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Russian President Vladimir Putin tours an exhibition at the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War on Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow, Russia, April 30, 2025.

Alexander Kazakov | Via Reuters

Russia has shown little appetite for peace negotiations with Ukraine, despite Moscow making a show of what war experts described as “performative ceasefires,” and a number of attempts by U.S. President Donald Trump to persuade Russian leader Vladimir Putin to talk to Kyiv.

In fact, Moscow is widely believed to be planning a new summer offensive in Ukraine to consolidate territorial gains in the southern and eastern parts of the country, that its forces partially occupy. If successful, the offensive could give Russia more leverage in any future talks.

While Russia seems reluctant to pursue peace now, increasing economic and military pressures at home — ranging from supplies of military hardware and recruitment of soldiers, to sanctions on revenue-generating exports like oil — could be the factors that eventually drive Moscow to the negotiating table.

“Russia will seek to intensify offensive operations to build pressure during negotiations, but the pressure cannot be sustained indefinitely,” Jack Watling, senior research fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, said in analysis Tuesday.

Russian stockpiles of military equipment left over from the Soviet era, including tanks, artillery and infantry fighting vehicles, will be running out between now and mid-fall, Watling said, meaning that Russia’s ability to replace losses will be entirely dependent on what it can produce from scratch.

“At the same time, while Russia can fight another two campaign seasons with its current approach to recruitment, further offensive operations into 2026 will likely require further forced mobilisation, which is both politically and economically challenging,” Watling surmised.

CNBC has contacted the Kremlin for a response to the comments and is awaiting a reply.

Economy slowing

In the meantime, dark clouds are gathering on the horizon when it comes to Russia’s war-focused economy, which has labored under the weight of international sanctions as well as homegrown pressures, also largely resulting from war, such as rampant inflation and high food and production costs that even Putin described as “alarming.”

Russia’s central bank (CBR) has stood the course of keeping interest rates high (at 21%) in a bid to lower the rate of inflation, which stood at 10.2% in April. The CBR said in May that a disinflationary process is underway but that “a prolonged period of tight monetary policy” is still required for inflation to return to its target of 4% in 2026. In the meantime, a marked slowdown in the Russian economy has surprised some economists.

“The sharp slowdown in Russian gross domestic product growth from 4.5% year-on-year in the fourth quarter, to 1.4% in the first quarter is consistent with a sharp fall in output and suggests that the economy may be heading for a much harder landing than we had expected,” Liam Peach, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics commented last week.

“Such a sharp drop in GDP growth has surprised us, although we had expected a slowdown to take hold this year,” he noted, adding that “a technical recession is possible over the first half of the year and GDP growth over 2025 as a whole could come in significantly below our current forecast of 2.5%.”

In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin visits Uralvagonzavod, the country’s main tank factory in the Urals, in Nizhny Tagil, on Feb. 15, 2024.

Ramil Sitdikov | Afp | Getty Images

The growth that remains in the Russian economy is concentrated in manufacturing, specifically the defense sector and related industries, and is being fueled by state spending, according to Alexander Kolyandr, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“After three years of militarizing the country, Russia’s economy is cooling,” he said in online analysis for CEPA, noting that the slowdown in inflation, less borrowing by companies and consumers, declining imports, industrial output and consumer spending all pointed to the slowdown continuing.

That’s not disputed by Russian officials, with the Economic Development Ministry predicting that economic growth will slow from 4.3% in 2024 to 2.5% this year.

“The economy is not demobilizing; it is just running out of steam. That said, a drop can easily become a dive. Bad decisions by policymakers, a further dip in oil prices, or carelessness with inflation, and Russia could find itself in trouble,” Kolyandr said.

Sanctions and oil price bite

What’s particularly starting to hurt Russia are factors beyond its control, including tighter sanctions on Russia’s “shadow fleet” (vessels illicitly transporting oil in a bid to evade sanctions enacted following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine) and a decline in oil prices as a result of Trump’s global tariffs policy that is hitting demand.

On Thursday, benchmark Brent futures with a July expiry stood at $64.94 a barrel while frontmonth July U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was at $61.65. The last spot price of a barrel of Urals crude oil, Russia’s benchmark, was at $59.97, according to LSEG data.

At the start of 2025, Brent was trading at $74.64 per barrel, while WTI and Urals crude were trading at $75.13 and $70.04, respectively.

