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The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral further up this decade, fueled by an epic growth spurt in the commercial space sector. To relieve the congestion, some mission planners are looking to the ocean as the next big gateway to space. China has sent more than a dozen space missions from ocean platforms since 2019, most recently in January 2025. Italy’s space program has announced it will reopen its ocean launchpad off the coast of Kenya, while German space insiders envision an offshore spaceport in the North Sea. In the US, the idea of sea launches has attracted attention from heavyweights like SpaceX and inspired a new startup called the Spaceport Company.  Launching rockets from offshore platforms like barges or oil rigs has a number of advantages. For one thing, it dramatically expands potential locations to lift off from, especially along the equator (this provides rockets with a natural speed boost because, thanks to geometry, the equator moves faster than the poles). At the same time, it is potentially safer and more environmentally friendly, placing launches further from population centers and delicate ecosystems.  Ocean launches have taken place on and off for decades. But the renewed interest in offshore spaceports raises a host of questions about the unique regulatory, geopolitical, and environmental trade-offs of sea-based launches. It also offers a glimpse of new technologies and industries, enabled by a potentially limitless launch capacity, that could profoundly reshape our lives. “The best way to build a future where we have dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of spaceports is to build them at sea,” says Tom Marotta, CEO and founder of the Spaceport Company, which is working to establish offshore launch hubs. “It’s very hard to find a thousand acres on the coast over and over again to build spaceports. It’s very easy to build the same ship over and over again.” The saga of sea launches The vision of oceanic spaceports is almost as old as rocketry itself. The first large rocket to take off from sea was a V2, the notorious missile developed by Germany in World War II and subsequently adopted by the United States, which the US Navy launched from the aircraft carrier USS Midway south of Bermuda on September 6, 1947.  As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward  the vessel’s own command center, known as the island. “I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.” Despite this brush with disaster, the test was considered a success because it proved that launching rockets from sea platforms was technically feasible. That revelation enabled the proliferation of missile-armed vessels, like warships or submarines, that have prowled the sea ever since. Of course, missiles are designed to hit targets on Earth, not venture into space. But in the early 1960s Robert Truax, an American rocketry engineer, began pursuing a spectacular vision: the Sea Dragon.  Standing nearly 500 feet tall, it would have been by far the biggest rocket in history, towering over the Apollo Program’s Saturn V or SpaceX’s Starship. No launchpad on land could withstand the force of its liftoff. A rocket this gargantuan could only be launched from a submerged position beneath the sea, rising out of the water like a breaching whale and leaving whirlpools swirling in its wake. Truax proposed this incredible idea in 1963 while he was working at the rocket and missile manufacturer Aerojet General. He was even able to test a few small prototypes, including the Sea Bee, which was fired from under the waters of San Francisco Bay. Though the Sea Dragon never became a reality, the concept captured the imaginations of space dreamers for decades; most recently, it was depicted bursting from the ocean in the Apple+ series For All Mankind.   Truax was eerily prescient about many future trends in spaceflight, and indeed, various governments and private entities have developed offshore launch platforms to take advantage of the flexibility offered by the seas. “The most wanted launching sites are close to the equator,” says Gerasimos Rodotheatos, an assistant professor of international law and security at the American University in the Emirates who has researched sea-based launches. “Many countries there are hard to deal with because of political instability or because they don’t have the infrastructure. But if you’re using a platform or a vessel, it’s easier to select your location.” Another major advantage is safety. “You’re far away from cities,” Rodotheatos adds. “You’re far away from land. You’re minimizing the risk of any accidents or any failures.” For these reasons, rockets have intermittently lifted off from sea for nearly 60 years, beginning with Italy’s Luigi Broglio Malindi Space Center, a retrofitted oil rig off the coast of Kenya that launched orbital missions from the 1960s to the 1980s and may soon reopen after a nearly 40-year hiatus.  Sea Launch, a multinational company founded in 1995, launched dozens of missions into orbit from the LP Odyssey, another repurposed drilling rig. The company might still be in business if Russia had not annexed Crimea in 2014, a move that prompted the venture—a partnership between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Norway—to shutter later the same year.  The saga of Sea Launch proved that offshore launches could be commercially profitable, but it also exposed gray areas in international marine and space law. For instance, while Sea Launch was a venture between four spacefaring nations, it registered its rig and vessels to Liberia, which has been interpreted as a flag of convenience. Such strategies could present the opportunity for companies or other entities to evade certain labor laws, tax obligations, and environmental regulations.   “Some states are very strict on the nationality and transparency of ownership, and other states less strict,” says Alla Pozdnakova, a professor of law at the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute for Maritime Law, who has researched sea-based launches. “For now, it seems that it hasn’t been really that problematic because the United States, for example, would require that if you’re a US citizen or a US company, then you have to apply for a license from the US space authorities, regardless of where you want to launch.” But if the US imposes strict oversight on launches, other nations might apply different standards to licensing agreements with launch providers. “I can imagine that some unauthorized projects may become possible simply because they are on the seas and there is no real authority—by contrast to land-based space launches—to supervise those kinds of launches,” Pozdnakova says. Boeing, which managed Sea Launch, was fined $10 million in 1998 by the US Department of State for allegedly sharing information about American defense technology with its foreign partners in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. In addition to the legal and national security risks posed by Sea Launch, Pacific Island nations raised concerns to the United Nations in 1999 that the company’s offshore rockets could damage the environment by, for instance, creating oil slicks from unused fuel in discarded boosters.  