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Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and building fusion power plants at scales large enough to drive down economic costs. The US and other Western countries will have to build strong supply chains across a range of technologies in addition to creating the fundamental technology behind practical fusion power plants. Investing in supply chains and scaling up complex production processes has increasingly been a strength of China’s and a weakness of the West, resulting in the migration of many critical industries from the West to China. With fusion, we run the risk that history will repeat itself. But it does not have to go that way. The US and Europe were the dominant public funders of fusion energy research and are home to many of the world’s pioneering private fusion efforts. The West has consequently developed many of the basic technologies that will make fusion power work. But in the past five years China’s support of fusion energy has surged, threatening to allow the country to dominate the industry. The industrial base available to support China’s nascent fusion energy industry could enable it to climb the learning curve much faster and more effectively than the West. Commercialization requires know-how, capabilities, and complementary assets, including supply chains and workforces in adjacent industries. And especially in comparison with China, the US and Europe have significantly under-supported the industrial assets needed for a fusion industry, such as thin-film processing and power electronics. To compete, the US, allies, and partners must invest more heavily not only in fusion itself—which is already happening—but also in those adjacent technologies that are critical to the fusion industrial base.  China’s trajectory to dominating fusion and the West’s potential route to competing can be understood by looking at today’s most promising scientific and engineering pathway to achieve grid-relevant fusion energy. That pathway relies on the tokamak, a technology that uses a magnetic field to confine ionized gas—called plasma—and ultimately fuse nuclei. This process releases energy that is converted from heat to electricity. Tokamaks consist of several critical systems, including plasma confinement and heating, fuel production and processing, blankets and heat flux management, and power conversion. A close look at the adjacent industries needed to build these critical systems clearly shows China’s advantage while also providing a glimpse into the challenges of building a fusion industrial base in the US or Europe. China has leadership in three of these six key industries, and the West is at risk of losing leadership in two more. China’s industrial might in thin-film processing, large metal-alloy structures, and power electronics provides a strong foundation to establish the upstream supply chain for fusion. The importance of thin-film processing is evident in the plasma confinement system. Tokamaks use strong electromagnets to keep the fusion plasma in place, and the magnetic coils must be made from superconducting materials. Rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductors are the highest-performing materials available in sufficient quantity to be viable for use in fusion. The REBCO industry, which relies on thin-film processing technologies, currently has low production volumes spanning globally distributed manufacturers. However, as the fusion industry grows, the manufacturing base for REBCO will likely consolidate among the industry players who are able to rapidly take advantage of economies of scale. China is today’s world leader in thin-film, high-volume manufacturing for solar panels and flat-panel displays, with the associated expert workforce, tooling sector, infrastructure, and upstream materials supply chain. Without significant attention and investment on the part of the West, China is well positioned to dominate REBCO thin-film processing for fusion magnets. The electromagnets in a full-scale tokamak are as tall as a three-story building. Structures made using strong metal alloys are needed to hold these electromagnets around the large vacuum vessel that physically contains the magnetically confined plasma. Similar large-scale, complex metal structures are required for shipbuilding, aerospace, oil and gas infrastructure, and turbines. But fusion plants will require new versions of the alloys that are radiation-tolerant, able to withstand cryogenic temperatures, and corrosion-resistant. China’s manufacturing capacity and its metallurgical research efforts position it well to outcompete other global suppliers in making the necessary specialty metal alloys and machining them into the complex structures needed for fusion. A tokamak also requires large-scale power electronics. Here again China dominates. Similar systems are found in the high-speed rail (HSR) industry, renewable microgrids, and arc furnaces. As of 2024, China had deployed over 48,000 kilometers of HSR. That is three times the length of Europe’s HSR network and 55 times as long as the Acela network in the US, which is slower than HSR. While other nations have a presence, China’s expertise is more recent and is being applied on a larger scale. But this is not the end of the story. The West still has an opportunity to lead the other three adjacent industries important to the fusion supply chain: cryo-plants, fuel processing, and blankets.  