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Exclusive: EET connects hydrogen-ready furnace at Stanlow in UK first

Essar Energy Transition (EET) Fuels has completed the installation and connection of a hydrogen-ready furnace at its Stanlow refinery site, in a landmark moment for UK industry. Formerly Essar Oil, EET Fuels aims to create the “world’s leading low-carbon process refinery” at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, having taken delivery of the furnace in 2022. The new […]

Essar Energy Transition (EET) Fuels has completed the installation and connection of a hydrogen-ready furnace at its Stanlow refinery site, in a landmark moment for UK industry.

Formerly Essar Oil, EET Fuels aims to create the “world’s leading low-carbon process refinery” at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, having taken delivery of the furnace in 2022.

The new furnace will consume around 10% of Stanlow’s total energy usage and replace three existing furnaces at the refinery, the company said.

The Stanlow site is one of the largest oil refineries in Europe and supplies close to 16% of all road transport fuels in the UK, processing 4.4 billion litres of diesel each year.

EET Fuels said the new furnace will be capable of running on 100% refinery off gas (ROG), a blend of ROG and hydrogen fuel – or 100% hydrogen.

EET Fuels chief executive Deepak Maheshwari said the installation of the hydrogen-ready furnace is a “major milestone” in the company’s decarbonisation strategy.

“Decommissioning three old furnaces and connecting this new highly efficient hydrogen-ready furnace to our refinery is a significant milestone for EET Fuels,” he said.

“Not only will the new furnace deliver an immediate reduction in CO2 emissions, it will deliver an even bigger reduction once fully powered with low-carbon hydrogen.”

And as Ruth Herbert, EET managing director, business development and strategic initiatives, told Energy Voice editor Mark Selby in our exclusive video interview:

“We are officially hydrogen ready at Stanlow refinery, so for us it’s not in the future – it’s now… and we’re ready to receive the hydrogen.”

Stanlow refinery decarbonisation

Refinery furnaces are critical for heating crude oil and other feedstocks to separate and purify the crude to produce various fuels and chemical products.

EET plans to run the furnace on conventional fuel until 2028, before transitioning to 100% low-carbon hydrogen produced at EET Hydrogen’s HPP1 plant.

Approved in January last year, the 1.35 GW blue hydrogen production facility forms part of the HyNet industrial decarbonisation cluster.

Consisting of two plants (HPP1 and HPP2), EET said the hydrogen hub will enable local industries to switch from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy.

Under the HyNet plans, up to 97% of the carbon emitted from the hydrogen production process will be captured and stored in depleted gas fields under Liverpool Bay.

Italian operator Eni reached a financial deal with the UK government last week to progress the £2 billion carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

EET said the installation of the hydrogen-ready furnace will “significantly progress” its aim to eliminate 95% of its carbon emissions by 2030.

When running on 100% hydrogen, it will reduce the Stanlow site’s annual CO2 emissions by 200,000 tonnes.

EET said the furnace will also improve air quality at the site by significantly reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, alongside improvements to energy efficiency.

Alongside the hydrogen-ready furnace, EET is also aiming to build Europe’s first hydrogen-ready combine heat and power (CHP) plant at Stanlow by 2027.

EET revealed to Energy Voice last year that it will become the first supplier of hydrogen-generated electricity to the UK grid from the CHP project.

EET is also partnering with SSE to develop the 40 MW Gowy Green electrolytic hydrogen production facility at Stanlow.

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Pantheon of college football gets a Wi-Fi upgrade

Notre Dame has fully adopted mobile ticketing and introduced grab-and-go concession stands, with plans to expand them further. Alcohol sales were recently approved, prompting efforts to support new services like mobile carts. In premium areas, fans can stream various games during events. Notre Dame also tested mobile ordering for concessions

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The U.S. leads the world in AI (job) anxiety

The Americans have the highest search volume with a population-adjusted value of 440,000 search queries on the topic of AI job loss, while their attitude towards AI is moderately positive at 54.5%. The intensity score of 3 for the U.S. shows that the concern of losing jobs to AI is

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Tigera extends cloud-native networking with Calico 3.30

This logging capability is exposed through two new components: Goldmane: A gRPC-based API endpoint that aggregates flow logs from Calico’s Felix component, which runs on each node. Whisker: A web-based visualization tool built with React and TypeScript that connects to the Goldmane API. The combination of these components provides detailed

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Innovation Zero: In conversation with Ian Hunter, MD of Net Zero Teesside Power

