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Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.”  He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive handbags, before gesturing toward the shelves filled with more bags behind him. “You recognize them: Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci—all crafted in our workshops.” “But brands erase ‘Made in China’ from the tags,” he continues. “Same leather from their tanneries, same hardware from their suppliers, same threads they call luxury. Master artisans they never credit. We earn pennies; they make millions. That is unfair—to us, to you, to anyone who values honesty.”  He ends by urging viewers to buy directly from his factory. ♬ original sound – DHgate Video “exposés” like this—where a sales agent breaks down the material cost of luxury goods, from handbags to perfumes to appliances—are everywhere on TikTok right now.  Some videos claim, for example, that a pair of Lululemon leggings costs just $4 to make. Others show the scale and precision of Chinese manufacturing: Creators walk through spotless factory floors, passing automated assembly lines and teams of workers at clean, orderly stations. Some factories identify themselves as suppliers—or former suppliers—for brands like Dyson, Under Armour, and Victoria’s Secret. Whether or not their claims are true, these videos and their virality speak to a new, serious push by Chinese manufacturers to connect directly with American consumers. Even with tariffs, many of the products pitched in the videos would still be significantly cheaper than buying from the name brands. (MIT Technology Review did not verify the claims made in the videos about where products are produced and how much the manufacturing costs; Lululemon, Hermès, Kering (the owner of Gucci), and LVMH (the owner of Louis Vuitton) did not reply to requests for comment.) Fueled by fears of losing international business and frustration over Trump-era tariffs, factories are turning their production lines into content studios to market themselves—filming leather workshops and sewing lines, offering warehouse tours. What began as the work of a few frustrated sourcing agents has morphed into a full-blown genre that’s part protest, part marketing plan, part survival strategy. It’s “a collective search for a workaround” to the tariffs, says Ivy Yang, an e-commerce expert and founder of the New York–based consulting firm Wavelet Strategy. “Smaller platforms and sourcing agents are jumping in, offering ‘direct from factory’ content on social media as an alternative supply route.” Cutting out the middleman The Chinese creators sharing insights into sourcing materials and manufacturing techniques often offer direct purchasing options that effectively bypass traditional retail channels.  The companies that sell directly to consumers include DHgate, a Chinese B2B e-commerce platform, which users commonly refer to as “the gate” or “the yellow app.” In the US Apple app store, the app jumped from #302 on April 8 to #2 overall in mid-April, just behind ChatGPT. On April 15, it was the most downloaded app in the country. As of April 18, DHgate sat at the top of Apple’s shopping charts in 98 countries.  After buying on DHgate, users enthusiastically return to TikTok to share their new purchases; one user jokingly bragged, “Ordered my bag from my Chinese plug.” DHGate told MIT Technology Review that the social media attention has resulted in a surge in transactions on the platform, with categories like home goods, electronics, outdoor gear, and pet supplies seeing the most popularity. During the week of April 12 to 19, home appliances saw a 962% increase in sales, while security tech jumped 601%. TikTok is indeed not a vanity project for these manufacturers but a survival strategy in an increasingly competitive environment.  Chinese factories have long sold to overseas markets, but when domestic economic growth started to slow in the past decade, manufacturers increasingly turned to major B2B platforms like Alibaba to connect with buyers abroad without relying on middlemen. In the past few years, however, the cost of gaining visibility to foreign buyers on major platforms like Amazon and Alibaba has skyrocketed.  “It has become a crowded, saturated space, and it could cost 30,000 to 40,000 RMB [$210,000 to $290,000] a year just to get your factory to show up on the first page in search results,” says Logan Wang, an e-commerce manager at Shendeng Consulting, who advises Chinese manufacturers on overseas operations. The landscape only got more fraught as traditional manufacturing sectors struggled with oversupply and post-covid stagnation. In 2024, China’s apparel exports to the US grew by less than 1%, while the average unit price of those goods dropped by 7.6%—a sign that competition is fiercer and profit margins are shrinking.  Add the new tariffs to this mix and Chinese manufacturers are increasingly motivated to find creative ways to reach buyers. Linda Luo, a manager at a Guangzhou-based apparel factory, says that in the wake of the latest round of sanctions, her factory has paused US shipments, which previously accounted for around 30% of their sales. Now, storage rooms are filling up with products that have no clear destination.  “Many nearby factories are like us,” Luo says, “holding out to see how these tariffs develop, hoping the situation will resolve itself.” Motivated by the success of peers who’ve gone viral, Luo says, her team is now actively reaching out to TikTok-famous sourcing agents, hoping to forge direct connections with new buyers. But it’s not just economic conditions pushing the viral videos; there’s also a feeling that Chinese work and craftsmanship are being disrespected. In a Fox News interview on April 3, for instance, Vice President JD Vance made a comment denigrating the “Chinese peasants” who make products for Americans. The remark drew sharp criticism from Chinese officials and from Chinese people across the internet, who viewed it as insulting.  “Chinese manufacturers have done the dirtiest, most arduous work for Western brands since the 1980s—often with razor-thin margins,” says Wang. “And yet they’re constantly stigmatized, pushed around, and caught in the crossfire of geopolitics. Hearing President Trump frame the past few decades as China taking advantage of the US—that’s a narrative that doesn’t sit right with anyone working in this industry.” Factory as spectacle Beyond rage and anxiety, Chinese factories have been inspired by the past viral success of manufacturing content on TikTok, according to Tianyu Fang, a technology and democracy fellow at the think tank New America who studies Chinese technology and globalization. Since 2020, factory videos showing assembly lines producing everyday items like wigs, dolls, and gloves have amassed millions of views. In comments, viewers describe these looping production videos as “soothing” and “mesmerizing.”  By 2022, factories themselves recognized their work floors as content gold mines. But Alice Gu, who works at a Shenzhen-based digital marketing company and helps factories build their TikTok presence, has seen client inquiries triple over the past year, with many now featuring English-speaking staff as on-camera personalities. As Fang explains, “These videos resonate with young people in the West on TikTok because manufacturing is so removed from their daily experience. They offer rare glimpses into advanced manufacturing while satisfying genuine curiosity.” He adds: “Seeing Chinese factory workers address Western audiences directly feels almost subversive.” The cultural gap between creators and audiences has become an asset rather than a liability, generating authentic moments that resonate with users who are hyper-online.  One creator, Tony, toggles between American accents while promoting light boxes; he has gained over 1.2 million Instagram followers as the face of LC Sign, a Guangzhou electrical signage company. The “alumununu lady,” a saleswoman with a distinctive accent promoting capsule homes by Etong, turned “Hello, boss” into a catchphrase adopted by countless factory videos. In 2024, Dong Hua Jin Long, an industrial glycine manufacturer, went viral for machine-translated promotional videos boasting unmatched production quality. TikTok users found humor in the niche company’s efforts to connect with potential customers, making it a widely circulated meme. “These videos appeal largely because they’re so wonderfully out of context,” Fang says. “The popularity of these sourcing videos reflects a desire to understand previously hidden parts of the global economy and find alternatives to mainstream political narratives.” Despite the trend, experts including Yang and Fang don’t believe large numbers of average American consumers will shift to buying directly from factories, as the process involves too many logistical hurdles. There’s also been plenty of news coverage warning that you may not end up getting an all-but-equal-to-Hermès bag without the brand label.  Yaling Jiang, writer of the newsletter Following the Yuan, explains that buying through factory back channels is a common practice in China: “It’s an open secret that many local factories produce for prestigious brands, and people often buy through side channels to get similar-quality products at a fraction of the price.” However, Jiang suggests that these arrangements rely on a complex supply and distribution system—and warns that some TikTok sourcing agents may be falsely claiming connections to well-known companies. On top of all this, these direct-to-consumer videos may not even be available much longer. Yang warns that a lot of the content treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. “This will quickly become an IP minefield for platforms like TikTok and Instagram,” she says. “If the trend continues to grow, rights holders will push back—and platform governance will need to catch up fast.” MIT Technology Review found that many of the original viral videos promoting knockoff products have already been removed from TikTok. DHgate did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether it facilitates the sale of counterfeit products. Nevertheless, many Chinese factories will almost certainly continue to build out their own R&D teams—and not just to weather the current moment. “Every factory owner’s dream is to have their own brand,” Wang says. “After decades of making products designed elsewhere, Chinese manufacturers are ready to create, not just produce.”

