Your Gateway to Power, Energy, Datacenters, Bitcoin and AI
Dive into the latest industry updates, our exclusive Paperboy Newsletter, and curated insights designed to keep you informed. Stay ahead with minimal time spent.
Discover What Matters Most to You
AI
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Bitcoin:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Datacenter:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Energy:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
Discover What Matter Most to You
Featured Articles
Trump Says He’s Inclined to Exclude XOM From Venezuela
(Update) January 12, 2026, 4:24 PM GMT: Article updated. Adds shares in the fifth paragraph. President Donald Trump signaled he’s leaning toward excluding Exxon Mobil Corp. from his push for US oil majors to rebuild Venezuela’s petroleum industry, saying he was displeased with the company’s response to his initiative. “I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” Trump told reporters late Sunday aboard the presidential plane on the way back to Washington from his Florida estate. “I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.” Trump appeared to be referring to a White House meeting on Friday with almost 20 oil industry executives, where Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods expressed some of the strongest reservations and described Venezuela as “uninvestable.” The president’s latest comments also highlight the challenge of persuading the US oil industry to commit to an ambitious reconstruction of Venezuela’s once-mighty energy sector, which he announced within hours of the capture of former President Nicolás Maduro. Exxon shares fell as much as 1.7% Monday as crude futures were little changed. Reviving the oil industry and undoing years of underinvestment and mismanagement would, by some estimates, require $100 billion and take a decade. Despite US moves over the past week to take full control of Venezuelan oil exports, many questions remain over how major investment on the ground could be guaranteed over such a protracted period in a country beset by corruption and insecurity. When asked Sunday which backstops or guarantees he had told oil companies he was willing to provide, Trump said: “Guarantees that they’re going to be safe, that there’s going to be no problem. And there won’t be.” Trump didn’t specify in what way he might seek to exclude Exxon. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside of US office hours.
North America Adds Almost 100 Rigs Week on Week
North America added 94 rigs week on week, according to Baker Hughes’ latest North America rotary rig count, which was published on January 9. Although the total U.S. rig count dropped by two week on week, the total Canada rig count increased by 96 during the same period, pushing the total North America rig count up to 741, comprising 544 rigs from the U.S. and 197 rigs from Canada, the count outlined. Of the total U.S. rig count of 544, 525 rigs are categorized as land rigs, 16 are categorized as offshore rigs, and three are categorized as inland water rigs. The total U.S. rig count is made up of 409 oil rigs, 124 gas rigs, and 11 miscellaneous rigs, according to Baker Hughes’ count, which revealed that the U.S. total comprises 475 horizontal rigs, 57 directional rigs, and 12 vertical rigs. Week on week, the U.S. land rig count dropped by two, and its offshore and inland water rig counts remained unchanged, Baker Hughes highlighted. The U.S. oil rig count dropped by three week on week, its gas rig count dropped by one, and its miscellaneous rig count increased by two week on week, the count showed. The U.S. horizontal rig count dropped by one, its vertical rig count dropped by two, and its directional rig count increased by one, week on week, the count revealed. A major state variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, Louisiana dropped three rigs, and New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming each dropped one rig. Utah added four rigs and Colorado added one rig week on week, the count highlighted. A major basin variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, the Permian basin dropped three rigs, the Haynesville, Mississippian, and Williston basins
Scattered network data impedes automation efforts
