What if computer history were a romantic comedy?

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What if computer history were a romantic comedy?

The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy—William Marchant’s The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without explaining who he is or why he is studying the behavior of the workers. Bunny Watson, the head of the department, discovers that the engineer plans to install an “electronic brain” called Emmarac, which Sumner affectionately refers to as “Emmy” and describes as “the machine that takes the pause quotient out of the work–man-hour relationship.” What Sumner calls the “pause quotient” is jargon for the everyday activities and mundane interactions that make human beings less efficient than machines. Emmarac would eliminate inefficiencies, such as walking to a bookshelf or talking with a coworker about weekend plans. Bunny Watson comes to believe that the computing machine will eliminate not only inefficiencies in the workplace but also the need for human workers in her department. Sumner, the engineer, presents the computer as a technology of efficiency, but Watson, the department head, views it as a technology of displacement. Bunny Watson’s view was not uncommon during the first decade of computing technology. Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, insisted that one of his firm’s first machines be called a “calculator” instead of a “computer” because “he was concerned that the latter term, which had always referred to a human being, would raise the specter of technological unemployment,” according to historians Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. In keeping with the worry of both Watsons, the computer takes the stage on Broadway as a threat to white-collar work. The women in Marchant’s play fight against the threat of unemployment as soon as they learn why Sumner has arrived. The play thus attests to the fact that the very benefits of speed, accuracy, and information processing that made the computer useful for business also caused it to be perceived as a threat to the professional-managerial class. Comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment. This threat was somewhat offset by the fact that for most of the 1950s, the computing industry was not profitable in the United States. Manufacturers produced and sold or leased the machines at steep losses, primarily to preserve a speculative market position and to bolster their image as technologically innovative. For many such firms, neglecting to compete in the emerging market for computers would have risked the perception that they were falling behind. They hoped computing would eventually become profitable as the technology improved, but even by the middle of the decade, it was not obvious to industry insiders when this would be the case. Even if the computer seemed to promise a new world of “lightning speed” efficiency and information management, committing resources to this promise was almost prohibitively costly. While firms weighed the financial costs of computing, the growing interest in this new technology was initially perceived by white-collar workers as a threat to the nature of managerial expertise. Large corporations dominated American enterprise after the Second World War, and what historian Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of managerial professionals exerted considerable influence over the economy. Many observers wondered if computing machines would lead to a “revolution” in professional-managerial tasks. Some even speculated that “electronic brains” would soon coordinate the economy, thus replacing the bureaucratic oversight of most forms of labor. Howard Gammon, an official with the US Bureau of the Budget, explained in a 1954 essay that “electronic information processing machines” could “make substantial savings and render better service” if managers were to accept the technology. Gammon advocated for the automation of office work in areas like “stock control, handling orders, processing mailing lists, or a hundred and one other activities requiring the accumulating and sorting of information.” He even anticipated the development of tools for “erect[ing] a consistent system of decisions in areas where ‘judgment’ can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules such as (1) ‘purchase at the lowest price,’ or (2) ‘never let the supply of bolts fall below the estimated one-week requirement for any size or type.’” Gammon’s essay illustrates how many administrative thinkers hoped that computers would allow upper-level managers to oversee industrial production through a series of unambiguous rules that would no longer require midlevel workers for their enactment. This fantasy was impossible in the 1950s for so many reasons, the most obvious being that only a limited number of executable processes in postwar managerial capitalism could be automated through extant technology, and even fewer areas of “judgment,” as Gammon called them, can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules. Still, this fantasy was part of the cultural milieu when Marchant’s play premiered on Broadway, one year after Gammon’s report and just a few months after IBM had announced the advance in memory storage technology behind its new 705 Model II, the first successful commercial data-processing machine. IBM received 100 orders for the 705, a commercial viability that seemed to signal the beginning of a new age in American corporate life. It soon became clear, however, that this new age was not the one that Gammon imagined. Rather than causing widespread unemployment or the total automation of the visible hand, the computer would transform the character of work itself. Marchant’s play certainly invokes the possibility of unemployment, but its posture toward the computer shifts toward a more accommodative view of what later scholars would call the “computerization of work.” For example, early in the play, Richard Sumner conjures the specter of the machine as a threat when he asks Bunny Watson if the new electronic brains “give you the feeling that maybe—just maybe—that people are a little bit outmoded.” Similarly, at the beginning of the second act, a researcher named Peg remarks, “I understand thousands of people are being thrown out of work because of these electronic brains.” The play seems to affirm Sumner’s sentiment and Peg’s implicit worry about her own unemployment once the computer, Emmarac, has been installed in the third act. After the installation, Sumner and Watson give the machine a research problem that previously took Peg several days to complete. Watson expects the task to stump Emmarac, but the machine takes only a few seconds to produce the same answer. While such moments conjure the specter of “technological unemployment,” the play juxtaposes Emmarac’s feats with Watson’s wit and spontaneity. For instance, after Sumner suggests people may be “outmoded,” Watson responds, “Yes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they stopped making them.” Sumner gets the joke but doesn’t find it funny: “Miss Watson, Emmarac is not a subject for levity.” The staging of the play contradicts Sumner’s assertion. Emmarac occasions all manner of levity in The Desk Set, ranging from Watson’s joke to Emmarac’s absurd firing of every member of the International Broadcasting Company, including its president, later in the play. This shifting portrayal of Emmarac follows a much older pattern in dramatic comedy. As literary critic Northrop Frye explains, many forms of comedy follow an “argument” in which a “new world” appears on the stage and transforms the society entrenched at the beginning of the play. The movement away from established society hinges on a “principle of conversion” that “include[s] as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.” We see a similar dynamic in how Marchant’s play portrays the efficiency expert as brusque, rational, and incapable of empathy or romantic interests. After his arrival in the office, a researcher named Sadel says, “You notice he never takes his coat off? Do you think maybe he’s a robot?” Another researcher, Ruthie Saylor, later kisses Sumner on the cheek and invites him to a party. He says, “Sorry, I’ve got work to do,” to which Ruthie responds, “Sadel’s right—you are a robot!” Even as Sumner’s robotic behavior portrays him as antisocial, Emmarac further isolates him from the office by posing a threat to the workers. The play accentuates this blocking function by assigning Emmarac a personality and gender: Sumner calls the machine “Emmy,” and its operator, a woman named Miss Warriner, describes the machine as a “good girl.” By taking its place in the office, Emmarac effectively moves into the same space of labor and economic power as Bunny Watson, who had previously overseen the researchers and their activities. After being installed in the office, the large mainframe computer begins to coordinate this knowledge work. The gendering of the computer thus presents Emmarac as a newer model of the so-called New Woman, as if the computer imperils the feminist ideal that Bunny Watson clearly embodies. By directly challenging Watson’s socioeconomic independence and professional identity, the computer’s arrival in the workplace threatens to make the New Woman obsolete. Yet much like Frye’s claims about the “argument” of comedy, the conflict between Emmarac and Watson resolves as the machine transforms from a direct competitor into a collaborator. We see this shift during a final competition between Emmarac and the research department. The women have been notified that their positions have been terminated, and they begin packing up their belongings. Two requests for information suddenly arrive, but Watson and her fellow researchers refuse to process them because of their dismissal, so Warriner and Sumner attempt to field the requests. The research tasks are complicated, and Warriner mistakenly directs Emmarac to print a long, irrelevant answer. The machine inflexibly continues although the other inquiry needs to be addressed. Sumner and Warriner try to stop the machine, but this countermanding order causes the machine’s “magnetic circuit” to emit smoke and a loud noise. Sumner yells at Warriner, who runs offstage, and the efficiency expert is now the only one to field the requests and salvage the machine. However, he doesn’t know how to stop Emmarac from malfunctioning. Marchant’s stage directions here say that Watson, who has studied the machine’s maintenance and operation, “takes a hairpin from her hair and manipulates a knob on Emmarac—the NOISE obligingly stops.” Watson then explains, “You forget, I know something about one of these. All that research, remember?” The madcap quality of this scene continues after Sumner discovers that Emmarac’s “little sister” in the payroll office has sent pink slips to every employee at the broadcasting firm. Sumner then receives a letter containing his own pink slip, which prompts Watson to quote Horatio’s lament as Hamlet dies: “Good night, sweet prince.” The turn of events poses as tragedy, but of course it leads to the play’s comic resolution. Once Sumner discovers that the payroll computer has erred—or, at least, that someone improperly programmed it—he explains that the women in the research department haven’t been fired. Emmarac, he says, “was not meant to replace you. It was never intended to take over. It was installed to free your time for research—to do the daily mechanical routine.” Even as Watson “fixes” the machine, the play fixes the robotic man through his professional failures. After this moment of discovery, Sumner apologizes to Watson and reconciles with the other women in the research department. He then promises to take them out to lunch and buy them “three martinis each.” Sumner exits with the women “laughing and talking,” thus reversing the antisocial role that he has occupied for most of the play. Emmarac’s failure, too, becomes an opportunity for its conversion. It may be that a programming error led to the company-wide pink slips, but the computer’s near-breakdown results from its rigidity. In both cases, the computer fails to navigate the world of knowledge work, thus becoming less threatening and more absurd through its flashing lights, urgent noises, and smoking console. This shift in the machine’s stage presence—the fact that it becomes comic—does not lead to its banishment or dismantling. Rather, after Watson “fixes” Emmarac, she uses it to compute a final inquiry submitted to her office: “What is the total weight of the Earth?” Given a problem that a human researcher “can spend months finding out,” she chooses to collaborate. Watson types out the question and Emmarac emits “its boop-boop-a-doop noise” in response, prompting her to answer, “Boop-boop-a-doop to you.” Emmarac is no longer Watson’s automated replacement but her partner in knowledge work. In Marchant’s play, comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment. This template converts the automation of professional-managerial tasks from a threat into an opportunity, implying that a partnership with knowledge workers can convert the electronic brain into a machine compatible with their happiness. The computerization of work thus becomes its own kind of comic plot.

