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Stargate’s slow start reveals the real bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure

The CFO emphasized that SoftBank remains committed to its original target of $346 billion (JPY 500 billion) over 4 years for the Stargate project, noting that major sites have been selected in the US and preparations are taking place simultaneously across multiple fronts. Requests for comment to Stargate partners Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle remain unanswered. Infrastructure reality check for CIOs These challenges offer important lessons for enterprise IT leaders facing similar AI infrastructure decisions. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Goto’s confirmation of delays “reflects a challenge CIOs see repeatedly” in partner onboarding delays, service activation slips, and revised delivery commitments from cloud and datacenter providers. Oishi Mazumder, senior analyst at Everest Group, noted that “SoftBank’s Stargate delays show that AI infrastructure is not constrained by compute or capital, but by land, energy, and stakeholder alignment.” The analyst emphasized that CIOs must treat AI infrastructure “as a cross-functional transformation, not an IT upgrade, demanding long-term, ecosystem-wide planning.” “Scaling AI infrastructure depends less on the technical readiness of servers or GPUs and more on the orchestration of distributed stakeholders — utilities, regulators, construction partners, hardware suppliers, and service providers — each with their own cadence and constraints,” Gogia said.

Read More »

The Download: GPT-5 is here, and Intel’s CEO drama

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version.It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access.  GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Sam Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Donald Trump has called on Intel’s CEO to resignHe claims Lip-Bu Tan is “conflicted” by his business ties to China. (FT $)+ Tan was already at odds with some of his board members before the intervention. (WSJ $)+ But the CEO claims he’s got the full backing of his board presently. (Bloomberg $) 2 Wildfires are raging across the western USAnd strong winds are rapidly spreading them across parched land. (WP $)+ The fires have a devastating effect on human health. (The Guardian)+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Meta’s AI superintelligence team is growingThe new TBD Lab is currently working on the newest version of its Llama model. (WSJ $)+ Meta has also been busy acquiring an AI audio firm. (The Information $)+ Elsewhere, Tesla has disbanded its supercomputer team. (Bloomberg $) 4 A man suffered psychosis after ChatGPT suggested he take sodium bromideThe 60-year old ended up with bromism. (Ars Technica)+ He’d been taking it for three months before he went to the ER. (The Independent)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Meet Silicon Valley’s AI RationalistsThe group’s influence has spread through tech giants and AI pioneers alike. (NYT $)+ Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present. (MIT Technology Review) 6 An CBP agent wore Meta smart glasses during an immigration raidSignalling that law enforcement are interested in this technology. (404 Media)

7 The US military has a new use for Tesla CybertrucksNamely, aiming missiles at them. (The Verge)+ It wants to learn how to destroy them if enemies start deploying them. (The Register) 8 South Korea will decide whether to let Google Maps work 🗺️The decades-old debate could be laid to rest next week. (The Guardian)+ The country has previously rejected Google’s requests on security grounds. (Reuters) 9 Instagram’s new location-sharing feature is hereIt’s a bid to make the app more participatory and social. (Insider $)+ It also looks a whole lot like Snap’s map. (Fast Company $)10 These headphones could help you to focus 🎧Startup Neurable wants to track your brain activity to prevent you getting distracted. (Vox)+ A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “I don’t think we should think of them as the ‘new Google’ yet.” —Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, questions the hype swirling around AI agents’ capabilities, TechCrunch reports.
One more thing
The arrhythmia of our current ageArrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure.Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s.Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands.All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Read the full story. —David Ewing Duncan

Read More »

TotalEnergies Sells Stake in Argentina Blocks to YPF

TotalEnergies announced, in a statement posted on its site recently, that its affiliate Total Austral has signed an agreement with YPF SA for the sale of its 45 percent operated interest in two unconventional oil and gas blocks in Argentina “for an amount of $500 million at a valuation of around $10,000/acre”. The blocks comprise Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada, TotalEnergies highlighted in the release. The company pointed out that these concessions are located in the Vaca Muerta area in the Neuquén Basin, comprise 51,000 net acres, and are currently in a “pilot development phase”. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary conditions, TotalEnergies noted in the statement. “The sale of Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada blocks is part of our active portfolio management strategy,” Javier Rielo, TotalEnergies Senior Vice President Americas, Exploration & Production, said in the statement. “TotalEnergies remains fully committed to Argentina, where it operates a large unconventional area of 183,000 nets acres in the Vaca Muerta play, after the divestment of these two blocks which represented around 20 percent of our net acreage in that play,” he added. “The company is currently producing gas and condensates from the operated blocks Aguada Pichana Este and San Roque, with a combined production of around 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in TotalEnergies share in 2024,” he continued. “This transaction allows us to unlock value from part of our portfolio, while focusing on the development of our core assets in the Neuquén Basin and in the offshore of Tierra del Fuego,” Rielo went on to state. In a translation of a letter to the Argentine Securities Commission dated August 6, which was included in a Securities and Exchange Commission document posted on the YPF website recently, YPF said it entered into a share purchase agreement

Read More »

Petrobras Misses Estimates

Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer Petrobras reported weaker-than-expected results and cut its dividend after lower oil prices offset stronger production figures.  Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as it is formally known, increased investments 30.6% on year and 9% from the previous quarter to $4.4 billion as it develops massive deep-water oil fields. Investors have been hoping to see Petrobras contain capital expenditures to help preserve shareholder payouts. Chief Executive Officer Magda Chambriard has vowed to tighten spending to navigate the challenging scenario of lower oil prices, while sticking to a production expansion.  Petrobras also cited one-off events that include asset impairments and labor agreements.  Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, was 52.3 billion reais ($9.6 billion), trailing the 56.9 billion-reais estimate. Petrobras will pay $1.6 billion in second-quarter dividends and interest on capital, it said in a filing. Expectations were for a $2.2 billion payout, according to an average of five analyst forecasts reviewed by Bloomberg.  The lower dividends came despite a significant boost in second-quarter output, driven by the rapid ramp-up of its offshore Buzios field and the nearby Mero field. The company’s oil and natural gas output climbed 7.8% year-over-year to 2.9 million barrels per day.  The company reported a sharp increase in debt that it attributed to growth in oil platform leasing with new units coming on line. Brazil needs to open up new offshore regions to oil exploration to prevent production from going into decline in the 2030s.  The Rio de Janeiro-based company hopes to get the green light for an oil-spill-simulation test at a key offshore region off the coast of the Amazon forest. The company will meet Brazil environmental officials next week for planning. The test is considered the last step to obtain a permit to drill a block in the Foz do

Read More »

Presidio to Be Listed on NYSE After Business Combination

Fort Worth, Texas-based Presidio Investment Holdings LLC is set to become a public company after entering into a definitive business combination agreement with EQV Ventures Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by EQV Group. The proposed business combination will result in Presidio being listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “FTW,” the company said in a news release. The combined company is expected to have an estimated post-transaction enterprise value of approximately $660 million, including assets acquired under the transaction, according to the release. The combined company will be named Presidio Production Company and will be led by Presidio’s existing management team, including Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack as co-CEOs. As part of the transaction, Presidio will also acquire a complementary Texas Panhandle asset from EQV Resources LLC, an affiliate of EQV. EQV’s sponsor will maintain a significant ownership stake in Presidio post-closing, the release said. Presidio said it expects to have over 2,000 operated producing wells across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas with expected net production of 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) in 2025. To finance the transaction, EQV has entered into agreements for approximately $85 million in common stock Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) investments. The common stock PIPE is anchored by strategic and institutional investors, including an undisclosed major oil and gas company, according to the release. Further, management and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Energy Partners will provide approximately $65 million of rollover equity, the release said. Presidio said it intends to acquire and optimize additional producing oil and gas wells and then optimize the acquisitions through the application of technology, which includes automation, real-time data analytics and the introduction of artificial intelligence processes. The company said it also expects to initiate an annual common dividend of $1.35 per share

Read More »

