Do European M&Ms Actually Taste Better than American M&Ms?

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Do European M&Ms Actually Taste Better than American M&Ms?

(Oh, I am the only one who’s been asking this question…? Hm. Well, if you have a minute, please enjoy this exploratory Data Analysis — featuring experimental design, statistics, and interactive visualization — applied a bit too earnestly to resolve an international debate.) 1. Introduction 1.1 Background and motivation Chocolate is enjoyed around the world. […]

1. Introduction

1.1 Background and motivation

Chocolate is enjoyed around the world. From ancient practices harvesting organic cacao in the Amazon basin, to chocolatiers sculpting edible art in the mountains of Switzerland, and enormous factories in Hershey, Pennsylvania churning out 70 million kisses per day, the nuanced forms and flavors of chocolate have been integrated into many cultures and their customs. While quality can greatly vary across chocolate products, a well-known, shelf-stable, easily shareable form of chocolate are M&Ms. Readily found by convenience store check-out counters and in hotel vending machines, the brightly colored pellets are a popular treat whose packaging is re-branded to fit nearly any commercializable American holiday.

While living in Denmark in 2022, I heard a concerning claim: M&Ms manufactured in Europe taste different, and arguably “better,” than M&Ms produced in the United States. While I recognized that fancy European chocolate is indeed quite tasty and often superior to American chocolate, it was unclear to me if the same claim should hold for M&Ms. I learned that many Europeans perceive an “unpleasant” or “tangy” taste in American chocolate, which is largely attributed to butyric acid, a compound resulting from differences in how milk is treated before incorporation into milk chocolate.

But honestly, how much of a difference could this make for M&Ms? M&Ms!? I imagined M&Ms would retain a relatively processed/mass-produced/cheap candy flavor wherever they were manufactured. As the lone American visiting a diverse lab of international scientists pursuing cutting-edge research in biosustainability, I was inspired to break out my data science toolbox and investigate this M&M flavor phenomenon.

1.2 Previous work

To quote a European woman, who shall remain anonymous, after she tasted an American M&M while traveling in New York:

“They taste so gross. Like vomit. I don’t understand how people can eat this. I threw the rest of the bag away.”

Vomit? Really? In my experience, children raised in the United States had no qualms about eating M&Ms. Growing up, I was accustomed to bowls of M&Ms strategically placed in high traffic areas around my house to provide readily available sugar. Clearly American M&Ms are edible. But are they significantly different and/or inferior to their European equivalent?

In response to the anonymous European woman’s scathing report, myself and two other Americans visiting Denmark sampled M&Ms purchased locally in the Lyngby Storcenter Føtex. We hoped to experience the incredible improvement in M&M flavor that was apparently hidden from us throughout our youths. But curiously, we detected no obvious flavor improvements.

Unfortunately, neither preliminary study was able to conduct a side-by-side taste test with proper controls and randomized M&M sampling. Thus, we turn to science.

1.3 Study Goals

This study seeks to remedy the previous lack of thoroughness and investigate the following questions:

Is there a global consensus that European M&Ms are in fact better than American M&Ms?
Can Europeans actually detect a difference between M&Ms purchased in the US vs in Europe when they don’t know which one they are eating? Or is this a grand, coordinated lie amongst Europeans to make Americans feel embarrassed?
Are Americans actually taste-blind to American vs European M&Ms? Or can they taste a difference but simply don’t describe this difference as “an improvement” in flavor?
Can these alleged taste differences be perceived by citizens of other continents? If so, do they find one flavor obviously superior?

2. Methods

2.1 Experimental design and data collection

Participants were recruited by luring — er, inviting them to a social gathering (with the promise of free food) that was conveniently co-located with the testing site. Once a participant agreed to pause socializing and join the study, they were positioned at a testing station with a trained experimenter who guided them through the following steps:

Participants sat at a table and received two cups: 1 empty and 1 full of water. With one cup in each hand, the participant was asked to close their eyes, and keep them closed through the remainder of the experiment.
The experimenter randomly extracted one M&M with a spoon, delivered it to the participant’s empty cup, and the participant was asked to eat the M&M (eyes still closed).
After eating each M&M, the experimenter collected the taste response by asking the participant to report if they thought the M&M tasted: Especially Good, Especially Bad, or Normal.
Each participant received a total of 10 M&Ms (5 European, 5 American), one at a time, in a random sequence determined by random.org.
Between eating each M&M, the participant was asked to take a sip of water to help “cleanse their palate.”
Data collected: for each participant, the experimenter recorded the participant’s continent of origin (if this was ambiguous, the participant was asked to list the continent on which they have the strongest memories of eating candy as a child). For each of the 10 M&Ms delivered, the experimenter recorded the M&M origin (“Denmark” or “USA”), the M&M color, and the participant’s taste response. Experimenters were also encouraged to jot down any amusing phrases uttered by the participant during the test, recorded under notes (data available here).

2.2 Sourcing materials and recruiting participants

Two bags of M&Ms were purchased for this study. The American-sourced M&Ms (“USA M&M”) were acquired at the SFO airport and delivered by the author’s parents, who visited her in Denmark. The European-sourced M&Ms (“Denmark M&M”) were purchased at a local Føtex grocery store in Lyngby, a little north of Copenhagen.

Experiments were conducted at two main time points. The first 14 participants were tested in Lyngby, Denmark in August 2022. They mostly consisted of friends and housemates the author met at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) who came to a “going away party” into which the experimental procedure was inserted. A few additional friends and family who visited Denmark were also tested during their travels (e.g. on the train).

The remaining 37 participants were tested in Seattle, WA, USA in October 2022, primarily during a “TGIF happy hour” hosted by graduate students in the computer science PhD program at the University of Washington. This second batch mostly consisted of students and staff of the Paul. G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering (UW CSE) who responded to the weekly Friday summoning to the Allen Center atrium for free snacks and drinks.

Figure 1. Distribution of participants recruited to the study. In the first sampling event in Lyngby, participants primarily hailed from North America and Europe, and a few additionally came from Asia, South America, or Australia. Our second sampling event in Seattle greatly increased participants, primarily from North America and Asia, and a few more from Europe. Neither event recruited participants from Africa. Figure made with Altair.

While this study set out to analyze global trends, unfortunately data was only collected from 51 participants the author was able to lure to the study sites and is not well-balanced nor representative of the 6 inhabited continents of Earth (Figure 1). We hope to improve our recruitment tactics in future work. For now, our analytical power with this dataset is limited to response trends for individuals from North America, Europe, and Asia, highly biased by subcommunities the author happened to engage with in late 2022.

2.3 Risks

While we did not acquire formal approval for experimentation with human test subjects, there were minor risks associated with this experiment: participants were warned that they may be subjected to increased levels of sugar and possible “unpleasant flavors” as a result of participating in this study. No other risks were anticipated.

After the experiment however, we unfortunately observed several cases of deflated pride when a participant learned their taste response was skewed more positively towards the M&M type they were not expecting. This pride deflation seemed most severe among European participants who learned their own or their fiancé’s preference skewed towards USA M&Ms, though this was not quantitatively measured and cannot be confirmed beyond anecdotal evidence.

3. Results & Discussion

3.1 Overall response to “USA M&Ms” vs “Denmark M&Ms”

3.1.1 Categorical response analysis — entire dataset

In our first analysis, we count the total number of “Bad”, “Normal”, and “Good” taste responses and report the percentage of each response received by each M&M type. M&Ms from Denmark more frequently received “Good” responses than USA M&Ms but also more frequently received “Bad” responses. M&Ms from the USA were most frequently reported to taste “Normal” (Figure 2). This may result from the elevated number of participants hailing from North America, where the USA M&M is the default and thus more “Normal,” while the Denmark M&M was more often perceived as better or worse than the baseline.

^{Figure 2. Qualitative taste response distribution across the whole dataset. The percentage of taste responses for “Bad”, “Normal” or “Good” was calculated for each type of M&M. Figure made with Altair.}

Now let’s break out some Statistics, such as a chi-squared (X2) test to compare our observed distributions of categorical taste responses. Using the scipy.stats chi2_contingency function, we built contingency tables of the observed counts of “Good,” “Normal,” and “Bad” responses to each M&M type. Using the X2 test to evaluate the null hypothesis that there is no difference between the two M&Ms, we found the p-value for the test statistic to be 0.0185, which is significant at the common p-value cut off of 0.05, but not at 0.01. So a solid “maybe,” depending on whether you’d like this result to be significant or not.

3.1.2 Quantitative response analysis — entire dataset.

The X2 test helps evaluate if there is a difference in categorical responses, but next, we want to determine a relative taste ranking between the two M&M types. To do this, we converted taste responses to a quantitative distribution and calculated a taste score. Briefly, “Bad” = 1, “Normal” = 2, “Good” = 3. For each participant, we averaged the taste scores across the 5 M&Ms they tasted of each type, maintaining separate taste scores for each M&M type.

Figure 3. Quantitative taste score distributions across the whole dataset. Kernel density estimation of the average taste score calculated for each participant for each M&M type. Figure made with Seaborn.

With the average taste score for each M&M type in hand, we turn to scipy.stats ttest_ind (“T-test”) to evaluate if the means of the USA and Denmark M&M taste scores are different (the null hypothesis being that the means are identical). If the means are significantly different, it would provide evidence that one M&M is perceived as significantly tastier than the other.

We found the average taste scores for USA M&Ms and Denmark M&Ms to be quite close (Figure 3), and not significantly different (T-test: p = 0.721). Thus, across all participants, we do not observe a difference between the perceived taste of the two M&M types (or if you enjoy parsing triple negatives: “we cannot reject the null hypothesis that there is not a difference”).

But does this change if we separate participants by continent of origin?

3.2 Continent-specific responses to “USA M&Ms” vs “Denmark M&Ms”

We repeated the above X2 and T-test analyses after grouping participants by their continents of origin. The Australia and South America groups were combined as a minimal attempt to preserve data privacy. Due to the relatively small sample size of even the combined Australia/South America group (n=3), we will refrain from analyzing trends for this group but include the data in several figures for completeness and enjoyment of the participants who may eventually read this.

3.2.1 Categorical response analysis — by continent

In Figure 4, we display both the taste response counts (upper panel, note the interactive legend) and the response percentages (lower panel) for each continent group. Both North America and Asia follow a similar trend to the whole population dataset: participants report Denmark M&Ms as “Good” more frequently than USA M&Ms, but also report Denmark M&Ms as “Bad” more frequently. USA M&Ms were most frequently reported as “Normal” (Figure 4).

On the contrary, European participants report USA M&Ms as “Bad” nearly 50% of the time and “Good” only 18% of the time, which is the most negative and least positive response pattern, respectively (when excluding the under-sampled Australia/South America group).

^{Figure 4. Qualitative taste response distribution by continent. Upper panel: counts of taste responses — click the legend to interactively filter! Lower panel: percentage of taste responses for each type of M&M. Figure made with Altair.}

This appeared striking in bar chart form, however only North America had a significant X2 p-value (p = 0.0058) when evaluating each continent’s difference in taste response profile between the two M&M types. The European p-value is perhaps “approaching significance” in some circles, but we’re about to accumulate several more hypothesis tests and should be mindful of multiple hypothesis testing (Table 1). A false positive result here would be devastating.

When comparing the taste response profiles between two continents for the same M&M type, there are a couple interesting notes. First, we observed no major taste discrepancies between all pairs of continents when evaluating Denmark M&Ms — the world seems generally consistent in their range of feelings about M&Ms sourced from Europe (right column X2 p-values, Table 2). To visualize this comparison more easily, we reorganize the bars in Figure 4 to group them by M&M type (Figure 5).

^{Figure 5. Qualitative taste response distribution by M&M type, reported as percentages. (Same data as Figure 4 but re-arranged). Figure made with Altair.}

However, when comparing continents to each other in response to USA M&Ms, we see larger discrepancies. We found one pairing to be significantly different: European and North American participants evaluated USA M&Ms very differently (p = 0.000007) (Table 2). It seems very unlikely that this observed difference is by random chance (left column, Table 2).

3.2.2 Quantitative response analysis — by continent

We again convert the categorical profiles to quantitative distributions to assess continents’ relative preference of M&M types. For North America, we see that the taste score means of the two M&M types are actually quite similar, but there is a higher density around “Normal” scores for USA M&Ms (Figure 6A). The European distributions maintain a bit more of a separation in their means (though not quite significantly so), with USA M&Ms scoring lower (Figure 6B). The taste score distributions of Asian participants is most similar (Figure 6C).

Reorienting to compare the quantitative means between continents’ taste scores for the same M&M type, only the comparison between North American and European participants on USA M&Ms is significantly different based on a T-test (p = 0.001) (Figure 6D), though now we really are in danger of multiple hypothesis testing! Be cautious if you are taking this analysis at all seriously.

Figure 6. Quantitative taste score distributions by continent. Kernel density estimation of the average taste score calculated for each each continent for each M&M type. A. Comparison of North America responses to each M&M. B. Comparison of Europe responses to each M&M. C. Comparison of Asia responses to each M&M. D. Comparison of continents for USA M&Ms. E. Comparison of continents for Denmark M&Ms. Figure made with Seaborn.

At this point, I feel myself considering that maybe Europeans are not just making this up. I’m not saying it’s as dramatic as some of them claim, but perhaps a difference does indeed exist… To some degree, North American participants also perceive a difference, but the evaluation of Europe-sourced M&Ms is not consistently positive or negative.

3.3 M&M taste alignment chart

In our analyses thus far, we did not account for the baseline differences in M&M appreciation between participants. For example, say Person 1 scored all Denmark M&Ms as “Good” and all USA M&Ms as “Normal”, while Person 2 scored all Denmark M&Ms as “Normal” and all USA M&Ms as “Bad.” They would have the same relative preference for Denmark M&Ms over USA M&Ms, but Person 2 perhaps just does not enjoy M&Ms as much as Person 1, and the relative preference signal is muddled by averaging the raw scores.

Inspired by the Lawful/Chaotic x Good/Evil alignment chart used in tabletop role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons©™, in Figure 7, we establish an M&M alignment chart to help determine the distribution of participants across M&M enjoyment classes.

Figure 7. M&M enjoyment alignment chart. The x-axis represents a participant’s average taste score for USA M&Ms; the y-axis is a participant’s average taste score for Denmark M&Ms. Figure made with Altair.

Notably, the upper right quadrant where both M&M types are perceived as “Good” to “Normal” is mostly occupied by North American participants and a few Asian participants. All European participants land in the left half of the figure where USA M&Ms are “Normal” to “Bad”, but Europeans are somewhat split between the upper and lower halves, where perceptions of Denmark M&Ms range from “Good” to “Bad.”

An interactive version of Figure 7 is provided below for the reader to explore the counts of various M&M alignment regions.

^{Figure 7 (interactive): click and brush your mouse over the scatter plot to see the counts of continents in different M&M enjoyment regions. Figure made with Altair.}

3.4 Participant taste response ratio

Next, to factor out baseline M&M enjoyment and focus on participants’ relative preference between the two M&M types, we took the log ratio of each person’s USA M&M taste score average divided by their Denmark M&M taste score average.

Equation 1: Equation to calculate each participant’s overall M&M preference ratio.

As such, positive scores indicate a preference towards USA M&Ms while negative scores indicate a preference towards Denmark M&Ms.

On average, European participants had the strongest preference towards Denmark M&Ms, with Asians also exhibiting a slight preference towards Denmark M&Ms (Figure 8). To the two Europeans who exhibited deflated pride upon learning their slight preference towards USA M&Ms, fear not: you did not think USA M&Ms were “Good,” but simply ranked them as less bad than Denmark M&Ms (see participant_id 4 and 17 in the interactive version of Figure 7). If you assert that M&Ms are a bad American invention not worth replicating and return to consuming artisanal European chocolate, your honor can likely be restored.

Figure 8. Distribution of participant M&M preference ratios by continent. Preference ratios are calculated as in Equation 1. Positive numbers indicate a relative preference for USA M&Ms, while negative indicate a relative preference for Denmark M&Ms. Figure made with Seaborn.

North American participants are pretty split in their preference ratios: some fall quite neutrally around 0, others strongly prefer the familiar USA M&M, while a handful moderately prefer Denmark M&Ms. Anecdotally, North Americans who learned their preference skewed towards European M&Ms displayed signals of inflated pride, as if their results signaled posh refinement.

Overall, a T-test comparing the distributions of M&M preference ratios shows a possibly significant difference in the means between European and North American participants (p = 0.049), but come on, this is like the 20th p-value I’ve reported — this one is probably too close to call.