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.” 

He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one of the world’s most exclusive and expensive handbags, before gesturing toward the shelves filled with more bags behind him. “You recognize them: Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci—all crafted in our workshops.”

“But brands erase ‘Made in China’ from the tags,” he continues. “Same leather from their tanneries, same hardware from their suppliers, same threads they call luxury. Master artisans they never credit. We earn pennies; they make millions. That is unfair—to us, to you, to anyone who values honesty.” 

He ends by urging viewers to buy directly from his factory.

♬ original sound – DHgate

Video “exposés” like this—where a sales agent breaks down the material cost of luxury goods, from handbags to perfumes to appliances—are everywhere on TikTok right now. 

Some videos claim, for example, that a pair of Lululemon leggings costs just $4 to make. Others show the scale and precision of Chinese manufacturing: Creators walk through spotless factory floors, passing automated assembly lines and teams of workers at clean, orderly stations. Some factories identify themselves as suppliers—or former suppliers—for brands like Dyson, Under Armour, and Victoria’s Secret.

Whether or not their claims are true, these videos and their virality speak to a new, serious push by Chinese manufacturers to connect directly with American consumers. Even with tariffs, many of the products pitched in the videos would still be significantly cheaper than buying from the name brands. (MIT Technology Review did not verify the claims made in the videos about where products are produced and how much the manufacturing costs; Lululemon, Hermès, Kering (the owner of Gucci), and LVMH (the owner of Louis Vuitton) did not reply to requests for comment.)

Fueled by fears of losing international business and frustration over Trump-era tariffs, factories are turning their production lines into content studios to market themselves—filming leather workshops and sewing lines, offering warehouse tours. What began as the work of a few frustrated sourcing agents has morphed into a full-blown genre that’s part protest, part marketing plan, part survival strategy.

It’s “a collective search for a workaround” to the tariffs, says Ivy Yang, an e-commerce expert and founder of the New York–based consulting firm Wavelet Strategy. “Smaller platforms and sourcing agents are jumping in, offering ‘direct from factory’ content on social media as an alternative supply route.”

Cutting out the middleman

The Chinese creators sharing insights into sourcing materials and manufacturing techniques often offer direct purchasing options that effectively bypass traditional retail channels. 

The companies that sell directly to consumers include DHgate, a Chinese B2B e-commerce platform, which users commonly refer to as “the gate” or “the yellow app.” In the US Apple app store, the app jumped from #302 on April 8 to #2 overall in mid-April, just behind ChatGPT. On April 15, it was the most downloaded app in the country. As of April 18, DHgate sat at the top of Apple’s shopping charts in 98 countries. 

After buying on DHgate, users enthusiastically return to TikTok to share their new purchases; one user jokingly bragged, “Ordered my bag from my Chinese plug.”

DHGate told MIT Technology Review that the social media attention has resulted in a surge in transactions on the platform, with categories like home goods, electronics, outdoor gear, and pet supplies seeing the most popularity. During the week of April 12 to 19, home appliances saw a 962% increase in sales, while security tech jumped 601%.

TikTok is indeed not a vanity project for these manufacturers but a survival strategy in an increasingly competitive environment. 

Chinese factories have long sold to overseas markets, but when domestic economic growth started to slow in the past decade, manufacturers increasingly turned to major B2B platforms like Alibaba to connect with buyers abroad without relying on middlemen. In the past few years, however, the cost of gaining visibility to foreign buyers on major platforms like Amazon and Alibaba has skyrocketed. 

“It has become a crowded, saturated space, and it could cost 30,000 to 40,000 RMB [$210,000 to $290,000] a year just to get your factory to show up on the first page in search results,” says Logan Wang, an e-commerce manager at Shendeng Consulting, who advises Chinese manufacturers on overseas operations.

The landscape only got more fraught as traditional manufacturing sectors struggled with oversupply and post-covid stagnation. In 2024, China’s apparel exports to the US grew by less than 1%, while the average unit price of those goods dropped by 7.6%—a sign that competition is fiercer and profit margins are shrinking. 

Add the new tariffs to this mix and Chinese manufacturers are increasingly motivated to find creative ways to reach buyers.

Linda Luo, a manager at a Guangzhou-based apparel factory, says that in the wake of the latest round of sanctions, her factory has paused US shipments, which previously accounted for around 30% of their sales. Now, storage rooms are filling up with products that have no clear destination. 

