Generative AI and Civic Institutions

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Generative AI and Civic Institutions

Different sectors, different goals Recent events have got me thinking about AI as it relates to our civic institutions — think government, education, public libraries, and so on. We often forget that civic and governmental organizations are inherently deeply different from private companies and profit-making enterprises. They exist to enable people to live their best lives, protect people’s rights, and make opportunities accessible, even if (especially if) this work doesn’t have immediate monetary returns. The public library is an example I often think about, as I come from a library-loving and defending family — their goal is to provide books, cultural materials, social supports, community engagement, and a love of reading to the entire community, regardless of ability to pay. In the private sector, efficiency is an optimization goal because any dollar spent on providing a product or service to customers is a dollar taken away from the profits. The (simplified) goal is to spend the bare minimum possible to run your business, with the maximum amount returned to you or the shareholders in profit form. In the civic space, on the other hand, efficiency is only a meaningful goal insomuch as it enables higher effectiveness — more of the service the institution provides getting to more constituents. In the civic space, efficiency is only a meaningful goal insomuch as it enables higher effectiveness — more of the service the institution provides getting to more constituents. So, if you’re at the library, and you could use an Ai Chatbot to answer patron questions online instead of assigning a librarian to do that, that librarian could be helping in-person patrons, developing educational curricula, supporting community services, or many other things. That’s a general efficiency that could make for higher effectiveness of the library as an institution. Moving from card catalogs to digital catalogs is a prime example of this kind of efficiency to effectiveness pipeline, because you can find out from your couch whether the book you want is in stock using search keywords instead of flipping through hundreds of notecards in a cabinet drawer like we did when I was a kid. However, we can pivot too hard in the direction of efficiency and lose sight of the end goal of effectiveness. If, for example, your online librarian chat is often used by schoolchildren at home to get homework help, replacing them with an AI chatbot could be a disaster — after getting incorrect information from such a bot and getting a bad grade at school, a child might be turned off from patronizing the library or seeking help there for a long time, or forever. So, it’s important to deploy Generative Ai solutions only when it is well thought out and purposeful, not just because the media is telling us that “AI is neat.” (Eagle-eyed readers will know that this is basically similar advice to what I’ve said in the past about deploying AI in businesses as well.) As a result, what we thought was a gain in efficiency leading to net higher effectiveness actually could diminish the number of lifelong patrons and library visitors, which would mean a loss of effectiveness for the library. Sometimes unintended effects from attempts to improve efficiency can diminish our ability to provide a universal service. That is, there may be a tradeoff between making every single dollar stretch as far as it can possibly go and providing reliable, comprehensive services to all the constituents of your institution. Sometimes unintended effects from attempts to improve efficiency can diminish our ability to provide a universal service. AI for efficiency It’s worth it to take a closer look at this concept — AI as a driver of efficiency. Broadly speaking, the theory we hear often is that incorporating generative AI more into our workplaces and organizations can increase productivity. Framing it at the most Econ 101 level: using AI, more work can be completed by fewer people in the same amount of time, right? Let’s challenge some aspects of this idea. AI is useful to complete certain tasks but is sadly inadequate for others. (As our imaginary schoolchild library patron learned, an LLM is not a reliable source of facts, and should not be treated like one.) So, AI’s ability to increase the volume of work being done with fewer people (efficiency) is limited by what kind of work we need to complete. If our chat interface is only used for simple questions like “What are the library’s hours on Memorial Day?” we can hook up a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system with an LLM and make that quite useful. But outside of the limited bounds of what information we can provide to the LLM, we should probably set guard rails and make the model refuse to try and answer, to avoid giving out false information to patrons. So, let’s play that out. We have a chatbot that does a very limited job, but does it well. The librarian who was on chatbot duty now may have some reduction in the work required of them, but there are still going to be a subset of questions that still require their help. We have some choices: put the librarian on chatbot duty for a reduced number of hours a week, hoping the questions come in when they’re on? Tell people to just call the reference desk or send an email if the chatbot refuses to answer them? Hope that people come in to the library in person to ask their questions? I suspect the likeliest option is actually “the patron will seek their answer elsewhere, perhaps from another LLM like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.” Once again, we’ve ended up in a situation where the library loses patronage because their offering wasn’t meeting the needs of the patron. And to boot, the patron may have gotten another wrong answer somewhere else, for all we know. I am spinning out this long example just to illustrate that efficiency and effectiveness in the civic environment can have a lot more push and pull than we would initially assume. It’s not to say that AI isn’t useful to help civic organizations stretch their capabilities to serve the public, of course! But just like with any application of generative AI, we need to be very careful to think about what we’re doing, what our goals are, and whether those two are compatible. Conversion of labor Now, this has been a very simplistic example, and eventually we could hook up the whole encyclopedia to that chatbot RAG or something, of course, and try to make it work. In fact, I think we can and should continue developing more ways to chain together AI models to expand the scope of valuable work they can do, including making