move

To move the cutting head of the ‘Monica’ tunnel boring machine, a 152-wheel truck was needed. It’s the key to Australia’s ‘water battery’

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Transporting a gigantic tunnel boring machine to the work point is no small feat, and Madrid has a few things to say about this. However, in Cooma, a small town in the Australian state of New South Wales, they seem to have gotten the hang of it. And the colossal piece of steel crossed its streets at a snail’s pace on a 152 wheel truck. The cargo was part of Snowy 2.0one of the largest energy storage projects in the world. What is it about?. The piece was the central block of the cutting head of the tunnel boring machine named Monica. According to Snowy Hydro, the public company behind the project, this component weighs more than 137 tons and measures seven meters wide. The head is the part that really matters in a tunnel boring machine, since it is the rotating disc that faces the rock and crushes it as it moves. Media deployment. Monica’s head is too big to transport in one piece, so it had to be divided into five parts. Still, just moving the center block required months of preparation. The entire transport reached 73 meters in length, and was moved at night facing the last stretch along the Snowy Mountains Highway, heading to the Marica site, north of Kiandra, where the machine would be assembled. A colossal engineering project. This move was just one piece of a much larger puzzle. The company indicates that in the previous weeks more than 140 large loads were delivered to Marica from the port of Port Kembla, south of Sydney. The tunnel boring machines do not arrive assembled, as they are transported in sections (head, drive system, shields, support platforms) and are assembled on site. In fact, last October, the transport of Monica’s motor system (a component about 207 tons and eight meters wide) brought more than 1,500 people to Cooma, in what Snowy Hydro called one of the largest loads ever transported by road in New South Wales. What is all this for? Snowy 2.0 is, in essence, a gigantic water battery. The project will connect the Tantangara and Talbingo reservoirs through some 27 kilometers of tunnels and an underground power station. The idea is to generate electricity by turbineing water when demand is high and, in times of surplus solar and wind energy, pump it back uphill for reuse. The company assures that it will have a capacity of 2,200 megawatts and enough stored energy to supply about three million homes for a week. Start-up. Last February, Snowy Hydro announced that Monica had been commissioned and would be responsible for excavating the section of the tunnel that crosses the Long Plain fault zone, a geologically complicated area. Designed by the German firm Herrenknecht, the machine advances at one end of the tunnel while another tunnel boring machine, Florence, does so at the opposite. The idea is that both are underground before being dismantled. For those dates the project exceeded 70% execution. Snowy 2.0 has not been without controversy with news of cost overruns and delays, and completion is now scheduled for December 2028. Images | Snowy Hydro In Xataka | Canada is going to debut the residential skyscraper with the most floors in all of North America: it has 12 sides and 351 meters high

China is about to launch the most powerful cargo drone in the world. And it will move it with hydrogen

