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ADNOC Awards $15B Contracts to Emirati Suppliers

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co PJSC (ADNOC) said Wednesday it has awarded AED 54 billion ($14.7 billion) worth of contracts to suppliers operating in the United Arab Emirates in the second half of 2025. “The contracts – spanning strategic services, drilling, maintenance, logistics, digital solutions and major projects across the ADNOC Group – underscore ADNOC’s role in […]

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co PJSC (ADNOC) said Wednesday it has awarded AED 54 billion ($14.7 billion) worth of contracts to suppliers operating in the United Arab Emirates in the second half of 2025.

“The contracts – spanning strategic services, drilling, maintenance, logistics, digital solutions and major projects across the ADNOC Group – underscore ADNOC’s role in driving the UAE’s economy by creating business opportunities for domestic manufacturers, suppliers and service providers”, ADNOC said in a statement on its website.

“They also reflect ADNOC’s determination to strengthen its supply chain efficiency, enhance local market competitiveness and drive sustainable growth across its operations”.

It said it had signed “framework agreements” with ABB Transmission & Distribution Ltd, Emerson Process Management Distribution Ltd, Honeywell International Inc, Schneider Electric SE, and Yokogawa Middle East & Africa BSC(c). The agreements involve “integrated control and safety system, emergency shutdown system, automation, control and monitoring system, and fire and gas system products that will be manufactured in the UAE”, ADNOC said.

ADNOC said its In-Country Value (ICV) program has also enabled 12 new local manufacturing facilities and final investment decisions.

“These milestones showcase tangible outcomes of the ICV program across key industrial zones in Abu Dhabi, Al Ruwais, Al Ain, Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah to build a strong, competitive industrial base in the UAE”, ADNOC said.

“ADNOC plans to locally manufacture AED 90 billion ($24.5 billion) worth of products in its procurement pipeline by 2030”, it said.

“The company’s ICV program has driven AED 242 billion ($65.9 billion) back into the UAE economy and enabled 18,500 Emiratis to be employed in the private sector since 2018. It aims to drive a further AED 200 billion ($54.5 billion) into the UAE economy over the next five years”.

Omar Abdulla Alnuiam, commercial and ICV acting director at ADNOC, said, “ADNOC is accelerating the UAE’s industrial growth and economic diversification and providing our partners greater visibility into our procurement pipeline as we deliver on our strategic priorities”.

“We are channeling demand from our procurement opportunities to boost the local economy, strengthen the resilience of our supply chain and ensure that products once imported are now made in the UAE. The procurement contracts and agreements we have awarded this year are testament to this effort and we invite local and international companies to leverage our In-Country Value program to drive long-term value creation”.

Separately on Wednesday, TA’ZIZ – ADNOC’s chemicals joint venture with Abu Dhabi state-owned investor ADQ – announced the award of a $1.99-billion engineering, procurement and construction contract to China National Chemical Engineering & Construction Corporation Seven Ltd for the UAE’s first integrated single-site polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production complex.

To rise at TA’ZIZ’s industrial complex in Ruwais, the facility will produce 1.9 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa) of PVC, ethylene dichloride (EDC), vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) and caustic soda, TA’ZIZ said.

“These chemicals are critical to serving growing demand in sectors such as construction, infrastructure, packaging and healthcare, both in the UAE and internationally”, TA’ZIZ said.

It expects the project to be completed by 2028.

“Localizing the production of critical chemicals like PVC and caustic soda will strengthen the country’s industrial resilience, generate considerable in-country value, unlock new downstream manufacturing opportunities and deliver significant long-term value to the nation’s economy”, TA’ZIZ chief executive Mashal Al-Kindi said.

TA’ZIZ added, “The first phase of the TA’ZIZ ecosystem is expected to contribute $50 billion (AED183 billion) to the UAE economy and generate 20,000 construction jobs and 6,000 operational roles over the lifetime of the project”.

“The platform will enable local manufacturers to produce hundreds of new end-products for the first time, supporting the UAE’s industrial growth and ADNOC’s ambition to become a top three global chemicals player”, it said.

On Thursday TA’ZIZ announced preliminary agreements to supply India’s The Sanmar Group over 350,000 MMtpa of EDC and VCM for up to 10 years. The petrochemical feedstocks will support Sanmar’s operations in India and Egypt.

The contracts, as well as the Sanmar agreements, were announced at the ADIPEC energy forum in Abu Dhabi.

