A plume of smoke rises after a strike on Tehran on March 4, 2026.
Atta Kenare | AFP | Getty Images
What you need to know today
China on Thursday set its GDP growth target for 2026 at 4.5% to 5% — the lowest target on record going back to the early 1990s — according to a copy of the government work report seen by CNBC, as Beijing grapples with persistent deflationary pressures and trade tensions with the U.S. Defense spending will rise by 7%, the slowest increase since 2021, although analysts believe the official figures are understated.
A vote to force President Donald Trump to pull back from the war in Iran failed to pass in the U.S. Senate Wednesday. The resolution faced plenty of hurdles and was largely symbolic, as Trump was almost certain to veto it. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday described the Middle East war as a “disaster”. That follows Trump’s pledge to cut off trade with Madrid after Spain’s government prevented two jointly operated bases in its territory from being used in the strikes.
Amazon’s Bahrain data center was targeted by Iran for supporting the U.S. military, state media Fars News Agency said Wednesday. The company’s cloud computing unit said Monday that one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were also damaged after they were “directly struck” by drones.
Global 15% tariffs will start this week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC, up from the current 10%. Bessent also predicted that U.S. tariff rates would, by August, effectively return to where they stood before the Supreme Court recently struck down the often-steeper duties that Trump unilaterally imposed on most of the world’s countries last year.
A tech industry group expressed ‘concern’ to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a company was designated as a supply chain risk. The letter, written by the Information Technology Industry Council, did not name Anthropic, though the artificial intelligence company was given that label on Friday after failing to reach a deal with the Defense Department. Among the participating firms were Nvidia, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.
Broadcom reported earnings and revenue beat, and issued a strong forecast for the current period, as the chipmaker rides the artificial intelligence boom. The stock rose as much as 5% in extended trading Wednesday. “We have line of sight to achieve AI revenue from chips, just chips, in excess of $100 billion in 2027,” Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on a conference call with analysts. “We have also secured the supply chain required to achieve this.”
And finally…
Nvidia CEO Huang says $30 billion OpenAI investment ‘might be the last’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI “might be the last time” it invests in the artificial intelligence startup before it could go public toward the end of the year.
He added that the $100 billion investment that the two companies touted in September is probably “not in the cards.”
“The reason for that is because they’re going to go public,” Huang said during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday.
