Good morning. An agreement with the Philippines to establish a high-tech industrial hub is the Trump administration’s latest effort to lessen China’s dominance over global supply chains.

The deal to build up American manufacturing across a stretch of the island of Luzon, signed Thursday, will offer U.S. companies access to essential inputs such as critical minerals that bypass Beijing’s control.

• Special zone: The artificial-intelligence-powered manufacturing hub is planned for a 4,000-acre site given to the U.S. by Manila, said undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg. The U.S. will occupy the site rent-free and administer it as a special economic zone.
   
• Diplomatic immunity: The hub will have diplomatic immunity, such as the protections afforded to an American embassy, and operate under U.S. common law—the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the world. The two-year lease is renewable for 99 years.
   
• U.S. control: The arrangement is a bid to accelerate U.S. manufacturing in defense and other key industries while lessening China’s chokehold on critical minerals and other key components for electronics, building on the Trump administration’s agenda to bring more of the supply chain under American control. “You can’t build anything in Ohio if the minerals and the process materials are controlled by an adversary who can cut you off tomorrow,” Helberg said in an interview.

Lawmakers urge tough export control penalties amid China chip face-off.

The U.S. should toughen penalties for export-control violations as it faces off against China in a battle to dominate artificial intelligence, a congressional committee said.

The U.S. should increase civil and criminal penalties for violations to reflect the strategic importance of semiconductors, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said in a report issued Thursday. The influential committee brings together some of Congress’s most ardent China hawks.

Power-hungry AI boom complicates Big Tech’s climate pledges.

Big tech companies are attempting a tricky balancing act: They are dramatically increasing their consumption of fossil fuels to power data centers needed for artificial intelligence computing while clinging to the goal of carbon neutrality for their operations.

To square that circle, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon have been pouring billions into startups that sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, buying credits that cancel out some of their emissions. They also have been ramping up spending on renewable energy certificates, which allow companies to offset their emissions by buying green power from elsewhere.

• EPA Wants Companies to Reuse Water to Cool Data Centers

• California just took a step toward enacting perhaps the strictest private-equity transparency law in the country.
   
• A project to suck carbon out of the atmosphere in Louisiana—which faced closure under the Trump administration—is among thousands of clean-technology initiatives getting a surprise funding lifeline after a Department of Energy review.
   
• A compromise House proposal to renew a powerful national-security surveillance program for five years failed to advance early Friday, an embarrassing setback for Republican Party leaders who thought they could muscle the measure over the finish line in overnight votes.

The Dow Jones Risk Journal Summit London on May 7 will convene senior business professionals for discussions on a range of corporate risks including supply chains, artificial intelligence, geopolitics and financial crime. Speakers include: Kathy Wengel, EVP, Chief Technical Operations and Risk Officer, Johnson & Johnson; Nish Imthiyaz, Global Privacy and Responsible AI Counsel, Vodafone; and Will Mayes, Chief Executive, Cyber Monitoring Centre.

Request a complimentary invitation here using the code COMPLIMENTARY. Attendance is limited, and all requests are subject to approval.

Europe could have only around six weeks of jet fuel left as Iran war strains supply.

Europe has only roughly six weeks of jet-fuel supply left and could soon face flight cancellations as the war in Iran strains global markets, said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

“I can tell you soon we will hear the news that some of the flights from city A to city B might be canceled as a result of lack of jet fuel” if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t fully reopened, he said in an interview with the Associated Press on Thursday.

• Trump Bets Economic Pain Will Finally Force Iran to Reopen Strait

How a 233-year-old Wall Street institution went all in on crypto.

Centralized, gated and closed on weekends, the New York Stock Exchange is the ultimate architectural symbol of everything bitcoin was created to disrupt. And yet, the 233-year-old titan of Wall Street has quietly positioned itself as an unlikely crypto powerhouse.

Between a multibillion-dollar blitz into digital assets and a planned 24/7 trading platform for blockchain-based securities, the storied exchange is undergoing its grandest—and likely riskiest—transformation yet: using the distributed ledger technology behind bitcoin to reinvent the very system it spent centuries building.

• Many farmers are not panicking about high fertilizer prices.
   
• The race to automate digital defenses is leaving entry-level cybersecurity workers behind, as companies seek more seasoned professionals to handle increasingly complex systems.
   
• The Middle East conflict has added to economic risks, New York Fed President John Williams said.
   
• The possibility of direct talks between the leaders of Israel and Lebanon as announced by Trump on Thursday would mark a historic step for two states that have been technically at war for 78 years. But they would leave one of the main belligerents on the sidelines: Hezbollah.
   
• With Iran’s uranium enrichment firmly in President Trump’s crosshairs, North Korea is quickly advancing its ability to expand its nuclear arsenal, upping activity at its main nuclear site, including work on a suspected new enrichment site.

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• Netflix Chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings will step down from the company’s board after his term expires in June, the streaming giant said Thursday.
   
• Charles Schwab said Thursday that it would soon allow customers to trade bitcoin and ether on its platform, marking the latest traditional financial powerhouse to cater to individual investors’ penchant for digital assets.
   
• Ford Motor plans to expand partnerships with Chinese manufacturers abroad, while also opening the door to one day allowing Chinese cars in the U.S.
   
• Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who oversaw the Trump administration’s controversial migration crackdown, is set to leave the department in May.
   
• The House passed a bipartisan measure Thursday that would reinstate temporary legal protections for Haitian immigrants living in the U.S., with 11 members of the Republican conference breaking with the Trump administration to side with Democrats on the measure.