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AI and greed cause a massive spike in memory prices

TrendForce says that as of 2Q25, HBM3e still commanded a price premium more than four times that of DDR5, so it’s hard to fault the memory manufacturers for wanting to make a buck. However, as DDR5 prices continue to rise, the gap between the two is projected to narrow significantly

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USA Crude Oil Stocks Rise More Than 5MM Barrels WoW

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) increased by 5.2 million barrels from the week ending October 24 to the week ending October 31. That’s what the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted in its latest weekly petroleum status report, which was released on November 5 and included data for the week ending October 31. The EIA report showed that crude oil stocks, not including the SPR, stood at 421.2 million barrels on October 31, 416.0 million barrels on October 24, and 427.7 million barrels on November 1, 2024. Crude oil in the SPR stood at 409.6 million barrels on October 31, 409.1 million barrels on October 24, and 387.2 million barrels on November 1, 2024, the report highlighted. Total petroleum stocks – including crude oil, total motor gasoline, fuel ethanol, kerosene type jet fuel, distillate fuel oil, residual fuel oil, propane/propylene, and other oils – stood at 1.679 billion barrels on October 31, the report revealed. Total petroleum stocks were up 1.1 million barrels week on week and up 44.5 million barrels year on year, the report showed. “At 421.2 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about four percent below the five year average for this time of year,” the EIA said in its latest weekly petroleum status report. “Total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 4.7 million barrels from last week and are about five percent below the five year average for this time of year. Both finished gasoline and blending components inventories decreased last week,” it added. “Distillate fuel inventories decreased by 0.6 million barrels last week and are about nine percent below the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories increased by 0.4 million barrels from last week and are 15 percent above the five year average

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Energy Transfer Bags 20-Year Deal to Deliver Gas for Entergy Louisiana

Energy Transfer LP has signed a 20-year transport agreement to deliver natural gas to Entergy Corp to support the power utility’s operations in Louisiana. “Under the agreement, Energy Transfer would initially provide 250,000 MMBtu per day of firm transportation service beginning in February 2028 and continuing through January 2048”, a joint statement said. “The deal structure also provides an option to Entergy to expand delivery capacity in the region to meet future energy demand and demonstrates both companies’ long-term commitment to meeting the region’s growing energy needs. “The natural gas supplied through this agreement, already in Entergy’s financial plan, will help fuel Entergy Louisiana’s combined-cycle combustion turbine facilities, which are being developed to provide efficient, cleaner energy for the company’s customers and to support projects like Meta’s new hyperscale data center in Richland Parish. “The project includes expanding Energy Transfer’s Tiger Pipeline with the construction of a 12-mile lateral with a capacity of up to one Bcfd. Natural gas supply for this project will be sourced from Energy Transfer’s extensive pipeline network which is connected to all the major producing basins in the U.S.” Entergy Louisiana had 1.1 million electric customers in 58 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes as of December 2024, Entergy Louisiana says on its website. Earlier Energy Transfer secured an agreement to deliver gas for a power-data center partnership between VoltaGrid LLC and Oracle Corp. VoltaGrid will deploy 2.3 gigawatts of “cutting-edge, ultra-low-emissions infrastructure, supplied by Energy Transfer’s pipeline network, to support the energy demands of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) next-generation artificial intelligence data centers”, VoltaGrid said in a press release October 15. “The VoltaGrid power infrastructure will be delivered through the proprietary VoltaGrid platform – a modular, high-transient-response system developed by VoltaGrid with key suppliers, including INNIO Jenbacher and ABB”. “This power plant deployment is being supplied with firm natural gas from Energy Transfer’s expansive pipeline

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SRP to Convert Unit 4 of SGS Station in Arizona to Use Gas

Three of the four units at the coal-fired Springerville Generation Station (SGS) in Arizona will shift to natural gas in the early 2030s. This week Salt River Project’s (SRP) board approved the conversion of Unit 4. Earlier this year Tucson Electric Power (TEP), which operates all four units, said it will convert Units 1 and 2. Unit 3, owned by the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, is set to be retired. “Today’s decision is the lowest-cost option to preserve the plant’s 400-megawatt (MW) generating capacity, enough to serve 90,000 homes, which is important to meeting the Valley’s growing power need in the early 2030s”, SRP said in a statement on its website. “Converting SGS Unit 4 to run on natural gas is expected to save SRP customers about $45 million compared to building a new natural gas facility and about $826 million relative to adding new long-duration lithium-ion batteries over the same period”, the public power utility added. “The decision also provides a bridge to the mid-2040s, when other generating technology options, including advanced nuclear, are mature”. Gas for the converted Unit 4 will come from a new pipeline that SRP will build. The pipeline will also supply gas to the Coronado Generating Station (CGS). On June 24 SRP announced board approval for the conversion of CGS from coal to gas. “SRP is working to more than double the capacity of its power system in the next 10 years while maintaining reliability and affordability and making continued progress toward our sustainability goals”, SRP said. “SRP will accomplish this through an all-of-the-above approach that plans to add renewables in addition to natural gas and storage resources”.  SRP currently supplies 3,000 MW of “carbon-free energy” including over 1,500 MW of solar, with nearly 1,300 MW of battery and pumped hydro storage supporting its

