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Belgium’s foreign minister accused the European Commission on Monday of taking “insufficient” action against trade with illegal Israeli settlements as a push to clamp down divides EU countries.

EU foreign ministers gathered in Brussels are due to discuss a paper written by Ursula von der Leyen’s EU executive, and seen by POLITICO , that pitches various options for limiting trade with the West Bank settlements, including “prohibitive tariffs” and a licensing system.

But this paper falls short of Belgium’s demands for concrete proposals to ban or limit trade, according to Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot — who said the Commission had circulated the paper to give countries a “bone to chew on.”

“The European Commission has finally proposed some options over two pages,” Prévot told journalists on his way into the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels. “So this is the feeling they have thrown out a bone to chew on rather than any real will to go forward.”

Prévot went on to say that the measures were “largely insufficient compared to the need to be a credible actor on the geopolitical level in the Israeli-Palestinian situation — which, I regret to say, the European Union has not been for some time.”

The push to clamp down on Israel’s illegal settlements was due to loom large at the gathering of foreign ministers, with a group of countries — including Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland — seeking to form a majority to force the Commission to table a formal proposal that can be put to a vote.

Speaking to journalists on her way into the meeting, chief EU diplomat Kaja Kallas said the situation with illegal settlements needs to be addressed and that she sided with the European Council’s legal service against the Commission on whether tariffs on the settlements are trade measures or sanctions. The difference is that the former requires only a qualified majority of states to pass, while the latter requires unanimity.

Ministers from the Netherlands and Spain also called for an EU-wide halt to trade with the settlements, pointing out that their own countries had already taken bilateral measures.

“Spain has banned these imports bilaterally. The European Union needs to do it too,” said Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno.

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Ridley Scott has extracted some of the best performances of both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington 's careers, and he reunited the two Oscar-winners in one of his most ambitious movies. In the mid-2000s, Scott worked almost exclusively with Crowe, who won an Oscar for his lead performance in the epic blockbuster Gladiator . They worked together on a string of movies across a variety of genres, but none captured the magic of Gladiator , either critically or commercially. After the 2010 epic Robin Hood , Scott and Crowe stopped collaborating entirely, and even took jabs at each other around the release of Gladiator II , which, incidentally, features Washington as the villain. While Crowe hasn't commented on Washington's performance , he has certainly made his negative opinion of Gladiator II known.

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It was still a ways off, but I'd kind of latched on to '2028' being the end in sight of the raging memory supply crisis. However, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung reckons we should only be so lucky.

"We forecast that ‌next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," Kwak recently told Reuters . Not only is 2027 apparently set to be even worse, but Kwak also predicts the situation won't improve for years beyond the 2028 date I'd been holding on to, when SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung are all set to complete capacity expanding builds .

"Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations," Kwak said, "We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem."

The company also began trading on Nasdaq last Friday , with a US megalisting of shares that was seven times oversubscribed. SK hynix said then that it wants to use the resulting capital for at least two more construction projects in South Korea: a fabrication hub in Yongin, as well as an advanced packaging facility in Cheongju.

Kwak also said that the company is considering a number of other global sites for future wafer ⁠fabrication investment. He said, "The ​US, Japan, and Southeast Asia are all under consideration. Nothing has been decided yet. We are evaluating which location can provide the greatest business advantage."

(Image credit: Future) The tech stock market is still incredibly volatile though; while SK hynix shares were up 13.3% at $168.85 on the Nasdaq Friday afternoon, the company's shares then plunged by 15% in Seoul on Monday. According to Reuters , this marks the company's biggest one-day decline in nearly 20 years. As for the company's US-listed shares come Monday morning, those dipped by 9.2% to $152.50.

What explains that dip? For one thing, analysts say that South Korea's recent multi-billion dollar investments in the AI chip industry , plus all of those other capacity-expanding builds I mentioned earlier, has heightened investor anxiety that tight memory supply may tip over into oversupply in the coming years. Jing Jie Yu, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said, "Our base case here is the fresh capacity in 2027 and 2028 coming up in earnest will improve supply dynamics, thereby leading to price erosion."

Furthermore, the AI bubble is arguably looking a bit strained. Morningstar's director, Lorraine Tan, said, "Despite accelerating artificial intelligence adoption, monetisation remains uncertain and profitability for key players, such as OpenAI, appears to be under pressure. Funding is also shifting toward debt or equity, raising concerns about the maintainability of current spending levels."

In other words, yes, the industry is hoovering up all the memory, but if AI spending fails to see a sensible return on that investment, or data centre build out calms down, the bubble may burst and there will be much less demand for all of that silicon.

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PARIS – Germany’s Helsing raised US$1.8 billion in Europe’s biggest-ever funding round for a defense-technology startup, valuing the company at $18 billion and continuing a flurry of mega rounds for the continent’s defense industry.

Munich-based Helsing raised the funding in a Series E funding round, with investor demand “significantly” exceeding the available allocation, the company said in a statement on Monday. The company remains predominantly European-owned after the fund raising, Helsing said.

The latest round raises Helsing’s valuation from a reported €1.2 billion in June 2025, and follows a $1.2 billion funding round for German defense-tech firm Quantum Systems this month that valued that company at $8 billion. Defense technology has been one of the fastest-growing areas of venture capital funding on the back of rising military budgets worldwide, and in Europe in particular.

“This latest investment will accelerate Helsing’s mission to develop and integrate entirely new AI platforms into the defense capabilities of its growing number of partner nations,” the company said.

Investor demand reflected strong and growing confidence in AI-driven and software-defined defense technology, Helsing said. The company’s valuation puts it among Europe’s most valuable defense companies despite having been founded only in 2021.

The German company’s offer includes the HX-2 strike drone and the Altra AI-enabled battlefield-operations software as well as concepts including the proposed CA-1 autonomous fighter jet, and the firm works with the likes of Rheinmetall, Kongsberg and Saab to implement its AI solutions.

Other mega rounds in Europe this year include the United Kingdom’s Kraken Technology, which makes autonomous vessels, and which raised $175 million this month in a Series B funding round that valued the startup at $1 billion. A mega round is shorthand in the investment industry for a fund raising of $100 million or more.

German unmanned-systems maker Stark raised €500 million in June ($570 million) at a reported valuation of €3.2 billion, while Finland’s ICEYE, whose radar satellites are being ordered by militaries all over Europe , raised €450 million in a Series F round last month. French defense-tech startup Harmattan AI raised $200 million in January in a Series B round led by Dassault Aviation that valued the company at €1.4 billion, creating the country’s first defense unicorn.

Helsing said new and existing investors participated in the funding round, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst. The company’s existing investors include Prima Materia, Accel and Greenoaks.

The company said its board remains unchanged with Daniel Ek and Tom Enders as co-chairmen, members Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation Gen. Denis Mercier, and co-founders Gundberg Scherf, Niklas Köhler and Torsten Reil.