The complex issues that offshore spaceports raise for international law, environmental protection, and launch access have never been more relevant. SpaceX, which is famous for pioneering offshore rocket landings, has also flirted with sea-based launches. The company went so far as to purchase two oil rigs for $3.5 million apiece in 2020. They were renamed Deimos and Phobos after the two moons of Mars. “SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter (when it was still Twitter) in 2020.  SpaceX eventually abandoned this project and sold the rigs, though Gwynne Shotwell, its president and COO, said in 2023 that sea-based launches were likely to be part of the company’s future. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.  The company might need to move launch operations offshore if it wants to carry through on its aspirations for Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever developed and the keystone of SpaceX’s future plans to send humans to the moon and Mars. “We have designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it,” she said at a conference in 2023, according to SpaceNews. “We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.”  The environmental impact of launching hundreds of rockets a day, either from sea or land, is not known. While offshore launches pose fewer direct risks to local environments than land launches, very little is understood about the risks that rocket emissions and chemical pollution pose to the climate and human health at current levels, much less exponentially higher ones.  “It’s hard to deny that launching or emitting anything further from people is usually better,” says Sebastian Eastham, the senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, who studies aerospace emissions and their environmental impacts. “But when we say that we’re concerned about the emissions, it is incomplete to say that we’re not launching near people, so people aren’t going to be affected.” “I really hope that we find out that the impacts are small,” he continues. “But because you have this very rapid growth in launch emissions, you can’t sample now and say that this is representative of what it’s going to be like in five years. We’re nowhere near a steady state.” In other words, rocket launches have been largely overlooked as a source of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, simply because they have been too rare to be considered a major contributor. As space missions ramp up around the world, experts must aim to constrain the impact on climate change, the ozone layer, and pollution from spent parts that burn up in the atmosphere.  The McDonald’s of spaceports Offshore launches are almost routine in China, where companies like Galactic Energy, Orienspace, and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have expanded orbital liftoffs from barges. (None of these companies responded to a request for comment.)  But at the moment, sea-based launches are limited to small rockets that can deploy payloads of a few thousand pounds to orbit. No ocean spaceport is currently equipped to handle the world’s most powerful rockets, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which can deliver more than 140,000 pounds to orbit. There are also currently no public plans to invest in sea-based infrastructure for heavy-lift rockets, but that may change if smaller offshore spaceports prove to be reliable and affordable options. “All the activities now are based on off-the-shelf technologies,” Rodotheatos says, meaning facilities like oil rigs or barges. “If one company makes an investment to design and implement a floating platform from zero, specifically fitted for that purpose, I expect to see a big change.”  Tom Marotta founded the Spaceport Company in 2022 with a similar long-term vision in mind. After working both for the space company Astra and on the regulatory side at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Marotta observed what he calls a “spaceport bottleneck” that had to be addressed to keep pace with the demands of the commercial space sector.   To that end, the Spaceport Company procured a former US Navy training vessel, named the Once in a Lifetime after the Talking Heads song, as its first launchpad. The company is currently serving customers for suborbital space missions and missile tests, but its broader vision is to establish a network of scalable orbital spaceports across the ocean. “We want to be the McDonald’s of spaceports, and build a model that can be repeated and copied-and-pasted all around the world,” Marotta says. Marotta sees boundless applications for such a network. It could expand launch capacity without threatening coastal ecosystems or provoking pushback from local communities. It could serve as a reliable backup option for busy spaceports on land. It could give nations that normally don’t have access to spaceflight an affordable option for their own launch services.  “Many nations want their own sovereign orbital launch capability, but they don’t want to spend a billion dollars to build a launchpad that might only be used once or twice,” Marotta says. “We see an opportunity there to basically give them a launchpad on demand.” Marotta also has another dream in mind: ocean platforms could help to enable point-to-point rocket travel, capable of transporting cargo and passengers anywhere on Earth in under 90 minutes. “You’re going to need dedicated and exclusive use of rockets off the coasts of major cities to serve that point-to-point rocket travel concept,” Marotta says. “This is science fiction right now, but I would not be surprised if in the next five years we see [organizations], particularly the military, experimenting with point-to-point rocket cargo.”  Offshore launches currently represent a small tile in the global space mosaic, but they could dramatically change our lives in the coming decades. What that future might look like, with all of its risks and benefits, depends on the choices that companies, governments, and the public make right now. Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in Ithaca, NY. She writes the weekly Abstract column for 404 Media and is the author of the upcoming book First Contact, about the search for alien life.

Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral further up this decade, fueled by an epic growth spurt in the commercial space sector.

To relieve the congestion, some mission planners are looking to the ocean as the next big gateway to space. China has sent more than a dozen space missions from ocean platforms since 2019, most recently in January 2025. Italy’s space program has announced it will reopen its ocean launchpad off the coast of Kenya, while German space insiders envision an offshore spaceport in the North Sea. In the US, the idea of sea launches has attracted attention from heavyweights like SpaceX and inspired a new startup called the Spaceport Company. 

Launching rockets from offshore platforms like barges or oil rigs has a number of advantages. For one thing, it dramatically expands potential locations to lift off from, especially along the equator (this provides rockets with a natural speed boost because, thanks to geometry, the equator moves faster than the poles). At the same time, it is potentially safer and more environmentally friendly, placing launches further from population centers and delicate ecosystems. 

Ocean launches have taken place on and off for decades. But the renewed interest in offshore spaceports raises a host of questions about the unique regulatory, geopolitical, and environmental trade-offs of sea-based launches. It also offers a glimpse of new technologies and industries, enabled by a potentially limitless launch capacity, that could profoundly reshape our lives.

“The best way to build a future where we have dozens, hundreds, or maybe thousands of spaceports is to build them at sea,” says Tom Marotta, CEO and founder of the Spaceport Company, which is working to establish offshore launch hubs. “It’s very hard to find a thousand acres on the coast over and over again to build spaceports. It’s very easy to build the same ship over and over again.”

The saga of sea launches

The vision of oceanic spaceports is almost as old as rocketry itself. The first large rocket to take off from sea was a V2, the notorious missile developed by Germany in World War II and subsequently adopted by the United States, which the US Navy launched from the aircraft carrier USS Midway south of Bermuda on September 6, 1947. 

As it turned out, the inaugural flight was a bit of a mixed bag. Neal Casey, an 18-year-old technician stationed on the Midway, later recalled how the missile tilted dangerously starboard and headed toward  the vessel’s own command center, known as the island.

“I had no problem tracking the rocket,” said Casey, according to the USS Midway Museum. “It almost hit the island.”

Despite this brush with disaster, the test was considered a success because it proved that launching rockets from sea platforms was technically feasible. That revelation enabled the proliferation of missile-armed vessels, like warships or submarines, that have prowled the sea ever since.

Of course, missiles are designed to hit targets on Earth, not venture into space. But in the early 1960s Robert Truax, an American rocketry engineer, began pursuing a spectacular vision: the Sea Dragon. 