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Libya NOC Announces New Oil Find

In a statement posted on its Facebook page this week, which was translated, Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced the discovery of oil in the Ghaddams basin. “The National Oil Corporation announced the discovery of a new oil for the Gulf Arab Oil Company in Al-Beer H1 – MN 4 (H1-NC4) located in the Ghadams Al-Rasoubi basin,” the translated statement said. “The daily production of this well is estimated at 4,675 barrels per day of crude oil, and about two million cubic feet of gas,” it added. In the statement, the National Oil Corporation highlighted that the project is 100 percent owned by the corporation. In a statement posted on its website on October 29, Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced a new oil discovery in the Sirte Basin. “The National Oil Corporation (NOC) has announced a new oil discovery by OMV Austria Ltd. – Libya Branch in the Sirte Basin, specifically at well B1 in Block 106/4,” the National Oil Corporation said in that statement. “Production tests show that this exploratory well, reaching a depth of 10,476 feet, is producing over 4,200 barrels of oil per day, with gas production expected to exceed 2.6 million cubic feet daily,” it added. “This well marks the first discovery for OMV in Block 106/4, under the Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement (EPSA) signed in 2008 between the NOC, as the owner, and OMV, as the operator,” Libya’s National Oil Corporation pointed out. When Rigzone asked OMV for comment on this statement, an OMV spokesperson directed Rigzone to an OMV post on LinkedIn about the discovery. “OMV has safely completed an onshore exploration well in the Contract Area 106/4 (EPSA C103) of Libya’s Sirte Basin,” OMV noted in that post. “The well, drilled in the ‘Essar’ prospect, encountered oil-bearing formations with estimated contingent recoverable volumes

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Suncor Raises Dividend

Suncor Energy Inc has declared a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.6 ($0.4) per share, increased about five percent from the prior three-month period on the back of improved operational performance. The Canadian oil sands-focused producer and refiner achieved its highest quarterly volumes in bitumen production at 958,300 barrels per day (bpd), refinery throughput at 491,700 bpd and refined product sales at 646,800 bpd in the July-September 2025 period. “The board’s confidence in our improved operational performance and solid financial foundation underpins its decision to raise the quarterly dividend, reflecting our ongoing commitment to creating value for shareholders”, Suncor said in a statement on its website. Suncor reported CAD 1.79 billion in third-quarter net profit adjusted for nonrecurring items, up from CAD 873 million for the prior three months but down from CAD 1.88 billion for the same period last year. Its adjusted earnings per share of CAD 1.34 ($1) beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.85. Net income was CAD 1.62 billion. That was up from CAD 1.13 billion for Q2 but down from CAD 2.02 billion for Q3 2024 as upstream price realizations dropped. Cash flow from operating activities was CAD 3.79 billion, up from CAD 2.92 billion for Q2 but down from CAD 4.26 billion for Q3 2024. After adjustment for changes in non-cash working capital, the figure becomes CAD 3.83 billion, up both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. Upstream output averaged 870,000 bpd, up from 808,100 bpd in Q2 and 828,600 in Q3 2024. Suncor said the Q3 2025 figure is its highest third-quarter upstream production. The increase in oil sands bitumen production was driven by record quarterly production at Fort Hills and record third-quarter production at Firebag. Suncor’s net synthetic crude production also set a third-quarter record at 544,100 bpd, having benefited from “excellent upgrader reliability and improved

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ADNOC Awards $15B Contracts to Emirati Suppliers