The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy—William Marchant’s The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without explaining who he is or why he is studying the behavior of the workers. Bunny Watson, the head of the department, discovers that the engineer plans to install an “electronic brain” called Emmarac, which Sumner affectionately refers to as “Emmy” and describes as “the machine that takes the pause quotient out of the work–man-hour relationship.”

What Sumner calls the “pause quotient” is jargon for the everyday activities and mundane interactions that make human beings less efficient than machines. Emmarac would eliminate inefficiencies, such as walking to a bookshelf or talking with a coworker about weekend plans. Bunny Watson comes to believe that the computing machine will eliminate not only inefficiencies in the workplace but also the need for human workers in her department. Sumner, the engineer, presents the computer as a technology of efficiency, but Watson, the department head, views it as a technology of displacement.

Bunny Watson’s view was not uncommon during the first decade of computing technology. Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, insisted that one of his firm’s first machines be called a “calculator” instead of a “computer” because “he was concerned that the latter term, which had always referred to a human being, would raise the specter of technological unemployment,” according to historians Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. In keeping with the worry of both Watsons, the computer takes the stage on Broadway as a threat to white-collar work. The women in Marchant’s play fight against the threat of unemployment as soon as they learn why Sumner has arrived. The play thus attests to the fact that the very benefits of speed, accuracy, and information processing that made the computer useful for business also caused it to be perceived as a threat to the professional-managerial class.

Comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment.

This threat was somewhat offset by the fact that for most of the 1950s, the computing industry was not profitable in the United States. Manufacturers produced and sold or leased the machines at steep losses, primarily to preserve a speculative market position and to bolster their image as technologically innovative. For many such firms, neglecting to compete in the emerging market for computers would have risked the perception that they were falling behind. They hoped computing would eventually become profitable as the technology improved, but even by the middle of the decade, it was not obvious to industry insiders when this would be the case. Even if the computer seemed to promise a new world of “lightning speed” efficiency and information management, committing resources to this promise was almost prohibitively costly.

