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About 700 Bcf of Gas Matched in 2nd Midterm Round of AggregateEU

The European Commission has matched almost 20 billion cubic meters (706.29 billion cubic feet) of demand from European Union gas buyers with offers from potential suppliers under the second midterm round of AggregateEU. Vendors offered 31 Bcm, exceeding the 29 Bcm of demand pooled during the matchmaking round opened this month, according to an online […]

The European Commission has matched almost 20 billion cubic meters (706.29 billion cubic feet) of demand from European Union gas buyers with offers from potential suppliers under the second midterm round of AggregateEU.

Vendors offered 31 Bcm, exceeding the 29 Bcm of demand pooled during the matchmaking round opened this month, according to an online statement Wednesday from the Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy.

“All participants have been informed about the matching results and will now be able to negotiate contracts bilaterally”, the Directorate said.

Energy and Housing Commissioner Dan Jørgensen commented, “As we fast track our decarbonization efforts in the EU, it is also key that European buyers are able to secure competitive gas offers from reliable international suppliers”.

“The positive results of this second matching round on joint gas purchasing show the strong interest from the market and the value in providing increased transparency to European gas users and buyers”, Jørgensen added.

Announcing the second midterm round March 12, 2025, the Directorate said LNG buyers and sellers not only can name their preferred terminal of delivery as before but can now also express preference to have the LNG delivered free-on-board. This option has been added “to better reflect LNG trade practices and attract additional international suppliers”, the Directorate said.

AggregateEU, a mechanism in which gas suppliers compete to book demand placed by companies in the EU and its Energy Community partner countries, was initially only meant for the 2023-24 winter season. However, citing lessons from the prolonged effects of the energy crisis, the EU has made it a permanent mechanism under “Regulation (EU) 2024/1789 on the internal markets for renewable gas, natural gas and hydrogen”, adopted June 13, 2024.

Midterm rounds offer six-month contracts for potential suppliers during a buyer-seller partnership of up to five years.

“In early 2024, with the effects of the energy crisis still not over, AggregateEU is introducing a different concept of mid-term tenders in order to address the growing demand for stability and predictability from buyers and sellers of natural gas”, the Directorate said February 1, 2024, announcing the first midterm tender.

“Under such tenders, buyers will be able to submit their demand for seasonal 6-month periods (for a minimum 1,800,000 MWh for LNG and 30,000 for NBP per period), going from April 2024 to October 2029. This is intended to support sellers in identifying buyers who might be interested in a longer trading partnership – i.e. up to 5 years.

“Mid-term tenders will not only increase security of supply but also help European industrial players increase their competitiveness”.

NBP gas, or National Balancing Point gas, refers to gas from the national transmission systems of EU states.

The first midterm round aggregated 34 Bcm of demand from 19 companies including industrial players. Offers totaled 97.4 Bcm, almost triple the demand, the Commission said February 28, 2024.

A total of 7 rounds have been conducted under AggregateEU, pooling over 119 Bcm of demand and attracting 191 Bcm of offers. Nearly 100 Bcm have been matched, according to Thursday’s results announcement. 

AggregateEU, created under Council Regulation 2022/2576 of December 19, 2022, is part of the broader EU Energy Platform for coordinated purchases of gas and hydrogen. The Energy Platform was formed 2022 as part of the REPowerEU strategy for achieving energy independence from Russia.

To contact the author, email [email protected]

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Mapping Trump’s tariffs by trade balance and geography

U.S. importers may soon see costs rise for many imported goods, as tariffs on foreign goods are set to rise. On July 31, President Donald Trump announced country-specific reciprocal tariffs would finally be implemented on Aug. 7, after a monthslong pause. The news means more than 90 countries will see

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JF Expands in Southwest with Maverick Acquisition

The JF Group (JF) has acquired Arizona-based Maverick Petroleum Services. JF, a fueling infrastructure, petroleum equipment distribution, service, general contracting, and construction services provider, said in a media release that Maverick brings expertise in the installation, maintenance, and repair of petroleum handling equipment, Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, and environmental testing. As

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TotalEnergies Sells Stake in Argentina Blocks to YPF