Solution: Proof-of-concept mindset Smaller companies and deep network engineering teams can often succeed with a homegrown or open-source NSoT solution, at least at in the early stages of a network automation strategy. As complexity, scale, and diversity of use cases grow, many network teams will need to partner with a NSoT vendor. Thus, network teams should approach these projects with a NSoT mindset. They should document the value of such a tool as much as possible and prepare a business case for how a vendor could amplify this success. Challenge: Data pain NSoT isn’t a magic bullet for solving the problems IT organizations have with poor network documentation and scattered operational data. Network engineering teams will need to discover, validate, reconcile, and import data from multiple repositories. This process can be challenging and time-consuming. Some of this data will difficult to find. Once the data is found, engineers need to validate the data is good. For instance, is the spreadsheet for a network’s IP address plan accurate? “In brownfield networks, IP addresses are in one IPAM, VLANs are in another system. Some people have spreadsheet and some use MongoDB,” said a network automation engineer at a Fortune 500 bank. “The sources of data are everywhere, and everyone is doing their own thing.” “There was so much information for the operational team,” said network engineer with a large energy company. “From circuits to IPs to devices, all that was in so many different Excel sheets and different spaces, and each team had its own version.” Solution: Discovery tools, cooperation There is no quick fix for solving data problems during NSoT projects, but network discovery tools can help. Network observability solutions can typically discovery a wide variety of relevant data on the network. IP address management tools also offer discovery. NSoT specialist vendors
Mitigating emissions from air freight: Unlocking the potential of SAF with book and claim
In association withAvelia Emissions from air freight have increased by 25% since 2019, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth. The researchers found that the expansion of cargo-only fleets to transport goods during the pandemic — as air travel halted, slower freight modes faced disruption, but demand for rapid delivery soared — has led to a yearly increase of almost 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, making up 93.8m tonnes from air freight overall. [embedded content] And though fleet modernization and operational improvements by freight operators have contributed to ongoing decarbonization efforts, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) looks set to be instrumental in helping the sector achieve its ambitions to reduce environmental footprint in the long-term. When used neat, or pure and unblended, SAF can help reduce the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation by as much as 80% relative to conventional fuel. It’s why the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that SAF could account for as much as 65% of total reduction of emissions.
For Christoph Wolff, CEO of the Smart Freight Centre, “SAF is the main pathway” to decarbonization across both freight and the wider aviation ecosystem. “The great thing about SAF is it’s chemically identical to Jet A fuel,” he says. “You can blend it [which means] you have a pathway to ramp it up. You can start small and you can scale it. By scaling it there is the promise or the hope that the price comes down.”
At at least twice the price of conventional jet fuel, cost is a significant barrier hindering broader adoption. And it isn’t the only one standing between SAF and wider penetration. Bridging the gap between a concentrated supply of SAF and global demand also remains a major hurdle. Though the number of verified SAF outlets has increased from fewer than 20 locations in 2021 to 114 as of April 2025, according to sustainability solutions framework 4Air, that accounts for only 92 airports worldwide out of more than 40,000. “SAF is central to the decarbonization of the aviation sector,” believes Raman Ojha, president of Shell Aviation. “Having said that, adoption and penetration of SAF hasn’t really picked up massively. It’s not due to lack of production capacity, but there are lots of things that are at play. And book and claim in that context helps to bridge that gap.” Bridging the gap with book and claim Book and claim is a chain of custody model, where the flow of administrative records is not necessarily connected to the physical product through the supply chain (source: ISO 22095:2020). Book and claim potentially enables airlines and corporations to access the life cycle GHG emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel even when SAF is not physically available at their location; this model helps bridge the gap between that concentrated supply and global demand, until SAF’s availability improves. “To be bold, without book and claim, no short-term science-based target will be achieved,” says Bettina Paschke, vice president of ESG accounting, reporting and controlling at DHL Express. “Book and claim is essential to achieving science-based targets.”
