OPEC+ has agreed in principle to increase its collective oil production quotas by 206,000 barrels per day for May, three sources familiar with the group’s talks told Reuters on Sunday.

The move, however, amounts to little more than a paper adjustment while the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran continues to paralyze the world’s most vital oil artery.

The decision, which mirrors the increase approved for April, comes as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since late February has caused the largest single supply disruption ever recorded, removing an estimated 12 to 15 million barrels per day — up to 15% of global supply. With physical production severely curtailed by damage to Gulf infrastructure and ongoing attacks, the quota hike is widely viewed as symbolic, signaling the group’s readiness to flood the market with additional barrels the moment the strait reopens.

Increasing output appears to be the only viable short-term option left for OPEC+ to help moderate the punishing price surge triggered by the shutdown. Crude has already climbed to a four-year high near $120 a barrel, and JPMorgan warned Thursday that prices could spike above $150, an all-time record, if the disruption drags into mid-May.

Gulf officials have privately told industry contacts that repairing damaged facilities and restoring full export capacity could take months, even if hostilities cease and the strait is reopened immediately. Russia, another major OPEC+ member, remains hobbled by Western sanctions and infrastructure damage from its war in Ukraine, leaving only a handful of producers with any meaningful spare capacity.

The timing of Sunday’s meetings added to the sense of urgency. Ministers from the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee were scheduled to convene around 1300 GMT, followed by separate talks among the eight core members who actually set production policy. These eight nations had spent most of 2025 unwinding 2.9 million bpd of earlier cuts before pausing further increases for the first three months of 2026.

A source close to the discussions described the May adjustment as largely “academic” while Hormuz remains blocked. Energy Aspects, a respected consultancy, called the increase “academic” as long as the physical constraints persist.

Tensions escalated further on Easter Sunday when President Donald Trump issued an expletive-laden post on Truth Social threatening direct strikes on Iranian power plants and bridges if the strait is not reopened.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” Trump wrote. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!”

He ended the post with the sarcastic sign-off: “Praise be to Allah.”

The president also announced he would hold a news conference in the Oval Office on Monday, following the U.S. military’s rescue of two American pilots whose aircraft were downed over Iran.

Iran, for its part, said on Saturday it would exempt Iraqi tankers from restrictions on using the strait. Shipping data on Sunday showed at least one tanker carrying Iraqi crude had successfully transited the waterway, but sources cautioned that few ship owners are willing to risk their vessels and crews until the security situation dramatically improves.

The war has exposed the fragility of global energy security. With the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and LNG, effectively shuttered for more than a month, traditional market-balancing mechanisms have been rendered almost powerless.

OPEC+’s modest quota increase is one of the few tools still available to signal that additional supply could eventually reach the market, even if the actual barrels remain trapped behind the conflict.

There is little hope that this symbolic step, combined with Trump’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric, will pressure Tehran to reopen the strait.

However, with physical supply severely constrained and repair timelines stretching into months, traders and consuming nations are left hoping that diplomacy, or force, can restore the flow before prices inflict even greater damage on the global economy.

Britain is stepping up efforts to persuade Anthropic to deepen its presence in the country, in what appears to be a calculated attempt by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government to turn a transatlantic regulatory clash into a strategic gain for the UK’s ambitions in artificial intelligence.

The move following Anthropic’s escalating clash with the U.S. Defense Department is seen as more than a diplomatic overture to a high-profile artificial intelligence company. It marks the emergence of a potentially significant new front in the global AI race, one in which companies frustrated by political pressure, regulatory conflict, or strategic restrictions in one jurisdiction may increasingly look to relocate, expand, or list in rival markets.

The Starmer government is seeking to capitalize on that opening. According to the Financial Times, British officials are preparing proposals that range from an expansion of Anthropic’s London operations to the possibility of a dual stock market listing, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office backing the initiative ahead of a planned late-May visit by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI platform, has been locked in a legal and political confrontation with Washington after the U.S. government designated it a national-security supply-chain risk when it refused to allow the military to use Claude for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the designation, but the legal fight remains active, with the Trump administration now appealing the ruling.

This is where the British move becomes far more consequential than a simple investment pitch. It creates a precedent in the AI industry: that companies facing punitive or politically charged treatment in one country may find strategic alternatives elsewhere.

In practical terms, this opens a new arbitrage in the AI race. Governments are no longer only competing on talent pools, tax incentives, and data-center infrastructure. They are increasingly competing on political alignment, regulatory tolerance, and strategic autonomy.

This means that if a company becomes “disgruntled” by defense-linked pressure, export restrictions, procurement blacklists, or national-security designations in one market, it may increasingly consider shifting its footprint to jurisdictions willing to offer capital access, regulatory support, and operational certainty.

Britain appears eager to position itself as one such destination, which could prove significant for London’s broader technology ambitions. The UK has long sought to strengthen its standing as Europe’s premier AI and deep-tech hub, leveraging its research universities, financial markets, and startup ecosystem. Securing a larger operational base for Anthropic would not only reinforce London’s AI credentials but could also create spillover effects in research, cloud infrastructure, venture investment, and enterprise adoption.

The proposed dual listing is especially important in this regard. It offers London a chance to attract one of the world’s most valuable private AI companies into its capital-market ecosystem at a time when global tech listings have increasingly gravitated toward New York. It also offers diversification of capital access and a potential hedge against policy concentration risk in the United States.

The broader geopolitical implication is that AI companies are increasingly being treated as strategic national assets. This is not unlike what occurred in semiconductors, where firms became central to geopolitical competition, and governments moved aggressively to secure domestic champions. The difference, however, is that AI firms can, at least for now, move capital structures, research teams, and legal domiciles with greater flexibility than chip manufacturers.

