The future of India’s first semiconductor plant and the country’s ambition to replace China as a major supplier to Apple face growing uncertainty after Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said he would no longer seek another term.

Tata Group has made some of the “largest capital commitments” under Chandrasekaran’s leadership, which in the latest letter to shareholders he described as the building blocks for India’s road to becoming a developed country by 2047.

Tata Sons, the holding company of Tata Group, also acquired beleaguered national carrier Air India in 2022, started iPhone production after buying Wistron and Pegatron, reportedly overtaking Taiwanese company Foxconn’s India unit to become the country’s largest Apple supplier.

In 2024, it unveiled plans to set up India’s first semiconductor plant worth $11 billion in partnership with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp.

All these initiatives by the slat-to-steel conglomerate that also owns luxury automaker JLR are in the early investment cycles and are not churning profits.

The decision to take bold bets, risking losses at a time when the group’s top money-spinning company, Tata Consultancy Services, grapples with the impact of artificial intelligence on the information technology sector has led to a rift between Tata Sons and its key shareholder, Tata Trusts, experts said.

On Thursday, a day after Chandrasekaran gave up on another term as chairman, expressing displeasure at the delay in finalizing his reappointment for another five years, the process has formally begun to look for the 63-year-old’s replacement.

Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, part of the key trusts that together hold a 66% stake in Tata Sons, said in a statement that it “respects Mr. Chandrasekaran’s decision not to offer himself for re-appointment” and extends “full support to Tata Sons in ensuring a smooth, timely and orderly transition of leadership.”

Chandrasekaran, in his resignation letter on Wednesday, said the proposal to extend his term had been pending for six months and “was not carried through because one of the Board Members did not support it.” As per local media reports, he had disagreements…

Crude oil stockpiles in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve have fallen below 300 million barrels, the lowest level in more than four decades, as global inventories stay under pressure due to the Iran war.

The SPR fell by 6.1 million barrels to 298.7 million barrels last week, according to data released by the Department of Energy on Monday. The reserve, created in 1975, is at its lowest level since January 1983.

President Donald Trump ordered the release of 172 million barrels in March after Iran choked off oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz, triggering the largest disruption of crude oil supplies in history.

The drawdown in the SPR, whose authorized storage capacity is 714 million barrels, has raised questions about whether U.S. government stockpiles are on the verge of depletion. The minimum amount of oil needed to safely operate the SPR is about 70 million barrels, an Energy Department spokesperson told CNBC in July.

There is enough oil left in the SPR to do another release if needed, said David Goldwyn, who served as a State Department special envoy for international energy affairs under President Barack Obama. 

“I’m not worried about the stability of the reserve or our ability to do another drawdown, if we needed to,” Goldwyn told CNBC.

The SPR stood at around 415 million barrels before the U.S and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. U.S. government stocks will fall to around 243 million barrels when the release Trump ordered is completed.

The SPR’s operational capability is at risk due to aging infrastructure, according to a May report from the Government Accountability Office. More than a quarter of its inventory was “not available for drawdown due to a combination of construction outages and cavern outages” as of December 2025, GAO investigators found.

That implied that a minimum of 103 million barrels in the SPR today are not available for use, according to a July analysis by Rapidan Energy.

“The SPR’s drawdown, distribution and fill capabilities are currently limited and are at risk going forward due to longstanding issues with aging infrastructure compounded with ongoing major construction intended to address them,” the GAO warned in the report.

U.S. presidents have ordered massive releases from the SPR with growing frequency in recent years. President Joe Biden deployed 180 million barrels to address energy market volatility after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. That was the largest release in the history of the SPR.

The GAO described the release in response to the Ukraine war as an “unplanned stress test” for the SPR.

“When you do a drawdown, then you accelerate kind of the degradation of the wells themselves and some of the equipment,” Goldwyn said. “It’s like anything else — you use it a lot, you have to maintain it.”

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to the lowest level in more than 40 years as emergency stocks are released to help ease the supply disruption triggered by the Iran war.

The SPR stood at 340.3 million barrels as of June 12, the lowest level since the summer of 1983, according to data released Monday by the Department of Energy. The reserve fell nearly 9 million barrels week over week.

The deal that the U.S. and Iran are set to sign on Friday to reopen the Strait of Hormuz comes as oil executives have warned that global inventories are rapidly depleting to critical levels.

“We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” Exxon senior vice president Neil Chapman said May 28 at a conference hosted by Bernstein in New York. Chapman warned at the time that oil prices would spike as inventories fall while summer fuel demand is set to peak.

Inventories will continue to decline even after the U.S.-Iran deal is implemented as it will likely take weeks to months for oil flows through Hormuz to normalize.

“We still have inventory draws. Those are inexorable and they’re already at historic lows,” said Bob McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy. “We don’t think we’re out of the woods in terms of upper pressure on prices”

The U.S. agreed in early March to release 172 million barrels from the reserve. It was part of a coordinated release of 400 million barrels by the members of the International Energy Agency, the largest such intervention in the organization’s history.

“The U.S. is the supplier of last resort,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler. “Everybody’s coming to the U.S. to pull barrels out of it because there’s not the availability elsewhere.”

President Donald Trump repeatedly slammed the Biden administration for releasing barrels from the SPR after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The SPR hit a Biden-era low of around 346 million barrels in July 2023.

The SpaceX initial public offering is about to test whether Wall Street needs a new playbook.

The company, which starts trading on Friday, has a business that doesn’t cleanly fit into the categories investors usually use. Elon Musk’s space firm isn’t just a rocket company, or satellite internet company, or traditional defense contractor. 

The better way to understand SpaceX may be as private geopolitical infrastructure: A company with products that are embedded in how governments, militaries, airlines, remote communities and AI workloads operate. 

That is the core of the “strategic tech” premium. The combination of hyper growth, national importance and light regulation is rarely seen in the same company at the same time.

In its IPO filing, SpaceX said it was the primary launch provider for the U.S. government in 2025, launching 11 of 12 National Security Space Launch medium and heavy-lift missions and all five U.S. crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station for NASA. Roughly one-fifth of its 2025 revenue came from U.S. federal government agencies.

A traditional valuation can miss that kind of essential role in government operations.

A normal tech company is valuable because customers choose it. A strategic tech company becomes more valuable because customers may have trouble replacing it.

SpaceX already operates 10,000 Starlink broadband and mobile satellites in low-Earth orbit, which it says accounted for about 75% of all active maneuverable satellites in orbit as of March 31. Starlink had 10.3 million subscribers at that point, more than double the 5 million it had a year earlier.

The bull case is not just that SpaceX can sell more satellite internet subscriptions. It’s that more of the world’s communications, defense, disaster response, aviation, maritime and space infrastructure could start to depend on the network.

But SpaceX is different from the defense giants it is often compared with.

Musk’s space company sits somewhere between defense, tech and infrastructure. It has government importance, but also has a large commercial business. Defense exposure, but not the same mature defense-contractor valuation. Infrastructure characteristics, but not utility-style regulation.

Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3Harris are indispensable to U.S. national security, but the upside for those stocks is shaped by the Pentagon. Most of their revenue comes from government contracts, where pricing, costs and profits are subject to procurement rules and oversight.

For now, SpaceX gets the best of both worlds: The indispensability of a national security contractor with more of the pricing power and growth profile of a tech platform.

Public markets are already paying for a version of this in Palantir.

Palantir is part AI company, part defense contractor, part government operating system. Its software is wired into U.S. defense, intelligence and federal operations, while revenue is growing at a pace traditional defense…