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The aeronautical industry has been researching and experimenting for quite some time. with hydrogen turboprop engines on airplanes. A Chinese company is about to break that barrier, as it has taken off an airplane with one of these megawatt-scale engines. Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC) has completed the first test flight of the AEP100, installed on a 7.5-ton cargo drone, in an operation that took off from Zhuzhou airport, in Hunan province. what has happened. The device flew for 16 minutes, reached an altitude of 300 meters and traveled 36 kilometers at a speed of 220 km/h before landing without incident. According to AECC, the engine operated stably throughout the flight profile and responded as expected. Chinese state media present it as the world’s first flight with a hydrogen turboprop of this power. Why is it relevant?. Yes, it is a short, unmanned, low-altitude test. But this means that hydrogen aeronautical propulsion leaves the laboratory and test benches to face real flight conditions. AECC maintains that the country already has a complete technological chain for hydrogen aeronautical engines, from essential components to system integration. direct combustion. The AEP100 does not use fuel cells to power an electric motor. It burns liquid hydrogen directly in a turbine cycle, just as a conventional turboprop would burn kerosene. This is the main difference with other bets. Airbus, for example, has prioritized fuel cells on its roadmap to a hydrogen commercial aircraft in 2035, while China has opted for direct combustion. Combustion is more complicated to tame in engineering, but offers much higher power density, something key to scaling up to larger aircraft. What aircraft is it intended for?. The AEP100 is custom designed for the W5000, a twin-engine cargo drone developed by Chinese startup Air White Whale. According to the manufacturer’s data, we are talking about a device with a maximum takeoff weight of 10.8 tons, 5 tons of payload, more than 65 cubic meters of hold and a range of 2,600 kilometers. Just like share from China Daily, when it completes its first flight, it will become the most powerful transport drone in the world, surpassing the Norinco Luca. Deadlines. Yuan An, general manager of subsidiary AE General Aviation Power Tech, has explained The engine is in the final phase of the type certification process and they hope to obtain approval from the Civil Aviation Administration of China in 2027. The process is progressing faster than usual because the AEP100 shares a core with the AES100 turboshaft, which shortens procedures. Yuan has also assured that the AEP100 and its variants will “end the heavy dependence on foreign engines” in Chinese general aviation. Where will it be used first?. For now, we have to forget about getting on a hydrogen-powered passenger plane. The bet goes through what they call the “low altitude economy”that is, situations in which unmanned cargo drones, inter-island logistics or controlled transport routes to remote areas are used, being scenarios where hydrogen refueling infrastructure, certification and operational economics are more manageable than in passenger aviation. Yuan remember also that the United States has more than 275,000 general aviation aircraft, while in China there are only a few thousand. The problems that remain unresolved. Burning hydrogen in a turbine is no small feat, as you can imagine. It burns at higher temperatures than kerosene and with a much higher flame speed, which requires the design of systems that avoid autoignition, flame flashbacks and combustion oscillations. Added to this is storage, since liquid hydrogen requires cryogenic temperatures close to -253 ° C, heavily insulated tanks and, most likely, redesigning the geometry of the fuselage itself to accommodate it. Sustainability. aviation Today it is around 2% of global CO₂ emissions, a figure that could skyrocket in the coming decades if the sector maintains its dependence on fossil fuels. China aims to reduce its exposure to imported oil in an increasingly complicated geopolitical scenario, so hydrogen can fit into both narratives. And now what. China’s road map mark 2028 as horizon to validate similar technologies in small unmanned aircraft, helicopters and urban air mobility, 2035 for applications in broader regions and 2050 for large commercial turbofan aircraft. The first flight of the W5000 with the AEP100 installed is expected in the coming months and will be the next litmus test. Cover image | CCTV In Xataka | For China, DeepSeek is more than just AI: it is the key to creating an industry that makes them independent of Nvidia

7,000 employees move to AI while 8,000 clear their desks

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Thousands of Meta employees will go to sleep tonight without knowing if tomorrow they will have work. Mark Zuckerberg’s company has set a date and time to put end to the long agony that their employees were suffering in one of the further staff cuts that Meta has done in its recent history. According to advanced Reuters, the company has asked its US employees to telework tomorrow while layoff notices are rolled out. A measure that, beyond logistics, reflects the enormous tension that the company knew would be generated that day. Layoffs at 4 in the morning and without relief. According to an internal document to which the news agency has had access, the layoffs will be carried out in three waves that will begin at 4 a.m. on Wednesday, local time, in each region. This was detailed by Janelle Gale, director of Human Resources at Meta, in an internal memo shared with employees. “Many leaders will announce organizational changes,” the directive wrote. According to that document, the set of layoffs will affect about 10% of the entire workforce of the 77,986 employees that Meta had at the end of March. Furthermore, the company has withdrawn 6,000 offers of work to fill vacancies that were open. More than 7,000 employees relocated to AI. The layoffs are just one part of the restructuring movement that Mark Zuckerberg is carrying out. Meta has already reassigned more than 7,000 employees to new positions in new projects linked to AIaccording to the same Gale memo. Some transfers have already become effective before May 20, but in other cases employees will be notified throughout the same Wednesday. In that internal communication, Gale explained the goal of the changes: “We are now at a stage where many organizations can operate with a more horizontal structure, with smaller teams of groups or cohorts that can move more quickly and with greater autonomy.” The company also will eliminate middle management to flatten your hierarchy and speed up decision making. Weeks of anguish before the cut. The last few weeks at Meta have been especially hard for workers after the news of the layoffs leaked, and the hasty confirmation by the company. Meta employees rated the experience as “a hell of 28 days.” During these days a group of employees protested against the use of mouse tracking technology to monitor productivity, in a tension scenario in which many workers questioned their permanence in the company. The price of betting everything on AI. These changes are part of a profound renewal at Meta this year, which many are already calling Meta’s “second Year of Efficiency”, in reference to the first major restructuring that Mark Zuckerberg applied between 2023 and 2024. According to pointed Business Insider, several company leaders did not rule out further cuts beyond this initial 10%which makes May 20 the beginning of a process of thinning the Mera structure that is more intense than anticipated in the initial figures. In Xataka | Technology companies have laid off 92,000 employees to invest in AI. The problem is that the layoffs are costing them a fortune. Image | Unsplash (Mariia Shalabaieva), Goal