Oil Has Performed Poorly This Week

Brent crude oil has performed poorly this week, with the front-month contract falling by nearly eight percent to reach around $67 per barrel. That’s what analysts at BMI said in a BMI report sent to Rigzone by the Fitch Group on Friday, adding that the initial sell off was triggered by the OPEC+ announcement that it would raise supply by an additional 547,000 barrels per day in September, “marking the full unwinding of the 2.2 million barrels per day of cuts that the group planned to reintroduce to market over 2025 and 2026”. “Meanwhile, tariff-related uncertainties and broad-based economic concerns loom large, exacerbated by the recent raft of tariff announcements and weak economic data releases in the U.S. raising concerns for oil demand at a time when supply is continuing to grow,” they added. The BMI analysts also noted in the report that bearish sentiment helps to explain the decline seen in Brent in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s new executive order (EO) issued August 6, which they highlighted “introduces an additional 25 percent tariff on India, effective August 27, in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil, and establishes a process for extending similar penalties to other countries”. “All else equal, the EO should be bullish for prices, to the extent that it curbs flows from Russia, the world’s second largest net exporter of oil,” they said. “However, market participants seem to share our view that there is ample scope for Trump to reverse course in response to potential concessions from Russian President Vladimir Putin,” they added. The analysts went on to state in the report that some combination of the loosening of the global oil supply and demand balance, potential pushback from India, economic fallout from higher effective tariff rates, and the rerouting of Russian oil

Read More »

Stargate’s slow start reveals the real bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure

The CFO emphasized that SoftBank remains committed to its original target of $346 billion (JPY 500 billion) over 4 years for the Stargate project, noting that major sites have been selected in the US and preparations are taking place simultaneously across multiple fronts. Requests for comment to Stargate partners Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle remain unanswered. Infrastructure reality check for CIOs These challenges offer important lessons for enterprise IT leaders facing similar AI infrastructure decisions. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Goto’s confirmation of delays “reflects a challenge CIOs see repeatedly” in partner onboarding delays, service activation slips, and revised delivery commitments from cloud and datacenter providers. Oishi Mazumder, senior analyst at Everest Group, noted that “SoftBank’s Stargate delays show that AI infrastructure is not constrained by compute or capital, but by land, energy, and stakeholder alignment.” The analyst emphasized that CIOs must treat AI infrastructure “as a cross-functional transformation, not an IT upgrade, demanding long-term, ecosystem-wide planning.” “Scaling AI infrastructure depends less on the technical readiness of servers or GPUs and more on the orchestration of distributed stakeholders — utilities, regulators, construction partners, hardware suppliers, and service providers — each with their own cadence and constraints,” Gogia said.

Read More »

The Download: GPT-5 is here, and Intel’s CEO drama

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version.It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access.  GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Sam Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Donald Trump has called on Intel’s CEO to resignHe claims Lip-Bu Tan is “conflicted” by his business ties to China. (FT $)+ Tan was already at odds with some of his board members before the intervention. (WSJ $)+ But the CEO claims he’s got the full backing of his board presently. (Bloomberg $) 2 Wildfires are raging across the western USAnd strong winds are rapidly spreading them across parched land. (WP $)+ The fires have a devastating effect on human health. (The Guardian)+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Meta’s AI superintelligence team is growingThe new TBD Lab is currently working on the newest version of its Llama model. (WSJ $)+ Meta has also been busy acquiring an AI audio firm. (The Information $)+ Elsewhere, Tesla has disbanded its supercomputer team. (Bloomberg $) 4 A man suffered psychosis after ChatGPT suggested he take sodium bromideThe 60-year old ended up with bromism. (Ars Technica)+ He’d been taking it for three months before he went to the ER. (The Independent)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Meet Silicon Valley’s AI RationalistsThe group’s influence has spread through tech giants and AI pioneers alike. (NYT $)+ Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present. (MIT Technology Review) 6 An CBP agent wore Meta smart glasses during an immigration raidSignalling that law enforcement are interested in this technology. (404 Media)

7 The US military has a new use for Tesla CybertrucksNamely, aiming missiles at them. (The Verge)+ It wants to learn how to destroy them if enemies start deploying them. (The Register) 8 South Korea will decide whether to let Google Maps work 🗺️The decades-old debate could be laid to rest next week. (The Guardian)+ The country has previously rejected Google’s requests on security grounds. (Reuters) 9 Instagram’s new location-sharing feature is hereIt’s a bid to make the app more participatory and social. (Insider $)+ It also looks a whole lot like Snap’s map. (Fast Company $)10 These headphones could help you to focus 🎧Startup Neurable wants to track your brain activity to prevent you getting distracted. (Vox)+ A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “I don’t think we should think of them as the ‘new Google’ yet.” —Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, questions the hype swirling around AI agents’ capabilities, TechCrunch reports.
One more thing
The arrhythmia of our current ageArrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure.Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s.Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands.All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Read the full story. —David Ewing Duncan

Read More »

TotalEnergies Sells Stake in Argentina Blocks to YPF

TotalEnergies announced, in a statement posted on its site recently, that its affiliate Total Austral has signed an agreement with YPF SA for the sale of its 45 percent operated interest in two unconventional oil and gas blocks in Argentina “for an amount of $500 million at a valuation of around $10,000/acre”. The blocks comprise Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada, TotalEnergies highlighted in the release. The company pointed out that these concessions are located in the Vaca Muerta area in the Neuquén Basin, comprise 51,000 net acres, and are currently in a “pilot development phase”. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary conditions, TotalEnergies noted in the statement. “The sale of Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada blocks is part of our active portfolio management strategy,” Javier Rielo, TotalEnergies Senior Vice President Americas, Exploration & Production, said in the statement. “TotalEnergies remains fully committed to Argentina, where it operates a large unconventional area of 183,000 nets acres in the Vaca Muerta play, after the divestment of these two blocks which represented around 20 percent of our net acreage in that play,” he added. “The company is currently producing gas and condensates from the operated blocks Aguada Pichana Este and San Roque, with a combined production of around 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in TotalEnergies share in 2024,” he continued. “This transaction allows us to unlock value from part of our portfolio, while focusing on the development of our core assets in the Neuquén Basin and in the offshore of Tierra del Fuego,” Rielo went on to state. In a translation of a letter to the Argentine Securities Commission dated August 6, which was included in a Securities and Exchange Commission document posted on the YPF website recently, YPF said it entered into a share purchase agreement

Read More »

Petrobras Misses Estimates

Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer Petrobras reported weaker-than-expected results and cut its dividend after lower oil prices offset stronger production figures.  Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as it is formally known, increased investments 30.6% on year and 9% from the previous quarter to $4.4 billion as it develops massive deep-water oil fields. Investors have been hoping to see Petrobras contain capital expenditures to help preserve shareholder payouts. Chief Executive Officer Magda Chambriard has vowed to tighten spending to navigate the challenging scenario of lower oil prices, while sticking to a production expansion.  Petrobras also cited one-off events that include asset impairments and labor agreements.  Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, was 52.3 billion reais ($9.6 billion), trailing the 56.9 billion-reais estimate. Petrobras will pay $1.6 billion in second-quarter dividends and interest on capital, it said in a filing. Expectations were for a $2.2 billion payout, according to an average of five analyst forecasts reviewed by Bloomberg.  The lower dividends came despite a significant boost in second-quarter output, driven by the rapid ramp-up of its offshore Buzios field and the nearby Mero field. The company’s oil and natural gas output climbed 7.8% year-over-year to 2.9 million barrels per day.  The company reported a sharp increase in debt that it attributed to growth in oil platform leasing with new units coming on line. Brazil needs to open up new offshore regions to oil exploration to prevent production from going into decline in the 2030s.  The Rio de Janeiro-based company hopes to get the green light for an oil-spill-simulation test at a key offshore region off the coast of the Amazon forest. The company will meet Brazil environmental officials next week for planning. The test is considered the last step to obtain a permit to drill a block in the Foz do

Read More »

Presidio to Be Listed on NYSE After Business Combination

Fort Worth, Texas-based Presidio Investment Holdings LLC is set to become a public company after entering into a definitive business combination agreement with EQV Ventures Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by EQV Group. The proposed business combination will result in Presidio being listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “FTW,” the company said in a news release. The combined company is expected to have an estimated post-transaction enterprise value of approximately $660 million, including assets acquired under the transaction, according to the release. The combined company will be named Presidio Production Company and will be led by Presidio’s existing management team, including Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack as co-CEOs. As part of the transaction, Presidio will also acquire a complementary Texas Panhandle asset from EQV Resources LLC, an affiliate of EQV. EQV’s sponsor will maintain a significant ownership stake in Presidio post-closing, the release said. Presidio said it expects to have over 2,000 operated producing wells across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas with expected net production of 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) in 2025. To finance the transaction, EQV has entered into agreements for approximately $85 million in common stock Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) investments. The common stock PIPE is anchored by strategic and institutional investors, including an undisclosed major oil and gas company, according to the release. Further, management and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Energy Partners will provide approximately $65 million of rollover equity, the release said. Presidio said it intends to acquire and optimize additional producing oil and gas wells and then optimize the acquisitions through the application of technology, which includes automation, real-time data analytics and the introduction of artificial intelligence processes. The company said it also expects to initiate an annual common dividend of $1.35 per share

