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In my opinion, it’s better to live alone than be with people who make your life miserable. It’s better to live alone than be with people who always put a spanner in the works. It’s
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Smoke billowing from a fire during drone and missile attacks in Kyiv on Wednesday. Russian missile and drone barrages rocked parts of Ukraine, killing four and wounding dozens, officials said on June 2, the latest
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Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron Technology Inc, shows a chip on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange. (Reuters/File Photo) Micron Technology’s march toward a $1tn valuation is nothing if not dramatic: a year ago it was a little over $100bn. That surge, though, was not built on its famed frugality, but on a nearly too-late push from Nvidia that pulled the US memory chipmaker into the centre of the AI boom. For decades, the Idaho-based company survived by building factories on a shoestring budget, adopting used equipment and avoiding cutting-edge bets. That discipline helped it endure brutal boom-bust cycles in memory chips and outlast rivals, leaving it one of three global suppliers alongside Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. But that approach of treating memory chips as a commodity clashed with Nvidia’s vision for AI. Three years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met Micron boss Sanjay Mehrotra and outlined how he expected the memory market to evolve, Huang said in a media interview last month. Huang had long bet early that memory, and not just processors, would become a critical bottleneck for AI, forcing suppliers like Micron to rethink both technology and spending. “I was really grateful that Micron and Nvidia really lined up all of our road map,” Huang said in the interview. As Nvidia and other AI leaders rewired data centers, memory shifted from a commodity component to specialized high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips tailored to specific processors. These chips are co-designed for customers, making Micron’s offerings for Nvidia distinct from those it sells to Advanced Micro Devices or others. Micron’s chips are now tightly integrated into AI systems, including Nvidia’s upcoming Vera Rubin platform. That alignment reshaped Micron’s trajectory, pulling it into long-term, higher-margin deals and giving investors greater confidence in its earnings. Micron’s stock has surged roughly 10-fold over the past year. The company crossed the $1tn market capitalization on May 26, joining an elite group of trillion-dollar firms including Samsung. A day later, Hynix hit that mark. Separately, Marvell Technology’s shares hit a record high earlier this week after Huang called the custom chipmaker the next “trillion-dollar company” during the Computex week in Taipei. AI GROWTH RESHAPES MICRON’S TRAJECTORYMicron expects the HBM market it serves to grow to about $100bn by 2028. It posted a $14bn profit in the latest quarter, a striking turnaround from the $5.8bn loss it posted as recently as 2023, when the memory cycle turned and demand collapsed. That rebound follows a misstep. For years, memory was a commodity business, with customers such as Apple and Dell able to switch suppliers easily and drive down prices. That volatility made Micron wary of betting early on high-bandwidth memory, even as Korean rivals pushed ahead. Nvidia’s AI build-out forced a rethink. Micron said in March it had signed its first five-year supply agreement, a landmark shift for an industry long driven by short-term pricing swings. Analysts expect Nvidia to be central to those arrangements, though neither company has confirmed it. “They are seeing long-term customer demand, with real commitment,” said Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. “That is the key driver getting them to spend money.” REMAINING NIMBLE IN A CYCLICAL MARKETMicron’s old habits have not entirely disappeared and may still be an advantage, even as the company adapts them for a faster-moving market. The challenge now is speed. Under Mehrotra, Micron has focused on shortening development cycles and quickly fixing production issues, a critical capability in AI where missing technical specifications can cost lucrative supply deals. Micron’s position as the only major US-based memory supplier also adds an edge as customers diversify away from Korea and governments push for domestic supply chains. But the real test will come when the cycle turns again. Analysts expect AI to make the memory market structurally larger, but not immune to slowdowns. When that happens, Micron’s longstanding discipline - the same frugality that once held it back - could again set it apart. “In the early days, nobody gave Micron a chance,” said Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of technology consulting firm TechInsights. “They’ve always had that back-against-the-wall attitude. If they lose that, like Intel lost it, they’ll die.”