TotalEnergies announced, in a statement posted on its site recently, that its affiliate Total Austral has signed an agreement with YPF SA for the sale of its 45 percent operated interest in two unconventional oil and gas blocks in Argentina “for an amount of $500 million at a valuation of around $10,000/acre”. The blocks comprise Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada, TotalEnergies highlighted in the release. The company pointed out that these concessions are located in the Vaca Muerta area in the Neuquén Basin, comprise 51,000 net acres, and are currently in a “pilot development phase”. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary conditions, TotalEnergies noted in the statement. “The sale of Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada blocks is part of our active portfolio management strategy,” Javier Rielo, TotalEnergies Senior Vice President Americas, Exploration & Production, said in the statement. “TotalEnergies remains fully committed to Argentina, where it operates a large unconventional area of 183,000 nets acres in the Vaca Muerta play, after the divestment of these two blocks which represented around 20 percent of our net acreage in that play,” he added. “The company is currently producing gas and condensates from the operated blocks Aguada Pichana Este and San Roque, with a combined production of around 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in TotalEnergies share in 2024,” he continued. “This transaction allows us to unlock value from part of our portfolio, while focusing on the development of our core assets in the Neuquén Basin and in the offshore of Tierra del Fuego,” Rielo went on to state. In a translation of a letter to the Argentine Securities Commission dated August 6, which was included in a Securities and Exchange Commission document posted on the YPF website recently, YPF said it entered into a share purchase agreement

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Petrobras Misses Estimates

Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer Petrobras reported weaker-than-expected results and cut its dividend after lower oil prices offset stronger production figures.  Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as it is formally known, increased investments 30.6% on year and 9% from the previous quarter to $4.4 billion as it develops massive deep-water oil fields. Investors have been hoping to see Petrobras contain capital expenditures to help preserve shareholder payouts. Chief Executive Officer Magda Chambriard has vowed to tighten spending to navigate the challenging scenario of lower oil prices, while sticking to a production expansion.  Petrobras also cited one-off events that include asset impairments and labor agreements.  Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, was 52.3 billion reais ($9.6 billion), trailing the 56.9 billion-reais estimate. Petrobras will pay $1.6 billion in second-quarter dividends and interest on capital, it said in a filing. Expectations were for a $2.2 billion payout, according to an average of five analyst forecasts reviewed by Bloomberg.  The lower dividends came despite a significant boost in second-quarter output, driven by the rapid ramp-up of its offshore Buzios field and the nearby Mero field. The company’s oil and natural gas output climbed 7.8% year-over-year to 2.9 million barrels per day.  The company reported a sharp increase in debt that it attributed to growth in oil platform leasing with new units coming on line. Brazil needs to open up new offshore regions to oil exploration to prevent production from going into decline in the 2030s.  The Rio de Janeiro-based company hopes to get the green light for an oil-spill-simulation test at a key offshore region off the coast of the Amazon forest. The company will meet Brazil environmental officials next week for planning. The test is considered the last step to obtain a permit to drill a block in the Foz do

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Oil Has Performed Poorly This Week

Brent crude oil has performed poorly this week, with the front-month contract falling by nearly eight percent to reach around $67 per barrel. That’s what analysts at BMI said in a BMI report sent to Rigzone by the Fitch Group on Friday, adding that the initial sell off was triggered by the OPEC+ announcement that it would raise supply by an additional 547,000 barrels per day in September, “marking the full unwinding of the 2.2 million barrels per day of cuts that the group planned to reintroduce to market over 2025 and 2026”. “Meanwhile, tariff-related uncertainties and broad-based economic concerns loom large, exacerbated by the recent raft of tariff announcements and weak economic data releases in the U.S. raising concerns for oil demand at a time when supply is continuing to grow,” they added. The BMI analysts also noted in the report that bearish sentiment helps to explain the decline seen in Brent in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s new executive order (EO) issued August 6, which they highlighted “introduces an additional 25 percent tariff on India, effective August 27, in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil, and establishes a process for extending similar penalties to other countries”. “All else equal, the EO should be bullish for prices, to the extent that it curbs flows from Russia, the world’s second largest net exporter of oil,” they said. “However, market participants seem to share our view that there is ample scope for Trump to reverse course in response to potential concessions from Russian President Vladimir Putin,” they added. The analysts went on to state in the report that some combination of the loosening of the global oil supply and demand balance, potential pushback from India, economic fallout from higher effective tariff rates, and the rerouting of Russian oil

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Presidio to Be Listed on NYSE After Business Combination