3.5 Taste inconsistency and “Perfect Classifiers”

For each participant, we assessed their taste score consistency by averaging the standard deviations of their responses to each M&M type, and plotting that against their preference ratio (Figure 9).

^{Figure 9. Participant taste consistency by preference ratio. The x-axis is a participant’s relative M&M preference ratio. The y-axis is the average of the standard deviation of their USA M&M scores and the standard deviation of their Denmark M&M scores. A value of 0 on the y-axis indicates perfect consistency in responses, while higher values indicate more inconsistent responses. Figure made with Altair.}

Most participants were somewhat inconsistent in their ratings, ranking the same M&M type differently across the 5 samples. This would be expected if the taste difference between European-sourced and American-sourced M&Ms is not actually all that perceptible. Most inconsistent were participants who gave the same M&M type “Good”, “Normal”, and “Bad” responses (e.g., points high on the y-axis, with wider standard deviations of taste scores), indicating lower taste perception abilities.

Intriguingly, four participants — one from each continent group — were perfectly consistent: they reported the same taste response for each of the 5 M&Ms from each M&M type, resulting in an average standard deviation of 0.0 (bottom of Figure 9). Excluding the one of the four who simply rated all 10 M&Ms as “Normal”, the other three appeared to be “Perfect Classifiers” — either rating all M&Ms of one type “Good” and the other “Normal”, or rating all M&Ms of one type “Normal” and the other “Bad.” Perhaps these folks are “super tasters.”

3.6 M&M color

Another possible explanation for the inconsistency in individual taste responses is that there exists a perceptible taste difference based on the M&M color. Visually, the USA M&Ms were noticeably more smooth and vibrant than the Denmark M&Ms, which were somewhat more “splotchy” in appearance (Figure 10A). M&M color was recorded during the experiment, and although balanced sampling was not formally built into the experimental design, colors seemed to be sampled roughly evenly, with the exception of Blue USA M&Ms, which were oversampled (Figure 10B).

Figure 10. M&M colors. A. Photo of each M&M color of each type. It’s perhaps a bit hard to perceive on screen in my unprofessionally lit photo, but with the naked eye, USA M&Ms seemed to be brighter and more uniformly colored while Denmark M&Ms have a duller and more mottled color. Is it just me, or can you already hear the Europeans saying “They are brighter because of all those extra chemicals you put in your food that we ban here!” B. Distribution of M&Ms of each color sampled over the course of the experiment. The Blue USA M&Ms were not intentionally oversampled — they must be especially bright/tempting to experimenters. Figure made with Altair.

We briefly visualized possible differences in taste responses based on color (Figure 11), however we do not believe there are enough data to support firm conclusions. After all, on average each participant would likely only taste 5 of the 6 M&M colors once, and 1 color not at all. We leave further M&M color investigations to future work.

Figure 11. Taste response profiles for M&Ms of each color and type. Profiles are reported as percentages of “Bad”, “Normal”, and “Good” responses, though not all M&Ms were sampled exactly evenly. Figure made with Altair.

3.7 Colorful commentary

We assured each participant that there was no “right “answer” in this experiment and that all feelings are valid. While some participants took this to heart and occasionally spent over a minute deeply savoring each M&M and evaluating it as if they were a sommelier, many participants seemed to view the experiment as a competition (which occasionally led to deflated or inflated pride). Experimenters wrote down quotes and notes in conjunction with M&M responses, some of which were a bit “colorful.” We provide a hastily rendered word cloud for each M&M type for entertainment purposes (Figure 12) though we caution against reading too far into them without diligent sentiment analysis.

Figure 11. A simple word cloud generated from the notes column of each M&M type. Fair warning — these have not been properly analyzed for sentiment and some inappropriate language was recorded. Figure made with WordCloud.

4. Conclusion

Overall, there does not appear to be a “global consensus” that European M&Ms are better than American M&Ms. However, European participants tended to more strongly express negative reactions to USA M&Ms while North American participants seemed relatively split on whether they preferred M&Ms sourced from the USA vs from Europe. The preference trends of Asian participants often fell somewhere between the North Americans and Europeans.