Standing nearly 500 feet tall, it would have been by far the biggest rocket in history, towering over the Apollo Program’s Saturn V or SpaceX’s Starship. No launchpad on land could withstand the force of its liftoff. A rocket this gargantuan could only be launched from a submerged position beneath the sea, rising out of the water like a breaching whale and leaving whirlpools swirling in its wake.

Truax proposed this incredible idea in 1963 while he was working at the rocket and missile manufacturer Aerojet General. He was even able to test a few small prototypes, including the Sea Bee, which was fired from under the waters of San Francisco Bay. Though the Sea Dragon never became a reality, the concept captured the imaginations of space dreamers for decades; most recently, it was depicted bursting from the ocean in the Apple+ series For All Mankind.  

Truax was eerily prescient about many future trends in spaceflight, and indeed, various governments and private entities have developed offshore launch platforms to take advantage of the flexibility offered by the seas.

“The most wanted launching sites are close to the equator,” says Gerasimos Rodotheatos, an assistant professor of international law and security at the American University in the Emirates who has researched sea-based launches. “Many countries there are hard to deal with because of political instability or because they don’t have the infrastructure. But if you’re using a platform or a vessel, it’s easier to select your location.”

Another major advantage is safety. “You’re far away from cities,” Rodotheatos adds. “You’re far away from land. You’re minimizing the risk of any accidents or any failures.”

For these reasons, rockets have intermittently lifted off from sea for nearly 60 years, beginning with Italy’s Luigi Broglio Malindi Space Center, a retrofitted oil rig off the coast of Kenya that launched orbital missions from the 1960s to the 1980s and may soon reopen after a nearly 40-year hiatus. 

Sea Launch, a multinational company founded in 1995, launched dozens of missions into orbit from the LP Odyssey, another repurposed drilling rig. The company might still be in business if Russia had not annexed Crimea in 2014, a move that prompted the venture—a partnership between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Norway—to shutter later the same year. 

The saga of Sea Launch proved that offshore launches could be commercially profitable, but it also exposed gray areas in international marine and space law. For instance, while Sea Launch was a venture between four spacefaring nations, it registered its rig and vessels to Liberia, which has been interpreted as a flag of convenience. Such strategies could present the opportunity for companies or other entities to evade certain labor laws, tax obligations, and environmental regulations.  

“Some states are very strict on the nationality and transparency of ownership, and other states less strict,” says Alla Pozdnakova, a professor of law at the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute for Maritime Law, who has researched sea-based launches. “For now, it seems that it hasn’t been really that problematic because the United States, for example, would require that if you’re a US citizen or a US company, then you have to apply for a license from the US space authorities, regardless of where you want to launch.”

But if the US imposes strict oversight on launches, other nations might apply different standards to licensing agreements with launch providers. “I can imagine that some unauthorized projects may become possible simply because they are on the seas and there is no real authority—by contrast to land-based space launches—to supervise those kinds of launches,” Pozdnakova says.

Boeing, which managed Sea Launch, was fined $10 million in 1998 by the US Department of State for allegedly sharing information about American defense technology with its foreign partners in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. In addition to the legal and national security risks posed by Sea Launch, Pacific Island nations raised concerns to the United Nations in 1999 that the company’s offshore rockets could damage the environment by, for instance, creating oil slicks from unused fuel in discarded boosters. 

The complex issues that offshore spaceports raise for international law, environmental protection, and launch access have never been more relevant. SpaceX, which is famous for pioneering offshore rocket landings, has also flirted with sea-based launches. The company went so far as to purchase two oil rigs for $3.5 million apiece in 2020. They were renamed Deimos and Phobos after the two moons of Mars.

“SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter (when it was still Twitter) in 2020. 

SpaceX eventually abandoned this project and sold the rigs, though Gwynne Shotwell, its president and COO, said in 2023 that sea-based launches were likely to be part of the company’s future. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. 

The company might need to move launch operations offshore if it wants to carry through on its aspirations for Starship, which is the most powerful rocket ever developed and the keystone of SpaceX’s future plans to send humans to the moon and Mars. “We have designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it,” she said at a conference in 2023, according to SpaceNews. “We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.” 

