raises

Repeated blasts at military sites expose the risks facing Syria as it rebuilds its army and consolidates weapons after years of war.

A series of explosions at weapons and ammunition sites across Syria this month have exposed the difficulties facing the country’s military in storing and moving munitions, as the armed forces rebuild after more than a decade of war.

The latest blasts injured at least four people in the early hours of Monday morning at an arms depot in al-Eis, south of Aleppo.

On Friday, a blast in Ayyash, west of Deir Az Zor, killed 11 soldiers. Another on September 9 killed 14 defence ministry personnel in Sarmada, Idlib. Also in Idlib, five people were killed when a vehicle carrying ammunition exploded in the town of Binnish on September 1 .

According to a tally by the Reuters news agency, at least 16 similar explosions have hit arms storage facilities since the fall of long-time President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 after an opposition offensive.

Some have been attributed to poor storage conditions. The Syrian Defence Ministry said it is investigating the causes behind the recurrent explosions to prevent future incidents.

Long-time neglect

Security analysts are divided on the root causes, with some pointing to a lack of professional infrastructure and others highlighting the potential for foreign interference – although there is as yet no hard evidence for that.

Omer Ozkizilcik, a nonresident senior fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programmes, explained to Al Jazeera that the Syrian military is undergoing a period of huge change. It is reorganising from what it was under al-Assad, consolidating weapons from different sources and integrating various forces. All of that could be putting pressure on Syria’s storage infrastructure, which was already creaking after the long war and international isolation.

“The explosions could have happened due to neglect, Ozkizilcik said. “The Syrian army is receiving much more military aid than ever before. It gained control over the stockpiles of the former regime and the formerly US-backed [Syrian Democratic Forces]. The increase in quantity coupled with the need to protect weapons from potential Israeli airstrikes may have pushed the Syrian army to store weapons in inadequate places.”

Ozkizilcik emphasised that Syria’s military is still in a transitional phase. The former army was dissolved after the fall of the al-Assad regime and fighters from armed opposition groups were integrated into a new military structure. Damascus has also been working to integrate territory and forces previously controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF.

“The Syrian army has yet to become a professional army,” Ozkizilcik added. “These explosions are not the first that happen in Syria. Before the fall of al-Assad, similar things happened many times in Syria. [but] I don’t think these explosions will affect Syria’s military capabilities in any visible way. It’s merely a loss of some stockpiles that can be replenished.”

Weapons and ammunition, by their nature, need to be handled extremely carefully and stored properly. Storing large quantities of ageing ammunition for years in poor conditions, such as high temperatures or humidity, can accelerate their deterioration and lead to them becoming unstable.

“The current warehouse infrastructure suffers from severe ageing; most of it dates back decades and does not meet international safe storage standards,” said security expert Ismat al-Absi. “Storing ageing munitions in open or semi-closed environments without controlled cooling and humidity systems creates what we call a thermal runaway chain reaction.”

Possibility of sabotage

The repeated explosions have led to some fears of sabotage, particularly in light of repeated Israeli attacks against Syria since the fall of al-Assad, many of which have targeted the military, including the August strikes on the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib.

Ozkizilcik noted that there was “no public information about possible sabotage” being behind the weapons depot explosions, and no evidence of any direct Israeli links. But the repeated explosions, coupled with Israel’s attacks in Syria and past intelligence operations against groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, mean it cannot be totally ruled out.

“Considering that the Israeli media recently wrote about the growing military capabilities of Syria, suspicions grow,” he said.

Al-Absi told Al Jazeera that the wide geographic scope of the explosions nevertheless meant that deliberate interference should be investigated.

“The main loopholes that [could have allowed sabotage operations] are the absence of smart surveillance, relying on traditional human guarding instead of remote sensors and thermal movement detection; weak securing of transport lines and administrative fragmentation,” al-Absi said. “The weakness of security discipline during the restructuring phase of the military institution has made some sites vulnerable to penetration or internal manipulation.”

Bank of Japan raises benchmark interest rate from 1 to 1.25 percent, pledging to help counter inflation risks.

