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For many decades, students have been steered toward a singular path: go to college, or risk falling behind. It’s a message that took hold in the 1970s and 80s, when school districts removed shop classes—once designed to introduce students to trades like carpentry, welding, and electrical work.

To the detriment of young people today, learning a trade was downgraded as the fallback option, a “vocational consolation prize,” according to Mike Rowe, best known for his stint hosting Dirty Jobs, a show that highlighted the dirtiest—and most essential—jobs in America. 

That shift ultimately “scared parents to death,” Rowe said last week alongside BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the company’s 2026 Infrastructure Summit. Even with the financial burden of following the college path exploding. And now Gen Z are paying the price.

“Nothing in the history of western civilization has gotten more expensive more quickly than a four-year degree,” Rowe said. “It’s not to say it’s not valuable, but I mean nothing—not real estate, not healthcare, not energy.” 

At least in recent decades, the data backs him up. Between 1983 and 2025, the cost of college tuition has significantly outpaced every other household expense, according to analysis by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

It’s collectively left young people facing a perfect storm: soaring student loan debt, degrees that don’t translate into stable careers, and an AI-obsessed job market that’s only growing more uncertain. Millions of Gen Z are ending up as NEET—not in employment, education, or training—and stuck in a limbo that college was supposed to prevent.

Simply put, “the kids are not alright,” Rowe said. “If I had an alarm bell, I would ring it.”

Data center electricians are making upwards of $280,000 a year, according to Mike Rowe

That mismatch has created a stark labor imbalance: too many young people chasing degrees, and not enough trained workers to fill critical, in-demand jobs.

Nowhere is that clearer than in parts of the economy tied to the AI boom, where skilled labor is commanding salaries that rival—or exceed—traditional white-collar roles.

During a recent visit to a data center in Plano, Texas, Rowe said he met three electricians—all under 30 years old—earning between $240,000 and $280,000 a year—with no college debt. Even more striking: all three had been poached three times in the previous 18 months.

Electricians, in particular, have emerged as some of the most in-demand—and AI-resistant—professions as companies race to build the infrastructure powering AI. An estimated 300,000 new electricians will be needed over the next decade, on top of replacing roughly 200,000 upcoming retirees.

But the shortage extends far beyond a single trade. Across industries, demand for skilled labor is surging. At Rowe’s foundation, which supports trade training, applications have jumped tenfold over the past year—a sign, he said, that interest may finally be catching up with opportunity.

“Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from the leader of some consequential industry who is freaking out in real time,” he said, pointing to the fact that professions like shipbuilders, welders, and plumbers are all in need hundreds of thousands of workers to meet growing labor demands.

But moving forward, Rowe said what’s emerging is a new reality where post-secondary education is no longer treated as one-size-fits-all—with skills becoming the clearer signal of opportunity.

“This is the trap and it’s so easy to fall into it,” he said. Blue collar versus white collar, shop class versus Brown or Dartmouth. Solar versus nuclear, wind versus fossil—bull crap. None of that, the color of collars is over.”

Mike Rowe isn’t alone—the CEOs of BlackRock, Nvidia, and Ford are worried about skilled trade shortages

Rowe may be best known as a reality TV host—but his feeling about the need for skilled trade workers is being increasingly reinforced by the nation’s top CEOs.

BlackRock’s Larry Fink said in the panel with Rowe that AI will only expand the demand for skilled trade, but the education system hasn’t properly set young people up for success.

“AI is going to create a lot of skilled jobs needs, and the biggest issue confronting our country today and other countries is the speed at which this change is occurring,” Fink said. Just last week, BlackRock announced an investment of $100 million in the training of skilled trade workers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also warned that the skilled workers needed to build the physical backbone of AI—from chip factories to data centers—are already in short supply.

“The labor required to support this buildout is enormous. AI factories need electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, steelworkers, network technicians, installers and operators,” Huang wrote in a blog post released earlier this month.

“These are skilled, well-paid jobs, and they are in short supply. You do not need a PhD in computer science to participate in this transformation.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley has echoed concerns about a shortage of manually skilled workers.
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Farley told the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast earlier this year. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and tradesmen. It’s a very serious thing.”

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Business leaders are split on if AI will trigger a jobs armageddon or usher in “super interesting” gigs of the future. And Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick believes the veil is finally lifting on the reality of tech-driven workplace disruption: there’s “another side” to the story, where human employees are more powerful than ever before.

“Until we get super [artificial general intelligence], humans are valuable,” Kalanick said recently on the TBPN podcast. “And they are going to become more and more valuable, because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress.”

The serial entrepreneur and CloudKitchens CEO uses one blue-collar profession as an example: plumbers. 

If every job in the world was automated except for plumbers, those human workers would be “extremely valuable” because they’re critically essential to the success of expanding infrastructure. New buildings couldn’t be made unless plumbers were readily available—and there would be “so much efficiency everywhere” that they would need millions of people for the task. 

Kalanick also confronted the possibility that all human workers could one day be replaced by super AGI. Still, he offered an optimistic, “white-pilled” take on the situation: new “solutions” will emerge, and there’s no need to fret about a work wipeout—for now.

“Until we get there, I believe we’re going to be super fine,” he continued. “That’s my white pill.”

The CEOs who believe AI will create ‘better’ jobs and ‘superhuman’ working skills

While many workers are hand-wringing over the fate of their careers, there are several CEOs who believe humans will be turbocharged rather than crushed by AI. 

The CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, believes that AI will actually create new jobs that leverage the tools and “are actually better.” He told Wired in a 2025 interview that so long as everything goes well, the tech will bring about a “golden era” of radical abundance within the next decade. 

