Emerging Europe

A brutal July sell-off in AI chip shares has caught out many retail investors. Whether prices return to their highs is the loudest question. Mark Zuckerberg did not buy or sell a single chip, yet on July 1 his company set off the sharpest fall in semiconductor shares in years. Bloomberg reported that day that Meta planned to rent out spare computing power to other firms through a new arm, Meta Compute. Mike Intrator’s CoreWeave, which does little else, fell almost 14 per cent the next session

Football needs no reinvention. FIFA, the non-profit that runs it, has decided to put a fifth of its commercial heart up for sale regardless. The three-minute hydration breaks at the recent FIFA World Cup, ostensibly introduced to allow players to take on water during matches but widely seen as a tool to allow TV rights holders to show more adverts, were summarily booed by match going supporters and criticised by commentators for interrupting the flow of the game. No longer is football a game

A struggling firm reaches for artificial intelligence as it once reached for innovation. Neither saves a business the sums no longer favour. Lip-Bu Tan took charge of Intel in March 2025 and started cutting almost at once. His predecessor, Pat Gelsinger, had shed around 15,000 jobs before the board pushed him out that December; by late July Tan had axed roughly 21,000 more and scrapped planned fabrication plants in Germany and Poland. Intel had spent decades at the frontier of chip design, an

Ukrainian drones have choked Kazakhstan’s main oil route through Russia. Romania is most exposed, and Astana is now hedging each bet it has. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev picked his moment. On July 25, seated beside Vladimir Putin at a forum in the Siberian city of Omsk, Kazakhstan’s president urged his host to freeze the war in Ukraine and revive the Istanbul 2.0 talks abandoned in 2022. The war’s purpose, he said, was hard to grasp, even for Kazakhstan. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, rejec

A record shortage of truck drivers is now throttling the world’s trade, and this time it will not fix itself when the economy turns. Umberto de Pretto, who runs the International Road Transport Union (IRU), delivered a grim tally this year: 2.9 million lorry-driving jobs standing empty across 18 markets, 11 per cent of the workforce and the highest the group had recorded. The number had not fallen even as freight demand cooled. The shortage had “deepened as a critical structural issue”, de Pr

The Last Word: One more client might buy some time, one more initiative may create some new energy, but neither is enough to save a company. Ask IT companies what is holding them back and the answer comes quickly: they need another client. One more contract will ease the pressure, fill the pipeline and give the team room to breathe. It sounds reasonable and sometimes it is even true but I have seen this pattern too often to accept it at face value. The new client arrives, everyone celebrat

Europe built its export growth on being the trustworthy alternative in a suspicious world. The question the next 18 months will answer is whether the region’s compliance infrastructure can grow as fast as its order books. The US Justice and Homeland Security departments published a joint trade fraud enforcement guide on July 14 as their task force claimed over one billion US dollars in recoveries, penalties, forfeitures, and publicly charged losses. The guide centers on the US import system.

A wave of costly failures has humbled vertical farming. Its next chapter is now being written underground, and it looks far more affordable. In July Jacob Nickles and his colleagues lowered themselves 1.1 kilometres beneath England’s North Yorkshire moors, past the dark-matter detectors, and planted a crop. Their farm, in a working polyhalite mine near Whitby, is now the deepest in the world. Nickles, who co-leads the controlled-environment group at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for

The rush to colonise the heavens says more about the urge to flee Earth than to save it. Its real worth may lie a good deal closer to home. In April four astronauts flew around the Moon and came home, the first humans to travel that far since 1972. While Artemis II did not land, instead looping around the far side, taking some amazing photographs and then splashing down in the Pacific, the mission thrilled hundreds of millions of people who followed its every move, from launch to reentry, wi

Unicorns are badges of honour for many countries, but the success of a start-up ecosystem cannot be measured by mythical creatures alone. Just six months after Cast AI, an automation platform for cloud native and AI workloads, crossed the billion-dollar mark, Lithuania has produced another unicorn. With Oxylabs, a web intelligence and data infrastructure provider, reaching a 3.6 billion US dollars (3.1 billion euros) valuation following a 130 million US dollars investment from Warburg Pinc

