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A major Pizza Hut franchisee is suing the pizza chain, claiming gig workers leveraged its AI system for their own benefit, causing “cascading operational breakdowns” that pummeled sales at more than 100 locations.

Pizza Hut franchisee Chaac Pizza Northeast—which operates more than 110 Pizza Huts across New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania—filed a lawsuit in Texas Business Court earlier this month claiming that its franchiser’s Dragontail Artificial Intelligence system gave outsized visibility of operations to third-party delivery drivers, enabling them to prioritize certain orders, slowing delivery times and throttling customer satisfaction. The litigation was first reported by Restaurant Dive.

Chaac is seeking $100 million in damages for lost business and enterprise value.

Yum! Brands, Pizza Hut’s parent company, did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment but told Restaurant Dive it did not comment on ongoing litigation.

“We are in the process of reviewing the claim and will respond through the appropriate legal channels,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

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The U.S.-Israel war with Iran has caused the largest global energy-supply shock ever: Some 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows have been cut off at the Strait of Hormuz.

From gas rationing in Bangladesh, to farmers in Africa without fertilizer, to Americans struggling to afford filling their gas tanks, the supply-chain bottleneck is affecting every part of the world. But while an end to the current crisis is inevitable, its ripple effects will be shaking up the geopolitical and energy landscape long after it’s over.

One thing is not going to change: global energy usage. Power demand is rising by close to 4% a year, driven by growing populations, more electrification, and the AI data center boom. The worldwide energy feast will only grow, even as the recipes and cooks evolve.

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On the morning of Monday, March 23, President Trump pulled his first “TACO” of the Iran war. After four weeks of fighting, with oil prices already up 55%, Trump had given Iran an ultimatum on Friday: make a deal within 48 hours, or the U.S. would strike its power plants and energy infrastructure.

But on Monday morning, Trump reversed course. In an all-caps Truth Social post, he announced the U.S. and Iran had been having “very good and productive conversations” and that he would extend the deadline for a deal by five days.

Wall Street, for the first time since the war began, exhaled. Stocks rose. Brent crude plunged nearly 11%. Energy stocks—one of the few reliable winners of the conflict—sold off with oil.

The brokerage account in Trump’s name spent the day buying them.

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One of the world’s most contentious AI companies just took its first outside investment. The check came from the Chinese government.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng—a hedge fund billionaire who controls nearly the entire company—has spent years refusing outside money. Then, in mid-April, reports emerged that DeepSeek was raising at a $10 billion valuation. Within three weeks, that number hit $20 billion. By May 6, reports alleged that number had climbed to $45 billion–50 billion, with a target raise of up to $7.35 billion. The lead investor: The China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (a.k.a. the Big Fund)—the same government vehicle that bankrolls the country’s biggest chipmakers. 

The infusion of state capital into DeepSeek isn’t a one-off occurrence.

According to a recent PitchBook analyst note on China’s AI market, the move is the logical endpoint of a decade-long structural shift in government policy. Government-linked investors in China went from fewer than 10 AI deals per year before 2018 to more than 140 deals in 2025—roughly a 15x increase in participation. In semiconductors, which is what both DeepSeek and the Big Fund care most about, the state’s footprint is even more disproportionate. 

“The state recognizes they can’t really match what Nvidia or the rest of the world’s AI giants are doing,” senior VC analyst at Pitchbook, Kaidi Gao, told Fortune. “But there is a different game that they can play. They can deploy capital into what are the most readily addressable sectors,” Gao said, citing semiconductors, compute infrastructure, and hardware as among those sectors.

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Protests erupted in Kenya’s capital Nairobi Monday as a nationwide public transport strike kicked off in protest at rising fuel prices.

Commuters were stranded in various suburbs and the city center remained deserted. Drivers with private vehicles opted to stay home as protesters burned tires on major roads.

The Kenya Association of Private Schools had advised its members to assess the safety of students going to school, and most schools opted for online learning.

Kenya’s fuel prices hit a record high on Friday with the diesel price increasing by 23.5% and gasoline by 8%.

President William Ruto, who has been out of the country, is yet to comment on the new prices. In the last price review in April he attributed it to the Iran war but reduced the taxes to prevent a sharp increase in price at the time.

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Could the beloved 401(k) match be next on the benefits chopping block?

That looks to be the case for at least one technology services and outsourcing firm. TTEC recently paused 401(k) matches for its US-based employees, Business Insider reported on May 8. The company, which is headquartered in Austin, has about 16,000 staff in the US.

