Good evening, this is Markets Desk with your top stories.
Oil markets opened the week in shock after Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, sending crude prices surging as much as five percent. The strait handles roughly a fifth of global oil supply, and any sustained closure would ripple through energy costs, inflation expectations, and central bank calculus worldwide. Traders are watching closely.
From energy to silicon, Meta has confirmed its Hyperion data center supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana will carry a price tag north of fifty billion dollars, making it one of the largest single infrastructure commitments in corporate history. The five gigawatt facility was shaped in part by generous state tax incentives, underscoring how aggressively states are competing for the AI buildout economy.
And speaking of the AI talent wars, Anthropic has pulled another marquee name into its orbit. Tom Blomfield, cofounder of the British digital bank Monzo and a partner at Y Combinator, is stepping away from the storied startup accelerator to join Anthropic's compute team. It signals just how fiercely frontier AI labs are competing for operators who can scale infrastructure, not just researchers who can build models.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