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As the European Union (EU) unveiled its technology sovereignty package on Wednesday, a top official posted in glee: “Today is Tech Liberation Day”. True technological independence from US Big Tech, however, will take longer to attain. The EU plan aims to boost European tech firms and limit some access for dominant US rivals. It marks a key but initial step, with the bloc trailing far behind the US and Asia on AI, chips, cloud services and data centres. Ralf Wintergerst, president of German digital industry group Bitkom, said measures like the proposed Chips Act 2.0 were a “step in right direction”, but Europe needed concrete action and a better investment environment from chips to AI infrastructure. “It is now crucial that these efforts do not stop at mere announcements. Europe needs to move quickly,” he said. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen presented the package that restricts US giants like Amazon , Microsoft and Google from the most sensitive cloud tenders, while encouraging a quick build-out of data centres that use at least some European hardware or software. On chips, the plan is less about luring leading-edge plants and more about supporting existing strengths around leading chip equipment maker ASML from materials to advanced packaging, while using public demand to help startups scale. But with few regional champions, cutting reliance is not going to happen quickly. The bloc has no European version of Nvidia to design AI chips, no rival to Taiwan’s TSMC to manufacture them, and no software giants comparable with the big US firms able to drive demand through vast cloud platforms. “We will continue to rely on Nvidia and AMD for GPUs and will need to cooperate with international partners on certain AI models. This is not a weakness, but realism,” said Achim Weiß, CEO of German cloud provider Ionos. “It must be clear that sovereignty does not mean self-sufficiency.” The EU plan also contains little new money, especially compared with huge US investment and Chinese industrial support. That leaves the bill to member states already under budget pressure, while companies face high energy costs, labour shortages and fragmented capital markets. “Europe cannot regulate its way into semiconductor leadership”, said Erik Rein, head of European chipmaker association ESIA, who also heads Bosch’s semiconductor business. Mitchell Rutledge, Europe Policy Manager at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said a focus on data centre capacity was good but Europe needed to be attracting investment, “not shutting it out”. A Microsoft spokesperson said the firm shared the EU’s ambition to strengthen technological sovereignty and global competitiveness in AI, but called for an open market with “fair competition”. Wolfgang Weber, managing director of ZVEI, the German electrical and digital industry group, praised plans for faster approvals of strategic tech projects that require state aid, though he said Europe couldn’t “force the issue”. “Europe achieves sovereignty through its own strength, not through barriers,” he said. The final European Commission package also stopped short of a hard “Buy European” approach, which left some critics saying it had not gone far enough. “I am sceptical that this will be sufficient to ensure long term independence from the US,” said Greens/EFA European parliament member Kim van Sparrentak. “This long delayed package finally recognises the scale of Europe’s digital dependency, but ultimately falls short.” Some pointed to the balance the measures struck— realistic small steps towards a longer-term ambition. “The package frames tech sovereignty in a more pragmatic way than previous debates often did,” Julia Hess of interface, a German technology policy think-tank, told Reuters.
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An excavator clears the rubble of a building as rescuers search for victims after an Israeli airstrike that struck near a hospital in Tyre. (AFP) In the summer of 1982, as Israeli shells fell on a besieged Beirut, a seasoned Lebanese statesman named Saeb Salam offered a thought that has outlived him. A chance for peace, he warned, must never be treated as a commodity — something to be hoarded, haggled over or sold to the highest bidder. Opportunities of that kind do not sit on a shelf, waiting to be bought back later. They appear, and then they are gone. Four decades on, Lebanon and its neighbours are living through an eerie echo of that moment. The cast has changed, and so has the condition of the country, but the test is the same. Once again a window has opened amid the wreckage, and once again the temptation is to trade it away. This time the decision rests in several hands at once: an American president, an Israeli public, the armed movement that calls itself the resistance and its patron in Tehran, and the Lebanese who are angrily demanding a sovereignty their country lost with the Cairo Agreement of 1969. Mr Salam’s warning should be lost on none of them. Consider each in turn, for all are caught in the same crisis — one that deepened the day Binyamin Netanyahu drew the United States into open war with Iran. Begin with Donald Trump. His decision to go to war was poorly weighed, and it has pushed the world towards the edge of a catastrophe that would spare no one. The poorest states — those with weak governments, fragile economies and swelling populations — would suffer first and worst. But the wealthy democracies, already gnawed by self-doubt and a jittery, inward-looking nationalism, would not escape either. And yet a crisis is also a door. Mr Trump has the chance to vault the whole world into a calmer phase, if he grasps the plain arithmetic of cost and benefit and finally addresses the poisoned wound of the Palestinian tragedy. The choice before him is stark. On one side lies a genuine peace between the Islamic world — the 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Iran and Saudi Arabia prominent among them — and Israel and America. On the other lies capture by the most extreme faction in Israeli politics: Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Mr Netanyahu, whose government commands the support of fewer than two Israelis in five, and whose prime minister’s personal approval has sunk below 30%. Mr Trump stands at a