Instead of being a job-killer, he predicted AGI will actually be a win for society, curing disease, increasing lifespans, and finding new energy sources starting 2030.

“If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy,” Hassabis continued, adding that AI will serve as “these incredible tools that supercharge our productivity and actually almost make us a little bit superhuman.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also insisted that the coming decade could be the most exciting time in history to start a career, despite the percolating anxiety around AI automation. Echoing Hassabis’ projection, Altman sees massive potential for new human work in space. These universe-explorers will get paid cushy salaries, and will feel “so bad for you and I that we had to do this really boring, old work and everything is just better.”

“In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job,” Altman told journalist Cleo Abram last year. 

Leaders are also lauding the idea that AI will give workers “superhuman” skills—and as the technology advances, it’ll only get better. Instead of being a career threat, Nvidia leader Jensen Huang said that AI gives his peers wings in an industry innovating at breakneck speed. 

“I’m surrounded by superhuman people and super intelligence, from my perspective, because they’re the best in the world at what they do,” Huang told Abram in a 2025 episode. “And they do what they do way better than I can do it. And I’m surrounded by thousands of them. Yet it never one day caused me to think, all of a sudden, I’m no longer necessary.”

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Bitcoin dipped below the $70,000 level for the first time in over a week, as stocks sank and energy prices surged following renewed attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency fell as much as 2.7% to $69,308 on Thursday, extending a decline from the previous day, when Bitcoin saw its largest drop in three weeks. Other cryptocurrencies such as Ether, BNB and XRP also declined. 

“Bitcoin has likely run out of steam in the short term after dropping nearly 5% over the past 24 hours, with a pullback toward $65,000, a possible outcome in the coming days,” said Robin Singh, chief executive officer of crypto tax platform Koinly. Price action is likely to remain between $65,000 and $75,000 in the coming weeks, he added.

Escalating tensions around the conflict in Iran have triggered a broad risk-off attitude across global markets, with Japanese equities suffering their longest slump since April and European equities falling across the board. Futures for the S&P 500 slipped after the US benchmark wiped out gains for the week in the previous session.

The moves followed Iranian attacks on a major liquefied natural gas site in Qatar, deepening concerns that the war in the Middle East will stoke inflation and hit growth. Brent prices surged to $115 a barrel on Thursday, while European natural gas rose as much as 35%.

“The spectre of stagflation is hovering, with the combination of rising prices and stagnating growth posing a real threat,” Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, said in a note Thursday.

Bitcoin had touched a six-week high of almost $76,000 earlier in the week, as momentum appeared to recover temporarily. The token remains in positive territory over the last month, providing a rare bright spot while other macro assets have been subdued by the conflict, according to Joel Kruger, markets strategist at LMAX Group.

“It is possible that cryptocurrencies were simply unable to ignore the significant deterioration in external sentiment,” added Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro. “Overall, however, we maintain a more pessimistic view, anticipating the bear market will continue, with bulls likely to be beaten soon, not least due to macro factors.”

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The wrong question about the Paris trade talks isn’t whether they succeeded. It’s why anyone expected them to. China’s negotiating position was set long before anyone sat down at OECD headquarters — and it does not depend on what happens in any meeting room.

After 60 years advising CEOs and boards across the United States, Europe, and Asia — including decades working with Chinese companies and serving on Chinese boards — what came out of Paris only confirmed what I have told business leaders for months: China is not negotiating from uncertainty. It is negotiating from structural advantage.

Both sides called the talks “constructive.” Both described the atmosphere as “remarkably stable.” Both agreed to continue consultations. That is diplomatic language for something more fundamental: no resolution is possible because each side wants what the other cannot give.

China’s position does not depend on what happens in any meeting room. Its exports are still expected to grow 10% to 15% in 2026. Across most industrial categories, there is still no alternative supply chain that can match China on both quality and price. Business leaders I speak with daily are increasing imports from China—not because they want to, but because they have no viable substitute.

That reality is the foundation of Xi Jinping’s confidence. China ran a $1.2 trillion trade surplus in 2025 and is on track to generate at least $1.25 trillion in export earnings this year. No negotiation will quickly change that. Xi is not bargaining from weakness; he is bargaining from a position built over three decades.

That is why the concessions China offered in Paris were predictable. Increased openness to U.S. agricultural imports. A reaffirmation of soybean purchases. Limited discussions around energy and critical minerals. These are real concessions, but they are tactical. They create the appearance of reciprocity while preserving what matters most.

What China ultimately wants is not agricultural trade. It is technology—first semiconductors, then, over time, aerospace.

In recent conversations with senior executives at one of the world’s major aircraft engine manufacturers, a consistent assessment emerged: Chinese firms may already have many of the necessary jet engine designs. The constraint is not design. It is industrialization. Turning those designs into engines that can be produced reliably at scale remains a capability concentrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. As one executive put it to me, “They may have the drawings, but they cannot yet build them at scale.”

This is the gap Beijing is quietly probing in every round of negotiations. It rarely makes headlines, but it is central to China’s long-term strategy.

Much attention is likely to focus on potential reductions in Chinese subsidies. These will be framed as significant concessions. But they are unlikely to change pricing dynamics in any meaningful way. China’s industries operate with massive excess capacity. When survival depends on volume, companies price aggressively with or without government support. The system is already self-sustaining.

This is why tariffs have limited effect. Tariffs operate on margins. China’s advantage is structural: scale, infrastructure, workforce capability, and coordinated state support built over decades. Those advantages cannot be offset in a few years through tariff policy.

Against this backdrop, the delay of the Beijing summit should not be misunderstood. It is not a cost to Xi. It is a benefit.

China has built substantial energy insulation, including large crude stockpiles and a decade-long investment in solar, batteries, and electric vehicles. As global energy markets tighten, China is better positioned than most major economies. At the same time, prolonged geopolitical tension—whether in the Middle East or elsewhere—diverts U.S. focus and increases strategic complexity for Washington.

Time favors the more patient player. And China has made patience a core element of its strategy.

Any eventual agreements will also be reversible. Both sides will retain the ability to pause commitments. Xi is not giving away structural advantages permanently. He never does.

For CEOs, the implications are immediate. The Paris talks did not change the trajectory, and the Beijing summit is unlikely to do so no matter when it happens.

The question is no longer what governments will decide. It is what business leaders will do.

Companies need a clear, unvarnished view of their dependencies: which inputs are irreplaceable, where alternative sourcing is possible, and how operations would respond to disruptions in rare earths, semiconductors, or key industrial components. The most critical risk is not gradual change but sudden interruption—the possibility that China could restrict supply of essential inputs with little warning.

Some CEOs have already mapped these scenarios and built contingency plans. Others are still waiting for policy clarity that may never come.

The reality is this: The United States is buying time to rebuild. China is using time to consolidate. Neither side is stepping back.

The leaders who recognize that dynamic—and act on it now—will shape the next decade. Those waiting for a breakthrough from a summit will find that, quietly, their options have narrowed.

The wake-up call has already sounded. The only question is who is ready to respond.

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President Donald Trump’s memecoin team is inviting top holders out to a meal—again. Last week, the outfit behind the $TRUMP cryptocurrency announced that there will be a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience at the Trump family’s private club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in late April, according to the conference’s website. 

Attendees to the “THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CRYPTO & BUSINESS CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD” will have access to a gala luncheon where the President is advertised as a keynote speaker. Moreover, “18 global superstars” will be in attendance, though the website advertising the conference didn’t say who these “global giants” are. In the hours after the announcement, the price of Trump’s memecoin soared almost 60%, according to data from Binance, though it’s declined in price since.

Here’s what we do and don’t know about the second outing for the biggest holders of the President’s memecoin: 

What happened last year?

In May 2025, the top 220 holders of Trump’s memecoin—launched just days before his inauguration in January 2025—attended a dinner held at the Trump family’s Virginia golf club. The President himself appeared and spoke briefly to the audience. Critics, including Democratic lawmakers, called the dinner a blatant pay-for–access scheme. “The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself,” a White House spokesperson said at the time to Fortune. 

But even for some attendees who ponied up to see Trump in person, the experience was underwhelming. The meal itself proved to be especially disappointing. “Trash,” Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old social media influencer, texted Fortune while he was at the banquet. “Walmart steak, man.”

What’s happening this year?

In spite of the media circus and crowd of protesters that the last dinner attracted, Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump business partner who’s behind the memecoin, is organizing another event. This time, the attendee list has expanded to include the top 297 holders of $TRUMP. And the top 29 holders will be able to attend a VIP reception with their “FAVORITE PRESIDENT and other superstar guests.” Last year, attendees included infamous crypto billionaire Justin Sun, the former basketball star Lamar Odom, and Jack Lu, the CEO of the NFT marketplace Magic Eden.

Pinto plans to attend again, despite his previous complaints about the food, and other attendees from the last dinner are also considering going this year, he told Fortune. While he sold a portion of his holdings, he still owns about $40,000 in the cryptocurrency. “My parents are actually kind of concerned that I’m spending money to go to another lunch,” Pinto said, saying it’s a second chance to talk to other high-rollers. “Anyone that I didn’t speak to will probably be at this event. I can talk to them again.”

Will President Donald Trump be there?

While the website advertising the conference in all capital letters says the President will be in attendance, a White House official told Fortune that Trump’s attendance isn’t yet confirmed. In fact, the President is confirmed to attend the White House correspondents’ dinner, which is on the same day as the conference, said the official. 

Zanker did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump has confirmed his attendance to the conference or who the “global superstars” are.

Why is Robinhood mentioned?

The page announcing the upcoming conference claims that “Robinhood is the Preferred Platform for the TRUMP Leaderboard.” This leaderboard breaks down who’s accumulated enough of the memecoin to attend the gala luncheon and other festivities. A spokesperson for Robinhood said that the online brokerage is helping its users connect their accounts to the leaderboard to track their Trump memecoin holdings. The company did not pay or get paid for the integration, said the spokesperson.

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A simple question: if you wager (or “invest” or “purchase a contract for”) $100 on who will win the NCAA championship next month, is that a sports bet?

If you said yes, you are probably a normal, rational human being. If you said no, you are probably heavily invested in Kalshi or Polymarket. 

So-called “prediction markets” bill themselves as the future of truth in America – tools of price discovery, engines of transparency, an “economic function” that will help us understand the world. All of that brought to you by the same apps where users can “purchase” a contract that says there’s a 37% chance the Wizards cover the spread against the Pacers.

The truth is unregulated sports betting is the main attraction on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. The overwhelming majority of activity on predictive markets in the U.S. today is sports gambling. Kalshi has put the figure as high as 90%. Illegal sports gambling isn’t a sideshow on these platforms. It’s what’s propelling their eye-popping valuations. 

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s embrace of these platforms has allowed them to bypass state and tribal regulatory frameworks, offer unregulated online sports gambling all across the country, and skirt hundreds of millions in state sports betting taxes. It is telling that in his defense of prediction markets, CFTC Chair Mike Selig did not mention “sports” once, despite it being the primary use case for prediction markets today.

Congress never gave the CFTC authority to regulate online sports betting, a responsibility that the Supreme Court has affirmed lies with the states. The CFTC was created more than 50 years ago to regulate crop futures and has neither the resources, expertise, nor authority to give operators a blank check to offer online sports betting to anyone and everyone anywhere in the country.

Nearly a dozen states have decided so far not to legalize online sports betting, as is their right. States that have legalized online wagering did so with frameworks in place to protect consumers, set age restrictions, and generate new tax income for community projects. Prediction markets that offer online sports betting don’t comply with any of those voter-approved requirements, and those platforms are even seizing on those age restrictions, which they don’t comply with, to target teenagers and get them hooked on sports betting early.

In South Carolina, the state I previously represented, lawmakers have decided to not yet legalize online sports betting. Prediction markets don’t care, and are actively marketing online sports betting in South Carolina today. I applaud Utah Gov. Spencer Cox for vowing to fight these platforms and the CFTC in court. 

The proliferation of predictive market platforms is misleading Americans, particularly our youth, to conflate investing and online sports betting. We are breeding a generation of gamblers in the process.

That is why I am leading a new coalition to pushback on the disinformation that the prediction markets are aggressively pushing in Washington and across the country. Gambling is Not Investing is a new coalition of consumer advocates united in the fight to ensure all forms of online gambling – regardless of what you call it – are appropriately regulated at the state level.

We should stop pretending these platforms are high-minded financial innovations and treat them as what they are: sports betting platforms operating through a regulatory back door. And if they are doing that in states where sports betting is illegal, then those platforms are illegal. 

If states and tribes must earn the right to offer legal sports betting through legislation, licensing, and strict consumer protections, then so should everyone else. Underage users and at-risk gamblers shouldn’t be “trading the future” without guardrails. And companies shouldn’t be allowed to evade state and tribal law simply by swapping the word “bet” for “predict.”

The solution isn’t complicated: regulate this activity as sports betting. Enforce age standards. Require responsible gaming tools. Pay appropriate taxes. Respect state and tribal frameworks. Protect consumers. And stop letting a clever label rewrite the rules.

Because when someone is wagering on a point spread, it isn’t a “prediction.” It’s a bet.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Indonesia’s richest man, Michael Bambang Hartono, who helped turn the Djarum cigarette company into one of the country’s largest business empires and later became a controlling shareholder of Bank Central Asia, Indonesia’s biggest private lender, died Thursday. He was 86.

Hartono died at a hospital in Singapore on Thursday afternoon, the Djarum Group said in a statement.

“With deep sorrow, the extended family of PT Djarum announces the passing of one of our company’s leaders, Michael Bambang Hartono,” the statement said. “We extend our gratitude for his dedication and service.”

The family has not revealed the cause of his death. He had previously acknowledged suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a heart attack.

Hartono and his brother Robert Budi Hartono grew their inherited family business into a conglomerate based in Central Java’s Kudus regency, operating in banking, palm oil plantations, properties, electronics, telecommunications, and an e-commerce platform.

Their flagship company PT Djarum produced dozens of domestic and international brands, primarily kretek, or clove cigarettes, including Djarum Black, Djarum Super and L.A. Lights. The brothers also are the biggest shareholders in Bank Central Asia, Indonesia’s largest bank, which had revenue of 57.5 trillion rupiah ($3.43 billion) last year.

Their net worth was more than $43.8 billion, making the Hartono brothers the wealthiest in Indonesia. Michael Hartono had about $25.1 billion in December 2024, making him the 76th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

In 2004, they won the right to redevelop Hotel Indonesia, a historic site in the heart of Jakarta. They transformed the property into a shopping mall, office, luxury hotel and apartment complex called Grand Indonesia.

Through its parent company, PT Dwimuria Investama Andalan, better known as the Djarum Group, the company has diversified into non‑tobacco businesses, including banking, technology and food.

Djarum also owns PB Djarum, one of Indonesia’s most prominent badminton clubs, whose players have won numerous world championships for Indonesia, and the Italian football club Como. The company was a major sponsor of Indonesia’s top soccer league from 2005 to 2011.

Hartono was also a champion bridge player and the president of the South East Asia Bridge Federation. He received an award from the World Bridge Federation in 2017 for his efforts in making bridge a category in the Asian Games.

He represented Indonesia at the 2018 Asian Games in bridge, winning a bronze medal with his team, making him the oldest Indonesian Asian Games medal winner.

When he and other athletes were honored at the presidential palace for Indonesia’s performance at the Games that year, Hartono received a reward of about $16,700, which he donated to the development of his beloved card game.

Born Oct. 2, 1939, Hartono watched his father roll tobacco with a native clove spice to make the cigarettes Indonesians call “kretek” for the crackling sound made by the burning scented spice. The brothers took over the business upon their father’s death in 1963, worked on developing new blends and began exporting in 1972 to many countries, including the U.S.

They created their first machine-made kretek, the Djarum Filter, in 1976, and introduced the machine-rolled Djarum Super, in 1981.

It is one of the most popular brands in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, where more than 64 million adults smoke daily.

Djarum’s clove products are now marketed as “filtered cigars” and are wrapped in tobacco leaf instead of black paper since the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act banned most flavored cigarettes in the U.S.

Today, about 60,000 workers at their factories manually roll Djarum’s cigarettes, which are sold mostly to lower-income earners.

Hartono is survived by his wife and a son.

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European leaders doubled down Thursday on refusing to join the United States and Israel military campaigns in the Middle East as they met in Brussels to grapple with rising oil and gas prices caused by the war.

European leaders have deflected entreaties from U.S. President Donald Trump to send military assets to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for the global flow of oil, gas and fertilizer. However, rising energy prices because of the war and fears in Europe of a new refugee crisis have pushed leaders to make the Middle East a priority at the summit.

“We are very worried about the energy crisis,” said Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever ahead of the summit. He said that energy prices were too high before the war, but that the conflict “created another spike.”

“If that becomes structural, we’re in deep trouble,” he said.

The summit was initially expected to center on overcoming Hungary’s opposition to a massive loan for Ukraine, but the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon reset the agenda.

European leaders have no ‘appetite’ for joining the war

European leaders have been deeply critical of the Iranian government, but none have offered immediate help to the U.S. Britain is flat-out refusing to be drawn into the war. France says the fighting would have to die down first.

Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said that Europe “will not allow itself to be blackmailed” into joining the United States and Israel military campaign in the Middle East.

“Europe — and Austria as well — will not allow itself to be blackmailed,” he said ahead of the European Council summit of the leaders of the 27 EU nations. “Intervention in the Strait of Hormuz is not an option for Austria anyway.”

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said there was “no appetite” among leaders to expand a European naval force in the Red Sea to help secure the Strait of Hormuz or otherwise join the fray.

Looking ahead to the war’s end

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the war must end before his country can help with matters such as keeping shipping lanes clear.

“We can and will commit ourselves only when the weapons fall silent,” he said of potential German military support to secure shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz. “We can then do a great deal, up to opening sea lanes and keeping them clear, but we’re not doing it during ongoing combat operations.”

He said that would require an international mandate, among other complicated steps, “before we can even consider such an issue.”

While the EU isn’t a party to the conflict, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said he understood the U.S. and Israeli reasons for launching the campaign against the “brutal” Iranian government. He called for the EU to increase both sanctions on Iran and support for Iranian opposition groups

But others blasted the war as “illegal” and destabilizing.

“We are against this war because it is illegal,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said: “It’s causing a lot of damage to civilians, of course, refugees and the economic consequences that the whole world, especially the global south, is already suffering.”

Trump had mentioned NATO support for clearing the Strait of Hormuz but has not officially requested it, said Evika Silina, prime minister of Latvia, one of the 23 out of the 27 EU nations that are NATO members.

“When there will be some official requests, I think we always have to evaluate those requests.”

No single fix for the EU’s diverse energy markets

The European Commission has told leaders it has a mix of financial instruments that member nations could deploy to lower energy prices, which will be up for discussion. No single policy will likely work to blunt the economic shocks from the war across the bloc’s myriad markets from Romania to Ireland.

EU leaders are hoping their experience weaning off of Russian energy in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and of building up the bloc’s military spending towards self-sufficiency will enable to them to do the same for energy independence.

While some European capitals have called for the suspension or scrapping of climate policies to stave off the worst of the recent spike in energy prices because of the war, others have argued that the EU’s long-term energy strategy should be home-grown sustainable energy decoupled from vulnerable fossil fuel markets.

European Council President Antonio Costa said that “energy means security” and that the EU should “build our own capacity to produce our own energy, because it’s the only way to be secure.”

___

Associated Press writers Pietro De Cristofaro, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

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Your next laptop, smartphone, or even refrigerator is going to cost more — and you can thank AI for that. The AI boom has triggered what insiders are calling “RAMageddon”: a gold rush on high-bandwidth memory chips that is squeezing out nearly every other buyer in the global market, driving up prices across consumer electronics and straining industries from automotive to healthcare. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned about the pressure AI infrastructure costs are placing on hardware margins.

The biggest AI players have effectively imposed a tax on the entire economy — and most people have no idea it’s happening.

How the once-affordable memory chip became a luxury good

Modern computing relies on several types of memory. SRAM is the fastest and most expensive; it’s used in small amounts inside processors. DRAM is the workhorse of the group: cheap, abundant, found in everything from laptops to cars to refrigerators. Then there’s High Bandwidth Memory or HBM. This is a specialized, premium form of DRAM that stacks chips die-to-die to achieve dramatically faster data transfer speeds. The cost for this premium memory is quite steep: a single silicon wafer provides 3x as much commodity DRAM as HBM. Fab processing time for HBM is significantly longer too, making the supply problem worse. As a result, producing more HBM equates to fewer total memory chips produced.

For AI training and inference, HBM has become the essential ingredient. It’s the jet fuel that powers the GPUs running today’s largest and most advanced models. 

Memory manufacturers have a limited number of wafers they can produce from each fab, or silicon factory. The same production lines that churn out commodity DRAM for the devices consumers use every day are being allocated to building HBM. It’s a rational business decision: HBM commands premium prices in a volatile industry and comes with massive guaranteed purchase orders. In fact, AI firms and their peers have already locked up HBM supply well into 2027. The result is a tightening of commodity memory supply, rising prices, and longer lead times with ripple effects that touch almost every industry. And right now, the industry’s biggest players have cornered the supply, creating the core tension driving the memory shortage. The AI industry is effectively taxing the entire economy in order to build its own.

The memory wall explained

The scale of AI’s memory appetite is staggering. As model sizes have grown from millions to billions to trillions of parameters and context windows have grown from thousands of tokens to tens of millions of tokens, memory requirements have increased in step, and the architecture of data centers has struggled to keep pace. This is the industry’s “memory wall”: a fundamental bottleneck where memory bandwidth and capacity can’t keep up with the processors demanding it.

HBM was an elegant solution to an earlier version of this problem. When models were smaller (such as GPT-2 and GPT-3), placing memory adjacent to the processors and delivering data at extreme speeds worked well. But we’ve since blown past that era. Today’s frontier models exceed two trillion parameters and the next generation will be over five trillion. A single HBM stack holds about 24 gigabytes. That’s roughly one percent of what today’s workloads actually need and far less than that for the next generation of workloads.

The result is that data centers must now scale out exponentially. They chain together hundreds of processors across servers and racks. At that point, HBM’s killer feature of extreme local bandwidth gets strangled by the comparatively slow links connecting all of these machines. The industry has built a gold-plated solution to the problem: AI companies pay the HBM premium while realizing only diminishing returns on performance.

The AI gold rush leaves most behind

The prevailing narrative frames AI infrastructure investment as broadly good: better for memory makers, better for chip companies, better for innovation everywhere. The reality is more lopsided.

Memory manufacturers may profit in the short term. But the true winner is concentration itself. When the HBM supply is locked up by a handful of hyperscalers, it functions as a moat. Startups, enterprises, and established industries all face higher hardware costs and more limited access to the advanced AI capabilities they need to compete. The companies that can afford to stockpile chips don’t just win today; they entrench advantages that could become impossible to dislodge.

Everyone else is caught in the crossfire. Consumers will pay more for devices with less capability. Businesses face a hardware cost environment that has become more taxing and volatile. And the broader technology ecosystem is competing for memory resources against an industry that has essentially unlimited capital to outbid them.

Charting a more sustainable path for AI and memory

The AI industry loves to talk about democratization: open models, accessible tools, intelligence for everyone. That story is increasingly disconnected from the hardware reality being constructed underneath it.

The current trajectory isn’t sustainable. Pouring more investment into HBM capacity addresses a symptom while ignoring the underlying disease. The industry needs to move beyond its fixation on a single memory architecture designed for an earlier era of AI and invest seriously in new approaches—ones that can meet AI’s demands today, and as they grow a hundredfold in the next few years.

Solving this requires more than ramping up additional HBM fabs. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how memory is architected for AI. What’s needed are memory systems that are smart, fast, and compact — architectures that can scale alongside model growth without requiring brute-force resource consumption. Most importantly, the emerging architecture must make AI accessible to more than just a handful of companies.

The memory wall isn’t just an engineering footnote in AI’s rise. It’s the defining infrastructure challenge of this era. The industry’s current answer of “more HBM, faster, at any cost” is a perilous road that risks eroding competition, innovation, and consumer trust. As an industry, we must find a way to do better, and quickly, before it’s too late. The most immediate relief available is a pivot away from HBM dependency toward commodity DRAM architectures engineered specifically for AI’s requirements. The window to act — before the gap between AI haves and have-nots becomes unbridgeable — is closing fast.

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President Donald Trump is facing perhaps the most daunting question of the war with Iran, one that could define his time in office: Will he put U.S. troops on the ground in Iran to secure some 970 pounds of enriched uranium that Tehran could potentially use to build nuclear weapons?

Trump has offered shifting reasons for launching the war, but he has been consistent in articulating that a primary objective in joining Israel in the military action is ensuring that Iran will “never have a nuclear weapon.”

The president has been more circumspect about how far he’s willing to go to follow through on his pledge to destroy Iran’s weapons program once and for all, including seizing or destroying the near-bomb-grade nuclear material that Iran possesses.

Much of it is believed to be buried under the rubble of a mountain facility pummeled in U.S. bombings Trump ordered last June that he had claimed “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program.

It’s a risky, complicated project that many nuclear experts say cannot be done without a sizable deployment of U.S. troops into Iran, a dangerous and politically fraught operation for the Republican president, who has vowed not to entangle the U.S. in the sort of extended and bloody Middle East conflicts that still loom large on America’s psyche.

At the same time, lawmakers and experts remain concerned that if Iran hard-liners emerge from the fighting, they’ll be more motivated than ever to build nuclear weapons as they look to deter the U.S. and Israel from future military action, a dynamic that makes taking control of Iran’s enriched uranium even more critical. That stockpile could allow Iran to build as many as 10 nuclear bombs, should it decide to weaponize its program.

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., say they remain deeply fearful that the president has put the nation on a path that will require putting troops inside Iran for what he called Trump’s confused and chaotic objectives.

“Some of the objectives that he continues to espouse simply cannot be achieved without a physical presence there — securing the uranium cannot be done without a physical presence,” said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Meanwhile, Republican allies of Trump stress that there are plans in place to deal with the enriched uranium. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman James Risch, R-Idaho, on Wednesday cited “a number of plans that have been put on the table.” He declined to elaborate.

Others acknowledged the complications of deploying troops into Iran.

“No one has given me a briefing on how you would do it without boots on the ground,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It doesn’t mean you can’t. But no one’s ever briefed me about it.”

Scott added it’s not tenable to allow the stockpile to remain: “I think it would be helpful to get rid of it.”

Trump and his advisers are rigidly obtuse

Nearly three weeks into a conflict that’s left hundreds of people dead, tested longtime alliances and brought pain to the global economy, Trump and his top advisers have been rigidly obtuse about their deliberations over Iran’s uranium stockpile.

“I’m not going to talk about that,” Trump said last week when asked about the enriched uranium. “But we have hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we’re not finished yet.”

Later that day, during an appearance in Kentucky, Trump appeared to claim the strikes had already neutralized the threat. “They don’t have nuclear potential,” he said.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters earlier this week that the administration sees no point in telegraphing “what we’re willing to do or how far we’re willing to go” while asserting “we have options, for sure.”

Experts say it’s doable but won’t be easy

Richard Goldberg, who served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction for the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, said that seizing or destroying the enriched uranium is certainly doable, if the president decides to go that route.

The U.S. and Israeli forces have been making strides toward creating the conditions — namely, establishing total air superiority — that would allow for special operations forces operators, who are trained in blowing up centrifuges and dealing with nuclear material, to conduct such an operation if the president decides to go that route.

To be certain, a troops-on-the-ground effort is expected to be far more complicated than other recent high-profile, lightning-strike insertion operations, such as the January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro or the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, Goldberg said. And the likely need to remove rubble to get to the canisters of enriched uranium adds another layer of complexity, because it would require heavy construction equipment.

“But if you actually own the airspace and you can have close air support and drones and everything else up in the sky for pretty wide perimeter, presumably you could do a lot,” said Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told reporters in Washington this week that the assumption is much of the enriched uranium remains in the trio of Iranian nuclear sites bombarded last year by the U.S.

“The impression we have … is that it hasn’t been moved,” said Grossi, adding that a bulk of the material is beneath the rubble at Iran’s Isfahan facility while lesser amounts are at the Natanz and Fordow facilities that were destroyed in last year’s American strikes.

Testifying before a Senate committee on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in her prepared remarks said that the U.S. attacks on Iran had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and buried underground facilities.

Gabbard said the U.S. has been monitoring whether Iran’s leaders will try to restart its nuclear program but said that they have not tried to rebuild their nuclear enrichment capability. She added that the clerical authority overseeing Iranian government has been degraded in Israel’s strikes on its leadership but remains intact.

Brandan Buck, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute, said that an effort to extract or dilute the enriched material would likely take more than 1,000 troops at each Iranian site and would take time to complete.

On the other hand, not acting to secure the enriched uranium also comes with risk. Should Iran’s hard-liners remain in power, and with enriched material, they will now have greater motivation to build a nuclear weapon.

“Trump has put himself between a rock and a hard place,” Buck said. “Throughout this, he has had maximalist aims, but he’s wanted to maintain minimal effort in order to keep the costs low.”

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Associated Press writers Stephen Groves, Matthew Lee and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

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Adobe’s longtime CEO Shantanu Narayen announced he was stepping down last week, a move caused, at least in part, by investors’ impatience with the software company’s AI transition. Abode’s stock has been crushed in the “SaaSpocalypse” market selloff that has hit companies whose per-seat software tools are especially vulnerable to automation. Shares are down 25% year-to-date, and investors weren’t impressed with Adobe’s AI-driven quarterly revenue. 

Narayen’s exit is a stark reminder that, after years of hyping the technology, CEOs now must turn their AI rhetoric into results—or risk being shown the door. The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives. Last year, companies in the S&P 1500 named 168 new CEOs, the highest total in more than 15 years, according to Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm. Already this year, the CEOs of several companies including Lululemon, Disney, Target, and Walmart, have left their roles. 

CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare. All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.

“What we’re seeing right now is clearly a sign of stress,” says Dirk Jenter, professor of finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. AI is only one part of the reason why.

AI hype is becoming a career hazard for corporate leaders

CEOs have been quick to blame recent layoffs of rank-and-file employees on AI, but their own departures are rarely explained so simply. Still, there’s little doubt that expectations around AI are factoring into chief executives’ more frequent departures in one way or another. 

There are circumstances like Narayen’s in which shareholders are displeased with a CEO’s ability to deliver on an AI vision. “Investors are not necessarily super patient,” Jenter says. “They see billions being spent on AI investments, and they see sort of very little in short-term return on investment, and that puts a lot of pressure on company leadership.”

But investors are also expecting CEOs to achieve overall growth on par with the extraordinary gains recorded at companies at the center of the AI revolution, the so-called “Magnificent 7.” 

“There’s increasing pressure on all CEOs to be growing at similar kinds of rates,” says Anthony Nyberg, a management professor at the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business. “[It’s] not actually sustainable or manageable for those companies.”

A surge in shareholder activism is another sign of investors’ growing impatience. Activist campaigns hit an all-time high of 255 last year, surpassing the 2018 record, according to Barclays. U.S. campaigns rose 23%. 

Activists are increasingly targeting CEOs. “Five or ten years ago, activism was largely about corporate policies,” Jenter says. “Now they’re going directly after the top leadership of companies.” Thirty-two U.S. CEOs resigned within a year of an activist campaign, a 38% increase over the four-year average, Barclays’ data shows. 

And then there are instances in which boards tap fresh (often younger) blood to guide companies through the AI transition. Doug McMillon, Walmart’s highly-respected former CEO who, by all accounts, left on his own terms, cited AI in explaining his decision to step down in January. He said his successor, John Furner, was “uniquely capable of leading the company through this next AI‑driven transformation.”

Another force behind the churn: Today’s board directors are less likely to be current or former CEOs than in the past, studies show. Nyberg argues that these less CEO‑centric boards tend to be less sympathetic to sitting chiefs—and perhaps less attuned to the full scope of the job—making them more inclined to support a leadership change.

Experts also argue that CEO turnover is catching up after a backlog from the COVID era, during which boards favored continuity. 

All told, CEOs are getting less time to deliver on their visions. The average tenure for S&P 1500 CEOs hit 8.5 years last year, down from 9.2 years in 2024—and the shortest since 2019. 

The broader CEO churn trend 

The rapid turnover is requiring boards to fulfill their succession planning responsibilities, and they’re increasingly dipping into their companies’ own ranks to replace chief executives. 

The share of externally hired CEOs hit 60% in 2025, up from 57%, a historic low, in 2024. But there are signs that boards have been caught off-guard by the pace of CEO turnover. Nineteen new CEOs were appointed from their company’s board last year, the most since 2020, according to Spencer Stuart, “suggesting that some companies are not ready for succession.” 

Almost always, internal CEO hires lack prior chief executive experience, a trait that shows up in the data. In 2025, 84% of newly appointed S&P 1500 CEOs in 2025 were serving in their first enterprise CEO role, reversing a multiyear trend toward CEOs with prior public-company experience.

Boards often view experienced CEOs as a safer bet, but Spencer Stuart research shows that, compared to veteran chief executives, rookies led their companies to higher market-adjusted total shareholder returns, with less volatility in the stock price.

As the number of first-time CEOs has increased, the age of new CEOs has dropped, hitting 54.4 in 2025, down from 55.8 in 2024. The share of incoming CEOs 60 and above fell to 18%, after hovering near 30% for the past two years.

Even with higher stakes and higher turnover, today’s CEOs are unlikely to garner much sympathy from the wider public. Median chief executive compensation hit $16.5 million in the S&P 500, according to 2025 proxy filings. (Exorbitant pay may actually be one reason two-time CEOs are so rare; few need the money.) 

Still, rapid CEO churn should raise alarm bells outside the boardroom. CEOs who hold onto the job past year ten beat the S&P 500 over the course of their time in the job, more than those in any other length of tenure, Spencer Stuart research shows. “That’s where the greatest shareholder value creation comes in,” says Jim Citrin, chair of the firm’s global CEO practice. “Longer is better.”

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Global energy prices soared Thursday after Iran attacked two oil refineries in Kuwait and a key natural gas facility in Qatar that can supply one-fifth of the world’s liquified natural gas.

The attacks added to fears the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic may be longer and more extensive than feared, with lasting damage to oil and gas production.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose nearly 6% to $113.77 per barrel, up from less than $73 per barrel on the eve of the war. U.S. benchmark crude was less affected by the latest attacks in the Middle East, rising less than 1% to $96.26 per barrel.

The European TTF benchmark for natural gas prices traded 17% higher on Thursday and has doubled in the past month.

The Iranian attack hit the Ras Laffan terminal for shipping out liquefied natural gas in Qatar. Qatar normally supplies some 20% of the world’s consumption of LNG, which can be carried by ship. The facility shut down after a drone attack. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz to most tanker traffic also left the gas with nowhere to go.

If the disruptions from Iran’s attacks on its Gulf Arab neighbors’ energy infrastructure keep oil and gas prices high for long, they could create a debilitating wave of inflation for the global economy.

Markets on Wall Street slipped before the opening bell. Futures for the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average each fell a 0.1%, while Nasdaq futures dipped 0.3%.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve opted to leave its benchmark interest rate alone and projected just one more quarter-point cut this year due to ongoing elevated inflation and uncertainty about the ramifications the Iran war will have on the global economy.

Prices for gold and silver also tumbled, dragging down major mining stocks with them. Gold fell 4% to $4,697 an ounce, while silver slipped 8.7% to $70.80. Most industrial metals also saw their prices fall.

Shares in miners Hecla and Newmont slid 7.8%, while Freeport-McMoRan fell 4.6%.

Markets in Europe and Asia were getting hit much harder than U.S. markets. Germany’s DAX lost 2.4% by midday, the CAC 40 in Paris fell 1.7% and Britain’s FTSE 100 shed 2.1%.

In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 3.4% to 53,372.53 as the Bank of Japan also opted to keep its benchmark interest rate on hold at 0.75%, citing the war with Iran as one factor.

In its monetary policy statement the BOJ said that “in the wake of increased tension in the Middle East, global financial and capital markets have been volatile and crude oil prices have risen significantly; future developments warrant attention.”

Higher oil prices are a heavy burden for Japan, which like South Korea and Taiwan depends on imports of most raw materials for industries that rely heavily on oil and its derivatives.

The Kospi in Seoul lost 2.7% to 5,763.22.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng slipped 2% to 25,500.58, while the Shanghai Composite index shed 1.4% to 4,006.55.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 1.7% to 8,497.80 and Taiwan’s Taiex fell 1.9%. In India, which has also suffered from shocks to supplies of oil and gas, the Sensex lost 2.7%.

“The combination of higher oil, rising U.S. yields, and a stronger dollar is acting as a macro wrecking ball across Asian assets and currencies,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

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Business Writer Matt Ott reported from Washington; McHugh contributed from Frankfurt, Germany.

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The Pentagon is seeking $200 billion in additional funds for the Iran war, a senior administration official says.

The department sent the request to the White House, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private information.

It’s an extraordinarily high number and comes on top of extra funding the Defense Department already received last year in President Donald Trump’s big tax cuts bill.

Congress is bracing for a new spending request but it is not clear the White House has transmitted the request for consideration. It is unclear the spending request would have support.

The new funding request was first reported by The Washington Post. Asked about the figure at a press conference Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not directly confirm the figure, saying it could change. But he said “we’re going back to Congress and our folks there to to ensure that we’re properly funded.”

“It takes money to kill bad guys,” Hegseth said.

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