The environmental impact of launching hundreds of rockets a day, either from sea or land, is not known. While offshore launches pose fewer direct risks to local environments than land launches, very little is understood about the risks that rocket emissions and chemical pollution pose to the climate and human health at current levels, much less exponentially higher ones. 

“It’s hard to deny that launching or emitting anything further from people is usually better,” says Sebastian Eastham, the senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, who studies aerospace emissions and their environmental impacts. “But when we say that we’re concerned about the emissions, it is incomplete to say that we’re not launching near people, so people aren’t going to be affected.”

“I really hope that we find out that the impacts are small,” he continues. “But because you have this very rapid growth in launch emissions, you can’t sample now and say that this is representative of what it’s going to be like in five years. We’re nowhere near a steady state.”

In other words, rocket launches have been largely overlooked as a source of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, simply because they have been too rare to be considered a major contributor. As space missions ramp up around the world, experts must aim to constrain the impact on climate change, the ozone layer, and pollution from spent parts that burn up in the atmosphere. 

The McDonald’s of spaceports

Offshore launches are almost routine in China, where companies like Galactic Energy, Orienspace, and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have expanded orbital liftoffs from barges. (None of these companies responded to a request for comment.) 

But at the moment, sea-based launches are limited to small rockets that can deploy payloads of a few thousand pounds to orbit. No ocean spaceport is currently equipped to handle the world’s most powerful rockets, like SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which can deliver more than 140,000 pounds to orbit. There are also currently no public plans to invest in sea-based infrastructure for heavy-lift rockets, but that may change if smaller offshore spaceports prove to be reliable and affordable options.

“All the activities now are based on off-the-shelf technologies,” Rodotheatos says, meaning facilities like oil rigs or barges. “If one company makes an investment to design and implement a floating platform from zero, specifically fitted for that purpose, I expect to see a big change.” 

Tom Marotta founded the Spaceport Company in 2022 with a similar long-term vision in mind. After working both for the space company Astra and on the regulatory side at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Marotta observed what he calls a “spaceport bottleneck” that had to be addressed to keep pace with the demands of the commercial space sector.  

To that end, the Spaceport Company procured a former US Navy training vessel, named the Once in a Lifetime after the Talking Heads song, as its first launchpad. The company is currently serving customers for suborbital space missions and missile tests, but its broader vision is to establish a network of scalable orbital spaceports across the ocean.

“We want to be the McDonald’s of spaceports, and build a model that can be repeated and copied-and-pasted all around the world,” Marotta says.

Marotta sees boundless applications for such a network. It could expand launch capacity without threatening coastal ecosystems or provoking pushback from local communities. It could serve as a reliable backup option for busy spaceports on land. It could give nations that normally don’t have access to spaceflight an affordable option for their own launch services. 

“Many nations want their own sovereign orbital launch capability, but they don’t want to spend a billion dollars to build a launchpad that might only be used once or twice,” Marotta says. “We see an opportunity there to basically give them a launchpad on demand.”

Marotta also has another dream in mind: ocean platforms could help to enable point-to-point rocket travel, capable of transporting cargo and passengers anywhere on Earth in under 90 minutes.

“You’re going to need dedicated and exclusive use of rockets off the coasts of major cities to serve that point-to-point rocket travel concept,” Marotta says. “This is science fiction right now, but I would not be surprised if in the next five years we see [organizations], particularly the military, experimenting with point-to-point rocket cargo.” 

Offshore launches currently represent a small tile in the global space mosaic, but they could dramatically change our lives in the coming decades. What that future might look like, with all of its risks and benefits, depends on the choices that companies, governments, and the public make right now.

Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in Ithaca, NY. She writes the weekly Abstract column for 404 Media and is the author of the upcoming book First Contact, about the search for alien life.