Fort Worth, Texas-based Presidio Investment Holdings LLC is set to become a public company after entering into a definitive business combination agreement with EQV Ventures Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by EQV Group. The proposed business combination will result in Presidio being listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “FTW,” the company said in a news release. The combined company is expected to have an estimated post-transaction enterprise value of approximately $660 million, including assets acquired under the transaction, according to the release. The combined company will be named Presidio Production Company and will be led by Presidio’s existing management team, including Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack as co-CEOs. As part of the transaction, Presidio will also acquire a complementary Texas Panhandle asset from EQV Resources LLC, an affiliate of EQV. EQV’s sponsor will maintain a significant ownership stake in Presidio post-closing, the release said. Presidio said it expects to have over 2,000 operated producing wells across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas with expected net production of 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) in 2025. To finance the transaction, EQV has entered into agreements for approximately $85 million in common stock Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) investments. The common stock PIPE is anchored by strategic and institutional investors, including an undisclosed major oil and gas company, according to the release. Further, management and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Energy Partners will provide approximately $65 million of rollover equity, the release said. Presidio said it intends to acquire and optimize additional producing oil and gas wells and then optimize the acquisitions through the application of technology, which includes automation, real-time data analytics and the introduction of artificial intelligence processes. The company said it also expects to initiate an annual common dividend of $1.35 per share

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Halliburton Awarded Contract for NEP CCS Project

Halliburton said it was awarded a contract to provide completions and downhole monitoring services for the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) carbon capture and storage (CCS) system in northeast England’s East Coast Cluster (ECC). Halliburton will manufacture and deliver the majority of the equipment required for the project from its U.K. completion manufacturing facility in Arbroath, the company said in a news release. Financial details of the contract were not disclosed. The NEP infrastructure includes a carbon dioxide (CO2) gathering network and onshore compression facilities, as well as a 91-mile (145-kilometer) offshore pipeline, and subsea injection and monitoring systems for the Endurance saline aquifer, located around 3281 feet (1000 meters) below the seabed. The infrastructure will transport and permanently store up to an initial 4 million metric tons of CO2, according to the release. Operations are expected to start in 2028. “Halliburton is pleased to develop and deliver innovative well completions and monitoring solutions for this groundbreaking carbon storage project,” Jean-Marc Lopez, senior vice president of Halliburton, said. “This project allows expansion of our completions activity and showcases Halliburton’s leadership in CCS projects. We look forward to the opportunity to deliver our services to support the NEP project”. Halliburton’s U.K. center supports North Sea operations and provides on-site product development and testing resources alongside advanced manufacturing capabilities, the company said. NEP is a joint venture that includes BP PLC, Equinor ASA, and TotalEnergies SE. It was formed in 2020 as the ECC CO2 transportation and storage provider, which will transport and store CO2 emissions from the Teesside and Humber regional industrial clusters. Infrastructure Contracts Awarded NEP has awarded a series of offshore contracts to support the next phase of its CCS infrastructure, the joint venture said in an earlier statement. Following financial close in December 2024, NEP is now advancing through

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In wind and solar dispute, Sens. Grassley, Curtis delay Trump nominees

Dive Brief: Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and John Curtis, R-Utah, have placed holds on three of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Department of the Treasury, with Grassley saying that he’s doing so to ensure the administration’s upcoming rulemaking regarding wind and solar tax credit phase-outs aligns with congressional intent. “During consideration of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, I worked with my colleagues to provide wind and solar an appropriate glidepath for the orderly phase-out of the tax credits,” Grassley stated in the Congressional Record. “This is a case where both the law and congressional intent are clear.” Curtis didn’t comment publicly about why he placed his holds, but someone familiar with the matter told Utility Dive that his reasoning aligned with Grassley’s. Dive Insight: The OBBB, signed by Trump on July 4, truncated the length of time that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investment and production tax credits will be available for wind and solar — attempting to close that window by the end of 2027.  However, Senate negotiations produced a stipulation in the final bill that allows wind and solar projects to qualify after that as long as they commence construction by July 5, 2026. Trump then issued an executive order July 7 which instructed the Treasury secretary to publish guidance within 45 days “to ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented.”  Ahead of the release of that guidance, Grassley and Curtis have put holds on the nominations of Brian Morrissey, Jr. to be the Treasury Department’s general counsel, Francis Brooke to be an assistant secretary, and Jonathan McKernan to be an undersecretary. Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, said Sen. Grassley is trying to thread the needle on renewables in a state “on the red side of purple” that

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Stargate’s slow start reveals the real bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure

The CFO emphasized that SoftBank remains committed to its original target of $346 billion (JPY 500 billion) over 4 years for the Stargate project, noting that major sites have been selected in the US and preparations are taking place simultaneously across multiple fronts. Requests for comment to Stargate partners Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle remain unanswered. Infrastructure reality check for CIOs These challenges offer important lessons for enterprise IT leaders facing similar AI infrastructure decisions. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Goto’s confirmation of delays “reflects a challenge CIOs see repeatedly” in partner onboarding delays, service activation slips, and revised delivery commitments from cloud and datacenter providers. Oishi Mazumder, senior analyst at Everest Group, noted that “SoftBank’s Stargate delays show that AI infrastructure is not constrained by compute or capital, but by land, energy, and stakeholder alignment.” The analyst emphasized that CIOs must treat AI infrastructure “as a cross-functional transformation, not an IT upgrade, demanding long-term, ecosystem-wide planning.” “Scaling AI infrastructure depends less on the technical readiness of servers or GPUs and more on the orchestration of distributed stakeholders — utilities, regulators, construction partners, hardware suppliers, and service providers — each with their own cadence and constraints,” Gogia said.