While firms weighed the financial costs of computing, the growing interest in this new technology was initially perceived by white-collar workers as a threat to the nature of managerial expertise. Large corporations dominated American enterprise after the Second World War, and what historian Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of managerial professionals exerted considerable influence over the economy. Many observers wondered if computing machines would lead to a “revolution” in professional-managerial tasks. Some even speculated that “electronic brains” would soon coordinate the economy, thus replacing the bureaucratic oversight of most forms of labor.

Howard Gammon, an official with the US Bureau of the Budget, explained in a 1954 essay that “electronic information processing machines” could “make substantial savings and render better service” if managers were to accept the technology. Gammon advocated for the automation of office work in areas like “stock control, handling orders, processing mailing lists, or a hundred and one other activities requiring the accumulating and sorting of information.” He even anticipated the development of tools for “erect[ing] a consistent system of decisions in areas where ‘judgment’ can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules such as (1) ‘purchase at the lowest price,’ or (2) ‘never let the supply of bolts fall below the estimated one-week requirement for any size or type.’”

Gammon’s essay illustrates how many administrative thinkers hoped that computers would allow upper-level managers to oversee industrial production through a series of unambiguous rules that would no longer require midlevel workers for their enactment.

This fantasy was impossible in the 1950s for so many reasons, the most obvious being that only a limited number of executable processes in postwar managerial capitalism could be automated through extant technology, and even fewer areas of “judgment,” as Gammon called them, can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules. Still, this fantasy was part of the cultural milieu when Marchant’s play premiered on Broadway, one year after Gammon’s report and just a few months after IBM had announced the advance in memory storage technology behind its new 705 Model II, the first successful commercial data-processing machine. IBM received 100 orders for the 705, a commercial viability that seemed to signal the beginning of a new age in American corporate life.

It soon became clear, however, that this new age was not the one that Gammon imagined. Rather than causing widespread unemployment or the total automation of the visible hand, the computer would transform the character of work itself. Marchant’s play certainly invokes the possibility of unemployment, but its posture toward the computer shifts toward a more accommodative view of what later scholars would call the “computerization of work.” For example, early in the play, Richard Sumner conjures the specter of the machine as a threat when he asks Bunny Watson if the new electronic brains “give you the feeling that maybe—just maybe—that people are a little bit outmoded.” Similarly, at the beginning of the second act, a researcher named Peg remarks, “I understand thousands of people are being thrown out of work because of these electronic brains.” The play seems to affirm Sumner’s sentiment and Peg’s implicit worry about her own unemployment once the computer, Emmarac, has been installed in the third act. After the installation, Sumner and Watson give the machine a research problem that previously took Peg several days to complete. Watson expects the task to stump Emmarac, but the machine takes only a few seconds to produce the same answer.

While such moments conjure the specter of “technological unemployment,” the play juxtaposes Emmarac’s feats with Watson’s wit and spontaneity. For instance, after Sumner suggests people may be “outmoded,” Watson responds, “Yes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they stopped making them.” Sumner gets the joke but doesn’t find it funny: “Miss Watson, Emmarac is not a subject for levity.” The staging of the play contradicts Sumner’s assertion. Emmarac occasions all manner of levity in The Desk Set, ranging from Watson’s joke to Emmarac’s absurd firing of every member of the International Broadcasting Company, including its president, later in the play.

This shifting portrayal of Emmarac follows a much older pattern in dramatic comedy. As literary critic Northrop Frye explains, many forms of comedy follow an “argument” in which a “new world” appears on the stage and transforms the society entrenched at the beginning of the play. The movement away from established society hinges on a “principle of conversion” that “include[s] as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.”

