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Puerto Rico Board Suspends $20B New Fortress Gas Deal
Puerto Rico’s finance watchdog is refusing to OK a $20 billion natural gas supply deal that it said would give New Fortress Energy Inc. a near monopoly over the island’s energy future. The Financial Oversight and Management Board has “profound concerns” about a proposed 15-year contract between Genera PR – a New Fortress subsidiary that operates the territory’s power plants – and the company unit that delivers liquefied gas, according to a letter to Puerto Rico’s energy czar, Josue Colon. Approving the contract would “lock the island into a long-term commitment with a single supplier, potentially undermining market competition and limiting flexibility,” the board wrote, saying the deal would create a “monopolistic arrangement that would ultimately jeopardize energy security.” New Fortress Energy did not respond to a request for comment. Colon’s office declined to immediately comment on the letter. The watchdog’s objections are just the latest blow to New Fortress, which lost more than 80 percent of its market value in the last year as it struggles to shore up its finances and reassure investors and bondholders. The shares fell as much as 19 percent on Thursday. “Given the magnitude of the proposed contract and the critical nature of the services at stake, it would be irresponsible for the Oversight Board to review the proposed contract thoroughly in this short time,” the board wrote. Even so, the board said it is willing to meet with all those involved to ensure the deal is “fiscally responsible.” New Fortress already is a key supplier of LNG to Puerto Rico’s power sector. Other sources include EcoElectrica and Crowley, which ship the fuel to plants operated by other companies. New Fortress’ initial LNG supply contract was due to expire in June but has been extended on a temporary basis. In April, government agencies called for bids to provide

Argentina Asks US Appeals Court to Delay YPF Turnover Order
Argentina asked a US appeals court for an emergency delay of an order requiring it to hand over by a Monday deadline its controlling stake in energy company YPF SA to help satisfy a $16 billion judgment. The government of Argentine President Javier Milei requested the delay Thursday afternoon, hours after filing notice it was appealing the June 30 handover order by US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York. The South American nation likened Preska’s order to a foreign court directing the US government to “pack up the gold stored at Fort Knox and ship it abroad.” Argentina wants the federal appeals court in New York to put the order on hold while it considers the country’s arguments to overturn Preska’s decision, a process that could take months. Preska, who ruled in 2023 that Argentina owed billions to shareholders affected by a 2012 nationalization of YPF, found last month that the country’s 51 percent stake wasn’t shielded by foreign sovereign immunity. Preska ordered Argentina to turn over the shares within 14 days to a group led by Burford Capital, a litigation funding firm that acquired the interests of original YPF shareholders. An Argentine law passed at the time of the nationalization bars Milei’s government from transferring the government’s YPF stake without a two-thirds vote of the national Congress. Without a delay, Argentina on Monday faces a choice among “changing its own domestic laws, violating those laws, or disregarding a US court’s order,” the country said in a court filing. The June 30 ruling came as a major blow to Milei, who inherited the case when he took office about 18 months ago promising to turn around Argentina’s flailing economy. Argentina’s sovereign bonds and YPF shares both dropped after the ruling, while the country’s parallel exchange rate weakened. Milei vowed to

Mozambique’s $57B LNG Projects Get Reboot Despite Risk
Four years after terrorist attacks halted a massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique, momentum behind $57 billion in facilities that will export the fuel is picking up. TotalEnergies SE and Eni SpA have readied contractors and signed agreements for preliminary work on projects to add capacity. In addition, the French major’s Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne was scheduled to meet Mozambican President Daniel Chapo on Thursday, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Revenue from gas exports could be significant for the southern African nation, one of the world’s poorest. At the same time, developers must weigh the risk of renewed terrorist attacks, which prompted Total to halt its $20 billion facility in 2021 in the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Mozambique has deployed its army, police, mercenaries and regional armed forces to end the attacks by the Islamic State-linked insurgents. But they have not been stamped out. “Activity by the insurgent group will remain a threat to LNG timelines and the operating environment across Cabo Delgado province,” said Ryan Cummings, director at Cape Town-based Signal Risk. “A near-term resumption of LNG-related activity could be a trigger for renewed attacks.” Fighting intensified in June, with Islamic State claiming what would be among its deadliest single assaults on security forces. Chapo said in an interview last week that Total’s 2021 declaration of force majeure would remain in place indefinitely “if we’re waiting for Cabo Delgado to be a heaven.” He described business as proceeding as usual in the district of Palma, where attacks occurred that precipitated shuttering the project. Over the last few months, Total received approval for key financing from the US Export-Import Bank. Pouyanne has likened remaining obstacles to “more a question of paperwork,” while

Energy Department Authorizes Strategic Petroleum Reserve Exchange to Support Fuel Supply in Gulf Coast
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the authorization of an exchange from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with ExxonMobil Corporation to address logistical challenges impacting crude oil deliveries to the company’s Baton Rouge refinery. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright authorized this action to help maintain stable regional supply of transportation fuels across Louisiana and the broader Gulf Coast. This action preserves the SPR’s operational flexibility and will not impact or delay the Department’s ongoing efforts to refill the reserve. Under the exchange agreement, DOE will provide up to 1 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR. The exchange will support ExxonMobil’s restoration of refinery operations that were reduced due to an offshore supply disruption. ExxonMobil will return the borrowed crude along with additional barrels of crude oil for the SPR at no cost to the taxpayer. The Department remains in close coordination with industry partners to ensure stability in the fuel supply chain during the peak demand season. DOE continues to encourage refiners to prioritize efficient production and delivery of refined fuels, stands ready to support the nation’s energy security through the responsible use of strategic resources, and will continue to deliver on President Trump’s commitment to protect American energy security by refilling the SPR. Background: Sections 159 and 160 of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 6239 and 6240, authorize the Secretary of Energy to exchange SPR petroleum products and to acquire petroleum products by exchange for storage in the SPR. The Secretary of Energy has previously exercised this legal authority to conduct emergency exchanges in response to supply disruptions, including Keystone Pipeline in 2022, and the Calcasieu Ship Channel closures in 2006 and 2000. An oil supply disruption has led to reduced operations at the Baton Rouge refinery, limiting production

Nvidia hits $4T market cap as AI, high-performance semiconductors hit stride
“The company added $1 trillion in market value in less than a year, a pace that surpasses Apple and Microsoft’s previous trajectories. This rapid ascent reflects how indispensable AI chipmakers have become in today’s digital economy,” Kiran Raj, practice head, Strategic Intelligence (Disruptor) at GlobalData, said in a statement. According to GlobalData’s Innovation Radar report, “AI Chips – Trends, Market Dynamics and Innovations,” the global AI chip market is projected to reach $154 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%. Nvidia has much of that market, but it also has a giant bullseye on its back with many competitors gunning for its crown. “With its AI chips powering everything from data centers and cloud computing to autonomous vehicles and robotics, Nvidia is uniquely positioned. However, competitive pressure is mounting. Players like AMD, Intel, Google, and Huawei are doubling down on custom silicon, while regulatory headwinds and export restrictions are reshaping the competitive dynamics,” he said.