Teesside can set an example for the rest of the world with its innovative carbon capture plans – while also creating thousands of jobs – the Managing Director of Net Zero Teesside Power (NZTP) has said. Talking to Energy Voice at the Innovation Zero conference, Ian Hunter heralded plans to build the planet’s first major gas-fired power station with carbon capture. Some 742MW of “low carbon flexible power” will be provided, he explained. NZTP is working closely with East Coast Cluster and the Northern Endurance Partnership on the project, which will involve transporting CO2 and storing it “permanently and safely” deep off the North Sea. Mr Hunter said the proposals had been drawn up amid “global agreement” around the need for a “massive amount” of CCS in the future. “This is exciting as it would be the first gas-fired power station in the world with this technology,” he continued. “It is really important for the UK…we need a power source that can meet our energy demands when it is not windy or sunny. “We want to take flexible energy and decarbonise it.” An international blueprint for scale © Supplied by EquinorThe Northern Endurance Partnership CCS project is being developed in Teesside. Mr Hunter said the “real beauty” of the scheme was that, if successful, it could be copied globally. NZTP hope to have the project up and running by 2028. “This is really happening,” he said. “Contracts are all signed, we are now in the execution phase. “The UK is really trying to develop a system where big projects get on line and smaller projects tie in later. “That is how you achieve scale and variety in your carbon capture.” E-FWD Analysis: “Just get moving” on Tees Valley’s path to energy leadership Describing the scheme as important on a national

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Policy uncertainty could trigger ‘recession’ for renewables, analyst says

Dive Brief: Global solar companies’ total corporate funding, including venture capital, public market and debt financing,  declined 41% year over year during the first quarter of 2025, while energy storage companies’ funding fell 81%, according to Mercom Capital Group, a consulting firm. Uncertainty — primarily around the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and renewable energy tax credits, but also around tariffs and supply chain concerns — has prevented many financing deals from moving forward because the negotiating parties can’t reliably calculate potential returns, said Raj Prabhu, CEO and co-founder of Mercom Capital Group. If Congress does not soon signal a consensus on the IRA’s fate, the renewable energy industry could end up snared in something like a sector-specific recession “in the sense that activity is going to stall because of the uncertainty,” Prabhu said. Dive Insight: Funding for solar, energy storage and smart grid companies plummeted essentially across the board during the first quarter of 2025 — an outcome Prabhu described as expected following the election of President Donald Trump, but one that could be concerning should the trend continue long term. Prabhu said investor interest in renewable energy had begun to cool even before the election in November in conjunction with Trump’s then-growing popularity. But the slump isn’t related as much to Trump’s specific positions, Prabhu said, as it is to the overall lack of certainty about how key elements of U.S. energy policy will ultimately fare. “Mergers and acquisitions can still happen, but financing is a whole other deal right now,” given that investors and developers don’t know what it will cost to import their equipment and how much they can expect to receive in tax credits, Prabhu said. “Yes, some venture capital deals can happen if you have a company with something really innovative. But beside the sure-fire

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US energy storage sector commits to $100B investment by 2030

Dive Brief: The U.S. energy storage industry will invest $100 billion over the next five years to build and buy batteries made in the United States, the American Clean Power Association and company representatives said Tuesday. The announcement adds about $85 billion to a set of “active investments” worth $10 billion to $15 billion, executives with the trade group said in a press briefing. The commitment “represents a clear pathway to supplying 100% of U.S. energy storage projects with American-made batteries by 2030,” but depends on a “streamlined permitting environment” and predictable tax and trade policy, ACP said. Dive Insight: In 2018, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 841 freed energy storage resources to participate in wholesale markets operated by regional transmission organizations and independent system operators. Stationary storage deployment has grown more than 25-fold since then, ACP said. More recently, surging electric vehicle adoption, particularly in China, and improved lithium-ion battery economics have helped drive average levelized energy costs for wind and solar installations firmed with batteries below the cheapest thermal alternatives. The stationary storage industry’s fortunes improved further with the August 2022 enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions in federal tax credits for clean energy manufacturing, deployment and generation. U.S. energy storage supply chain companies now have 25 factories in development, 11 of which are under construction or operational, according to the ACP fact sheet. These manufacturing investments include a new Tesla refinery near Corpus Christi, Texas, and an expanded manufacturing footprint at its Megapack factory near Reno, Nevada; multiple Fluence plants in the southern and western U.S.; and the West Virginia factory where Form Energy is commercializing iron-air batteries that can discharge continuously for four days. COVID-era disruptions across the global battery supply chain convinced Fluence that an energy storage market as robust as the

