Arvind's Newsletter

1.After S&P, Japan's R&I upgrades India's sovereign rating to BBB+: Economic Times

Japan's Rating and Investment Information, Inc. (R&I) on Friday upgraded India’s Foreign Currency Issuer Rating from BBB to BBB+ with a stable outlook, citing strong domestic demand, fiscal discipline, and improved external stability.

This is the third such upgrade by a sovereign credit rating agency this year, following S&P’s upgrade to ‘BBB’ (from BBB-) in August 2025 and Morningstar DBRS’ upgrade to ‘BBB’ (from BBB (low)) in May 2025.

R&I said India’s large economy, currently in its demographic dividend phase, is expected to sustain firm growth despite global uncertainties.

2.JSW Energy to acquire Tidong Hydro Project for ₹1,728 cr in renewables push: Business Standard

Sajjan Jindal-owned JSW Energy’s renewable arm, JSW Neo Energy, has agreed to acquire Tidong Power Generation from Norway’s Statkraft IH Holding in a ₹1,728 crore deal. 

The deal would add a 150-megawatt (Mw) hydroelectric project in Himachal Pradesh for the Indian power producer, accelerating its clean energy expansion.

The transaction involves a 100 per cent acquisition of Tidong Power Generation by JSW Neo Energy. Tidong Power is building a run-of-river plant in Kinnaur district’s Tidong Valley. The project is scheduled to commence operations in October 2026.

3.Amazon India's big play is now ads, and q-comm the new billboard: Mint

Amazon India's advertisement revenue engines, which already outpace its e-commerce business, may get further fuel with the expansion of its new vertical Amazon Now, as the quick commerce venture opens up more advertising space. Yet the company still has catching up to do, since rivals Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart are already far ahead in the game on their established quick commerce apps.

Amazon India’s advertising and allied services revenue grew 25% in FY25, against a 21% growth in its mainstay marketplace business, making it one of the fastest-growing segments, data from business intelligence platform Tofler showed.

However, the marketplace remains Amazon India's backbone; it contributed ₹17,328 crore, or 58% of operating revenue, while advertisements and logistics brought in another ₹8,342 crore. The balance ₹4,468 crore came from other services.

The Tofler data showed Amazon Seller Services posted a 19% jump in revenue to ₹30,139 crore in FY25, up from ₹25,406 crore a year earlier, as more customers transacted on its platform. Losses shrank sharply, with the net loss narrowing 89% to ₹374.3 crore from ₹3,469.5 crore in FY24, driven by tighter cost control and improved operating efficiency.

4.How India's millionaires spend money: Realty, Rolex, Emirates, Rare Whisky: Business Standard.

In 2025, India’s high-net-worth landscape has exploded: the number of households with ₹8.5 crore or more in net worth nearly doubled (up~90%) between 2021 and 2025, swelling to roughly 8.71 lakh millionaire households, per the Mercedes-Benz Hurun India Wealth Report 2025.

India has 8,71,700 millionaire households (net worth ≥INR8.5Cr), up 90% from 2021, creating a surge in high-value discretionary spending. Analysts at Hurun note that the rich are no longer focused only on traditional status symbols such as jewelry and cars, but are diversifying their wealth into lifestyle upgrades and global aspirations.

Luxury Homes & Real Estate: High-net-worth individuals (HNIs) continue to favor luxury real estate in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru, with second homes in Goa and the Himalayas also gaining traction. Investment in holiday villas and branded residences has grown, as families seek both lifestyle value and asset appreciation.

5.Several of the world’s top universities are coming to India—can they deliver on the hype? Mint

Foreign universities, like the University of Southampton and Deakin, are opening campuses in India, a trend fuelled by the National Education Policy. While this allows students to get an international education without leaving home, will it reshape India’s academic landscape forever?

These global institutions establishing branches in the country marks a major shift in India’s higher education. The push comes from the National Education Policy—2020, which aims to internationalise higher education and attract more foreign universities.

Under the guidelines, the top 500 universities in global rankings are eligible to establish fully autonomous campuses in India. While they are free to decide admission policies, fee structures, and hiring of faculty, their academic standards, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and degrees need to be the same as the parent institution, with no franchise or ‘twinning’ (where students complete part of the degree in an Indian university and the rest at a foreign partner university) models permitted.

The initial plan permits 15 such campuses to open in the country. Aside from the universities cited above, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Liverpool, Victoria University, Western Sydney University, and the Istituto Europeo di Design have secured letters of approval and are expected to open campuses within the next two years.

6.Petrodollars and the ‘Islamic bomb’: how a Saudi-Pakistan pact was forged: Financial Times and others

Saudi Arabia, deeply dependent on US weapons and technology, would enter into a defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan, just months after Islamabad had clashed with New Delhi.

