of 330 million euros from PDVSA. Furthermore, Financial Times warns that competitors like Chevron have an advantage due to their close personal relationship with Trump and for having maintained constant operations under special licenses during the years of the embargo. Added to this is the warning from analyst Ron Bousso in Reuters: Trump has suggested that companies should “forget” past debts to start on a “level playing field.” For Repsol, this could mean definitively giving up collecting what was lost under Chavismo in exchange for maintaining its future exploitation rights. A final bet. The company must decide whether to bury billions in rebuilding fossil infrastructure in a world clamoring for the energy transition. The “hole” of 1,160 million euros in Spain’s trade deficit with Venezuela It is just the symptom of a dangerous dependency. Venezuela is still the largest gas station in the world, but today it is a facility in ruins. Repsol’s success will no longer depend only on its technical expertise in the Quiriquire or La Perla fields, but on its ability to dance to the rhythm set by Washington in a reconstruction that, according to expertscould take decades to complete. Image | Repsol Xataka | Getting hold of Venezuela’s immense oil reserves seems like a “bargain.” It’s actually an engineering nightmare.

Millionaires from the US and Mexico invest their fortunes in Spain

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In 2025, the luxury real estate market in Spain he has lived a silent movement but constant. Madrid and Barcelona have become the main destinations for investments of the great fortunes from the US and Mexico, which are buying luxury homes in some of the most exclusive urban areas of the main capitals. The data of the General Council of Notaries confirm a clear increase in foreign buyers in high-value transactions, especially in neighborhoods where the price per square meter already moves above 10,000 euros per square meter. The new buyers. The statistics of the General Council of Notaries show that in 2025 the purchase and sale of luxury homes by foreigners maintains considerable weight in Spain. According what was published According to Idealista, in Madrid, operations carried out by foreigners already represent around a fifth (21%) of sales in prime areas. In Barcelona, ​​this percentage is somewhat higher, especially in districts where luxury housing concentrates a large part of the available supply. Within this group, buyers of American and Mexican nationality stand out for the average amount of the operations, well above the market average. Specific neighborhoods and heart-stopping prices. He interest of these buyers concentrates on very specific enclaves. In the center of Madrid, neighborhoods such as Salamanca, Recoletos, El Viso or certain areas of Chamberí accumulate a good part of the operations carried out by large international fortunes. These are areas where the price per square meter easily exceeds 10,000 euros and where it is common for the price of housing to be above one million euros. In Barcelona, ​​the pattern is similar. Districts such as Sarrià-Sant Gervasi, Pedralbes or Ciutat Vella attract foreign buyers looking for unique, rehabilitated or properties with high heritage value. Why the US and Mexico are looking at Spain. Behind this movement there are several factors that reinforce each other. On the one hand, Spain offers legal stability, property security and a relatively predictable tax framework for large assets. On the other hand, Madrid and Barcelona function as international business hubs well connected to America, with frequent direct flights that keep them connected to Miami, Mexico or New York. In the case of Mexico, the cultural and linguistic link also plays a relevant role, while American buyers especially value the relationship between price, quality of life and services compared to other large European cities. In this way, they use their home in Spain as a way to improve your quality of life or as a gateway to your businesses in Europe. They can pay more, so prices skyrocket. The impact of this international demand can be seen in prices. According to data According to Idealista, the average value of housing in Spain has risen around 7.9% year-on-year in 2025, with Madrid and Barcelona leading the rising prices. In the luxury segment, the pressure is even greater due to the scarcity of properties of this type and its high demand. Although these purchases do not compete directly with affordable housing, they do contribute to reinforcing the dynamic of rising prices in the most sought-after areas. The result is a market in which a crowding out effect occurs in which local rich are displaced to other neighborhoods by wealthier millionaires. In this way, Madrid and Barcelona are consolidated as attractive places for millionaires to have their second residence, especially in a context of international uncertainty. In Xataka | How much money do you need to be among the richest 1% in Spain Image | Unsplash (Eddie Pipocas)

If the question is why we buy a home in Spain, mortgages have the answer: to invest

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In the middle of the debate on the weight of speculation in the Spanish real estate market and with the Catalan Government immersed in the debate Regarding whether or not it should put limits on the purchase of housing for investment purposes, the sector has come across data that adds even more fuel to the fire. According to a study carried out by the Financial Users Association (Asufin), the 47.7% of the mortgages signed are aimed at acquiring homes for investment purposes. That is to say, the idea of ​​those who take mortgages is not to convert houses into homes, but to put their savings in a safe security in search of good returns. What does the study say? The report by Asufin is just that, a report with its biases and limitations prepared based on a survey with 1,301 interviewees and data from different official sources, but it still offers an interesting ‘photo’. And a resounding conclusion: among those who go to the bank in search of financing to buy a home, there are many more people with an investment mentality than there are families looking for a home in which to settle. What figures do you use? The study concludes that only 15.9% of the new mortgage holders will convert the home into their first residence. Another 18.5% are looking for credit to get a second home that they will dedicate to personal use and 17.9% intend to change their usual residence. The photo is completed with the 47.7% that we mentioned before: buyers who knock on the doors of banks in search of credit to purchase a second home as an investment. The size of this last percentage is not surprising if we take into account that the price per residential square meter has been climbing for years (both in the purchase and rental markets) and there are those who estimate that buying an apartment for rent offers returns of more than 6% (either even older), significantly above what more traditional investments guarantee. Why do we buy houses? Asufin’s study has given rise to another interpretation that shows us more clearly what percentage of buyers go to the real estate market with an investment mentality, not in search of a home. If what we are talking about is the reasons that lead buyers to consider requesting a loan, investment is the main motivation 65%. The data shows that brick is still seen as a refuge value. And so, recognizes the associationleads to “the cycle of buying to rent or saving value to sell more expensively continuing to significantly stress the market.” It’s actually nothing new. Previous studies Asufin itself already reflected that more mortgages are requested to invest than to buy homes. Does the report say anything else? Yes. It confirms the low flow of new housing entering the market, that today the cheapest option is fixed mortgages and that foreign buyers they account for a total of 14%although the data varies depending on the region and the market segment we are talking about. For example, in the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands they account for almost 30%, while there are half a dozen autonomous communities in which foreigners do not even reach 4%. Another interesting reading is that credits take up a considerable part of the finances of Spanish households. To be more precise, the average mortgage payments are already They represent 35% of salaries, a percentage that rises to 40% if we talk about the segment of young buyers, between 25 and 35 years old. However, the Asufin data show a slight change in trend, with a clear decline in the percentage of buyers who go into debt to buy second homes for investment purposes. Although they continue to represent an important part of the pie (47.7%), at the beginning of the year they represented 56.2%. Image | Ján Jakub Naništa (Unsplash) In Xataka | Buying a house is already an impossible mission for many young Spaniards. So his parents donate it to him