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Clean energy manufacturers cancel projects as Trump-era policies take hold

Clean energy manufacturers canceled, closed or downsized nearly $8 billion in projects in the first quarter of 2025, as the Trump administration’s rollback of support for the sector sets in. Clean energy advocacy nonprofit E2 announced the cancellations earlier this month as part of its monthly tracking of clean energy project announcements in the U.S. It was the first time E2 has opted to include cancellations and downsizes as part of its tracking, as the number of abandoned projects grows across the U.S.  Cancellations included lithium battery maker Kore Power’s cancellation of its planned $1.2 billion factory in Arizona, as well as Freyr Battery’s cancellation of its $2.6 billion Georgia battery factory.  The cancellations, which spanned 16 projects in sectors such as wind, solar and electric vehicle manufacturing, are another sign of companies’ hesitation to push ahead with clean energy projects in the era of the Trump administration.  In the years following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, manufacturers poured hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy projects in a bid to cash in on the law’s lucrative tax credits for domestic manufacturing, as well as its direct funding and loan financing.  Now, however, times have changed. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump froze IRA funding pending a federal review. Last week, a federal judge ordered the funding temporarily reinstated while a lawsuit from six climate groups is under consideration.  Trump has been critical of the climate law and what he calls former President Joe Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate,” referring to Biden’s 2021 executive order that called for half of new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric by 2030. The president has also criticized EV tax credits provided under the IRA.  Further compounding this issue are the Trump administration’s tariffs, which could

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Analysts Look at Upcoming OPEC+ Meeting

In an oil report sent to Rigzone by the Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) team recently, Ole R. Hvalbye, a commodities analyst at the company, noted that the next OPEC+ meeting is set for May 5, “with the proposed June output hike expected to top the agenda”. “The group will likely choose between a scheduled, incremental increase of 138,000 barrels per day, or a more aggressive jump of 411,000 barrels per day – equivalent to … three months’ worth of increases rolled into one,” Hvalbye predicted in the report. “The latter scenario would put downward pressure on oil prices and highlight deepening tensions within OPEC+, while also exacerbating concerns in a market already clouded by weak demand expectations,” he warned. “Although the final decision on volumes remains unclear, OPEC+ has demonstrated it still has pricing power, and that it can pull prices lower quickly if it chooses to do so,” Hvalbye went on to state in the report. In a Stratas Advisors report sent to Rigzone by the Stratas team late Monday, which also highlighted the upcoming OPEC+ meeting, the company said it thinks it will be essential for OPEC+ to communicate that its members will maintain discipline and be proactive in aligning supply with demand so as not to undermine the long-term viability of OPEC+, which Stratas described in the report as “increasingly critical to the stability of the oil market”. In a market analysis sent to Rigzone on Tuesday, Osama Al Saifi, Managing Director for MENA at Traze, said several OPEC+ members are likely to advocate for additional output hikes in the coming months, potentially exacerbating supply imbalances. In another market analysis sent to Rigzone on Monday, Konstantinos Chrysikos, Head of Customer Relationship Management at Kudotrade, said the prospect of OPEC+ considering further increases in oil output at their

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3 Workers Killed in Scaffold Collapse at LNG Plant in Texas

Three workers were killed and two were injured when a section of scaffolding collapsed early Tuesday at a liquefied natural gas plant that Sempra is building in Texas. The two survivors at the Port Arthur LNG project were rescued from the top of the structure after it gave way at about 2 a.m. local time, according to Captain Crystal Holmes of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The other three fell several stories and died. The engineering company Bechtel Group, which employs the workers, has halted work at the site, about 85 miles east of Houston.  The injured workers were hospitalized, San Diego-based Sempra said in a statement. Regulators and local authorities are investigating the incident. Bechtel said it is fully cooperating.  Sempra began building the plant in 2023 and expects to finish in 2027 or 2028. The company didn’t say when work at the site would resume.   A local news station earlier reported the incident.  WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed. MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR Bloomberg

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Nvidia AI supercluster targets agents, reasoning models on Oracle Cloud

Oracle has previously built an OCI Supercluster with 65,536 Nvidia H200 GPUs using the older Hopper GPU technology and no CPU that offers up to 260 exaflops of peak FP8 performance. According to the blog post announcing the availability, the Blackwell GPUs are available via Oracle’s public, government, and sovereign clouds, as well as in customer-owned data centers through its OCI Dedicated Region and Alloy offerings. Oracle joins a growing list of cloud providers that have made the GB200 NVL72 system available, including Google, CoreWeave and Lambda. In addition, Microsoft offers the GB200 GPUs, though they are not deployed as an NVL72 machine.

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Deep Data Center: Neoclouds as the ‘Picks and Shovels’ of the AI Gold Rush

In 1849, the discovery of gold in California ignited a frenzy, drawing prospectors from around the world in pursuit of quick fortune. While few struck it rich digging and sifting dirt, a different class of entrepreneurs quietly prospered: those who supplied the miners with the tools of the trade. From picks and shovels to tents and provisions, these providers became indispensable to the gold rush, profiting handsomely regardless of who found gold. Today, a new gold rush is underway, in pursuit of artificial intelligence. And just like the days of yore, the real fortunes may lie not in the gold itself, but in the infrastructure and equipment that enable its extraction. This is where neocloud players and chipmakers are positioned, representing themselves as the fundamental enablers of the AI revolution. Neoclouds: The Essential Tools and Implements of AI Innovation The AI boom has sparked a frenzy of innovation, investment, and competition. From generative AI applications like ChatGPT to autonomous systems and personalized recommendations, AI is rapidly transforming industries. Yet, behind every groundbreaking AI model lies an unsung hero: the infrastructure powering it. Enter neocloud providers—the specialized cloud platforms delivering the GPU horsepower that fuels AI’s meteoric rise. Let’s examine how neoclouds represent the “picks and shovels” of the AI gold rush, used for extracting the essential backbone of AI innovation. Neoclouds are emerging as indispensable players in the AI ecosystem, offering tailored solutions for compute-intensive workloads such as training large language models (LLMs) and performing high-speed inference. Unlike traditional hyperscalers (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), which cater to a broad range of use cases, neoclouds focus exclusively on optimizing infrastructure for AI and machine learning applications. This specialization allows them to deliver superior performance at a lower cost, making them the go-to choice for startups, enterprises, and research institutions alike.

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Soluna Computing: Innovating Renewable Computing for Sustainable Data Centers

Dorothy 1A & 1B (Texas): These twin 25 MW facilities are powered by wind and serve Bitcoin hosting and mining workloads. Together, they consumed over 112,000 MWh of curtailed energy in 2024, demonstrating the impact of Soluna’s model. Dorothy 2 (Texas): Currently under construction and scheduled for energization in Q4 2025, this 48 MW site will increase Soluna’s hosting and mining capacity by 64%. Sophie (Kentucky): A 25 MW grid- and hydro-powered hosting center with a strong cost profile and consistent output. Project Grace (Texas): A 2 MW AI pilot project in development, part of Soluna’s transition into HPC and machine learning. Project Kati (Texas): With 166 MW split between Bitcoin and AI hosting, this project recently exited the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc. planning phase and is expected to energize between 2025 and 2027. Project Rosa (Texas): A 187 MW flagship project co-located with wind assets, aimed at both Bitcoin and AI workloads. Land and power agreements were secured by the company in early 2025. These developments are part of the company’s broader effort to tackle both energy waste and infrastructure bottlenecks. Soluna’s behind-the-meter design enables flexibility to draw from the grid or directly from renewable sources, maximizing energy value while minimizing emissions. Competition is Fierce and a Narrower Focus Better Serves the Business In 2024, Soluna tested the waters of providing AI services via a  GPU-as-a-Service through a partnership with HPE, branded as Project Ada. The pilot aimed to rent out cloud GPUs for AI developers and LLM training. However, due to oversupply in the GPU market, delayed product rollouts (like NVIDIA’s H200), and poor demand economics, Soluna terminated the contract in March 2025. The cancellation of the contract with HPE frees up resources for Soluna to focus on what it believes the company does best: designing

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Quiet Genius at the Neutral Line: How Onics Filters Are Reshaping the Future of Data Center Power Efficiency

