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ORLEN Signs Up for More Renewable Hydrogen from Finland

ORLEN SA has signed agreements with ABO Energy Suomi, Nordic Ren-Gas and VolagHy Kuopio SPV for the supply of renewable hydrogen to Poland. “The Finnish companies with which ORLEN has signed the agreements are implementing key projects in the area of production of renewable hydrogen and its derivatives: ABO Energy Suomi is developing installations with a total […]

ORLEN SA has signed agreements with ABO Energy Suomi, Nordic Ren-Gas and VolagHy Kuopio SPV for the supply of renewable hydrogen to Poland.

“The Finnish companies with which ORLEN has signed the agreements are implementing key projects in the area of production of renewable hydrogen and its derivatives: ABO Energy Suomi is developing installations with a total capacity of up to 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year, Nordic Ren-Gas is constructing integrated facilities producing e-methane using renewable hydrogen and biogenic CO2 and VolagHy Kuopio SPV is developing a synthetic fuel production project with a capacity of approximately 50,000 tonnes per year, with plans for further expansion across the Nordic region”, said a joint statement online. The companies did not disclose agreed volumes or contract durations.

The statement disclosed that ORLEN had already signed an agreement last year with Finland’s leading producer of green hydrogen, P2X Solutions Oy.

P2X Solutions “operates Finland’s first industrial-scale facility for the production of renewable hydrogen and e-methane in Harjavalta and is pursuing further investments aimed at achieving one GW [gigawatts] of installed production capacity within the next decade”, the statement said.

“The agreements also provide for cooperation on developing a model for future supplies of hydrogen and its derivatives to Poland”, the companies added.

“The partners will also work together to define the logistical conditions enabling the transport of hydrogen and its derivatives from Finland to the ORLEN Group’s refining and chemical facilities in Poland”.

Marcin Wasilewski, a member of ORLEN’s Management Board for Transition, said, “The agreements we have signed represent to us a key building block in the development of a European hydrogen ecosystem. They enable us to tap into the expertise, experience and capabilities of the Finnish companies, ensuring access to competitively priced hydrogen that can be safely stored in Poland and supplied across Central Europe”.

ORLEN, which has seven active underground gas storage facilities, plans to tap into Poland’s salt caverns for the “large-scale” underground storage of hydrogen, the joint statement said.

Polish Minister of State Assets Wojciech Balczun was quoted in the statement as saying, “The Polish economy should continue to diversify its energy sources, as this is crucial for strengthening our economic and political security”.

“Hydrogen is widely regarded as the fuel of the future, and Polish companies must take part in the race to fully leverage its potential”, Balczun added.

Finnish Foreign Trade and Development Minister Ville Tavio said, “Finland’s diversified energy mix provides some of Europe’s most stable and affordable energy prices, enabling companies to scale up hydrogen production and support the clean transition. Joint projects enhance competitiveness and energy security in both countries”.

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Crooks are hijacking and reselling AI infrastructure: Report

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ORLEN Signs Up for More Renewable Hydrogen from Finland

ORLEN SA has signed agreements with ABO Energy Suomi, Nordic Ren-Gas and VolagHy Kuopio SPV for the supply of renewable hydrogen to Poland. “The Finnish companies with which ORLEN has signed the agreements are implementing key projects in the area of production of renewable hydrogen and its derivatives: ABO Energy Suomi is developing installations with a total capacity of up to 100,000 tonnes of hydrogen per year, Nordic Ren-Gas is constructing integrated facilities producing e-methane using renewable hydrogen and biogenic CO2 and VolagHy Kuopio SPV is developing a synthetic fuel production project with a capacity of approximately 50,000 tonnes per year, with plans for further expansion across the Nordic region”, said a joint statement online. The companies did not disclose agreed volumes or contract durations. The statement disclosed that ORLEN had already signed an agreement last year with Finland’s leading producer of green hydrogen, P2X Solutions Oy. P2X Solutions “operates Finland’s first industrial-scale facility for the production of renewable hydrogen and e-methane in Harjavalta and is pursuing further investments aimed at achieving one GW [gigawatts] of installed production capacity within the next decade”, the statement said. “The agreements also provide for cooperation on developing a model for future supplies of hydrogen and its derivatives to Poland”, the companies added. “The partners will also work together to define the logistical conditions enabling the transport of hydrogen and its derivatives from Finland to the ORLEN Group’s refining and chemical facilities in Poland”. Marcin Wasilewski, a member of ORLEN’s Management Board for Transition, said, “The agreements we have signed represent to us a key building block in the development of a European hydrogen ecosystem. They enable us to tap into the expertise, experience and capabilities of the Finnish companies, ensuring access to competitively priced hydrogen that can be safely stored in Poland and supplied across Central Europe”. ORLEN, which has seven active

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Denmark, Germany Ink Agreement on Bornholm Energy Island

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Nuclear safety rules quietly rewritten to favor AI