prohibit purchases to invest

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Catalonia is studying the pros, cons and viability of a controversial measure to alleviate the residential crisis: restricting the purchase of houses that are acquired as an investment. At the moment it is just that, an idea analyzed by a work group constituted by the Government of Salvador Illa and the Commons, but it has generated expectation. The team has started working this week at the headquarters of the Territory Department and its objective is to have a first report between end of year and beginning of 2026facing the next step: thinking about how to translate it at a legislative level, with proposals that will have to be transferred to Parliament. “An immediate response must be given,” they claim its drivers. “Unfair competition”. The idea is to stop (at least in part) the deep imbalance between supply and demand of housing and the residential crisis that the community is experiencing, like other regions of Spain. According to Idealista, only in the last year has Catalonia seen prices increase 7.1% in the rental market and 9.7% in the purchase and sale. Against that backdrop, compounded by the pressure of vacation rentals and seasonal contracts, the community has been the scene of demonstrations in defense of the right to housing. From Comuns they even talk about the “unfair competition” exercised by investment funds that acquire properties “for cash” (the party remembers that 60% of purchases in Spain are made without a mortgage involved) in search of good returns. The objective of the Government’s working group is to stop this ‘leak’ of apartments to avoid “speculation” and keep them on the market available to families who want to live in them. In short: avoid “speculative purchase”. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Is it something new? The creation of the working group yes. The idea and the resolution of the Government, no. A few weeks ago Illa already advanced his intention to “in-depth” study the possibility of restricting apartment purchases that are made for speculative purposes, not to be used as housing. Probably the most belligerent formation on the matter, however, is another: the Comuns, which a few weeks ago advertisement his intention to take that same crusade to different administrations in Catalonia, including a proposal in Parliament to limit purchases. Actually the idea doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is based on a report recent commissioned by the Barcelona Metropolitan Strategic Plan (PEMB) and prepared by the jurist Pablo Feu, expert in administrative and urban law and professor at the University of Barcelona (UB), which addresses precisely that issue: whether or not it is “legally viable” to put limits on those home purchases that are made with an investor mentality, not to convert them into homes and use them as residences. “It’s viable”. The document is interesting above all for two reasons. To begin with, because its author concludes that the veto of this type of purchases may have legal protection. The second, because it makes it clear that a series of conditions related to the context must first be met. “The report concludes that it is feasible to restrict the acquisition of real estate for speculative use, a practice that, according to the recent jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, can be limited in the face of ‘the exceptional situation of loss of the right of access to housing by the majority of the population,’” the PEMB states in its release about the study. But what does the report say? That like the limitation of rental prices, the veto must respect certain conditions: it would apply only in Stressed Residential Market Areas (ZMRT), provided for in the Right to Housing Law of 2023 and where it would only be allowed to acquire housing for “habitual and permanent use” of the buyer himself, which reduces any investment approach. “The objective is to stop speculative operations that contribute to emptying urban centers and raising prices above the purchasing power of the population,” they reflect from the Pla Estratègic. The small print. The report also talks about certain “exceptions”, a fine print that seeks to ensure the “balance and proportionality” of the ban. For example, it contemplates that entire buildings can be acquired as long as their apartments are rented as “regular rentals” for a certain period of time, keeping them out of the vacation market or seasonal rentals. How long would that limitation last? The PEMB speaks of between five or seven years, depending on whether an individual or a company purchases. The purchase of second homes outside the town where the owner resides would also be allowed, even in areas considered “stressed”, but the operation would be conditioned on a crucial requirement: that the house or apartment be dedicated to personal use, not to rental or investment. The Newspaper assures There is another exception related to those who buy for close relatives. And the legal reserve? The report released by PEMB is just that, a report, a theoretical document presented just before the Government and Commons working group is formed, but it contains a few interesting ideas. The study focuses on the “stressed market” areas and in Catalonia (at least that was the case a year ago) there are some 271 municipalities with that consideration. A significant number of locations that would cover almost 90% of the population. The other reason is that its author insists on the legal fit of the proposals. “Public administrations can intervene in the real estate market. It is a possible measure because it has justified cause and because it is delimited in space and time,” Feu claims. The study in fact ensures that the measure could be transferred to both the regional and state and local levels, “taking advantage of the powers that already exist in terms of housing and urban planning.” Regarding the international scene, the entity assures that there are no doubts about its fit into community legislation. “Countries such as Denmark, Croatia, Finland and Malta have already implemented similar measures,” … Read more

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