Power Moves: ETZ Ltd’s new offshore renewables director and more

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Power Moves: ETZ Ltd’s new offshore renewables director and more

Isla Robb has been appointed as the new offshore renewables director at ETZ Ltd. The appointment comes as ETZ Ltd looks to secure new offshore wind-related investment for the Energy Transition Zone and the wider region to deliver sustainable economic impact. Robb’s energy career spans the public and private sectors, with a strong focus on […]

Isla Robb has been appointed as the new offshore renewables director at ETZ Ltd.

The appointment comes as ETZ Ltd looks to secure new offshore wind-related investment for the Energy Transition Zone and the wider region to deliver sustainable economic impact.

Robb’s energy career spans the public and private sectors, with a strong focus on offshore wind and supply chain management.

As managing director of Opergy Scotland, she led numerous initiatives to support large-scale clients, SMEs, and public sector organisations, guiding them through the challenges of energy transition.

Her work in connecting local suppliers with developers through meet-the-buyer events and promoting diversity in the offshore wind industry was recognised last year when she won the prestigious Judges’ Award at Scottish Green Energy Awards 2024 and was described by the judging panel as an “inspiring force for change”.

Robb said: “It is a huge privilege to be appointed director of offshore renewables at ETZ Ltd, an organisation that is at the vanguard of energy transition and efforts to secure a vibrant and prosperous future for Aberdeen and the North East of Scotland.

“This region has all the ingredients for success, a pipeline of transformational projects on our doorstep alongside a world-class supply chain that can deliver them, and I’m relishing the opportunity draw upon my experience to ensure we unlock the investment required to maximise the vast potential afforded by offshore wind.”

Great British Energy has added five non-executive directors to its start-up board.

The new board will set a strategy for how the publicly owned company will work with the energy sector and communities to drive investment in clean energy technologies.

Frances O’Grady is a member of the House of Lords and served as general secretary for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) between 2013 and 2022.

Frank Mitchell is the former CEO for SP Energy Networks (2009 to 2022), as well as chair of Skills Development Scotland and a member of the Scottish Energy Advisory Board.

Kate Gilmartin is the CEO of the British Hydropower Association, and has a background in renewable energy and low carbon project development.

Dr Nina Skorupska is the former chief executive of the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology (REA).

And Valerie Todd is an HR professional with extensive experience across the private, public and third sectors, having previously worked as director of people and organisation at Siemens.

Together with chairman Juergen Maier, they will help to scale up GB Energy and build its organisational structure and Aberdeen headquarters.

The legislation to create GB Energy is currently going through the House of Lords and is at the committee stage.

Maier said: “This is an important milestone for Great British Energy, as we bring together an expert board to rapidly scale up the company and get to work in delivering a UK-wide clean energy revolution.

“Their experience across the energy industry, government and trade unions will be crucial in shaping our strategy and organisation, ensuring we can back clean energy projects, bolster UK supply chains and create good jobs across the country.”

Johnson Matthey non-executive director Sinead Lynch.

Sinead Lynch has joined energy solutions group Johnson Matthey as a non-executive director.

Before taking on her new role, Lynch served as senior vice president of Shell’s low-carbon fuels business from 2021 to 2024.

She also worked as UK country chair at the London-listed supermajor from 2016 to 2021.

She brings her extensive knowledge and experience of the low-carbon fuel sector to her new position, along with experience across commercial operations, organisational change and multidisciplinary integration.

Johnson Matthey has been involved in developing Kellas Midstream’s H2NorthEast hydrogen project on Teesside.

OEG Energy Group chief human resources officer Paula Richardson.

Paula Richardson has joined energy solutions business OEG Energy Group in the newly created role of chief human resources officer.

Richardson will be based at the company’s new headquarters in Dyce, Aberdeen and will also join the company’s executive team

OEG last year grew its workforce to over 1,300 employees across 65 global locations, with plans for continued expansion in renewables and other key offshore energy markets.

In her new role, Richardson will lead the strategic direction of the group’s HR function. She will focus on developing and implementing a people strategy that aligns with OEG’s growth objectives while addressing the evolving needs of the business and its diverse workforce.