Why Harmonics Matter In a typical data center, nonlinear loads—like servers, UPS systems, and switch-mode power supplies—introduce harmonic distortion into the electrical system. These harmonics travel along the neutral and ground conductors, where they can increase current flow, cause overheating in transformers, and shorten the lifespan of critical power infrastructure. More subtly, they waste power through reactive losses that don’t show up on a basic utility bill, but do show up in heat, inefficiency, and increased infrastructure stress. Traditional mitigation approaches—like active harmonic filters or isolation transformers—are complex, expensive, and often require custom integration and ongoing maintenance. That’s where Onics’ solution stands out. It’s engineered as a shunt-style, low-pass filter: a passive device that sits in parallel with the circuit, quietly siphoning off problematic harmonics without interrupting operations.  The result? Lower apparent power demand, reduced electrical losses, and a quieter, more stable current environment—especially on the neutral line, where cumulative harmonic effects often peak. Behind the Numbers: Real-World Impact While the Onics filters offer a passive complement to traditional mitigation strategies, they aren’t intended to replace active harmonic filters or isolation transformers in systems that require them—they work best as a low-complexity enhancement to existing power quality designs. LoPilato says Onics has deployed its filters in mission-critical environments ranging from enterprise edge to large colos, and the data is consistent. In one example, a 6 MW data center saw a verified 9.2% reduction in energy consumption after deploying Onics filters at key electrical junctures. Another facility clocked in at 17.8% savings across its lighting and support loads, thanks in part to improved power factor and reduced transformer strain. The filters work by targeting high-frequency distortion—typically above the 3rd harmonic and up through the 35th. By passively attenuating this range, the system reduces reactive current on the neutral and helps stabilize

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New IEA Report Contrasts Energy Bottlenecks with Opportunities for AI and Data Center Growth

Artificial intelligence has, without question, crossed the threshold—from a speculative academic pursuit into the defining infrastructure of 21st-century commerce, governance, and innovation. What began in the realm of research labs and open-source models is now embedded in the capital stack of every major hyperscaler, semiconductor roadmap, and national industrial strategy. But as AI scales, so does its energy footprint. From Nvidia-powered GPU clusters to exascale training farms, the conversation across boardrooms and site selection teams has fundamentally shifted. It’s no longer just about compute density, thermal loads, or software frameworks. It’s about power—how to find it, finance it, future-proof it, and increasingly, how to generate it onsite. That refrain—“It’s all about power now”—has moved from a whisper to a full-throated consensus across the data center industry. The latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) gives this refrain global context and hard numbers, affirming what developers, utilities, and infrastructure operators have already sensed on the ground: the AI revolution will be throttled or propelled by the availability of scalable, sustainable, and dispatchable electricity. Why Energy Is the Real Bottleneck to Intelligence at Scale The major new IEA report puts it plainly: The transformative promise of AI will be throttled—or unleashed—by the world’s ability to deliver scalable, reliable, and sustainable electricity. The stakes are enormous. Countries that can supply the power AI craves will shape the future. Those that can’t may find themselves sidelined. Importantly, while AI poses clear challenges, the report emphasizes how it also offers solutions: from optimizing energy grids and reducing emissions in industrial sectors to enhancing energy security by supporting infrastructure defenses against cyberattacks. The report calls for immediate investments in both energy generation and grid capabilities, as well as stronger collaboration between the tech and energy sectors to avoid critical bottlenecks. The IEA advises that, for countries

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Colorado Eyes the AI Data Center Boom with Bold Incentive Push

Even as states work on legislation to limit data center development, it is clear that some locations are looking to get a bigger piece of the huge data center spending that the AI wave has created. It appears that politicians in Colorado took a look around and thought to themselves “Why is all that data center building going to Texas and Arizona? What’s wrong with the Rocky Mountain State?” Taking a page from the proven playbook that has gotten data centers built all over the country, Colorado is trying to jump on the financial incentives for data center development bandwagon. SB 24-085: A Statewide Strategy to Attract Data Center Investment Looking to significantly boost its appeal as a data center hub, Colorado is now considering Senate Bill 24-085, currently making its way through the state legislature. Sponsored by Senators Priola and Buckner and Representatives Parenti and Weinberg, this legislation promises substantial economic incentives in the form of state sales and use tax rebates for new data centers established within the state from fiscal year 2026 through 2033. Colorado hopes to position itself strategically to compete with neighboring states in attracting lucrative tech investments and high-skilled jobs. According to DataCenterMap.com, there are currently 53 data centers in the state, almost all located in the Denver area, but they are predominantly smaller facilities. In today’s era of massive AI-driven hyperscale expansion, Colorado is rarely mentioned in the same breath as major AI data center markets.  Some local communities have passed their own incentive packages, but SB 24-085 aims to offer a unified, statewide framework that can also help mitigate growing NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) sentiment around new developments. The Details: How SB 24-085 Works The bill, titled “Concerning a rebate of the state sales and use tax paid on new digital infrastructure

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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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