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) has raised interest rates by 0.25 to 1.25 percent, pushing borrowing costs to their highest level in 31 years, amid rising inflation and wages, and pressure from Washington.

The move on Friday marked the first hike since June, and takes interest rates closer to levels the BoJ deems neutral to the economy, marking another step away from decades of ultra-low rates that cemented the yen’s status as a cheap global funding currency.

Japan is grappling to contain inflation, which is being driven by factors including rising energy prices, global supply pressures and domestic inflation exceeding the 2 percent target.

Core consumer inflation held steady near the target in August, data showed on Friday, as companies continued to pass on rising costs for a wide range of food and grocery items.

The country also faced a “slow-moving demographic shock” with a shrinking labour pool lifting wages, a structural factor that ⁠cannot be dismissed as temporary, BoJ Executive Director Koji Nakamura said on Monday.

The Federal Reserve’s rate hike on Wednesday, and the prospect of another one later this year, have added pressure on the BoJ to keep pace.

Further widening of the United States-Japan rate gap risks weakening the yen and lifting inflation through higher import costs, analysts told the Reuters news agency.

Its policy rate also remains lower than the European Central Bank, which raised its key rate to 2.5 percent last week.

Such pressure could affect the tone of BoJ Governor Kazuo Ueda’s post-meeting briefing, which will be closely watched by markets for clues on the timing and pace of further increases.

WASHINGTON, United States: The US Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, defying President Donald Trump’s demand for cuts, as central bank chief Kevin Warsh stressed the need to combat inflation that has been “too high” for “too long.”

The Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee voted unanimously to raise rates by 25 basis points to between 3.75 and 4.00 percent, saying the rate hike would support a “timelier return” to its two-percent target for inflation.

Warsh, appointed by Trump, said the decision was a “serious” one, but needed to be taken.

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long,” he told a press conference.

And Wednesday’s rate hike may not be the last — the vast majority of Fed policymakers indicated that at least one more rate hike was likely necessary before the end of the year, according to their Summary of Economic Projections.

US households and businesses have been battered by years of higher-than-target inflation, and prices have surged in the wake of Trump’s war on Iran, his signature tariff policies and the ongoing AI boom.

Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the Fed’s independence since taking office, attempting to fire a Fed Governor and launching a criminal probe against Warsh’s predecessor in his quest for lower rates to spur economic activity.

The president’s Republican Party faces a stern test in upcoming midterm elections, with rival Democrats seeking to wrest control of both houses of Congress and economic issues front-and-center for voters.

Growing calls for hike

The Fed has held rates steady since January, choosing to wait to gauge the effects of the Iran war’s energy price shocks and to let the impact of tariffs on prices ripple through the economy.

Since July, however, a growing faction of policymakers had indicated a rate hike may be required to tame inflation, as the war grinds on and prices remained elevated.

On Friday, August’s consumer price index came in at 3.4 percent — unchanged from the month before, but still well above the Fed’s long-term two-percent target.

In its SEP, the Fed raised its forecast for its preferred gauge of inflation — the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index — by 0.1 percentage points to 3.7 percent by year-end.

The Fed also raised its projection for GDP growth by year-end to 2.3 percent, up 0.1 percentage points.

‘Rather unfortunate’

US stock markets largely priced in Wednesday’s rate hike, but they were still down on the news — expected with any rate hike as equities become less attractive.

Yields on 10-year US Treasury bonds — which have surged in recent days as uncertainty on long-term inflation has spiked — were also up past the five-percent threshold.

Following the Fed’s announcement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the decision was “rather unfortunate” and that Trump had been clear that he wanted lower interest rates.

Warsh was named to his position after a contentious Senate confirmation process, where Democratic lawmakers accused him of being a “sock puppet” for Trump, which he denied.

So far, Trump has supported Warsh, claiming that the Fed chair wants lower rates and accusing the board of being “political.”

The Fed has a dual mandate to deliver maximum employment while keeping inflation to its long-term two-percent target.

It mainly achieves these goals by setting the key US interest rate — lower rates tend to spur economic activity but fuel inflation, and hiking them cools both activity and prices.

