Oil prices were 4% higher on Wednesday morning following the 11th consecutive round of U.S. strikes against Iran overnight, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Strait of Hormuz remains a sticking point between the two sides.

Shortly after 4 a.m. ET, global benchmark Brent crude futures for July delivery were almost 4% higher at $94.23. Front-month U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were up 3.8% to trade at $87.46.

At the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ meeting in the Philippines on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington remained committed to diplomacy, but accused Tehran of violating the two sides’ agreement over the Strait of Hormuz.

“The problem we’re having right now is that they’re not serious about talks,” he said. “If they’re serious, we’re serious. If they’re not, then we will do what is necessary to protect our interests and also the interests of our allies.”

Tuesday saw the U.S. Central Command carry out its eleventh consecutive night of strikes against Iran.

Centcom forces targeted Iranian military operations centers, maritime capabilities, aircraft hangars, drone storage facilities, and military logistics infrastructure.

The military unit said the strikes had been completed to “further degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Rubio said Wednesday that the strait — a critical shipping route for oil and other vital commodities — remains a sticking point in bilateral talks, alleging that Iran “demands the right” to control the waterway. Allowing this to happen would set “a very dangerous precedent” for the world, he added.

“With no breakthroughs regarding Iran, the market focus returned to inflation over the last 24 hours, as Brent crude closed above $90/bbl for the first time in over a month, reviving fears about a wider stagflationary shock. And this morning we’ve seen a further rise above $92/bbl, so there’s little sign of oil prices easing as the U.S. confirmed overnight they’d completed an 11th consecutive evening of strikes against Iran,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid said in a note on Wednesday morning.

As energy prices continued to climb, investor bets on hawkish Federal Reserve policy measures mounted.

“The probability of a July hike was back up to 26% by [Tuesday’s] close, the highest since last week’s downside surprise in the U.S. CPI print,” Reid wrote on Wednesday. “It was at 45% the day before CPI and as low as 10% the day after.”

As of Wednesday morning, money markets were pricing in a 24.1% chance of a rate hike from the Fed this month, and a 69% chance of at least a quarter-point hike in September, according to the CME’s FedWatch tool.

Analysts at ING said in a note released on Wednesday morning that there were “mounting supply risks” in energy markets, as hopes for a temporary…

Anthropic is in very preliminary talks to lease artificial intelligence computing power from Meta, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC’s Kate Rooney.

Shares of the social media giant climbed off their lows of the day Friday following a report from the New York Times that a potential deal was being discussed worth about $10 billion.

Meta declined to comment.

The talks come weeks after Anthropic announced a similar deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use the computing capacity at its Colossus 1 data center to improve capacity for paid subscribers.

The deal talks are a sign that Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs, continues to make big commitments with other companies to gain access to AI chips made by Nvidia.

Access to enough AI chips remains a challenge for firms like Anthropic, which places usage limits on its most advanced models like Fable.

The talks also come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in May that the social media company was considering entering the cloud computing business, in an effort to show investors that the firm can make money from AI investments beyond improvements to its current business.

Meta could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures, including for AI infrastructure, in 2026.

Dave Brown, a former longtime senior executive at Amazon Web Services, is set to join Meta, CNBC has confirmed.

Last October, Zuckerberg said that companies are regularly “asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”

Seven & i Holdings Co. shares gained over 3% Friday after a Nikkei report said the 7-Eleven parent was nearing a deal to buy a stake in Polish convenience giant Zabka Group.

The potential transaction, expected to be worth several hundred billion yen, underscores Seven & i’s strategy to expand its overseas convenience store business by entering the Eastern European market, the Nikkei reported.

Zabka Group, established in 1998, has more than 10,000 franchise-operated stores in Poland selling hot snacks and groceries. Shares of the retailer, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, closed 10.9% higher on Thursday, to hit a record high.

Seven & i has been accelerating its global expansion with an eye toward increasing its worldwide store count, including Japan, from 87,000 to 100,000 by 2030. The company expects that the Zabka investment will significantly bolster its retail network in Europe, according to the Nikkei report.

Amir Anvarzadeh, market strategist at Asymmetric Advisors, said the market reaction reflected investor support for Seven & i’s renewed investment activity after a relatively quiet period following its acquisition of Australia’s 7-Eleven business.

