problem

Xiaomi has made profits selling cars in its first year. The problem is that it has optimized for an unrepeatable moment

by

Xiaomi Auto, Xiaomi’s car division, reported a few weeks ago something that is considered impossible in the automobile industry: achieving profits in its first year. It has had a healthy gross margin of 25.5% and a net profit of 680 million yuan, about 82 million euros, thanks to 109,000 cars delivered in a single quarter. Barely a year after selling its first car, the division presents numbers that place a newcomer in the same range as BMW or Mercedes. One that took Tesla years to reach and one that other manufacturers like NIO are still not there. Some They died trying to get there. Lei Jun has executed an impeccable launch and his investors have reason to be impressed, but if we take a closer look at the numbers and break down the origin of the margins (something that must be attributed to Poe Zhao’s wonderful analysis in Hello China Tech), a different story appears: that of a company that has perfectly optimized for a moment that will not be repeated. Two figures: The average price per car in the third quarter was 238,000 yuan (about 29,000 euros). The broadest category was close to 260,000 (about 32,000 euros). Those numbers They are not representative of the market that Xiaomi wants to addressbut rather they represent a temporary concentration. In that quarter, many units of the SU7 Ultra and other premium configurations. The first buyers (the biggest fans of the brand, those who wanted to be the first to drive a Xiaomi) ordered the most expensive versions. It’s not that Xiaomi has fooled anyone, it’s the natural dynamic of any technological launch. The early adopters They always buy the higher versions. The testmotto is to confuse that initial demand with sustained market demand. The 25.5% margin does not validate your business model, it only tells you that you have sold the right product to the right people at the right time. The question is what happens when those people run out. Lu Weibing, president of the group, made this clear in the presentation of results. It said auto margins will likely fall in 2026 due to “competitive factors and normalization of the product mix.” It’s careful business language, but lto translation is simple: When you’re done delivering premium configurations and have to sell entry-level versions to maintain volume, you’re going to find out how much it really costs to compete in this market. Apple experienced something similar with the first Apple Watch. The first few quarters showed spectacular margins, but those numbers reflected sales to enthusiasts willing to pay for novelty, not sustained demand from a mature category. They had to learn to sell beyond the circle of fans. The difference is that Apple was not competing in a market with structural overcapacity and price wars. Xiaomi yes. Xiaomi competes in a Chinese electric vehicle industry where overcapacity is systemicgovernment subsidies have an imminent expiration date and the competition is fierce. There is another detail that should worry: Xiaomi is delivering cars faster than it is selling them. They are consuming the backlog of accumulated orders at a rate that exceeds the entry of new orders. An optimized factory running at maximum capacity is impressive, but if demand is not growing at the same rate, you have built production capacity for a level of demand that you have not yet proven exists. What is coming in 2026 is a kind of convergence of pressures: The portfolio of premium configurations will be exhausted. Subsidies will disappear. And security regulations will be tightened. Xiaomi will have to demonstrate that it can be profitable by selling cheaper cars, without public aid and meeting stricter standards. It is the moment when companies that built a real business are separated from those that surfed favorable temporary conditions. The trap of early profitability is not that the numbers are false. It’s that they make you believe that you have solved the problem when you have only optimized for the easier phase. The real test of Xiaomi Auto is not whether it can make quality cars (it has already proven this) but whether it can build a car business that works when the novelty wears off and it has to compete car for car with rivals that cannot afford to lose. That answer is not in the third quarter report. It’s coming. In Xataka | Xiaomi is no longer a brand: there are several brands fighting over the same logo Featured image | Xiaomi

Europe has experienced its cleanest electric Christmas. The problem is what comes next