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Indian LNG Buyers Embrace USA Benchmark to Balance Volatility

Indian liquefied natural gas importers have signed a flurry of long-term purchase agreements linked to the US price benchmark, the latest effort by the nation’s buyers to protect themselves from volatile markets. State-owned companies have signed at least four contracts since December, totaling nearly 11 million tons per year, priced to the Henry Hub index, according to the executives familiar with the deals. Until now, most of India’s long-term contracts have been linked to crude oil, the traditional way to price LNG deals. Pricing the fuel to the Henry Hub index doesn’t necessarily mean that the fuel will come from the US, rather it is a move to hedge risk.  India’s consumers — from power plants to petrochemical facilities — are highly price-sensitive as gas competes head-to-head with cheaper and dirtier alternatives. Companies that relied on the spot market or oil-linked contracts have periodically been forced to cut back purchases due to price spikes. US gas futures have also been relatively less volatile and more liquid than the Asian spot benchmark, the Japan-Korea Marker. “The last ten year average shows that there have been periods during winter months JKM benchmark surged beyond imagination, while Henry Hub prices saw proportionally smaller growth,” Bharat Petroelum Corp Ltd’s Director Finance V.R.K. Gupta said. BPCL in February signed a deal with ADNOC Trading for 2.5 million tons of LNG for five years. The Mumbai-based refiner will evaluate the performance of the deal and may sign more such contracts, Gupta said.  Indian Oil Corp. last week signed a deal with Trafigura for 2.5 million tons, or 27 cargoes, spread over five years, with supplies starting the middle of this year. The recent deals have been signed at a 115% link to Henry Hub plus $5 to $6 per million British thermal units. The supply is

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PJM, utilities urge FERC to dismiss call for colocation settlement talks

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should reject a call for a 90-day pause in its deliberations over the PJM Interconnection’s rules for colocating data centers at power plants, according to PJM, major utilities and other organizations. “The national interest will be best served by a quick dismissal of this proceeding, and a ruling that the existing PJM Tariff remains just and reasonable,” PJM transmission owners said in a Wednesday filing urging FERC to dismiss a call for stakeholder settlement talks. “Rather than fighting about a wish list of new rules, the parties will then instead begin to focus on obtaining service under the rules in place today.” The transmission owners include utility companies such as American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Exelon, FirstEnergy and PPL Electric. “The record is clear — no matter how connected to the PJM transmission system, large loads pose both a safety and a reliability concern,” the utilities said. “It is unrealistic to ask the [transmission owners] to accede to these demands in the context of settlement procedures while those questions remain unresolved.” PJM also wants FERC to ignore the call for settlement discussions that was made in late April by the Electric Power Supply Association, the PJM Power Providers Group, Calpine, Cogentrix Energy Power Management, Constellation Energy Generation and LS Power Development. “The Commission should not pause its work on offering the industry guidance on a path forward for co-location arrangements,” PJM said in a Monday filing. The call for settlement talks lacks broad stakeholder support, PJM said, noting it is holding a workshop on “large load” issues on Friday. American Municipal Power, a wholesale power provider for public power utilities, and Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative and Northeastern Rural Electric Membership Corp. also oppose holding settlement talks. Beside the power generators and trade organizations,

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Tech CEOs warn Senate: Outdated US power grid threatens AI ambitions

The implications are clear: without dramatic improvements to the US energy infrastructure, the nation’s AI ambitions could be significantly constrained by simple physical limitations – the inability to power the massive computing clusters necessary for advanced AI development and deployment. Streamlining permitting processes The tech executives have offered specific recommendations to address these challenges, with several focusing on the need to dramatically accelerate permitting processes for both energy generation and the transmission infrastructure needed to deliver that power to AI facilities, the report added. Intrator specifically called for efforts “to streamline the permitting process to enable the addition of new sources of generation and the transmission infrastructure to deliver it,” noting that current regulatory frameworks were not designed with the urgent timelines of the AI race in mind. This acceleration would help technology companies build and power the massive data centers needed for AI training and inference, which require enormous amounts of electricity delivered reliably and consistently. Beyond the cloud: bringing AI to everyday devices While much of the testimony focused on large-scale infrastructure needs, AMD CEO Lisa Su emphasized that true AI leadership requires “rapidly building data centers at scale and powering them with reliable, affordable, and clean energy sources.” Su also highlighted the importance of democratizing access to AI technologies: “Moving faster also means moving AI beyond the cloud. To ensure every American benefits, AI must be built into the devices we use every day and made as accessible and dependable as electricity.”

