Celtic Freeport officially launches in bid to bring investment to Southwest Wales

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Celtic Freeport officially launches in bid to bring investment to Southwest Wales

The Celtic Freeport, spanning the ports at Milford Haven and Port Talbot in Southwest Wales, was officially launched on March 13. The official launch follows the freeport opening for business in November 2024. Freeports are areas created by the government to attract investment into certain regions of the country, supported by a range of tax […]

The Celtic Freeport, spanning the ports at Milford Haven and Port Talbot in Southwest Wales, was officially launched on March 13.

The official launch follows the freeport opening for business in November 2024.

Freeports are areas created by the government to attract investment into certain regions of the country, supported by a range of tax breaks and customs exemptions for businesses within the freeport area and benefiting from port infrastructure.

The Celtic Freeport is one of 12 such freeports to be established across England, Wales and Scotland since 2022. It is a public-private consortium including Associated British Ports (ABP), Neath Port Talbot Council, Pembrokeshire County Council and the Port of Milford Haven, as well as energy companies, renewables developers, industrial complexes, innovation assets, academic institutions and education providers.

In the Celtic Freeport’s case, it is supported by £26 million of UK government investment, subject to approval of its full business case. This is on top of both UK and Welsh government tax breaks offered to businesses within the freeport.

Stakeholders in the Celtic Freeport hope that it will create up to 11,500 skilled jobs and attract up to £8.4bn of investment, both from the public and private sectors, as well as adding a projected £8.1bn in economic value (GVA).

They describe the freeport’s vision as creating a “green investment and innovation corridor that will drive inward investment, skills development, and national decarbonisation”.

Projects at the freeport include clean energy developments, fuel terminals, a power station, heavy engineering and the steel industry across Southwest Wales.

There are also plans for the Celtic Freeport to support new manufacturing facilities and major port infrastructure upgrades to facilitate the roll-out of floating offshore wind (FLOW) in the Celtic Sea.

The announcement about the freeport’s launch pointed to FLOW in the Celtic Sea as being “key” to making the UK a “clean energy superpower” by 2030.

“The Celtic Freeport is taking significant strides forward with key milestones secured such as the planning consents for the LanzaTech’s sustainable aviation fuel production plants and RWE’s Pembroke Green Hydrogen plant, the launch of the Milford Haven CO2 Project, H2 Energy and Trafigura’s West Wales Hydrogen project securing a hydrogen CfD, Haush establishing a green energy HQ and their green hydrogen plant coming forward at Pembroke Dock and the approval of the wind turbine development to expand Dragon Energy’s Renewables Park,” stated the Celtic Freeport’s CEO, Luciana Ciubotariu.

“These Celtic Freeport partner initiatives, coupled with investments in battery energy storage by RWE and port infrastructure at Port Talbot, are accelerating South Wales’ reindustrialisation and driving a decarbonised economy rich in evolving and new industries,” she added.

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IBM laying foundation for mainframe as ultimate AI server

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Podcast: On the Frontier of Modular Edge AI Data Centers with Flexnode’s Andrew Lindsey

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Amid Shifting Regional Data Center Policies, Iron Mountain and DC Blox Both Expand in Virginia’s Henrico County

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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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