by

Europe has just said goodbye to the “cleanest” Christmas in its recent history in electrical terms, but the sector’s toast has been bittersweet. While families celebrated the holidays with electricity prices at a minimum, in the offices of regulators and analysis centers a very different scenario was already being drawn for the near future. We have the sun, we have the wind and we have broken production records, but the system shows signs of exhaustion. The success of this Christmas is, in reality, a reminder of the paradox that the continent is experiencing: we have never produced so much clean energy and, yet, the specter of gas, the saturation of the networks and an imminent rise in regulated costs threaten to spoil the party from 2026. The milestones of December. The fourth week of December 2025 will be recorded as an oasis of low prices. According to data from AleaSoft Energy Forecastingthe prices of the main European electricity markets fell significantly, with weekly averages below €85/MWh. In the Iberian Peninsula, the MIBEL market led this trend with a drop of 20%, the largest percentage decrease on the continent. This phenomenon, dubbed by analysts as the “Christmas effect”, is due to the combination of lower demand due to the festive break and a massive increase in wind and solar production, which put downward pressure on prices across almost the entire continent. The deployment of clean energies. As the report detailssolar photovoltaic production increased by 48% in Portugal and 21% in Spain during the week of December 22. This push was not exclusive to the peninsula: Germany, Italy and France set new historical highs for photovoltaic production for a day in December (Germany generated 87 GWh on the 25th). For its part, wind production maintained its upward trend, rising by 80% in Italy and 21% in Spain. According to the monthly report of OMIEthis force of the wind had already been brewing since November, the month in which wind energy reached a market share of 39.7% in the Spanish system. Abundance vs. rigidity. Despite these records, the transition faces critical obstacles: the disconnection between generation and the capacity to absorb it. According to AleaSoft forecastsAlthough solar production continues to grow, the European grid shows signs of saturation as demand falls. The technical problem is that, at times of maximum solar production and low demand, the system has nowhere to store the surplus. This forces prices collapse non-structurallywhich in the long term puts the profitability of new investments in check. Furthermore, added to this is a fiscal anomaly since in much of Europe, electricity is still burdened with tolls and taxes that make it up to three times more expensive than gas for the end user, slowing down the adoption of efficient technologies. like heat pumps. The Spanish case: the danger of bottlenecks. In Spain, this situation is especially delicate. The country has converted in a “case study on the dangers of saturation.” The lack of investment in networks (only 30 cents for every euro invested in renewables) has caused the curtailment —clean energy that is wasted because the grid cannot transport it—has tripled. The example most critical is Asturias. The network in the central Asturian area is at the technical limit; No more storage projects or new industry can be connected because the cables and transformers cannot support any more load. Furthermore, to avoid blackouts, Red Eléctrica operates in “reinforced mode”activating expensive gas plants to stabilize the tension, an extra cost that ends up in the citizens’ bill. A structural January slope. This Christmas’s price relief could be temporary. AleaSoft Energy Forecasting warns that future of CO2 have reached their highest closing prices since October 2024 (above €88/t), and TTF gas remains stressed due to low temperatures and European reserves below 65%. And in Spain we have to add the regulatory horizon of 2026. As we have detailedthe largest simultaneous increase in fixed costs in years is expected: transport tolls will rise by 12.1% and government charges by 10.5%. There is a real risk of returning to the tariff deficit if electricity demand does not grow as much as the Government expects, which would generate new structural debt in the system. The challenge of not dying of success. The European energy transition has shown that it can expel fossil fuels in certain days. However, this triumph has collided with an insurmountable physical reality: obsolete networks and a cost structure that still penalizes electricity. Christmas 2025 has given us a green market, but the shadow of 2026 reminds us that it is not enough to fill the landscape with mirrors and windmills. Without a real commitment to batteries, a modernization of cables and a reform of regulated costs, the abundance of clean energy will remain a mirage that fades just before reaching our pockets. Image | freepik Xataka | 2026 has not yet started but it has already managed to produce the first bad news: the light goes up

In Spain there are many graduates. The problem is that they are not the ones that companies need.

by

a study on educational quality in Europe has put in black and white one of the keys to what is happening in the labor market in Spain: Graduate rates in Spain have exceeded the European average. However, the data suggests that these graduates have studied the wrong races. The result is a mismatch in the labor market and a inefficient use of talent because an important part of those who have spent years training end up in positions that either do not require that level of education or have nothing to do with the studies they completed. ​Many university students, many vacancies. According to the report ‘Education and Training Monitor‘ Prepared by the European Commission, in the age group of 25 to 34 years, 52.6% of people in Spain have higher education. This places Spain above the EU average, with 44.1%, and the European goal of 45% set for 2030. This is great news since Spain has already exceeded the European goal for graduates, and even so it continues to expand that advantage year after year. The problem is that all these graduates do not respond to what the labor market is demanding. According to Eurostat data By 2024, 35% of higher education graduates aged 20 to 64 are working in jobs for which their level of qualification is not required, compared to an EU average of 21.9%. Spain is at the rate of highest overqualification in all of Europe. What is studied and what is needed. The European Commission emphasizes that this mismatch between the higher education courses being taken in Spain and the demand from companies is structural and that the Spanish economic system is not being able to absorb the volume of graduates it generates. ​The European report describes a low employability of graduates in humanities, social studies and arts, who are more likely to end up in jobs below their educational level or far from the field they studied. In parallel, it is noted that overqualification affects women to a greater extent than men, which aggravates the gender inequalities in qualified employment. On the other hand, the demand for specialists in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), grows much faster than the supply of graduates. In 2024, the number of vacancies per worker in the green and digital sectors will exceed the average by 52% and 212% respectively, showing a growing gap between the skills coming out of the education system and those requested by companies. ​FP is taking off, but it’s not enough. The Vocational Training figures in Spain progress positivelybut they have not yet reached the point of balance between the supply of training and the demand for professionals. According to the study, only 10.1% of adults aged 25 to 64 have a mid-level VET qualification, well below the 34.6% average in the EU. This lower presence of intermediate qualifications translates into worse employment results. The data suggests that the average employment rate in 2024 of recent VET graduates is 68.6%, compared to the 80.0% European average and far from the target of 82%. Connecting education and business improves job placement. The dual vocational training reform It does seem to show signs of a positive impact on job placement. According to data From the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports, 73.8% of mid-level vocational training graduates in dual modality from the 2019-2020 academic year were working four years after finishing, compared to 66.5% of those who completed non-dual vocational training programs. Furthermore, 33.8% of dual vocational training students got a job in the first year after graduating, which confirms that direct contact with the company facilitates the transition to the labor market. In Xataka | Spain has a big problem with the generational change in the labor market: there is a lack of 3.5 million young workers Image | Unsplash (Christian Lendl)