Their joint declaration came as the Middle East was being reshaped by an unrestrained Israel, a wounded Iran and an unpredictable US. As Israel struck Palestinian militants in Qatar, a key US ally, on September 9, President Donald Trump stood by. The attack in the heart of Doha shocked Gulf leaders.

While the details of the pact remain vague, and Saudi officials maintained the timing was incidental, the implications were clear: if Israel and the US were reshuffling the Middle East order, Saudi Arabia was keen to shore up an older alliance with a nimble friend.

The Saudi-Pakistan pact can’t replace American military power in the region, but it sends a message. “It shows Saudi Arabia has options and the US is not the only game in town,” Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator told the Financial Times.

Meanwhile,India said on Friday it hoped Saudi Arabia would keep in mind mutual interests and sensitivities between the two countries, two days after Riyadh signed a mutual defence pact with New Delhi's old foe Pakistan, reported Reuters.

7.Google is adding AI chatbot features to Chrome, the most used browser in the world

The most visible change is a button that launches its Gemini chatbot, but there are also options for searching and doing research; cursor-controlling “agentic” tools are in the pipeline.

Gemini is already being integrated into other products — there are AI tools in Gmail and Google Docs, and pop-ups implore users to “let Gemini take notes for this meeting” in video chats.

“AI’s looming presence does seem unescapable,” WIRED reported, although Google is hardly alone in pushing unasked-for changes on a captive audience.

Samsung is starting to put ads on its fridges, the inevitable end point of its “screen everywhere” initiative, The Verge noted.

8.The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound: New York Times

The technology is one of the strongest examples yet of how artificial intelligence can be used in a seamless, practical way to improve people’s lives reports Brian Chen. Gift Article

The $250 AirPods Pro 3 use artificial intelligence to do real-time translations, their most significant new feature. (The earphones, which have slightly better noise cancellation, are otherwise not that different from the last iteration.) As my friend spoke, Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, acted as an interpreter, speaking in a robotic voice that immediately converted the Spanish words into English in my ears.

9.Secrets of Chinese AI Model DeepSeek Revealed in Landmark Paper: Scientific American

China's DeepSeek AI publishes peer-reviewed study finding its AI model R1 did not rely on rival models like ChatGPT for training, cost $294K to create—tens of millions less than rivals' estimated costs.

The success of DeepSeek’s powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model R1 — that made the US stock market plummet when it was released in January — did not hinge on being trained on the output of its rivals, researchers at the Chinese firm have said. The statement came in documents released alongside a peer-reviewed version of the R1 model, published today in Nature.

R1 is designed to excel at ‘reasoning’ tasks such as mathematics and coding, and is a cheaper rival to tools developed by US technology firms. As an ‘open weight’ model, it is available for anyone to download and is the most popular such model on the AI community platform Hugging Face to date, having been downloaded 10.9 million times.

The paper updates a preprint released in January, which describes how DeepSeek augmented a standard large language model (LLM) to tackle reasoning tasks. Its supplementary material reveals for the first time how much R1 cost to train: the equivalent of just US$294,000. This comes on top of the $6 million or so that the company, based in Hangzhou, spent to make the base LLM that R1 is built on, but the total amount is still substantially less than the tens of millions of dollars that rival models are thought to have cost. DeepSeek says R1 was trained mainly on Nvidia’s H800 chips, which in 2023 became forbidden from being sold to China under US export controls.

10.China’s flying car start-ups take their case to the skies: Financial Times

Hovering taxis above the city of Guangzhou could soon become commonplace.

The recent demonstration in southern China’s Guangzhou showcased the technology of flying taxi maker EHang, which this year became the world’s first company to receive approval from its national regulator to operate unmanned passenger flights on tourist routes.

“We believe [airspace] below 1,000 metres . . . is currently humanity’s most under-developed natural resource,” said company vice-president He Tianxing, referring to the height at which many drones fly.

EHang hopes to start selling tickets soon for short sightseeing trips in Guangzhou and Hefei — the two cities where it has received approval to operate such flights — and eventually expand into public transport, logistics and emergency services.

Proponents of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft envisage a future where cheap, battery-powered helicopters revolutionise transport and logistics between and within cities. Analysts say China’s flying car sector is the world’s most advanced, driven by the country’s dominance of battery production and supportive regulation.

Globally, however, the sector has been frustrated by years of false starts, regulatory hurdles and safety concerns. Regulators have to unpick thorny issues such as which routes vehicles can take, how to deal with crashes and potential noise pollution from hundreds of small helicopters flying over densely populated areas.

While paid tourism flights will be a major commercial milestone, analysts said the most compelling example of large-scale deployment would be flying taxis, which hinges on officials resolving the complexities of urban flight and companies proving the real-world utility of their products.

Bernstein analysts estimate the global market for urban air mobility will be worth nearly $24bn a year by 2030, up from about $5bn last year. China’s state planner has established a department dedicated to developing the sector, prompting local governments to begin laying the groundwork for flying cars.