“Many nearby factories are like us,” Luo says, “holding out to see how these tariffs develop, hoping the situation will resolve itself.” Motivated by the success of peers who’ve gone viral, Luo says, her team is now actively reaching out to TikTok-famous sourcing agents, hoping to forge direct connections with new buyers.

But it’s not just economic conditions pushing the viral videos; there’s also a feeling that Chinese work and craftsmanship are being disrespected. In a Fox News interview on April 3, for instance, Vice President JD Vance made a comment denigrating the “Chinese peasants” who make products for Americans. The remark drew sharp criticism from Chinese officials and from Chinese people across the internet, who viewed it as insulting. 

“Chinese manufacturers have done the dirtiest, most arduous work for Western brands since the 1980s—often with razor-thin margins,” says Wang. “And yet they’re constantly stigmatized, pushed around, and caught in the crossfire of geopolitics. Hearing President Trump frame the past few decades as China taking advantage of the US—that’s a narrative that doesn’t sit right with anyone working in this industry.”

Factory as spectacle

Beyond rage and anxiety, Chinese factories have been inspired by the past viral success of manufacturing content on TikTok, according to Tianyu Fang, a technology and democracy fellow at the think tank New America who studies Chinese technology and globalization. Since 2020, factory videos showing assembly lines producing everyday items like wigs, dolls, and gloves have amassed millions of views. In comments, viewers describe these looping production videos as “soothing” and “mesmerizing.” 

By 2022, factories themselves recognized their work floors as content gold mines. But Alice Gu, who works at a Shenzhen-based digital marketing company and helps factories build their TikTok presence, has seen client inquiries triple over the past year, with many now featuring English-speaking staff as on-camera personalities.

As Fang explains, “These videos resonate with young people in the West on TikTok because manufacturing is so removed from their daily experience. They offer rare glimpses into advanced manufacturing while satisfying genuine curiosity.”

He adds: “Seeing Chinese factory workers address Western audiences directly feels almost subversive.”

The cultural gap between creators and audiences has become an asset rather than a liability, generating authentic moments that resonate with users who are hyper-online. 

One creator, Tony, toggles between American accents while promoting light boxes; he has gained over 1.2 million Instagram followers as the face of LC Sign, a Guangzhou electrical signage company. The “alumununu lady,” a saleswoman with a distinctive accent promoting capsule homes by Etong, turned “Hello, boss” into a catchphrase adopted by countless factory videos. In 2024, Dong Hua Jin Long, an industrial glycine manufacturer, went viral for machine-translated promotional videos boasting unmatched production quality. TikTok users found humor in the niche company’s efforts to connect with potential customers, making it a widely circulated meme.

“These videos appeal largely because they’re so wonderfully out of context,” Fang says. “The popularity of these sourcing videos reflects a desire to understand previously hidden parts of the global economy and find alternatives to mainstream political narratives.”

Despite the trend, experts including Yang and Fang don’t believe large numbers of average American consumers will shift to buying directly from factories, as the process involves too many logistical hurdles. There’s also been plenty of news coverage warning that you may not end up getting an all-but-equal-to-Hermès bag without the brand label. 

Yaling Jiang, writer of the newsletter Following the Yuan, explains that buying through factory back channels is a common practice in China: “It’s an open secret that many local factories produce for prestigious brands, and people often buy through side channels to get similar-quality products at a fraction of the price.” However, Jiang suggests that these arrangements rely on a complex supply and distribution system—and warns that some TikTok sourcing agents may be falsely claiming connections to well-known companies.

On top of all this, these direct-to-consumer videos may not even be available much longer. Yang warns that a lot of the content treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. “This will quickly become an IP minefield for platforms like TikTok and Instagram,” she says. “If the trend continues to grow, rights holders will push back—and platform governance will need to catch up fast.”

MIT Technology Review found that many of the original viral videos promoting knockoff products have already been removed from TikTok. DHgate did not respond to a request for comment regarding whether it facilitates the sale of counterfeit products.

Nevertheless, many Chinese factories will almost certainly continue to build out their own R&D teams—and not just to weather the current moment. “Every factory owner’s dream is to have their own brand,” Wang says. “After decades of making products designed elsewhere, Chinese manufacturers are ready to create, not just produce.”