The exorbitant deployment of data centers for AI has a new problem: salt caverns

by

In the collective imagination, artificial intelligence is an ethereal cloud of algorithms. The reality is much more complex and what we know for sure is that an energy eater that needs to “eat” constantly. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has summarized with unusual crudeness: “The problem is no longer that it is missing Nvidia chips, but that there are not enough plugs.” And so that these plugs have power 24 hours a day with the 99.999% reliability that the sector demands, Big Tech has ended up looking where no one expected: thousands of meters below the ground, towards the salt caverns. When the bits hit the underground. The AI ​​race has entered a “slow start” phase in the construction of these underground caverns, which could hinder the rollout of data centers. According to Fortunethe reason is mathematical since these digital infrastructures do not tolerate interruptions and require extreme reliability. To guarantee this constant flow, natural gas has become the indispensable backup. However, as they explain, it is not enough to produce gas; you have to save it. Industry projections indicate that only about half of the storage that will be needed to meet future demand has been planned. Without these artificial caves dug thousands of meters below the surface, hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Meta) are left at the mercy of gas pipelines, vulnerable to corrosion, landslides or extreme weather events. But why salt caverns? The technical answer lies in flexibility. As detailed by experts in Fortunethere are two ways to store gas: in depleted oil fields or in salt caverns. The former are cheaper, but structurally slow. The gas is injected in summer and extracted in winter, following a classic seasonal cycle. AI, on the other hand, does not understand seasons. Their demand peaks are constant, sudden and difficult to predict. The salt caverns, created by injecting water to leach the mineral, act as a high-pressure lung: they allow gas to be injected and extracted with a much higher frequency, adapting to the volatility of the electrical grid that powers the servers. The “supercycle 2.0”. Given this scenario, companies like Enbridge they have taken the lead. Greg Ebel, CEO of the company, has confirmed that they are expanding their facilities in Egan (Louisiana) and Moss Bluff (Texas). “This demand dramatically changes the economics of supply,” he said. But it is not enough. Jack Weixel East Daley Analytics analystwarns that double the capacity currently planned is needed. Projects such as the Freeport Energy Storage Hub (FRESH), in Houston, They seek to connect up to 17 gas pipelines to a new salt dome by 2028, but construction times—often exceeding four years—clash with the urgency of AI. For his part, Jim Goetz, CEO of Trinity Gas Storage, defines it as the “storage supercycle 2.0”. His company has just reached the final investment decision (FID) to expand its capacity in East Texas, seeking to support critical infrastructures such as Stargate, the titanic $500 billion project from OpenAI and Microsoft. The shadow of a doubt. The underlying question is not only whether the salt caverns work—they work—but what type of energy system they are consolidating. Natural gas is fast, flexible and reliable, but it also introduces new dependencies and risks. According to analystsgas infrastructure on the Gulf Coast is especially vulnerable to extreme weather events. A direct hurricane over Texas or Louisiana can disrupt production, exports and transportation at the same time. In that scenario, even with gas available in other regionsthe lack of nearby storage can leave data centers without electrical backup. Added to this is the question of price. The sustained increase in demand to fuel data centers, LNG exports and reindustrialization is already pushing up gas and electricity bills. Without enough storage capacity, that volatility is amplified. As the sector points out, storage acts as a buffer; when it is missing, the peaks transferred directly to the consumer. Furthermore, the criticism is more structural since AI is pushing to prolong dependence on fossil fuels just when governments and companies were committed to reducing it. Look beyond the gas. Aware of this physical limit, large technology companies are no longer looking only at salt caverns and gas pipelines. They look for any firm source of electricity that does not depend exclusively on the traditional energy market. An example is Fervo Energy, a geothermal startup that has just closed one of the largest financing rounds in the sector, with Google as an investor and client. His commitment to advanced geothermal —constant electricity 24 hours a day—reflects the extent to which AI is redrawing the energy map. This is not an immediate or universal solution, but it is a clear signal: the problem is no longer technological, but energy-based. A problem only in the United States? The United States is the epicenter, but not the only scenario. The clash between AI and energy is global, although responses vary. In Europe, the rise of AI is leading to rethinking the closure of gas and coal plants. Some electricity companies are negotiating to convert old plants into data centers, taking advantage of their access to the network, water and already depreciated infrastructure. The logic is the same: firm, immediate and available energy. China, for its part, has chosen another path. Beijing not only promotes underwater data centers either large energy clusters in interior provinces, but directly subsidizes the electricity that powers its AI. The objective is to reduce the “fuel” of digital models and compensate for the lower energy efficiency of national chips compared to those from Nvidia. The return to the underground. In all cases, the pattern repeats itself. Renewables are growing, but not fast enough or with the stability necessary to sustain the demand for AI in the short term. Gas – with salt caverns, temporary turbines or recycled plants – becomes the inevitable crutch. In our race to create an intelligence that lives on the plane of ideas, we have ended up returning to mining, drilling, and the depths of the Earth. The future … Read more

