Good morning, and happy Independence Day weekend. The tricolour is still up on most balconies, the monsoon is refusing to take a break over the hills, and the mood this Sunday is a mix of national pride and quiet worry about the rain. There is a lot to catch up on from a long weekend, so let's get into it.
In today's newsletter: Modi's Red Fort pledge to train a crore youth in AI, a deadly flash flood and landslide in Arunachal Pradesh, and Nvidia quietly scaling back its OpenAI data-centre bet.
Something for the long weekend
Reacher, season 4. Alan Ritchson is back on Prime Video as the unstoppable ex-military drifter, and critics are calling this season darker and more complex, even if a few see the first signs of the formula wearing thin. |
Cocktail 2, if you want Bollywood gloss. Hindustan Times found that Shahid Kapoor carries the film with real conviction even though the story keeps reminding you of the sharper original. |
Modi pledges AI training for one crore youth from the Red Fort
Addressing the nation on the 80th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the government will provide AI skills training to one crore young Indians over the next year, spanning machine learning, data engineering and generative AI, with an explicit push to reach non-metro and rural districts.
The speech, his shortest Independence Day address in four years, also carried two other concrete commitments: free online coaching for competitive exams aimed at easing the financial burden on poorer families, and a nationwide sports talent hunt for children aged five to fifteen as India eyes a bid to host the 2036 Olympics.
As of this June, barely 53,000 candidates had enrolled in AI-related job roles under the government's existing skilling scheme, and fewer than half of those were certified. Training a crore people in a year means roughly 27,400 people starting every single day, which is less a scheme than a logistics problem the size of a small city moving through classrooms daily.
The free coaching announcement is a direct pitch to Gen Z voters squeezed by the cost of competitive exam prep, coming in the same speech as the sports talent hunt. Both read less like standalone welfare schemes and more like the opening moves of a longer play for young voters ahead of the run-up to 2029.
Flash flood and landslide kill four, leave five soldiers missing in Arunachal
Heavy rain triggered two separate disasters in Arunachal Pradesh on Friday evening. In Dibang Valley, a flash flood washed away two Army shelters, sweeping away seven personnel; two were rescued but five remain missing as search teams from the Grenadiers, ITBP and the General Reserve Engineer Force comb the area.
Separately, in Upper Subansiri district, a landslide at a road construction site killed four workers, underlining how monsoon infrastructure work in the eastern Himalayas keeps running through conditions that regularly turn fatal.
Nvidia quietly cuts its OpenAI data-centre guarantee by more than half
Nvidia has revised its backing for OpenAI's giant Ohio data-centre project, with the chipmaker now expected to guarantee under 120 billion dollars, down from the 250 billion dollars previously discussed, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The reduced backstop covers only the first phase of the 10-gigawatt campus being built on US Department of Energy land in Pike County.
The pullback follows investor unease about how much financial risk Nvidia is willing to carry for a single customer, even as a separate GPU financing arrangement worth up to 350 billion dollars is negotiated alongside it. For an AI boom that runs on the assumption of unlimited capital chasing compute, a chipmaker getting more careful about its own exposure is worth watching, in India and everywhere else betting on the same trend continuing unchecked.
Breaking.exe
SpaceX buys a coding tool. SpaceX has officially closed its acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor, folding a popular developer tool into Elon Musk's rocket and satellite empire. |
Apple's App Store squeeze. Apple has proposed taking a 15 percent cut of purchases made outside the App Store, a move that keeps the regulatory fight over its app economy rules very much alive. |
Shiprocket IPO closes hot. The logistics platform's Rs 1,617 crore IPO closed 99 times subscribed, with institutional investors bidding 123 times their reserved portion, ahead of a listing on the BSE and NSE later this month. |
Pangaea Revisited
France's under-15 ban blocked. France's Constitutional Council struck down a law banning social media for children under 15, ruling it disproportionate to free expression rights, two weeks before it was due to take effect. |
Ukraine hits deep inside Russia. Ukrainian forces struck a Russian military airbase and a Roscosmos space facility in Samara Oblast using domestically built Flamingo missiles, President Zelensky confirmed, hitting infrastructure tied to Russia's ballistic missile programme. |
Carrier swap in the Gulf. The US Navy is replacing the USS Abraham Lincoln with the USS George Washington after more than 265 days at sea and reports of serious morale and welfare problems among the crew. |
Philippines flood toll climbs. The death toll from back-to-back storms and monsoon rains has risen to 21, with Zambales and Bataan still under an orange rainfall warning as flooding continues. |
Also, Also, Also
Hockey World Cup opener. Hosts India beat Wales 3-1 thanks to a Harmanpreet Singh brace to begin their FIH Men's World Cup campaign in Amstelveen. |
Padikkal's maiden Test ton. On day one of the first Test in Galle, Devdutt Padikkal struck an unbeaten 131 as India closed on 288 for 2 against Sri Lanka, with KL Rahul retiring hurt on 77 after cramping up. |
LG Electronics India's best quarter. Net profit jumped 27.2 percent to Rs 652.86 crore on strong demand for premium appliances and air conditioners, its strongest quarter since listing. |
Reliance pulled up in court. The Supreme Court imposed a Rs 10 lakh cost on Reliance Industries for prolonging a 20-year-old gas supply suit filed by NTPC, criticising the company's litigation strategy in a case still stuck at the evidence stage. |