Therefore, I’ll admit that it’s probable that Europeans are not engaged in a grand coordinated lie about M&Ms. The skew of most European participants towards Denmark M&Ms is compelling, especially since I was the experimenter who personally collected much of the taste response data. If they found a way to cheat, it was done well enough to exceed my own passive perception such that I didn’t notice. However, based on this study, it would appear that a strongly negative “vomit flavor” is not universally perceived and does not become apparent to non-Europeans when tasting both M&Ms types side by side.

We hope this study has been illuminating! We would look forward to extensions of this work with improved participant sampling, additional M&M types sourced from other continents, and deeper investigations into possible taste differences due to color.

Thank you to everyone who participated and ate M&Ms in the name of science!

Figures and analysis can be found on github: https://github.com/erinhwilson/mnm-taste-test

Article by Erin H. Wilson, Ph.D.[1,2,3] who decided the time between defending her dissertation and starting her next job would be best spent on this highly valuable analysis. Hopefully it is clear that this article is intended to be comedic— I do not actually harbor any negative feelings towards Europeans who don’t like American M&Ms, but enjoyed the chance to be sassy and poke fun at our lively debates with overly-enthusiastic data analysis.

Shout out to Matt, Galen, Ameya, and Gian-Marco for assisting in data collection!

[1] Former Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington

[2] Former visiting Ph.D. student at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark

[3] Future data scientist at LanzaTech

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The Environmental Protect Agency on Wednesday said it would begin a sweeping rollback of environmental regulations, including air, water and waste rules that affect the power sector. “Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy [and] bring auto jobs back to the U.S.” Industry observers expected the EPA under the Trump administration would seek to revise regulations affecting the power sector, especially rules that have contributed to making it uneconomic to keep coal-fired power plants operating. Revising or eliminating the rules will require rulemaking processes that can take several years to complete, Capstone said in a client note Wednesday. “With EPA also making significant cuts to its staff, the agency faces serious logistical challenges to releasing final rules that do not run afoul of the [Administrative Procedure Act] in any of these areas,” the research firm said. Litigation would add at least a year to the process of revising the regulations, so some of the planned deregulatory actions would likely not be finished before the next presidential administration begins, Capstone analysts said. Also, many of the power sector-related regulations that could be revised are being litigated in court, extending the timeline for any new regulation to take effect, the analysts noted. However, the EPA said it aims to take interim measures that would reduce regulatory burdens from some of its rules. For example, the agency said it is considering granting a two-year exemption to power plants affected by its mercury and air toxics standards rule while the agency conducts a rulemaking process to revise the regulation. Deregulating the power sector would “substantially” reduce

Renewables cannot scale without oil and gas – Hitachi Energy

Continued collaboration with the oil and gas sector is essential for renewables to scale to meet the UK’s clean power ambitions, according to Hitachi country managing director for UK and Ireland Laura Fleming. In an exclusive interview with Energy Voice, Fleming said the energy transition would not mean an immediate severing of ties with hydrocarbons: “Instead, it’s about evolving and aligning both sectors towards shared decarbonisation goals”. “The oil and gas supply chains are still deeply intertwined with renewables, particularly in areas like offshore wind where the expertise in subsea engineering, logistics and heavy lifting that oil and gas companies have developed is essential,” she said. “The oil and gas industry has been very successful and the renewable industry can still learn a lot how to develop from an emerging industry to a mature industry, this goes for matters related to engineering but also to finance and investment.” In the UK, Hitachi is focused heavily on the wind sector and enabling the movement of electricity from wind farms to where it can find end users. Hitachi provides the connection for Dogger Bank Wind Farm and the Shetland Grid, among others. To that end, Fleming said the main priority for the UK right now is “to ensure that each GW of renewable energy is matched by investment in the grid”. “Growth in grid capacity is the key to unlocking growth in renewables. Grid capacity must move in lockstep with the growth of renewables,” she said. “Investment in grid capacity will allow the UK to capture the enormous growth opportunity from a Net Zero grid. To deliver this, the priority should be on delivering the Transmission Acceleration Action Plan and the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan with rapid unblocking of grid connections that risk holding back renewable energy projects.” Zombie projects Grid congestion