move two million tons of sand

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The paradisiacal coastline of the central Algarve is facing one of the great coastal problems of recent decades, the result of rising sea levels and extreme weather events happening more and more often: the ocean is swallowing its beaches. So he has left behind the classic breakwaters to carry out one of the most ambitious coastal regenerations of its history: moving more than two million tons of sand from the seabed to the shore. There is no beach in the Algarve. The problem of erosion in the area of ​​Forte Novo beach and Garrão beach (both in the municipality of Loulé, Faro district) is not new, but this winter’s storms aggravated it in a worrying way, as explains the Portuguese Environment Agency: Their records have documented a maximum retreat of up to 15 meters on Loulé Velho-Trafal beach and 14 meters in the Quarteira-Garrão area. On Forte Novo beach, a retreat of an additional six meters was detected. These data place this section as one of the most critical in all of continental Portugal. Why is it important. Coastal erosion represents a real physical risk for the population and infrastructure: when the sand of a beach recedes in a sustained manner, the coast is directly exposed to the waves, which accelerates the erosion of cliffs, threatens nearby infrastructure and destroys the associated dune ecosystems. According to a report By 2024 published on the European Union’s Copernicus science platform, between 27 and 40 percent of European sandy coasts are experiencing active retreat, with special incidence in the Mediterranean and the Iberian Atlantic. On the other hand, the Algarve is one of the great tourist engines of Portugal. The region recorded more than 20 million overnight stays in 2023, according to the National Institute of Statistics Portuguese and in 2025 concentrated 85 beaches with the Blue Flag, the highest European certification of coastal quality. Losing beaches means losing its main economic asset, which mostly lives off of sun and sea tourism. Coastal erosion patterns in Europe. European Environment Agency Context. This intervention is part of the Integrated Coastal Zone Management Strategy of Portugal, which aims to achieve a harmoniously and sustainably developed coastal area within a period of 20 years (in force since 2009). The APA has already carried out similar and even larger operations: it holds the record Figueira da Foz, where it moved more than 3.3 million cubic meters of sediments in the Cova-Gala/Costa de Lavos section, with an investment of 21.1 million euros. The Quarteira-Garrão operation is, therefore, the second major operation of this type in just over a year, which reflects the State’s policy on coastal protection. The Quarteira-Garrão project is the technical response to a regional-scale problem of the erosive dynamics that affects the entire Gulf of Cádiz. Portugal has opted for large contributions of sand instead of building rigid rock breakwaters, following European trends. These types of solutions seek to have a lower visual impact and better integration into the dynamic coastal ecosystem. In figures. The operation, without being the largest in the history of Portugal, it has some numbers that impact: Transfer of approximately 1.4 million cubic meters of sand (about two million tons). Rehabilitation of 6.7 kilometers of coastline. Planned average widening of 37 meters. Tender budget: 14.9 million euros. How are they doing it. The technique that Portugal is applying is called artificial beach feeding or beach nourishment and consists of extracting sediments from nearby underwater areas and depositing them on the shore through dredging and pipelines. The project has been executed in phases, section by section and in coordination with the Cultural Heritage Agency of Portugal and after an environmental impact assessment: on the one hand, to control the deposition of sediments at each point avoiding saturation and on the other, because this underwater extraction area contains remains of underwater archaeological heritage. The works began between April 2 and 3 and completion was scheduled for May 6, in time for the beginning of the bathing season. Yes, but. The artificial regeneration of beaches is an effective solution in the short and medium term, but it does not solve the underlying problem as science warns: the deposited sand moves again due to the action of waves, currents and storms. In most cases documented in Europeregenerated beaches require new intervention after a few years (it can be more than a decade), depending on the energy exposure of the coast. The underlying structural problem is the chronic loss of sediment throughout the coastal system, aggravated by climate change, the rise in sea level and the reduction in the river supply of sand caused by the regulation of rivers with dams. If these causes are not solved comprehensively, beach recharge is putting a patch on. In fact, the APA itself recognizes it by framing the intervention within a broader coastal protection strategy and continuously monitoring for the next action. In Xataka | Portugal’s radical proposal to stop touristification: an underwater cable that connects with the US In Xataka | “I am an engineer, politics is not my profession”: the mayor of Lisbon has turned it into a magnet for European startups Cover | Bengt Nyman and Ludovico Ceroseis

who are the names that move the country’s economy

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The size of a company is, ultimately, a matter of perspective. For example, Inditex worth more in the stock market than any other Spanish company, but Repsol far surpasses it if what we look at is its income. On the other hand, Mercadona, without being listed in any index, employs more people in Spain than any large multinational based in the country. They are three different data that return three business maps that barely overlap, but together they form the business reality of Spain and about how the Spanish economy is built, revealing which sectors generate wealth for investorswhich ones move the most money and which are those companies that really move the employment needle in our country. The Top 10 companies of the IBEX35 The most common when we talk about large companies is to go to the IBEX35, the Spanish stock ranking which does not measure how much a company invoices or how many people it employs, but rather how much investors trust in your future. With that criterion, Inditex leads the list with a wide difference. At the end of March 2026, after publishing its annual resultsits stock market value was around 163,500 million euros, although in December 2025 it reached 175,155 million, its historical maximum. At that time, investment bank Jefferies revised upwards its target price for the share, which would imply a value greater than 200,000 million euros. Inditex’s capitalization advantage over the rest of the companies does not come from your sales volumebut of what the company founded by Amancio Ortega win with every euro you sell. In its fiscal year of 2025, the textile company obtained a record net profit of 6,220 million, 6% more than the previous year. This explains why large banks, such as Santander, BBVA or CaixaBank and energy companies such as Iberdrola or Endesa, with larger business figures, are left behind on the stock market. In 2025, by first time in historyfive Spanish companies exceeded 100,000 million euros on the stock market at the same time. Despite this, the index continues to be dominated by banks and electricity companies. However, sectors with a very important presence in the daily lives of Spaniards (such as the food industry, hospitality, automotive) barely have a presence in this index. Largest companies in Spain by turnover When the criterion is not investor confidence, but the total income that a company generates, the map turns upside down. The oil, gas and electricity companies They occupy the first positions because they buy and sell enormous quantities of raw materials, although what they keep as profit is a relatively small part of that figure. In this case, Repsol is the clearest example. In 2025, the fall in the price of oil, with a barrel of Brent falling 14.5% to $69.1 on average, took its toll. His operating result It fell 12.2%, to 5,312 million euros, although the final net profit rose 8.1%, to 1,899 million. That is, billing is not the same as entering. The big surprise from the list of companies with the highest turnover in Spain It’s Mercadona. Without being listed on the stock market and with hardly any presence in the financial debate, the Valencian chain founded by Juan Roig closed 2025 with 41,858 million euros in sales (8% more) and a net profit of 1,729 million (25% more). These figures have left Mercadona with 28.5% of market share in food in Spain, six tenths above 2024. Juan Roig qualified the “historical” exercise. Inditex, on the other hand, despite being the most powerful company in market capitalization, remains in a middle position in the income ranking. Largest companies in Spain by number of employees There is a tendency to think that a large company also needs a large workforce, something that large technology companies also insist on denying month and month with their large rounds of layoffs. In fact, the proof of nine for this theory is that the list of largest companies in Spain for the employment they generate subverts the order again. The company that hires the most people in Spain is neither the largest on the stock market nor the one with the most turnover: it is Santander Bank and all the personnel it employs in the operations management area. More than 198,400 employees, despite the cuts to your workforce of branches. Mercadona closed 2025 with 110,000 workers between Spain and Portugal and that year raised salaries of its entire workforce 8.5%. The most striking contrast in the ranking is the one between the extremes with Repsol, which heads the billing list, is located at the bottom of the employment list since its workforce is around 25,000 people thanks to the high level of automation of its activity. Inditex or ACS need staff five or six times larger than Repsol to function due to the nature of their activity. The difference between selling clothes or build roads and extract oil or distribute electricity, explains why the impact on employment of these companies has nothing to do with their weight on the stock market or income. The largest companies in Spain by autonomous community Reading the business map of Spain by autonomous community reveals something that economic or national lists tend to hide: the country’s economy is more decentralized than it seems, and many of the companies that lead the economy or employment in their region are not even listed on the stock market or are those that obtain the most profits. Autonomous Community Company Sector Billing approx. 2025 Madrid Repsol Energy and oil €76.3 billion the Basque Country Iberdrola Electrical energy €45,546 M Com. Valencian Mercadona Food distribution €41,858 M Galicia Inditex Textile retail €39,864 M Cantabria Santander Bank Banking €135,000 M Catalonia seat Automotive €12,000 M Aragon Stellantis Spain Automotive €4,159 M Navarre Volkswagen Navarra Automotive €12,000 M Castile and León Renault Spain Automotive €10,000 M Andalusia Airbus Spain Aeronautics and defense €73,420 M Asturias ArcelorMittal Spain Iron and steel industry €3,749 M Murcia The Well Feeding €2,000 … Read more