Read More »

Oil Has Performed Poorly This Week

Brent crude oil has performed poorly this week, with the front-month contract falling by nearly eight percent to reach around $67 per barrel. That’s what analysts at BMI said in a BMI report sent to Rigzone by the Fitch Group on Friday, adding that the initial sell off was triggered by the OPEC+ announcement that it would raise supply by an additional 547,000 barrels per day in September, “marking the full unwinding of the 2.2 million barrels per day of cuts that the group planned to reintroduce to market over 2025 and 2026”. “Meanwhile, tariff-related uncertainties and broad-based economic concerns loom large, exacerbated by the recent raft of tariff announcements and weak economic data releases in the U.S. raising concerns for oil demand at a time when supply is continuing to grow,” they added. The BMI analysts also noted in the report that bearish sentiment helps to explain the decline seen in Brent in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s new executive order (EO) issued August 6, which they highlighted “introduces an additional 25 percent tariff on India, effective August 27, in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil, and establishes a process for extending similar penalties to other countries”. “All else equal, the EO should be bullish for prices, to the extent that it curbs flows from Russia, the world’s second largest net exporter of oil,” they said. “However, market participants seem to share our view that there is ample scope for Trump to reverse course in response to potential concessions from Russian President Vladimir Putin,” they added. The analysts went on to state in the report that some combination of the loosening of the global oil supply and demand balance, potential pushback from India, economic fallout from higher effective tariff rates, and the rerouting of Russian oil

Read More »

Presidio to Be Listed on NYSE After Business Combination

Fort Worth, Texas-based Presidio Investment Holdings LLC is set to become a public company after entering into a definitive business combination agreement with EQV Ventures Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by EQV Group. The proposed business combination will result in Presidio being listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “FTW,” the company said in a news release. The combined company is expected to have an estimated post-transaction enterprise value of approximately $660 million, including assets acquired under the transaction, according to the release. The combined company will be named Presidio Production Company and will be led by Presidio’s existing management team, including Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack as co-CEOs. As part of the transaction, Presidio will also acquire a complementary Texas Panhandle asset from EQV Resources LLC, an affiliate of EQV. EQV’s sponsor will maintain a significant ownership stake in Presidio post-closing, the release said. Presidio said it expects to have over 2,000 operated producing wells across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas with expected net production of 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) in 2025. To finance the transaction, EQV has entered into agreements for approximately $85 million in common stock Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) investments. The common stock PIPE is anchored by strategic and institutional investors, including an undisclosed major oil and gas company, according to the release. Further, management and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Energy Partners will provide approximately $65 million of rollover equity, the release said. Presidio said it intends to acquire and optimize additional producing oil and gas wells and then optimize the acquisitions through the application of technology, which includes automation, real-time data analytics and the introduction of artificial intelligence processes. The company said it also expects to initiate an annual common dividend of $1.35 per share

Read More »

Halliburton Awarded Contract for NEP CCS Project

Halliburton said it was awarded a contract to provide completions and downhole monitoring services for the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP) carbon capture and storage (CCS) system in northeast England’s East Coast Cluster (ECC). Halliburton will manufacture and deliver the majority of the equipment required for the project from its U.K. completion manufacturing facility in Arbroath, the company said in a news release. Financial details of the contract were not disclosed. The NEP infrastructure includes a carbon dioxide (CO2) gathering network and onshore compression facilities, as well as a 91-mile (145-kilometer) offshore pipeline, and subsea injection and monitoring systems for the Endurance saline aquifer, located around 3281 feet (1000 meters) below the seabed. The infrastructure will transport and permanently store up to an initial 4 million metric tons of CO2, according to the release. Operations are expected to start in 2028. “Halliburton is pleased to develop and deliver innovative well completions and monitoring solutions for this groundbreaking carbon storage project,” Jean-Marc Lopez, senior vice president of Halliburton, said. “This project allows expansion of our completions activity and showcases Halliburton’s leadership in CCS projects. We look forward to the opportunity to deliver our services to support the NEP project”. Halliburton’s U.K. center supports North Sea operations and provides on-site product development and testing resources alongside advanced manufacturing capabilities, the company said. NEP is a joint venture that includes BP PLC, Equinor ASA, and TotalEnergies SE. It was formed in 2020 as the ECC CO2 transportation and storage provider, which will transport and store CO2 emissions from the Teesside and Humber regional industrial clusters. Infrastructure Contracts Awarded NEP has awarded a series of offshore contracts to support the next phase of its CCS infrastructure, the joint venture said in an earlier statement. Following financial close in December 2024, NEP is now advancing through

Read More »

In wind and solar dispute, Sens. Grassley, Curtis delay Trump nominees

Dive Brief: Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and John Curtis, R-Utah, have placed holds on three of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the Department of the Treasury, with Grassley saying that he’s doing so to ensure the administration’s upcoming rulemaking regarding wind and solar tax credit phase-outs aligns with congressional intent. “During consideration of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, I worked with my colleagues to provide wind and solar an appropriate glidepath for the orderly phase-out of the tax credits,” Grassley stated in the Congressional Record. “This is a case where both the law and congressional intent are clear.” Curtis didn’t comment publicly about why he placed his holds, but someone familiar with the matter told Utility Dive that his reasoning aligned with Grassley’s. Dive Insight: The OBBB, signed by Trump on July 4, truncated the length of time that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investment and production tax credits will be available for wind and solar — attempting to close that window by the end of 2027.  However, Senate negotiations produced a stipulation in the final bill that allows wind and solar projects to qualify after that as long as they commence construction by July 5, 2026. Trump then issued an executive order July 7 which instructed the Treasury secretary to publish guidance within 45 days “to ensure that policies concerning the ‘beginning of construction’ are not circumvented.”  Ahead of the release of that guidance, Grassley and Curtis have put holds on the nominations of Brian Morrissey, Jr. to be the Treasury Department’s general counsel, Francis Brooke to be an assistant secretary, and Jonathan McKernan to be an undersecretary. Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, said Sen. Grassley is trying to thread the needle on renewables in a state “on the red side of purple” that

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Crude Drops for Sixth Straight Session

Oil fell to its lowest settlement price in more than two months as traders awaited a planned meeting between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump that may affect the availability of Russian crude supplies in the global market. West Texas Intermediate futures slipped to settle below $64 a barrel, marking the lowest settlement price since early June. The drop also sealed a six-session losing streak, the longest since December 2023. Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters Russia and the US had agreed on a venue for the meeting, which would be disclosed later. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 retreated, and the dollar strengthened. This week has seen a deluge of news around Trump’s push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, with the president doubling tariffs on goods from India due to the nation’s purchases of Russian energy. The levies won’t take effect for another three weeks and stopped short of more punitive measures around oil supplies that some traders had feared. “It looks like some of this risk premium on Russian oil tariffs is waning with the Trump-Putin meeting upcoming,” said Darrell Fletcher, managing director for commodities at Bannockburn Capital Markets. “With that premium diminishing and fundamentals back in focus, the market is looking at the oversupply for year end.” Crude has moved lower in August following a run of three monthly gains. Traders are positioning for a potential glut later this year after OPEC+ returned millions of barrels of shuttered capacity to the market. Futures have also been weighed down by concerns about slowing economic growth and weaker energy consumption because of Trump’s broader tariffs, with a globe-spanning swathe of punitive levies coming into effect on Thursday. Trend-following commodity traders known as CTAs may deepen the slide, potentially selling as much as 30% of their maximum size on Thursday,

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DOE Approves Fifth Loan Disbursement to Restart the Palisades Nuclear Plant

WASHINGTON—U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright today announced the release of the fifth loan disbursement to Holtec to help fund the restart of the Palisades Nuclear Plant. Today’s action disburses $83,234,156 of the up to $1.52 billion loan guarantee to Holtec for the Palisades Nuclear Plant, which will be America’s first restart of a commercial nuclear reactor in decommissioning, subject to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approvals. “Thanks to President Trump, the Department of Energy is working in tandem with our regulatory partners to accelerate the reopening of the Palisades Nuclear Plant and unleash a true American nuclear renaissance,” Secretary Wright said. “These efforts will help reinvigorate our nuclear industrial base, deliver lower energy costs for millions of Americans and strengthen our nation’s energy security.” This marks Holtec’s fifth disbursement of funds from the Loan Programs Office (LPO) since the September 2024 announcement of the loan’s financial close. To date, $335,112,194 of DOE-guaranteed loan funds have been disbursed to Holtec to help fund the reopening as it continues to make progress toward plant restart, including the NRC’s approval of a series of licensing and regulatory actions to transition the Palisades Nuclear Plant from decommissioning status back to operations. Today’s announcement highlights the Energy Department’s leading role in advancing President Trump’s Executive Order 14302, Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base, through funding the restart of nuclear plants. LPO is helping to advance this mission in order to maximize the speed and scale of nuclear capacity in the United States, ensuring Americans have access to reliable, abundant, and affordable energy. ###

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Energy Secretary Marks 200th Day of Trump Administration at SRNL’s New Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative Center

Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative in South Carolina Set to Lead on AI, Energy, and Manufacturing WASHINGTON—U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright joined U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC-02) and state and local leaders for the opening of the new Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative, creating a new chapter for American innovation in South Carolina. Launched during the first Trump Administration and led by the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), the new center enables DOE’s mission to support American manufacturing – serving as an economic driver, creating jobs, spurring innovation and maximizing the reach of industry in South Carolina. “The Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative will bring the expertise of the Department of Energy’s National Labs together with innovators from academia and the private sector with one shared goal: to unleash America’s energy potential,” said Energy Secretary Wright. “This mission was started by President Trump in his first term, and I am proud to be representing the Department of Energy 200 days into his second administration for the grand opening of this facility, completed in record time.” “The opening of the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative on USC Aiken’s campus will greatly enhance the ability for the Savannah River National Laboratory and private sector, along with academia, to work together on critical initiatives,” said U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “I was proud to secure federal funding for this facility because I believe this partnership will pay dividends for South Carolina and the rest of the nation. The opening of this facility will cement Aiken as a hub for innovation and advanced technology development for years to come. Finally, I would like to thank Secretary Wright and President Trump for recognizing the importance of South Carolina’s contribution to positioning America as a leader in manufacturing and innovation. I will continue to work

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National Grid, Con Edison urge FERC to adopt gas pipeline reliability requirements

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should adopt reliability-related requirements for gas pipeline operators to ensure fuel supplies during cold weather, according to National Grid USA and affiliated utilities Consolidated Edison Co. of New York and Orange and Rockland Utilities. In the wake of power outages in the Southeast and the near collapse of New York City’s gas system during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, voluntary efforts to bolster gas pipeline reliability are inadequate, the utilities said in two separate filings on Friday at FERC. The filings were in response to a gas-electric coordination meeting held in November by the Federal-State Current Issues Collaborative between FERC and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. National Grid called for FERC to use its authority under the Natural Gas Act to require pipeline reliability reporting, coupled with enforcement mechanisms, and pipeline tariff reforms. “Such data reporting would enable the commission to gain a clearer picture into pipeline reliability and identify any problematic trends in the quality of pipeline service,” National Grid said. “At that point, the commission could consider using its ratemaking, audit, and civil penalty authority preemptively to address such identified concerns before they result in service curtailments.” On pipeline tariff reforms, FERC should develop tougher provisions for force majeure events — an unforeseen occurence that prevents a contract from being fulfilled — reservation charge crediting, operational flow orders, scheduling and confirmation enhancements, improved real-time coordination, and limits on changes to nomination rankings, National Grid said. FERC should support efforts in New England and New York to create financial incentives for gas-fired generators to enter into winter contracts for imported liquefied natural gas supplies, or other long-term firm contracts with suppliers and pipelines, National Grid said. Con Edison and O&R said they were encouraged by recent efforts such as North American Energy Standard

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US BOEM Seeks Feedback on Potential Wind Leasing Offshore Guam

The United States Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Monday issued a Call for Information and Nominations to help it decide on potential leasing areas for wind energy development offshore Guam. The call concerns a contiguous area around the island that comprises about 2.1 million acres. The area’s water depths range from 350 meters (1,148.29 feet) to 2,200 meters (7,217.85 feet), according to a statement on BOEM’s website. Closing April 7, the comment period seeks “relevant information on site conditions, marine resources, and ocean uses near or within the call area”, the BOEM said. “Concurrently, wind energy companies can nominate specific areas they would like to see offered for leasing. “During the call comment period, BOEM will engage with Indigenous Peoples, stakeholder organizations, ocean users, federal agencies, the government of Guam, and other parties to identify conflicts early in the process as BOEM seeks to identify areas where offshore wind development would have the least impact”. The next step would be the identification of specific WEAs, or wind energy areas, in the larger call area. BOEM would then conduct environmental reviews of the WEAs in consultation with different stakeholders. “After completing its environmental reviews and consultations, BOEM may propose one or more competitive lease sales for areas within the WEAs”, the Department of the Interior (DOI) sub-agency said. BOEM Director Elizabeth Klein said, “Responsible offshore wind development off Guam’s coast offers a vital opportunity to expand clean energy, cut carbon emissions, and reduce energy costs for Guam residents”. Late last year the DOI announced the approval of the 2.4-gigawatt (GW) SouthCoast Wind Project, raising the total capacity of federally approved offshore wind power projects to over 19 GW. The project owned by a joint venture between EDP Renewables and ENGIE received a positive Record of Decision, the DOI said in

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Biden Bars Offshore Oil Drilling in USA Atlantic and Pacific

President Joe Biden is indefinitely blocking offshore oil and gas development in more than 625 million acres of US coastal waters, warning that drilling there is simply “not worth the risks” and “unnecessary” to meet the nation’s energy needs.  Biden’s move is enshrined in a pair of presidential memoranda being issued Monday, burnishing his legacy on conservation and fighting climate change just two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Yet unlike other actions Biden has taken to constrain fossil fuel development, this one could be harder for Trump to unwind, since it’s rooted in a 72-year-old provision of federal law that empowers presidents to withdraw US waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly authorizing revocations.  Biden is ruling out future oil and gas leasing along the US East and West Coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and a sliver of the Northern Bering Sea, an area teeming with seabirds, marine mammals, fish and other wildlife that indigenous people have depended on for millennia. The action doesn’t affect energy development under existing offshore leases, and it won’t prevent the sale of more drilling rights in Alaska’s gas-rich Cook Inlet or the central and western Gulf of Mexico, which together provide about 14% of US oil and gas production.  The president cast the move as achieving a careful balance between conservation and energy security. “It is clear to me that the relatively minimal fossil fuel potential in the areas I am withdrawing do not justify the environmental, public health and economic risks that would come from new leasing and drilling,” Biden said. “We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient and the food they produce secure — and keeping energy prices low.” Some of the areas Biden is protecting

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Biden Admin Finalizes Hydrogen Tax Credit Favoring Cleaner Production

The Biden administration has finalized rules for a tax incentive promoting hydrogen production using renewable power, with lower credits for processes using abated natural gas. The Clean Hydrogen Production Credit is based on carbon intensity, which must not exceed four kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen produced. Qualified facilities are those whose start of construction falls before 2033. These facilities can claim credits for 10 years of production starting on the date of service placement, according to the draft text on the Federal Register’s portal. The final text is scheduled for publication Friday. Established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the four-tier scheme gives producers that meet wage and apprenticeship requirements a credit of up to $3 per kilogram of “qualified clean hydrogen”, to be adjusted for inflation. Hydrogen whose production process makes higher lifecycle emissions gets less. The scheme will use the Energy Department’s Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model in tiering production processes for credit computation. “In the coming weeks, the Department of Energy will release an updated version of the 45VH2-GREET model that producers will use to calculate the section 45V tax credit”, the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the finalization of rules, a process that it said had considered roughly 30,000 public comments. However, producers may use the GREET model that was the most recent when their facility began construction. “This is in consideration of comments that the prospect of potential changes to the model over time reduces investment certainty”, explained the statement on the Treasury’s website. “Calculation of the lifecycle GHG analysis for the tax credit requires consideration of direct and significant indirect emissions”, the statement said. For electrolytic hydrogen, electrolyzers covered by the scheme include not only those using renewables-derived electricity (green hydrogen) but