Ignoring customers is unsustainable and bad policy
Kent Chandler is a resident senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, Chris Villarreal is an associate fellow in energy and environmental policy at R Street and Michael Giberson is a senior fellow in energy policy at R Street. Electric bills are rising, and energy adequacy is at the top of policymakers’ agendas. The most recent North American Electric Reliability Corp. analysis indicates that much of the country is at an elevated risk this summer of experiencing insufficient operating reserves in above-normal conditions. Given the backlogs of generator interconnection requests and gas turbine orders, the delays inherent in current state and federal siting regimes, and the immediacy of load growth in certain parts of the country, it is clear we can’t build our way out of this situation in the near-term. However, enabling flexible customer demand can drive significant system-wide benefits, mitigating the cost or timing of expensive system upgrades. Now is the time for states to take action to empower consumers to play a greater role in their individual and collective energy future. It’s been 30 years since some states began restructuring their electricity laws, allowing customers to buy electricity from suppliers other than their incumbent utilities. However, even with significant leaps in technological innovation and expansion of wholesale markets, implementation of retail choice and customer empowerment within vertically-integrated states has lagged. To determine the state of play for customers to make their own electricity choices, we recently completed a review of consumer choice, retail competition and customer empowerment in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, culminating in a report grading the states on their level of customer empowerment. As you might imagine, the grades vary, from Texas receiving an A- to Alabama receiving the effort’s lone F. Regardless of the grade

Puerto Rico Board Suspends $20B New Fortress Gas Deal
Puerto Rico’s finance watchdog is refusing to OK a $20 billion natural gas supply deal that it said would give New Fortress Energy Inc. a near monopoly over the island’s energy future. The Financial Oversight and Management Board has “profound concerns” about a proposed 15-year contract between Genera PR – a New Fortress subsidiary that operates the territory’s power plants – and the company unit that delivers liquefied gas, according to a letter to Puerto Rico’s energy czar, Josue Colon. Approving the contract would “lock the island into a long-term commitment with a single supplier, potentially undermining market competition and limiting flexibility,” the board wrote, saying the deal would create a “monopolistic arrangement that would ultimately jeopardize energy security.” New Fortress Energy did not respond to a request for comment. Colon’s office declined to immediately comment on the letter. The watchdog’s objections are just the latest blow to New Fortress, which lost more than 80 percent of its market value in the last year as it struggles to shore up its finances and reassure investors and bondholders. The shares fell as much as 19 percent on Thursday. “Given the magnitude of the proposed contract and the critical nature of the services at stake, it would be irresponsible for the Oversight Board to review the proposed contract thoroughly in this short time,” the board wrote. Even so, the board said it is willing to meet with all those involved to ensure the deal is “fiscally responsible.” New Fortress already is a key supplier of LNG to Puerto Rico’s power sector. Other sources include EcoElectrica and Crowley, which ship the fuel to plants operated by other companies. New Fortress’ initial LNG supply contract was due to expire in June but has been extended on a temporary basis. In April, government agencies called for bids to provide

Argentina Asks US Appeals Court to Delay YPF Turnover Order
Argentina asked a US appeals court for an emergency delay of an order requiring it to hand over by a Monday deadline its controlling stake in energy company YPF SA to help satisfy a $16 billion judgment. The government of Argentine President Javier Milei requested the delay Thursday afternoon, hours after filing notice it was appealing the June 30 handover order by US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York. The South American nation likened Preska’s order to a foreign court directing the US government to “pack up the gold stored at Fort Knox and ship it abroad.” Argentina wants the federal appeals court in New York to put the order on hold while it considers the country’s arguments to overturn Preska’s decision, a process that could take months. Preska, who ruled in 2023 that Argentina owed billions to shareholders affected by a 2012 nationalization of YPF, found last month that the country’s 51 percent stake wasn’t shielded by foreign sovereign immunity. Preska ordered Argentina to turn over the shares within 14 days to a group led by Burford Capital, a litigation funding firm that acquired the interests of original YPF shareholders. An Argentine law passed at the time of the nationalization bars Milei’s government from transferring the government’s YPF stake without a two-thirds vote of the national Congress. Without a delay, Argentina on Monday faces a choice among “changing its own domestic laws, violating those laws, or disregarding a US court’s order,” the country said in a court filing. The June 30 ruling came as a major blow to Milei, who inherited the case when he took office about 18 months ago promising to turn around Argentina’s flailing economy. Argentina’s sovereign bonds and YPF shares both dropped after the ruling, while the country’s parallel exchange rate weakened. Milei vowed to

Mozambique’s $57B LNG Projects Get Reboot Despite Risk
Four years after terrorist attacks halted a massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique, momentum behind $57 billion in facilities that will export the fuel is picking up. TotalEnergies SE and Eni SpA have readied contractors and signed agreements for preliminary work on projects to add capacity. In addition, the French major’s Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne was scheduled to meet Mozambican President Daniel Chapo on Thursday, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Revenue from gas exports could be significant for the southern African nation, one of the world’s poorest. At the same time, developers must weigh the risk of renewed terrorist attacks, which prompted Total to halt its $20 billion facility in 2021 in the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Mozambique has deployed its army, police, mercenaries and regional armed forces to end the attacks by the Islamic State-linked insurgents. But they have not been stamped out. “Activity by the insurgent group will remain a threat to LNG timelines and the operating environment across Cabo Delgado province,” said Ryan Cummings, director at Cape Town-based Signal Risk. “A near-term resumption of LNG-related activity could be a trigger for renewed attacks.” Fighting intensified in June, with Islamic State claiming what would be among its deadliest single assaults on security forces. Chapo said in an interview last week that Total’s 2021 declaration of force majeure would remain in place indefinitely “if we’re waiting for Cabo Delgado to be a heaven.” He described business as proceeding as usual in the district of Palma, where attacks occurred that precipitated shuttering the project. Over the last few months, Total received approval for key financing from the US Export-Import Bank. Pouyanne has likened remaining obstacles to “more a question of paperwork,” while

Energy Department Authorizes Strategic Petroleum Reserve Exchange to Support Fuel Supply in Gulf Coast
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the authorization of an exchange from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with ExxonMobil Corporation to address logistical challenges impacting crude oil deliveries to the company’s Baton Rouge refinery. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright authorized this action to help maintain stable regional supply of transportation fuels across Louisiana and the broader Gulf Coast. This action preserves the SPR’s operational flexibility and will not impact or delay the Department’s ongoing efforts to refill the reserve. Under the exchange agreement, DOE will provide up to 1 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR. The exchange will support ExxonMobil’s restoration of refinery operations that were reduced due to an offshore supply disruption. ExxonMobil will return the borrowed crude along with additional barrels of crude oil for the SPR at no cost to the taxpayer. The Department remains in close coordination with industry partners to ensure stability in the fuel supply chain during the peak demand season. DOE continues to encourage refiners to prioritize efficient production and delivery of refined fuels, stands ready to support the nation’s energy security through the responsible use of strategic resources, and will continue to deliver on President Trump’s commitment to protect American energy security by refilling the SPR. Background: Sections 159 and 160 of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 6239 and 6240, authorize the Secretary of Energy to exchange SPR petroleum products and to acquire petroleum products by exchange for storage in the SPR. The Secretary of Energy has previously exercised this legal authority to conduct emergency exchanges in response to supply disruptions, including Keystone Pipeline in 2022, and the Calcasieu Ship Channel closures in 2006 and 2000. An oil supply disruption has led to reduced operations at the Baton Rouge refinery, limiting production

Nvidia hits $4T market cap as AI, high-performance semiconductors hit stride
“The company added $1 trillion in market value in less than a year, a pace that surpasses Apple and Microsoft’s previous trajectories. This rapid ascent reflects how indispensable AI chipmakers have become in today’s digital economy,” Kiran Raj, practice head, Strategic Intelligence (Disruptor) at GlobalData, said in a statement. According to GlobalData’s Innovation Radar report, “AI Chips – Trends, Market Dynamics and Innovations,” the global AI chip market is projected to reach $154 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%. Nvidia has much of that market, but it also has a giant bullseye on its back with many competitors gunning for its crown. “With its AI chips powering everything from data centers and cloud computing to autonomous vehicles and robotics, Nvidia is uniquely positioned. However, competitive pressure is mounting. Players like AMD, Intel, Google, and Huawei are doubling down on custom silicon, while regulatory headwinds and export restrictions are reshaping the competitive dynamics,” he said.

