Siemens said it was seeing strong demand for data centres used to process AI, as well as for AI-enabled software and devices used to control factories and buildings

International News via Reuters:

Siemens is benefiting from the AI investment boom, the German industrial group said on Thursday, reporting its highest-ever quarterly industrial profit and raising its full-year guidance.

Siemens said it was seeing strong demand for data centres used to process AI, as well as for AI-enabled software and devices used to control factories and buildings.

Sentiment was also improving from aerospace, defence and machine building customers, prompting the company to raise its full-year profit guidance after beating third-quarter expectations.

“Our sharp focus on driving industrial AI and our strong positioning in attractive markets give us a solid foundation for our success,” Chief Executive Roland Busch told reporters.

The company’s industrial AI products, which help customers speed up innovation and improve productivity, were driving growth, he added.

Siemens was also benefiting from strong demand from the electronics and semiconductor makers, many of which are expanding capacity to supply AI-related equipment and chips.

“There is tremendous demand for electronics,” Busch said. “They are building more and more factories and they need to be automated, which is where Siemens’ business comes in.”

Siemens was working with nine of the top 10 largest data centre providers, he said, while orders had increased by a triple-digit percentage in the first nine months of its 2026 fiscal year.

HIGHEST QUARTERLY INDUSTRIAL PROFIT

Companies like Siemens, Swiss rival ABB and France’s Schneider Electric are seeing surging demand as Big Tech races to add data centres, chips and electricity capacity for AI training and operation.

Capital spending by five of the largest technology companies, a key driver of the global data-centre boom, is expected to rise 75% in 2026 from more than $400 billion in 2025, the International Energy Agency said in April.

For the quarter to the end of June, Siemens reported industrial profit rising 25% to €3.52 billion ($4.09 billion), its highest quarterly figure, beating forecasts for €3.18 billion in a company-gathered consensus.

Revenue rose 7% to €20.79 billion, ahead of forecasts for €20.64 billion, while orders picked up 13% to €27.90 billion, also a quarterly record.

Siemens raised its full-year earnings per share for the year ending in September to €11.20 to €11.50, from €10.70 to €11.10 previously.

Its shares fell 5.2% in mid-morning trading. Up to Wednesday’s close, they had gained nearly 20% from the beginning of the year to hit a record high at €291.50 in the session.

The company also said it had agreed with German tax authorities on the treatment of Siemens Healthineers shares that it plans to distribute to investors following the planned spin-off, meaning the distribution would be tax-free for Siemens shareholders.

($1=0.8660 euros)

Reporting by John RevillEditing by Linda Pasquini, Miranda Murray and Alexander Smith

French brokerage Portzamparc said profitability was well above its expectations, helped by higher oil prices and contained operating costs

International News via Reuters:

French oil producer Maurel & Prom reported a 78% jump in its half-year net income to $191 million on Thursday, boosted by higher crude prices, and said crude exports from Venezuela were expected to normalise in the second half of 2026.

French brokerage Portzamparc said profitability was well above its expectations, helped by higher oil prices and contained operating costs.

The company resumed crude oil sales from Venezuela in June, after receiving a license from the U.S. to operate there in February, though uncertainty remains over the country’s contribution to the business and how the situation will unfold, an analyst told Reuters.

Group working-interest production averaged 37,890 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the first half of 2026, up 1% from a year ago and 3% from the second half of 2025.

Free cash flow rose 21% year-on-year to $77 million. The company also raised its ordinary dividend paid out in August by 15% to €0.38 per share, or around $90 million in total.

Separately, Canadian oil and gas producer Gran Tierra Energy said on Wednesday it had agreed to sell its oil operations in Colombia and Ecuador to Maurel & Prom for $1.33 billion, including debt, which would mark the French company’s entry into Ecuador and expand its oil portfolio in Colombia.

Shares of Maurel & Prom were up 2.3% at 0800 GMT.

Reporting by Zakarya Meliani and Jerome Terroy in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak

The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch

International News via Reuters:

Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company.

The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer.

Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.

Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet’s chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change.

“(Hassabis) and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate company-wide memo. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.

Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le — some of Google’s most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders — left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation.

Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing.