AI has allowed developers to program faster than ever. That’s turning out to be a problem.

by

Whoever has tried it knows it. Programming with AI can be wonderful. Especially if you have (almost) no idea about programming. This is where generative AI models have seen their first and probably only revolution. The developers were the first to be able to embrace this new technology. The appearance of GitHub Copilot in 2021 It showed us that it was no longer necessary to chop so much code, because the machine was already doing it for you, and since then the advance of generative AI in the field of programming has been overwhelming. The question is: has it been positive? The answer is not at all clear. It is evident that AI has allowed: That millions of people who were not programmers could turn their ideas for applications and games into a reality. That millions of professionals can save time by not having to write repetitive code (boilerplate) to focus on other more important and productive parts of your work The industry, of course, has been especially insistent with this vision of the transformation of this segment. Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) and Sundar Pichai (CEO of Alphabet/Google) already boasted months ago that about 25% of the code generated by their companies is generated by AI. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang went further and made it clear that At this point no one should learn to program anymore because the AI ​​would do it for us. These are very forceful statements, but behind them lies another reality: that All that glitters is not gold in the world of AI for programmers. At MIT Technology Review they have spoken with more than 30 developers and experts in this field and have reached interesting conclusions. AI is a better programmer than ever. At least, according to the benchmarks In August 2024 OpenAI made a unique launch: presented SWE-bench Verifieda benchmark intended to measure the ability of generative AI models to program. At that time, the best of the models was only capable of solving 33% of the tests proposed by that benchmark. A year later the best models already exceed 70%. Current ranking of the best models according to the SWE-bench Verified benchmark. Several already pass 70% of the tests. Source: SWE-bench. The evolution in this area has been dizzying and we have witnessed the birth of that new modality programming called “vibe coding” and all the big ones have developed powerful programming tools to take advantage of the pull. We have OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, or Claude Code, for example, but they have been added startups like Cursor either Windsurfing who have also known how to take advantage of this fever for programming with AI. All of these tools promise basically the same thing: that you will program more and better. Productivity theoretically skyrockets, and while more code is certainly being written than ever thanks to AI, programmers They have gone from writing their own code to reviewing what machines generate. Recent studies reveal that veteran developers who believed they had been more productive actually they weren’t. Their estimate was that they had been 20% faster by being able to move forward without blockages, but in reality they had taken 19% longer than they would have taken without AI, according to the tests carried out. There is another problem too: code quality is not necessarily goodand as we say, developers must review that code before being able to use it in production. In the latest survey from Stack Overflow, one of the largest developer communities in the world, there was a notable fact: The positive perception of AI tools had decreased: it was 70% in 2024, and 60% in 2025. There are limitations, but even so everything has already changed Those interviewed by MIT Technology Review generally agreed with its conclusions. Generative AI programming tools are great for producing repetitive code, writing tests, fixing bugs, or explaining code to new developers. However, they still have important limitations, and the most notable is his short memory. These models are only capable of handling a fraction of the workload in professional environments: if your code is large, the AI ​​model may not be able to “consume” it and understand it all at once. For small projects, great. For large developments, probably not so much. The problem of hallucinations also affects the code, and in repositories with a multitude of components, AI models can end up getting lost and not understanding the structure and its interconnections. The problems are there, and they can end up accumulating and causing exactly the opposite of what they wanted to avoid. Several experts, however, explained in that text how it is actually difficult to go back. Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, explained that “the days of coding every line of code by hand are likely behind us.” Erin Yepis, an analyst at Stack Overflow, indicated that although this unbridled optimism towards AI has fallen somewhat, that is actually a sign of something else: that programmers embrace this technology, but they do so assuming its risks. And then there is another reality. One that is repeated day after day and that seems undeniable. The AI ​​we have today is the worst of all those we will have in the future. It may not be tomorrow or next week, but it is clear that the AI ​​you program will end up getting better and better. And there may come a point when those limitations disappear. Whether they do it or not, what is clear is that AI has changed programming forever. Image | Mohammad Rahmani In Xataka | OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into mainstream AI. In the business world the game is being won by its great rival