The electromagnets in an operational tokamak need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures of around 20 Kelvin to remain superconducting. This requires large-scale, multi-megawatt cryogenic cooling plants. Here, the country best set up to lead the industry is less clear. The two major global suppliers of cryo-plants are Europe-based Linde Engineering and Air Liquide Engineering; the US has Air Products and Chemicals and Chart Industries. But they are not alone: China’s domestic champions in the cryogenic sector include Hangyang Group, SASPG, Kaifeng Air Separation, and SOPC. Each of these regions already has an industrial base that could scale up to meet the demands of fusion. Fuel production for fusion is a nascent part of the industrial base requiring processing technologies for light-isotope gases—hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium. Some processing of light-isotope gases is already done at small scale in medicine, hydrogen weapons production, and scientific research in the US, Europe, and China. But the scale needed for the fusion industry does not exist in today’s industrial base, presenting a major opportunity to develop the needed capabilities. Similarly, blankets and heat flux management are an opportunity for the West. The blanket is the medium used to absorb energy from the fusion reaction and to breed tritium. Commercial-scale blankets will require entirely novel technology. To date, no adjacent industries have relevant commercial expertise in liquid lithium, lead-lithium eutectic, or fusion-specific molten salts that are required for blanket technology. Some overlapping blanket technologies are in early-stage development by the nuclear fission industry. As the largest producer of beryllium in the world, the US has an opportunity to capture leadership because that element is a key material in leading fusion blanket concepts. But the use of beryllium must be coupled with technology development programs for the other specialty blanket components. These six industries will prove critical to scaling fusion energy. In some, such as thin-film processing and large metal-alloy structures, China already has a sizable advantage. Crucially, China recognizes the importance of these adjacent industries and is actively harnessing them in its fusion efforts. For example, China launched a fusion consortium that consists of industrial giants spanning the steel, machine tooling, electric grid, power generation, and aerospace sectors. It will be extremely difficult for the West to catch up in these areas, but policymakers and business leaders must pay attention and try to create robust alternative supply chains. As the industrial area of greatest strength, cryo-plants could continue to be an opportunity for leadership in the West. Bolstering Western cryo-plant production by creating demand for natural-gas liquefaction will be a major boon to the future cryo-plant supply chain that will support fusion energy. The US and European countries also have an opportunity to lead in the emerging industrial areas of fuel processing and blanket technologies. Doing so will require policymakers to work with companies to ensure that public and private funding is allocated to these critical emerging supply chains. Governments may well need to serve as early customers and provide debt financing for significant capital investment. Governments can also do better to incentivize private capital and equity financing—for example, through favorable capital-gains taxation. In lagging areas of thin-film and alloy production, the US and Europe will likely need partners, such as South Korea and Japan, that have the industrial bases to compete globally with China. The need to connect and capitalize multiple industries and supply chains will require long-term thinking and clear leadership. A focus on the demand side of these complementary industries is essential. Fusion is a decade away from maturation, so its supplier base must be derisked and made profitable in the near term by focusing on other primary demand markets that contribute to our economic vitality. To name a few, policymakers can support modernization of the grid to bolster domestic demand for power electronics and domestic semiconductor manufacturing to support thin-film processing. The West must also focus on the demand for energy production itself. As the world’s largest energy consumer, China will leverage demand from its massive domestic market to climb the learning curve and bolster national champions. This is a strategy that China has wielded with tremendous success to dominate global manufacturing, most recently in the electric-vehicle industry. Taken together, supply- and demand-side investment have been a winning strategy for China. The competition to lead the future of fusion energy is here. Now is the moment for the US and its Western allies to start investing in the foundational innovation ecosystem needed for a vibrant and resilient industrial base to support it. Daniel F. Brunner is a co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a Partner at Future Tech Partners. Edlyn V. Levine is the co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Fiona E. Murray is a professor of entrepreneurship at the MIT School of Management and Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund. Rory Burke is a graduate of MIT Sloan and a former summer scholar with ARPA-E.