The Fed’s SEP showed that at least 12 of 18 policymakers who participated in the projection expected one more rate hike would be required before the end of the year.

Four policymakers expect two more rate hikes to be required.

Warsh has criticized the Fed’s policy of offering such projections in the past and did not participate in the previous iteration in June.

This projection also included only 18 policymakers, suggesting he had once again withheld his contribution.

Kevin Warsh has broken away from US President Donald Trump in his first Fed move, and he has done it with the entire committee behind him.

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The Federal Open Market Committee lifted rates on Wednesday after holding them at 3.5% to 3.75% since December, ending a pause that had grown harder to justify as energy costs pushed prices higher.

Not a single member dissented in a unanimous 12-0 vote.

That matters because the pressure ran in both directions as three regional presidents had voted for a hike in July, while the White House spent months demanding cuts.

Nobody voted for either extreme.

At the time of writing, the market reaction to the decision has been fairly muted likely due to the fact that the hike was widely expected.

A statement stripped to the bone

The Fed’s communication was as striking as its decision.

The statement ran to three short paragraphs, a fraction of the length markets are used to, with no forward guidance and no hedging.

“Inflation remains elevated,” it read, adding that “today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal.”

The word “timelier” carries an implicit admission that the return had been too slow.

Then a sentence the Fed almost never writes: “The Committee will deliver price stability.” Not seeks to, not is committed to. Will.

The economic assessment was also confident throughout.

Activity is “expanding at a solid pace”, domestic spending “has been resilient”, productivity growth is “strong” and capital investment “robust”, while job gains “have kept pace with the workforce”.

Uncertainty remains elevated, the Fed said, owing partly to “geopolitical developments”, its formulation for the Iran war.

By describing an economy in good health, the committee removed the argument that higher rates would damage growth, which is precisely the case US President Donald Trump has been making.

Boxed in by the data

The decision had been building for months.

Three regional Fed presidents dissented in July in favour of an increase, the most in one direction since 2016, and several others said afterwards they were ready to move unless inflation eased which it did not.

The Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal consumption expenditures index, ran at 3.7% in both June and July, with core inflation at 3.3%. Before the Iran war sent fuel prices climbing, core stood at 3%.

Consumer prices held at 3.4% in August, but the monthly increase of 0.4% was the sharpest since May, evidence the energy shock is feeding through. Inflation has now been above the 2% target for more than five years.

Warsh had effectively committed himself at Jackson Hole in August, telling the symposium he “would be hard pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive” and warning that unless underlying inflation moved to target “clearly and at sufficient speed”, the Fed had “work to do”.

Markets took him at his word as the CME’s FedWatch tool put the probability of a rate hike above 90% before today’s decision.

Defying the president who chose him

US President Donald Trump had spent months demanding the opposite, insisting the country should have the lowest interest rates in the world and choosing Warsh partly on the expectation he would deliver them.

Warsh himself said while campaigning for the job that rates could come down.

The treatment of his predecessor sharpened the stakes as Jerome Powell was publicly attacked for moving too slowly, and the US Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into testimony he gave to Congress.

Today’s decision could also have a restoring effect on the perceived independence of the Federal Reserve as an institution.

The technical details point to a Fed settling in at the new level.

The interest rate on reserve balances rises to 3.90% from Thursday, the primary credit rate to 4%, and standing repurchase operations will run at 4%. Seven regional reserve banks requested the discount rate increase.

The Fed’s new dot plot shows 12 of 18 officials expect another 0.25% hike by year-end, taking rates to 4.125%, while four see rates reaching 4.375%.

The hawkish signal extends well beyond 2026 as 14 officials see rates ending 2027 above today’s level, while the 2028 median stands at 3.9% versus 3.4% expected.

The longer-run rate also rose to 3.2%, suggesting officials increasingly believe neutral rates have moved higher while economists also expect more to follow.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

The 25 basis-point hike is the first raise in three years and comes ahead of critical midterm elections in the United States.

