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Category: finance – Page 87

The Export-Import Bank of the U.S. has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal it has done in six years.

WASHINGTON — The Export-Import Bank of the United States has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal the bank has done in six years.

Ex-Im announced June 21 that it approved $80.7 million in financing for a Falcon 9 launch of a Hispasat satellite, Amazonas Nexus, as well as launch and initial in-orbit insurance. The bank said the financing will be in the form of either a direct loan or a loan guarantee.

The Spanish operator announced in early 2020 it ordered Amazonas Nexus from Thales Alenia Space. The 4500-kilogram satellite will replace Amazonas-2 at 61 degrees west in geostationary orbit. At the time of the contract announcement, Hispasat said it expected to launch the satellite in the second half of 2022. Bpifrance, France’s export credit agency, is financing the construction of the satellite.

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That could reshape the Indian market, which has very few internet companies. While big tech firms are among the largest listed companies in China and the U.S., energy, financials and IT outsourcers currently dominate the Indian market. Reliance Industries —India’s biggest listed company, controlled by the country’s richest man—is pivoting away from oil and gas and last year secured investments from Facebook and Google for its tech unit, Jio Platforms.

Companies such as Zomato, Flipkart and fintech giant Paytm are considering initial public offerings in what could be a transformative moment for India’s stock market.

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Goldman Sachs ramps up bitcoin trading in new partnership with Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital.

The bank has begun trading bitcoin futures with Galaxy Digital, the crypto merchant bank founded by Mike Novogratz, CNBC has learned.

The trades represent the first time that Goldman has used a digital assets firm as a counterparty since the investment bank set up its cryptocurrency desk last month, according to Galaxy co-president Damien Vanderwilt.

The moves by Goldman, the preeminent global investment bank, may reverberate on Wall Street and beyond as banks increasingly face pressure from clients who want exposure to bitcoin. By being the first major U.S. bank to begin trading cryptocurrency, Goldman is essentially giving other banks cover to begin doing so as well, said Vanderwilt, a former Goldman partner who joined Galaxy last year.

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A Middle Eastern advanced persistent threat (APT) group has resurfaced after a two-month hiatus to target government institutions in the Middle East and global government entities associated with geopolitics in the region in a rash of new campaigns observed earlier this month.

Sunnyvale-based enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the activity to a politically motivated threat actor it tracks as TA402, and known by other monikers such as Molerats and GazaHackerTeam.

The threat actor is believed to be active for a decade, with a history of striking organizations primarily located in Israel and Palestine, and spanning multiple verticals such as technology, telecommunications, finance, academia, military, media, and governments.

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Circa 2019

As quantum computing enters the industrial sphere, questions about how to manufacture qubits at scale are becoming more pressing. Here, Fernando Gonzalez-Zalba, Tsung-Yeh Yang and Alessandro Rossi explain why decades of engineering may give silicon the edge.

In the past two decades, quantum computing has evolved from a speculative playground into an experimental race. The drive to build real machines that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics, and to use such machines to solve certain problems much faster than is possible with traditional computers, will have a major impact in several fields. These include speeding up drug discovery by efficiently simulating chemical reactions; better uses of “big data” thanks to faster searches in unstructured databases; and improved weather and financial-market forecasts via smart optimization protocols.

We are still in the early stages of building these quantum information processors. Recently, a team at Google has reportedly demonstrated a quantum machine that outperforms classical supercomputers, although this so-called “quantum supremacy” is expected to be too limited for useful applications. However, this is an important milestone in the field, testament to the fact that progress has become substantial and fast paced. The prospect of significant commercial revenues has now attracted the attention of large computing corporations. By channelling their resources into collaborations with academic groups, these firms aim to push research forward at a faster pace than either sector could accomplish alone.

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U.S. chip goliath Qualcomm has said it is open to the idea of investing in U.K. chip designer Arm if the company’s $40 billion sale to Nvidia is blocked by regulators, according to The Telegraph newspaper.

Qualcomm’s incoming CEO, Cristiano Amon, said Qualcomm would be willing to buy a stake in Arm alongside other industry investors if SoftBank, Arm’s current owner, listed the company on the stock market instead of selling it to Nvidia, the newspaper reported Sunday.

“If Arm has an independent future, I think you will find there is a lot of interest from a lot of the companies within the ecosystem, including Qualcomm, to invest in Arm,” Amon said. “If it moves out of SoftBank and it goes into a process of becoming a publicly-traded company, [with] a consortium of companies that invest, including many of its customers, I think those are great possibilities.”

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The aircraft could be used to transfer passengers between home and airports, Virgin believes. It would be able, for example, to make the 56-mile journey from Cambridge to Heathrow in 22 minutes, compared with a 90-minute drive.

The announcement represents another step in the race to making mass electric flight and air taxis a reality. Some analysts have predicted the sector could be worth £150bn by 2040 but significant hurdles remain, including regulation and safety certification. The VA-X4 has yet to take its first test flight. Dómhnal Slattery, the chief executive of Avolon, said its order would “accelerate the inevitable commercial rollout of zero-emissions aircraft. Before the end of this decade, we expect zero-emission urban air mobility, enabled by eVTOLs, to play an increasingly important role in the global commercial aviation market.”

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An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational, riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.

First observed in February 2021, “Prometheus” is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.

The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.

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