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Incentivizing the Digital Future: Inside America’s Race to Attract Data Centers

Across the United States, states are rolling out a wave of new tax incentives aimed squarely at attracting data centers, one of the country’s fastest-growing industries. Once clustered in only a handful of industry-friendly regions, today’s data-center boom is rapidly spreading, pushed along by profound shifts in federal policy, surging demand for artificial intelligence, and the drive toward digital transformation across every sector of the economy. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in the intensifying state-by-state competition to land massive infrastructure investments, advanced technology jobs, and the alluring prospect of long-term economic growth. The past year alone has seen a record number of states introducing or expanding incentives for data centers, from tax credits to expedited permitting, reflecting a new era of proactive, tech-focused economic development policy. Behind these moves, federal initiatives and funding packages underscore the essential role of digital infrastructure as a national priority, encouraging states to lower barriers for data center construction and operation. As states watch their neighbors reap direct investment and job creation benefits, a real “domino effect” emerges: one state’s success becomes another’s blueprint, heightening the pressure and urgency to compete. Yet, this wave of incentives also exposes deeper questions about the local impact, community costs, and the evolving relationship between public policy and the tech industry. From federal levels to town halls, there are notable shifts in both opportunities and challenges shaping the landscape of digital infrastructure advancement. Industry Drivers: the Federal Push and Growth of AI The past year has witnessed a profound federal policy shift aimed squarely at accelerating U.S. digital infrastructure, especially for data centers in direct response both to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and to intensifying international competition. In July 2025, the administration unveiled “America’s AI Action Plan,” accompanied by multiple executive orders that collectively redefined

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AI Supercharges Hyperscale: Capacity, Geography, and Design Are Being Redrawn

From Cloud to GenAI, Hyperscalers Cement Role as Backbone of Global Infrastructure Data center capacity is undergoing a major shift toward hyperscale operators, which now control 44 percent of global capacity, according to Synergy Research Group. Non-hyperscale colocations account for another 22 percent of capacity and is expected to continue, but hyperscalers projected to hold 61 percent of the capacity by 2030. That swing also reflects the dominance of hyperscalers geographically. In a separate Synergy study revealing the world’s top 20 hyperscale data center locations, just 20 U.S. state or metro markets account for 62 percent of the world’s hyperscale capacity.  Northern Virginia and the Greater Beijing areas alone make up 20 percent of the total. They’re followed by the U.S. states of Oregon and Iowa, Dublin, the U.S. state of Ohio, Dallas, and then Shanghai. Of the top 20 markets, 14 are in the U.S., five in APAC region, and only one is in Europe. This rapid shift is fueled by the explosive growth of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and especially generative AI (GenAI)—power-intensive technologies that demand the scale, efficiency, and specialized infrastructure only hyperscalers can deliver. What’s Coming for Capacity The capacity research shows on-premises data centers with 34 percent of the total capacity, a significant drop from the 56 percent capacity they accounted for just six years ago.  Synergy projects that by 2030, hyperscale operators such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure will claim 61 percent of all capacity, while on-premises share will drop to just 22 percent. So, it appears on-premises data centers are both increasing and decreasing. That’s one way to put it, but it’s about perspective. Synergy’s capacity study indicates they’re growing as the volume of enterprise GPU servers increases. The shrinkage refers to share of the market: Hyperscalers are growing

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In crowded observability market, Gartner calls out AI capabilities, cost optimization, DevOps integration