Ignoring customers is unsustainable and bad policy
Kent Chandler is a resident senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, Chris Villarreal is an associate fellow in energy and environmental policy at R Street and Michael Giberson is a senior fellow in energy policy at R Street. Electric bills are rising, and energy adequacy is at the top of policymakers’ agendas. The most recent North American Electric Reliability Corp. analysis indicates that much of the country is at an elevated risk this summer of experiencing insufficient operating reserves in above-normal conditions. Given the backlogs of generator interconnection requests and gas turbine orders, the delays inherent in current state and federal siting regimes, and the immediacy of load growth in certain parts of the country, it is clear we can’t build our way out of this situation in the near-term. However, enabling flexible customer demand can drive significant system-wide benefits, mitigating the cost or timing of expensive system upgrades. Now is the time for states to take action to empower consumers to play a greater role in their individual and collective energy future. It’s been 30 years since some states began restructuring their electricity laws, allowing customers to buy electricity from suppliers other than their incumbent utilities. However, even with significant leaps in technological innovation and expansion of wholesale markets, implementation of retail choice and customer empowerment within vertically-integrated states has lagged. To determine the state of play for customers to make their own electricity choices, we recently completed a review of consumer choice, retail competition and customer empowerment in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, culminating in a report grading the states on their level of customer empowerment. As you might imagine, the grades vary, from Texas receiving an A- to Alabama receiving the effort’s lone F. Regardless of the grade

Mozambique’s $57B LNG Projects Get Reboot Despite Risk
Four years after terrorist attacks halted a massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique, momentum behind $57 billion in facilities that will export the fuel is picking up. TotalEnergies SE and Eni SpA have readied contractors and signed agreements for preliminary work on projects to add capacity. In addition, the French major’s Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne was scheduled to meet Mozambican President Daniel Chapo on Thursday, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Revenue from gas exports could be significant for the southern African nation, one of the world’s poorest. At the same time, developers must weigh the risk of renewed terrorist attacks, which prompted Total to halt its $20 billion facility in 2021 in the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Mozambique has deployed its army, police, mercenaries and regional armed forces to end the attacks by the Islamic State-linked insurgents. But they have not been stamped out. “Activity by the insurgent group will remain a threat to LNG timelines and the operating environment across Cabo Delgado province,” said Ryan Cummings, director at Cape Town-based Signal Risk. “A near-term resumption of LNG-related activity could be a trigger for renewed attacks.” Fighting intensified in June, with Islamic State claiming what would be among its deadliest single assaults on security forces. Chapo said in an interview last week that Total’s 2021 declaration of force majeure would remain in place indefinitely “if we’re waiting for Cabo Delgado to be a heaven.” He described business as proceeding as usual in the district of Palma, where attacks occurred that precipitated shuttering the project. Over the last few months, Total received approval for key financing from the US Export-Import Bank. Pouyanne has likened remaining obstacles to “more a question of paperwork,” while

Argentina Asks US Appeals Court to Delay YPF Turnover Order
Argentina asked a US appeals court for an emergency delay of an order requiring it to hand over by a Monday deadline its controlling stake in energy company YPF SA to help satisfy a $16 billion judgment. The government of Argentine President Javier Milei requested the delay Thursday afternoon, hours after filing notice it was appealing the June 30 handover order by US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York. The South American nation likened Preska’s order to a foreign court directing the US government to “pack up the gold stored at Fort Knox and ship it abroad.” Argentina wants the federal appeals court in New York to put the order on hold while it considers the country’s arguments to overturn Preska’s decision, a process that could take months. Preska, who ruled in 2023 that Argentina owed billions to shareholders affected by a 2012 nationalization of YPF, found last month that the country’s 51 percent stake wasn’t shielded by foreign sovereign immunity. Preska ordered Argentina to turn over the shares within 14 days to a group led by Burford Capital, a litigation funding firm that acquired the interests of original YPF shareholders. An Argentine law passed at the time of the nationalization bars Milei’s government from transferring the government’s YPF stake without a two-thirds vote of the national Congress. Without a delay, Argentina on Monday faces a choice among “changing its own domestic laws, violating those laws, or disregarding a US court’s order,” the country said in a court filing. The June 30 ruling came as a major blow to Milei, who inherited the case when he took office about 18 months ago promising to turn around Argentina’s flailing economy. Argentina’s sovereign bonds and YPF shares both dropped after the ruling, while the country’s parallel exchange rate weakened. Milei vowed to

Puerto Rico Board Suspends $20B New Fortress Gas Deal
Puerto Rico’s finance watchdog is refusing to OK a $20 billion natural gas supply deal that it said would give New Fortress Energy Inc. a near monopoly over the island’s energy future. The Financial Oversight and Management Board has “profound concerns” about a proposed 15-year contract between Genera PR – a New Fortress subsidiary that operates the territory’s power plants – and the company unit that delivers liquefied gas, according to a letter to Puerto Rico’s energy czar, Josue Colon. Approving the contract would “lock the island into a long-term commitment with a single supplier, potentially undermining market competition and limiting flexibility,” the board wrote, saying the deal would create a “monopolistic arrangement that would ultimately jeopardize energy security.” New Fortress Energy did not respond to a request for comment. Colon’s office declined to immediately comment on the letter. The watchdog’s objections are just the latest blow to New Fortress, which lost more than 80 percent of its market value in the last year as it struggles to shore up its finances and reassure investors and bondholders. The shares fell as much as 19 percent on Thursday. “Given the magnitude of the proposed contract and the critical nature of the services at stake, it would be irresponsible for the Oversight Board to review the proposed contract thoroughly in this short time,” the board wrote. Even so, the board said it is willing to meet with all those involved to ensure the deal is “fiscally responsible.” New Fortress already is a key supplier of LNG to Puerto Rico’s power sector. Other sources include EcoElectrica and Crowley, which ship the fuel to plants operated by other companies. New Fortress’ initial LNG supply contract was due to expire in June but has been extended on a temporary basis. In April, government agencies called for bids to provide

Energy Department Authorizes Strategic Petroleum Reserve Exchange to Support Fuel Supply in Gulf Coast
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the authorization of an exchange from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with ExxonMobil Corporation to address logistical challenges impacting crude oil deliveries to the company’s Baton Rouge refinery. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright authorized this action to help maintain stable regional supply of transportation fuels across Louisiana and the broader Gulf Coast. This action preserves the SPR’s operational flexibility and will not impact or delay the Department’s ongoing efforts to refill the reserve. Under the exchange agreement, DOE will provide up to 1 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR. The exchange will support ExxonMobil’s restoration of refinery operations that were reduced due to an offshore supply disruption. ExxonMobil will return the borrowed crude along with additional barrels of crude oil for the SPR at no cost to the taxpayer. The Department remains in close coordination with industry partners to ensure stability in the fuel supply chain during the peak demand season. DOE continues to encourage refiners to prioritize efficient production and delivery of refined fuels, stands ready to support the nation’s energy security through the responsible use of strategic resources, and will continue to deliver on President Trump’s commitment to protect American energy security by refilling the SPR. Background: Sections 159 and 160 of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 6239 and 6240, authorize the Secretary of Energy to exchange SPR petroleum products and to acquire petroleum products by exchange for storage in the SPR. The Secretary of Energy has previously exercised this legal authority to conduct emergency exchanges in response to supply disruptions, including Keystone Pipeline in 2022, and the Calcasieu Ship Channel closures in 2006 and 2000. An oil supply disruption has led to reduced operations at the Baton Rouge refinery, limiting production