VergeIO enhances VergeFabric network virtualization offering

VergeIO is not, however, using an off-the-shelf version of KVM. Rather, it is using what Crump referred to as a heavily modified KVM hypervisor base, with significant proprietary enhancements while still maintaining connections to the open-source community. VergeIO’s deployment profile is currently 70% on premises and about 30% via bare-metal service providers, with a particularly strong following among cloud service providers that host applications for their customers. The software requires direct hardware access due to its low-level integration with physical resources. “Since November of 2023, the normal number one customer we’re attracting right now is guys that have had a heart attack when they got their VMware renewal license,” Crump said. “The more of the stack you own, the better our story becomes.” A 2024 report from Data Center Intelligence Group (DCIG) identified VergeOS as one of the top 5 alternatives to VMware. “VergeIO starts by installing VergeOS on bare metal servers,” the report stated. “It then brings the servers’ hardware resources under its management, catalogs these resources, and makes them available to VMs. By directly accessing and managing the server’s hardware resources, it optimizes them in ways other hypervisors often cannot.” Advanced networking features in VergeFabric VergeFabric is the networking component within the VergeOS ecosystem, providing software-defined networking capabilities as an integrated service rather than as a separate virtual machine or application.

Podcast: On the Frontier of Modular Edge AI Data Centers with Flexnode’s Andrew Lindsey

The modular data center industry is undergoing a seismic shift in the age of AI, and few are as deeply embedded in this transformation as Andrew Lindsey, Co-Founder and CEO of Flexnode. In a recent episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, Lindsey joined Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent and Senior Editor David Chernicoff to discuss the evolution of modular data centers, the growing demand for high-density liquid-cooled solutions, and the industry factors driving this momentum. A Background Rooted in Innovation Lindsey’s career has been defined by the intersection of technology and the built environment. Prior to launching Flexnode, he worked at Alpha Corporation, a top 100 engineering and construction management firm founded by his father in 1979. His early career involved spearheading technology adoption within the firm, with a focus on high-security infrastructure for both government and private clients. Recognizing a massive opportunity in the data center space, Lindsey saw a need for an innovative approach to infrastructure deployment. “The construction industry is relatively uninnovative,” he explained, citing a McKinsey study that ranked construction as the second least-digitized industry—just above fishing and wildlife, which remains deliberately undigitized. Given the billions of square feet of data center infrastructure required in a relatively short timeframe, Lindsey set out to streamline and modernize the process. Founded four years ago, Flexnode delivers modular data centers with a fully integrated approach, handling everything from site selection to design, engineering, manufacturing, deployment, operations, and even end-of-life decommissioning. Their core mission is to provide an “easy button” for high-density computing solutions, including cloud and dedicated GPU infrastructure, allowing faster and more efficient deployment of modular data centers. The Rising Momentum for Modular Data Centers As Vincent noted, Data Center Frontier has closely tracked the increasing traction of modular infrastructure. Lindsey has been at the forefront of this

Last Energy to Deploy 30 Microreactors in Texas for Data Centers

As the demand for data center power surges in Texas, nuclear startup Last Energy has now announced plans to build 30 microreactors in the state’s Haskell County near the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The reactors will serve a growing customer base of data center operators in the region looking for reliable, carbon-free energy. The plan marks Last Energy’s largest project to date and a significant step in advancing modular nuclear power as a viable solution for high-density computing infrastructure. Meeting the Looming Power Demands of Texas Data Centers Texas is already home to over 340 data centers, with significant expansion underway. Google is increasing its data center footprint in Dallas, while OpenAI’s Stargate has announced plans for a new facility in Abilene, just an hour south of Last Energy’s planned site. The company notes the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area alone is projected to require an additional 43 gigawatts of power in the coming years, far surpassing current grid capacity. To help remediate, Last Energy has secured a 200+ acre site in Haskell County, approximately three and a half hours west of Dallas. The company has also filed for a grid connection with ERCOT, with plans to deliver power via a mix of private wire and grid transmission. Additionally, Last Energy has begun pre-application engagement with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for an Early Site Permit, a key step in securing regulatory approval. According to Last Energy CEO Bret Kugelmass, the company’s modular approach is designed to bring nuclear energy online faster than traditional projects. “Nuclear power is the most effective way to meet Texas’ growing energy demand, but it needs to be deployed faster and at scale,” Kugelmass said. “Our microreactors are designed to be plug-and-play, enabling data center operators to bypass the constraints of an overloaded grid.” Scaling Nuclear for