We see a similar dynamic in how Marchant’s play portrays the efficiency expert as brusque, rational, and incapable of empathy or romantic interests. After his arrival in the office, a researcher named Sadel says, “You notice he never takes his coat off? Do you think maybe he’s a robot?” Another researcher, Ruthie Saylor, later kisses Sumner on the cheek and invites him to a party. He says, “Sorry, I’ve got work to do,” to which Ruthie responds, “Sadel’s right—you are a robot!”

Even as Sumner’s robotic behavior portrays him as antisocial, Emmarac further isolates him from the office by posing a threat to the workers. The play accentuates this blocking function by assigning Emmarac a personality and gender: Sumner calls the machine “Emmy,” and its operator, a woman named Miss Warriner, describes the machine as a “good girl.” By taking its place in the office, Emmarac effectively moves into the same space of labor and economic power as Bunny Watson, who had previously overseen the researchers and their activities. After being installed in the office, the large mainframe computer begins to coordinate this knowledge work. The gendering of the computer thus presents Emmarac as a newer model of the so-called New Woman, as if the computer imperils the feminist ideal that Bunny Watson clearly embodies. By directly challenging Watson’s socioeconomic independence and professional identity, the computer’s arrival in the workplace threatens to make the New Woman obsolete.

Yet much like Frye’s claims about the “argument” of comedy, the conflict between Emmarac and Watson resolves as the machine transforms from a direct competitor into a collaborator. We see this shift during a final competition between Emmarac and the research department. The women have been notified that their positions have been terminated, and they begin packing up their belongings. Two requests for information suddenly arrive, but Watson and her fellow researchers refuse to process them because of their dismissal, so Warriner and Sumner attempt to field the requests. The research tasks are complicated, and Warriner mistakenly directs Emmarac to print a long, irrelevant answer. The machine inflexibly continues although the other inquiry needs to be addressed. Sumner and Warriner try to stop the machine, but this countermanding order causes the machine’s “magnetic circuit” to emit smoke and a loud noise. Sumner yells at Warriner, who runs offstage, and the efficiency expert is now the only one to field the requests and salvage the machine. However, he doesn’t know how to stop Emmarac from malfunctioning. Marchant’s stage directions here say that Watson, who has studied the machine’s maintenance and operation, “takes a hairpin from her hair and manipulates a knob on Emmarac—the NOISE obligingly stops.” Watson then explains, “You forget, I know something about one of these. All that research, remember?”

The madcap quality of this scene continues after Sumner discovers that Emmarac’s “little sister” in the payroll office has sent pink slips to every employee at the broadcasting firm. Sumner then receives a letter containing his own pink slip, which prompts Watson to quote Horatio’s lament as Hamlet dies: “Good night, sweet prince.” The turn of events poses as tragedy, but of course it leads to the play’s comic resolution. Once Sumner discovers that the payroll computer has erred—or, at least, that someone improperly programmed it—he explains that the women in the research department haven’t been fired. Emmarac, he says, “was not meant to replace you. It was never intended to take over. It was installed to free your time for research—to do the daily mechanical routine.”

Even as Watson “fixes” the machine, the play fixes the robotic man through his professional failures. After this moment of discovery, Sumner apologizes to Watson and reconciles with the other women in the research department. He then promises to take them out to lunch and buy them “three martinis each.” Sumner exits with the women “laughing and talking,” thus reversing the antisocial role that he has occupied for most of the play.

Emmarac’s failure, too, becomes an opportunity for its conversion. It may be that a programming error led to the company-wide pink slips, but the computer’s near-breakdown results from its rigidity. In both cases, the computer fails to navigate the world of knowledge work, thus becoming less threatening and more absurd through its flashing lights, urgent noises, and smoking console. This shift in the machine’s stage presence—the fact that it becomes comic—does not lead to its banishment or dismantling. Rather, after Watson “fixes” Emmarac, she uses it to compute a final inquiry submitted to her office: “What is the total weight of the Earth?” Given a problem that a human researcher “can spend months finding out,” she chooses to collaborate. Watson types out the question and Emmarac emits “its boop-boop-a-doop noise” in response, prompting her to answer, “Boop-boop-a-doop to you.” Emmarac is no longer Watson’s automated replacement but her partner in knowledge work.