Marta Ortega prepares the move of the offices of four Inditex brands, but not to Galicia: to Barcelona

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The price of land within large cities makes it impossible for companies to develop their corporate infrastructure in them, and they are forced to look for that space at a more reasonable price. on the periphery. Inditex has decided to do exactly the opposite. The textile giant founded by Amancio Ortega has opted to take the opposite path and bring Barcelona closer to its next big corporate campus and build it next to the iconic Three Chimneys, in one of the enclaves of the metropolitan area What else is changing? in recent years. The project plans to move the offices that four of its brands currently have in Tordera (Maresme) to this new space, converting an old industrial land into the new business heart from an area that has been waiting for its opportunity for decades. An industrial floor that is reinvented. The land chosen for this project is the old site of the Schott Ibérica factory, in Sant Adrià de Besòs, which Inditex acquired in 2018. The local town council has approved initially an Urban Improvement Plan that covers nearly 90,000 square meters of land, where the new brand campus and a hypermarket Alcampo relocated to a new building. The new business proposal establishes a clear separation between the commercial use area, to the north, and the Inditex corporate campus, which will occupy most of the complex in the southern area, with 67,243 square meters intended entirely to house different offices of the Inditex brands. Four brands, one campus. The facilities that Inditex has in Tordera and Palafolls (Maresme) today house the headquarters of Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho and Lefties. With the move to Sant Adrià, these Maresme facilities will be able to dedicate themselves exclusively to logisticsstrengthening the group’s distribution capacity for those four chains in all its markets. The Zara and Zara Home offices are the only ones that do not change their location on the Arteixo campus, in its headquarters in La Coruñawho has also experienced a significant expansion with a complex of about 170,000 square meters. In Sant Adrià, the new Inditex campus will add a total of 164,098 m2 built distributed in four buildings with a ground floor and four floors, organized around three interior patios connected on the ground floor. These buildings will house offices, pattern-making workshops, pilot stores, audiovisual production and technology spaces. The locomotive that the neighborhood is waiting for. However, the importance of this move lies in the impact on the local economic fabric that the presence of an industrial giant like Inditex provides. The mayor of Sant Adrià, Filo Cañete, considered that the arrival of Inditex represents an exceptional opportunity to position the municipality as a benchmark for innovation and business activity in the metropolitan area, and highlighted that among the reasons that the company has valued most are the location and “good connectivity in public transport with metro, tram and train.” The campus will bring with it the arrival of around a million workers to a municipality that aspires to become one of the new economic districts of the Barcelona metropolitan area. To this end, the promoters undertake to pay the Sant Adrià City Council some nine million euros to finance two bridges that will connect the campus with the future audiovisual hub of Catalunya Media Citytransfer 10% of the urban use generated and restore the chimney of the old CELO factory, cataloged as Cultural Asset of Local Interest. Our sights set on 2030. The project still has to overcome some steps before becoming a reality. As and how I collected The Newspaperthe town councils of Sant Adrià and Badalona must consolidate the urban plan for the area, necessary by Catalan legislation to authorize large commercial areas of more than 2,500 square meters in municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants. With the municipal decree approved on February 27, 2026, a one-month public information period was opened to present allegations. If the deadlines are met, the partial opening of the campus is planned for 2028, with complete completion of the set towards 2030. Inditex has more than 8,500 employees and more than 170 stores in Catalonia, and this new campus will reinforce the axis between Galicia and Catalonia as the backbone of its global activity. In Xataka | Amancio Ortega is the landlord of Amazon, Primark and Zara: he has charged them almost 1,000 million euros in rent Image | Wikimedia Commons (Margavela), GTRES

If you want to buy a mansion at a bargain price, it’s easier than ever. The only thing is that you will have to move to Dubai