The United States Federal Reserve has said it will raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point as inflation, driven by soaring fuel prices amid the US-Iran war, continues to weigh on the economy.

The Fed, which is the central bank of the US, said on Wednesday that it will hike interest rates by 25 basis points to 3.75 percent to 4 percent.

It is the first hike in more than three years and comes just weeks before the US midterm elections, despite repeated demands from US President Donald Trump to lower rates.

“Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace. While uncertainty remains elevated owing, in part, to geopolitical developments, domestic spending has been resilient,” the Fed said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Inflation remains elevated. Today’s policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee’s 2 percent goal. The Committee will deliver price stability.”

After Wednesday’s hike, Fed officials expect one more rate increase this year, according to their quarterly projections.

CME FedWatch, which tracks the likelihood of monetary policy decisions, forecast a 92.3 percent chance of the Fed increasing rates to 3.75 to 4 percent. A week ago, that forecast was a 40 percent chance of a quarter-percent rate increase.

But in the days since, a slew of data shifted those expectations.

For one, consumer prices jumped in August by 0.4 percent, the highest increase in four months. On an annual basis, prices rose 3.4 percent, matching the increase recorded in July, while the job market remains healthy.

Since then, benchmark crude oil prices have continued to soar as strikes in the US-Israel war on Iran have intensified. Brent crude hovered near $109 per barrel on Tuesday.

The average price for a gallon (3.8 litres) of petrol is $4.36, up 14 cents in the past week, and up from $4.06 in the last month, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks daily petrol prices.

Diesel, on the other hand, was at $6.31, the highest recorded average and roughly double from a year ago. That, in turn, is expected to further stoke prices as diesel is used in trucks to haul everything from fruits and vegetables to steel and cement.

At the same time, the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield broke above the psychologically important 5 percent threshold on Tuesday, hitting 5.02 percent, its highest level in 19 years. The yield serves as a benchmark for borrowing costs, including car loans and home mortgages, and is a bellwether for inflation.

“The economy is in an unusual place,” Michael Klein, professor of international economic affairs at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and executive editor of EconoFact, a nonpartisan economic and social policy publication, as unemployment remains at a comfortable level while higher prices continue to stick, sending inflation beyond the Fed’s target of 2 percent.

“There [has been] a lot of pressure on Chairman Warsh to raise interest rates because of inflation coming in high, and that has been compounded by concerns about Trump’s pressure” as the president has continued to demand that interest rates be lowered, Klein said.

“Higher interest rates tend to weaken the economy… but if the market believes that there’s going to be a rate increase, it’s priced in already as prices move on news, so this won’t be news,” Klein said, adding that should help steady yields.

When it comes to Shohei Ohtani‘s injury management, it’s tempting to dwell on the what-ifs.

What if the Dodgers forced him to give up pitching duties in July, when he needed a lubricant injection to alleviate irritation in his left knee?

It was clear by then that Ohtani was playing through multiple injuries. A right biceps problem popped up for the second time on July 3 — the last time he pitched in a game. The Dodgers said his knee inflammation was only aggravated by pitching and the biceps tightness was tied to hitting. And yet, they were confident that the MLB All-Star break would give Ohtani enough time to bounce back.

If the Dodgers had been more proactive, instead of starting and stopping Ohtani’s throwing program until his injuries forced a shutdown, would he be in the lineup Friday against the Miami Marlins instead of the 15-day injured list?

Maybe.

Or maybe one or both injuries were far enough along by then that they would have affected him down the stretch regardless. Maybe seeing if he could return to the mound was worth the risk.

Maybe not.

“Anyone can do that, and say, ‘What could you have done better or different?’” manager Dave Roberts said earlier this week when asked if he had any regrets about Ohtani’s injury management. “That’s something going forward we’re going to look at, absolutely. But, it’s certainly not a blame-game thing. It’s learning from what happened and getting better.”

Parsing through the alternative outcomes from decisions made months ago could take time. But the fallout from this past week is clearer.

What if instead of resting Ohtani four days, and bringing him back Monday, the Dodgers had put him on the IL right away?