Russia’s finance ministry said in April that it expects 24% lower revenues from oil and gas this year, compared to earlier estimates, and lowered its oil price forecast from $69.7 to $56 per barrel. The ministry also raised the 2025 budget deficit estimate to 1.7% of GDP, from a previous forecast of 0.5%.

FILE PHOTO: Crude oil tanker Nevskiy Prospect, owned by Russia’s leading tanker group Sovcomflot, transits the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey September 6, 2020. 

Yoruk Isik | Reuters

A lower oil price will “severely limit Russian revenue while its reserves are becoming depleted,” RUSI’s analyst Watling remarked.

“More aggressive enforcement against Russia’s shadow fleet and the continuation of Ukraine’s deep strike campaign could reduce the liquid capital that has so far allowed Russia to steadily increase defence production and offer massive bonuses for volunteers joining the military,” he said.

If Western allies can maintain and strengthen efforts to degrade Russia’s economy, and Ukraine’s forces “deny Russia from reaching the borders of Donetsk [in eastern Ukraine] between now and Christmas,” then “Moscow will face hard choices about the costs it is prepared to incur for continuing the war.”

“Under such conditions the Russians may move from Potemkin negotiations to actually negotiating,” Watling said.

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

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This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI's nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers

Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.

OpenAI

It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.

Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.

“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”

His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.

Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.

Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”

The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.

“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.

Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.

With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.

Inside OpenAI's data center site search

The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with OracleNvidia, and SoftBank.

New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.

“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.

A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.

‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’

Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.

In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.

Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.

“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”

Competition is fierce.

Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.

Shelby Tauber | Reuters

Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.

OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.

And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.

While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.

However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.

OpenAI's stealth site search drew more than 800 bids since January 2025

“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.

Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.

“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”

The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.

“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.

He understands why many people are skeptical.

“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”

WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits

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Cadillac’s quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

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Cadillac's quiet coup: nearly HALF of all Caddies sold in Q3 were electric

There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.

GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.

As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.

Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.

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EV MODEL   Q3 25/Q3 24   Q3 25 Q3 24  YTD 25/YTD 24   YTD 25 YTD 24
Chevrolet Equinox EV +156.70% 25,085 9,772 +389.88% 52,834 10,785
Chevrolet Blazer EV +1.14% 8,089 7,998 +36.72% 20,825 15,232
Chevrolet Silverado EV +97.49% 3,940 1,995 +78.58% 9,379 5,252
Chevrolet BrightDrop * 2,384 * * 3,976 0
GMC Hummer EV Pickup +21.86% 5,246 4,305 +48.65% 13,233 8,902
GMC Sierra EV +771.84% 3,374 387 +1,488.37% 6,147 387
Cadillac Optiq * 4,886 * * 9,826 0
Cadillac Lyriq +1.18% 7,309 7,224 -18.17% 16,626 20,318
Cadillac Vistiq * 3,924 * * 5,669 0
Cadillac Escalade IQ * 2,264 * * 6,030 0
Total +109.91% 66,501 31,681 +137.44% 144,545 60,876

Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.

That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).

It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.

You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.

Cadillac Escalade IQ review


SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.


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Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

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Tesla teases mysterious new product unveiling this week

Tesla is teasing the unveiling of a mysterious new product planned for Tuesday, October 7th this week.

The teaser is ambiguous, which is sparking speculation.

On Sunday, Tesla released a short teaser on X featuring a few seconds of what appears to be a wheel or a fan spinning and ending with the date “10/7”:

Due to the ambiguous nature of Tesla’s teaser, people are speculating as to what the automaker plans to unveil on Tuesday.

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Let us speculate.

Electrek’s Take

Of course, Tesla being an automaker, people would quickly think this is a wheel. However, due to the alignment and the lack of lugs, I doubt this is a wheel.

If it has to do with a wheel, it would make more sense for this to be a wheel cover.

A wheel cover could indicate that Tesla will unveil the new, stripped-down Model Y. Timing-wise, this makes the most sense, as we have been expecting Tesla to launch the cheaper Model Y early in Q4.

It could also be a fan. What Tesla product could have a fan?

Elon Musk has been discussing Tesla’s potential development of an HVAC system for a long time, but I haven’t seen significant evidence that Tesla has been actively working on it.

The next-gen Roadster? Maybe Tesla has put some fans for downforce? The timing of that could also make sense, as Musk has been promising a demo by the end of the year. However, we heard that one a few times before.

Several media outlets are reporting that Ferrari is set to unveil its first electric car this week, so Tesla may be looking to steal some of its shine.

What do you think Tesla is teasing here? Let us know in the comment section below.

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