If Britain succeeds in attracting a deeper Anthropic presence, other countries may follow a similar playbook. Jurisdictions such as France, the UAE, Singapore, and even Canada could see an opening to attract frontier AI firms that become entangled in political disputes elsewhere.

This could fragment the global AI ecosystem into competing regulatory blocs. One bloc may be tightly aligned with defense and national-security priorities.

Another may market itself as a neutral, innovation-first environment for firms seeking distance from military integration. That dynamic introduces a new layer of competition in the AI race: jurisdictional migration.

The companies best positioned to exploit it may gain leverage in negotiations with home governments, using the threat of expansion elsewhere as a bargaining tool.

For Britain, the move is a bid to turn Washington’s conflict into London’s opportunity, while signaling to other AI firms that the UK is open to companies seeking a stable alternative base.

If this becomes a trend, the AI race may no longer be decided solely by model capability or compute scale, but by which countries can best retain, attract, and protect the companies.

Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a critical supplier to both Nvidia and Apple, has posted a sharp rise in first-quarter revenue.

The near-30 per cent surge in first-quarter revenue is the clearest signal yet that the global artificial intelligence build-out is fundamentally reshaping the economics of the hardware supply chain, with the Taiwanese giant emerging as one of the most strategic industrial beneficiaries of the spending boom.

The company, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, reported T$2.13 trillion ($66.6 billion) in first-quarter revenue, a 29.7 per cent increase from a year earlier, driven by sustained demand for AI servers and renewed strength in smart consumer electronics.

That figure came in slightly below the T$2.148 trillion LSEG SmartEstimate, but the broader picture remains emphatically positive: Foxconn is increasingly evolving from the world’s best-known iPhone assembler into a central infrastructure player in the AI arms race. The most important story inside the numbers is the continued acceleration of its cloud and networking division, the segment tied directly to AI servers, data-center racks, and high-performance computing systems.

Foxconn remains Nvidia’s biggest server manufacturing partner, placing it at the heart of global capital expenditure by hyperscalers, cloud providers, and enterprises racing to build AI infrastructure. As companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta continue to pour tens of billions of dollars into AI data centers, Foxconn’s production lines are becoming a direct proxy for that investment cycle.

This is why the March revenue print deserves closer attention. Monthly revenue jumped 45.6 per cent year-on-year to T$803.7 billion, the highest ever for that month. That kind of acceleration suggests sustained shipment momentum in AI racks, rather than a one-off quarter-end spike.

It also reinforces the view that the AI infrastructure cycle remains in its expansion phase. Foxconn itself signaled as much, saying that AI racks are maintaining a continued growth trend, with second-quarter operations expected to rise both sequentially and from a year earlier.

However, “it remains necessary to monitor the impact of the volatile global political and economic situation”, Foxconn said, without elaborating.

The company’s chairman, Young Liu, has already framed this as a multi-year cycle rather than a short-term surge. According to Reuters’ earlier reporting, Liu said the AI boom is expected to persist for another two to three years, while major customers see the industry approaching $1 trillion in size over that horizon.

That outlook is central to understanding Foxconn’s strategic repositioning. Historically, the company’s fortunes were tied heavily to smartphone cycles, particularly demand from Apple. Now, a second growth engine is clearly taking shape. The smart consumer electronics segment, which includes iPhones, also posted “significant” growth thanks to new product launches, giving Foxconn a rare dual exposure to both consumer-device demand and AI infrastructure spending.

This diversification matters for investors because many hardware companies remain exposed to cyclical weakness in PCs and smartphones. Foxconn, by contrast, now benefits from the strongest capital-spending theme in global technology while still retaining its traditional scale in consumer electronics.

That makes it structurally more resilient than peers that remain dependent on a single end-market cycle. Foxconn’s position in AI server manufacturing places it at the center of the geopolitical contest over technology infrastructure, marking a strategic supply-chain dimension.

As the U.S., China, and Europe race to secure AI leadership, the company’s factories in Taiwan, Mexico, India, and the United States become increasingly critical nodes in the global technology stack. Many believe it’s the reason management’s warning about “the volatile global political and economic situation” should not be treated as boilerplate.

The company has specifically pointed to the Middle East conflict as a major external challenge. For a business with deeply global logistics operations, any disruption to shipping routes, energy prices, or component supply chains can have direct operational and margin implications.

Higher oil prices, for instance, can feed into freight costs and industrial input inflation, while geopolitical tensions can disrupt customer capex timelines. That likely explains why the market response has remained cautious.

Despite the strong revenue growth, Foxconn shares have fallen 16 per cent this year, underperforming the broader Taiwan market, which is up 12 per cent. This divergence suggests investors are weighing two competing narratives. The extraordinary AI-driven revenue momentum, and the uncertainty over how much of that growth can translate into margin expansion amid geopolitical volatility and continued heavy capital investment.

That profitability question will become sharper when Foxconn reports full first-quarter earnings on May 14. But analysts have warned that revenue strength alone is no longer enough. This is because markets will be looking for evidence that the AI hardware boom is not just lifting top-line numbers but also improving earnings quality.

Even so, the broader industrial story is becoming harder to ignore. Foxconn is no longer simply the world’s largest contract electronics maker. It is increasingly becoming one of the most important physical enablers of the global AI economy, supplying the racks, systems, and infrastructure on which the next wave of computing power will run.

Some analysts believe that shift could define its next decade far more than smartphones ever did.