“I think if we look right now, here today, I would love to go back and put him on the IL,” Roberts said. “But at that moment in time, we all felt that giving him four days was sufficient. He was agreeable. Getting him out there on Monday with the hope that he would be able to play [again Wednesday]. But where we’re at right now, sure.”

Two weeks without Ohtani is hard to swallow. As a two-way player, he’s eligible for the 15-day IL instead of the 10-day for position players.

The Dodgers tried to avoid it. But when he returned to the lineup Monday, he “didn’t feel great” on a swing, Roberts revealed.

So now the Dodgers can only backdate Ohtani’s IL stint to Tuesday, rather than Sept. 3. At minimum, Ohtani will be out until the final five games of the regular season.

“The most important thing is him being as healthy as possible, not compromising his swing, and kind of bet on that,” Roberts said.

He acknowledged that Ohtani wouldn’t be back to “100%” even with the two weeks off.

But plenty of players push through injuries in the playoffs. October becomes a test of pain tolerance before addressing ailments in the offseason.

“I want to make sure that when I look back [on] this season,” Ohtani said Monday through interpreter Will Ireton, “that I used this as an experience, a learning experience and make sure that I use that as something to improve upon for next season.”

So, does that mean Ohtani feels like he could be more up-front with the team about his physical well-being, regardless of whether he thinks he can play through aches and pains?

Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani celebrates with teammates after a win over the Reds at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s hard to say now with the season still going on,” Ohtani said. “It’s something that I’m going to reflect back on during the offseason. I’m just making sure that I’m focusing on the now and finishing strong.”

The Dodgers, for the first time navigating what was expected to be a full season of two-way play from Ohtani, leaned on his expertise while managing his workload. In retrospect, they might have put too much stock in his self-evaluations.

Baseball has a long tradition of players downplaying injuries, out of a desire to play and a belief in their own perseverance.

“What can I learn?” Roberts said this week. “I think that sometimes, potentially trying to get ahead of managing his workload — it always feels good to run him out there offensively as a DH. Always feels good when you pencil him in as a starter — for me, it’s just really trying to be mindful of the long season.

“And I guess it’s under the thing of, ‘you don’t know until you know,’ and it’s important to learn from experiences. And I think it’s good for all of us to kind of appreciate that he’s not supernatural, as much as we think he might be at times.”

Roberts said he didn’t learn until Tuesday night, after giving Ohtani a day off for the fifth time in six games, that a swing on Monday had bothered him.

So, Ohtani didn’t return to the lineup Wednesday as planned. And the team arranged for No. 1 prospect Josue De Paula to meet the team in Miami, called up straight from double-A for his MLB debut on Friday.

“It was more just really huddling up and saying, ‘Hey, how are you going to feel on Friday? How are you going to feel on Saturday, talking to the doctors and training staff?’” Roberts said. “There was not much certainty that he’d be in a much better place. With that, just taking it off the table seemed like the best course of action.”

De Paula wasn’t otherwise guaranteed to debut this season, although the Dodgers would have needed to eventually put him on the 40-man roster to protect him from the Rule 5 Draft.

The Dodgers see him as a major-league ready hitter, but he still has work to do on the defensive side for the team to feel comfortable playing him in the outfield regularly. An early taste of the big leagues, even with his playing time expected to come mostly in the DH spot, could be beneficial for the 21-year-old’s development.

For Ohtani, the ramp from the IL to postseason play will be short. But his recent offensive struggles emphasized the importance of having a healthier version of him in the lineup come October.

If anyone can make it work, it’s Ohtani. He may not be supernatural, but he also isn’t just any player. And if he performs in the postseason, that will drown out any lingering what-ifs.

Times staff writer Kevin Baxter contributed to this report.

London, United Kingdom – In a wheat field near High Wycombe in the rolling English countryside, Alex Nelms watched the harvest on his farm die in a matter of days.

His crop had looked strong until the first heatwave came in May, when temperatures surpassed 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) just as his milling wheat entered its grain-fill phase, the critical weeks when the plant fattens its kernels.