Support for OpenTelemetry and open standards is another differentiator for Gartner. Vendors that embrace these frameworks are better positioned to offer extensibility, avoid vendor lock-in, and enable broader ecosystem integration. This openness is paired with a growing focus on cost optimization—an increasingly important concern as telemetry data volumes increase. Leaders offer granular data retention controls, tiered storage, and usage-based pricing models to help customers Gartner also highlights the importance of the developer experience and DevOps integration. Observability leaders provide “integration with other operations, service management, and software development technologies, such as IT service management (ITSM), configuration management databases (CMDB), event and incident response management, orchestration and automation, and DevOps tools.” On the automation front, observability platforms should support initiating changes to application and infrastructure code to optimize cost, capacity or performance—or to take corrective action to mitigate failures, Gartner says. Leaders must also include application security functionality to identify known vulnerabilities and block attempts to exploit them. Gartner identifies observability leaders This year’s report highlights eight vendors in the leaders category, all of which have demonstrated strong product capabilities, solid technology execution, and innovative strategic vision. Read on to learn what Gartner thinks makes these eight vendors (listed in alphabetical order) stand out as leaders in observability: Chronosphere: Strengths include cost optimization capabilities with its control plane that closely manages the ingestion, storage, and retention of incoming telemetry using granular policy controls. The platform requires no agents and relies largely on open protocols such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. Gartner cautions that Chronosphere has not emphasized AI capabilities in its observability platform and currently offers digital experience monitoring via partnerships. Datadog: Strengths include extensive capabilities for managing service-level objectives across data types and providing deep visibility into system and application behavior without the need for instrumentation. Gartner notes the vendor’s licensing

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LiquidStack CEO Joe Capes on GigaModular, Direct-to-Chip Cooling, and AI’s Thermal Future

In this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent speaks with LiquidStack CEO Joe Capes about the company’s breakthrough GigaModular platform — the industry’s first scalable, modular Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) purpose-built for direct-to-chip liquid cooling. With rack densities accelerating beyond 120 kW and headed toward 600 kW, LiquidStack is targeting the real-world requirements of AI data centers while streamlining complexity and future-proofing thermal design. “AI will keep pushing thermal output to new extremes,” Capes tells DCF. “Data centers need cooling systems that can be easily deployed, managed, and scaled to match heat rejection demands as they rise.” LiquidStack’s new GigaModular CDU, unveiled at the 2025 Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes, delivers up to 10 MW of scalable cooling capacity. It’s designed to support single-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling — a shift from the company’s earlier two-phase immersion roots — via a skidded modular design with a pay-as-you-grow approach. The platform’s flexibility enables deployments at N, N+1, or N+2 resiliency. “We designed it to be the only CDU our customers will ever need,” Capes says. From Immersion to Direct-to-Chip LiquidStack first built its reputation on two-phase immersion cooling, which Joe Capes describes as “the highest performing, most sustainable cooling technology on Earth.” But with the launch of GigaModular, the company is now expanding into high-density, direct-to-chip cooling, helping hyperscale and colocation providers upgrade their thermal strategies without overhauling entire facilities. “What we’re trying to do with GigaModular is simplify the deployment of liquid cooling at scale — especially for direct-to-chip,” Capes explains. “It’s not just about immersion anymore. The flexibility to support future AI workloads and grow from 2.5 MW to 10 MW of capacity in a modular way is absolutely critical.” GigaModular’s components — including IE5 pump modules, dual BPHx heat exchangers, and intelligent control systems —

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Oracle’s Global AI Infrastructure Strategy Takes Shape with Bloom Energy and Digital Realty

Bloom Energy: A Leading Force in On-Site Power As of mid‑2025, Bloom Energy has deployed over 400 MW of capacity at data centers worldwide, working with partners including Equinix, American Electric Power (AEP), and Quanta Computing. In total, Bloom has delivered more than 1.5 GW of power across 1,200+ global installations, a tripling of its customer base in recent years. Several key partnerships have driven this rapid adoption. A decade-long collaboration with Equinix, for instance, began with a 1 MW pilot in 2015 and has since expanded to more than 100 MW deployed across 19 IBX data centers in six U.S. states, providing supplemental power at scale. Even public utilities are leaning in: in late 2024, AEP signed a deal to procure up to 1 GW of Bloom’s solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) systems for fast-track deployments aimed at large data centers and commercial users facing grid connection delays. More recently, on July 24, 2025, Bloom and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) announced a strategic partnership to deploy SOFC systems at select U.S. Oracle data centers. The deployments are designed to support OCI’s gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure, delivering clean, uninterrupted electricity for high-density compute workloads. Bloom has committed to providing sufficient on-site power to fully support an entire data center within 90 days of contract signing. With scalable, modular, and low-emissions energy solutions, Bloom Energy has emerged as a key enabler of next-generation data center growth. Through its strategic partnerships with Oracle, Equinix, and AEP, and backed by a rapidly expanding global footprint, Bloom is well-positioned to meet the escalating demand for multi-gigawatt on-site generation as the AI era accelerates. Oracle and Digital Realty: Accelerating the AI Stack Oracle, which continues to trail hyperscale cloud providers like Google, AWS, and Microsoft in overall market share, is clearly betting big on AI to drive its next phase of infrastructure growth.

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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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GPT-5 is here. Now what?

At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically

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