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Dubai and Abu Dhabi have positioned themselves as the favorite destination of the richest people on the planet thanks to very lax taxation and great possibilities to obtain profitability with a rising real estate market. Luxury apartments on the artificial island of Palm Jumeirah, penthouses with views of the Burj Khalifa or luxury mansions on the seafront They were sold in hours to newly arrived millionaires. The Iranian missile attacks on airports, ports and residential areas of the United Arab Emirates have suddenly shattered the image of a safe haven that the region had built for decades. The real estate market, which seemed bulletproof, faces your first challenge: not to sink in the face of the uncertainty of war. ​The boom that no one wanted to stop. The real estate boom in the Emirates is supported mainly by the investments that foreign millionaires have made in the country to obtain your residency. The UAE offered zero income taxes, long-term visas for investors, and political stability that few countries in the area could boast. By 2025, nearly 90% of the UAE’s more than 11 million residents were expatriates, according to data collected by Reuters. The result was an off-plan apartment sales machinery that worked at full capacity. According to the report ‘Dubai Residential Real Estate FY 2025‘ the consulting firm Betterhomes, 65% of real estate transactions in Dubai in 2025 corresponded to off-plan homes that did not yet exist. Promoters launched projects and sold them out in hours. In Abu Dhabi, real estate prices rose by around 32% in 2025 alone from the previous year, according to the report ‘UAE Real Estate Market Review Q4 2025‘ from CBRE. And then the missiles came. On March 4, the markets of Dubai and Abu Dhabi reopened after two days closed due to missile attacks launched by Iran against US interests and its allies in the area. Shares in Aldar Properties, Abu Dhabi’s largest listed developer, and Emaar Properties, the company behind the Burj Khalifa, fell 5% in a single session. The bonds of large developers also collapsed and the debt market, key to financing new developments, was practically blocked for new issues. A senior banking manager in the sector explained to Reuters that his firm canceled that same week a capital raising operation for the UAE real estate market. “Investors are not thinking about investing in the region at the moment,” he said, adding that the risk associated with property in the UAE had become “much higher”. Records and sales at the same time. In the midst of the confusion of the bombings, Dubai closed one of its most striking operations of recent years. A 2,900 m2 apartment in the Aman Residences Dubai project, in the coastal neighborhood of Jumeirah 2, was sold for 422 million dirhams (about $115 million), becoming the third most expensive apartment sale in the history of the emirate. It is only surpassed by an operation of 550 million dirhams in Bugatti Residences in 2025. But at the same time, the platform PanicSelling.xyz, that monitors prices on more than 20,000 luxury properties in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, detected 82 discounts that totaled 14.3 million dollars in just a few days after the Iran attacks. Dale Buckner, CEO of Global Guardian, explained to CNBC that the exodus of expatriates showed no signs of slowing down and that just that morning his company had seven corporate clients looking to evacuate between 1,000 and 3,000 employees. “This situation is similar to Ukraine,” Buckner said. The storm that was already seen coming. What aggravates the situation is that the problems do not only come from outside. JPMorgan analysts they already warned before the attacks that Dubai’s population growth would likely not absorb the 300,000 to 400,000 new homes expected by 2028. The market already had an oversupply problem on the horizon before the missiles arrived. Ryan Lemand, co-founder and CEO of Neovision Wealth Management in Abu Dhabi, summed it up: “Real estate investing depends on stability, visibility and investor confidence, and all of these factors tend to weaken during prolonged periods of geopolitical uncertainty.” The excess real estate supply and a complicated geopolitical situation have kept the interest of investors for properties in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, suggesting the best time to invest in the area. The risk in this case is not in profitability, but in the precision of the missiles. In Xataka | While NEOM builds ski slopes in the desert, Dubai is going in the opposite direction: attracting tourism without going bankrupt Image | Unsplash (Duane Mendes), Wikipedia