In Marchant’s play, comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment. This template converts the automation of professional-managerial tasks from a threat into an opportunity, implying that a partnership with knowledge workers can convert the electronic brain into a machine compatible with their happiness. The computerization of work thus becomes its own kind of comic plot.

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OMV Petrom S.A. has acquired a 50 percent stake in the Gabare solar project from Enery Element, a large-scale project in Byala Slatina, near Sofia, Bulgaria. The company said in a media release that it had acquired the shares Enery held in Dunav Solar Plant EOOD, the developer of the Gabare project. The project has a design capacity of approximately 400 megawatts (MW) with an option to add a battery energy storage system. Once operational, the production of the photovoltaic (PV) park could cover the annual electricity consumption of approximately 150,000 Bulgarian households based on average consumption. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2025, after the fulfillment of certain conditions, OMV Petrom said. “By investing in one of the largest photovoltaic projects in Bulgaria, we are strengthening our presence in this neighboring market and are supporting the region’s energy transition. We believe that natural gas and renewables complement each other and play a key role in reducing emissions while ensuring energy stability”, Franck Neel, OMV Petrom Executive Board Member responsible for the Gas & Power division, said. “The investment framework also includes the acquisition by OMV Petrom of 50 percent of the electricity production from the project, through a power purchasing agreement (PPA) further reinforcing our commitment to securing low-carbon and reliable energy”, he added. “By securing a 50 percent long-term PPA with OMV Petrom as part of the investment framework, we are not only ensuring long-term revenue stability for the project but also setting a benchmark for how industrial players can actively participate in the energy transition in the region,” Richard König, Chief Executive Officer of Enery, noted. The Gabare solar park will feature solar tracking systems that follow the sun’s movement to maximize electricity generation. The development of a battery-based energy storage system

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Milan-headquartered Saipem SpA. has secured an engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for the expansion of the Porto Marghera biorefinery from Enilive, Eni SpA’s unit dedicated to biorefining, biomethane production and smart mobility solutions. The contract is valued at EUR 155 million ($180 million) and is part of the recently renewed collaboration agreement on biorefining between the two companies, Saipem said in a media release. Under the extended collaboration agreement, signed in March, the two companies will focus on the construction of new biorefineries, the conversion of traditional refineries into biorefineries, and the development of new initiatives by Eni in the field of industrial transformation, according to Eni. Saipem said the contract follows Eni’s assignment of the contract to Saipem for the start of preliminary detailed engineering activities, procurement services, and the purchase of critical equipment for the same project, also communicated last March. The project involves increasing the capacity of the plant near Venice from the current 400,000 to 600,000 tons per year and enabling the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) starting 2027, Saipem said. Eni has also selected Saipem, as part of the collaboration agreement, to convert the Livorno refinery into a biorefinery with a capacity of 500,000 tons of biogenic charge. The Livorno plant will be built in such a way as to allow, with appropriate technical modifications, a possible subsequent upgrading to produce SAF, Eni said in March. It noted that in both the Livorno and Venice projects, Saipem also carried out all the engineering activities preparatory to the executive phase, such as feasibility studies and front-end engineering design. The total value of both contracts is currently approximately EUR320 million ($372.5 million), according to Eni. Eni, through Enilive, currently has a biorefining capacity of 1.65 million tons per year and aims to increase it to

