Russia has temporarily halted shipping through the Don-Azov Channel and Kerch Strait after Ukraine attacked 13 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov. Since roughly 25% of Russia's wheat exports use this route, traders fear disruptions to global grain supplies, causing wheat prices to jump about 4%. It's unclear how long the shipping halt will last. Source: Reuters

Today Meta $META hinted it might rent out spare computing power, and its value jumped about 98-100 billion dollars in a single morning, roughly twice the entire market value of CoreWeave, the company Meta just signed a 21 billion dollar deal to buy computing power from. The buyer is turning into the seller, and the market cheered. The trigger was a Bloomberg report, which Meta has not confirmed, that it is building a cloud business called Meta Compute to rent access to its data centers and its own AI models. No product, no price, no launch date. On the rumor alone the stock rose as much as 10 percent while the pure rental firms cratered, CoreWeave down 13 percent, Nebius down 15. The strange part is that Meta is still one of the largest buyers of compute on earth, spending roughly 130 billion dollars this year, close to double last year, with active deals to buy far more. It is not drowning in spare machines. It is floating the idea of selling a few to help justify buying the rest. Which tells you what the market actually bought today. Not a product. Relief. A first hint that all that spending might one day earn something back. And it lit up the circularity now running underneath the entire trade. Meta buys compute from CoreWeave. CoreWeave borrows against more than 50 billion dollars in liabilities to buy the Nvidia chips it rents out. Musk's xAI rents its Memphis data center to Anthropic. The same chip, the same server, gets booked as revenue two and three times as it moves around the loop. So when a buyer this size starts talking about selling, an uncomfortable question sits under the rally. If the biggest customers turn into suppliers, what holds up the scarcity that made all of this worth so much? CoreWeave shedding a tenth of its value on a rumor is the market beginning to ask. One number should stop you. Meta added more value in a single morning, on a report it would not even confirm, than CoreWeave is worth in full. Nobody was pricing a launch. They were pricing hope, that one of the most expensive spending races companies have ever run might finally sell something more than a promise. The buildout is not slowing. What changed today is that its biggest spenders admitted, out loud, that they now need to sell the shovels to keep funding the dig. Wild times!

The European Commission has halted public EU funding for solar projects using inverters from high-risk suppliers. This mainly affects Chinese firms like Huawei, as well as suppliers from Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The EU took this step due to serious cybersecurity risks, officials fear foreign governments could control or disrupt the devices, causing blackouts or other issues in Europe’s energy network. Chinese firms supply inverters for over 220 gigawatts of Europe’s solar capacity. The rules apply immediately to European Investment Bank and other EU program funds. This may raise costs for new solar builds in the short term as Europe shifts suppliers.

The White House has hinted that it plans to build a "top-secret" bunker under President Trump's new ballroom. The room has been referenced in multiple movies and television shows.