HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade.

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Iceland’s National Security Council formally labelled the possible collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) a national security risk in September — the first time the country has applied such a designation to a climate impact.

The move followed a government briefing on new research that raised “grave concerns” about the system’s future stability.

Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson, Iceland’s minister for environment, energy and climate, said the risks extend far beyond weather.

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Italy is on general strike for the third time in less than three months, following a call by the grassroots union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB). Pickets, industrial actions, and demonstrations were organized in over 40 cities, with massive rallies demanding an end to rearmament plans and the war budget shaped by Giorgia Meloni’s government.

On Friday, workers stressed that their mobilization is tied both to worsening material conditions at home and to international events, specifically the struggle of the Palestinian people – whose fate, they insist, is inseparable from Europe’s expanding war economy. As a result, those striking today reiterated their commitment to join the national march for Palestine in Rome, taking place on Saturday, November 29.

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Switzerland has long been a haven for the ultra rich. Its 300 wealthiest residents are worth a combined 850 billion Swiss Francs, or just over $1 trillion, according to business magazine Bilanz. But on Sunday, voters will go to the polls to vote on an inheritance tax that has riled them up.

The proposal to tax every inheritance and gift of more than 50 million Swiss Francs at 50% is likely to be defeated. A recent poll put support at just 30%.

But close followers of the debate told CNBC the initiative has shaken wealthy individuals and family-owned companies since it was proposed in 2024. Swiss billionaire Peter Spuhler, founder and owner of Stadler Rail, has threatened to leave the country if the tax becomes law. He told told Swiss daily Tagesanzeiger that his family would struggle to pay such a tax as their wealth is tied up in companies.

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Dr. Rajiv J. Shah – former USAID administrator and onetime head of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now president of the Rockefeller Foundation – announced a “next-gen storytelling” partnership with the world’s top YouTube creator, MrBeast.
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Rockefeller Foundation president Dr. Rajiv Shah told AP News that MrBeast can emotionally connect with younger generations in ways that traditional philanthropy has failed to do.

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The virus does not affect humans but is highly contagious and fatal for pigs, and an outbreak is potentially devastating for the country’s pork industry.

Agriculture Minister Luis Planas said on Saturday the government wanted to limit the economic impact on the agricultural sector “as much as possible”.

Spain, the world’s third largest producer of pork and pork derivatives, exports almost three million tonnes each year to more than 100 countries, Planas told a press conference.

But he said a third of those countries had halted imports from Spain — an automatic safety measure when African swine flu is detected.

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Adding up the three subtotals, we get a grand total for being a Santa Claus as $642 billion per year. This is even more than the federal government spends, which shows how impractical it is to become a Santa Claus.

Still, there might be some potential income for Santa. Huge sums of money could be extorted from people by the bad information that Santa’s detectives get. Santa might also get to claim his 600,000 elves as dependents on his tax forms. His detectives could claim to be unemployed, and thus collect welfare and unemployment checks from the government. Santa could incorporate and collect royalties on the use of his image from corporations. Best of all, Santa’s free gifts might drive corporations into bankruptcy, and he could take over all economic activity in the United States, with all of its potential for profit. Santa could then proceed to take over the economies of many extremely rich nations, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and thus assure himself of enough money to run his operations.

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In July 2024, I flew to a pop-up city named Vitalia that aimed to “make death optional.” Situated in the heart of a special economic zone on Roatan, a Honduran island, Vitalia advertised itself as a place to fast-track drug research outside of America’s burdensome regulatory constraints.

The AI-generated pictures I’d seen made it look sleek and futuristic, like a cross between South Beach Miami and The Jetsons. Since its launch seven months before, Vitalia had attracted scientists, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts—among them longevity guru Bryan Johnson and Balaji S. Srinivasan, the author of The Network State. The special economic zone in which Vitalia was located, Próspera, claimed on its website that a company could go to market 10 to 100 times faster there than the United States, which requires three phases of trials—testing first for safety, then for dosage and efficacy within a given population—before a product can be advertised or sold. Many drugs fail in what’s called the “valley of death” between promising early studies and the outcome of Phase 2 or 3 trials; 90 percent of drugs don’t make it through a process that can, all told, cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Vitalia joined a growing number of special economic zones and bespoke cities sprouting up around the world, usually to provide some form of relaxed taxation or regulation. Many are targeting medical innovation, trying to attract a new class of scientist you might call clinical nomads—those attempting to do research outside the traditional pathways. A 2022 report found that 82 special economic zones were attempting to lure genetic engineering startups to set up shop. India’s Genome Valley is hosting around 200 companies that will enjoy streamlined regulatory approval. Dubai Science Park offers 100 percent tax-free status to foreign-owned companies focused on the life sciences. The Technopolis Moscow Special Economic Zone, in Russia, is testing three gene therapies derived from a person’s own cells.

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Bloomberg reports that the latest delayed BLS data shows a sharp deterioration in white-collar jobs, especially those holding four-year degrees, now making up a record 25% of all unemployed – or about 1.9 million folks, the highest level since 1992.

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The White House has been silent on how the firm will be paid and on the total costs of the project. There has been no comment on whether the project will be paid for by taxpayers or through some other means.

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