Oil Prices Plunge on Trump Ceasefire Push

Oil plunged for the second straight day as US President Donald Trump signaled he wants to keep oil flowing out of Iran after brokering a fragile ceasefire between Tehran and Israel. West Texas Intermediate crude plunged by nearly 15% over two sessions to settle near $64 a barrel, while Brent was just above $67. Prices have slumped amid the significant deescalation of a conflict that has rocked the energy-rich Middle East. Trump said in a social media post that China can continue buying Iranian oil and that he hopes the country will also be purchasing “plenty” from the US. Crude fell further as both sides made deescalatory remarks. The move is a stark departure from an earlier US strategy of squeezing Iranian energy exports to apply pressure at the negotiating table, a move many investors thought might be contingent on upholding the ceasefire or assurances on nuclear intentions, said Rebecca Babin, a senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth Group. Crude has declined sharply this week — including a 7% rout on Monday — despite the arrival of a long-feared clash that saw America bomb Iran’s nuclear sites and the Islamic Republic retaliate against US bases in Qatar. While prices spiked in the wake of Israel and America’s initial attacks, the conflict hasn’t had any significant impact on oil flows from the Persian Gulf, and exports from Iran have surged. Trump cheered crude’s slide earlier on Tuesday, saying “I love it.” Furthermore, the shale boom of the early 2000s has helped to greatly reduce US reliance on Middle Eastern oil, blunting the impact of a conflict in the region on energy prices. The initial price surge has instead presented a major opportunity for domestic producers to lock in higher prices, with swap dealer positions in US crude futures climbing to

Cisco backs quantum networking startup Qunnect

In partnership with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs, Qunnect has set up quantum networking testbeds in New York City and Berlin. “Qunnect understands that quantum networking has to work in the real world, not just in pristine lab conditions,” Vijoy Pandey, general manager and senior vice president of Outshift by Cisco, stated in a blog about the investment. “Their room-temperature approach aligns with our quantum data center vision.” Cisco recently announced it is developing a quantum entanglement chip that could ultimately become part of the gear that will populate future quantum data centers. The chip operates at room temperature, uses minimal power, and functions using existing telecom frequencies, according to Pandey.

HPE announces GreenLake Intelligence, goes all-in with agentic AI

Like a teammate who never sleeps Agentic AI is coming to Aruba Central as well, with an autonomous supervisory module talking to multiple specialized models to, for example, determine the root cause of an issue and provide recommendations. David Hughes, SVP and chief product officer, HPE Aruba Networking, said, “It’s like having a teammate who can work while you’re asleep, work on problems, and when you arrive in the morning, have those proposed answers there, complete with chain of thought logic explaining how they got to their conclusions.” Several new services for FinOps and sustainability in GreenLake Cloud are also being integrated into GreenLake Intelligence, including a new workload and capacity optimizer, extended consumption analytics to help organizations control costs, and predictive sustainability forecasting and a managed service mode in the HPE Sustainability Insight Center. In addition, updates to the OpsRamp operations copilot, launched in 2024, will enable agentic automation including conversational product help, an agentic command center that enables AI/ML-based alerts, incident management, and root cause analysis across the infrastructure when it is released in the fourth quarter of 2025. It is now a validated observability solution for the Nvidia Enterprise AI Factory. OpsRamp will also be part of the new HPE CloudOps software suite, available in the fourth quarter, which will include HPE Morpheus Enterprise and HPE Zerto. HPE said the new suite will provide automation, orchestration, governance, data mobility, data protection, and cyber resilience for multivendor, multi cloud, multi-workload infrastructures. Matt Kimball, principal analyst for datacenter, compute, and storage at Moor Insights & strategy, sees HPE’s latest announcements aligning nicely with enterprise IT modernization efforts, using AI to optimize performance. “GreenLake Intelligence is really where all of this comes together. I am a huge fan of Morpheus in delivering an agnostic orchestration plane, regardless of operating stack

MEF goes beyond metro Ethernet, rebrands as Mplify with expanded scope on NaaS and AI

While MEF is only now rebranding, Vachon said that the scope of the organization had already changed by 2005. Instead of just looking at metro Ethernet, the organization at the time had expanded into carrier Ethernet requirements. The organization has also had a growing focus on solving the challenge of cross-provider automation, which is where the LSO framework fits in. LSO provides the foundation for an automation framework that allows providers to more efficiently deliver complex services across partner networks, essentially creating a standardized language for service integration. NaaS leadership and industry blueprint Building on the LSO automation framework, the organization has been working on efforts to help providers with network-as-a-service (NaaS) related guidance and specifications. The organization’s evolution toward NaaS reflects member-driven demands for modern service delivery models. Vachon noted that MEF member organizations were asking for help with NaaS, looking for direction on establishing common definitions and some standard work. The organization responded by developing comprehensive industry guidance. “In 2023 we launched the first blueprint, which is like an industry North Star document. It includes what we think about NaaS and the work we’re doing around it,” Vachon said. The NaaS blueprint encompasses the complete service delivery ecosystem, with APIs including last mile, cloud, data center and security services. (Read more about its vision for NaaS, including easy provisioning and integrated security across a federated network of providers)

AMD rolls out first Ultra Ethernet-compliant NIC

The UEC was launched in 2023 under the Linux Foundation. Members include major tech-industry players such as AMD, Intel, Broadcom, Arista, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, and HPE. The specification includes GPU and accelerator interconnects as well as support for data center fabrics and scalable AI clusters. AMD’s Pensando Pollara 400GbE NICs are designed for massive scale-out environments containing thousands of AI processors. Pollara is based on customizable hardware that supports using a fully programmable Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) transport and hardware-based congestion control. Pollara supports GPU-to-GPU communication with intelligent routing technologies to reduce latency, making it very similar to Nvidia’s NVLink c2c. In addition to being UEC-ready, Pollara 400 offers RoCEv2 compatibility and interoperability with other NICs.

Can Intel cut its way to profit with factory layoffs?

Matt Kimball, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “While I’m sure tariffs have some impact on Intel’s layoffs, this is actually pretty simple — these layoffs are largely due to the financial challenges Intel is facing in terms of declining revenues.” The move, he said, “aligns with what the company had announced some time back, to bring expenses in line with revenues. While it is painful, I am confident that Intel will be able to meet these demands, as being able to produce quality chips in a timely fashion is critical to their comeback in the market.” Intel, said Kimball, “started its turnaround a few years back when ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger announced its five nodes in four years plan. While this was an impressive vision to articulate, its purpose was to rebuild trust with customers, and to rebuild an execution discipline. I think the company has largely succeeded, but of course the results trail a bit.” Asked if a combination of layoffs and the moving around of jobs will affect the cost of importing chips, Kimball predicted it will likely not have an impact: “Intel (like any responsible company) is extremely focused on cost and supply chain management. They have this down to a science and it is so critical to margins. Also, while I don’t have insights, I would expect Intel is employing AI and/or analytics to help drive supply chain and manufacturing optimization.” The company’s number one job, he said, “is to deliver the highest quality chips to its customers — from the client to the data center. I have every confidence it will not put this mandate at risk as it considers where/how to make the appropriate resourcing decisions. I think everybody who has been through corporate restructuring (I’ve been through too many to count)

Intel appears stuck between ‘a rock and a hard place’

Intel, said Kimball, “started its turnaround a few years back when ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger announced its five nodes in four years plan. While this was an impressive vision to articulate, its purpose was to rebuild trust with customers, and to rebuild an execution discipline. I think the company has largely succeeded, but of course the results trail a bit.” Asked if a combination of layoffs and the moving around of jobs will affect the cost of importing chips, Kimball predicted it will likely not have an impact: “Intel (like any responsible company) is extremely focused on cost and supply chain management. They have this down to a science and it is so critical to margins. Also, while I don’t have insights, I would expect Intel is employing AI and/or analytics to help drive supply chain and manufacturing optimization.” The company’s number one job, he said, “is to deliver the highest quality chips to its customers — from the client to the data center. I have every confidence it will not put this mandate at risk as it considers where/how to make the appropriate resourcing decisions. I think everybody who has been through corporate restructuring (I’ve been through too many to count) realizes that, when planning for these, ensuring the resilience of these mission critical functions is priority one.” Added Bickley, “trimming the workforce, delaying construction of the US fab plants, and flattening the decision structure of the organization are prudent moves meant to buy time in the hopes that their new chip designs and foundry processes attract new business.”

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.

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

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

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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