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Soluna Computing: Innovating Renewable Computing for Sustainable Data Centers

Dorothy 1A & 1B (Texas): These twin 25 MW facilities are powered by wind and serve Bitcoin hosting and mining workloads. Together, they consumed over 112,000 MWh of curtailed energy in 2024, demonstrating the impact of Soluna’s model. Dorothy 2 (Texas): Currently under construction and scheduled for energization in Q4 2025, this 48 MW site will increase Soluna’s hosting and mining capacity by 64%. Sophie (Kentucky): A 25 MW grid- and hydro-powered hosting center with a strong cost profile and consistent output. Project Grace (Texas): A 2 MW AI pilot project in development, part of Soluna’s transition into HPC and machine learning. Project Kati (Texas): With 166 MW split between Bitcoin and AI hosting, this project recently exited the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc. planning phase and is expected to energize between 2025 and 2027. Project Rosa (Texas): A 187 MW flagship project co-located with wind assets, aimed at both Bitcoin and AI workloads. Land and power agreements were secured by the company in early 2025. These developments are part of the company’s broader effort to tackle both energy waste and infrastructure bottlenecks. Soluna’s behind-the-meter design enables flexibility to draw from the grid or directly from renewable sources, maximizing energy value while minimizing emissions. Competition is Fierce and a Narrower Focus Better Serves the Business In 2024, Soluna tested the waters of providing AI services via a  GPU-as-a-Service through a partnership with HPE, branded as Project Ada. The pilot aimed to rent out cloud GPUs for AI developers and LLM training. However, due to oversupply in the GPU market, delayed product rollouts (like NVIDIA’s H200), and poor demand economics, Soluna terminated the contract in March 2025. The cancellation of the contract with HPE frees up resources for Soluna to focus on what it believes the company does best: designing

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Quiet Genius at the Neutral Line: How Onics Filters Are Reshaping the Future of Data Center Power Efficiency

Why Harmonics Matter In a typical data center, nonlinear loads—like servers, UPS systems, and switch-mode power supplies—introduce harmonic distortion into the electrical system. These harmonics travel along the neutral and ground conductors, where they can increase current flow, cause overheating in transformers, and shorten the lifespan of critical power infrastructure. More subtly, they waste power through reactive losses that don’t show up on a basic utility bill, but do show up in heat, inefficiency, and increased infrastructure stress. Traditional mitigation approaches—like active harmonic filters or isolation transformers—are complex, expensive, and often require custom integration and ongoing maintenance. That’s where Onics’ solution stands out. It’s engineered as a shunt-style, low-pass filter: a passive device that sits in parallel with the circuit, quietly siphoning off problematic harmonics without interrupting operations.  The result? Lower apparent power demand, reduced electrical losses, and a quieter, more stable current environment—especially on the neutral line, where cumulative harmonic effects often peak. Behind the Numbers: Real-World Impact While the Onics filters offer a passive complement to traditional mitigation strategies, they aren’t intended to replace active harmonic filters or isolation transformers in systems that require them—they work best as a low-complexity enhancement to existing power quality designs. LoPilato says Onics has deployed its filters in mission-critical environments ranging from enterprise edge to large colos, and the data is consistent. In one example, a 6 MW data center saw a verified 9.2% reduction in energy consumption after deploying Onics filters at key electrical junctures. Another facility clocked in at 17.8% savings across its lighting and support loads, thanks in part to improved power factor and reduced transformer strain. The filters work by targeting high-frequency distortion—typically above the 3rd harmonic and up through the 35th. By passively attenuating this range, the system reduces reactive current on the neutral and helps stabilize

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New IEA Report Contrasts Energy Bottlenecks with Opportunities for AI and Data Center Growth

