By Amoha Basrur and Pranoy Jainendran
With applications already spanning the automotive, aerospace, and data-centre sectors, spintronics has become a strategic priority for countries with the manufacturing capacity to compete for it, driving targeted R&D funding, national roadmaps, and industry partnerships aimed at securing technological leadership and supply chain resilience.
By Siddharth Yadav
Global corporate AI investment reached US$581.7 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year’s total, with most of it flowing to the economies that already dominate research and hardware. Economies with nascent domestic digital infrastructure, investment vehicles, research ecosystems, and governance frameworks risk being marginalized by the AI-driven future.
By Gopalika Arora
The retrenchment of finance is not merely a result of a temporary slowdown in climate finance commitments by the developed countries. It may also signal a deeper restructuring of the climate finance architecture driven by changing institutional priorities within the multilateral system that was expected to anchor the transition.
By Parul Bakshi and Lydia Powell
Over the past decade, three structural shifts have been reordering global energy trade, encompassing not only traditional oil and gas flows but also the rapidly growing cross-border trade in electricity and clean energy goods.
By Piyush Verma
For the Global South, the stakes are particularly high: the energy transition could unlock industrialization, resilience, and strategic bargaining power, but it could also reproduce older patterns of dependency through new technologies, standards, minerals, and financial asymmetries.
By Andre Nicola
Unlike previous elections where the primary concern was social media manipulation, 2026 will test how Brazil, and other large democracies, respond to this new generative AI challenge. The question is no longer whether AI will shape elections. It is whether governments will build the right safeguards before, rather than after, elections can be manipulated.
By Ammar Nainar
The Iran War has already had a severe impact on the United States’ arms and ammunition inventory. The new demands for arms and munitions come just as India has begun to improve its domestic weapons manufacturing and promote defense exports. In the coming years, this offers opportunities for India and the United States to cooperate in defense manufacturing at scale.
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