“SAF production facilities are not everywhere,” she reiterates. “They’re very focused on one location, and if a customer wants to fulfil a mass balance obligation, SAF would need to be shipped around the world just to be at that airport for that customer. That would be very complicated, and very unrealistic.” It would also, counterintuitively, increase total emissions. By using book and claim instead, air freight operators can unlock the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel now, without waiting for supply to broaden. “It might no longer be needed when we have SAF product facilities at each airport in the future,” she points out. “But at the moment, that’s not the case.” At DHL itself, the mechanism has become central to achieving its own three interconnected sustainability pillars, which focus on decarbonizing logistics supply chains, supporting customers toward their decarbonization goals, and ensuring credible emission claims can be shared along the value chain. Demonstrating the importance of a credible and viable framework for book and claim systems is also what inspired the 2022 launch of Shell’s Avelia, one of the first blockchain-powered digital SAF book and claim solutions for aviation, which expanded in 2024 to encompass air freight in addition to business travel. Depending on the offering, Avelia offers freight forwarders the opportunity to share the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel across the value chain with shippers using their services. “It’s also backed by a physical supply chain, which gives our customers — whether those be corporates or freight forwarders or even airlines — a peace of mind that the SAF has been injected at a certain airport, it’s been used and environmental attributes, with the help of blockchain, have been tracked to where they’re getting retired,” says Ojha. He adds: “The most important or critical part is the transparency that it’s providing to our customers to be sure that they’re not saying something which they can’t confidently stand behind.” Moving beyond early adoption To scale up SAF via book and claim and help make it a more commercially viable lower-carbon solution, its adoption will need to be a coordinated “ecosystem play,” says Wolff. That includes early adopters, such as DHL, inspiring action from peers, solution providers such as Shell, working with various stakeholders to drive joint advocacy, and industry associations, like the Smart Freight Centre creating the required frameworks, educational resources, and industry alignment. An active book and claim community made up of many forward-thinking advocates is already driving much of this work forward with a common goal to develop greater standardization and consensus, Wolff points out. “It helps to make sure all definitions on the system are compatible and they can talk to one another, provide educational support, and [also that] there’s a repository of transactions so that it can be documented in a way that people can see and think, ‘oh this is how we do it.’ There are some early adopters that are very experienced, but it needs a lot more people for it to get comfortable.” In early 2024, discussions were held with a diverse group of expert book and claim stakeholders to develop and refine 11 key principles and best practices book and claim models. These represent an aligned set of principles informed by practical successes and challenges faced by practitioners working to decarbonize the heavy transport sector.
Adherence to such a framework is crucial given that book and claim is not yet accepted by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol nor the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) as a recognized model for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — though there are hopes that might change. “The industrialization of book and claim delivery systems is key to credibility and recognition,” says Wolff. “The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science Based Targets Initiative are making steps in recognizing that. There’s a pathway that the Smart Freight Centre is very closely involved in the technical working groups for [looking]to build such a system where, in addition to physical inventory, you also pursue market-based inventories.”
Paschke urges companies not to sit back and wait for policy to change before taking action, though. “The solution is there,” she says. “There are companies like DHL that are making huge upfront investments, and every single contribution helps to scale the industry and give a strong signal to the eco-space.” As pressure to accelerate decarbonization gains pace, it’s critical that air freight operators consider this now, agrees Ojha. “Don’t wait for perfection in guidelines, regulations, or platforms — act now,” he says. “That’s very, very critical. Second, learn by doing and join hands with others. Don’t try to do everything independently or in-house. “Third, make use of registries and platforms, such as Avelia, that can give credibility. Join them, utilize them, and leverage them so that you won’t have to establish auditability from scratch. “And fourth, don’t look at scope book and claim as a means for acquiring a certificate for environmental attributes. Think in terms of your decarbonisation commitment and think of this as a tool for exposure management. Think in terms of the bigger picture.” That bigger picture being a significant sector-wide push toward faster decarbonization — and turning the tide on emissions’ steep upward ascent. Watch the full webcast. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review. This content is produced by MIT Technology Review Insights in association with Avelia. Avelia is a Shell owned solution and brand that was developed with support from Amex GBT, Accenture and Energy Web Foundation. The views from individuals not affiliated with Shell are their own and not those of Shell PLC or its affiliates. Cautionary note | Shell Global
Intensity, Rainbow Near FID on North Dakota Gas Pipeline
Intensity Infrastructure Partners LLC and power producer Rainbow Energy Center LLC have indicated they are nearing a positive final investment decision (FID) on a new pipeline project to bring Bakken natural gas to eastern North Dakota. “[T]he firm transportation commitments contained in executed precedent agreements are sufficient to underpin the decision to advance Phase I of their 36-inch natural gas pipeline in North Dakota, reflecting growing confidence in the region’s long-term power and industrial demand outlook”, the companies said in a joint statement. “This approach establishes a scalable, dispatchable power and gas delivery hub capable of adapting to evolving market conditions, supporting sustained data center growth, grid reliability needs and long-term industrial development across North Dakota”. “The system will provide reliable natural gas supply through multiple receipt points, including Northern Border Pipeline, WBI Energy’s existing transmission and storage network, and direct connections to six Bakken natural gas processing plants, creating a highly integrated supply platform from Bakken and Canadian production”, the online statement added. “The pipeline is designed to operate without compression fuel surcharges, reducing operational complexity while enhancing reliability and tariff transparency for shippers. “Uncommitted capacity on phase I supports incremental gas-fired generation along the planned pipeline corridor and at Coal Creek Station, leveraging existing power transmission infrastructure, a strategic geographic location and a proven operating platform. “The 36-inch pipeline enables future throughput increases without the need for duplicative greenfield infrastructure as demand continues to develop”. Rainbow chief executive Stacy Tschider said, “By leveraging established assets like Coal Creek and integrating directly with basin supply and interstate systems, this project is positioned to meet near-term needs while remaining expandable for the next generation of load growth”. The project would proceed in two phases. Phase 1 would build a 136-mile, 36-inch pipeline with a capacity of about 1.1 million dekatherms a day (Dthd). The phase 1 line would
The Download: introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies
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. Introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies It’s easy to be cynical about technology these days. Many of the “disruptions” of the last 15 years were more about coddling a certain set of young, moneyed San Franciscans than improving the world. Yet you can be sympathetic to the techlash and still fully buy into the idea that technology can be good. We really can build tools that make this planet healthier, more livable, more equitable, and just all-around better. And some people are doing just that, pushing progress forward across a number of fundamental, potentially world-changing technologies.
These are exactly the technologies we aim to spotlight in our annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. These are 10 technologies that we believe are poised to fundamentally alter the world, and they’re a matter of hot debate across the newsroom for months before being unveiled. So, without further ado… Here’s the full list. Do you think we’ve missed something? You have until April to cast your vote for the 11th breakthrough!
Why some “breakthrough” technologies don’t work out —Fabio Duarte is associate director and principal research scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab. Today marks the 25th year the MIT Technology Review newsroom has compiled its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited the publication’s original list, finding that while all the technologies were still relevant, each had evolved and progressed in often unpredictable ways. I lead students through a similar exercise in a graduate class I teach with James Scott for MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, asking them what we can learn from the failures. Although it’s less glamorous than envisioning which advances will change our future, analyzing failed technologies is equally important. Read about why that is. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Iran has almost completely shut its internet down Which makes it very hard for the world to witness its government killing people. (AP)+ The shutdown is chillingly effective, and likely to last. (The Guardian)+ President Trump is considering military strikes against Iran. (NYT $)2 ICE is gaining powerful new surveillance capabilitiesIt’s purchased tools that give it the ability to track individuals across entire neighborhoods. (404 Media $)+ The ICE shooting shows why reality still matters. (The Verge $)+ It’s time for Apple to reinstate ICEBlock. (Engadget) 3 Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok They are the first in the world to ban the AI tool, which is being used to make explicit non-consensual deepfakes. (BBC)+ How Elon Musk’s platform unleashed a torrent of abuse upon women and girls. (The Guardian)4 Silicon Valley’s billionaires are panicking over a proposed 5% wealth taxPoor dears. (Wired $) 5 Meta signed a deal with three nuclear companiesIt’s becoming a favored power source for tech companies as their AI ambitions grow. (TechCrunch)+ Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? (MIT Technology Review) 6 AI has a memorization problem The fact it reproduces copyrighted work shows it might not work the way its makers claim. (The Atlantic $)+ DeepSeek is poised to release a new flagship AI model. (The Information $)7 Here’s the stuff from CES you might actually consider buying It’s always a bit of a gimmick fest—but these items made their way onto reporters’ wishlists. (The Verge $)+ On the flipside, you absolutely should not purchase anything on the ‘worst in show’ list. (The Register)8 How WhatsApp took over the world 🌍It’s used by more than three billion people every month—nearly half the global population. (New Yorker $)9 AI music is here to stayLove it or hate it, it’s only going to play a bigger role going forward. (Vox)+ It’s complicating our definitions of authorship and creativity in the process. (MIT Technology Review)10 We’re crying out for better experiences onlineThe question is: who will give them to us? (WP $) Quote of the day “Things here are very, very bad. A lot of our friends have been killed. They were firing live rounds. It’s like a war zone, the streets are full of blood. They’re taking away bodies in trucks.” —An anonymous source in Iran’s capital Tehran tells the BBC how the government is cracking down on protests.
One more thing This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel
Found Energy aims to harness the energy in scraps of aluminum metal to power industrial processes without fossil fuels. Since 2022, the company has worked to develop ways to rapidly release energy from aluminum on a small scale. Now it’s just switched on a much larger version of its aluminum-powered engine, which it claims is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. Soon, it will be installed to supply heat and hydrogen to a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US, using the aluminum waste produced by the plant itself as fuel. If everything works as planned, this technology, which uses a catalyst to unlock the energy stored within aluminum metal, could transform a growing share of aluminum scrap into a zero-carbon fuel. Read the full story. —James Dinneen
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + I enjoyed this heartwarming story of love across the generational divide ❤️ + It turns out you can cook an egg in an air fryer. The big question is—should you?+ Of course Japan has a real-life Pokémon Fossil Museum.+ If you haven’t already, make 2026 the year you get a hobby. Your life will be all the richer for it.
Trump Says He’s Inclined to Exclude XOM From Venezuela
(Update) January 12, 2026, 4:24 PM GMT: Article updated. Adds shares in the fifth paragraph. President Donald Trump signaled he’s leaning toward excluding Exxon Mobil Corp. from his push for US oil majors to rebuild Venezuela’s petroleum industry, saying he was displeased with the company’s response to his initiative. “I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” Trump told reporters late Sunday aboard the presidential plane on the way back to Washington from his Florida estate. “I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.” Trump appeared to be referring to a White House meeting on Friday with almost 20 oil industry executives, where Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods expressed some of the strongest reservations and described Venezuela as “uninvestable.” The president’s latest comments also highlight the challenge of persuading the US oil industry to commit to an ambitious reconstruction of Venezuela’s once-mighty energy sector, which he announced within hours of the capture of former President Nicolás Maduro. Exxon shares fell as much as 1.7% Monday as crude futures were little changed. Reviving the oil industry and undoing years of underinvestment and mismanagement would, by some estimates, require $100 billion and take a decade. Despite US moves over the past week to take full control of Venezuelan oil exports, many questions remain over how major investment on the ground could be guaranteed over such a protracted period in a country beset by corruption and insecurity. When asked Sunday which backstops or guarantees he had told oil companies he was willing to provide, Trump said: “Guarantees that they’re going to be safe, that there’s going to be no problem. And there won’t be.” Trump didn’t specify in what way he might seek to exclude Exxon. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside of US office hours.
North America Adds Almost 100 Rigs Week on Week
North America added 94 rigs week on week, according to Baker Hughes’ latest North America rotary rig count, which was published on January 9. Although the total U.S. rig count dropped by two week on week, the total Canada rig count increased by 96 during the same period, pushing the total North America rig count up to 741, comprising 544 rigs from the U.S. and 197 rigs from Canada, the count outlined. Of the total U.S. rig count of 544, 525 rigs are categorized as land rigs, 16 are categorized as offshore rigs, and three are categorized as inland water rigs. The total U.S. rig count is made up of 409 oil rigs, 124 gas rigs, and 11 miscellaneous rigs, according to Baker Hughes’ count, which revealed that the U.S. total comprises 475 horizontal rigs, 57 directional rigs, and 12 vertical rigs. Week on week, the U.S. land rig count dropped by two, and its offshore and inland water rig counts remained unchanged, Baker Hughes highlighted. The U.S. oil rig count dropped by three week on week, its gas rig count dropped by one, and its miscellaneous rig count increased by two week on week, the count showed. The U.S. horizontal rig count dropped by one, its vertical rig count dropped by two, and its directional rig count increased by one, week on week, the count revealed. A major state variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, Louisiana dropped three rigs, and New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming each dropped one rig. Utah added four rigs and Colorado added one rig week on week, the count highlighted. A major basin variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, the Permian basin dropped three rigs, the Haynesville, Mississippian, and Williston basins
Scattered network data impedes automation efforts