“It just killed everything stone dead,” he told Al Jazeera. “Everything was finished really early, and when we were sort of full of optimism and hope, it was scuppered almost overnight.”

Nelms farms just over 2,000 acres (809 hectares) of arable land in south Buckinghamshire, on a business his grandparents founded in 1955. His uncle, who has worked the farm for more than 40 years, has just suffered the worst harvest of his career.

Last month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said almost three-quarters of England, 71.3 percent, remained in drought. Rainfall in August reached just 34 percent of what would normally be expected by that point in the month, Defra said, and reservoir levels were 18.2 percentage points below where they should be for the time of year.

“We’re totally reliant on Mother Nature,” Nelms said, and nature did not deliver this year.

After a historically dry spring and a run of summer heatwaves, the farm is down roughly 1,000 tonnes on its average harvest, a shortfall of some $270,000 in revenue.

The farm, tucked in the Chiltern Hills, a steep, long ridge of white limestone rock, has no irrigation and never will.

“That has serious knock-on effects on our cash flow,” he said. A third consecutive difficult year would mean hard conversations with his bank and landlord, and farming to minimise risk rather than maximise output, “consequently, probably producing less food”.

‘Financial crisis point’

The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) says farmers are at a “financial crisis point” after the worst drought in 50 years, with historically low harvests, stunted grass growth, rising fuel and fertiliser costs, and a severe outbreak of bluetongue disease in livestock.

The union puts the gross production value loss of wheat at approximately $499m and the cost of replacing a shortfall in forage at roughly $45m.

NFU president Tom Bradshaw has said farmers now lack “breathing space” and are “increasingly exposed to geopolitical shocks, as well as repeated weather extremes, animal disease and global wars”.

He believes action is needed now to ensure the future of British farming “and enable the next generation to keep producing the nation’s food”.

To manage the risk, Nelms is diversifying, planting oilseed rape again on about 350 acres (142 hectares) for the first time in 20 years. He says that the crop’s usual insecticide protection, neonicotinoid seed treatments, is now banned, leaving it exposed to cabbage stem flea beetle and to game birds that can “absolutely nibble, eat, and destroy a crop”.

Growing it also means breaking a continuous wheat rotation that has kept a soil-borne disease called “Take-all”.

Tax allowances would make investing in grain storage and diversified income worthwhile, he said, as well as government-backed bridging loans, modelled on COVID-era support, to survive a bad year without permanent damage.

It is the kind of relief the NFU is pressing the government to provide nationally.

The union wants an interest-free “Keep Britain Growing” loan tied to drought losses, help covering the cost of disposing of livestock lost to bluetongue, faster planning permission for on-farm reservoirs, and clearer rules letting farmers access water as soon as levels allow, echoing Nelms’s case for storage on his farm.

“Drought conditions will continue to worsen until we receive sustained rainfall across the country and we still all have a role to play in conserving precious water supplies,” according to Philip Duffy, the Environment Agency’s chief executive, in a statement shared by Defra.

The Environment Agency has applied for a drought order to restrict abstraction from the River Severn, and 10 water companies, serving 30 million customers, now have restrictions in place.

“A few days or even weeks of wetter weather cannot reverse the impacts of several months of exceptionally dry conditions,” added Duffy.

Defra noted that the first meaningful rains since June have fallen but they have been patchy, so reservoirs and groundwater are still declining even as a handful of rivers see brief upticks in flow.

Despite the losses, Nelms is hopeful about farmers pulling together – sharing labour, machinery and market routes. He points to the Central Chiltern Farmer Cluster, where growers meet to talk through their problems and find solutions together.

“We’re working together, not competing with each other,” he said.

For a farm like Nelms’s, with no irrigation and no water in reserve, that patchiness is the problem. Soil parched from months without rain needs to absorb sustained rainfall before groundwater can even begin to recharge, let alone refill the reservoirs a future harvest might depend on.

“Our climate has changed,” Water Minister Emma Hardy, who chairs the National Drought Group, said late last month, “and we will continue to take all action necessary.”