Misaligned interconnection, transmission planning could hurt competitive markets: FERC’s Chang
There is a “misalignment” in grid interconnection and transmission planning processes that could harm competitive power markets, according to Judy Chang, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Amid surging electric demand forecasts, the interconnection logjam has led grid operators to propose short-term solutions, Chang said Thursday at a meeting held in Woodstock, Vermont, by WIRES, a transmission-focused trade group. The PJM Interconnection, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the Southwest Power Pool have proposed one-time processes that would create a fast-track interconnection review for planned generating projects that meet certain criteria. FERC approved PJM’s plan earlier this year over the opposition of some renewable energy companies that contend selected projects will be able to unfairly jump ahead of others that have been waiting in interconnection queues. “I don’t really love short-term fixes,” Chang said. “I really prefer to have better processes — fair and competitive processes — so that generators interconnecting know the rules of the game.” Chang said various issues are coming to a head at the same time, including disputes over interconnection cost allocation and the system’s ability to upgrade interconnection infrastructure and bring on new generation as fast as possible. Those issues could affect the future of competitive power markets, Chang said, noting that some states are considering withdrawing from regional transmission organizations. “I worry about how much states might want to compromise … the open access and competitive access to transmission and competitive markets by pulling back and finding internal solutions, or by complaining about competitive markets not meeting the challenge of the day,” she said. Getting generation online as quickly as possible is a key priority, according to Chang. “We should plan, design, permit — all faster,” Chang said. “So I am a big supporter of permitting reform on all infrastructure, but also

Environmental, consumer advocates sue Bonneville for joining SPP’s day-ahead market
Five advocacy groups on Thursday sued the Bonneville Power Administration for deciding to join the Southwest Power Pool’s Markets+ day-ahead market. The BPA’s May 9 decision to join Markets+ instead of a day-ahead market for the West developed by the California Independent System Operator will lead to higher electric costs, inefficient operations between market seams and potentially the need to build more generating facilities, according to the lawsuit filed by NW Energy Coalition, the Idaho Conservation League, the Montana Environmental Information Center, the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board and the Sierra Club. “Bonneville’s decision on markets will affect the transmission and generation of electric power across the West and is exactly the type of major federal action that should first consider the harms it could cause to our air quality, grid system reliability, [and] fish and wildlife,” Jaimini Parekh, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, said in a press release. Earthjustice represents the advocacy groups. The BPA’s decision violated the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, according to the groups. “BPA did not rationally explain how joining the smaller, non-contiguous Markets+ footprint will enable it to meet its duty to promote an adequate, efficient, economical, and reliable power supply for the region that also gives priority to clean, renewable resources,” the groups said in the lawsuit filed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The groups also contend that BPA’s choice to join Markets+ will likely increase the risk of blackouts during periods of high or extreme electricity demand because of the “many and complex” seams that power must be transferred across in the market as compared to CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market or a “no-action” alternative. BPA does not comment on active litigation, said Nick Quinata, a

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

Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters sell for £45m
Three Aberdeen oil company headquarters have been sold in a deal worth £45 million. The CNOOC, Apache and Taqa buildings at the Prime Four business park in Kingswells have been acquired by EEH Ventures. The trio of buildings, totalling 275,000 sq ft, were previously owned by Canadian firm BMO. The financial services powerhouse first bought the buildings in 2014 but took the decision to sell the buildings as part of a “long-standing strategy to reduce their office exposure across the UK”. The deal was the largest to take place throughout Scotland during the last quarter of 2024. Trio of buildings snapped up London headquartered EEH Ventures was founded in 2013 and owns a number of residential, offices, shopping centres and hotels throughout the UK. All three Kingswells-based buildings were pre-let, designed and constructed by Aberdeen property developer Drum in 2012 on a 15-year lease. © Supplied by CBREThe Aberdeen headquarters of Taqa. Image: CBRE The North Sea headquarters of Middle-East oil firm Taqa has previously been described as “an amazing success story in the Granite City”. Taqa announced in 2023 that it intends to cease production from all of its UK North Sea platforms by the end of 2027. Meanwhile, Apache revealed at the end of last year it is planning to exit the North Sea by the end of 2029 blaming the windfall tax. The US firm first entered the North Sea in 2003 but will wrap up all of its UK operations by 2030. Aberdeen big deals The Prime Four acquisition wasn’t the biggest Granite City commercial property sale of 2024. American private equity firm Lone Star bought Union Square shopping centre from Hammerson for £111m. © ShutterstockAberdeen city centre. Hammerson, who also built the property, had originally been seeking £150m. BP’s North Sea headquarters in Stoneywood, Aberdeen, was also sold. Manchester-based

2025 ransomware predictions, trends, and how to prepare
Zscaler ThreatLabz research team has revealed critical insights and predictions on ransomware trends for 2025. The latest Ransomware Report uncovered a surge in sophisticated tactics and extortion attacks. As ransomware remains a key concern for CISOs and CIOs, the report sheds light on actionable strategies to mitigate risks. Top Ransomware Predictions for 2025: ● AI-Powered Social Engineering: In 2025, GenAI will fuel voice phishing (vishing) attacks. With the proliferation of GenAI-based tooling, initial access broker groups will increasingly leverage AI-generated voices; which sound more and more realistic by adopting local accents and dialects to enhance credibility and success rates. ● The Trifecta of Social Engineering Attacks: Vishing, Ransomware and Data Exfiltration. Additionally, sophisticated ransomware groups, like the Dark Angels, will continue the trend of low-volume, high-impact attacks; preferring to focus on an individual company, stealing vast amounts of data without encrypting files, and evading media and law enforcement scrutiny. ● Targeted Industries Under Siege: Manufacturing, healthcare, education, energy will remain primary targets, with no slowdown in attacks expected. ● New SEC Regulations Drive Increased Transparency: 2025 will see an uptick in reported ransomware attacks and payouts due to new, tighter SEC requirements mandating that public companies report material incidents within four business days. ● Ransomware Payouts Are on the Rise: In 2025 ransom demands will most likely increase due to an evolving ecosystem of cybercrime groups, specializing in designated attack tactics, and collaboration by these groups that have entered a sophisticated profit sharing model using Ransomware-as-a-Service. To combat damaging ransomware attacks, Zscaler ThreatLabz recommends the following strategies. ● Fighting AI with AI: As threat actors use AI to identify vulnerabilities, organizations must counter with AI-powered zero trust security systems that detect and mitigate new threats. ● Advantages of adopting a Zero Trust architecture: A Zero Trust cloud security platform stops

