• Big-name macro managers like Brevan Howard, Caxton, and Taula have lost money in March.
• Ripple effects from the US-Israel strikes on Iran have dragged down hedge funds.
• Bridgewater Associates has so far avoided most of the pain.

Macro hedge funds have, for the most part, not been deft enough to avoid losses in this month’s market turmoil brought on by the strikes on Iran by the US and Israel.

Brevan Howard’s Master fund, its longest-running strategy, has given back its 2026 gains after falling 6% this month through last Friday. Andrew Law’s Caxton Associates is down 15% on the month through last Friday, while Millennium-backed Taula Capital has lost more than 7% in over the same period.

The funds either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg first reported Brevan and Taula’s losses, while the Financial Times first reported Caxton’s losses.

There is one big-name macro investor that has been able to avoid the fallout, though. Bridgewater Associates, the $92 billion manager founded by Ray Dalio, is down less than 1% in March in its flagship Pure Alpha strategy through last Friday, a person close to the Connecticut-based fund told Business Insider.

The fund had one of its best years on record in 2025, with a 33% surge. Bridgewater did not respond to requests for comment.

Macro investors use forecasts on geopolitical outcomes to make bets on a range of asset classes, including currencies, bonds, and interest rates.

It’s not clear what specific trade tripped up the stung macro managers listed above, but three different investors said a reversal in short-term interest rate expectations in the UK and Europe hurt traders across Wall Street and Mayfair, London’s posh neighborhood full of hedge fund offices.

The expectation coming into the year was that the Bank of England and the European Central Bank would cut interest rates, but fears of inflation driven by rising energy costs from the Iran conflict have forced central bankers to reconsider. Caxton’s Law told the FT last year that he expected UK borrowing costs to fall in 2026, for example.

It’s not only macro investors who have been hurt by the fallout from the strikes on Iran. Global stocks have fallen, and HSBC’s Hedge Weekly report notes that quant pioneer Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Cub Maverick Capital, and $80 billion Marshall Wace’s multistrategy offering, Alpha Plus, have all lost money this month. The firms declined to comment.

• Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
• The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
• Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.

ARM has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world’s smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.

Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn’t just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world’s most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.

“The biggest reason we’re doing this is that our partners have asked for it,” Haas said Tuesday.

With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.

Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see “strong growth opportunities” for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company’s outlook could be “too ambitious.”

Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm

Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming “Hyperion” cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.

“If we met the performance, we couldn’t get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn’t get the performance,” Janardhan said.

This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were “working ’round the clock” to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.

“I didn’t even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project,” Saab said onstage.

While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn’t an ARM chip available to buy.

OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.

“That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute,” Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.

Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.

The chip market is ‘getting very crowded’

Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is “getting very crowded,” Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave “limited” opportunity for Arm’s new CPU, Arya wrote.

“Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM’s smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies,” Arya wrote.

That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.

The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia’s core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm’s AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.

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• The acting head of the TSA said more than 480 officers working without pay have quit during the shutdown.
• She said they can’t be replaced fast enough to adequately staff airports for the World Cup in June.
• It could be another saga of long security lines due to understaffed TSA during a peak travel period.

Even if the partial government shutdown ends soon, the fallout at the Transportation Security Administration could spill into the summer’s marquee event.

In a House testimony on Wednesday, acting TSA administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill said that so many officers have quit since their pay stopped in mid-February that the agency can’t get replacements fast enough to adequately staff airports ahead of the World Cup in June.

She said TSA officers spend four to six months in training before working checkpoints, but the games — which will take place across 16 cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico — start in just 80 days.

“This is a dire situation,” she said, adding that more than 480 officers have quit so far. “We are facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at our airports.”

TSA agents haven’t been paid for nearly six weeks, yet are deemed “essential” and expected to work during the shutdown, with back pay promised afterward. Their annual pay starts at around $40,000 and averages $60,000 to $75,000 a year with experience.

Still, many live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to work unpaid for months at a time — quitting and finding another job or doing gig work is often their best option.

Mass TSA agent quits and callouts amid the shutdown, compounded by peak spring break travel, have already created hourslong security lines and stranded travelers. It’s a preview of the chaos that could repeat when an estimated 6 million fans descend on potentially understaffed airports for the World Cup.

“If we see any spikes [in attrition], we’re going to have to pivot and assess how we are going to staff the FIFA locations adequately,” McNeill said.

Passengers traveling to the scheduled World Cup games in San Francisco and Kansas City, however, are likely safe from staffing chaos.

Both city airports use private security officers employed by contract companies instead of TSA, meaning their agents are being paid despite the shutdown.

It’s not just the TSA sounding the alarm

Former Republican Sen. from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin — who was confirmed as the new head of the Department of Homeland Security on Monday after Kristi Noem’s ousting in early March — said in a Senate hearing last week that the US is “behind” on World Cup preparations and the shutdown is making it worse.

“It’ll take four months once funding comes in to start replacing those that we’ve lost for training before we can get them out in the field; we don’t have four months with FIFA,” he said. “How do we expect these people to stay on the job and work? We’re losing institutional knowledge, we’re losing people we’ve already trained.”

The mass quits are exacerbating a problem that was already flagged last year.

A February 2025 report from the US Travel Association — long before the shutdown’s impact could be factored in — warned that the TSA may not be efficient enough to handle surging travel volumes during the World Cup.

On its busiest days, the agency screened about 3 million passengers. During the games, the organization said that level of traffic would be the norm.

Lawmakers are still negotiating a funding deal to reopen DHS and end the partial shutdown.

• Another xAI cofounder, Manuel Kroiss, has told people he is leaving Elon Musk’s company.
• Just one cofounder out of 11 remains besides Musk.
• The company has been in flux ahead of a widely anticipated IPO at SpaceX, which recently acquired xAI.

And then there was one.

XAI cofounder Manuel Kroiss has told people he is leaving the company, according to insiders with knowledge of his exit.

Kroiss, who is also known as “Makro,” is one of 11 engineers who helped launch the company alongside Elon Musk in 2023. With his exit, the number of cofounder departures now sits at 10.

Guodong Zhang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Jimmy Ba, Tony Wu, and Greg Yang have all stepped away since January.

XAI and Kroiss did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kroiss led pretraining, which helps train the company’s AI models on large datasets, and reported directly to Musk. He also worked on improving xAI’s coding models alongside Zhang, who left earlier in March. Musk said at the Abundance Summit earlier this month that xAI is “behind in coding,” but the company is working to “exceed our competitors on coding.”

Before joining xAI, Kroiss worked at Google and DeepMind.

Ross Nordeen, who came to xAI from Tesla, is the only remaining cofounder aside from Musk.

The company’s organizational structure has been in flux over the past few weeks, according to people with knowledge of the changes. Musk has taken over managing dozens of direct reports and has brought in workers from Tesla and SpaceX. It has also shed dozens of employees, the people said.

Earlier this month, Musk said on X that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

He has also said that the company is resifting through old xAI candidates to bring in new people.

“Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI,” Musk wrote on X.

Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, acquired xAI earlier this year. The company is expected to file an initial public offering this year, which could value it at $1.5 trillion.

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Netmore Group, the leading network operator and platform provider for Massive IoT, today announced a partnership with Allcom Telecom, taking another strategic step in expanding its leadership in the Brazil IoT market.

The collaboration aims to enhance connectivity offerings across the country by providing hybrid low power wide area networks optimized to meet the needs of a broad set of customer use cases across diverse environments.

Through this partnership Allcom will enhance its offering by integrating with Netmore’s LoRaWAN infrastructure, allowing customers to use a combination of NB-IoT and LoRaWAN services and seamlessly manage all connected devices in real-time through its Allmanager IoT platform. Unique to MVNO solutions in the region, Allcom also offers satellite backhaul for remote or underserved areas where terrestrial backhaul is unavailable, ensuring operational continuity for critical applications.

With demand for hybrid IoT connectivity growing, Netmore and Allcom are taking a major step forward in reducing complexity for low-bandwidth critical infrastructure and essential business application across Brazil.

“Brazil presents a unique combination of opportunities and challenges when it comes to IoT connectivity,” said Gustavo Zarife, VP South America at Netmore.

“By combining Netmore LoRaWAN with Allcom NB-IoT in a single offering, we are addressing critical coverage gaps and enabling our customers to scale projects with confidence, regardless of location. Our strategy in Brazil is clear: to deliver a hybrid, resilient infrastructure designed to meet the country’s diverse market needs.”

Reinforcing this strategy, the partnership also delivers important operational benefits to the market:

“Doing all of this on a single platform is a major differentiator. The partnership brings network resilience, expanded coverage, integrated billing, and other capabilities into one place,” says Marcio Fabozi, CEO of Allcom Telecom. “The multi-connectivity strategy enables us to cover customers as comprehensively as possible. It also makes operations simpler, more reliable, and more efficient to support applications across sectors such as utilities, smart cities, agribusiness, tracking, mobility, and industry.”

The post Netmore Expands Connectivity in Brazil Through Strategic Partnership with Allcom Telecom appeared first on IoT Business News.

French connectivity specialist Move & Connect has struck an alliance with KORE to give European IoT operators a single-contract, API-managed way to run deployments across borders—an approach aimed at reducing operational friction in use cases where downtime is costly.

For years, pan-European IoT deployments have been less a technical challenge than an operational one. Devices can be designed to work anywhere, but the commercial and carrier realities of Europe—different operator relationships, varying coverage footprints, and inconsistent tools for monitoring fleets—often turn “multi-country” into a patchwork of contracts and management portals. That fragmentation becomes more than an inconvenience in critical infrastructure scenarios, where a connectivity issue can translate directly into service interruption and lost revenue.

Against that backdrop, Move & Connect and KORE Group Holdings have announced a strategic alliance intended to simplify how European businesses deploy and run cellular IoT across borders. The agreement pairs Move & Connect’s on-the-ground market and deployment expertise with KORE’s global connectivity footprint and connectivity management platform, including eSIM capabilities.

The core promise is straightforward: Move & Connect’s European customers gain access to KORE connectivity in more than 190 countries, with service managed through a single contract and API. In practical terms, that positions the two companies to act as a single operational interface for device fleets that routinely move across national boundaries—or for businesses scaling the same device type across multiple European markets.

Why this is more than another roaming deal

Partnership announcements between connectivity providers are common, and many boil down to “more coverage” messaging. What stands out here is the explicit emphasis on operational control via KORE’s platform and APIs, and on Move & Connect using that control to deliver managed services tailored to regional realities. That hints at a division of labor increasingly seen in mature IoT deployments: a global connectivity layer that is programmatically controlled, and a specialist provider that turns that control into day-to-day operational outcomes for specific verticals and geographies.

In the press release, the companies point to critical sectors including EV charging, retail and smart farming. These are not incidental examples. They are environments where distributed assets and field operations make troubleshooting expensive, and where service-level expectations are rising. The stated goal is to avoid the “unreliable connectivity and lack of unified visibility” that can emerge when fleets span multiple countries and multiple mobile network operators.

A concrete implication—without assuming unannounced product capabilities—is that a single contract plus API-based management can reduce the time it takes to onboard new countries or adjust connectivity policies across an installed base. For OEMs and enterprises, that can shift effort away from carrier-by-carrier negotiations and manual fleet administration toward repeatable rollout playbooks.

eSIM as an operating model, not a feature

KORE’s platform is described as including “extensive eSIM capabilities,” and the alliance is framed around lifecycle management rather than one-off SIM supply. That matters because eSIM in IoT is increasingly about maintaining control after deployment: managing profiles, standardizing provisioning processes, and enabling organizations to scale without rebuilding operational tooling every time they enter a new market.

This is where Move & Connect’s positioning becomes distinct. The company is not presenting itself as a pure connectivity reseller; it is emphasizing hands-on deployment knowledge—understanding device behavior and local geographies—and using KORE’s infrastructure to deliver an “enterprise-grade” service with local responsiveness. For system integrators, that combination can be attractive when customers want a single accountable partner but still need local expertise for rollout realities such as site readiness, device placement, and operational troubleshooting across dispersed estates.

An analytics layer on top of network data

Move & Connect also says it is developing a proprietary AI-powered analytics layer “on top of KORE’s network data.” While details are not disclosed, the intent is clear: to move up the stack from connectivity delivery into insights derived from connectivity operations.

One non-obvious takeaway for IoT professionals is what that suggests about the competitive battleground in managed connectivity. Connectivity management platforms have long provided visibility and control, but service providers are increasingly looking to differentiate with additional intelligence that can translate network and SIM telemetry into operational signals for customers. If Move & Connect succeeds, it strengthens the role of regional specialists as more than intermediaries—potentially becoming the operational analytics interface customers interact with daily, while the global provider remains the underlying connectivity and management substrate.

What it means for buyers and partners

For enterprises running multi-country deployments, the alliance is a reminder to evaluate connectivity not just on coverage maps, but on the management model: whether fleets can be governed through a single API and contract, and whether escalation paths and local expertise exist when deployments hit real-world issues.

For OEMs, the combination of a global platform and a European connectivity specialist may simplify commercialization in multiple countries, particularly when devices are expected to be installed and managed at scale by third parties. And for connectivity providers and integrators, the announcement underscores a broader trend: value is increasingly created at the operational layer—lifecycle management, programmatic control, and analytics—rather than in raw connectivity alone.

The post Move & Connect taps KORE’s eSIM platform to streamline multi-country IoT rollouts across Europe appeared first on IoT Business News.