TTEC’s chief people officer, Laura Butler, said in an April 30 memo that the pause would last nine months, and that the company hopes to resume its 3% match “if our business performance supports it.”

Employers often make changes to their retirement plan contributions during periods of economic strain or uncertainty, sources told HR Brew. And while many ultimately resume their match, they don’t always do so at the same level.

What prompts employers to hit pause on 401(k) matches? More than three-quarters (76%) of employers offered a Roth 401(k) or other similar defined contribution plan as of 2025, according to SHRM. Of those offering a defined contribution plan, 74% also offered a match.

Despite their popularity, 401(k) matches often take a hit when the economy goes south. TTEC is far from the first employer to hit pause on their retirement match. The paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams did so last year, as did Drexel University, though both resumed them within the year.

Pauses to 401(k) matching ticked up during the 2001 and 2008 recessions, as well as the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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For years, the American power grid was a bastion of predictable stability. Throughout the 2010s, U.S. electricity demand remained flat as efficiency gains and declines in energy-intensive sectors such as manufacturing helped obscure the dawning digital age.

But the power grid as it once was might be no match for the technological demands of the 2020s. Retail electricity prices have soared in recent years, an increase fast outpacing inflation over the same period, in part due to the rising power costs associated with the artificial intelligence-driven infrastructure boom. Electricity costs have been one of the factors fueling the recent nosedive AI has taken in public polling, and a new study suggests residential utility pain tied to the technology needs of this decade might be just getting started.

Between 2018 and 2023, the share represented by data centers in total U.S. electricity use rose from 1.9% to 4.4%, according to a study published last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters. 

By the end of the decade, the national average wholesale electricity cost could rise between 6% and 29%, according to the study, which modeled several different energy use scenarios based on existing power demand forecasts. This increase in utility prices is primarily tied to data center expansion, with cryptocurrency mining also included in the modeling of higher costs. 

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A Spanish court acquitted Shakira in a tax fraud case, ordering the government to return more than 55 million euros ($64 million) in wrongly imposed fines, a court document seen Monday by The Associated Press said.

The decision follows years of tax troubles in Spain for the Colombian superstar.

The ruling relates to a dispute over the 2011 tax year in which Spanish authorities failed to prove that the singer was a resident of Spain, the Madrid-based court said in its decision.

For a person to be considered a tax resident in Spain, she must spend more than 183 days in the country.

Spanish authorities were only able to prove that Shakira lived in Spain that year for a total of 163 days, the court said, ordering the Treasury to reimburse the singer the tax paid plus interest.

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Crypto firms are rushing to distance themselves from a controversial party that capped a major industry event in Miami. The shindig, which took place on May 6 and coincided with the end of the Consensus conference, took place at a well-heeled night club called E11EVEN and featured female dancers performing pole routines and lap dances. Following reports of the raunchy atmosphere, crypto exchange OKX told the Financial Times it would be reconsidering its sponsorship of the conference.

“These kinds of immature and frankly borderline discriminatory events risk alienating exactly the communities the industry needs in order to continue growing,” OKX’s global head of corporate affairs Elliott Suthers told the FT. “We believe the industry should be moving towards greater professionalism, inclusivity and credibility, not away from it.”

Meanwhile, another big crypto firm called Consensys (which is a distinct and unrelated business from Consensus) said it “had no role” in the event and was reviewing its “partner selection and brand usage processes” after its logo appeared at the party.

Consenys is an infrastructure firm founded by Joseph Lubin, a co-founder of Ethereum. The company created MetaMask, one of the most-used wallets in crypto.

The event, for which attendees paid up to $6,000 and reportedly included a VIP networking area, was held at E11EVEN, a Miami night club sometimes frequented by celebrities. It’s also known as a strip club, and one picture taken by an attendee shows scantily clad women onstage in front of a screen bearing the logo of crypto news outlet CoinDesk, which is the organizer of the Consensus conference. CoinDesk did not return a request for comment

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Days after Spirit Airlines shut down in the middle of the night, a lawyer for the defunct budget carrier stood before a bankruptcy judge and apologized to the price-conscious customers who might struggle to find affordable flights in its absence.

“We apologize most specifically to those Americans who may now be priced entirely out,” Spirit lawyer Marshall Huebner said in court, thanking all the passengers who relied on the airline during its 34-year run, many of whom, he said, “could not otherwise have afforded air travel.”

Spirit’s May 3 demise is not the only curveball confronting people planning trips a week before the summer travel season has its traditional U.S. launch on Memorial Day. Rising jet fuel costs tied to the Iran war have pushed up airfares and associated fees across the commercial aviation industry. Two of the remaining U.S. budget carriers just finalized a merger.