The Download: cybersecurity’s shaky alert system, and mobile IVF
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. Cybersecurity’s global alarm system is breaking down Every day, billions of people trust digital systems to run everything from communication to commerce to critical infrastructure. But the global early warning system that alerts security teams to dangerous software flaws is showing critical gaps in coverage—and most users have no idea their digital lives are likely becoming more vulnerable. Over the past eighteen months, two pillars of global cybersecurity have been shaken by funding issues: the US-backed National Vulnerability Database (NVD)—relied on globally for its free analysis of security threats—and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, the numbering system for tracking software flaws. Although the situation for both has stabilized, organizations and governments are confronting a critical weakness in our digital infrastructure: Essential global cybersecurity services depend on a complex web of US agency interests and government funding that can be cut or redirected at any time. Read the full story.
—Matthew King
The first babies have been born following “simplified” IVF in a mobile lab This week I’m sending congratulations to two sets of new parents in South Africa. Babies Milayah and Rossouw arrived a few weeks ago. All babies are special, but these two set a new precedent. They’re the first to be born following “simplified” IVF performed in a mobile lab. This new mobile lab is essentially a trailer crammed with everything an embryologist needs to perform IVF on a shoestring. It was designed to deliver reproductive treatments to people who live in rural parts of low-income countries, where IVF can be prohibitively expensive or even nonexistent. And best of all: it seems to work! Read our story about why it’s such an exciting development. —Jessica Hamzelou This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Trump is seeking huge cuts to basic scientific researchIf he gets his way, federal science funding will be slashed by a third for the next fiscal year. (NYT $)+ The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled. (MIT Technology Review)+ Senators are getting ready to push back against proposed NASA cuts. (Bloomberg $)
2 Conspiracy theorists are starting to turn on TrumpHe whipped them all up over the supposed existence of Epstein’s client list, and now they’re mad nothing’s being released. (The Atlantic $)3 AI actually slows experienced software developers downThey end up wasting lots of time checking and correcting AI models’ output. (Reuters $)4 The Pentagon is becoming the largest shareholder in a rare earth minerals companyIt shows just how much competition is hotting up to secure a steady supply of these materials. (Quartz $)+ The race to produce rare earth elements. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Solar power is starting to truly transform the world’s energy system Globally, roughly a third more power was generated from the sun this spring than last. (New Yorker $)6 Cops’ favorite AI tool auto-deletes evidence of AI being used A pretty breathtaking attempt to avoid any sort of audit, transparency or accountability. (Ars Technica)+ How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans. (MIT Technology Review)7 Why Chinese EV brands are being forced to go globalCompetition at home is becoming so intense that many have no choice but to seek profits elsewhere. (Rest of World)+ China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots. (MIT Technology Review)8 Which Big Tech execs are closest to the White House? Check out this scorecard showing how they’re all doing trying to stay in Trump’s good graces. (WSJ $)9 Elon Musk says Grok is coming to Tesla vehiclesYes, that’s the same Grok that keeps being racist. Shareholders must be delighted. (Insider $)+ X is basically becoming a strip mine for AI training data. (Axios)10 Trump Mobile is charging people’s credit cards without explanationBut I’m sure it’s all perfectly explicable and above board, right? Right?! (404 Media) Quote of the day “It has been nonstop pandemonium.” —Augustus Doricko, who founded a cloud seeding startup two years ago, tells the Washington Post he’s received a deluge of fury online from conspiracy theorists who blame him for the catastrophic Texas floods. One more thing
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | LUMMI What’s next for AI in 2025 For the last couple of years we’ve had a go at predicting what’s coming next in AI. A fool’s game given how fast this industry moves. But we gave it a go anyway back in January. As we sail pass this year’s halfway mark, it’s a good time to ask: how well did we do? Check out our predictions, and see for yourself!
—James O’Donnell, Will Douglas Heaven & Melissa Heikkilä This piece is part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, looking across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

Cybersecurity’s global alarm system is breaking down
Every day, billions of people trust digital systems to run everything from communication to commerce to critical infrastructure. But the global early warning system that alerts security teams to dangerous software flaws is showing critical gaps in coverage—and most users have no idea their digital lives are likely becoming more vulnerable. Over the past eighteen months, two pillars of global cybersecurity have flirted with apparent collapse. In February 2024, the US-backed National Vulnerability Database (NVD)—relied on globally for its free analysis of security threats—abruptly stopped publishing new entries, citing a cryptic “change in interagency support.” Then, in April of this year, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, the fundamental numbering system for tracking software flaws, seemed at similar risk: A leaked letter warned of an imminent contract expiration. Cybersecurity practitioners have since flooded Discord channels and LinkedIn feeds with emergency posts and memes of “NVD” and “CVE” engraved on tombstones. Unpatched vulnerabilities are the second most common way cyberattackers break in, and they have led to fatal hospital outages and critical infrastructure failures. In a social media post, Jen Easterly, a US cybersecurity expert, said: “Losing [CVE] would be like tearing out the card catalog from every library at once—leaving defenders to sort through chaos while attackers take full advantage.” If CVEs identify each vulnerability like a book in a card catalog, NVD entries provide the detailed review with context around severity, scope, and exploitability. In the end, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) extended funding for CVE another year, attributing the incident to a “contract administration issue.” But the NVD’s story has proved more complicated. Its parent organization, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), reportedly saw its budget cut roughly 12% in 2024, right around the time that CISA pulled its $3.7 million in annual funding for the NVD. Shortly after, as the backlog grew, CISA launched its own “Vulnrichment” program to help address the analysis gap, while promoting a more distributed approach that allows multiple authorized partners to publish enriched data.
“CISA continuously assesses how to most effectively allocate limited resources to help organizations reduce the risk of newly disclosed vulnerabilities,” says Sandy Radesky, the agency’s associate director for vulnerability management. Rather than just filling the gap, she emphasizes that Vulnrichment was established to provide unique additional information, like recommended actions for specific stakeholders, and to “reduce dependency of the federal government’s role to be the sole provider of vulnerability enrichment.” Meanwhile, NIST has scrambled to hire contractors to help clear the backlog. Despite a return to pre-crisis processing levels, a boom in vulnerabilities newly disclosed to the NVD has outpaced these efforts. Currently, over 25,000 vulnerabilities await processing – nearly 10 times the previous high in 2017, according to data from software company Anchore. Before that, the NVD largely kept pace with CVE publications, maintaining a minimal backlog.
“Things have been disruptive, and we’ve been going through times of change across the board,” Matthew Scholl, then chief of the computer security division in NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory, said at an industry event in April. “Leadership has assured me and everyone that NVD is and will continue to be a mission priority for NIST, both in resourcing and capabilities.” Scholl left NIST in May after 20 years at the agency, and NIST declined to comment on the backlog. The situation has now prompted multiple government actions, with the Department of Commerce launching an audit of the NVD in May and House Democrats calling for a broader probe of both programs in June. But the damage to trust is already transforming geopolitics and supply chains as security teams prepare for a new era of cyber risk. “It’s left a bad taste, and people are realizing they can’t rely on this,” says Rose Gupta, who builds and runs enterprise vulnerability management programs. “Even if they get everything together tomorrow with a bigger budget, I don’t know that this won’t happen again. So I have to make sure I have other controls in place.” As these public resources falter, organizations and governments are confronting a critical weakness in our digital infrastructure: Essential global cybersecurity services depend on a complex web of US agency interests and government funding that can be cut or redirected at any time. Security haves and have-nots What began as a trickle of software vulnerabilities in the early Internet era has become an unstoppable avalanche, and the free databases that have tracked them for decades have struggled to keep up. In early July, the CVE database crossed over 300,000 catalogued vulnerabilities. Numbers jump unpredictably each year, sometimes by 10% or much more. Even before its latest crisis, the NVD was notorious for delayed publication of new vulnerability analyses, often trailing private security software and vendor advisories by weeks or months. Gupta has watched organizations increasingly adopt commercial vulnerability management (VM) software that includes its own threat intelligence services. “We’ve definitely become over-reliant on our VM tools,” she notes, describing security teams’ growing dependence on vendors like Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable to supplement or replace unreliable public databases. These platforms combine their own research with various data sources to create proprietary risk scores that help teams prioritize fixes. But not all organizations can afford to fill the NVD’s gap with premium security tools. “Smaller companies and startups, already at a disadvantage, are going to be more at risk,” she explains. Komal Rawat, a security engineer in New Delhi whose mid-stage cloud startup has a limited budget, describes the impact in stark terms: “If NVD goes, there will be a crisis in the market. Other databases are not that popular, and to the extent they are adopted, they are not free. If you don’t have recent data, you’re exposed to attackers who do.” The growing backlog means new devices could be more likely to have vulnerability blind spots—whether that’s a Ring doorbell at home or an office building’s “smart” access control system. The biggest risk may be “one-off” security flaws that fly under the radar. “There are thousands of vulnerabilities that will not affect the majority of enterprises,” says Gupta. “Those are the ones that we’re not getting analysis on, which would leave us at risk.” NIST acknowledges it has limited visibility into which organizations are most affected by the backlog. “We don’t track which industries use which products and therefore cannot measure impact to specific industries,” a spokesperson says. Instead, the team prioritizes vulnerabilities on the basis of CISA’s known exploits list and those included in vendor advisories like Microsoft Patch Tuesday.
The biggest vulnerability Brian Martin has watched this system evolve—and deteriorate—from the inside. A former CVE board member and an original project leader behind the Open Source Vulnerability Database, he has built a combative reputation over the decades as a leading historian and practitioner. Martin says his current project, VulnDB (part of Flashpoint Security), outperforms the official databases he once helped oversee. “Our team processes more vulnerabilities, at a much faster turnaround, and we do it for a fraction of the cost,” he says, referring to the tens of millions in government contracts that support the current system. When we spoke in May, Martin said his database contains more than 112,000 vulnerabilities with no CVE identifiers—security flaws that exist in the wild but remain invisible to organizations that rely solely on public channels. “If you gave me the money to triple my team, that non-CVE number would be in the 500,000 range,” he said. In the US, official vulnerability management duties are split between a web of contractors, agencies, and nonprofit centers like the Mitre Corporation. Critics like Martin say that creates potential for redundancy, confusion, and inefficiency, with layers of middle management and relatively few actual vulnerability experts. Others defend the value of this fragmentation. “These programs build on or complement each other to create a more comprehensive, supportive, and diverse community,” CISA said in a statement. “That increases the resilience and usefulness of the entire ecosystem.” As American leadership wavers, other nations are stepping up. China now operates multiple vulnerability databases, some surprisingly robust but tainted by the possibility that they are subject to state control. In May, the European Union accelerated the launch of its own database, as well as a decentralized “Global CVE” architecture. Following social media and cloud services, vulnerability intelligence has become another front in the contest for technological independence. That leaves security professionals to navigate multiple, potentially conflicting sources of data. “It’s going to be a mess, but I would rather have too much information than none at all,” says Gupta, describing how her team monitors multiple databases despite the added complexity. Resetting software liability As defenders adapt to the fragmenting landscape, the tech industry faces another reckoning: Why don’t software vendors carry more responsibility for protecting their customers from security issues? Major vendors routinely disclose—but don’t necessarily patch—thousands of new vulnerabilities each year. A single exposure could crash critical systems or increase the risks of fraud and data misuse. For decades, the industry has hidden behind legal shields. “Shrink-wrap licenses” once forced consumers to broadly waive their right to hold software vendors liable for defects. Today’s end-user license agreements (EULAs), often delivered in pop-up browser windows, have evolved into incomprehensibly long documents. Last November, a lab project called “EULAS of Despair” used the length of War and Peace (587,287 words) to measure these sprawling contracts. The worst offender? Twitter, at 15.83 novels’ worth of fine print. “This is a legal fiction that we’ve created around this whole ecosystem, and it’s just not sustainable,” says Andrea Matwyshyn, a US special advisor and technology law professor at Penn State University, where she directs the Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow. “Some people point to the fact that software can contain a mix of products and services, creating more complex facts. But just like in engineering or financial litigation, even the most messy scenarios can be resolved with the assistance of experts.”
This liability shield is finally beginning to crack. In July 2024, a faulty security update in CrowdStrike’s popular endpoint detection software crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide and caused outages at everything from airlines to hospitals to 911 systems. The incident led to billions in estimated damages, and the city of Portland, Oregon, even declared a “state of emergency.” Now, affected companies like Delta Airlines have hired high-priced attorneys to pursue major damages—a signal opening of the floodgates to litigation. Despite the soaring number of vulnerabilities, many fall into long-established categories, such as SQL injections that interfere with database queries and buffer memory overflows that enable code to be executed remotely. Matwyshyn advocates for a mandatory “software bill of materials,” or S-BOM—an ingredients list that would let organizations understand what components and potential vulnerabilities exist throughout their software supply chains. One recent report found 30% of data breaches stemmed from the vulnerabilities of third-party software vendors or cloud service providers.
She adds: “When you can’t tell the difference between the companies that are cutting corners and a company that has really invested in doing right by their customers, that results in a market where everyone loses.” CISA leadership shares this sentiment, with a spokesperson emphasizing its “secure-by-design principles,” such as “making essential security features available without additional cost, eliminating classes of vulnerabilities, and building products in a way that reduces the cybersecurity burden on customers.” Avoiding a digital ‘dark age’ It will likely come as no surprise that practitioners are looking to AI to help fill the gap, while at the same time preparing for a coming swarm of cyberattacks by AI agents. Security researchers have used an OpenAI model to discover new “zero-day” vulnerabilities. And both the NVD and CVE teams are developing “AI-powered tools” to help streamline data collection, identification, and processing. NIST says that “up to 65% of our analysis time has been spent generating CPEs”—product information codes that pinpoint affected software. If AI can solve even part of this tedious process, it could dramatically speed up the analysis pipeline. But Martin cautions against optimism around AI, noting that the technology remains unproven and often riddled with inaccuracies—which, in security, can be fatal. “Rather than AI or ML [machine learning], there are ways to strategically automate bits of the processing of that vulnerability data while ensuring 99.5% accuracy,” he says. AI also fails to address more fundamental challenges in governance. The CVE Foundation, launched in April 2025 by breakaway board members, proposes a globally funded nonprofit model similar to that of the internet’s addressing system, which transitioned from US government control to international governance. Other security leaders are pushing to revitalize open-source alternatives like Google’s OSV Project or the NVD++ (maintained by VulnCheck), which are accessible to the public but currently have limited resources. As these various reform efforts gain momentum, the world is waking up to the fact that vulnerability intelligence—like disease surveillance or aviation safety—requires sustained cooperation and public investment. Without it, a patchwork of paid databases will be all that remains, threatening to leave all but the richest organizations and nations permanently exposed. Matthew King is a technology and environmental journalist based in New York. He previously worked for cybersecurity firm Tenable.