‘Referee now plays for the home team’ Kimball pointed out that while an SMR works on the same principle as a large-scale nuclear plant, using controlled fission to generate heat which is then converted to electricity, its design reduces environmental impacts such as groundwater contamination, water use, and the impact in the event of failure. For example, he said, the integral reactor design in an SMR, with all components in a single vessel, eliminates external piping. This means that accidents would be self-contained, reducing the environmental impact. In addition, he said, SMRs can be air-cooled, which greatly reduces the amount of water required. “These are just a couple of examples of how an SMR differs from the large industrial nuclear power plants we think of when we think of nuclear power.”  Because of differences like this, said Kimball, “I can see where rules generated/strengthened in the post-Three Mile Island era might need to be revisited for this new nuclear era. But it is really difficult to speak to how ‘loose’ these rules have become, and whether distinctions between SMRs and large-scale nuclear plants comprise the majority of the changes reported.” Finally, he said, “I don’t think I need to spend too many words on articulating the value of nuclear to the hyperscale or AI data center. The era of the gigawatt datacenter is upon us, and the traditional means of generating power can’t support this insatiable demand. But we have to ensure we deploy power infrastructure, such as SMRs, in a responsible, ethical, and safe manner.”  Further to that, Gogia pointed out that for CIOs and infrastructure architects, the risks extend well beyond potential radiation leaks. “What matters more immediately is that system anomalies — mechanical, thermal, software-related — may not be documented, investigated, or escalated with the diligence one would expect from

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Mplify launches AI-focused Carrier Ethernet certifications

“We didn’t want to just put a different sticker on it,” Vachon said. “We wanted to give the opportunity for operators to recertify their infrastructure so at least you’ve now got this very competitive infrastructure.” Testing occurs on live production networks. The automated testing platform can be completed in days once technical preparation is finished. Organizations pay once per certification with predictable annual maintenance fees required to keep certifications active. Optional retesting can refresh certification test records. Carrier Ethernet for AI The Carrier Ethernet for AI certification takes the business certification baseline and adds a performance layer specifically designed for AI workloads. Rather than creating a separate track, the AI certification requires providers to first complete the Carrier Ethernet for Business validation, then demonstrate they can meet additional stringent requirements. “What we identified was that there was another tier that we could produce a standard around for AI,” Vachon explained. “With extensive technical discussions with our membership, our CTO, and our director of certification, they identified the critical performance and functionality parameters.” The additional validation focuses on three key performance parameters: frame delay, inter-frame delay variation, and frame loss ratio aligned with AI workload requirements. Testing uses MEF 91 test requirements with AI-specific traffic profiles and performance objectives that go beyond standard business service thresholds. The program targets three primary use cases: connecting subscriber premises running AI applications to AI edge sites, interconnecting AI edge sites to AI data centers, and AI data center to data center interconnections.

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Gauging the real impact of AI agents

That creates the primary network issue for AI agents, which is dealing with implicit and creeping data. There’s a singular important difference between an AI agent component and an ordinary software component. Software is explicit in its use of data. The programming includes data identification. AI is implicit in its data use; the model was trained on data, and there may well be some API linkage to databases that aren’t obvious to the user of the model. It’s also often true that when an agentic component is used, it’s determined that additional data resources are needed. Are all these resources in the same place? Probably not. The enterprises with the most experience with AI agents say it would be smart to expect some data center network upgrades to link agents to databases, and if the agents are distributed away from the data center, it may be necessary to improve the agent sites’ connection to the corporate VPN. As agents evolve into real-time applications, this requires they also be proximate to the real-time system they support (a factory or warehouse), so the data center, the users, and any real-time process pieces all pull at the source of hosting to optimize latency. Obviously, they can’t all be moved into one place, so the network has to make a broad and efficient set of connections. That efficiency demands QoS guarantees on latency as well as on availability. It’s in the area of availability, with a secondary focus on QoS attributes like latency, that the most agent-experienced enterprises see potential new service opportunities. Right now, these tend to exist within a fairly small circle—a plant, a campus, perhaps a city or town—but over time, key enterprises say that their new-service interest could span a metro area. They point out that the real-time edge applications

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Photonic chip vendor snags Gates investment

“Moore’s Law is slowing, but AI can’t afford to wait. Our breakthrough in photonics unlocks an entirely new dimension of scaling, by packing massive optical parallelism on a single chip,” said Patrick Bowen, CEO of Neurophos. “This physics-level shift means both efficiency and raw speed improve as we scale up, breaking free from the power walls that constrain traditional GPUs.” The new funding includes investments from Microsoft’s investment fund M12 that will help speed up delivery of Neurophos’ first integrated photonic compute system, including datacenter-ready OPU modules. Neurophos is not the only company exploring this field. Last April, Lightmatter announced the launch of photonic chips to tackle data center bottlenecks, And in 2024, IBM said its researchers were exploring optical chips and developing a prototype in this area.

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Intel wrestling with CPU supply shortage

“We have important customers in the data center side. We have important OEM customers on both data center and client and that needs to be our priority to get the limited supply we have to those customers,” he added. CEO Lip-Bu Tan added that the continuing proliferation and diversification of AI workloads is placing significant capacity constraints on traditional and new hardware infrastructure, reinforcing the growing and essential role CPUs play in the AI era. Because of this, Intel decided to simplify its server road map, focusing resources on the 16-channel Diamond Rapids product and accelerate the introduction of Coral Rapids. Intel had removed multithreading from diamond Rapids, presumably to get rid of the performance bottlenecks. With each core running two threads, they often competed for resources. That’s why, for example, Ampere does not use threading but instead applies many more cores per CPU. With Coral Rapids, Intel is not only reintroducing multi-threading back into our data center road map but working closely with Nvidia to build a custom Xeon fully integrated with their NVLink technology to Build the tighter connection between Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia GPUs. Another aspect impacting supply has been yields or the new 18A process node. Tan said he was disappointed that the company could not fully meet the demand of the markets, and that while yields are in line with internal plans, “they’re still below where I want them to be,” Tan said.  Tan said yields for 18A are improving month-over-month and Intel is targeting a 7% to 8% improvement each month.

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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