Prior to joining OEG, she served as chief people officer at Donaldson Group UK, where she worked with leaders across the business to successfully develop strategies and programmes to enhance workplace culture and support leadership development.

OEG CEO John Heiton said that Richardson’s “extensive experience in people and organisational development will be instrumental in helping us achieve our growth goals and shape the future of the organisation.

“As we continue to scale, having the right people strategies in place will be critical, and Paula’s leadership in this newly created role will play a key part in our success.”

Richardson added: ” With the company’s strong commitment to growth and diversification, this is an incredible opportunity to help shape the people strategy, further strengthen its collaborative and inclusive culture, and support the development of talent across all levels.”

OEG has made several high-level appointments in recent months, including Thomas Lynch as regional director (Americas) at its OEG Renewables division and Ross Dornan as commercial market specialist.

Hydrogen Energy Association (HEA) CEO Dr Emma Guthrie.

Dr Emma Guthrie will take on the role of CEO of the Hydrogen Energy Association (HEA) starting January 30.

She succeeds Celia Greaves, who has led the HEA for two decades.

Guthrie brings a wealth of experience to the position, including 15 years at Air Products where she held a range of positions, including UK business development manager for hydrogen energy systems.

She commented: “I look forward to building on the organisation’s impressive legacy and working with members and stakeholders to accelerate the adoption of hydrogen as a key enabler of the clean energy transition.”

Greaves added: “My commitment to the hydrogen sector remains steadfast and I will continue working in the field as a consultant, supporting its growth through other avenues. This is an exciting new phase and I am confident that Emma will provide inspiration and energy as she leads the HEA forward.”

Peterson Energy Logistics CEO Sarah Moore.

Sarah Moore has joined the North Sea Transition Taskforce, an independent taskforce aimed at ensuring the North Sea’s strategic transition from oil and gas to a renewable future.

Moore currently serves as CEO of Peterson Energy Logistics, having held the position for the past three year.

Moore said: “The opportunities of the energy transition are massive but so are the challenges. Just like the generation before us united to make oil and gas the driving force of our economic success, we must now act together to get this right so we can protect the jobs of today and tomorrow.

“This is a critical juncture – a time for commitment and action. I was delighted to be asked to join this taskforce and proud to contribute perspectives of our world-leading supply chain, a supply chain which will underpin the success of the transition.”

EnerMech health, safety and environment (HSE) director Jason Harrower.

Jason Harrower has been appointed as health, safety and environment (HSE) director at Aberdeen-based technical solutions specialist EnerMech.

Based in Aberdeen, Harrower takes a position as part of the organisation’s senior leadership team having joined EnerMech in early January 2025.

In his new position at EnerMech, he has been tasked with leading the global HSE function and acting as the organisation’s senior representative for HSE matters in interactions with clients and regulatory and sector bodies.

He will also oversee EnerMech’s sustainability roadmap and action planning across the business.

EnerMech CEO Charles Davison Jr. said: “This is a crucial senior appointment for EnerMech and we welcome Jason to the team. He comes with a reputation for strategic leadership and a keen eye for operational management detail and takes on a vital role in providing direction and oversight for our colleagues.

“As an organisation with a large multi-disciplined workforce supporting clients spanning many geographies and sectors, safety is absolutely vital to ensuring operations run smoothly and without disruption.

“It’s an area we at EnerMech pride ourselves on taking seriously and Jason is the right candidate to further this commitment.”

EnerMech had a management shakeup recently, adding new people to high-level positions.

Ruben Alvarez has been appointed as the new CEO of rotating equipment specialist John Crane.

Effective 1 February, he will take over from outgoing CEO Bernard Cicut.

Alvarez brings 27 years of company experience to the role, most recently serving as divisional vice president of portfolios and customer operations.

Under his leadership, the company will continue to focus on developing innovative engineering solutions and services that prioritise a customer-first approach while also committing to sustainable practices that protect the environment.

He said: “I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Bernard for his leadership of John Crane over the past few years.

