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The United States resumed strikes on Iranian targets along the strait this week and, per USNI News, hit two unidentified ships; CENTCOM announced it by video on X and its spokesman withheld detail. Iran’s answer was the Sidr and the Senegal Prosperity on August 31, after a month in which USNI counts more than thirteen commercial vessels struck. Investing.com, citing TankerTrackers, puts crude through the strait at about 5 million barrels a day on a 28-day average, with a further 2.5 million bypassing it through Fujairah and other Gulf of Oman ports; together, more than 40 percent of pre-war regional flows. The US Navy has blockaded Iranian exports since July. Iran’s president has said the country’s trade is down 25 to 35 percent.

Both capitals are now arguing about the same number from opposite ends. The Treasury Secretary’s 15 to 17 million barrel days and the tracker’s 5 million average describe a strait that is open on the days Washington escorts and closed on the days it does not. Gulf states, Saudi Arabia among them, are running what USNI calls shuttle runs; the Houthis have declared a blockade of Saudi-linked ships in the Red Sea, closing the western exit. Politico reports Arab diplomats fear Iran is widening the war with no exit in sight.

Brent settled at $92.68 on Friday, up 0.8 percent on the day and 7.6 percent on the week by Reuters’ comparable-contract calculation, its biggest weekly gain since July, on renewed US-Iran strikes; WTI closed at $91.48, 9.7 percent higher on the week. The seven core OPEC+ producers meet online on Sunday at 11:00 GMT and, per Reuters’ sources, will leave October policy unchanged, the 1.65 million barrel-per-day 2023 cut now fully unwound on paper. Into that meeting, Igor Sechin, chief of Rosneft and one of the Kremlin’s most influential energy voices, told a Russian-Chinese forum in Vladivostok on Thursday that China “has effectively taken the lead from OPEC” by cutting its crude imports by 5.5 million barrels a day this year and thereby “managed to stabilise the global oil market”, citing the UAE’s withdrawal as evidence of the cartel’s “waning influence”.

Sechin’s figure is a claim, not a customs print, and he has been an OPEC sceptic for years. But the structure of his argument is the one Riyadh cannot dismiss: a market where the largest buyer manages demand by fiat while the largest seller cannot manage supply through its own strait is a market where OPEC+ quotas are paper. Aramco’s $2 discount on Arab Light to Asia for September, reported by Semafor this week, is the Kingdom pricing that reality rather than denying it.

Bloomberg reported on August 31, and the story has run through the week, that the National Debt Management Center has begun sounding out banks for a fresh loan of at least $8 billion, with Saudi Aramco in separate early talks with lenders. Both are preliminary. The backdrop, per the same reporting: a second-quarter deficit of 34.3 billion riyals, about $9.1 billion; the sharpest quarterly contraction since the pandemic, with the oil sector down nearly 25 percent; Brent averaging about $87 for the year; and a funding year that already includes roughly $6 billion of bonds, $4 billion of new Aramco debt, a $7 billion PIF raise in May, and the $13 billion seven-year syndicated loan the NDMC closed late last year. In May the NDMC said it had completed its annual borrowing plan, with about 90 percent of the year’s needs secured.

The gap between May’s “funded” and September’s “sounding out” is the war: Hormuz disruption, Red Sea threat from the Houthis, strikes on energy infrastructure, and the import-cost inflation the SAMA governor flagged at the G20 this week. Bank debt is the instrument of choice because it is fast, private until signed, and does not require the Kingdom to sell reserves or PIF assets into a distressed market.

San Francisco-based Together AI has agreed with Humain, the Crown Prince-backed Saudi AI company, for access to 250 megawatts of data-centre power in the Kingdom. Financial terms were not disclosed. Together’s chief executive Vipul Prakash put the motive plainly: “More and more, local communities don’t want data centers in their backyards, and there are a lot of cancellations and moratoriums, so U.S. capacity is becoming even more constrained.” Humain’s Tareq Amin framed it as “strengthening the region’s position as a global hub for AI infrastructure”. Humain’s existing partners, per the report, include Amazon Web Services, xAI, Microsoft and Applied Intuition; Gallup found 48 percent of Americans strongly opposed to a data centre nearby.