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In September 2025, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company slashed 4,000 customer service roles, opting for the remaining 5,000 support workers to share their roles with AI agents.

“I need less heads,” Benioff said at the time.

But as more companies adopt agentic AI in hopes of replacing or making human workers more efficient, one top economist has noted that customer service roles—particularly those overseas—are only growing.

Citing data from the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok noted in a recent blog post that from 2016 through 2025, call center employment in the Philippines has risen each year, nearly doubling to 2 million over the 10-year span.

He also found that from 2021 to March 2026, unemployment rates in the Philippines have decreased from 9% to about 4%, suggesting AI has not displaced offshore workers. In India, unemployment has remained steady at around 7%. The Philippines dethroned India as the largest call center employer about 15 years ago.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/17/ai-boom-cheap-offshore-call-center-labor-employment-jevons-paradox/?utm_source=reddit/

The artificial intelligence boom is leading to fights in some states over growing utility profits, as governors, attorneys general and others protesting rising electricity bills say cash-strapped residents are stuck in a broken system.

Officials and lawmakers in at least six states — including Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — are going to new lengths to try to block rate increases proposed by utilities. Some are pressing utilities to completely change their model for financing major system upgrades.

The push comes during a midterm election year in which affordability is the leading theme in Democrats’ attempts to loosen Republicans’ control of Washington.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat who is seeking reelection this year, is challenging two utility rate increase requests in front of the state’s utility regulatory board.

“I felt like it’s never been more important to stand up against the blatant corporate greed of our monopoly utilities in Arizona,” Mayes said in an interview.

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Samsung makes about a third of the world’s DRAM—the memory inside virtually every phone, laptop, server, and data center on the planet. Together with its Korean rival SK Hynix, it controls roughly two-thirds of the global DRAM market and an even larger share of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized chips that AI systems cannot run without. Samsung and SK Hynix are two of only three companies that make HBM at all; the third being American semiconductor company Micron.

When people talk about AI infrastructure, they tend to focus on Nvidia’s GPUs. But those GPUs are useless without the memory chips stacked alongside them, and Samsung’s three fabrication complexes in South Korea are among the most important pieces of the AI industrial boom. Samsung operates 12 fabrication lines, employs over 260,000 people worldwide, and is investing $73 billion in semiconductor capex and R&D this year alone, the largest single-year chip investment by any company in history.

That’s why it’ll be a shock to the system when on May 21, nearly 45,000 of Samsung’s unionized workers plan to walk off the job for 18 days. If that happens, it will be the largest work stoppage in the history of the semiconductor industry, at the single most important chokepoint in the AI supply chain. But unlike past labor disputes, AI hyperscalers won’t be able to absorb a supply disruption.

Last September, SK Hynix settled with its own union to allocate 10% of annual operating profit directly to employees as performance bonuses for the next decade, while removing caps on bonuses. Based on 2026 profit forecasts, that translates to average payouts of $460,000-$477,000 per worker this year across SK Hynix’s 35,000 staff, with projections approaching $900,000 per person next year. This is nothing new for SK Hynix: it already paid profit-sharing bonuses averaging about $95,000 per employee this past February.

Now, Samsung’s unions are requesting 15% of operating profit be allocated to a bonus pool, removal of the current cap that limits bonuses to 50% of base salary, and a 7% wage hike. Management countered with roughly 13% of operating profit, but only as a one-time payment for 2026, and didn’t commit to permanent structural changes.

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Dire warnings about oil supplies are coming from everywhere lately as the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed while President Donald Trump’s trip to China failed to produce a breakthrough to reopen the critical waterway.

While investors have been trading on hopes that the Iran ceasefire will remain intact, there is little sign that the oil trade will return to normal soon, forcing them to reckon with the reality of worsening shortages and an imminent tipping point ahead.

JPMorgan predicted that commercial oil inventories in the developed world could “approach operational stress levels” by early June. Saudi Aramco said global inventories of gasoline and jet fuel could reach “critically low levels” ahead of the summer.

The International Energy Agency warned the world is drawing down oil inventories at a record pace, with 164 million barrels released by governments and industry as of May 8.

“Rapidly shrinking buffers amid continued disruptions may herald future price spikes ahead,” IEA said in its lately monthly report.

The U.S. and Israel launched their war on Iran two and a half months ago, and analysts expected the Strait of Hormuz to reopen by the end of May or early June.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/16/oil-markets-crude-non-linear-price-spike-panic-buying-inventories-iran-hormuz/?utm_source=reddit/