Split screen

Happy FRIDAY, friends. We come to you this morning with the strange split-screen that has defined our new normal: Washington and Tehran haven’t fully made up, and yet the money has never moved faster.

We’re not holding our breath for much progress as far as peace talks go. Two days of talks in Doha ended with no real progress, with negotiators re-litigating the same Hormuz shipping and frozen-funds questions both sides had claimed to settle in the interim agreement a fortnight ago. This comes despite Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff talking up “positive” talks with regional leaders. Iran still says it’ll start tolling ships through Hormuz from mid-August, and oil slid to a four-month low. The next round waits until after Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral next Thursday.

While envoys re-argued old points in Doha, global dealmakers were having the year of their lives: Goldman Sachs data show global M&A hit USD 2.8 tn in 1Q 2026, up 49% y-o-y, fueled by AI and the Trump administration’s easing of antitrust guardrails.

And our part of the world is riding the wave harder than most — transaction value involving Gulf entities nearly tripled in 1H 2026 to some USD 300 bn, sending Wall Street firms scrambling to bolster their regional teams. Wartime — and yet.

Meanwhile, the A16z era in the Gulf has officially begun: Andreessen Horowitz just made its first-ever GCC investment, backing Saudi fintech Stitch’s USD 25 mn series A, a fitting punctuation mark on a half-year in which Saudi and the UAE came to account for 86% of MENA’s corporate-backed VC funding.

Today’s tell that the AI boom is bending everything around it: Apple. The company is reportedly in talks to buy memory chips from two Chinese makers on a Pentagon blacklist to ride out a memory shortage so acute Tim Cook has personally lobbied the likes of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to soften the fallout. The culprit? The same AI data-center gold rush driving our M&A numbers, which has memory makers chasing fatter margins.

And yet the machine keeps humming. Even amid the crunch, Apple is lining up its busiest hardware year yet for 2027 — upgraded iPad Pros, a redesigned entry-level MacBook Pro, the first M7 chips built for heavier AI workloads, and a 20th-anniversary iPhone — all with silicon schedules “in flux.” A useful reminder that even the most disciplined supply chain on earth is now improvising. –Salma