The first babies have been born following “simplified” IVF in a mobile lab
This week I’m sending congratulations to two sets of parents in South Africa. Babies Milayah and Rossouw arrived a few weeks ago. All babies are special, but these two set a new precedent. They’re the first to be born following “simplified” IVF performed in a mobile lab. This new mobile lab is essentially a trailer crammed with everything an embryologist needs to perform IVF on a shoestring. It was designed to deliver reproductive treatments to people who live in rural parts of low-income countries, where IVF can be prohibitively expensive or even nonexistent. And it seems to work! While IVF is increasingly commonplace in wealthy countries—around 12% of all births in Spain result from such procedures—it remains expensive and isn’t always covered by insurance or national health providers. And it’s even less accessible in low-income countries—especially for people who live in rural areas. People often assume that countries with high birth rates don’t need access to fertility treatments, says Gerhard Boshoff, an embryologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Sub-Saharan African countries like Niger, Angola, and Benin all have birth rates above 40 per 1,000 people, which is over four times the rates in Italy and Japan, for example.
But that doesn’t mean people in Sub-Saharan Africa don’t need IVF. Globally, around one in six adults experience infertility at some point in their lives, according to the World Health Organization. Research by the organization suggests that infertility rates are similar in high-income and low-income countries. As the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus puts it: “Infertility does not discriminate.” For many people in rural areas of low-income countries, IVF clinics simply don’t exist. South Africa is considered a “reproductive hub” of the African continent, but even in that country there are fewer than 30 clinics for a population of over 60 million. A recent study found there were no such clinics in Angola or Malawi.
Willem Ombelet, a retired gynecologist, first noticed these disparities back in the 1980s, while he was working at an IVF lab in Pretoria. “I witnessed that infertility was [more prevalent] in the black population than the white population—but they couldn’t access IVF because of apartheid,” he says. The experience spurred him to find ways to make IVF accessible for everyone. In the 1990s, he launched The Walking Egg—a science and art project with that goal. In 2008, Ombelet met Jonathan Van Blerkom, a reproductive biologist and embryologist who had already been experimenting with a simplified version of IVF. Typically, embryos are cultured in an incubator that provides a sterile mix of gases. Van Blerkom’s approach was to preload tubes with the required gases and seal them with a rubber stopper. “We don’t need a fancy lab,” says Ombelet. COURTESY OF GERHARD BOSHOFF Eggs and sperm can be injected into the tubes through the stoppers, and the resulting embryos can be grown inside. All you really need is a good microscope and a way to keep the tube warm, says Ombelet. Once the embryos are around five days old, they can be transferred to a person’s uterus or frozen. “The cost is one tenth or one twentieth of a normal lab,” says Ombelet. Ombelet, Van Blerkom, and their colleagues found that this approach appeared to work as well as regular IVF. The team ran their first pilot trial at a clinic in Belgium in 2012. The first babies conceived with the simplified IVF process were born later that year. More recently, Boshoff wondered if the team could take the show on the road. Making IVF simpler and cheaper is one thing, but getting it to people who don’t have access to IVF care is another. What if the team could pack the simplified IVF lab into a trailer and drive it around rural South Africa? “We just needed to figure out how to have everything in a very confined space,” says Boshoff. As part of the Walking Egg project, he and his colleagues found a way to organize the lab equipment and squeeze in air filters. He then designed a “fold-out system” that allowed the team to create a second room when the trailer was parked. This provides some privacy for people who are having embryos transferred, he says. People who want to use the mobile IVF lab will first have to undergo treatment at a local medical facility, where they will take drugs that stimulate their ovaries to release eggs, and then have those eggs collected. The rest of the process can be done in the mobile lab, says Boshoff, who presented his work at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology’s annual meeting in Paris earlier this month. The first trial started last year. The team partnered with one of the few existing fertility clinics in rural South Africa, which put them in touch with 10 willing volunteers. Five of the 10 women got pregnant following their simplified IVF in the mobile lab. One miscarried, but four pregnancies continued. On June 18, baby Milayah arrived. Two days later, another mother welcomed baby Rossouw. The other babies could come any day now. “We’ve proven that a very cheap and easy [IVF] method can be used even in a mobile unit and have comparable results to regular IVF,” says Ombelet, who says his team is planning similar trials in Egypt and Indonesia. “The next step is to roll it out all over the world.” This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

$8.8 trillion protected: How one CISO went from ‘that’s BS’ to bulletproof in 90 days
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 VentureBeat’s exclusive interview with Sam Evans, CISO of Clearwater Analytics, reveals why enterprise browsers are quickly becoming the frontline defense against shadow AI in its many forms. Evans faced a critical challenge in October 2023. Standing before Clearwater Analytics’ board, he had to confront concerns that employees might inadvertently expose data that could potentially compromise the firm’s $8.8 trillion assets under management. “The worst possible thing would be one of our employees taking customer data and putting it into an AI engine that we don’t manage,” Evans told VentureBeat. “The employee not knowing any different or trying to solve a problem for a customer…that data helps train the model.” Here is our conversation with Evans, edited for length and clarity VentureBeat: How do you see AI shaping cybersecurity today? Evans: The attacks have become significantly more sophisticated. If you consider it from the perspective of a bad actor, the phishing emails and attempts we receive have become much more complex. However, AI also possesses response capabilities. I like to explain it to our board, as the ultimate cat-and-mouse game. As bad actors start to use AI to advance phishing, or perhaps expedite the time it takes for exploits to emerge after vulnerabilities are announced, there’s the opposite side of security practitioners using AI to help advance how we respond. VentureBeat: How is AI helping your defensive capabilities? Evans: We’ve begun integrating AI into our security playbooks. By doing so, our security analysts now spend less time searching and hunting. The AI is involved in the security operations center (SOC) product, conducting its initial triage analysis and saying, “Based on previous things that

AWS doubles down on infrastructure as strategy in the AI race with SageMaker upgrades
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 seeks to extend its market position with updates to SageMaker, its machine learning and AI model training and inference platform, adding new observability capabilities, connected coding environments and GPU cluster performance management. However, AWS continues to face competition from Google and Microsoft, which also offer many features that help accelerate AI training and inference. SageMaker, which transformed into a unified hub for integrating data sources and accessing machine learning tools in 2024, will add features that provide insight into why model performance slows and offer AWS customers more control over the amount of compute allocated for model development. Other new features include connecting local integrated development environments (IDEs) to SageMaker, so locally written AI projects can be deployed on the platform. SageMaker General Manager Ankur Mehrotra told VentureBeat that many of these new updates originated from customers themselves. “One challenge that we’ve seen our customers face while developing Gen AI models is that when something goes wrong or when something is not working as per the expectation, it’s really hard to find what’s going on in that layer of the stack,” Mehrotra said. SageMaker HyperPod observability enables engineers to examine the various layers of the stack, such as the compute layer or networking layer. If anything goes wrong or models become slower, SageMaker can alert them and publish metrics on a dashboard. Mehrotra pointed to a real issue his own team faced while training new models, where training code began stressing GPUs, causing temperature fluctuations. He said that without the latest tools, developers would have taken weeks to identify the source of the issue and then fix it. Connected IDEs SageMaker already offered

Employee AI agent adoption: Maximizing gains while navigating challenges
While agentic AI definitely marks a turning point in human-computer interaction, moving from tool use to collaboration, the next step is integrating these agents and actually deriving value. At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Matthew Kropp, managing director and senior partner at BCG, offered a game plan for workflow evolution, employee adoption, and organizational change.
“The companies that are at the top of this curve — what we call future built, the ones that are most mature — are seeing substantial results: 1.5 times more revenue growth, 1.8 times higher shareholder value,” Kropp said. “There’s value here, but we’re early.”
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Deploy, reshape, invent
To take advantage and create value with AI and with agents, a company needs to determine where to focus, using a deploy, reshape, invent framework. AI is already being deployed in every enterprise, and will have agents within the next few years. But if you give an employee a chatbot, you haven’t changed the way the work is done. You have to rethink the work, and reshape functions, departments, and workflows by identifying where human work can be automated.
“We’re advising companies right now to focus on your three or four big rocks. If you have a big customer support organization, you should apply AI in customer support. It has a huge impact. If you have a big engineering organization, you should employ tools like Windsurf to reshape the way that you do engineering, software development.”
Invention is still in the very early stage, but enterprises should be thinking about how to use AI’s ability to be creative, reason, and plan. Look at services and products, and how you interact with customers: can you reinvent that using those capabilities?”
For instance, makeup company L’Oreal launched a virtual beauty advisor to scale that exclusive service beyond their retail locations, reinventing the way they think about interacting with their customers at scale.
Thinking beyond basic use cases
It’s also critical to think about how AI changes your business. There’s been a lot of focus in the last couple of years on cost reduction by replacing workers, but that isn’t big-picture thinking. AI amplifies the employees you currently have, dramatically increasing their productivity.
“This is what we’re seeing in software development,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll see companies laying off their software developers. We’re going to see a massive explosion in the amount of capability and features that software companies are building.”
In a study BCG conducted with Harvard, Wharton, and MIT, they asked 750 knowledge workers to write a business and marketing plan, with and without generative AI. The participants using GPT4 executed 25% faster, completed 15% more tasks, and the quality of their output was 40% better. And when given an LLM, the bottom performers in the baseline did just as well as the top performers.
“It brought everyone’s performance up, which is very powerful, because in most organizations the new joiners are less effective than more experienced people,” he said. “It has the ability to increase time to proficiency.”
AI can also surpass human scale, even open up new applications that were not previously possible. For example, in the medical space, outcomes for patients are significantly improved with preoperative and postoperative follow-up from a nurse, but implementing this has been cost-prohibitive — until the advent of AI nurses that can take on that task for a large patient population.
Overcoming the biggest hurdle: Adoption
While these tools are fantastic, people aren’t using them. BCG tracked the adoption of GitHub Copilot and productivity metrics for an organization with about 10,000 software engineers. The top 5% engineers doubled in productivity in four months, while 60% showed zero improvement, because they just didn’t adopt the tool at all.
Why won’t humans adopt? There are three reasons. First is capability ignorance. The second, habit inertia. The third is identity threat, and that is the hardest to overcome. Developers are asking, “If this AI can write code for me then who am I? What’s my value?”
“This is going to be the real work of the next three to five years,” Kropp said. “It’s getting people to use the agents.”
Strategies overcoming reluctance
There are a few valuable ways to overcome these challenges. Naturally, getting the right tool is the first step, and integrating it with the way people work by training them explicitly. It’s also critical to measure and celebrate adoption for those employees actively using the tools so that everyone else starts to see they need to get on this bandwagon.
Another important step is ramping up scarcity — that means taking away resources so employees need to do more with less. At the same time, it’s essential to redesign work processes hand-in-hand with those employees who are on the front lines. Don’t just identify laborious processes where manual work can be automated — identify the parts where humans bring value.
“We minimize the toil and we maximize the joy,” Kropp said. “We’re left with a much more efficient process, a much more efficient company, a much more productive workforce, and jobs that people like to be in.”