As Reuters detailed in a report last year, some people who have worked with Hassabis said he put scientific pursuits often ahead of making money for Google. The London-born scientist targeted a Nobel Prize as a business objective for DeepMind, three people familiar with the effort said. He worked against other efforts, insiders previously said, that could have meant new revenue for Alphabet or a better footing in the AI race. Allies inside Google rejected the notion that he was too focused on long-term science or gave short shrift to the business.

Senior leaders in Google Cloud, the company’s main AI revenue engine, cheered Kavukcuoglu’s takeover on Wednesday as welcome news for advancing commercialization efforts, according to a source with direct knowledge.

Kavukcuoglu had already been more directly involved than Hassabis in collaborations between DeepMind and Cloud, and his appointment as head of the AI lab was expected to steer Gemini towards a more product-oriented direction, the source said.

Hassabis will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, an Alphabet spokesperson told Reuters.

In his company memo, Hassabis touted the “great progress” on Google’s AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.

He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind, which he founded and remains CEO.

“I’ve always believed the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” he said. “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.”

BRAIN DRAIN

Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation.

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around $650 million in 2014.

Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis’ team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today.

In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist.

Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google’s annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini’s cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities.

Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than ⁠two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of his researchers away from the startup he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis ‌in 2024, said he would join Anthropic.

Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever coauthored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to “pre-train” AI systems would send them to new heights.

“Google has a deep bench of talent but losing these four individuals will leave a mark for some time. Getting innovation and execution back online is not going to be easy and losing key contributors won’t make it any better,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist for Zacks Investment Management.

Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also entered into a partnership with its cloud division to provide computing capacity.

Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco, additional reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

The school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025

International News via Reuters:

A SpaceX rocket piece floating in space since last year smashed into the moon at high speed early Wednesday morning, joining the ranks of meteoroids, wayward spacecraft and other pieces of space junk that have bombarded the lunar surface for ages, astronomers confirmed.

The school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025. Its predicted collision with the moon became a spectacle for astronomers and space enthusiasts eager to watch how it would unfold.

Weighing 4 metric tons (4,000 kg), the rocket body slammed into the moon around 2:35 a.m. ET (0635 GMT), travelling at 5,400 miles per hour (8,690 kph). None of the few spacecraft orbiting the moon were positioned to capture close-up images of the impact.

But at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope detected glimmers of light associated with the impact.

“We can confirm that the telescope detected spectral lines of sodium and lithium gas in the impact plume lasting for 5-10 minutes after impact,” an ESO spokesperson told Reuters.

The impact occurred near the moon’s terminator line, or the boundary of its shadow between the sunlit side and its far side. Similar to past objects that have hit the moon, the rocket stage kicked up a plume of lunar dust that was briefly illuminated by sunlight, but difficult to spot with the naked eye from Earth.

How the impact plume interacted with the sunlight allowed astronomers to glean clues about its composition.

The sodium gas evidenced in the spectra is believed to have originated from the lunar soil, while the traces of lithium may have come from the rocket stage itself, Carl Schmidt, the lead astronomer conducting the impact observations, told Reuters.

“This observation did not go perfectly and this is a very crude analysis, but I wanted to share something quickly, and we can say more about these results in time,” Schmidt said by email.

The impact was unintentional, SpaceX said. The rocket piece was expected to hit near Einstein Crater on the moon’s western limb, which is often difficult to see from Earth.

COSMIC FORCES NUDGED PIECE TO MOON

Such stages typically fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket’s payload to a precise spot in orbit. 

But because the January lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the rocket’s second stage remained in space, floating aimlessly among thousands of other pieces of space junk that active satellites must steer clear of.

It was not until earlier this year that astronomers determined that the rocket stage, which had dumped its remaining fuel and could not be controlled, was on an orbital trajectory ending at the moon.

“What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters on Monday.

“This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it,” said Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software Project Pluto, who appeared first to calculate and publish a report predicting the stage’s impact in April.

“By January, I was pretty sure it would hit, though with only a vague idea as to where it would do so. By April, I was confident enough to post an announcement,” Gray said.

Gray said that the impact presents no danger to anyone, “though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.”

Space junk impacts on the moon are rare. A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the moon in March 2022 after completing a lunar test mission. In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the moon to study the plume of lunar material kicked up by the impact, leading to a key discovery that lunar dirt contains traces of water ice.

Several spacecraft intending to softly land on the moon in recent years have crashed instead. Russia’s nuclear-powered Luna-25 mission spun out of control and crashed in 2023. Its small power source of plutonium-238 likely remains harmlessly on the lunar surface.

India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander mission crashed in 2019. Israel’s Beresheet lander crashed that same year. Among the Israeli lander’s payloads were tiny tardigrades, microscopic animals known for surviving radiation and other harsh environments and which may still be on the surface.

NASA intentionally crashed stages from its Saturn V moon rocket into the moon in the 1970s to study the impacts’ seismic effects.

NASA and SpaceX are discussing ways to prevent future lunar impacts, Scheiman said. The U.S. space agency plans to build a lunar base and send routine astronaut missions to the lunar surface beginning later this decade under its multibillion-dollar Artemis program. It would not want errant pieces of space junk impacting those assets.

Reporting by Joey RouletteEditing by Rod Nickel, Alex Richardson and Alistair Bell

While President Donald Trump has said a deal reopening the strait is imminent, U.S. officials have repeatedly insisted they would never agree to Iran controlling access to the world’s most important trade route for energy supplies

International News via Reuters:

A proposed deal between Iran and Oman to help end five months of war between Iran and the United States would give Tehran control over ships entering the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, a senior Iranian source and two regional officials told Reuters on Wednesday, one of the biggest concessions yet to Iran.

There was no immediate U.S. comment on the proposal. While President Donald Trump has said a deal reopening the strait is imminent, U.S. officials have repeatedly insisted they would never agree to Iran controlling access to the world’s most important trade route for energy supplies.

An agreement that gives Iran authority over traffic through the strait would mean the war launched by the United States and Israel in February had resulted in a major shift in the balance of regional power in Tehran’s favour. Before the war, the strait was freely open to all ships with no fees.

Amid a wider diplomatic effort in the region, Iran and Oman have been engaged in bilateral talks regarding the strait that they each control through northern and southern channels. Iran reported “significant progress” in the talks and said both inward and outward journeys would pass through Iranian waters.

Meanwhile, Iran has warned Gulf states that any new U.S. attack on its territory would trigger retaliation against critical energy infrastructure across the region, according to five sources, as Tehran seeks to raise the cost of military action by threatening Washington’s closest regional allies.

“The Iranian warning was unequivocal: if America targeted Iran’s infrastructure, they would retaliate by striking Gulf energy facilities and other regional targets,” one Gulf source said.

Iran has been striking back with missiles and drones against Washington’s allies in the region, while also targeting commercial ships transiting the strait without its permission.

UNRESOLVED ISSUES

Regarding any deal between Iran and Oman, the regional and Iranian sources who spoke to Reuters cautioned that significant issues remained unresolved and also pushed back against suggestions from Trump that a deal reopening the strait was imminent.

“The concession has already been made regarding some form of control over Hormuz,” one of the regional sources told Reuters.

The other regional source said there were still details to be determined about how “control” would be defined, with Gulf negotiators insisting regional countries supervise inspections of ships, and that any payment of fees be voluntary.

According to the senior Iranian official, Iran is seeking fees of between 5% and 7% of the price of cargoes from ships using the strait. Oman is discussing fees of around 3%, while Washington wants no fees at all.

The senior Iranian source said the text of an agreement already on the table envisioned Iran having control of ships heading into the Gulf through the strait, and one of the main sticking points was what role Iran would also have over ships heading in the opposite direction.

In comments to Iran’s official IRNA news agency, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said the arrangement was “designed in such a way that commercial ships will pass through Iranian territorial waters, both on the inbound and outbound legs.”

He said talks with Oman had “reached fundamental understandings” and added: “This progress is on the verge of being finalised.”

Gharibabadi also said Iran had received messages from the United States indicating that it was “fully prepared to return to its commitments” under a mid-June memorandum of understanding with Iran that provided for immediate cessation of military operations.

He said this was a condition for reopening of the strait, while adding that no talks with the United States had been held in recent days.