fork. Down one path lies a Nobel prize on steroids; down the other, the slow draining of a conflict that delivers neither victory nor peace, and offers no horizon at all. Turn next to the Israeli public, which has backed this war since the Hamas attack of October 7th. The conduct of the campaign since then — in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon — has revealed an ugly, unrestrained dehumanisation of Palestinians, and it is all on the record. This is hard for any nation to face. Yet a path back exists, if Israelis can absorb a single truth: that pain and humiliation are not a Jewish monopoly. Palestinians and Lebanese have their own stories of monstrous, indiscriminate revenge, and these too are written down. The bitter irony is that Jews everywhere now feel a hostility that scarcely existed before this cycle of cruelty began. Refuse the opening for peace, and violence itself becomes a commodity — bought and sold, traded back and forth — a danger as real to those who inflict it as to those who endure it. The old restraints of a pre-digital age have snapped; technology now permits, and even invites, unfettered violence in the name of revenge. It is a thoroughly unwanted condition, and a thoroughly avoidable one. Then there is Hizbullah and its sponsor in Iran. Here the war is not without its alibi. The conduct of the Revolutionary Guards’ proxies has been far less honourable than the romance of “resistance” pretends. Over the years they slid into coercive dominance —political assassinations, drug-running, smuggling and money-laundering — and traded a claim to the moral high ground for the manners of a protection racket. In Iraq, Syria and Lebanon they came to rule by fear, suspicion and bloodshed. The genuine sympathy of ordinary people, once freely given, was soiled. And there are the Lebanese themselves, whose simple wish for an ordinary, peaceful life has been bought and sold for half a century. The highest bidder always seized the commanding heights, and the country paid the bill: an economic order broken beyond recognition, a state hollowed out, daily life infested with corruption. The savings of hundreds of thousands were wiped away, leaving those who could not flee to sink into despair, and driving abroad a whole generation of the talented and the brave. The lesson is plain. Reality demolishes the comfortable lie that the end justifies the means, for an end is nothing more than the sum of the means used to reach it. Which returns us to Mr Salam, and to a thought worth absorbing slowly. The Chinese describe a crisis as the meeting of danger and opportunity. The danger has been the long, destructive course of war. The opportunity that comes with it must not be filed away as one more commodity — least of all at the expense of the young, who make up some 60% of a region under the age of 30. None of us should become prisoners of old people’s quarrels, and none of us should bequeath to the societies of the future an inheritance of the wretched. • The Lebanese writer is former editor of Al-Hayat in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.
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Ukraine recaptured more territory than it lost to Russian forces in May for the second straight month, AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) showed. Ukraine’s army gained a net 282 sq km over the month, according to the analysis, as Kyiv hails its improving fortunes on the sprawling battlefield across the south and east of the country. The pace of Russia’s advance has been slowing since late 2025, hobbled by the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s frontline and mid-range drone strikes, the ISW said. Moscow had lost control of around 120 sq km in April, the first month in which its forces gave up more ground than they captured for two and a half years. However, Russian soldiers are still infiltrated in most of the areas where Ukraine has retaken territory, the ISW said. The Russian army regularly sends small groups of soldiers to take up positions along parts of the front line and hide there — a tactic designed to pave the way for larger groups of troops to advance later. Ukraine’s gains in April and May — around 403 sq km in total — remain marginal, representing around 0.4% of the total territory held by Russia. But they nevertheless point to a positive trend for Kyiv, which has touted itself as having recently gained the upper hand in the four-year conflict. “Ukraine’s successful mid-range and frontline drone strike campaigns are limiting Russia’s ability to transport personnel to the frontline and to supply and sustain frontline positions,” the ISW reported last week. Most of Ukraine’s gains were in the eastern Donetsk region, which Russia claims as its own and is fighting to capture in full, and in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. The estimates exclude advances claimed by Russia but that the ISW has neither confirmed nor denied. The ISW works with the Critical Threats Project, part of the American Enterprise Institute, another US think tank specialising in conflict analysis. Moscow occupies just over 19% of Ukraine. That includes around seven percent — Crimea and parts of the industrial Donbas region — that was already under Russian or pro-Russian separatist control before the February 2022 invasion. Most of Russia’s advances were made during the first weeks of the conflict. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions forced from their homes since Russia invaded in February 2022.
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The EU on Wednesday eased its spending rules to help member states confront the energy shock sparked by the Middle East war, as back-to-back crises leave countries in a fiscal squeeze. The EU executive added
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New Mexicans will choose Democratic and Republican nominees for governor on Tuesday as the state grapples with high rates of violent crime, chronically underperforming schools and cuts to federal programs that are key safety nets
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Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) lifted the IPL Trophy for the second consecutive year by defeating Gujarat Titans (GT) on Sunday. One of the most entertaining sports events came to an end. Lots of young Indian