Spanish banks have no problem letting you buy cryptocurrencies. What they don’t want to do is advise you on them.

by

In March 2025 BBVA he stuck out his chest. It was the first large traditional bank in Spain that allowed its clients to operate in cryptocurrencies. Then other entities such as CaixaBank and OpenBank followed. In all of these cases there is a crucial detail: one thing is that they let you operate with cryptos. It’s quite another to advise you on how to do it. You cook it, you eat it. That traditional banking has made this move is definitive proof that cryptocurrencies have managed to convince even this very conservative sector. But these institutions are not willing to risk too much, so although they allow their clients to buy or sell cryptocurrencies, they leave all responsibility to the client: they do not advise or advise. And it’s not likely that they will. Nobody wants to advise. A report published by the ESMA and the EBA reveals that the vast majority of entities follow the same pattern: they allow trading with cryptocurrencies, but do not advise clients about them. Of the 110 entities that have achieved authorization of the MiCA regulation in Europe, only 20 have requested to provide crypto advice. 11 provide recommendations (like eToro) and another nine offer portfolio management. There is a clear reason why these entities leave the ball in the clients’ court. Too much risk. Caution is absolute not only on the part of traditional banking, but also of traditional exchanges or trading markets. These entities, which have traditionally been the only resource for users to operate with cryptocurrencies, have never offered advisory services, and one was clear when investing that they assumed full responsibility for their actions. The surprise is that exactly the same thing happens with traditional banking. They ignore it, and they do so because they have no interest in advising: the reputational risk is too high, and the volatility of these assets makes it especially difficult to make reliable recommendations. Crypto analyzes guarantee (almost) nothing. As explained in five days Gliroia Hernández Aler, co-founder and partner of finReg360, “Crypto assets have the value that the market assigns to them. By not having an underlying that can be analyzed, such as an income statement, for example, it is difficult to base advice on objective data. Although there is more and more news that can impact bitcoin, it is difficult to do a quantitative analysis with traditional methods.” MiCA opened the market. Europe wanted to try to regularize that “wild west” that the crypto market had become. To this end, in mid-2023 it approved the MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets) regulation, a European regulation to regularize this activity. Among other things, it offers consumer and investor protection and establishes measures to prevent market abuses. Banks as the new exchanges. We had to wait two years to see how the first banks took advantage of this regulation, but little by little more and more entities joined in. The message was clear: you no longer have to resort to “mysterious” cryptocurrency trading markets (exchanges). You can buy at your usual bank. Image | BBVA | André Francois McKenzie In Xataka | A British man was not allowed to look for his bitcoin disk in the trash for years: now he is considering buying the landfill

The runaway price of RAM threatens more expensive phones than ever. And that’s not even the biggest problem