Abu Dhabi National Oil Co PJSC (ADNOC) said Wednesday it has awarded AED 54 billion ($14.7 billion) worth of contracts to suppliers operating in the United Arab Emirates in the second half of 2025. “The contracts – spanning strategic services, drilling, maintenance, logistics, digital solutions and major projects across the ADNOC Group – underscore ADNOC’s role in driving the UAE’s economy by creating business opportunities for domestic manufacturers, suppliers and service providers”, ADNOC said in a statement on its website. “They also reflect ADNOC’s determination to strengthen its supply chain efficiency, enhance local market competitiveness and drive sustainable growth across its operations”. It said it had signed “framework agreements” with ABB Transmission & Distribution Ltd, Emerson Process Management Distribution Ltd, Honeywell International Inc, Schneider Electric SE, and Yokogawa Middle East & Africa BSC(c). The agreements involve “integrated control and safety system, emergency shutdown system, automation, control and monitoring system, and fire and gas system products that will be manufactured in the UAE”, ADNOC said. ADNOC said its In-Country Value (ICV) program has also enabled 12 new local manufacturing facilities and final investment decisions. “These milestones showcase tangible outcomes of the ICV program across key industrial zones in Abu Dhabi, Al Ruwais, Al Ain, Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah to build a strong, competitive industrial base in the UAE”, ADNOC said. “ADNOC plans to locally manufacture AED 90 billion ($24.5 billion) worth of products in its procurement pipeline by 2030”, it said. “The company’s ICV program has driven AED 242 billion ($65.9 billion) back into the UAE economy and enabled 18,500 Emiratis to be employed in the private sector since 2018. It aims to drive a further AED 200 billion ($54.5 billion) into the UAE economy over the next five years”. Omar Abdulla Alnuiam, commercial and ICV acting director at ADNOC, said, “ADNOC is accelerating the

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Chip-to-Grid Gets Bought: Eaton, Vertiv, and Daikin Deals Imply a New Thermal Capital Cycle

This week delivered three telling acquisitions that mark a turning point for the global data center supply chain; and more specifically, for the high-density liquid cooling mega-play now unfolding across the power-thermal continuum. Eaton is acquiring Boyd Thermal for $9.5 billion from Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Vertiv is buying PurgeRite for about $1 billion from Milton Street Capital. And Daikin Applied has moved to acquire Chilldyne, one of the most proven negative-pressure direct-to-chip pioneers. On paper, they’re three distinct transactions. In reality, they’re chapters in the same story: the acceleration of strategic vertical integration around thermal infrastructure for AI-class compute. The Equity Layer: Private Capital Builds, Strategics Buy From an equity standpoint, these are classic handoff moments between private-equity construction and corporate consolidation. Goldman Sachs built Boyd Thermal into a global platform spanning cold plates, CDUs, and high-density liquid loop design, now sold to Eaton at an enterprise multiple north of 5× 2026E revenue. Milton Street Capital took PurgeRite from a specialist contractor in fluid flushing and commissioning into a nationwide services platform. And Daikin, long synonymous with chillers and air-side thermal, is crossing the liquid Rubicon by buying its way into the D2C ecosystem. Each deal crystallizes a simple fact: liquid cooling is no longer an adjunct; it’s core infrastructure. Private equity did its job scaling the parts. Strategic players are now paying up for the system. Eaton’s Bid: The Chip-to-Grid Thesis For Eaton, Boyd Thermal is the final missing piece in its “chip-to-grid” thesis. The company already owns the electrical side of the data center: UPS, busway, switchgear, and monitoring. Boyd plugs the thermal gap, allowing Eaton to market full rack-to-substation solutions for AI loads in the 50–100 kW+ range. It’s a statement acquisition that places Eaton squarely against Schneider Electric, Vertiv and ABB in the race to

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Space: The final frontier for data processing

There are, however, a couple of reasons why data centers in space are being considered. There are plenty of reports about how the increased amount of AI processing is affecting power consumption within data centers; the World Economic Forum has estimated that the power required to handle AI is increasing at a rate of between 26% and 36% annually. Therefore, it is not surprising that organizations are looking at other options. But an even more pressing reason for orbiting data centers is to handle the amount of data that is being produced by existing satellites, Judge said. “Essentially, satellites are gathering a lot more data than can be sent to earth, because downlinks are a bottleneck,” he noted. “With AI capacity in orbit, they could potentially analyze more of this data, extract more useful information, and send insights back to earth. My overall feeling is that any more data processing in space is going to be driven by space processing needs.” And China may already be ahead of the game. Last year, Guoxing Aerospace  launched 12 satellites, forming a space-based computing network dubbed the Three-Body Computing Constellation. When completed, it will contain 2,800 satellites, all handling the orchestration and processing of data, taking edge computing to a new dimension.