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Xthings unveils Ulticam home security cameras powered by edge AI

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Xthings announced that its Ulticam security camera brand has a new model out today: the Ulticam IQ Floodlight, an edge AI-powered home security camera. The company also plans to showcase two additional cameras, Ulticam IQ, an outdoor spotlight camera, and Ulticam Dot, a portable, wireless security camera. All three cameras offer free cloud storage (seven days rolling) and subscription-free edge AI-powered person detection and alerts. The AI at the edge means that it doesn’t have to go out to an internet-connected data center to tap AI computing to figure out what is in front of the camera. Rather, the processing for the AI is built into the camera itself, and that sets a new standard for value and performance in home security cameras. It can identify people, faces and vehicles. CES 2025 attendees can experience Ulticam’s entire lineup at Pepcom’s Digital Experience event on January 6, 2025, and at the Venetian Expo, Halls A-D, booth #51732, from January 7 to January 10, 2025. These new security cameras will be available for purchase online in the U.S. in Q1 and Q2 2025 at U-tec.com, Amazon, and Best Buy. The Ulticam IQ Series: smart edge AI-powered home security cameras Ulticam IQ home security camera. The Ulticam IQ Series, which includes IQ and IQ Floodlight, takes home security to the next level with the most advanced AI-powered recognition. Among the very first consumer cameras to use edge AI, the IQ Series can quickly and accurately identify people, faces and vehicles, without uploading video for server-side processing, which improves speed, accuracy, security and privacy. Additionally, the Ulticam IQ Series is designed to improve over time with over-the-air updates that enable new AI features. Both cameras

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Intel unveils new Core Ultra processors with 2X to 3X performance on AI apps

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Intel unveiled new Intel Core Ultra 9 processors today at CES 2025 with as much as two or three times the edge performance on AI apps as before. The chips under the Intel Core Ultra 9 and Core i9 labels were previously codenamed Arrow Lake H, Meteor Lake H, Arrow Lake S and Raptor Lake S Refresh. Intel said it is pushing the boundaries of AI performance and power efficiency for businesses and consumers, ushering in the next era of AI computing. In other performance metrics, Intel said the Core Ultra 9 processors are up to 5.8 times faster in media performance, 3.4 times faster in video analytics end-to-end workloads with media and AI, and 8.2 times better in terms of performance per watt than prior chips. Intel hopes to kick off the year better than in 2024. CEO Pat Gelsinger resigned last month without a permanent successor after a variety of struggles, including mass layoffs, manufacturing delays and poor execution on chips including gaming bugs in chips launched during the summer. Intel Core Ultra Series 2 Michael Masci, vice president of product management at the Edge Computing Group at Intel, said in a briefing that AI, once the domain of research labs, is integrating into every aspect of our lives, including AI PCs where the AI processing is done in the computer itself, not the cloud. AI is also being processed in data centers in big enterprises, from retail stores to hospital rooms. “As CES kicks off, it’s clear we are witnessing a transformative moment,” he said. “Artificial intelligence is moving at an unprecedented pace.” The new processors include the Intel Core 9 Ultra 200 H/U/S models, with up to

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How a ‘vibe working’ approach at Genspark tripled ARR growth and supported a barrage of new products and features in just weeks

Traditionally, product releases can be cumbersome, requiring multiple sign-offs, endless tinkering, bureaucracies and friction points. The AI workspace company’s lean team practices AI-native working — or ‘vibe working,’ if you will — so that they can move at what they call “gen speed.” This allows them to release new products and features in rapid-fire succession (nearly every week or so), steadily driving up annual recurring revenue (ARR). As the company boasts, it could be “the fastest-growing startup ever in terms of ARR.”“When people are working the AI-native way, basically everybody is the manager,” Kaihua (Kay) Zhu, co-founder and CTO, told VentureBeat. “They are equipped with a team of AI agents, which are kind of their reportees, and they are capable of, single-handedly, delivering the feature end-to-end. “

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For regulated industries, AWS’s neurosymbolic AI promises safe, explainable agent automation

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now AWS is banking on the fact that by bringing its Automated Reasoning Checks feature on Bedrock to general availability, it will give more enterprises and regulated industries the confidence to use and deploy more AI applications and agents.  It is also hoping that introducing methods like automated reasoning, which utilizes math-based validation to determine ground truth, will ease enterprises into the world of neurosymbolic AI, a step the company believes will be the next major advancement — and its biggest differentiation — in the world of AI.   Automated Reasoning Checks enable enterprise users to verify the accuracy of responses and detect model hallucination. AWS unveiled Automated Reasoning Checks on Bedrock during its annual re: Invent conference in December, claiming it can catch nearly 100% of all hallucinations. A limited number of users could access the feature through Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, where organizations can set responsible AI policies. Byron Cook, distinguished scientist and vice president at AWS’s Automated Reasoning Group, told VentureBeat in an interview that the preview rollout proved systems like this work in an enterprise setting, and it helps organizations understand the value of AI that can mix symbolic or structured thinking with the neural network nature of generative AI.  AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI. Join our exclusive salon to discover how top teams are: Secure your spot to stay ahead: https://bit.ly/4mwGngO “There’s this notion of neurosymbolic AI, that’s the sort of moniker under which you might call automated reasoning,” Cook said. “The rise of interest in neurosymbolic AI caused people, while they were using the tool, to realize how important

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Google’s new diffusion AI agent mimics human writing to improve enterprise research

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Google researchers have developed a new framework for AI research agents that outperforms leading systems from rivals OpenAI, Perplexity, and others on key benchmarks. The new agent, called Test-Time Diffusion Deep Researcher (TTD-DR), is inspired by the way humans write by going through a process of drafting, searching for information, and making iterative revisions. The system uses diffusion mechanisms and evolutionary algorithms to produce more comprehensive and accurate research on complex topics. For enterprises, this framework could power a new generation of bespoke research assistants for high-value tasks that standard retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems struggle with, such as generating a competitive analysis or a market entry report. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI. Join our exclusive salon to discover how top teams are: Secure your spot to stay ahead: https://bit.ly/4mwGngO According to the paper’s authors, these real-world business use cases were the primary target for the system. The limits of current deep research agents Deep research (DR) agents are designed to tackle complex queries that go beyond a simple search. They use large language models (LLMs) to plan, use tools like web search to gather information, and then synthesize the findings into a detailed report with the help of test-time scaling techniques such as chain-of-thought (CoT), best-of-N sampling, and Monte-Carlo Tree Search. However, many of these systems have fundamental design limitations. Most publicly available DR agents apply test-time algorithms and tools without a structure that mirrors human cognitive behavior. Open-source agents often follow a rigid linear or parallel process of planning, searching, and generating content, making it difficult for the different phases

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Anthropic ships automated security reviews for Claude Code as AI-generated vulnerabilities surge

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Anthropic launched automated security review capabilities for its Claude Code platform on Wednesday, introducing tools that can scan code for vulnerabilities and suggest fixes as artificial intelligence dramatically accelerates software development across the industry. The new features arrive as companies increasingly rely on AI to write code faster than ever before, raising critical questions about whether security practices can keep pace with the velocity of AI-assisted development. Anthropic’s solution embeds security analysis directly into developers’ workflows through a simple terminal command and automated GitHub reviews. “People love Claude Code, they love using models to write code, and these models are already extremely good and getting better,” said Logan Graham, a member of Anthropic’s frontier red team who led development of the security features, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It seems really possible that in the next couple of years, we are going to 10x, 100x, 1000x the amount of code that gets written in the world. The only way to keep up is by using models themselves to figure out how to make it secure.” The announcement comes just one day after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.1, an upgraded version of its most powerful AI model that shows significant improvements in coding tasks. The timing underscores an intensifying competition between AI companies, with OpenAI expected to announce GPT-5 imminently and Meta aggressively poaching talent with reported $100 million signing bonuses. AI Scaling Hits Its Limits Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI. Join our exclusive salon to discover how top teams are: Secure your spot to stay ahead: https://bit.ly/4mwGngO Why AI code generation is creating a massive security problem

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Five ways that AI is learning to improve itself

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself.  Zuckerberg recently said on an earnings call that Meta Superintelligence Labs will be focused on building self-improving AI—systems that can bootstrap themselves to higher and higher levels of performance. The possibility of self-improvement distinguishes AI from other revolutionary technologies. CRISPR can’t improve its own targeting of DNA sequences, and fusion reactors can’t figure out how to make the technology commercially viable. But LLMs can optimize the computer chips they run on, train other LLMs cheaply and efficiently, and perhaps even come up with original ideas for AI research. And they’ve already made some progress in all these domains. According to Zuckerberg, AI self-improvement could bring about a world in which humans are liberated from workaday drudgery and can pursue their highest goals with the support of brilliant, hypereffective artificial companions. But self-improvement also creates a fundamental risk, according to Chris Painter, the policy director at the AI research nonprofit METR. If AI accelerates the development of its own capabilities, he says, it could rapidly get better at hacking, designing weapons, and manipulating people. Some researchers even speculate that this positive feedback cycle could lead to an “intelligence explosion,” in which AI rapidly launches itself far beyond the level of human capabilities. But you don’t have to be a doomer to take the implications of self-improving AI seriously. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all include references to automated AI research in their AI safety frameworks, alongside more familiar risk categories such as chemical weapons and cybersecurity. “I think this is the fastest path to powerful AI,” says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia and senior research advisor at Google DeepMind. “It’s probably the most important thing we should be thinking about.”
By the same token, Clune says, automating AI research and development could have enormous upsides. On our own, we humans might not be able to think up the innovations and improvements that will allow AI to one day tackle prodigious problems like cancer and climate change. For now, human ingenuity is still the primary engine of AI advancement; otherwise, Meta would hardly have made such exorbitant offers to attract researchers to its superintelligence lab. But AI is already contributing to its own development, and it’s set to take even more of a role in the years to come. Here are five ways that AI is making itself better.
1. Enhancing productivity Today, the most important contribution that LLMs make to AI development may also be the most banal. “The biggest thing is coding assistance,” says Tom Davidson, a senior research fellow at Forethought, an AI research nonprofit. Tools that help engineers write software more quickly, such as Claude Code and Cursor, appear popular across the AI industry: Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed in October 2024 that a quarter of the company’s new code was generated by AI, and Anthropic recently documented a wide variety of ways that its employees use Claude Code. If engineers are more productive because of this coding assistance, they will be able to design, test, and deploy new AI systems more quickly. But the productivity advantage that these tools confer remains uncertain: If engineers are spending large amounts of time correcting errors made by AI systems, they might not be getting any more work done, even if they are spending less of their time writing code manually. A recent study from METR found that developers take about 20% longer to complete tasks when using AI coding assistants, though Nate Rush, a member of METR’s technical staff who co-led the study, notes that it only examined extremely experienced developers working on large code bases. Its conclusions might not apply to AI researchers who write up quick scripts to run experiments. Conducting a similar study within the frontier labs could help provide a much clearer picture of whether coding assistants are making AI researchers at the cutting edge more productive, Rush says—but that work hasn’t yet been undertaken. In the meantime, just taking software engineers’ word for it isn’t enough: The developers METR studied thought that the AI coding tools had made them work more efficiently, even though the tools had actually slowed them down substantially. 2. Optimizing infrastructure Writing code quickly isn’t that much of an advantage if you have to wait hours, days, or weeks for it to run. LLM training, in particular, is an agonizingly slow process, and the most sophisticated reasoning models can take many minutes to generate a single response. These delays are major bottlenecks for AI development, says Azalia Mirhoseini, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and senior staff scientist at Google DeepMind. “If we can run AI faster, we can innovate more,” she says. That’s why Mirhoseini has been using AI to optimize AI chips. Back in 2021, she and her collaborators at Google built a non-LLM AI system that could decide where to place various components on a computer chip to optimize efficiency. Although some other researchers failed to replicate the study’s results, Mirhoseini says that Nature investigated the paper and upheld the work’s validity—and she notes that Google has used the system’s designs for multiple generations of its custom AI chips. More recently, Mirhoseini has applied LLMs to the problem of writing kernels, low-level functions that control how various operations, like matrix multiplication, are carried out in chips. She’s found that even general-purpose LLMs can, in some cases, write kernels that run faster than the human-designed versions. Elsewhere at Google, scientists built a system that they used to optimize various parts of the company’s LLM infrastructure. The system, called AlphaEvolve, prompts Google’s Gemini LLM to write algorithms for solving some problem, evaluates those algorithms, and asks Gemini to improve on the most successful—and repeats that process several times. AlphaEvolve designed a new approach for running datacenters that saved 0.7% of Google’s computational resources, made further improvements to Google’s custom chip design, and designed a new kernel that sped up Gemini’s training by 1%.    That might sound like a small improvement, but at a huge company like Google it equates to enormous savings of time, money, and energy. And Matej Balog, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind who led the AlphaEvolve project, says that he and his team tested the system on only a small component of Gemini’s overall training pipeline. Applying it more broadly, he says, could lead to more savings.

3. Automating training LLMs are famously data hungry, and training them is costly at every stage. In some specific domains—unusual programming languages, for example—real-world data is too scarce to train LLMs effectively. Reinforcement learning with human feedback, a technique in which humans score LLM responses to prompts and the LLMs are then trained using those scores, has been key to creating models that behave in line with human standards and preferences, but obtaining human feedback is slow and expensive.  Increasingly, LLMs are being used to fill in the gaps. If prompted with plenty of examples, LLMs can generate plausible synthetic data in domains in which they haven’t been trained, and that synthetic data can then be used for training. LLMs can also be used effectively for reinforcement learning: In an approach called “LLM as a judge,” LLMs, rather than humans, are used to score the outputs of models that are being trained. That approach is key to the influential “Constitutional AI” framework proposed by Anthropic researchers in 2022, in which one LLM is trained to be less harmful based on feedback from another LLM. Data scarcity is a particularly acute problem for AI agents. Effective agents need to be able to carry out multistep plans to accomplish particular tasks, but examples of successful step-by-step task completion are scarce online, and using humans to generate new examples would be pricey. To overcome this limitation, Stanford’s Mirhoseini and her colleagues have recently piloted a technique in which an LLM agent generates a possible step-by-step approach to a given problem, an LLM judge evaluates whether each step is valid, and then a new LLM agent is trained on those steps. “You’re not limited by data anymore, because the model can just arbitrarily generate more and more experiences,” Mirhoseini says. 4. Perfecting agent design One area where LLMs haven’t yet made major contributions is in the design of LLMs themselves. Today’s LLMs are all based on a neural-network structure called a transformer, which was proposed by human researchers in 2017, and the notable improvements that have since been made to the architecture were also human-designed.  But the rise of LLM agents has created an entirely new design universe to explore. Agents need tools to interact with the outside world and instructions for how to use them, and optimizing those tools and instructions is essential to producing effective agents. “Humans haven’t spent as much time mapping out all these ideas, so there’s a lot more low-hanging fruit,” Clune says. “It’s easier to just create an AI system to go pick it.” Together with researchers at the startup Sakana AI, Clune created a system called a “Darwin Gödel Machine”: an LLM agent that can iteratively modify its prompts, tools, and other aspects of its code to improve its own task performance. Not only did the Darwin Gödel Machine achieve higher task scores through modifying itself, but as it evolved, it also managed to find new modifications that its original version wouldn’t have been able to discover. It had entered a true self-improvement loop. 5. Advancing research Although LLMs are speeding up numerous parts of the LLM development pipeline, humans may still remain essential to AI research for quite a while. Many experts point to “research taste,” or the ability that the best scientists have to pick out promising new research questions and directions, as both a particular challenge for AI and a key ingredient in AI development.  But Clune says research taste might not be as much of a challenge for AI as some researchers think. He and Sakana AI researchers are working on an end-to-end system for AI research that they call the “AI Scientist.” It searches through the scientific literature to determine its own research question, runs experiments to answer that question, and then writes up its results.
One paper that it wrote earlier this year, in which it devised and tested a new training strategy aimed at making neural networks better at combining examples from their training data, was anonymously submitted to a workshop at the International Conference on Machine Learning, or ICML—one of the most prestigious conferences in the field—with the consent of the workshop organizers. The training strategy didn’t end up working, but the paper was scored highly enough by reviewers to qualify it for acceptance (it is worth noting that ICML workshops have lower standards for acceptance than the main conference). In another instance, Clune says, the AI Scientist came up with a research idea that was later independently proposed by a human researcher on X, where it attracted plenty of interest from other scientists. “We are looking right now at the GPT-1 moment of the AI Scientist,” Clune says. “In a few short years, it is going to be writing papers that will be accepted at the top peer-reviewed conferences and journals in the world. It will be making novel scientific discoveries.”
Is superintelligence on its way? With all this enthusiasm for AI self-improvement, it seems likely that in the coming months and years, the contributions AI makes to its own development will only multiply. To hear Mark Zuckerberg tell it, this could mean that superintelligent models, which exceed human capabilities in many domains, are just around the corner. In reality, though, the impact of self-improving AI is far from certain. It’s notable that AlphaEvolve has sped up the training of its own core LLM system, Gemini—but that 1% speedup may not observably change the pace of Google’s AI advancements. “This is still a feedback loop that’s very slow,” says Balog, the AlphaEvolve researcher. “The training of Gemini takes a significant amount of time. So you can maybe see the exciting beginnings of this virtuous [cycle], but it’s still a very slow process.” If each subsequent version of Gemini speeds up its own training by an additional 1%, those accelerations will compound. And because each successive generation will be more capable than the previous one, it should be able to achieve even greater training speedups—not to mention all the other ways it might devise to improve itself. Under such circumstances, proponents of superintelligence argue, an eventual intelligence explosion looks inevitable. This conclusion, however, ignores a key observation: Innovation gets harder over time. In the early days of any scientific field, discoveries come fast and easy. There are plenty of obvious experiments to run and ideas to investigate, and none of them have been tried before. But as the science of deep learning matures, finding each additional improvement might require substantially more effort on the part of both humans and their AI collaborators. It’s possible that by the time AI systems attain human-level research abilities, humans or less-intelligent AI systems will already have plucked all the low-hanging fruit. Determining the real-world impact of AI self-improvement, then, is a mighty challenge. To make matters worse, the AI systems that matter most for AI development—those being used inside frontier AI companies—are likely more advanced than those that have been released to the general public, so measuring o3’s capabilities might not be a great way to infer what’s happening inside OpenAI. But external researchers are doing their best—by, for example, tracking the overall pace of AI development to determine whether or not that pace is accelerating. METR is monitoring advancements in AI abilities by measuring how long it takes humans to do tasks that cutting-edge systems can complete themselves. They’ve found that the length of tasks that AI systems can complete independently has, since the release of GPT-2 in 2019, doubled every seven months. 
Since 2024, that doubling time has shortened to four months, which suggests that AI progress is indeed accelerating. There may be unglamorous reasons for that: Frontier AI labs are flush with investor cash, which they can spend on hiring new researchers and purchasing new hardware. But it’s entirely plausible that AI self-improvement could also be playing a role. That’s just one indirect piece of evidence. But Davidson, the Forethought researcher, says there’s good reason to expect that AI will supercharge its own advancement, at least for a time. METR’s work suggests that the low-hanging-fruit effect isn’t slowing down human researchers today, or at least that increased investment is effectively counterbalancing any slowdown. If AI notably increases the productivity of those researchers, or even takes on some fraction of the research work itself, that balance will shift in favor of research acceleration. “You would, I think, strongly expect that there’ll be a period when AI progress speeds up,” Davidson says. “The big question is how long it goes on for.”

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The Download: OpenAI’s open-weight models, and the future of internet search

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. OpenAI has finally released open-weight language models The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. Unlike the models available through OpenAI’s web interface, these new open models can be freely downloaded, run, and even modified on laptops and other local devices. Why it matters: These releases re-establish OpenAI as a presence for users of open models. That’s particularly notable at a time when Meta, which had previously dominated the American open-model landscape with its Llama models, may be reorienting toward closed releases—and when Chinese open models are becoming more popular than their American competitors. Read the full story. 
—Grace Huckins
MIT Technology Review Narrated: AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it The biggest change to the way search engines deliver information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. Instead, you can ask questions in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers written by generative AI and based on live information from across the internet, delivered the same way.Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. And people are also worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Nvidia insists its AI chips don’t have a “kill switch”After China’s Cyberspace Administration asked for security documentation. (CNBC)+ The country’s ambitions to consolidate its chip giants aren’t going to plan. (FT $)+ Two Chinese nationals have been charged with illegally shipping chips. (Reuters) 2 America’s new data centers are driving colossal electricity demandAnd a handful of equipment makers are reaping the benefits. (FT $)+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (MIT Technology Review)

3 RFK Jr has cancelled close to $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts Which could leave us dangerously underprepared for a future pandemic. (Politico)+ We’re losing a key insight into global health. (Vox)+ How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Uber has a sexual assault problemNewly-unveiled records show it gathered far more sexual assault and misconduct reports than previously revealed. (NYT $) 5 A British politician created an AI clone of himselfAnd although it provoked a backlash, other MPs may follow his lead. (WP $)+ A former CNN journalist has interviewed an AI version of a mass-shooting victim. (The Guardian) 6 xAI’s new Grok Imagine tool has a “spicy” modeWhich seems to be code for non-consensual porn images. (The Verge)  + It’s already generated fake Taylor Swift nudes without being asked. (Ars Technica) 7 How does ChatGPT fare as a couple’s counselor?It gets some stuff right. But it also gets some things really wrong. (NPR)+ The AI relationship revolution is already here. (MIT Technology Review) 8 Syria’s refugees are returning to rebuild its tech industryBut sectarian violence and poor connectivity mean it’s an uphill battle. (Rest of World) 9 Sales of Ozempic have droppedRival Mounjaro seems to be more effective. (The Guardian)+ We’re learning more about what weight-loss drugs do to the body. (MIT Technology Review) 10 Google Calendar rules college kids’ livesThey schedule everything from assignments to parties and hook ups. (WSJ $)
Quote of the day
“This is a bad day for science.” —Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticizes the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for mRNA vaccine projects, the New York Times reports. One more thing Future space food could be made from astronaut breathThe future of space food could be as simple—and weird—as a protein shake made with astronaut breath or a burger made from fungus.For decades, astronauts have relied mostly on pre-packaged food during their forays off our planet. With missions beyond Earth orbit in sight, a NASA-led competition is hoping to change all that and usher in a new era of sustainable space food.To solve the problem of feeding astronauts on long-duration missions, NASA asked companies to propose novel ways to develop sustainable foods for future missions. Around 200 rose to the challenge—creating nutritious (and outlandish) culinary creations in the process. Read the full story.  —Jonathan O’Callaghan
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + There are a lot of funny cat videos out there but honestly, this is top-drawer.+ Check out this adorable website where people share what they see in clouds.+ Babe you’re glowing! No seriously, you literally are. + I loved watching this woman from London’s East End wax lyrical about the dawn of TV.

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Stargate’s slow start reveals the real bottlenecks in scaling AI infrastructure

The CFO emphasized that SoftBank remains committed to its original target of $346 billion (JPY 500 billion) over 4 years for the Stargate project, noting that major sites have been selected in the US and preparations are taking place simultaneously across multiple fronts. Requests for comment to Stargate partners Nvidia, OpenAI, and Oracle remain unanswered. Infrastructure reality check for CIOs These challenges offer important lessons for enterprise IT leaders facing similar AI infrastructure decisions. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, said that Goto’s confirmation of delays “reflects a challenge CIOs see repeatedly” in partner onboarding delays, service activation slips, and revised delivery commitments from cloud and datacenter providers. Oishi Mazumder, senior analyst at Everest Group, noted that “SoftBank’s Stargate delays show that AI infrastructure is not constrained by compute or capital, but by land, energy, and stakeholder alignment.” The analyst emphasized that CIOs must treat AI infrastructure “as a cross-functional transformation, not an IT upgrade, demanding long-term, ecosystem-wide planning.” “Scaling AI infrastructure depends less on the technical readiness of servers or GPUs and more on the orchestration of distributed stakeholders — utilities, regulators, construction partners, hardware suppliers, and service providers — each with their own cadence and constraints,” Gogia said.

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The Download: GPT-5 is here, and Intel’s CEO drama

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. GPT-5 is here. Now what? At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version.It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access.  GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Sam Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Donald Trump has called on Intel’s CEO to resignHe claims Lip-Bu Tan is “conflicted” by his business ties to China. (FT $)+ Tan was already at odds with some of his board members before the intervention. (WSJ $)+ But the CEO claims he’s got the full backing of his board presently. (Bloomberg $) 2 Wildfires are raging across the western USAnd strong winds are rapidly spreading them across parched land. (WP $)+ The fires have a devastating effect on human health. (The Guardian)+ How AI can help spot wildfires. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Meta’s AI superintelligence team is growingThe new TBD Lab is currently working on the newest version of its Llama model. (WSJ $)+ Meta has also been busy acquiring an AI audio firm. (The Information $)+ Elsewhere, Tesla has disbanded its supercomputer team. (Bloomberg $) 4 A man suffered psychosis after ChatGPT suggested he take sodium bromideThe 60-year old ended up with bromism. (Ars Technica)+ He’d been taking it for three months before he went to the ER. (The Independent)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Meet Silicon Valley’s AI RationalistsThe group’s influence has spread through tech giants and AI pioneers alike. (NYT $)+ Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present. (MIT Technology Review) 6 An CBP agent wore Meta smart glasses during an immigration raidSignalling that law enforcement are interested in this technology. (404 Media)

7 The US military has a new use for Tesla CybertrucksNamely, aiming missiles at them. (The Verge)+ It wants to learn how to destroy them if enemies start deploying them. (The Register) 8 South Korea will decide whether to let Google Maps work 🗺️The decades-old debate could be laid to rest next week. (The Guardian)+ The country has previously rejected Google’s requests on security grounds. (Reuters) 9 Instagram’s new location-sharing feature is hereIt’s a bid to make the app more participatory and social. (Insider $)+ It also looks a whole lot like Snap’s map. (Fast Company $)10 These headphones could help you to focus 🎧Startup Neurable wants to track your brain activity to prevent you getting distracted. (Vox)+ A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “I don’t think we should think of them as the ‘new Google’ yet.” —Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, questions the hype swirling around AI agents’ capabilities, TechCrunch reports.
One more thing
The arrhythmia of our current ageArrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure.Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s.Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands.All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Read the full story. —David Ewing Duncan

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TotalEnergies Sells Stake in Argentina Blocks to YPF

TotalEnergies announced, in a statement posted on its site recently, that its affiliate Total Austral has signed an agreement with YPF SA for the sale of its 45 percent operated interest in two unconventional oil and gas blocks in Argentina “for an amount of $500 million at a valuation of around $10,000/acre”. The blocks comprise Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada, TotalEnergies highlighted in the release. The company pointed out that these concessions are located in the Vaca Muerta area in the Neuquén Basin, comprise 51,000 net acres, and are currently in a “pilot development phase”. Completion of the transaction is subject to customary conditions, TotalEnergies noted in the statement. “The sale of Rincon La Ceniza and La Escalonada blocks is part of our active portfolio management strategy,” Javier Rielo, TotalEnergies Senior Vice President Americas, Exploration & Production, said in the statement. “TotalEnergies remains fully committed to Argentina, where it operates a large unconventional area of 183,000 nets acres in the Vaca Muerta play, after the divestment of these two blocks which represented around 20 percent of our net acreage in that play,” he added. “The company is currently producing gas and condensates from the operated blocks Aguada Pichana Este and San Roque, with a combined production of around 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in TotalEnergies share in 2024,” he continued. “This transaction allows us to unlock value from part of our portfolio, while focusing on the development of our core assets in the Neuquén Basin and in the offshore of Tierra del Fuego,” Rielo went on to state. In a translation of a letter to the Argentine Securities Commission dated August 6, which was included in a Securities and Exchange Commission document posted on the YPF website recently, YPF said it entered into a share purchase agreement

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Petrobras Misses Estimates

Brazil’s state-controlled oil producer Petrobras reported weaker-than-expected results and cut its dividend after lower oil prices offset stronger production figures.  Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as it is formally known, increased investments 30.6% on year and 9% from the previous quarter to $4.4 billion as it develops massive deep-water oil fields. Investors have been hoping to see Petrobras contain capital expenditures to help preserve shareholder payouts. Chief Executive Officer Magda Chambriard has vowed to tighten spending to navigate the challenging scenario of lower oil prices, while sticking to a production expansion.  Petrobras also cited one-off events that include asset impairments and labor agreements.  Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, was 52.3 billion reais ($9.6 billion), trailing the 56.9 billion-reais estimate. Petrobras will pay $1.6 billion in second-quarter dividends and interest on capital, it said in a filing. Expectations were for a $2.2 billion payout, according to an average of five analyst forecasts reviewed by Bloomberg.  The lower dividends came despite a significant boost in second-quarter output, driven by the rapid ramp-up of its offshore Buzios field and the nearby Mero field. The company’s oil and natural gas output climbed 7.8% year-over-year to 2.9 million barrels per day.  The company reported a sharp increase in debt that it attributed to growth in oil platform leasing with new units coming on line. Brazil needs to open up new offshore regions to oil exploration to prevent production from going into decline in the 2030s.  The Rio de Janeiro-based company hopes to get the green light for an oil-spill-simulation test at a key offshore region off the coast of the Amazon forest. The company will meet Brazil environmental officials next week for planning. The test is considered the last step to obtain a permit to drill a block in the Foz do

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Presidio to Be Listed on NYSE After Business Combination

Fort Worth, Texas-based Presidio Investment Holdings LLC is set to become a public company after entering into a definitive business combination agreement with EQV Ventures Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by EQV Group. The proposed business combination will result in Presidio being listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “FTW,” the company said in a news release. The combined company is expected to have an estimated post-transaction enterprise value of approximately $660 million, including assets acquired under the transaction, according to the release. The combined company will be named Presidio Production Company and will be led by Presidio’s existing management team, including Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack as co-CEOs. As part of the transaction, Presidio will also acquire a complementary Texas Panhandle asset from EQV Resources LLC, an affiliate of EQV. EQV’s sponsor will maintain a significant ownership stake in Presidio post-closing, the release said. Presidio said it expects to have over 2,000 operated producing wells across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas with expected net production of 26,000 barrels of oil equivalent (boepd) in 2025. To finance the transaction, EQV has entered into agreements for approximately $85 million in common stock Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) investments. The common stock PIPE is anchored by strategic and institutional investors, including an undisclosed major oil and gas company, according to the release. Further, management and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Energy Partners will provide approximately $65 million of rollover equity, the release said. Presidio said it intends to acquire and optimize additional producing oil and gas wells and then optimize the acquisitions through the application of technology, which includes automation, real-time data analytics and the introduction of artificial intelligence processes. The company said it also expects to initiate an annual common dividend of $1.35 per share

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Oil Has Performed Poorly This Week

Brent crude oil has performed poorly this week, with the front-month contract falling by nearly eight percent to reach around $67 per barrel. That’s what analysts at BMI said in a BMI report sent to Rigzone by the Fitch Group on Friday, adding that the initial sell off was triggered by the OPEC+ announcement that it would raise supply by an additional 547,000 barrels per day in September, “marking the full unwinding of the 2.2 million barrels per day of cuts that the group planned to reintroduce to market over 2025 and 2026”. “Meanwhile, tariff-related uncertainties and broad-based economic concerns loom large, exacerbated by the recent raft of tariff announcements and weak economic data releases in the U.S. raising concerns for oil demand at a time when supply is continuing to grow,” they added. The BMI analysts also noted in the report that bearish sentiment helps to explain the decline seen in Brent in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s new executive order (EO) issued August 6, which they highlighted “introduces an additional 25 percent tariff on India, effective August 27, in response to its continued purchase of Russian oil, and establishes a process for extending similar penalties to other countries”. “All else equal, the EO should be bullish for prices, to the extent that it curbs flows from Russia, the world’s second largest net exporter of oil,” they said. “However, market participants seem to share our view that there is ample scope for Trump to reverse course in response to potential concessions from Russian President Vladimir Putin,” they added. The analysts went on to state in the report that some combination of the loosening of the global oil supply and demand balance, potential pushback from India, economic fallout from higher effective tariff rates, and the rerouting of Russian oil

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