by

Neither the car nor the house, the new indicator that someone is good pasta is the RAM memory that you have available. The RAM crisis is extremea price increase planned for 2026 that will hit the entire industry. Such is the seriousness of the matterthere are already those who predict that the manufacturers of telephones are considering returning to figures of the past: the 4 GB of unified RAM for smartphones of the next year. Samsung has doubled the price of DDR5 RAM after running out of stock, a movement that completely threatens the entire smartphone industry. And no, RAM is not just an element to ensure the fluidity of the mobile phone and efficient multitasking: RAM is a pillar on which the advancement of technology itself depends. How to know the components of your PC (RAM, Graphics, CPU…) and the state they are in The rise in prices. In just six months, RAM prices have skyrocketed between 100% and 400%. Giants like Samsung and SK Hynix are allocating around 40% of its resources to supply RAM to Stargatethe OpenAI infrastructure. Consequence: the RAM market has entered a valley of scarcity. The 4 GB of RAM. There are clear pillars for not recommending a phone even to my worst enemy: That it does not have good update support. That has a processor that can’t handle basic apps. That has less than 6 GB of RAM There are already those who predict that 4 GB of RAM will return in 2026a significant leap back even for entry-level devices, where 6GB of RAM was starting to become the standard. What they didn’t tell you about RAM. Advances in RAM go far beyond basic performance in multitasking and everyday apps. RAM memory is one of the vital organs of any smartphone, and the advances in it are what have allowed us, today, to have smartphones that are much more capable than those of years ago. Local AI processing– Without sufficient RAM, it is not possible to run local AI models. He iPhone 15 is the best example. Photographic quality: functions such as processing HDRcomputational zoom, and even the processing of the photograph itself (subsequently processed RAW data) depend largely on the mobile phone’s ability to move all that data in RAM. Exactly the same applies to video recording. Multi-window and multitasking: Multitasking is not just about not having a heavy game crash while you browse in Chrome. It’s that Google Maps can run in the background without slowing down your phone, that YouTube can run in mode PiP (window), that your keyboard is capable of managing translations and corrections in real time in any heavy app, etc. Gaming experience: We usually focus on CPU and GPU when thinking about a mobile phone capable of running a heavy game, but RAM is essential to avoid microcuts, speed up loading times despite having open apps, and ensure that the game will not close in the middle of a game. The consequences. We have been complaining for the last few years that there is hardly any real progress in smartphones and that, perhaps, we are close to their peak. But there are nuances in this interpretation. We have never had humble mobile phones with AI implementation, the ability to move triple A games on budget devicesand such a positive experience in practically any product range. The RAM crisis is a major brake on the advancement of upcoming proposals, and may make it more than likely that some 2026 phones will end up performing worse than their predecessors. There is no solution in sight. DDR5 RAM, although it has been on the market since SK Hynix released it in 2020is not common in entry-level proposals. DDR4 RAM is still the standard here and, unfortunately, so is its price. has been increasing by close to 200% in recent months. More expensive RAM, more expensive mobile phones or mobile phones with less RAM. Image | Xataka In Xataka | How to know how much RAM you have and what type it is, in Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux

Europe is the world leader in heat pump manufacturing. The only problem is that Europeans don’t use them

by

Not to get grandiose, but Europe has never had so many renewables underwayhad never made so much clean technology and never had talked so much about energy independence. And yet, winter has arrived again and the ritual is always the same: turning on the heating still means burning imported gas. Although if we reach this point it is not for lack of alternatives, because they are there. The problem is much more mundane: in much of the continent, heating with electricity it’s still more expensive than doing it with gas. The energy shock that changed everything. A recent EMBER report has detailed how Europe abruptly lost access to cheap Russian gas and had to replace it with much more expensive liquefied natural gas in a highly volatile global market. The result was an unprecedented price shock: an accumulated extra cost of 930 billion euros during the energy crisis. More on fossils. Far from being a problem caused by the green transition, the document indicates that the impact was concentrated precisely in the sectors most dependent on imported fossil fuels. Energy-intensive industries reduced production and, in many cases, never returned to pre-Ukraine war levels. This reading coincides with that presented by researcher Jan Rosenowwho rejects the idea that dismantling climate policies would make energy cheaper. The problem, he maintains, was not going too fast, but rather having delayed electrification for decades and having kept gas as the pillar of the system. Here the central contradiction emerges. According to EMBERheat pumps are a mature, efficient and strategic technology: they produce between two and three times more heat than a gas boiler for each unit of energy consumed. Even if that electricity came entirely from a gas plant, the net fuel savings would still exist. However, in practice, the technological advantage is diluted in the bill. In most EU countries, electricity costs 2 to 4 times more than gas for the end consumer. The average electricity-gas ratio in the EU is 2.85, and in some member states it exceeds 4. The problem: the pricing structure. As pointed out in the consultancynon-energy costs —taxes, tolls and public policy surcharges— can represent up to three quarters of the final price of electricity, while gas maintains a much lower tax burden. The result is an obvious distortion: the most efficient technology appears expensive and the most polluting technology appears affordable. You save but not. For an average home, this anomaly has a direct effect, since changing systems reduces energy consumption, but it does not always reduce the bill. And when that happens, adoption slows down. Furthermore, the data confirm that this is not a cultural or climatic issue, but rather an economic one. In countries like the Netherlands, where electricity is only slightly more expensive than gas, heat pump sales are soaring. On the other hand, in Germany, Poland or Hungary —where electricity can cost more than three times as much as gas—, adoption is much lower. The lever that remains to be activated. Solutions exist and many are immediately applicable: transferring the costs of electricity policies to public budgets, reducing electricity VAT, taxing fossil gas more coherently or implementing specific rates for heat pumps. From there, technological deployment is no longer a promise, but a reality. In fact, Europe leads the global heat pump industrywith manufacturers such as Bosch, Vaillant, NIBE or Danfoss, and with industrial projects that already operate on a large scale. These are not prototypes or pilots, but rather functioning infrastructure. Real limits and tensions. None of this eliminates obstacles. Europe still need gas to stabilize its electrical grid. The infrastructures are stressed, the flexibility of the system is insufficient and any cold winter can send prices skyrocketing again. Added to this are the physical frictions of the transition. The massive expansion of offshore wind in the North Sea is generating unprecedented conflicts between countries due to the so-called “wake effect”, which reduces the production of neighboring parks. Electrification is not only a matter of political will, but also of technical coordination and supranational planning. The anomaly that Europe has not yet corrected. Europe already has the technology, the industry and the climate goals. What it has not yet corrected is a basic anomaly: fiscally penalizing electricity while de facto subsidizing fossil gas. As long as that distortion persists, heat pumps will continue to advance more slowly than data, engineering, and economic common sense would allow. As the EMBER report concludeselectrifying heating is not a green whim, but a strategy for energy security, industrial competitiveness and price stability. The transition is not about inventing new machines, but about deciding which energy is made cheaper and which is left behind. And today, in Europe, that decision continues to be reflected—very clearly—in the invoice. Image | freepik Xataka | While the US and China dominate different sectors, Europe leads an unexpected leadership: heat pumps