The Western Balkans IT sector has turned a difficult history into a key selling point, and clients are increasingly willing to pay for it. Three World Bank economists, Sanja Madzarevic-Sujster, Richard Record, and Natasha Rovo, called their 2023 report looking at the six economies of the Western Balkans region (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia) Testing Resilience. The title was a good fit. Few countries in Europe have seen their resilience tested (b

A court has freed Marine Le Pen to seek the French presidency. A victory would let a founding member corrode the European Union from within. A news cycle focused on the renewal of hostilities in the Middle East, the World Cup, the sharp fall in the value of tech stocks (particularly semiconductors), a change of prime minister in the United Kingdom and an unprecedented heatwave across most of western Europe meant that a decision taken by a Paris court on July 7 went largely unnoticed. The d

High-speed rail sells saved minutes. Most passengers would settle for a train that turns up, runs often and meets a second train on arrival. Apostolos Tzitzikostas and Raffaele Fitto stood up in Brussels in November 2025 to launch the European Commission’s high-speed rail action plan, which proposes some 345 billion euros by 2040, and perhaps 550 billion by 2050, on a network joining the Union’s capitals. The transport commissioner promised Berlin to Copenhagen in four hours rather than seven

The Last Word: Reinvention is the ability to turn learning into a different path. It means changing what you do, and how you create value. I read an interview with Natalia Hatalska, a futurologist, trendwatcher, researcher, and the founder and CEO of infuture.institute in Poland. Apparently, she does not like being called a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball. Fair enough, foresight is not fortune-telling, but after reading her answer to the question of what are the two most importan

Before any organisation can work in four days what it previously did in five, it needs to answer a question that most companies have never seriously asked: Where does the time actually go? The four-day working week is no longer a fringe idea. Pilots across the United Kingdom, Iceland, Germany, and Portugal have produced results that are hard to dismiss—employee wellbeing up, productivity stable or improved, and retention stronger. Governments are taking notice. Trade unions are pushing for le

The money to rebuild Ukraine is being lined up behind public guarantees. Most of it moves only once Russia’s war has finally come to an end. Dominykas Tuckus had a figure to share. On June 25, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk, the Amber Infrastructure executive said the European Flagship Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine had gathered roughly 260 million euros in commitments, 220 million of it first-loss equity from the European Commission and the development banks of France,

The Last Word: Heat turns assumptions into evidence. The firms that wait for normal to return are confusing relief with genuine readiness. I am writing this from London, which is doing what London often does in a crisis: pretending, with admirable understatement, that things are broadly fine. They are not. The air is heavy, the pavements radiate heat, and the city’s older buildings seem to have been designed on the assumption that summer would remain a pleasant rumour.  Still, there is c

Albania’s flamingos can’t be bribed, and the peaceful revolution they sparked is the cheapest, easiest win the West will find in the Western Balkans. At dawn on the Narta Lagoon, before the heat settles over the salt pans, the flamingos stand in a long pink line between the water and the Adriatic. They have wintered and bred along this coast longer than anyone here can remember. But at the end of this month, they should expect visitors. A delegation of European members of parliament will tr

Conferences spent decades selling the big idea. Now, the business has learned that what people pay for is access, and is rebuilding to suit. When Eric Newcomer hosted the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit in March 2023, he borrowed an empty office from Max Child and James Wilsterman, two founders of a voice-gaming startup, and spent the day shushing billionaires. Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque divided the audience over whether he was a visionary or a huckster. One guest left and put more than a b

Few countries succeed as discreetly as Slovenia does. The low profile rather flatters the place, but capital follows attention, not modesty. Of Europe’s smaller countries, it’s arguably Estonia that these days gets the most attention. Its digital society is by now world-renowned, a model for digitalisation from Mongolia to Costa Rica. Politically it punches above its weight too, not least as former prime minister Kaja Kallas is now the European Union’s foreign policy chief, a high profile rol