Artificial intelligence has, without question, crossed the threshold—from a speculative academic pursuit into the defining infrastructure of 21st-century commerce, governance, and innovation. What began in the realm of research labs and open-source models is now embedded in the capital stack of every major hyperscaler, semiconductor roadmap, and national industrial strategy. But as AI scales, so does its energy footprint. From Nvidia-powered GPU clusters to exascale training farms, the conversation across boardrooms and site selection teams has fundamentally shifted. It’s no longer just about compute density, thermal loads, or software frameworks. It’s about power—how to find it, finance it, future-proof it, and increasingly, how to generate it onsite. That refrain—“It’s all about power now”—has moved from a whisper to a full-throated consensus across the data center industry. The latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) gives this refrain global context and hard numbers, affirming what developers, utilities, and infrastructure operators have already sensed on the ground: the AI revolution will be throttled or propelled by the availability of scalable, sustainable, and dispatchable electricity. Why Energy Is the Real Bottleneck to Intelligence at Scale The major new IEA report puts it plainly: The transformative promise of AI will be throttled—or unleashed—by the world’s ability to deliver scalable, reliable, and sustainable electricity. The stakes are enormous. Countries that can supply the power AI craves will shape the future. Those that can’t may find themselves sidelined. Importantly, while AI poses clear challenges, the report emphasizes how it also offers solutions: from optimizing energy grids and reducing emissions in industrial sectors to enhancing energy security by supporting infrastructure defenses against cyberattacks. The report calls for immediate investments in both energy generation and grid capabilities, as well as stronger collaboration between the tech and energy sectors to avoid critical bottlenecks. The IEA advises that, for countries

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Colorado Eyes the AI Data Center Boom with Bold Incentive Push

Even as states work on legislation to limit data center development, it is clear that some locations are looking to get a bigger piece of the huge data center spending that the AI wave has created. It appears that politicians in Colorado took a look around and thought to themselves “Why is all that data center building going to Texas and Arizona? What’s wrong with the Rocky Mountain State?” Taking a page from the proven playbook that has gotten data centers built all over the country, Colorado is trying to jump on the financial incentives for data center development bandwagon. SB 24-085: A Statewide Strategy to Attract Data Center Investment Looking to significantly boost its appeal as a data center hub, Colorado is now considering Senate Bill 24-085, currently making its way through the state legislature. Sponsored by Senators Priola and Buckner and Representatives Parenti and Weinberg, this legislation promises substantial economic incentives in the form of state sales and use tax rebates for new data centers established within the state from fiscal year 2026 through 2033. Colorado hopes to position itself strategically to compete with neighboring states in attracting lucrative tech investments and high-skilled jobs. According to DataCenterMap.com, there are currently 53 data centers in the state, almost all located in the Denver area, but they are predominantly smaller facilities. In today’s era of massive AI-driven hyperscale expansion, Colorado is rarely mentioned in the same breath as major AI data center markets.  Some local communities have passed their own incentive packages, but SB 24-085 aims to offer a unified, statewide framework that can also help mitigate growing NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiment around new developments. The Details: How SB 24-085 Works The bill, titled “Concerning a rebate of the state sales and use tax paid on new digital infrastructure

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Wonder Valley and the Great AI Pivot: Kevin O’Leary’s Bold Data Center Play

Data Center World 2025 drew record-breaking attendance, underscoring the AI-fueled urgency transforming infrastructure investment. But no session captivated the crowd quite like Kevin O’Leary’s electrifying keynote on Wonder Valley—his audacious plan to build the world’s largest AI compute data center campus. In a sweeping narrative that ranged from pandemic pivots to stranded gas and Branson-brand inspiration, O’Leary laid out a real estate and infrastructure strategy built for the AI era. A Pandemic-Era Pivot Becomes a Case Study in Digital Resilience O’Leary opened with a Shark Tank success story that doubled as a business parable. In 2019, a woman-led startup called Blueland raised $50 million to eliminate plastic cleaning bottles by shipping concentrated cleaning tablets in reusable kits. When COVID-19 shut down retail in 2020, her inventory was stuck in limbo—until she made an urgent call to O’Leary. What followed was a high-stakes, last-minute pivot: a union-approved commercial shoot in Brooklyn the night SAG-AFTRA shut down television production. The direct response ad campaign that resulted would not only liquidate the stranded inventory at full margin, but deliver something more valuable—data. By targeting locked-down consumers through local remnant TV ad slots and optimizing by conversion, Blueland saw unheard-of response rates as high as 17%. The campaign turned into a data goldmine: buyer locations, tablet usage patterns, household sizes, and contact details. Follow-up SMS campaigns would drive 30% reorders. “It built such a franchise in those 36 months,” O’Leary said, “with no retail. Now every retailer wants in.” The lesson? Build your infrastructure to control your data, and you build a business that scales even in chaos. This anecdote set the tone for the keynote: in a volatile world, infrastructure resilience and data control are the new core competencies. The Data Center Power Crisis: “There Is Not a Gig on the Grid” O’Leary

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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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