TRUMP FACES VOTER PRESSURE

Trump, who at the start of the war said it would end in Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and with him approving the choice of its leader, has been under pressure to find a way out of a conflict U.S. voters oppose by two-to-one ahead of crucial midterm elections in November.

Months of U.S. military efforts, including a two-week campaign of strikes in July, have not broken Iran’s grip on the strait. U.S. commanders advised Trump in July that they were running low on some munitions. Reuters reported on Tuesday that the U.S. Army had used up nearly all of its long-range precision missiles.

Crude prices have plunged over the past two days after Trump called off renewed attacks on Iran, citing talks he said could end the conflict.

Prices edged lower on Wednesday, although losses were capped by a maritime embargo declared by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis on Saudi ports and vessels, heightening risks to Red Sea shipping.

The Houthis said on Wednesday they had launched a missile attack on a Saudi oil tanker off the coast of the Red Sea port city of Yanbu and another missile attack on a Saudi oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden. There was no Saudi confirmation on either incident.

Reporting Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Timour Azhari in Riyadh, Menna Ala El Din in Cairo and Elwely Elwelly in Dubai; Writing by Peter Graff, Alison Williams, David Brunnstrom and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Alison Williams and Sanjeev Miglani

Germany opened a counterterrorism investigation on Wednesday after the drone prompted the closure of parts of one of Europe’s biggest cargo hubs

International News via Reuters:

German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the explosive-laden drone found near a runway at Leipzig/Halle airport overnight was a hybrid attack which opened a new level of danger.

Germany opened a counterterrorism investigation on Wednesday after the drone prompted the closure of parts of one of Europe’s biggest cargo hubs.

“Drone sightings and drone threats in a hybrid context are something we have known from the past, but a drone armed with explosives being present on airport grounds is a new threat scenario,” Dobrindt said, after an emergency meeting with the heads of Germany’s security services on Wednesday night.

Airport workers discovered the drone in a restricted cargo area near the southern runway overnight. Flights were suspended and several aircraft, including some owned by German logistics firm DHL, were diverted.

Authorities said there had been no danger to passengers or airport staff and most operations resumed by morning after one runway was reopened.

All speculation about the explosives, the drone, its origin, and who is behind it, is now part of the investigation, the interior minister said.

“It is part of the nature of hybrid threats that it is not always immediately clear where they originate,” Dobrindt said.

DIVERTED PLANE HITS UNIDENTIFIED OBJECT

Investigators were also examining what a cargo plane had struck in the air after being diverted from the airport in eastern Germany during the disruption.

Minor damage was discovered after it landed in Hanover, authorities said. A source familiar with the incident said the plane belonged to DHL.

The southern runway of the airport, a major hub for DHL and Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines, remained closed while explosives experts examined the drone and removed its detonator, according to authorities.

LATEST IN A SERIES OF DRONE THREATS

German airports are on high alert after a series of unauthorised drone overflights at sites including military facilities, energy terminals, seaports and logistics companies.

“What is happening now also shows that the assessment made months ago — that we are dealing with a high level of danger — was justified,” Dobrindt told reporters.

Federal police have said the overflights could have been organised by Russian agents.

Germany’s Bild newspaper reported that the Leipzig drone had been found lying in the immediate vicinity of a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane. The airline has used Leipzig/Halle as an operating base since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

Anti-extremism prosecutors and counterterrorism officers took over the investigation after experts confirmed the drone was carrying explosives.

“Such threat situations are not carried out by amateurs, but must be prepared very professionally and executed professionally,” Dobrindt told reporters.

European security agencies have been investigating a series of incendiary devices concealed in parcels that caught fire in 2024, raising concerns about sabotage of air cargo operators.

Some of the devices were found at a DHL warehouse in Leipzig and in freight shipments in transit across Europe.

An Interior Ministry spokesperson said no connection with Tuesday night’s incident could be determined at this stage.

Russia has denied any involvement in the 2024 incidents and the more recent overflights.

Reporting by Friederike Heine, Markus Wacket, Miranda Murray and Maria Martinez in Berlin and Matthias Inverardi in Duesseldorf; Editing by Sabine Wollrab, Kevin Liffey and Daniel Wallis