Published on
08/09/2026 – 10:39 GMT+2

Europe’s answer to OpenAI has just become considerably better funded.

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The Paris-based company Mistral AI announced its Series D on Tuesday, three years after being seeded, with the memory chip giant Samsung leading alongside the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity.

The step up is steep.

Mistral was valued at €11.7 billion in 2025 after a €1.7 billion Series C led by Dutch chipmaker ASML, meaning the company has almost doubled its valuation in a year.

Much of the money is going into concrete rather than code. CEO Arthur Mensch announced the funding would build out data centres and computing capacity that Mistral can rent to others but that will also ensure autonomy.

“Long term, the plan is to fully rely on capacity that we are building ourselves, and so that means that the amount of compute that we own is going to grow around 100% in the next five years,” Mensch said, adding that the company would train “bigger and faster models.”

Mistral is already spending €4 billion on data centres across France and Europe, with one facility running outside Paris and another under construction in Sweden.

It raised further debt financing in March for the same purpose, and Microsoft has agreed to fund capacity from its European network, built around thousands of Nvidia chips.

Both Microsoft and Nvidia are also investors in Mistral, with the latter also adding exposure in this funding round.

The company says more than 125 enterprises across 20 countries use its technology, and Mistral projects it will pass a billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.

Europe lags behind in the AI race

Despite the news, Europe continues to critically lag behind in the global AI race.

Mistral’s valuation sits far below OpenAI and Anthropic, and Europe’s wider AI sector remains a fraction of the American one, with enterprise adoption across the bloc running at around 13.5%.

Other European contenders exist but are smaller.

Germany’s Aleph Alpha focuses on government and regulated industries rather than competing at the frontier, while Helsing has grown quickly in defence applications, and Switzerland’s Apertus offers fully open models and training data.

Brussels is trying to close the gap.

The InvestAI initiative carries a €200 billion headline commitment, and in July the Commission opened tenders for up to seven AI gigafactories, aiming to unlock more than €30 billion in investment, though those sites are not expected to operate until next year or 2028.

Thirteen smaller AI factories are already being built across seven EU countries.

The AI Act became applicable in August, but its toughest obligations were pushed back by the digital omnibus agreed in May, with high-risk rules now landing in December 2027 and August 2028, a delay Brussels framed as making the policy more innovation-friendly.

Netflix bosses have raised UK prices for the second time this year – with the cheapest plan going up by a third

There is bad news for Netflix users after bosses raised the prices of UK subscriptions for the second time this year.

The streaming platform, which houses Stranger Things, Love Is Blind, Bridgerton, Selling Sunset and many other beloved programmes, has updated its pricing – with the cheapest rising by a third.

Customers will be given 30 days’ notice by email before the changes. Those with the standard plan with ads will now pay £7.99 a month, up from £5.99, while the advert-free option has moved from £12.99 to £13.99.

Users who have a premium plan, which allows them to add extra members and stream on more devices, will pay £20.99 from their next billing cycle, a change of £2.

For viewers who want to add an extra member for their subscription, they will have to pay £5.99 under new guidelines, up from £4.99.

This is the second time that the prices have increased this year, with previous changes being introduced in February.

A spokesperson said, via Deadline, that the changes “reflect improvements to our wide range of entertainment and the quality of our service.”

“Our approach remains the same: we continue offering a range of prices and plans to meet a variety of needs, and as we deliver more value to our members, we reinvest in quality entertainment and improve their experience by updating our prices,” the statement added.

“We know members have never had more choices in entertainment, and we’re committed to delivering an experience that meets and exceeds their expectations.”

The news was confirmed just after the second series of Guy Ritchie’s acclaimed drama, The Gentlemen, landed on the platform, with many high-profile releases still to come.

Keira Knightley will be returning in season two of Black Doves in November, while a documentary on late Friends actor Matthew Perry will hit screens at the end of October.

In recent years, original shows including Adolescence, Baby Reindeer, The Crown and Ozark have collected a string of awards. Fans have also raved about Netflix’s film slate, including Voicemails for Isabelle, Nonnas, Carry-On and Rebel Ridge.

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