he preferred not to move

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Despite having built two business empiresAmancio Ortega does not live in a luxury skyscraper in London or in a penthouse in Miami. Not even in a big capital. Ortega has preferred to settle his residence in La Coruña, the city where he opened your first Zara store in 1975, marking the beginning of what would later become Inditex. Staying in La Coruña reflects not only a personal rootsbut also his taste for stay away from the media spotlight and keep a low profile in front of the press. With just over 250,000 inhabitants, La Coruña has become the refuge of ninth greatest fortune of the world with a heritage of 149,000 million dollars who, instead of living in an ostentatious mansion, has resided for decades in a luxury apartment in the Avenida da Marina area of ​​La Coruña, on the city’s seafront. How much does it cost to be a neighbor of Amancio Ortega? According to published AD, Amancio Ortega’s usual residence is a large duplex in a classic-style residential building in the historic center. The façade with glass galleries, typical of the city, let in natural light and offer open panoramic views over the marina and the bay. It is not an isolated house or a private chalet, but rather a luxury apartment integrated into an urban fabric with daily activity. There is no record of the size of the house, but estimates based on other nearby properties suggest that it would be in a range between 180 or 220 m2 on several floors. Entering the same residential segment as Ortega’s home means placing yourself in the most exclusive part of the real estate market in La Coruña. In 2026, data from specialized portals show that prices are not uniform within the city. According to data from real estate portals such as Idealista, they establish that the average price of housing in the city is around 2,974 euros/m2 in 2026. However, when we focus on areas of high demand such as the area around Ciudad Vieja, where Amancio Ortega resides, its price shoots up above 3,985 euros/m2. In some cases of buildings with recent rehabilitation, dominant height and direct views of the sea, offers can exceed 4,200 euros/m2. If we take a home of comparable size to that estimated for Ortega’s residence, the purchase price in 2026 would be in a range of between 760,000 euros and more than 850,000 euros. To put it in perspective, that amount would be the equivalent that Amancio Ortega would earn in two hours and 25 minutes of your time. Living on rent would also not be a cheap solution to being a neighbor of a billionaire of the stature of Ortega. The municipal average of La Coruña is around 11 euros/m2 per month. However, in the heart of the historic center and the seafront, rents frequently exceed 14 euros/m2 per month. For a home similar to that of Amancio Ortega, the monthly price could be around 2,800 euros per month. That fee is high for Galicia, but it may even seem cheap when compared to the rents paid in exclusive city neighborhoods like Madrid or Barcelona. The country house and its visits to Madrid In addition to his urban residence in A Coruña, Ortega is owner del Pazo de Drozo, a stately property located in the municipality of Cambre (Anceis), about 17 km from the center of Coruña. The manor is a traditional Galician construction from the 17th century, located on a 4,500 m2 plot with large gardens and a more private and country character. The Anceis property has served as the setting for family events such as the wedding of his daughter Marta Ortegatoday the highest representative of the Ortega family at Inditex as non-executive president of the firm from 2022. Amancio Ortega has built a real estate empire all over the world thanks to dividends obtained from Inditex managed by Pontegadea. However, when the millionaire must travel to the capital to fulfill his business agenda, he stays at the residence that, as as I pointed out Vanitatisthe millionaire bought in the exclusive Milenium building, in front of Madrid’s Puerta de Alcalá. According to collected The Confidentialthe approximate price of the homes on that property was between 15,000 and 20,000 euros per m2, achieving the dubious record of positioning itself as one of the most expensive properties in the capital. In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear Image | GTRES

Intel refuses to be left out of the AI ​​race. Your next move points directly to NVIDIA’s territory

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The AI ​​fever is not only redefining software, it is also turning the map of power in the chip industry upside down. On this new board, the GPU has become the essential engine for building models and scaling data centers, to the point that demand has skyrocketed and placed its main manufacturers in a dominant position. For Intel, the diagnosis is difficult but evident: if the next decade of computing is decided in this area, it is not enough to protect the kingdom of the CPU. Intel’s move. The Santa Clara company has chosen a very specific setting to begin organizing its speech. During an AI Summit organized by Cisco, the company’s CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, said that Intel will start to produce GPUs and has just hired the “chief GPU architect” who will lead that effort. The manager avoided giving details about the name, but he did leave a message consistent with the moment in the sector: the GPU matters and will continue to matter. The missing piece. According to Reutersthe talent hired by Intel is Eric Demers, from Qualcomm. On the other hand, the initiative would fall under the umbrella of Kevork Kechichian, executive vice president and head of Intel’s data center business, incorporated in September within the framework of a series of hires aimed at strengthening the company’s technical profile. AI, before gaming. The nuance is important, because talking about GPU can automatically activate the imagination of graphics cards for gaming, but reality goes in another direction. Intel already has a presence in graphics on the PC, with its Arc productsbut the announcement targets GPUs for AI and data centers. The initiative as a still early plan, with a strategy that will be developed based on customer demand, a coherent approach with an AI infrastructure market where the most intense battle is being fought today. Intel’s corporate moment. According to CNBCthe stock market value has risen in the last year in the heat of optimism about your business foundrybut the company is still mainly dedicated to manufacturing chips for its own catalog. It’s no secret that Intel has lost ground to companies driven by the AI ​​data center wave, and is now taking steps to respond. No relief until 2028. In the same forum, Tan slipped in another element that helps dimension the challenge of AI infrastructure. He spoke of the memory chip shortage which is disrupting the market due to the mismatch between supply and demand, driven by the construction of AI-oriented data centers. That environment is giving manufacturers room to continue raising prices, and Tan was blunt in describing AI as the “biggest challenge” to memory. He also released an estimate that leaves little room for optimism: he stated that he does not expect “no relief until 2028.” Images | Brecht Corbeel In Xataka | Goodbye to the duopoly of Intel and AMD in Windows: the arrival of NVIDIA processors is imminent and brings 8 laptops under its arm

monitor every move of Russia and China in the Arctic

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First World War II and then the Cold War turned Greenland into a magnificent surveillance platform belonging to Denmark but granting the United States a VIP pass that it now wants to switch to annexation. Because that piece of frozen land (less and less) has rare earthsbut the most attractive thing has always been its strategic location. Old radars are not enough. The melting of Greenland has opened new sea routes that Russia and China have welcomed with open arms. the advantages it offers compared to traditional routes. Of the 15 military bases that the US had in Greenland in 1945, now only one remains: the Pituffik Air Base or Thule. And a problem: outdated and insufficient systems to monitor what happens there, such as acknowledged the Pentagon first and the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies after. So they have gotten to work to solve it: the United States Department of Defense agency responsible for the development of cutting-edge technologies for military use (DARPA) has requested a new technology collected in Frosty. This program aims to develop new radars that operate reliably in the harsh Arctic environment. DARPA is seeking proposals capable of detecting aerial targets at least 75 kilometers away with a detection probability greater than 90%. The coveted new polar “silk road”. The launch of this new radar is important because it would mean having a real lookout in the Arctic and on the new route that has appeared so that the great world powers can gain commercial and military advantage. China has already made clear what do you want be a “great polar power”“. The immediate advantage is reduce shipping times to Europe from up to 50 days to less than half (on its route through Suez). This recent academic article In its security report, the United States Coast Guard reviews other possible risks such as the expansion of its fishing grounds, access to natural resources for scientific cooperation and mentions the existence of its advanced fleet of modern icebreakers and Chinese submarines capable of operating under the ice. Spoiler: With current technology, they are difficult to detect from the surface. For Russia, the new passage route that is being opened is a threat to the current North Sea route, which operates under its jurisdiction. Furthermore, Greenland is part of the GIUK bottleneck (shared with the United Kingdom and Iceland) that its northern fleet must pass through to reach the open waters of the Atlantic, at the gates of the United States. We are talking about nuclear submarines as advanced as the Borei-A class and the Yasen-M. Also at stake is the sovereignty of the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain range that links it to Greenland, which could eventually give it exclusive rights to vast hydrocarbon reserves. And that’s without talking about the massive rare earth deposits The technical challenge of being so far north. The northern lights are very beautiful, but they generate a huge amount of electromagnetic noise when they occur. Since the Earth’s magnetic field lines also converge at the North Pole, the ionosphere is unstablegenerating scintillation that corrupts the GPS signal and absorption in the polar cap. In short, conventional radars not only fall short, but sometimes also go blind. The DARPA wish list. What the US agency wants It is essentially transforming the electromagnetic chaos of the Arctic into a detection tool with a brain in the form of processing software with advanced algorithms that dynamically “filter” interference from geomagnetic storms to isolate potential threats. Furthermore, it would not be a single giant antenna, but rather a mesh of small mobile nodes that share data to triangulate targets. These are the radars you request: A passive environmental noise radar that does not simply emit a signal and wait for the bounce, but uses natural radio frequency noise from the environment to detect objects. That is, it does not treat noise as an interference, but as a source. If a ship passes through that noise, it generates a disturbance that can be detected. Radars Over-the-Horizon that, unlike line-of-sight ones, which travel in a straight line and collide with the curvature of the Earth, these are capable of bouncing waves off the ionosphere to be able to detect objects beyond the Earth’s curvature. They are indicated to detect maritime vessels or aircraft flying at low altitude, thus evading conventional radars. An externally illuminated radar with high-power transmitters located at great distances as power sources, like Alaska’s HAARPwhich allows objects to be illuminated indirectly. For when. As mark your roadmapthe receipt of industry proposals for the tender ended on January 30 and the next 18 months will focus on algorithm development, offline implementation and laboratory testing. Between 2027 and 2028, the integration of the software into real hardware would take place, with field tests in Point Barrow and Poker Flat, Alaska. Therefore, to see this new and ambitious radar network in action we will have to wait until 2028. In Xataka | Russia and China already had an advantage over the US in the Arctic. After Greenland, it has multiplied In Xataka | Now that Europe has sent its troops to Greenland, a question emerges that no one wants to ask: what happens if the US invades it? Cover | JoAnne Castagna / US Army Corps of Engineers (Public domain)

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