Zabka’s operating model could potentially provide Seven & i with a platform for further convenience store expansion in central Europe, Anvarzadeh said, adding that the initial stake purchase could create opportunities for closer collaboration over time. 

The proposed transaction would mark the company’s return to major overseas convenience store investments after a period of limited dealmaking activity.

In 2024 the Japanese giant completed its acquisition of 7-Eleven Australia to expand its presence in the country, taking full ownership of the business. The move followed its $21 billion acquisition of Speedway, a U.S. convenience store operator with locations alongside gasoline stations, in 2021. 

Seven & i Holdings and  Zabka Group did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment. 

Apple is in talks with a small Silicon Valley company that says it can shrink powerful artificial intelligence models enough to run directly on an iPhone, the startup’s CEO told CNBC.

PrismML, a Khosla Ventures-backed spinout from the California Institute of Technology, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model on Tuesday. The company said it reduced the model from roughly 54 GB to less than 4 GB, allowing all 27 billion of its parameters to run on an iPhone 15 or newer.

PrismML CEO Babak Hassibi told CNBC that Apple and other companies have been evaluating the startup’s models and measuring their speed, energy efficiency and performance on devices.

“They’re really evaluating our technology right now,” Hassibi said of Apple.

He characterized the discussions as very early and said it remains unclear where they will lead, but that “things are progressing nicely.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Information previously reported the PrismML breakthrough.

The release comes one day after Apple opened the public beta of iOS 27, giving iPhone owners their first broad access to the company’s long-delayed overhaul of Siri. Apple is trying to make Siri more competitive with assistants from OpenAI and Anthropic while keeping more personal information and AI processing on the device.

The company’s approach could address one of the central constraints facing Apple’s AI strategy. The most capable models typically require too much memory and processing power to run on a smartphone.

Apple can send complex requests to cloud-based models, but running more AI directly on the iPhone would reduce the delay associated with sending data to a remote server, lower cloud-computing costs and support the company’s privacy pitch. It would also allow certain features to work without an internet connection.

Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, said smaller models could let Apple move more demanding features onto the iPhone, including computational photography, video generation and health or fitness tools that rely on sensitive personal data.

“The more you can do on device, the better it is,” she said, pointing to health and medication data that users would want to keep private.

PrismML said it shrinks AI models by drastically simplifying how their internal information is stored — reducing each value from 16 bits to just one or three possible values. That significantly cuts the memory required to store and operate the model.

Hassibi compared it to the chip industry’s move from eight-bit to four-bit computing, but takes it a step further.

The startup said the compressed models use between 10 and 15 times less memory, generate responses six to eight times faster and consume three to six times less…

Hello, this is Katie Foley writing to you from London. Welcome to today’s edition of the Daily Open newsletter.

It has been a week of narrative whiplash.

In just 48 hours at the NATO summit, we saw the vibe shift from tense confrontation to a “love-in” between allies and the U.S. President.

On Tuesday, meanwhile, investors aggressively dumped semiconductor stocks after Samsung’s results disappointed. Now it’s Friday, and rival SK Hynix is poised to become Wall Street’s latest AI chip darling.

Despite recent airstrikes, the U.S. will engage in “technical talks” with Iran and remains committed to finding a solution to the conflict, MS Now reported Thursday, citing a U.S. official. It comes after President Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, said that the ceasefire with Iran was “over.”

As my colleague Steve Sedgwick noted on the ground, “I’ve never witnessed such dramatic reversals of fortune, affecting so many global players, compressed into just 48 hours.” The summit wasn’t simply another diplomatic gathering; it was a real-time demonstration of how quickly the geopolitical landscape can shift when Trump is at its center.

In markets, Asian stocks are echoing gains on Wall Street, with tech fueling the rise. But futures are pointing to a more muted start here in Europe.

SK Hynix, the second-most valuable company in South Korea, behind only Samsung, is slated to begin trading on the Nasdaq today. The firm raised $26.5 billion in its U.S. offering, pricing its ADRs at $149. The listing will test whether the stock can shed its long-standing “Korea discount.”