Solution: Proof-of-concept mindset Smaller companies and deep network engineering teams can often succeed with a homegrown or open-source NSoT solution, at least at in the early stages of a network automation strategy. As complexity, scale, and diversity of use cases grow, many network teams will need to partner with a NSoT vendor. Thus, network teams should approach these projects with a NSoT mindset. They should document the value of such a tool as much as possible and prepare a business case for how a vendor could amplify this success. Challenge: Data pain NSoT isn’t a magic bullet for solving the problems IT organizations have with poor network documentation and scattered operational data. Network engineering teams will need to discover, validate, reconcile, and import data from multiple repositories. This process can be challenging and time-consuming. Some of this data will difficult to find. Once the data is found, engineers need to validate the data is good. For instance, is the spreadsheet for a network’s IP address plan accurate? “In brownfield networks, IP addresses are in one IPAM, VLANs are in another system. Some people have spreadsheet and some use MongoDB,” said a network automation engineer at a Fortune 500 bank. “The sources of data are everywhere, and everyone is doing their own thing.” “There was so much information for the operational team,” said network engineer with a large energy company. “From circuits to IPs to devices, all that was in so many different Excel sheets and different spaces, and each team had its own version.” Solution: Discovery tools, cooperation There is no quick fix for solving data problems during NSoT projects, but network discovery tools can help. Network observability solutions can typically discovery a wide variety of relevant data on the network. IP address management tools also offer discovery. NSoT specialist vendors
Mitigating emissions from air freight: Unlocking the potential of SAF with book and claim
In association withAvelia Emissions from air freight have increased by 25% since 2019, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth. The researchers found that the expansion of cargo-only fleets to transport goods during the pandemic — as air travel halted, slower freight modes faced disruption, but demand for rapid delivery soared — has led to a yearly increase of almost 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, making up 93.8m tonnes from air freight overall. [embedded content] And though fleet modernization and operational improvements by freight operators have contributed to ongoing decarbonization efforts, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) looks set to be instrumental in helping the sector achieve its ambitions to reduce environmental footprint in the long-term. When used neat, or pure and unblended, SAF can help reduce the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation by as much as 80% relative to conventional fuel. It’s why the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that SAF could account for as much as 65% of total reduction of emissions.
For Christoph Wolff, CEO of the Smart Freight Centre, “SAF is the main pathway” to decarbonization across both freight and the wider aviation ecosystem. “The great thing about SAF is it’s chemically identical to Jet A fuel,” he says. “You can blend it [which means] you have a pathway to ramp it up. You can start small and you can scale it. By scaling it there is the promise or the hope that the price comes down.”
At at least twice the price of conventional jet fuel, cost is a significant barrier hindering broader adoption. And it isn’t the only one standing between SAF and wider penetration. Bridging the gap between a concentrated supply of SAF and global demand also remains a major hurdle. Though the number of verified SAF outlets has increased from fewer than 20 locations in 2021 to 114 as of April 2025, according to sustainability solutions framework 4Air, that accounts for only 92 airports worldwide out of more than 40,000. “SAF is central to the decarbonization of the aviation sector,” believes Raman Ojha, president of Shell Aviation. “Having said that, adoption and penetration of SAF hasn’t really picked up massively. It’s not due to lack of production capacity, but there are lots of things that are at play. And book and claim in that context helps to bridge that gap.” Bridging the gap with book and claim Book and claim is a chain of custody model, where the flow of administrative records is not necessarily connected to the physical product through the supply chain (source: ISO 22095:2020). Book and claim potentially enables airlines and corporations to access the life cycle GHG emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel even when SAF is not physically available at their location; this model helps bridge the gap between that concentrated supply and global demand, until SAF’s availability improves. “To be bold, without book and claim, no short-term science-based target will be achieved,” says Bettina Paschke, vice president of ESG accounting, reporting and controlling at DHL Express. “Book and claim is essential to achieving science-based targets.”