“The demand for our technical expertise has never been greater. At John Crane, we are uniquely positioned to innovate and pioneer new solutions and services.

“Solutions that will support the safe adoption of a range of clean power alternatives as well as reducing emissions in the traditional energy sectors.”

The appointment comes at a strategic time for John Crane, part of Smiths Group, as the company continues to develop solutions that support both clean power adoption and emissions reduction in traditional energy sectors.

Knights MPR consultant and sustainability lead Karen Clark.

Karen Clark has been appointed as consultant and sustainability lead at communication agency Knights MPR.

Clark, who originally hails from Aberdeen, joins the company’s growing team of experienced communication specialists and ex-journalists and will be based in the north-east of Scotland.

In the newly created role, she will lead operations in Scotland, whilst providing communication services to Knights MPR’s portfolio of international clients operating in the maritime, energy and manufacturing sectors.

In addition, she will support all of Knights MPR’s clients on sustainability matters.

Clark said: “We’ve seen a monumental shift in the corporate mindset in recent years; the gap between profitability and responsibility is closing. Businesses are delivering positive change quickly and at scale, however many face challenges effectively communicating corporate sustainability.

“As net zero targets rapidly approach; mindful, targeted, and impactful communication has never been more important.”

IK Trax Europe and Africa account manager Scott Glendinning.

Scott Glendinning has been appointed as Europe and Africa account manager at pipeline engineering specialists IK Trax.

In his new position, Glendinning will help drive the company’s focus on accounts across Europe and Africa.

He brings over 30 years of experience in the oil and gas industry to the company. His most recent positions include commercial manager at TAQA and business development manager Africa & UK at TCO.

Vestas chief financial officer Jakob Wegge-Larsen.

Jakob Wegge-Larsen will take on the position of chief financial officer at Vestas during the second quarter of 2025.

He joins Vestas from DB Schenker, where he currently serves as CFO and a member of its management board.

Rasmus Gram will continue as interim CFO until Jakob Wegge-Larsen starts and conduct a thorough handover as part of Jakob’s induction.

Wegge-Larsen replaces Hans Martin Smith, who stepped down as CFO at Vestas at the end of 2024.

Vestas president and CEO Henrik Andersen said: “Jakob will spearhead our finance organisation as we aim to achieve our long-term target of double-digit profitability and I am confident his extensive experience from several large, global companies will be instrumental for our continued progress.”

Exolum CEO Jorge Lanza and chairwoman Rosa Garcia.

Jorge Lanza and Rosa Garcia, CEO and chairwoman of logistics company Exolum will step down from their respective roles.

Their departure from the company will be effective after the annual shareholders’ general meeting in May.

Over their nine-year tenure, both have helped transform Exolum (formerly Compania Logistica de Hidrocarburos – CLH), beginning its internationalisation and diversification.

The company is now present in 11 different countries and is expanding its range of services to the storage and transportation of chemical products, including hydrogen and ammonia.

The company’s board of directors has appointed Alfredo Barrios as the new chairman and Javier Goni as its new CEO.

The Spanish group is developing a green hydrogen project at the Port of Immingham in Lincolnshire.

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Stay ahead with more perspectives on cutting-edge power, infrastructure, energy, bitcoin and AI solutions. Explore these articles to uncover strategies and insights shaping the future of industries.

F5 tackles AI security with new platform extensions

F5 AI Guardrails deploys as a proxy between users and AI models. Wormke describes it as being inserted as a proxy layer at the “front door” of AI interaction, between AI applications, users and agents. It intercepts prompts before they reach the model and analyzes outputs before they return to

AWS European cloud service launch raises questions over sovereignty

There are examples of similar scenarios in recent years. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor was reportedly shut out of Microsoft applications following the imposition of US sanctions, for example. Other instances include Adobe cutting off Venezuelan customers in compliance with US sanctions against that country in 2019, while Microsoft

Cisco finally patches seven-week-old zero-day flaw in Secure Email Gateway products

“Talos assesses with moderate confidence that this activity is being conducted by a Chinese-nexus threat actor, which we track as UAT-9686. As part of this activity, UAT-9686 deploys a custom persistence mechanism we track as ‘AquaShell’ accompanied by additional tooling meant for reverse tunneling and purging logs,” Cisco Talos said.

IP Fabric 7.9 boosts visibility across hybrid environments

Multicloud and hybrid network viability has also been extended to include IPv6 path analysis, helping teams reason about connectivity in dual-stack and hybrid environments. This capability addresses a practical challenge for enterprises deploying IPv6 alongside existing IPv4 infrastructure. Network teams can now validate that applications can reach IPv6 endpoints and

Batistas Poised for Venezuelan Oil Revival

The billionaire Batista brothers are eyeing a billion-barrel Venezuelan oil project that stands to benefit from US President Donald Trump’s planned revival of the South American nation’s energy sector. The Batistas, who control the world’s biggest meatpacker, are discreetly positioned on the outskirts of Venezuela’s oil sector via the stake one of their business associates holds in the Petrolera Roraima project, according to people familiar with the situation. Prior to the ouster of strongman Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, a commercial representative of the Batistas obtained a stake in a cluster of oilfields formerly operated by ConocoPhillips. Fluxus, an oil company owned by the Batistas, could join that or other petroleum developments in the country once the business outlook clears up, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing non-public information. J&F SA, the Brazilian brothers’ holding company, said in response to questions that it doesn’t have any assets in Venezuela, and is closely monitoring events. “Once a scenario of institutional stability and legal certainty is established, we will be ready to evaluate investments,” J&F said in an email. The Batistas have taken a cautious approach to Venezuela since the US imposed sanctions because of extensive American investments that include chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., people familiar with their business strategy said. Although Trump has said the Venezuelan government “stole” oil riches claimed by American companies such as ConocoPhillips during a nationalization drive almost 20 years ago, he also has evinced no desire to reverse those asset seizures. That indicates the Batistas are in pole position to help expand the country’s oil production while US and European drillers await stronger financial and security guarantees. Since Maduro’s fall, Joesley Batista has emerged as a key figure in the post-Maduro transition. Last week, he flew from Washington to Caracas for

Reliance Posts Refining Gains despite Sourcing Challenges

Reliance Industries Ltd saw revenue from its oil-to-chemicals segment for the quarter ended December 2025 (third quarter of financial year 2026) increase 8.4 percent from Q3 FY 2025 to $18 billion. That was helped by a two percent increase in refining throughput with 20.6 million metric tons of crude processed in the three-month period, despite challenges in procuring oil, according to an online statement by the diversified Indian conglomerate. “Agile crude sourcing helped sustain throughput despite procurement challenges”, Reliance said. “Partial resumption of Red Sea route also benefitted operations”, it added. Reliance operates what it says is the world’s biggest single-site refinery in Jamnagar, India. The facility has a declared processing capacity of 1.4 million barrels a day. The Q3 FY2026 statement said refinery utilization was maximized “to capture high margins”. Reliance reported 18.2 million metric tons in production meant for sale, up 1.7 percent year-on-year. Reliance’s fuel retailing network under the Reliance BP Mobility Ltd brand, a joint venture with BP PLC, expanded by 14 percent year-over-year to 2,125 outlets, driving volume growth of over 20 percent, according to the statement. A “sharp increase in transportation fuel cracks and higher sulfur realization” drove a 14.6 percent year-on-year increase to $1.18 billion in petrochemicals EBITDA. The improvement in transport fuel cracks was aided by “continued disruptions in Russian supply and unplanned outages in other regions”, Reliance said. “US/EU sanctions on Russian refiners further tightened fuel markets”. On the other hand, Reliance saw “weakness in downstream chemical margins and higher feedstock freight rates”. However, it added, “Favorable ethane cracking economics and domestic market placements continued to support profitability”. At the backdrop, both global and domestic demand for oil products grew year-on-year in Q3 FY2026, partially offset by a price decline, the statement noted. “Crude oil benchmarks declined y-o-y on expectations of

Why Is the USA Natural Gas Price Rising Today?

Why is the U.S. natural gas price rising today? That was the question Rigzone asked Ole R. Hvalbye, a commodities analyst at Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB), in an exclusive interview on Monday. Responding to the question, Hvalbye highlighted to Rigzone that Henry Hub was trading around $3.5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) today, “up from [around] … $3.1 per MMBtu before the weekend”, and noted that “the drivers look fairly straightforward and well known rather than structural”. “Short-term forecasts turned colder across parts of the U.S., lifting heating demand expectations and supporting front-end prices,” Hvalbye told Rigzone. “Feedgas flows remain elevated and firm, reinforcing near-term demand for U.S. gas and tightening the spot balance marginally,” he added. “After the recent sell-off, the market was relatively short, so colder weather and steady LNG demand triggered short-covering rather than fresh long positioning,” he continued. Hvalbye went on to state that, “on the supply side, there’s no disruption story”. “U.S. production remains strong, storage is still comfortable, and nothing suggests a sudden structural tightening from my data – i.e., a reason why the move looks tactical rather than fundamental,” he pointed out. Hvalbye highlighted to Rigzone that today’s price increase “isn’t a clean breakout”, adding that prices “are roughly back to where they were a week ago, so part of today’s move is simply retracing last week’s dip”. “In short: weather plus LNG demand plus positioning explain today’s strength. It’s a bounce, not a regime shift,” he added. In a separate exclusive interview with Rigzone on Monday, Art Hogan, Chief Market Strategist at B. Riley Wealth, said U.S. natural gas “is bouncing off a 13-week low of $3.10 last week after the weather outlook for late January shifted colder”. “The colder than normal outlook is expected to drive strong heating demand

Var Energi Raises Estimates for New Barents Sea Oil Discovery

An appraisal well has confirmed Vår Energi ASA’ Zagato oil discovery in the Goliat area on Norway’s side of the North Sea, with preliminary estimated recoverable resources of 21-25 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe), the Norwegian Offshore Directorate (NOD) said. That is equivalent to 3.3-11.9 million standard cubic meters of oil equivalent (MMscmoe), up from the previous estimate of 2.8-10.1 MMscmoe before appraisal well 7122/8-3 A was drilled, the upstream regulator said in a press release. The latest target represents the 14th exploration well drilled in production license 229, awarded under the Barents Sea Project in 1997, the NOD noted. Var Energi said separately, “The latest well tested two intervals with each showing maximum flow rates of more than 4,000 barrels of oil per day, confirming reservoir quality”. “The production tests confirmed good quality reservoirs and oil quality similar to the Goliat field”, Vår Energi said. Goliat, discovered 2000, started producing 2016 and expanded with the startup of the Snadd and Goliat West accumulations in 2017 and 2021 respectively, according to field information on government website Norskpetroleum.no. Operator Vår Energi (65 percent) and partner Equinor ASA (35 percent) have now drilled five wells in the Goliat Ridge, Vår Energi noted. “Including the latest well, the Goliat Ridge is estimated to contain gross discovered recoverable resources of 35-138 MMboe, and with additional prospective resources taking the total gross potential to over 200 MMboe”, it said. “A tie-back to the nearby Goliat FPSO [floating production, storage and offloading vessel] is being planned, targeting first production in 2019. “Vår Energi was recently awarded an adjacent license to the Goliat field in the 2025 Awards in Predefined Areas, which offers additional prospectivity on trend with the Goliat Ridge discovery”. Norskpetroleum.no says plans for Goliat include a connection to the Equinor-operated gas liquefaction facility on Melkøya island. “The recent discoveries reinforce Vår Energi’s position as a leading exploration company on the Norwegian continental shelf and continue to strengthen our ability to sustain high-value production of

Where Will the WTI Oil Price Land in 2026 and 2027?

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest short term energy outlook (STEO) which was published on January 13, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) spot price average will drop in 2026 and 2027. The EIA projected in this STEO that the WTI spot price will come in at $52.21 per barrel this year and $50.36 per barrel next year. The commodity averaged $65.40 per barrel in 2025, the EIA’s January STEO showed. A quarterly breakdown included in the outlook forecast that the WTI spot price will come in at $54.93 per barrel in the first quarter of 2026, $52.67 per barrel in the second quarter, $52.03 per barrel in the third quarter, $49.34 per barrel in the fourth quarter, $49.00 per barrel in the first quarter of 2027, $50.66 per barrel in the second quarter, $50.68 per barrel in the third quarter, and $51.00 per barrel in the fourth quarter of next year. In its previous STEO, which was released in December, the EIA projected that the WTI spot price would average $65.32 per barrel in 2025 and $51.42 per barrel in 2026. That STEO did not offer an average WTI spot price forecast for 2027. The EIA’s November STEO saw the WTI spot price averaging $65.15 per barrel in 2025 and $51.26 per barrel in 2026. A chart hosted on the EIA’s website, which was last updated on January 14 and displayed the annual average Cushing, OK, WTI spot price, on a free on board basis, from 1986 to 2025, showed that this commodity hit a peak in 2008, at $99.67 per barrel. The commodity saw its lowest price, between 1986 and 2025, in 1986, at $15.05 per barrel, the chart highlighted. The highest price the commodity has seen this decade came in 2022, at $94.90 per barrel,

Leviathan Partners Approve Expansion Project

Chevron Corp and its local partners have agreed on a $2.36-billion final investment decision (FID) for stage 1 of a project to raise production in the Leviathan natural gas and condensate field offshore Israel. Expected to start operation in the second half of 2029, the first stage of Phase 1B aims to increase capacity to about 21 billion cubic meters (741.61 billion cubic feet) a year, consortium member NewMed Energy LP said in a stock filing on Friday. On August 21, 2025, it said the Energy and Infrastructures Ministry had approved Phase 1B. Leviathan, discovered 2010 off the coast of Haifa city, went onstream December 2019 under Phase 1A, which has a capacity of about 12 Bcm per annum, according to NewMed Energy. Chevron upstream president Clay Neff said in a separate statement issued online by the United States energy giant, “Chevron is a leading energy player in the Eastern Mediterranean, where we are focused on natural gas production and exports”. “Our decision to invest in the expansion of Leviathan’s production capacity reflects our confidence in the future of energy in the region”, Neff added. Neff claimed, “Pragmatic U.S. and regional energy policies are helping to strengthen energy security across the Eastern Mediterranean and foster an environment that encourages investment in the Middle East and globally”. “This milestone demonstrates our ongoing commitment to partner with the state of Israel to develop natural gas resources and provide essential energy to millions of people in Israel, Egypt and Jordan”, said Jack Baker, Chevron managing director for the Eastern Mediterranean. NewMed Energy’s regulatory disclosure said, “According to the development plan, Stage One of the Expansion Project includes the drilling and completion of three additional production wells, the addition of supplementary subsea systems and expansion of the processing systems on the platform, with the aim

NVIDIA’s Rubin Redefines the AI Factory

The Architecture Shift: From “GPU Server” to “Rack-Scale Supercomputer” NVIDIA’s Rubin architecture is built around a single design thesis: “extreme co-design.” In practice, that means GPUs, CPUs, networking, security, software, power delivery, and cooling are architected together; treating the data center as the compute unit, not the individual server. That logic shows up most clearly in the NVL72 system. NVLink 6 serves as the scale-up spine, designed to let 72 GPUs communicate all-to-all with predictable latency, something NVIDIA argues is essential for mixture-of-experts routing and synchronization-heavy inference paths. NVIDIA is not vague about what this requires. Its technical materials describe the Rubin GPU as delivering 50 PFLOPS of NVFP4 inference and 35 PFLOPS of NVFP4 training, with 22 TB/s of HBM4 bandwidth and 3.6 TB/s of NVLink bandwidth per GPU. The point of that bandwidth is not headline-chasing. It is to prevent a rack from behaving like 72 loosely connected accelerators that stall on communication. NVIDIA wants the rack to function as a single engine because that is what it will take to drive down cost per token at scale. The New Idea NVIDIA Is Elevating: Inference Context Memory as Infrastructure If there is one genuinely new concept in the Rubin announcements, it is the elevation of context memory, and the admission that GPU memory alone will not carry the next wave of inference. NVIDIA describes a new tier called NVIDIA Inference Context Memory Storage, powered by BlueField-4, designed to persist and share inference state (such as KV caches) across requests and nodes for long-context and agentic workloads. NVIDIA says this AI-native context tier can boost tokens per second by up to 5× and improve power efficiency by up to 5× compared with traditional storage approaches. The implication is clear: the path to cheaper inference is not just faster GPUs.

Power shortages, carbon capture, and AI automation: What’s ahead for data centers in 2026

“Despite a broader use of AI tools in enterprises and by consumers, that does not mean that AI compute, AI infrastructure in general, will be more evenly spread out,” said Daniel Bizo, research director at Uptime Institute, during the webinar. “The concentration of AI compute infrastructure is only increasing in the coming years.” For enterprises, the infrastructure investment remains relatively modest, Uptime Institute found. Enterprises will limit investment to inference and only some training, and inference workloads don’t require dramatic capacity increases. “Our prediction, our observation, was that the concentration of AI compute infrastructure is only increasing in the coming years by a couple of points. By the end of this year, 2026, we are projecting that around 10 gigawatts of new IT load will have been added to the global data center world, specifically to run generative AI workloads and adjacent workloads, but definitely centered on generative AI,” Bizo said. “This means these 10 gigawatts or so load, we are talking about anywhere between 13 to 15 million GPUs and accelerators deployed globally. We are anticipating that a majority of these are and will be deployed in supercomputing style.” 2. Developers will not outrun the power shortage The most pressing challenge facing the industry, according to Uptime, is that data centers can be built in less than three years, but power generation takes much longer. “It takes three to six years to deploy a solar or wind farm, around six years for a combined-cycle gas turbine plant, and even optimistically, it probably takes more than 10 years to deploy a conventional nuclear power plant,” said Max Smolaks, research analyst at Uptime Institute. This mismatch was manageable when data centers were smaller and growth was predictable, the report notes. But with projects now measured in tens and sometimes hundreds of

Google warns transmission delays are now the biggest threat to data center expansion

The delays stem from aging transmission infrastructure unable to handle concentrated power demands. Building regional transmission lines currently takes seven to eleven years just for permitting, Hanna told the gathering. Southwest Power Pool has projected 115 days of potential loss of load if transmission infrastructure isn’t built to match demand growth, he added. These systemic delays are forcing enterprises to reconsider fundamental assumptions about cloud capacity. Regions including Northern Virginia and Santa Clara that were prime locations for hyperscale builds are running out of power capacity. The infrastructure constraints are also reshaping cloud competition around power access rather than technical capabilities. “This is no longer about who gets to market with the most GPU instances,” Gogia said. “It’s about who gets to the grid first.” Co-location emerges as a faster alternative to grid delays Unable to wait years for traditional grid connections, hyperscalers are pursuing co-location arrangements that place data centers directly adjacent to power plants, bypassing the transmission system entirely. Pricing for these arrangements has jumped 20% in power-constrained markets as demand outstrips availability, with costs flowing through to cloud customers via regional pricing differences, Gogia said. Google is exploring such arrangements, though Hanna said the company’s “strong preference is grid-connected load.” “This is a speed to power play for us,” he said, noting Google wants facilities to remain “front of the meter” to serve the broader grid rather than operating as isolated power sources. Other hyperscalers are negotiating directly with utilities, acquiring land near power plants, and exploring ownership stakes in power infrastructure from batteries to small modular nuclear reactors, Hanna said.

OpenAI turns to Cerebras in a mega deal to scale AI inference infrastructure

Analysts expect AI workloads to grow more varied and more demanding in the coming years, driving the need for architectures tuned for inference performance and putting added pressure on data center networks. “This is prompting hyperscalers to diversify their computing systems, using Nvidia GPUs for general-purpose AI workloads, in-house AI accelerators for highly optimized tasks, and systems such as Cerebras for specialized low-latency workloads,” said Neil Shah, vice president for research at Counterpoint Research. As a result, AI platforms operating at hyperscale are pushing infrastructure providers away from monolithic, general-purpose clusters toward more tiered and heterogeneous infrastructure strategies. “OpenAI’s move toward Cerebras inference capacity reflects a broader shift in how AI data centers are being designed,” said Prabhu Ram, VP of the industry research group at Cybermedia Research. “This move is less about replacing Nvidia and more about diversification as inference scales.” At this level, infrastructure begins to resemble an AI factory, where city-scale power delivery, dense east–west networking, and low-latency interconnects matter more than peak FLOPS, Ram added. “At this magnitude, conventional rack density, cooling models, and hierarchical networks become impractical,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. “Inference workloads generate continuous, latency-sensitive traffic rather than episodic training bursts, pushing architectures toward flatter network topologies, higher-radix switching, and tighter integration of compute, memory, and interconnect.”

Cisco’s 2026 agenda prioritizes AI-ready infrastructure, connectivity

While most of the demand for AI data center capacity today comes from hyperscalers and neocloud providers, that will change as enterprise customers delve more into the AI networking world. “The other ecosystem members and enterprises themselves are becoming responsible for an increasing proportion of the AI infrastructure buildout as inferencing and agentic AI, sovereign cloud, and edge AI become more mainstream,” Katz wrote. More enterprises will move to host AI on premises via the introduction of AI agents that are designed to inject intelligent insight into applications and help improve operations. That’s where the AI impact on enterprise network traffic will appear, suggests Nolle. “Enterprises need to host AI to create AI network impact. Just accessing it doesn’t do much to traffic. Having cloud agents access local data center resources (RAG etc.) creates a governance issue for most corporate data, so that won’t go too far either,” Nolle said. “Enterprises are looking at AI agents, not the way hyperscalers tout agentic AI, but agents running on small models, often open-source, and are locally hosted. This is where real AI traffic will develop, and Cisco could be vulnerable if they don’t understand this point and at least raise it in dialogs where AI hosting comes up,” Nolle said. “I don’t expect they’d go too far, because the real market for enterprise AI networking is probably a couple years out.” Meanwhile, observers expect Cisco to continue bolstering AI networking capabilities for enterprise branch, campus and data centers as well as hyperscalers, including through optical support and other gear.

Microsoft tells communities it will ‘pay its way’ as AI data center resource usage sparks backlash

It will work with utilities and public commissions to set the rates it pays high enough to cover data center electricity costs (including build-outs, additions, and active use). “Our goal is straightforward: To ensure that the electricity cost of serving our data centers is not passed on to residential customers,” Smith emphasized. For example, the company is supporting a new rate structure Wisconsin that would charge a class of “very large customers,” including data centers, the true cost of the electricity required to serve them. It will collaborate “early, closely, and transparently” with local utilities to add electricity and supporting infrastructure to existing grids when needed. For instance, Microsoft has contracted with the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) to add 7.9GW of new electricity generation to the grid, “more than double our current consumption,” Smith noted. It will pursue ways to make data centers more efficient. For example, it is already experimenting with AI to improve planning, extract more electricity from existing infrastructure, improve system resilience, and speed development of new infrastructure and technologies (like nuclear energy). It will advocate for state and national public policies that ensure electricity access that is affordable, reliable, and sustainable in neighboring communities. Microsoft previously established priorities for electricity policy advocacy, Smith noted, but “progress has been uneven. This needs to change.” Microsoft is similarly committed when it comes to data center water use, promising four actions: Reducing the overall amount of water its data centers use, initially improving it by 40% by 2030. The company is exploring innovations in cooling, including closed-loop systems that recirculate cooling liquids. It will collaborate with local utilities to map out water, wastewater, and pressure needs, and will “fully fund” infrastructure required for growth. For instance, in Quincy, Washington, Microsoft helped construct a water reuse utility that recirculates

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

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

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

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

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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

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

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

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