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Meta’s $27B Hyperion Campus: A New Blueprint for AI Infrastructure Finance

At the end of October, Meta announced a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to finance, develop, and operate the previously announced “Hyperion” project, a multi-building AI megacampus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Under the new JV structure, Blue Owl will own 80 percent and Meta 20 percent, though Meta had announced the project long before Blue Owl’s involvement was confirmed. The venture anticipates roughly $27 billion in total development costs for the buildings and the long-lived power, cooling, and connectivity infrastructure. Blue Owl contributed about $7 billion in cash at formation; Meta received a $3 billion one-time distribution and contributed land and construction-in-progress to the vehicle. Rachel Peterson, VP of Data Centers at Meta, noted that construction on the project is already well underway, with thousands of workers on-site. Structuring Capital and Control Media coverage from Reuters and others characterizes the financing package as one of the largest private-capital deals ever for a single industrial campus, with debt placements led by PIMCO and additional institutional investors. Meta keeps the project largely off its balance sheet through the joint venture while retaining the development and property-management role and serving as the anchor tenant for the campus. The JV allows Meta to smooth its capital expenditures and manage risk while maintaining execution control over its most ambitious AI site to date. The structure incorporates lease agreements and a residual-value guarantee, according to Kirkland & Ellis (Blue Owl’s counsel), enabling lenders and equity holders to underwrite a very large, long-duration asset with multiple exit paths. For Blue Owl, Hyperion represents a utility-like digital-infrastructure platform with contracted cash flows to a single A-tier counterparty: a hyperscaler running mission-critical AI workloads for training and inference. As Barron’s and MarketWatch have noted, the deal underscores Wall Street’s ongoing appetite for AI-infrastructure investments at

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ZincFive targets AI data centers with new energy system

The system is engineered to absorb sharp transient loads from GPU clusters and AI training environments, while also providing reliable runtime support for conventional IT operations. By managing dynamic power at the UPS level, it reduces strain on upstream infrastructure, lowers capital expenditures (CAPEX), and improves grid interactions, according to ZincFive. “With BC 2 AI, we are delivering a safe, sustainable, and future-ready power solution designed to handle the most demanding AI workloads while continuing to support traditional IT backup. This is a defining moment not just for ZincFive, but for the entire data center industry as it adapts to the AI era,” Tod Higinbotham, CEO of ZincFive, said in a statement. Another benefit is its smaller design. Competing solutions can require two to four times more space to meet AI’s power surges, which can be up to 150% of UPS rated capacity. With BC 2 AI’s minimal footprint expansion, power can be handled more efficiently, ZincFive stated.

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Cisco centralizes customer experience around AI

The idea is to make sure enterprises are effectively choosing, implementing, and using the technologies they purchase to achieve their business goals, according to the company. Cisco CX offers a suite of services to help customers optimize their network infrastructure, security, collaboration, cloud and data center operations – from planning and design to implementation and maintenance. “For too long, the delivery of services has been fragmented, with support and professional services using different tools optimized for specific functions or lifecycle stages. This has led to a fragmented experience where customers, partners, and Cisco teams spend more time on data collection and tool maintenance than on high-value analysis,” wrote Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, senior vice president of engineering with the Cisco CX group in a blog about the new technology.  “Historically, the handoffs between these stages have been inefficient. Designs are interpreted by humans and then converted into code. Operational data is manually analyzed to inform optimizations. This process is slow, error-prone, and loses critical context at every step.” “Cisco IQ represents a shift from this tool-centric model to an intelligence-centric one. It is a multi-persona system, serving customers, partners, and our own services teams through an API-first architecture. Our objective is to turn decades of institutional knowledge into a living, adaptive system that makes your infrastructure smarter, more resilient, and more secure,” Jayakrishnan wrote.

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Data Center Jobs: Engineering, Construction, Commissioning, Sales, Field Service and Facility Tech Jobs Available in Major Data Center Hotspots

Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Looking for Data Center Candidates? Check out Pkaza’s Active Candidate / Featured Candidate Hotlist Data Center Facility Technician (All Shifts Available) Impact, TX This position is also available in: Ashburn, VA; Abilene, TX; Needham, MA and New York, NY.  Navy Nuke / Military Vets leaving service accepted! This opportunity is working with a leading mission-critical data center provider. This firm provides data center solutions custom-fit to the requirements of their client’s mission-critical operational facilities. They provide reliability of mission-critical facilities for many of the world’s largest organizations facilities supporting enterprise clients, colo providers and hyperscale companies. This opportunity provides a career-growth minded role with exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Electrical Commissioning Engineer Montvale, NJ This traveling position is also available in: New York, NY; White Plains, NY;  Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Hampton, GA; Fayetteville, GA; New Albany, OH; Cedar Rapids, IA; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX or Chicago IL *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA Agents and CxA PMs. *** Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design and LEED expertise when providing these consulting services for enterprise, colocation and hyperscale companies. This career-growth minded opportunity offers exciting projects with leading-edge technology and innovation as well as competitive salaries and benefits. Data Center MEP Construction

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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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