All tech companies are putting AI in all their products. The problem is that nobody wants them

by

It’s been a year and a half and it seems like 10 have passed. In May 2024, Microsoft announced the launching Windows Recallan artificial intelligence option that allowed us to remember and recover things we had done on our PC. It seemed like an interesting idea, but soon he was criticized his approach to privacy and security and the company had to delay it and then relaunch it without making too much noise. That was one of those AI features that promised to transform our PC experience, but three years after the launch of ChatGPT, one thing is certain: AI has not meant no revolution. Not at least on the PC, we insist. Microsoft, of course, has not stopped adding more and more AI functions to Windows 11. We have co-pilots and theoretically revolutionary functions to bore, and that obsession with putting AI even in the soup has been demonstrated with the legendary Notepadwhich has gone from being a minimalist app to one that is losing focus. Microsoft’s reasons are legitimate: they have invested a real fortune in AI and they will want to take advantage of it. Surely the intention was good (at least, in part) when it came to offering new ways of working and enjoying our PC. The problem is that good intentions have caused just the opposite of what Microsoft intended. Instead of us wanting to use Windows 11 more and more, is making us want to use it less and less. We have seen it with renewed interest for some Linux distributionsbut also with the appearance of an app that is exclusively dedicated to eradicating Windows 11 any trace of AI functions. AI fatigue The same thing is happening with AI browsers. Comet, Day and Atlas They are two striking proposals for this integration of AI functions, but neither of them seems to have caught on, and Microsoft Edge – which of course has integrated Copilot – has not proposed any change in trend either: the browsers we want to use, at least for the moment, continue to be the traditional ones, without AI. And there is the key. In what We users have not asked for so much AI. That is precisely the great criticism of these industry efforts to boast that their products have AI. Those two magic letters no longer get expectations. What they are starting to get is rejection. Firefox is the latest example. Mozilla has just appointed a new CEO, and in its first public statement it pointed out its intention to transform Firefox into a product in which AI was the central axis. The users of this browser – and I count myself among them – are not at all clear, and the unified response message has been clear: “Firefox does not need AI, but rather listen to its users“. What has happened and is happening with Windows 11 and Firefox shows that we are entering a new stage in which AI no longer excites, but rather fatigues. It’s everywhere: The list is of course much longer, and in many cases there is another added problem: that AI is the excuse to raise prices. Microsoft is here again a notable example with Microsoft 365but we have also seen it in Adobe, which He raised the price to his customers right off the bat because now they could enjoy an AI that they had not asked for. It’s happening everywhere because the promised AI revolution still hasn’t happened. There are, of course, areas in which it has proven to be transformative—programming is the clear case—but in many others that acronym has lost its meaning. The industry’s commitment to making this work is logical: companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars invested with the idea that this was going to explode… and so far it hasn’t. But they continue to fill everything with AI. And as often happens, that’s the bad thing. It tires you a lot…And if we haven’t asked for it, even more so. In Xataka | Adobe has presented itself as the champion of copyright in the AI ​​era. Now we know that maybe not so much

