Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the Sudanese city of Al Fashir by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in a two-day window after the paramilitary group captured the regional capital, analysts believe.
Sky News is not able to independently verify the claim by Yale Humanitarian Labs, as the city remains under a telecommunications blackout.
Stains and shapes resembling blood and corpses can be seen from space in satellite images analysed by the research lab.
Al Fashir University. Pic: Airbus DS/2025
Al Fashir University. Pic: Airbus DS/2025
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale Humanitarian Labs, said: “In the past 48 hours since we’ve had [satellite] imagery over Al Fashir, we see a proliferation of objects that weren’t there before RSF took control of Al Fashir – they are approximately 1.3m to 2m long which is critical because in satellite imagery at very high resolution, that’s the average length of a human body lying vertical.”
Mini Minawi, the governor of North Darfur, said on X that 460 civilians have been killed in the last functioning hospital in the city.
The Sudan Doctors Network has also shared that the RSF “cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside Al Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards”.
World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was “appalled and deeply shocked” by the reports.
Satellite images support the claims of a massacre at Al Saudi Hospital, according to Mr Raymond, who said YHL’s report detailed “a large pile of them [objects believed to be bodies] against a wall at one building at Saudi hospital. And we believe that’s consistent with reports that patients and staff were executed en masse”.
In a video message released on Wednesday, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo acknowledged “violations in Al Fashir” and claimed “an investigation committee should start to hold any soldier or officer accountable”.
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Army soldiers ‘fled key Sudan city’ before capture
The Saudi Maternity Hospital in Al Fashir. Pic: Airbus DS /2025 via AP
The commander is known for committing atrocities in Darfur in the early 2000s as a Janjaweed militia leader, and the RSF has been accused of carrying out genocide in Darfur 20 years on.
Sources have told Sky News the RSF is holding doctors, journalists and politicians captive, demanding ransoms from some families to release their loved ones.
One video shows a man from Al Fashir with an armed man kneeling on the ground, telling his family to pay 15,000. The currency was not made clear.
In some cases, ransoms have been paid, but then more messages come demanding that more money be transferred to secure release.
Muammer Ibrahim, a journalist based in the city, is currently being held by the RSF, who initially shared videos of him crouched on the ground, surrounded by fighters, announcing his hometown had been captured under duress.
Read more:
Key Sudan city falls – what does this mean for the war?
‘Massacre’ kills more than 50, including children
200,000 trapped after army flees
He is being held incommunicado as his family scrambles to negotiate his release. Muammer courageously covered the siege of Al Fashir for months, enduring starvation and shelling.
The Committee to Protect Journalists regional director Sara Qudah said the abduction of Muammar Ibrahim “is a grave and alarming reminder that journalists in Al Fashir are being targeted simply for telling the truth”.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.
On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.
Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.
For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.
Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”
Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.
Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.
Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.
Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.
“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.
In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.
As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.
“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.
Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.
The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.
“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report.
It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.
There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.
The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.
Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.
“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”
The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined.
In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.
Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter.
Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.
AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.
WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria
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