Stateside, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh announced some prominent outside names to lead five advisory task forces. On artificial intelligence, the members all appear to be believers in AI as a transformative technology.

Heading the other way, Anthropic has appointed Ben Bernanke, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, to its Long-Term Benefit Trust, the company’s independent governance structure that advises the company and appoints its board members.

On the European corporate front, Volkswagen says it will cut its model lineup by as much as half in what would be its biggest restructuring yet. Competition from China, tariffs from the U.S., and regulation at home have seen profit margins halve at the automotive giant between 2021 to 2025.

— Katie Foley

Ukraine’s drone playbook is wreaking havoc in Russia — and upending where NATO wants to invest

Ukraine’s drone attacks have been dominating headlines about its war with Russia — and upended NATO’s investment thesis.

Having boosted drone production and capabilities in four years of war, Ukraine has stepped…

The U.S. will enage in “technical talks” with Iran and remains committed to finding a solution to the conflict, despite the two countries trading airstrikes in recent days, MS Now reported Thursday, citing a U.S. official.

The official said President Donald Trump had made his position clear and characterized Iran’s attacks on commercial vessels as “acts of terrorism,” according to MS Now.

Those comments come after Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, said that the ceasefire with Iran was “over.”

The memorandum of understanding between the two countries is performance-based, and Iran’s actions constitute “failed performance at an unacceptable level,” the U.S. official told MS Now, adding that talks with Tehran will continue.

The ceasefire signed last month has come under serious strain in recent days with the U.S. and Iranian forces conducting strikes this week. “I don’t want to deal with them [Iran] anymore,” Trump said at the NATO summit. 

On his way back from the summit, Trump said that Iran had called to make a deal to cease the escalating hostilities in the Middle East. “They called a little while ago. They want to make a deal so badly. I just don’t know if they’re worthy of making a deal. I don’t know that they’re going to honor the deal. That’s the problem,” he said.

Iranian officials have accused the U.S. of violating the MOU, citing violation of “Iranian adjustments” in the Strait of Hormuz, “persistent threats of further strikes” and reinstating oil sanctions.

The U.S. military conducted renewed rounds of offensive strikes against Iran in retaliation for three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz coming under attack. The U.S. Treasury Department subsequently withdrew a waiver that had allowed Iran to sell its oil.

Oil prices were marginally lower on Thursday evening, with global benchmark Brent crude futures for September delivery easing to $76.3 per barrel while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures traded at $71.87.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday resurrected his push for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, and suggested the U.S. could pull all of its armed services members out of Europe in response to the continent’s continued pushback on the issue.

The island territory “should be controlled by the United States,” Trump said shortly after he arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

The 32-member alliance — which includes Denmark, of which Greenland is a part — fell into a crisis in January, as Trump demanded that the U.S. must take control of the island territory on national security grounds.

In a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday afternoon Ankara time, Trump vented that Europe’s refusal to go along with his expansionist desire is “what hurt my relationship with NATO.”

“Because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark. Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” Trump told reporters.

“And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships, and that’s not going to happen, the ships, is, it’s not going to happen,” he said, repeating claims about foreign military threats against the self-governing island that experts on Greenland have denied.

Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” Trump went on. “And when they wouldn’t go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia — we don’t have to spend any money.”

“We could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe,” he added. “Because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago.”

“And they better be careful,” Trump went on, speaking broadly about Europe, “with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore.”

He then ended the portion of the meeting that was open to the press.

Trump’s comments thrust Greenland, a vast, sparsely populated and largely frozen Arctic island, back into the geopolitical spotlight.

The U.S. president’s pursuit of Greenland, had become a major trans-Atlantic issue at the start of the year, sparked by Trump’s repeated claims that the U.S. needed to acquire the island. Greenlandic lawmakers have insisted the island is not for sale.

Trump, who had refused to rule out the use of military force to annex Greenland, abruptly announced in late January, however, that he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had formed a “framework of a future deal” with respect to the territory.

A working group of representatives from the U.S., Denmark and Greenland have since been meeting to discuss the way forward.

Oil prices fell Wednesday after President Donald Trump said U.S. talks with Iran in Qatar are going well.

Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, traded 2.3% lower to $71.26 per barrel by 1:15 p.m. ET. The contract dropped roughly 21% last month, notching its largest monthly decline since March 2020.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures fell 1.7% to $68.29. The contract dropped more than 20% in June, reflecting its worst monthly performance since late 2021.

“As far as things are going, the denuclearization of Iran is moving along well” Trump told reporters. “They’ve had very good meetings and we’ll see.”

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Doha, Qatar on Tuesday for indirect talks with Iran. The U.S. envoys are speaking with mediators and not directly with the Iranians, a Qatari government spokesperson said.

The talks in Qatar come after renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran over the weekend jeopardized a 60-day truce between the two countries. Tehran fired on two commercial ships and the U.S. struck targets in Iran in retaliation.

The U.S. and Iran struck a 14-point memorandum of understanding on June 17 to pause fighting that had disrupted global oil flows through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.

Located in the Persian Gulf between Oman and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most critical energy choke points. The narrow waterway typically handles around 20% of the world’s oil traffic.

Iranian state media reported Wednesday that a ship ran aground in the Strait of Hormuz while using a route that was not approved by Tehran. The Islamic Republic identified the vessel as a foreign container ship, without providing further details.

The oil market continues to take an optimistic view on a supply recovery in the Middle East despite recent flare-ups between the U.S. and Iran, said ING strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey.

They said in a research note published Wednesday that tanker vessel movements in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz still appear limited.

“Admittedly, there has been a slight pickup in inbound tanker traffic, suggesting that shipowners are becoming increasingly confident about moving vessels into the Persian Gulf,” Patterson and Manthey said.

“If this trend accelerates, it becomes a clear headwind—and potentially a direct challenge—to our view that oil prices should rise from…

Oil prices were slightly higher on Tuesday as energy market participants closely monitored the potential for fresh talks between the U.S. and Iran in Qatar.

International benchmark Brent crude futures with August delivery were last seen up 0.2% at $73.32 per barrel, erasing earlier losses. The contract, however, is on track to end June roughly $19 lower, or 20% lower than the closing session on May 29. Brent crude futures with September delivery, meanwhile, rose 0.5% at $74.29.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures with August delivery traded 0.5% higher at $71.08, putting the contract on course for a $16 drop, or 19% fall, from last month’s closing.

The moves come as oil traders monitor the prospect of U.S.-Iran talks in Doha on Tuesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said talks between the two countries would take place in Qatar’s capital on Tuesday, claiming via social media that Tehran had “requested a meeting” following an exchange of strikes over the weekend.

A spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Monday reportedly denied that talks were scheduled over the coming days. They added that an Iranian technical delegation’s visit to Qatar this week was not related to U.S. officials visiting the country.

The mixed messaging appears to underscore the fragility of an interim peace deal struck by the U.S. and Iran earlier this month.

The two countries struck a 14-point memorandum of understanding on June 17 to pause fighting that had severely disrupted global oil flows through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.

Located in the gulf between Oman and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is recognized as one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints. The narrow waterway typically handles around 20% of the world’s oil traffic.

Energy analysts say they have been surprised by the pace of the sell-off in the oil market, noting that it has been far more aggressive than most had expected.

“The price action in recent weeks reflects a market that is treating this temporary ceasefire between the US and Iran as a permanent deal. This is clearly not the case, and as we have seen over the last four months, the situation can change very quickly,” strategists at ING said in a research note published Monday.

“It took long enough to agree on a temporary ceasefire. Reaching a permanent deal which tackles the nuclear issue within 60 days would be very optimistic. Of course, there is always the potential for the ceasefire to be extended, which would effectively be kicking the can down the road,” they added.

The U.S. and Iran are poised to hold fresh talks on Tuesday in Qatar’s capital, President Donald Trump said via social media on Monday, following a weekend of hostilities in the Middle East.

“IRAN HAS REQUESTED A MEETING. IT WILL TAKE PLACE TOMORROW IN DOHA!,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

There was no immediate reaction from Iran, although a senior Iranian official had denied that any technical talks were expected to take place in Doha over the coming days.

Trump’s post comes after the U.S. and Iran exchanged a series of strikes over the weekend that threatened to derail negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.

U.S. officials said both sides would pause hostilities and allow commercial vessels to transit the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.