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and building fusion power plants at scales large enough to drive down economic costs.

The US and other Western countries will have to build strong supply chains across a range of technologies in addition to creating the fundamental technology behind practical fusion power plants. Investing in supply chains and scaling up complex production processes has increasingly been a strength of China’s and a weakness of the West, resulting in the migration of many critical industries from the West to China. With fusion, we run the risk that history will repeat itself. But it does not have to go that way.

The US and Europe were the dominant public funders of fusion energy research and are home to many of the world’s pioneering private fusion efforts. The West has consequently developed many of the basic technologies that will make fusion power work. But in the past five years China’s support of fusion energy has surged, threatening to allow the country to dominate the industry.

The industrial base available to support China’s nascent fusion energy industry could enable it to climb the learning curve much faster and more effectively than the West. Commercialization requires know-how, capabilities, and complementary assets, including supply chains and workforces in adjacent industries. And especially in comparison with China, the US and Europe have significantly under-supported the industrial assets needed for a fusion industry, such as thin-film processing and power electronics.

To compete, the US, allies, and partners must invest more heavily not only in fusion itself—which is already happening—but also in those adjacent technologies that are critical to the fusion industrial base. 

China’s trajectory to dominating fusion and the West’s potential route to competing can be understood by looking at today’s most promising scientific and engineering pathway to achieve grid-relevant fusion energy. That pathway relies on the tokamak, a technology that uses a magnetic field to confine ionized gas—called plasma—and ultimately fuse nuclei. This process releases energy that is converted from heat to electricity. Tokamaks consist of several critical systems, including plasma confinement and heating, fuel production and processing, blankets and heat flux management, and power conversion.

A close look at the adjacent industries needed to build these critical systems clearly shows China’s advantage while also providing a glimpse into the challenges of building a fusion industrial base in the US or Europe. China has leadership in three of these six key industries, and the West is at risk of losing leadership in two more. China’s industrial might in thin-film processing, large metal-alloy structures, and power electronics provides a strong foundation to establish the upstream supply chain for fusion.

The importance of thin-film processing is evident in the plasma confinement system. Tokamaks use strong electromagnets to keep the fusion plasma in place, and the magnetic coils must be made from superconducting materials. Rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductors are the highest-performing materials available in sufficient quantity to be viable for use in fusion.

The REBCO industry, which relies on thin-film processing technologies, currently has low production volumes spanning globally distributed manufacturers. However, as the fusion industry grows, the manufacturing base for REBCO will likely consolidate among the industry players who are able to rapidly take advantage of economies of scale. China is today’s world leader in thin-film, high-volume manufacturing for solar panels and flat-panel displays, with the associated expert workforce, tooling sector, infrastructure, and upstream materials supply chain. Without significant attention and investment on the part of the West, China is well positioned to dominate REBCO thin-film processing for fusion magnets.

The electromagnets in a full-scale tokamak are as tall as a three-story building. Structures made using strong metal alloys are needed to hold these electromagnets around the large vacuum vessel that physically contains the magnetically confined plasma. Similar large-scale, complex metal structures are required for shipbuilding, aerospace, oil and gas infrastructure, and turbines. But fusion plants will require new versions of the alloys that are radiation-tolerant, able to withstand cryogenic temperatures, and corrosion-resistant. China’s manufacturing capacity and its metallurgical research efforts position it well to outcompete other global suppliers in making the necessary specialty metal alloys and machining them into the complex structures needed for fusion.

A tokamak also requires large-scale power electronics. Here again China dominates. Similar systems are found in the high-speed rail (HSR) industry, renewable microgrids, and arc furnaces. As of 2024, China had deployed over 48,000 kilometers of HSR. That is three times the length of Europe’s HSR network and 55 times as long as the Acela network in the US, which is slower than HSR. While other nations have a presence, China’s expertise is more recent and is being applied on a larger scale.

But this is not the end of the story. The West still has an opportunity to lead the other three adjacent industries important to the fusion supply chain: cryo-plants, fuel processing, and blankets. 

The electromagnets in an operational tokamak need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures of around 20 Kelvin to remain superconducting. This requires large-scale, multi-megawatt cryogenic cooling plants. Here, the country best set up to lead the industry is less clear. The two major global suppliers of cryo-plants are Europe-based Linde Engineering and Air Liquide Engineering; the US has Air Products and Chemicals and Chart Industries. But they are not alone: China’s domestic champions in the cryogenic sector include Hangyang Group, SASPG, Kaifeng Air Separation, and SOPC. Each of these regions already has an industrial base that could scale up to meet the demands of fusion.

Fuel production for fusion is a nascent part of the industrial base requiring processing technologies for light-isotope gases—hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium. Some processing of light-isotope gases is already done at small scale in medicine, hydrogen weapons production, and scientific research in the US, Europe, and China. But the scale needed for the fusion industry does not exist in today’s industrial base, presenting a major opportunity to develop the needed capabilities.

Similarly, blankets and heat flux management are an opportunity for the West. The blanket is the medium used to absorb energy from the fusion reaction and to breed tritium. Commercial-scale blankets will require entirely novel technology. To date, no adjacent industries have relevant commercial expertise in liquid lithium, lead-lithium eutectic, or fusion-specific molten salts that are required for blanket technology. Some overlapping blanket technologies are in early-stage development by the nuclear fission industry. As the largest producer of beryllium in the world, the US has an opportunity to capture leadership because that element is a key material in leading fusion blanket concepts. But the use of beryllium must be coupled with technology development programs for the other specialty blanket components.