different specific models for different responsibilities. However, this development is itself work. It’s not really just a matter of “people do work” or “models do work”, but instead it’s “people do work building AI” or “people do work providing services to people”. There’s a calculation to be made to determine when it would be more efficient to do the targeted work itself, and when AI is the right way to go. Working on the AI has an advantage in that it will hopefully render the task reproducible, so it will lead to efficiency, but let’s remember that AI engineering is vastly different from the work of the reference librarian. We’re not interchanging the same workers, tasks, or skill sets here, and in our contemporary economy, the AI engineer’s time costs a heck of a lot more. So if we did want to measure this efficiency all in dollars and cents, the same amount of time spent working at the reference desk and doing the chat service will be much cheaper than paying an AI engineer to develop a better agentic AI for the use case. Given a bit of time, we could calculate out how many hours, days, years of work as a reference librarian we’d need to save with this chatbot to make it worth building, but often that calculation isn’t done before we move towards AI solutions. We need to interrogate the assumption that incorporating generative AI in any given scenario is a guaranteed net gain in efficiency. Externalities While we’re on this topic of weighing whether the AI solution is worth doing in a particular situation, we should remember that developing and using AI for tasks does not happen in a vacuum. It has some cost environmentally and economically when we choose to use a generative AI tool, even when it’s a single prompt and a single response. Consider that the newly released GPT-4.5 has increased prices 30x for input tokens ($2.50 per million to $75 per million) and 15x for output tokens ($10 per million to $150 per million) just since GPT-4o. And that isn’t even taking into account the water consumption for cooling data centers (3 bottles per 100 word output for GPT-4), electricity use, and rare earth minerals used in GPUs. Many civic institutions have as a macro level goal to improve the world around them and the lives of the citizens of their communities, and concern for the environment has to have a place in that. Should organizations whose purpose is to have a positive impact weigh the possibility of incorporating AI more carefully? I think so. Plus, I don’t often get too much into this, but I think we should take a moment to consider some folks’ end game for incorporating AI — reducing staffing altogether. Instead of making our existing dollars in an institution go farther, some people’s idea is just reducing the number of dollars and redistributing those dollars somewhere else. This brings up many questions, naturally, about where those dollars will go instead and whether they will be used to advance the interests of the community residents some other way, but let’s set that aside for now. My concern is for the people who might lose their jobs under this administrative model. For-profit companies hire and fire employees all the time, and their priorities and objectives are focused on profit, so this is not particularly hypocritical or inconsistent. But as I noted above, civic organizations have objectives around improving the community or communities in which they exist. In a very real way, they are advancing that goal when part of what they provide is economic opportunity to their workers. We live in a Society where working is the overwhelmingly predominant way people provide for themselves and their families, and giving jobs to people in the community and supporting the economic well-being of the community is a role that civic institutions do play. [R]educing staffing is not an unqualified good for civic organizations and government, but instead must be balanced critically against whatever other use the money that was paying their salaries will go to. At the bare minimum, this means that reducing staffing is not an unqualified good for civic organizations and government, but instead must be balanced critically against whatever other use the money that was paying their salaries will go to. It’s not impossible for reducing staff to be the right decision, but we have to bluntly acknowledge that when members of communities experience joblessness, that effect cascades. They are now no longer able to patronize the shops and services they would have been supporting with their money, the tax base may be reduced, and this negatively affects the whole collective. Workers aren’t just workers; they’re also patrons, customers, and participants in all aspects of the community. When we think of civic workers as simply money pits to be replaced with AI or whose cost for labor we need to minimize, we lose sight of the reasons for the work to be done in the first place. Conclusion I hope this discussion has brought some clarity about how really difficult it is to decide if, when, and how to apply generative AI to the civic space. It’s not nearly as simple a thought process as it might be in the for-profit sphere because the purpose and core meaning of civic institutions are completely different. Those of us who do machine learning and build AI solutions in the private sector might think, “Oh, I can see a way to use this in government,” but we have to recognize and appreciate the complex contextual implications that might have. Next month, I’ll be bringing you a discussion of how social science research is incorporating generative AI, which has some very intriguing aspects. As you may have heard, Towards Data Science has moved to an independent platform, but I will continue to post my work on my Medium page, my personal website, and the new TDS platform, so you’ll be able to find me wherever you happen to go. Subscribe to my newsletter on Medium if you’d like to ensure you get every article in your inbox. Find more of my work at www.stephaniekirmer.com. Further reading “It’s a lemon”-OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews: GPT-4.5 offers marginal gains in capability and poor coding performance despite 30x the cost. arstechnica.com Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water: New research shows generative AI consumes a lot of water – up to 1,408ml to generate 100 words of text. www.tomshardware.com Environmental Implications of the AI Boom: The digital world can’t exist without the natural resources to run it. What are the costs of the tech we’re using… towardsdatascience.com Economics of Generative AI: What’s the business model for generative AI, given what we know today about the technology and the market? towardsdatascience.com

Different sectors, different goals

Recent events have got me thinking about AI as it relates to our civic institutions — think government, education, public libraries, and so on. We often forget that civic and governmental organizations are inherently deeply different from private companies and profit-making enterprises. They exist to enable people to live their best lives, protect people’s rights, and make opportunities accessible, even if (especially if) this work doesn’t have immediate monetary returns. The public library is an example I often think about, as I come from a library-loving and defending family — their goal is to provide books, cultural materials, social supports, community engagement, and a love of reading to the entire community, regardless of ability to pay.

In the private sector, efficiency is an optimization goal because any dollar spent on providing a product or service to customers is a dollar taken away from the profits. The (simplified) goal is to spend the bare minimum possible to run your business, with the maximum amount returned to you or the shareholders in profit form. In the civic space, on the other hand, efficiency is only a meaningful goal insomuch as it enables higher effectiveness — more of the service the institution provides getting to more constituents.

In the civic space, efficiency is only a meaningful goal insomuch as it enables higher effectiveness — more of the service the institution provides getting to more constituents.

So, if you’re at the library, and you could use an Ai Chatbot to answer patron questions online instead of assigning a librarian to do that, that librarian could be helping in-person patrons, developing educational curricula, supporting community services, or many other things. That’s a general efficiency that could make for higher effectiveness of the library as an institution. Moving from card catalogs to digital catalogs is a prime example of this kind of efficiency to effectiveness pipeline, because you can find out from your couch whether the book you want is in stock using search keywords instead of flipping through hundreds of notecards in a cabinet drawer like we did when I was a kid.

However, we can pivot too hard in the direction of efficiency and lose sight of the end goal of effectiveness. If, for example, your online librarian chat is often used by schoolchildren at home to get homework help, replacing them with an AI chatbot could be a disaster — after getting incorrect information from such a bot and getting a bad grade at school, a child might be turned off from patronizing the library or seeking help there for a long time, or forever. So, it’s important to deploy Generative Ai solutions only when it is well thought out and purposeful, not just because the media is telling us that “AI is neat.” (Eagle-eyed readers will know that this is basically similar advice to what I’ve said in the past about deploying AI in businesses as well.)

As a result, what we thought was a gain in efficiency leading to net higher effectiveness actually could diminish the number of lifelong patrons and library visitors, which would mean a loss of effectiveness for the library. Sometimes unintended effects from attempts to improve efficiency can diminish our ability to provide a universal service. That is, there may be a tradeoff between making every single dollar stretch as far as it can possibly go and providing reliable, comprehensive services to all the constituents of your institution.

Sometimes unintended effects from attempts to improve efficiency can diminish our ability to provide a universal service.

AI for efficiency

It’s worth it to take a closer look at this concept — AI as a driver of efficiency. Broadly speaking, the theory we hear often is that incorporating generative AI more into our workplaces and organizations can increase productivity. Framing it at the most Econ 101 level: using AI, more work can be completed by fewer people in the same amount of time, right?

Let’s challenge some aspects of this idea. AI is useful to complete certain tasks but is sadly inadequate for others. (As our imaginary schoolchild library patron learned, an LLM is not a reliable source of facts, and should not be treated like one.) So, AI’s ability to increase the volume of work being done with fewer people (efficiency) is limited by what kind of work we need to complete.

If our chat interface is only used for simple questions like “What are the library’s hours on Memorial Day?” we can hook up a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system with an LLM and make that quite useful. But outside of the limited bounds of what information we can provide to the LLM, we should probably set guard rails and make the model refuse to try and answer, to avoid giving out false information to patrons.

So, let’s play that out. We have a chatbot that does a very limited job, but does it well. The librarian who was on chatbot duty now may have some reduction in the work required of them, but there are still going to be a subset of questions that still require their help. We have some choices: put the librarian on chatbot duty for a reduced number of hours a week, hoping the questions come in when they’re on? Tell people to just call the reference desk or send an email if the chatbot refuses to answer them? Hope that people come in to the library in person to ask their questions?

I suspect the likeliest option is actually “the patron will seek their answer elsewhere, perhaps from another LLM like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.” Once again, we’ve ended up in a situation where the library loses patronage because their offering wasn’t meeting the needs of the patron. And to boot, the patron may have gotten another wrong answer somewhere else, for all we know.

I am spinning out this long example just to illustrate that efficiency and effectiveness in the civic environment can have a lot more push and pull than we would initially assume. It’s not to say that AI isn’t useful to help civic organizations stretch their capabilities to serve the public, of course! But just like with any application of generative AI, we need to be very careful to think about what we’re doing, what our goals are, and whether those two are compatible.

Conversion of labor

Now, this has been a very simplistic example, and eventually we could hook up the whole encyclopedia to that chatbot RAG or something, of course, and try to make it work. In fact, I think we can and should continue developing more ways to chain together AI models to expand the scope of valuable work they can do, including making different specific models for different responsibilities. However, this development is itself work. It’s not really just a matter of “people do work” or “models do work”, but instead it’s “people do work building AI” or “people do work providing services to people”. There’s a calculation to be made to determine when it would be more efficient to do the targeted work itself, and when AI is the right way to go.

Working on the AI has an advantage in that it will hopefully render the task reproducible, so it will lead to efficiency, but let’s remember that AI engineering is vastly different from the work of the reference librarian. We’re not interchanging the same workers, tasks, or skill sets here, and in our contemporary economy, the AI engineer’s time costs a heck of a lot more. So if we did want to measure this efficiency all in dollars and cents, the same amount of time spent working at the reference desk and doing the chat service will be much cheaper than paying an AI engineer to develop a better agentic AI for the use case. Given a bit of time, we could calculate out how many hours, days, years of work as a reference librarian we’d need to save with this chatbot to make it worth building, but often that calculation isn’t done before we move towards AI solutions.

We need to interrogate the assumption that incorporating generative AI in any given scenario is a guaranteed net gain in efficiency.

Externalities

While we’re on this topic of weighing whether the AI solution is worth doing in a particular situation, we should remember that developing and using AI for tasks does not happen in a vacuum. It has some cost environmentally and economically when we choose to use a generative AI tool, even when it’s a single prompt and a single response. Consider that the newly released GPT-4.5 has increased prices 30x for input tokens ($2.50 per million to $75 per million) and 15x for output tokens ($10 per million to $150 per million) just since GPT-4o. And that isn’t even taking into account the water consumption for cooling data centers (3 bottles per 100 word output for GPT-4), electricity use, and rare earth minerals used in GPUs. Many civic institutions have as a macro level goal to improve the world around them and the lives of the citizens of their communities, and concern for the environment has to have a place in that. Should organizations whose purpose is to have a positive impact weigh the possibility of incorporating AI more carefully? I think so.

Plus, I don’t often get too much into this, but I think we should take a moment to consider some folks’ end game for incorporating AI — reducing staffing altogether. Instead of making our existing dollars in an institution go farther, some people’s idea is just reducing the number of dollars and redistributing those dollars somewhere else. This brings up many questions, naturally, about where those dollars will go instead and whether they will be used to advance the interests of the community residents some other way, but let’s set that aside for now. My concern is for the people who might lose their jobs under this administrative model.

For-profit companies hire and fire employees all the time, and their priorities and objectives are focused on profit, so this is not particularly hypocritical or inconsistent. But as I noted above, civic organizations have objectives around improving the community or communities in which they exist. In a very real way, they are advancing that goal when part of what they provide is economic opportunity to their workers. We live in a Society where working is the overwhelmingly predominant way people provide for themselves and their families, and giving jobs to people in the community and supporting the economic well-being of the community is a role that civic institutions do play.

[R]educing staffing is not an unqualified good for civic organizations and government, but instead must be balanced critically against whatever other use the money that was paying their salaries will go to.

At the bare minimum, this means that reducing staffing is not an unqualified good for civic organizations and government, but instead must be balanced critically against whatever other use the money that was paying their salaries will go to. It’s not impossible for reducing staff to be the right decision, but we have to bluntly acknowledge that when members of communities experience joblessness, that effect cascades. They are now no longer able to patronize the shops and services they would have been supporting with their money, the tax base may be reduced, and this negatively affects the whole collective.

Workers aren’t just workers; they’re also patrons, customers, and participants in all aspects of the community. When we think of civic workers as simply money pits to be replaced with AI or whose cost for labor we need to minimize, we lose sight of the reasons for the work to be done in the first place.

Conclusion

I hope this discussion has brought some clarity about how really difficult it is to decide if, when, and how to apply generative AI to the civic space. It’s not nearly as simple a thought process as it might be in the for-profit sphere because the purpose and core meaning of civic institutions are completely different. Those of us who do machine learning and build AI solutions in the private sector might think, “Oh, I can see a way to use this in government,” but we have to recognize and appreciate the complex contextual implications that might have.

Next month, I’ll be bringing you a discussion of how social science research is incorporating generative AI, which has some very intriguing aspects.

As you may have heard, Towards Data Science has moved to an independent platform, but I will continue to post my work on my Medium page, my personal website, and the new TDS platform, so you’ll be able to find me wherever you happen to go. Subscribe to my newsletter on Medium if you’d like to ensure you get every article in your inbox.

Find more of my work at www.stephaniekirmer.com.

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Oversupply concerns tank oil prices

November 2025 WTI NYMEX futures prices retreated rapidly after having breached the Upper-Bollinger Band limit the prior week. They are now trading below the 8-, 13- and 20-day Moving Averages this week and managed to breach the Lower-Bollinger Band limit, a Buy signal. Small gains occurred Friday on this technical buying. Volume is around the recent average at 208,000. The Relative Strength Indicator (RSI), a momentum indicator, is now in oversold territory at 41, another potential Buy signal. Resistance is now pegged at $61.50 while near-term critical Support is $60.35 (Lower-Bollinger Band). Looking ahead Traders will enter next week with the prospect of OPEC+ output increases baked into prices after this week’s declines. Hard data as to the actual increases achieved with these decisions will set the tone going forward but the current bear market for oil will be hard to shake as we’ve exited the driving season. The Tropics continue to show no real threat to the Gulf of Mexico as we move towards the end of the peak of the hurricane season on Oct. 15. A prolonged government shutdown will set a negative tone for the US economy which is always negative for energy demand. Natural gas, fundamental analysis NYMEX natural gas futures got a boost this week on the change from October to November, the first winter month on the energy calendar. Additionally, 90-degree temperatures remained for much of the southern tier of states. A lower-than-forecasted storage injection added some bullish sentiment midweek as well. The week’s High was $3.585 /MMbtu on Thursday while the week’s Low was $3.13 on Monday. Supply/demand data was not available this week due to the government shutdown. Dutch TTF prices fell slightly to $10.92/MMbtu while Asia’s JKM was quoted at $11.05/MMbtu. The EIA’s Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report indicated an

Roundup: Digital Realty Marks Major Milestones in AI, Quantum Computing, Data Center Development

Key features of the DRIL include: • High-Density AI and HPC Testing. The DRIL supports AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads with high-density colocation, accommodating workloads up to 150 kW per cabinet. • AI Infrastructure Optimization. The ePlus AI Experience Center lets businesses explore AI-specific power, cooling, and GPU resource requirements in an environment optimized for AI infrastructure. • Hybrid Cloud Validation. With direct cloud connectivity, users can refine hybrid strategies and onboard through cross connects. • AI Workload Orchestration. Customers can orchestrate AI workloads across Digital Realty’s Private AI Exchange (AIPx) for seamless integration and performance. • Latency Testing Across Locations. Enterprises can test latency scenarios for seamless performance across multiple locations and cloud destinations. The firm’s Northern Virginia campus is the primary DRIL location, but companies can also test latency scenarios between there and other remote locations. DRIL rollout to other global locations is already in progress, and London is scheduled to go live in early 2026. Digital Realty, Redeployable Launch Pathway for Veteran Technical Careers As new data centers are created, they need talented workers. To that end, Digital Realty has partnered with Redeployable, an AI-powered career platform for veterans, to expand access to technical careers in the United Kingdom and United States. The collaboration launched a Site Engineer Pathway, now live on the Redeployable platform. It helps veterans explore, prepare for, and transition into roles at Digital Realty. Nearly half of veterans leave their first civilian role within a year, often due to unclear expectations, poor skill translation, and limited support, according to Redeployable. The Site Engineer Pathway uses real-world relevance and replaces vague job descriptions with an experience-based view of technical careers. Veterans can engage in scenario-based “job drops” simulating real facility and system challenges so they can assess their fit for the role before applying. They

BlackRock’s $40B data center deal opens a new infrastructure battle for CIOs

Everest Group partner Yugal Joshi said, “CIOs are under significant pressure to clearly define their data center strategy beyond traditional one-off leases. Given most of the capacity is built and delivered by fewer players, CIOs need to prepare for a higher-price market with limited negotiation power.” The numbers bear this out. Global data center costs rose to $217.30 per kilowatt per month in the first quarter of 2025, with major markets seeing increases of 17-18% year-over-year, according to CBRE. Those prices are at levels last seen in 2011-2012, and analysts expect them to remain elevated. Gogia said, “The combination of AI demand, energy scarcity, and environmental regulation has permanently rewritten the economics of running workloads. Prices that once looked extraordinary have now become baseline.” Hyperscalers get first dibs The consolidation problem is compounded by the way capacity is being allocated. North America’s data center vacancy rate fell to 1.6% in the first half of 2025, with Northern Virginia posting just 0.76%, according to CBRE Research. More troubling for enterprises: 74.3% of capacity currently under construction is already preleased, primarily to cloud and AI providers. “The global compute market is no longer governed by open supply and demand,” Gogia said. “It is increasingly shaped by pre-emptive control. Hyperscalers and AI majors are reserving capacity years in advance, often before the first trench for power is dug. This has quietly created a two-tier world: one in which large players guarantee their future and everyone else competes for what remains.” That dynamic forces enterprises into longer planning cycles. “CIOs must forecast their infrastructure requirements with the same precision they apply to financial budgets and talent pipelines,” Gogia said. “The planning horizon must stretch to three or even five years.”

Nvidia, Infineon partner for AI data center power overhaul

The solution is to convert power right at the GPU on the server board and to upgrade the backbone to 800 volts. That should squeeze more reliability and efficiency out of the system while dealing with the heat, Infineon stated. Nvidia announced the 800 Volt direct current (VDC) power architecture at Computex 2025 as a much-needed replacement for the 54 Volt backbone currently in use, which is overwhelmed by the demand of AI processors and increasingly prone to failure. “This makes sense with the power needs of AI and how it is growing,” said Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst with Forrester Research. “This helps mitigate power losses seen from lower voltage and AC systems, reduces the need for materials like copper for wiring/bus bars, better reliability, and better serviceability.” Infineon says a shift to a centralized 800 VDC architecture allows for reduced power losses, higher efficiency and reliability. However, the new architecture requires new power conversion solutions and safety mechanisms to prevent potential hazards and costly server downtimes such as service and maintenance.

Meta details cutting-edge networking technologies for AI infrastructure

ESUN initiative As part of its standardization efforts, Meta said it would be a key player in the new Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) initiative that brings together AMD, Arista, ARM, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE Networking, Marvell, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Oracle to advance the networking technology to handle the growing scale-up domain for AI systems. ESUN will focus solely on open, standards-based Ethernet switching and framing for scale-up networking—excluding host-side stacks, non-Ethernet protocols, application-layer solutions, and proprietary technologies. The group will focus on the development and interoperability of XPU network interfaces and Ethernet switch ASICs for scale-up networks, the OCP wrote in a blog. ESUN will actively engage with other organizations such as Ultra-Ethernet Consortium (UEC) and long-standing IEEE 802.3 Ethernet to align open standards, incorporate best practices, and accelerate innovation, the OCP stated. Data center networking milestones The launch of ESUN is just one of the AI networking developments Meta shared at the event. Meta engineers also announced three data center networking innovations aimed at making its infrastructure more flexible, scalable, and efficient: The evolution of Meta’s Disaggregated Scheduled Fabric (DSF) to support scale-out interconnect for large AI clusters that span entire data center buildings. A new Non-Scheduled Fabric (NSF) architecture based entirely on shallow-buffer, disaggregated Ethernet switches that will support our largest AI clusters like Prometheus. The addition of Minipack3N, based on Nvidia’s Ethernet Spectrum-4 ASIC, to Meta’s portfolio of 51Tbps OCP switches that use OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface and Meta’s Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS) software stack. DSF is Meta’s open networking fabric that completely separates switch hardware, NICs, endpoints, and other networking components from the underlying network and uses OCP-SAI and FBOSS to achieve that, according to Meta. It supports Ethernet-based RoCE RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE/RDMA)) to endpoints, accelerators and NICs from multiple vendors, such as Nvidia,

Arm joins Open Compute Project to build next-generation AI data center silicon

Keeping up with the demand comes down to performance, and more specifically, performance per watt. With power limited, OEMs have become much more involved in all aspects of the system design, rather than pulling silicon off the shelf or pulling servers or racks off the shelf. “They’re getting much more specific about what that silicon looks like, which is a big departure from where the data center was ten or 15 years ago. The point here being is that they look to create a more optimized system design to bring the acceleration closer to the compute, and get much better performance per watt,” said Awad. The Open Compute Project is a global industry organization dedicated to designing and sharing open-source hardware configurations for data center technologies and infrastructure. It covers everything from silicon products to rack and tray design. It is hosting its 2025 OCP Global Summit this week in San Jose, Calif. Arm also was part of the Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) initiative announced this week at the Summit that included AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, HPE Networking, Marvell, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia. ESUN promises to advance Ethernet networking technology to handle scale-up connectivity across accelerated AI infrastructures. Arm’s goal by joining OCP is to encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration between companies and users to share ideas, specifications and intellectual property. It is known for focusing on modular rather than monolithic designs, which is where chiplets come in. For example, customers might have multiple different companies building a 64-core CPU and then choose IO to pair it with, whether like PCIe or an NVLink. They then choose their own memory subsystem, deciding whether to go HBM, LPDDR, or DDR. It’s all mix and match like Legos, Awad said.

BlackRock-Led Consortium to Acquire Aligned Data Centers in $40 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal

Capital Strategy and Infrastructure Readiness The AIP consortium has outlined an initial $30 billion in equity, with potential to scale toward $100 billion including debt over time as part of a broader AI infrastructure buildout. The Aligned acquisition represents a cornerstone investment within that capital roadmap. Aligned’s “ready-to-scale” platform – encompassing land, permits, interconnects, and power roadmaps – is far more valuable today than a patchwork of single-site developments. The consortium framed the transaction as a direct response to the global AI buildout crunch, targeting critical land, energy, and equipment bottlenecks that continue to constrain hyperscale expansion. Platform Overview: Aligned’s Evolution and Strategic Fit Aligned Data Centers has rapidly emerged as a scale developer and operator purpose-built for high-density, quick-turn capacity demanded by hyperscalers and AI platforms. Beyond the U.S., Aligned extended its reach across the Americas through its acquisition of ODATA in Latin America, creating a Pan-American presence that now spans more than 50 campuses and over 5 GW of capacity. The company has repeatedly accessed both public and private capital markets, most recently securing more than $12 billion in new equity and debt financing to accelerate expansion. Aligned’s U.S.–LATAM footprint provides geographic diversification and proximity to fast-growing AI regions. The buyer consortium’s global relationships – spanning utilities, OEMs, and sovereign-fund partners – help address power, interconnect, and supply-chain constraints, all of which are critical to sustaining growth in the AI data-center ecosystem. Macquarie Asset Management built Aligned from a niche U.S. operator into a 5 GW-plus, multi-market platform, the kind of asset infrastructure investors covet as AI demand outpaces grid and supply-chain capacity. Its sale at this stage reflects a broader wave of industry consolidation among large-scale digital-infrastructure owners. Since its own acquisition by BlackRock in early 2024, GIP has strengthened its position as one of the world’s top owners

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

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