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Networking errors pose threat to data center reliability

Still, IT and networking issues increased in 2024, according to Uptime Institute. The analysis attributed the rise in outages due to increased IT and network complexity, specifically, change management and misconfigurations. “Particularly with distributed services, cloud services, we find that cascading failures often occur when networking equipment is replicated across an entire network,” Lawrence explained. “Sometimes the failure of one forces traffic to move in one direction, overloading capacity at another data center.” The most common causes of major network-related outages were cited as: Configuration/change management failure: 50% Third-party network provider failure: 34% Hardware failure: 31% Firmware/software error: 26% Line breakages: 17% Malicious cyberattack: 17% Network overload/congestion failure: 13% Corrupted firewall/routing tables issues: 8% Weather-related incident: 7% Configuration/change management issues also attributed for 62% of the most common causes of major IT system-/software-related outages. Change-related disruptions consistently are responsible for software-related outages. Human error continues to be one of the “most persistent challenges in data center operations,” according to Uptime’s analysis. The report found that the biggest cause of these failures is data center staff failing to follow established procedures, which has increased by about 10 percentage points compared to 2023. “These are things that were 100% under our control. I mean, we can’t control when the UPS module fails because it was either poorly manufactured, it had a flaw, or something else. This is 100% under our control,” Brown said. The most common causes of major human error-related outages were reported as:

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Liquid cooling technologies: reducing data center environmental impact

“Highly optimized cold-plate or one-phase immersion cooling technologies can perform on par with two-phase immersion, making all three liquid-cooling technologies desirable options,” the researchers wrote. Factors to consider There are numerous factors to consider when adopting liquid cooling technologies, according to Microsoft’s researchers. First, they advise performing a full environmental, health, and safety analysis, and end-to-end life cycle impact analysis. “Analyzing the full data center ecosystem to include systems interactions across software, chip, server, rack, tank, and cooling fluids allows decision makers to understand where savings in environmental impacts can be made,” they wrote. It is also important to engage with fluid vendors and regulators early, to understand chemical composition, disposal methods, and compliance risks. And associated socioeconomic, community, and business impacts are equally critical to assess. More specific environmental considerations include ozone depletion and global warming potential; the researchers emphasized that operators should only use fluids with low to zero ozone depletion potential (ODP) values, and not hydrofluorocarbons or carbon dioxide. It is also critical to analyze a fluid’s viscosity (thickness or stickiness), flammability, and overall volatility. And operators should only use fluids with minimal bioaccumulation (the buildup of chemicals in lifeforms, typically in fish) and terrestrial and aquatic toxicity. Finally, once up and running, data center operators should monitor server lifespan and failure rates, tracking performance uptime and adjusting IT refresh rates accordingly.

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Cisco unveils prototype quantum networking chip

Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said. “We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said. For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said. The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers.  The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco.  The challenges for quantum data center network fabric

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Zyxel launches 100GbE switch for enterprise networks

Port specifications include: 48 SFP28 ports supporting dual-rate 10GbE/25GbE connectivity 8 QSFP28 ports supporting 100GbE connections Console port for direct management access Layer 3 routing capabilities include static routing with support for access control lists (ACLs) and VLAN segmentation. The switch implements IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tagging, port isolation, and port mirroring for traffic analysis. For link aggregation, the switch supports IEEE 802.3ad for increased throughput and redundancy between switches or servers. Target applications and use cases The CX4800-56F targets multiple deployment scenarios where high-capacity backbone connectivity and flexible port configurations are required. “This will be for service providers initially or large deployments where they need a high capacity backbone to deliver a primarily 10G access layer to the end point,” explains Nguyen. “Now with Wi-Fi 7, more 10G/25G capable POE switches are being powered up and need interconnectivity without the bottleneck. We see this for data centers, campus, MDU (Multi-Dwelling Unit) buildings or community deployments.” Management is handled through Zyxel’s NebulaFlex Pro technology, which supports both standalone configuration and cloud management via the Nebula Control Center (NCC). The switch includes a one-year professional pack license providing IGMP technology and network analytics features. The SFP28 ports maintain backward compatibility between 10G and 25G standards, enabling phased migration paths for organizations transitioning between these speeds.

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Engineers rush to master new skills for AI-driven data centers

According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%. Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications. Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations. “Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.” These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says. AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds. The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary. The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the

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

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs).  In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

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

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

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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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