Puerto Rico Board Suspends $20B New Fortress Gas Deal
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Argentina Asks US Appeals Court to Delay YPF Turnover Order
Argentina asked a US appeals court for an emergency delay of an order requiring it to hand over by a Monday deadline its controlling stake in energy company YPF SA to help satisfy a $16 billion judgment. The government of Argentine President Javier Milei requested the delay Thursday afternoon, hours after filing notice it was appealing the June 30 handover order by US District Judge Loretta Preska in New York. The South American nation likened Preska’s order to a foreign court directing the US government to “pack up the gold stored at Fort Knox and ship it abroad.” Argentina wants the federal appeals court in New York to put the order on hold while it considers the country’s arguments to overturn Preska’s decision, a process that could take months. Preska, who ruled in 2023 that Argentina owed billions to shareholders affected by a 2012 nationalization of YPF, found last month that the country’s 51 percent stake wasn’t shielded by foreign sovereign immunity. Preska ordered Argentina to turn over the shares within 14 days to a group led by Burford Capital, a litigation funding firm that acquired the interests of original YPF shareholders. An Argentine law passed at the time of the nationalization bars Milei’s government from transferring the government’s YPF stake without a two-thirds vote of the national Congress. Without a delay, Argentina on Monday faces a choice among “changing its own domestic laws, violating those laws, or disregarding a US court’s order,” the country said in a court filing. The June 30 ruling came as a major blow to Milei, who inherited the case when he took office about 18 months ago promising to turn around Argentina’s flailing economy. Argentina’s sovereign bonds and YPF shares both dropped after the ruling, while the country’s parallel exchange rate weakened. Milei vowed to

Mozambique’s $57B LNG Projects Get Reboot Despite Risk
Four years after terrorist attacks halted a massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique, momentum behind $57 billion in facilities that will export the fuel is picking up. TotalEnergies SE and Eni SpA have readied contractors and signed agreements for preliminary work on projects to add capacity. In addition, the French major’s Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne was scheduled to meet Mozambican President Daniel Chapo on Thursday, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Revenue from gas exports could be significant for the southern African nation, one of the world’s poorest. At the same time, developers must weigh the risk of renewed terrorist attacks, which prompted Total to halt its $20 billion facility in 2021 in the northern province of Cabo Delgado. Mozambique has deployed its army, police, mercenaries and regional armed forces to end the attacks by the Islamic State-linked insurgents. But they have not been stamped out. “Activity by the insurgent group will remain a threat to LNG timelines and the operating environment across Cabo Delgado province,” said Ryan Cummings, director at Cape Town-based Signal Risk. “A near-term resumption of LNG-related activity could be a trigger for renewed attacks.” Fighting intensified in June, with Islamic State claiming what would be among its deadliest single assaults on security forces. Chapo said in an interview last week that Total’s 2021 declaration of force majeure would remain in place indefinitely “if we’re waiting for Cabo Delgado to be a heaven.” He described business as proceeding as usual in the district of Palma, where attacks occurred that precipitated shuttering the project. Over the last few months, Total received approval for key financing from the US Export-Import Bank. Pouyanne has likened remaining obstacles to “more a question of paperwork,” while

Energy Department Authorizes Strategic Petroleum Reserve Exchange to Support Fuel Supply in Gulf Coast
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the authorization of an exchange from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) with ExxonMobil Corporation to address logistical challenges impacting crude oil deliveries to the company’s Baton Rouge refinery. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright authorized this action to help maintain stable regional supply of transportation fuels across Louisiana and the broader Gulf Coast. This action preserves the SPR’s operational flexibility and will not impact or delay the Department’s ongoing efforts to refill the reserve. Under the exchange agreement, DOE will provide up to 1 million barrels of crude oil from the SPR. The exchange will support ExxonMobil’s restoration of refinery operations that were reduced due to an offshore supply disruption. ExxonMobil will return the borrowed crude along with additional barrels of crude oil for the SPR at no cost to the taxpayer. The Department remains in close coordination with industry partners to ensure stability in the fuel supply chain during the peak demand season. DOE continues to encourage refiners to prioritize efficient production and delivery of refined fuels, stands ready to support the nation’s energy security through the responsible use of strategic resources, and will continue to deliver on President Trump’s commitment to protect American energy security by refilling the SPR. Background: Sections 159 and 160 of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), 42 U.S.C.A. §§ 6239 and 6240, authorize the Secretary of Energy to exchange SPR petroleum products and to acquire petroleum products by exchange for storage in the SPR. The Secretary of Energy has previously exercised this legal authority to conduct emergency exchanges in response to supply disruptions, including Keystone Pipeline in 2022, and the Calcasieu Ship Channel closures in 2006 and 2000. An oil supply disruption has led to reduced operations at the Baton Rouge refinery, limiting production

Nvidia hits $4T market cap as AI, high-performance semiconductors hit stride
“The company added $1 trillion in market value in less than a year, a pace that surpasses Apple and Microsoft’s previous trajectories. This rapid ascent reflects how indispensable AI chipmakers have become in today’s digital economy,” Kiran Raj, practice head, Strategic Intelligence (Disruptor) at GlobalData, said in a statement. According to GlobalData’s Innovation Radar report, “AI Chips – Trends, Market Dynamics and Innovations,” the global AI chip market is projected to reach $154 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20%. Nvidia has much of that market, but it also has a giant bullseye on its back with many competitors gunning for its crown. “With its AI chips powering everything from data centers and cloud computing to autonomous vehicles and robotics, Nvidia is uniquely positioned. However, competitive pressure is mounting. Players like AMD, Intel, Google, and Huawei are doubling down on custom silicon, while regulatory headwinds and export restrictions are reshaping the competitive dynamics,” he said.

Ignoring customers is unsustainable and bad policy
Kent Chandler is a resident senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, Chris Villarreal is an associate fellow in energy and environmental policy at R Street and Michael Giberson is a senior fellow in energy policy at R Street. Electric bills are rising, and energy adequacy is at the top of policymakers’ agendas. The most recent North American Electric Reliability Corp. analysis indicates that much of the country is at an elevated risk this summer of experiencing insufficient operating reserves in above-normal conditions. Given the backlogs of generator interconnection requests and gas turbine orders, the delays inherent in current state and federal siting regimes, and the immediacy of load growth in certain parts of the country, it is clear we can’t build our way out of this situation in the near-term. However, enabling flexible customer demand can drive significant system-wide benefits, mitigating the cost or timing of expensive system upgrades. Now is the time for states to take action to empower consumers to play a greater role in their individual and collective energy future. It’s been 30 years since some states began restructuring their electricity laws, allowing customers to buy electricity from suppliers other than their incumbent utilities. However, even with significant leaps in technological innovation and expansion of wholesale markets, implementation of retail choice and customer empowerment within vertically-integrated states has lagged. To determine the state of play for customers to make their own electricity choices, we recently completed a review of consumer choice, retail competition and customer empowerment in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, culminating in a report grading the states on their level of customer empowerment. As you might imagine, the grades vary, from Texas receiving an A- to Alabama receiving the effort’s lone F. Regardless of the grade
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