Data Center Jobs: Engineering and Technician Jobs Available in Major Markets

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. Data Center Facility Engineer (Night Shift Available) Ashburn, VAThis position is also available in: Tacoma, WA (Nights), Days/Nights: Needham, MA and New York City, NY. This opportunity is working directly with a leading mission-critical data center developer / wholesaler / colo 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 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 New Albany, OHThis traveling position is also available in: Somerset, NJ; Boydton, VA; Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Hampton, GA; Fayetteville, GA; Des Moines, IA; San Jose, CA; Portland, OR; St Louis, MO; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; Chicago, IL; or Toronto, ON. *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA agents.*** 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. Switchgear Field Service Technician – Critical Facilities Nationwide TravelThis position is also available in: Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Dallas,

Amid Shifting Regional Data Center Policies, Iron Mountain and DC Blox Both Expand in Virginia’s Henrico County

The dynamic landscape of data center developments in Maryland and Virginia exemplify the intricate balance between fostering technological growth and addressing community and environmental concerns. Data center developers in this region find themselves both in the crosshairs of groups worried about the environment and other groups looking to drive economic growth. In some cases, the groups are different components of the same organizations, such as local governments. For data center development, meeting the needs of these competing interests often means walking a none-too-stable tightrope. Rapid Government Action Encourages Growth In May 2024, Maryland demonstrated its commitment to attracting data center investments by enacting the Critical Infrastructure Streamlining Act. This legislation provides a clear framework for the use of emergency backup power generation, addressing previous regulatory challenges that a few months earlier had hindered projects like Aligned Data Centers’ proposed 264-megawatt campus in Frederick County, causing Aligned to pull out of the project. However, just days after the Act was signed by the governor, Aligned reiterated its plans to move forward with development in Maryland. With the Quantum Loop and the related data center development making Frederick County a focal point for a balanced approach, the industry is paying careful attention to the pace of development and the relations between developers, communities and the government. In September of 2024, Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater revealed draft legislation that would potentially restrict where in the county data centers could be built. The legislation was based on information found in the Frederick County Data Centers Workgroup’s final report. Those bills would update existing regulations and create a floating zone for Critical Digital Infrastructure and place specific requirements on siting data centers. Statewide, a cautious approach to environmental and community impacts statewide has been deemed important. In January 2025, legislators introduced SB116, a bill

New Reports Show How AI, Power, and Investment Trends Are Reshaping the Data Center Landscape

Today we provide a comprehensive roundup of the latest industry analyst reports from CBRE, PwC, and Synergy Research, offering a data-driven perspective on the state of the North American data center market. To wit, CBRE’s latest findings highlight record-breaking growth in supply, soaring colocation pricing, and mounting power constraints shaping site selection. For its part, PwC’s analysis underscores the sector’s broader economic impact, quantifying its trillion-dollar contribution to GDP, rapid job growth, and surging tax revenues. Meanwhile, the latest industry analysis from Synergy Research details the acceleration of cloud spending, AI’s role in fueling infrastructure demand, and an unprecedented surge in data center mergers and acquisitions. Together, these reports paint a picture of an industry at an inflection point—balancing explosive expansion with evolving challenges in power availability, cost pressures, and infrastructure investment. Let’s examine them. CBRE: Surging Demand Fuels Record Data Center Expansion CBRE says the North American data center sector is scaling at an unprecedented pace, driven by unrelenting demand from artificial intelligence (AI), hyperscale, and cloud service providers. The latest North America Data Center Trends H2 2024 report from CBRE reveals that total supply across primary markets surged by 34% year-over-year to 6,922.6 megawatts (MW), outpacing the 26% growth recorded in 2023. This accelerating expansion has triggered record-breaking construction activity and intensified competition for available capacity. Market Momentum: Scaling Amid Power Constraints According to CBRE, data center construction activity reached historic levels, with 6,350 MW under development at the close of 2024—more than doubling the 3,077.8 MW recorded a year prior. Yet, the report finds the surge in development is being met with significant hurdles, including power constraints and supply chain challenges affecting critical electrical infrastructure. As a result, the vacancy rate across primary markets has plummeted to an all-time low of 1.9%, with only a handful of sites

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle