Egypt-born b’naire Mohamed Mansour set to purchase a USD 500 mn MLS franchise in San Diego: Senior treasurer of the UK Conservative Party Mohamed Mansour will become the owner of a USD 500 mn Major League Soccer (MLS) team expansion franchise this week in San Diego, according to the Times. The move is part of Mansour’s plan to invest in global football and expand on the success of acquiring Danish football club Nordsjaelland (FCN). He has also expressed interest in purchasing an English football club in the future, the newspaper reports. Besides football, Mansour previously invested in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Uber.

More details: Mansour teamed up with the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation — a Native American tribe in San Diego — with the USD 500 mn expansion fee making it the largest ever paid in the history of MLS. The team is set to start playing in 2025.

Shell to use AI to boost oil exploration: Oil major Shell is turning to AI-powered oil exploration under a partnership with SparkCognition for data analytics, according to Reuters. The AI will be used to speed up and increase efficiency in exploration, the companies said. SparkCognition will develop an AI-powered algorithm designed to detect new oil and gas reserves by analyzing seismic data, which can potentially accelerate explorations from nine months to less than nine days. The algorithm will use fewer seismic data scans to generate subsurface images, consequently reducing the prints and preserving deep seas.

This could be good news for everyone: The traditional process of identifying potential oil and gas fields is very time-consuming and requires a lot of seismic scanning to cover vast exploration areas, which can leave environmental prints in the deep seas. Relying on AI can make the process faster, as well as more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable.

Tags: