🚀 Key Research
Geopolitics is shaped by control over energy inputs and energy value chains. As a price taker rather than market maker, western countries are using carbon markets as a tool to regain control of global energy value chains lost to BRICS.
Innovation that fixes spillovers and supply chain coordination issues drives more value than carbon tax, according to NBER paper
We built the Nehanda LLM with the goal of developing domain specific models with strong epistemic grounding and ability to maintain ground truths even under adversarial prompting
📅 Asoba Events
On Stage at AGES 2026 — Cape Town
Gertie took the stage at Africa's Green Economy Summit (AGES) in Cape Town (February 24–27), pitching Asoba as part of the summit's Investment Pitch and Showcase — a curated pipeline of over 50 vetted African climate projects presented to DFIs, venture capital funds, banks, and asset managers. AGES 2026 featured projects from 25+ countries seeking a combined $3.09 billion across energy, e-mobility, circular economy, and climate-resilient infrastructure.
Gertie presenting at AGES 2026
Gertie presented Asoba's case for closing the data infrastructure gap that stands between Southern Africa's 18 GW private renewable pipeline and the trading-grade intelligence the market requires — starting at $10/site/month versus the €300–800 that European platforms charge, with 24-hour deployment and production-proven forecasting accuracy (3.4% nRMSE) from as little as three months of historical data. The pitch: give away the data standard, monetize the intelligence layer above it.
🔥 AI, Energy, and Geopolitics
Africa
Zimbabwe's second fuel price hike in March — ZERA raises diesel to US$2.05 and petrol to US$2.17, with cost pressures piling up. The petrodollar system's fractures don't stay abstract for long; they show up at the pump in Harare within days.
Mining drives a billion-dollar rural industrial push in Zimbabwe — two of Buhera's largest mining companies anchor a new rural industrialisation strategy. When oil-dependent revenue models fail, mineral extraction becomes the fallback growth engine.
Chinese Embassy tells firms in Zimbabwe to follow the law — Beijing publicly reining in its own nationals operating in African mining. Unusual. Worth watching whether this is reputation management or a signal of tightening strategic discipline ahead of the March 31 negotiations.
Americas
The US is starving Cuba of oil — after capturing Venezuela's oil industry and ousting Maduro, Washington is now threatening tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba. Blackouts lasting up to 20 hours. Flights grounded. The UN has condemned the executive order as a humanitarian violation. This is what weaponising the petrodollar supply chain looks like when pointed at a country with no leverage.
US requests $200 billion in Iran war funding — described as a "small price." For context, that is roughly four times annual US renewable energy investment. The financial ceiling on escalation is not theoretical.
Connect the Grid Act of 2026 introduced in the Senate alongside three AI bills — the Future of AI Innovation Act, the NSF AI Education Act, and the AI Fraud Accountability Act. Legislating the AI buildout and the grid it depends on while simultaneously draining the energy budget to fund a war is the contradiction no one in Washington is reconciling.
Asia
India faces a "triple threat" — high energy costs, falling remittances from the Gulf, and reverse migration. India's exposure to the Gulf crisis is structural, not incidental. Deep linkages across energy dependence, labour markets, and financial flows.
HDFC Bank chairman resigns citing "values and ethics" — ₹1 lakh crore wiped from India's largest private bank in a single session. War fears plus governance shock in one of Asia's systemically important banks is not a combination markets handle gracefully.
China opens the door to a direct rival to US payment systems — rule changes to CIPS could turn it into a genuine SWIFT alternative. The structural plumbing for de-dollarization is being laid while the war provides the political cover.
China is weathering the Iran war oil shock better than others in Asia — strategic reserves, pipeline diversification, and yuan-denominated oil contracts are doing exactly what they were designed to do.
Apple is way behind in AI — and still making a fortune from it. AI revenue set to top $1 billion this year without building a single data centre. A reminder that the AI value chain has more than one business model, and not all of them require cheap Gulf energy.
Europe
European nations, Japan, and Canada announce joint safety efforts in the Strait of Hormuz — a coalition that conspicuously frames itself as multilateral, distinct from the US unilateral posture.
Iran has caused a rates crisis for the world's central banks — just when policymakers thought they had beaten inflation, the oil rally restarted the cycle. The ECB faces the same trap as the Fed with less fiscal headroom.
World on its way to a "doomsday" gas crisis scenario — LNG supply chain fragility from the Persian Gulf is pricing into European energy futures in ways that make the 2022 Russia shock look like a rehearsal.
🏆 Inside Asoba
Nehanda v2.1: $95 Model Outperforms GPT-5-mini
Our 32B parameter language model — fine-tuned on Qwen 2.5-32B for epistemic robustness — scored 0.959 on our RAG synthesis benchmark versus GPT-5-mini's 0.938. The breakthrough: moving domain knowledge out of weights and into retrieval at inference time, freeing the entire training budget for epistemic discipline — handling conflicting sources, refusing fabrication, maintaining consistency across multi-turn conversations.
Zorora: Scouting Pipeline & Discovery Now Live
Two major capabilities shipped this month. The Scouting Pipeline lets energy investors track brownfield, greenfield, and BESS sites through a full evaluation workflow — from identification through scoring, feasibility, diligence, to decision. Discovery overlays 739 mapped generation assets, mineral deposits, and mining concessions onto satellite imagery with VIIRS nightlights, grid infrastructure, and solar resource data across the SAPP region. Both run locally on Apple Silicon and are available on the enterprise tier of eSUMS.
🌍 Heard Around the World
"It is easier to start wars than to end them."
Gulf sovereign wealth funds hold approximately $2.5 trillion in USD-denominated assets — roughly 28% of total foreign Treasury holdings. The AI buildout that represents the last broadly accepted US growth thesis depends on two inputs simultaneously: cheap energy and Gulf capital deployment. A war that threatens both at once is not a risk to sentiment. It is a structural threat to the growth model itself.
Till next time,