Ukraine’s biggest problem is not Russia. There are three European countries trapped in a perverse mechanism: type C accounts

by

Europe faces a decision that goes far beyond an accounting discussion and that defines its strategic credibility: what to do with the more than 210,000 million of euros of Russian assets frozen since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. The problem is twofold, because it is not just about figures, but about what comes after activating the operation. The European crossroads. Yes, because the question is not only whether that money should be used to support kyiv at a critical moment, but whether the European Union is capable to take the risks political, legal and economic implications of doing so. As Washington presses for a quick exit to the conflict and reduces its financial support, Brussels finds itself caught between the urgency of avoiding a Ukrainian defeat and the fear of unleashing a russian retaliation that directly hits several of its Member States. Putin clearly. Statements this week by Vladimir Putinloaded with contempt for European elites and confidence in a protracted war, are not simple rhetoric. Moscow makes it clear that it is not contemplating real concessions and that it considers the use of its frozen assets as theft that demands a response. That response would not be symbolic, but surgical: selective seizures, accelerated nationalizations, endless litigation and the use of the Russian financial system as a weapon. The message, a priori, is unequivocal: if Europe crosses the line, Russia will not only punish Ukraine on the battlefield, but also European countries that still have exposed economic interests within their territory. The real blockage. I remembered this morning the financial times he crux of the whole situation. Although the debate is presented as a struggle between hawks and cautions, the real blockage comes from a handful of countries specific, with Belgium, Italy and Austria at the head. It is not a question of ideology, but of direct vulnerability. Belgium hosts Euroclear, the warehouse that guards most of the frozen Russian assets, and fears becoming the first target of retaliation judicial and economic. Italy and Austria, for their part, maintain banks and companies with billions trapped in Russia, benefits included, which they cannot repatriate. For these countries, authorizing the use of Russian money is not an abstract foreign policy decision, but rather an immediate risk to their financial and corporate systems. Type C accounts: the ace of Moscow. At the center of this fear are the calls type C accountsthe mechanism created by Moscow to withhold dividends, interest and assets from Western companies. That money, formally owned by European and American companies, is under Russian control and can be frozen, redistributed or directly transferred to the state budget with a simple decree. For the Kremlin, these accounts are a retaliation tool fast and effective, far superior in agility to slow Western judicial processes. For Europe, they are an invisible chain that binds entire governments when making strategic decisions, because any false step can translate into lost billions and internal political crises. Germany pushes, Europe hesitates. Germany has become the main political engine of the plan to use Russian assets, convinced that without that money there is no realistic way to support Ukraine for another two years without skyrocketing the European debt or depending on impossible unanimity. Berlin insists that the risk must be shared among everyone and that failure to act would send a devastating sign: Europe is not capable of defending its own security. However, this logic collides with the reality of countries that feel that the risk is not distributed, but rather concentrated in their national balance sheetsits banks and its courts. A (bad) peace as a threat. This financial blockade occurs in an even more disturbing context: European fear to an imposed peace on terms favorable to Russia. For many capitals, an agreement that consolidates Moscow’s territorial gains would not only leave Ukraine defenseless, but would force Europe to prepare for a scenario direct confrontation in the medium term, with longer borders, a strengthened Russian army and a weakened European deterrent. In this framework, the frozen Russian money stops being a tactical lever and becomes a strategic investment: either it is used now to support Ukraine, or it is paid for later in the form of massive rearmament and risk of war. The final dilemma. In short, the European Union has frozen Russian assets to prevent them from returning to Moscow without reparations, but now it must decide whether it dares to give the next step. Without that money, Ukraine could run out of liquidity in a matter of months, losing all negotiating power and forcing a deal from weakness. With him, Europe is exposed to reprisals, litigation and immediate economic losses, concentrated in a few countries that are currently holding back the decision. The crossroads are clear: assume the political and financial cost now, or accept that the fear of type C accounts determine European security policy. Not only the future of Ukraine is at stake in that election, but also Europe’s ability to act as a coherent geopolitical actor when your own interests are at risk. Image | RawPixel In Xataka | A missile has been bombarding Ukraine’s defenses for weeks. What no one could imagine is that he is not Russian: he is from the West In Xataka | A day later the satellites leave no doubt: Russia fortified a bridge, and a Ukrainian drone made science fiction a reality

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.