Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More In the age of AI, public utilities are now facing a new, unexpected problem: Phantom data centers. On the surface, it may seem absurd: Why (and how) would anyone fabricate something as complex as a data center? But as AI demand skyrockets along with the need for more compute power, speculation around data center development is creating chaos, particularly in areas like Northern Virginia, the data center capital of the world. In this evolving landscape, utilities are being bombarded with power requests from real estate developers who may or may not actually build the infrastructure they claim. Fake data centers represent an urgent bottleneck in scaling data infrastructure to keep up with compute demand. This emerging phenomenon is preventing capital from flowing where it actually needs to. Any enterprise that can help solve this problem — perhaps leveraging AI to solve a problem created by AI — will have a significant edge. The mirage of gigawatt demands Dominion Energy, Northern Virginia’s largest utility, has received aggregate requests for 50 gigawatts of power from data center projects. That’s more power than Iceland consumes in a year.  But many of these requests are either speculative or outright false. Developers are eyeing potential sites and staking their claims to power capacity long before they have the capital or any strategy around how to break ground. In fact, estimates suggest that as much as 90% of these requests are entirely bogus. In the early days of the data center boom, utilities never had to worry about fake demand. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft — dubbed “hyperscalers” because they operate data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers — submitted straightforward power requests, and utilities

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Nuwa Pen is a smart ballpoint pen that digitizes the words you write on paper as you write them. The pen uses a standard D1 ballpoint ink cartridge in conjunction with AI, computer vision and motion sensors to digitize every stroke a user writes or doodles on any type of piece of paper. Nuwa Pen will show the pen at CES 2025, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week. Shipping in public beta in February 2025, Nuwa Pen said it can help people rediscover the joy of writing without losing the productivity of digital applications, bridging the gap between analog and digital in a way no other device can. Available to purchase at a special pre-order price of $295 and with over 5,000 pre-orders to date, CES attendees can try Nuwa Pen firsthand at CES Unveiled Las Vegas on Sunday, January 5, at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, with CES preview media interviews available by appointment on January 6, and at the Venetian Expo, Booth 51272 from January 7 – 10. View a short video about Nuwa Pen here. There are multiple, well-documented downsides of humanity’s screen-obsessed lives: poor REM sleep, reduced creativity and declining memory retention. Most people spend eight or more hours per day in front of a computer—often followed by recreational screen use. Recent mounting research, however, praises the benefits of handwriting, which has clear benefits for thinking and learning as it helps to boost literacy and communication skills. “Writing is one of the most human acts. Many of history’s most extraordinary ideas and literature were handwritten, not typed,” said Nuwa Pen CEO and founder Marc Tuiner, in a statement. “We’ve developed the smartest, most advanced

Oil and natural gas producer focusing on projects in Europe and Türkiye, Trillion Energy International Inc., has continued the velocity string tubing (VS) program on two tripods after previously completing operations on the Akcakoca platform in late November. The company said in a media release that this week, a crane barge arrived at the SASB gas field to transport the snubbing unit from the Akcakoca platform to the Akkaya tripod for the next operation on the Alapli-2 well where 2,996 meters (9,839 feet) of 2 3/8 tubing will be run. Trillion said it holds a 49 percent interest in the SASB natural gas field, a Black Sea natural gas development, and a 19.6 percent (except three wells with 9.8 percent) interest in the Cendere oil field. After completing Alapli-2, the crane barge will move the snubbing unit to the East Ayazli tripod where 2,888 meters (9475 feet) of 2 3/8 VS tubing will be run in the Bayhanli-2 well, it said. Trillion said it will employ three sets of rupture discs in each well to provide buoyancy for the tubing within the horizontal well sections during installation. These discs will then be ruptured. Following the safe deployment of the VS string, the crane barge and snubbing crew will be demobilized, and nitrogen stimulation will commence. Trillion notes that nitrogen lifting has recently demonstrated its effectiveness in initiating gas well production. The whole operation is expected to be completed within approximately two weeks, weather permitting, the company said. Trillion added that together with its technical advisors it will continue working onsite to optimize production. Gas lift compressors are currently being sized for various wells, the first being South Akcakoca. At the start of December 2024, Trillion said it installed 2 3/8-inch V tubing in four existing wells, including three extended-reach wells

Tullow Oil Plc gained after an international body found it wasn’t liable for a $320 million tax assessment in Ghana, where its key oil assets are located. The International Chamber of Commerce said the tribunal found the branch profit remittance tax assessment by the West African nation “falls outside of the tax regime provided for in the petroleum agreements,” according to a Tullow statement published late Thursday. The company filed a request for arbitration in 2021. The shares rose as much as 14% to 25 pence. The stock pared gains to 24.34 pence as of 8:28 a.m. in London trading.  Ghana handed back-tax demands to some of the biggest companies operating there, including MTN Group Ltd., Gold Fields Ltd. and Kosmos Energy Ltd. in recent years. The country was seeking additional revenue after losing access to international capital markets because of its ballooning debt and loan-service costs. The ICC announcement is a boost for Tullow after Chief Executive Officer Rahul Dhir said he would step down and Kosmos Energy dropped a bid for the explorer following “very preliminary discussions” around a deal. “The removal of a further liability will take some pressure off the stretched balance sheet,” Ashley Kelty, an analyst at Panmure Gordon & Co., said in a note.  Tullow still has two remaining disputed tax assessments from the Ghana Revenue Authority for which it filed requests for arbitration with the ICC. They relate to loan interest over a decade and business interruption insurance proceeds it received. Those assessments total $387 million plus penalties, Tullow said in 2023.  “I look forward to constructive discussions with the government of Ghana to resolve the remaining claims,” Dhir said in the statement. While the decision in favor of Tullow brings optimism ahead of the other cases, replacing Dhir presents another obstacle, Kelty said. “Uncertainty over who

Oil extended a rally that has brought it to the highest in more than two months as shrinking US crude stockpiles and a risk-on tone in broader markets overshadowed signs of a misfiring Chinese economy. West Texas Intermediate climbed for the fifth straight session, approaching $74 a barrel and settling at the highest closing price since mid-October. A push above key technical levels earlier in the week spurred fresh buying from quantitative funds, while strength in equity markets and a slump in the dollar aided Friday’s gain. WTI’s prompt spread firmed to about 75 cents a barrel in a sign of a tightening supply outlook. Capping oil’s advance, the onshore yuan weakened past a level that China had been defending throughout December, fanning concerns over the nation’s economic struggles. The outlook for 2025 remains uncertain, however, with expectations for oversupply, the possible revival of idled OPEC+ production and lackluster demand from top importer China. The return of Donald Trump to the White House later this month also adds unpredictability for global markets. In a positive sign for prices, some Middle Eastern barrels have gained in value in recent days as a mix of robust refinery demand and disruption to flows from Iran and Russia by sanctions pushed regional values to a rare premium to the global Brent benchmark. “Oil prices are a few dollars undervalued right now,” Daan Struyven, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in a Bloomberg television interview. “Global energy demand will continue to rise very significantly.” Oil Prices: WTI for February delivery rose 1.1% to settle at $73.96 a barrel in New York. Brent for March settlement gained 0.8% to settle at $76.51 a barrel. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you, join the conversation on the Rigzone Energy Network.

Linux supports quite a few filesystem types. Your choice of which filesystem to use can play an important role in optimizing performance, reliability and data integrity. Among the more popular filesystems are Ext4, Btrfs, XFS and ZFS. Each is widely used and offers some unique features and benefits. Metadata handling, journaling, and data integrity mechanisms are central factors in determining their suitability for various workloads.  Ext4 Ext4, the default filesystem for many Linux distributions, balances performance and reliability. First developed in 1992, Ext has slowly evolved into Ext4. Its metadata is efficiently managed using traditional inode structures, ensuring fast file access and directory traversal. Ext4’s journaling mechanism logs metadata changes, enhancing recovery from crashes. However, while Ext4 is highly reliable, its metadata structures lack the advanced features of some of the newer filesystems, such as using check sums for data integrity. Btrfs Btrfs, designed for modern workloads, excels in metadata handling and data integrity. It uses a copy-on-write (COW) mechanism for metadata, ensuring that changes are committed atomically. Its journaling-like functionality includes using checksums for both data and metadata, providing superior integrity verification. However, these features come at the cost of performance, particularly in write-intensive workloads, due to the overhead of copy-on-write operations.