These six industries will prove critical to scaling fusion energy. In some, such as thin-film processing and large metal-alloy structures, China already has a sizable advantage. Crucially, China recognizes the importance of these adjacent industries and is actively harnessing them in its fusion efforts. For example, China launched a fusion consortium that consists of industrial giants spanning the steel, machine tooling, electric grid, power generation, and aerospace sectors. It will be extremely difficult for the West to catch up in these areas, but policymakers and business leaders must pay attention and try to create robust alternative supply chains.

As the industrial area of greatest strength, cryo-plants could continue to be an opportunity for leadership in the West. Bolstering Western cryo-plant production by creating demand for natural-gas liquefaction will be a major boon to the future cryo-plant supply chain that will support fusion energy.

The US and European countries also have an opportunity to lead in the emerging industrial areas of fuel processing and blanket technologies. Doing so will require policymakers to work with companies to ensure that public and private funding is allocated to these critical emerging supply chains. Governments may well need to serve as early customers and provide debt financing for significant capital investment. Governments can also do better to incentivize private capital and equity financing—for example, through favorable capital-gains taxation. In lagging areas of thin-film and alloy production, the US and Europe will likely need partners, such as South Korea and Japan, that have the industrial bases to compete globally with China.

The need to connect and capitalize multiple industries and supply chains will require long-term thinking and clear leadership. A focus on the demand side of these complementary industries is essential. Fusion is a decade away from maturation, so its supplier base must be derisked and made profitable in the near term by focusing on other primary demand markets that contribute to our economic vitality. To name a few, policymakers can support modernization of the grid to bolster domestic demand for power electronics and domestic semiconductor manufacturing to support thin-film processing.

The West must also focus on the demand for energy production itself. As the world’s largest energy consumer, China will leverage demand from its massive domestic market to climb the learning curve and bolster national champions. This is a strategy that China has wielded with tremendous success to dominate global manufacturing, most recently in the electric-vehicle industry. Taken together, supply- and demand-side investment have been a winning strategy for China.

The competition to lead the future of fusion energy is here. Now is the moment for the US and its Western allies to start investing in the foundational innovation ecosystem needed for a vibrant and resilient industrial base to support it.

Daniel F. Brunner is a co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems and a Partner at Future Tech Partners.

Edlyn V. Levine is the co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Fiona E. Murray is a professor of entrepreneurship at the MIT School of Management and Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund.

Rory Burke is a graduate of MIT Sloan and a former summer scholar with ARPA-E.

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Such a shift, analysts say, could offer short-term benefits for enterprises, particularly in cost and access, but also introduces new operational risks. “This acquisition may potentially lower enterprise pricing through lease cost elimination and annual savings, while improving GPU access via expanded power capacity, enabling faster deployment of Nvidia chipsets and systems,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “However, service reliability risks persist during this crypto-to-AI retrofitting.” This also indicates that struggling vendors such as Core Scientific and similar have a way to cash out, according to Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group. “However, it does not materially impact the availability of Nvidia GPUs and similar for enterprises,” Joshi added. “Consolidation does impact the pricing power of vendors.” Concerns for enterprises Rising demand for AI-ready infrastructure can raise concerns among enterprises, particularly over access to power-rich data centers and future capacity constraints. “The biggest concern that CIOs should have with this acquisition is that mature data center infrastructure with dedicated power is an acquisition target,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights. “This may turn out to create challenges for CIOs currently collocating data workloads or seeking to keep more of their data loads on private data centers rather than in the cloud.”

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CoreWeave achieves a first with Nvidia GB300 NVL72 deployment

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Oracle to power OpenAI’s AGI ambitions with 4.5GW expansion

“For CIOs, this shift means more competition for AI infrastructure. Over the next 12–24 months, securing capacity for AI workloads will likely get harder, not easier. Though cost is coming down but demand is increasing as well, due to which CIOs must plan earlier and build stronger partnerships to ensure availability,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO at EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. He added that CIOs should expect longer wait times for AI infrastructure. To mitigate this, they should lock in capacity through reserved instances, diversify across regions and cloud providers, and work with vendors to align on long-term demand forecasts.  “Enterprises stand to benefit from more efficient and cost-effective AI infrastructure tailored to specialized AI workloads, significantly lower their overall future AI-related investments and expenses. Consequently, CIOs face a critical task: to analyze and predict the diverse AI workloads that will prevail across their organizations, business units, functions, and employee personas in the future. This foresight will be crucial in prioritizing and optimizing AI workloads for either in-house deployment or outsourced infrastructure, ensuring strategic and efficient resource allocation,” said Neil Shah, vice president at Counterpoint Research. Strategic pivot toward AI data centers The OpenAI-Oracle deal comes in stark contrast to developments earlier this year. In April, AWS was reported to be scaling back its plans for leasing new colocation capacity — a move that AWS Vice President for global data centers Kevin Miller described as routine capacity management, not a shift in long-term expansion plans. Still, these announcements raised questions around whether the hyperscale data center boom was beginning to plateau. “This isn’t a slowdown, it’s a strategic pivot. The era of building generic data center capacity is over. The new global imperative is a race for specialized, high-density, AI-ready compute. Hyperscalers are not slowing down; they are reallocating their capital to

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Arista Buys VeloCloud to reboot SD-WANs amid AI infrastructure shift

What this doesn’t answer is how Arista Networks plans to add newer, security-oriented Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities to VeloCloud’s older SD-WAN technology. Post-acquisition, it still has only some of the building blocks necessary to achieve this. Mapping AI However, in 2025 there is always more going on with networking acquisitions than simply adding another brick to the wall, and in this case it’s the way AI is changing data flows across networks. “In the new AI era, the concepts of what comprises a user and a site in a WAN have changed fundamentally. The introduction of agentic AI even changes what might be considered a user,” wrote Arista Networks CEO, Jayshree Ullal, in a blog highlighting AI’s effect on WAN architectures. “In addition to people accessing data on demand, new AI agents will be deployed to access data independently, adapting over time to solve problems and enhance user productivity,” she said. Specifically, WANs needed modernization to cope with the effect AI traffic flows are having on data center traffic. Sanjay Uppal, now VP and general manager of the new VeloCloud Division at Arista Networks, elaborated. “The next step in SD-WAN is to identify, secure and optimize agentic AI traffic across that distributed enterprise, this time from all end points across to branches, campus sites, and the different data center locations, both public and private,” he wrote. “The best way to grab this opportunity was in partnership with a networking systems leader, as customers were increasingly looking for a comprehensive solution from LAN/Campus across the WAN to the data center.”

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Data center capacity continues to shift to hyperscalers

However, even though colocation and on-premises data centers will continue to lose share, they will still continue to grow. They just won’t be growing as fast as hyperscalers. So, it creates the illusion of shrinkage when it’s actually just slower growth. In fact, after a sustained period of essentially no growth, on-premises data center capacity is receiving a boost thanks to genAI applications and GPU infrastructure. “While most enterprise workloads are gravitating towards cloud providers or to off-premise colo facilities, a substantial subset are staying on-premise, driving a substantial increase in enterprise GPU servers,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

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Oracle inks $30 billion cloud deal, continuing its strong push into AI infrastructure.

He pointed out that, in addition to its continued growth, OCI has a remaining performance obligation (RPO) — total future revenue expected from contracts not yet reported as revenue — of $138 billion, a 41% increase, year over year. The company is benefiting from the immense demand for cloud computing largely driven by AI models. While traditionally an enterprise resource planning (ERP) company, Oracle launched OCI in 2016 and has been strategically investing in AI and data center infrastructure that can support gigawatts of capacity. Notably, it is a partner in the $500 billion SoftBank-backed Stargate project, along with OpenAI, Arm, Microsoft, and Nvidia, that will build out data center infrastructure in the US. Along with that, the company is reportedly spending about $40 billion on Nvidia chips for a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas, that will serve as Stargate’s first location in the country. Further, the company has signaled its plans to significantly increase its investment in Abu Dhabi to grow out its cloud and AI offerings in the UAE; has partnered with IBM to advance agentic AI; has launched more than 50 genAI use cases with Cohere; and is a key provider for ByteDance, which has said it plans to invest $20 billion in global cloud infrastructure this year, notably in Johor, Malaysia. Ellison’s plan: dominate the cloud world CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison announced in a recent earnings call Oracle’s intent to become No. 1 in cloud databases, cloud applications, and the construction and operation of cloud data centers. He said Oracle is uniquely positioned because it has so much enterprise data stored in its databases. He also highlighted the company’s flexible multi-cloud strategy and said that the latest version of its database, Oracle 23ai, is specifically tailored to the needs of AI workloads. Oracle

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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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