“SAF production facilities are not everywhere,” she reiterates. “They’re very focused on one location, and if a customer wants to fulfil a mass balance obligation, SAF would need to be shipped around the world just to be at that airport for that customer. That would be very complicated, and very unrealistic.” It would also, counterintuitively, increase total emissions. By using book and claim instead, air freight operators can unlock the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel now, without waiting for supply to broaden. “It might no longer be needed when we have SAF product facilities at each airport in the future,” she points out. “But at the moment, that’s not the case.” At DHL itself, the mechanism has become central to achieving its own three interconnected sustainability pillars, which focus on decarbonizing logistics supply chains, supporting customers toward their decarbonization goals, and ensuring credible emission claims can be shared along the value chain. Demonstrating the importance of a credible and viable framework for book and claim systems is also what inspired the 2022 launch of Shell’s Avelia, one of the first blockchain-powered digital SAF book and claim solutions for aviation, which expanded in 2024 to encompass air freight in addition to business travel. Depending on the offering, Avelia offers freight forwarders the opportunity to share the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel across the value chain with shippers using their services. “It’s also backed by a physical supply chain, which gives our customers — whether those be corporates or freight forwarders or even airlines — a peace of mind that the SAF has been injected at a certain airport, it’s been used and environmental attributes, with the help of blockchain, have been tracked to where they’re getting retired,” says Ojha. He adds: “The most important or critical part is the transparency that it’s providing to our customers to be sure that they’re not saying something which they can’t confidently stand behind.” Moving beyond early adoption To scale up SAF via book and claim and help make it a more commercially viable lower-carbon solution, its adoption will need to be a coordinated “ecosystem play,” says Wolff. That includes early adopters, such as DHL, inspiring action from peers, solution providers such as Shell, working with various stakeholders to drive joint advocacy, and industry associations, like the Smart Freight Centre creating the required frameworks, educational resources, and industry alignment. An active book and claim community made up of many forward-thinking advocates is already driving much of this work forward with a common goal to develop greater standardization and consensus, Wolff points out. “It helps to make sure all definitions on the system are compatible and they can talk to one another, provide educational support, and [also that] there’s a repository of transactions so that it can be documented in a way that people can see and think, ‘oh this is how we do it.’ There are some early adopters that are very experienced, but it needs a lot more people for it to get comfortable.” In early 2024, discussions were held with a diverse group of expert book and claim stakeholders to develop and refine 11 key principles and best practices book and claim models. These represent an aligned set of principles informed by practical successes and challenges faced by practitioners working to decarbonize the heavy transport sector.
Adherence to such a framework is crucial given that book and claim is not yet accepted by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol nor the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) as a recognized model for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — though there are hopes that might change. “The industrialization of book and claim delivery systems is key to credibility and recognition,” says Wolff. “The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science Based Targets Initiative are making steps in recognizing that. There’s a pathway that the Smart Freight Centre is very closely involved in the technical working groups for [looking]to build such a system where, in addition to physical inventory, you also pursue market-based inventories.”
Paschke urges companies not to sit back and wait for policy to change before taking action, though. “The solution is there,” she says. “There are companies like DHL that are making huge upfront investments, and every single contribution helps to scale the industry and give a strong signal to the eco-space.” As pressure to accelerate decarbonization gains pace, it’s critical that air freight operators consider this now, agrees Ojha. “Don’t wait for perfection in guidelines, regulations, or platforms — act now,” he says. “That’s very, very critical. Second, learn by doing and join hands with others. Don’t try to do everything independently or in-house. “Third, make use of registries and platforms, such as Avelia, that can give credibility. Join them, utilize them, and leverage them so that you won’t have to establish auditability from scratch. “And fourth, don’t look at scope book and claim as a means for acquiring a certificate for environmental attributes. Think in terms of your decarbonisation commitment and think of this as a tool for exposure management. Think in terms of the bigger picture.” That bigger picture being a significant sector-wide push toward faster decarbonization — and turning the tide on emissions’ steep upward ascent. Watch the full webcast. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review. This content is produced by MIT Technology Review Insights in association with Avelia. Avelia is a Shell owned solution and brand that was developed with support from Amex GBT, Accenture and Energy Web Foundation. The views from individuals not affiliated with Shell are their own and not those of Shell PLC or its affiliates. Cautionary note | Shell Global
Intensity, Rainbow Near FID on North Dakota Gas Pipeline
Intensity Infrastructure Partners LLC and power producer Rainbow Energy Center LLC have indicated they are nearing a positive final investment decision (FID) on a new pipeline project to bring Bakken natural gas to eastern North Dakota. “[T]he firm transportation commitments contained in executed precedent agreements are sufficient to underpin the decision to advance Phase I of their 36-inch natural gas pipeline in North Dakota, reflecting growing confidence in the region’s long-term power and industrial demand outlook”, the companies said in a joint statement. “This approach establishes a scalable, dispatchable power and gas delivery hub capable of adapting to evolving market conditions, supporting sustained data center growth, grid reliability needs and long-term industrial development across North Dakota”. “The system will provide reliable natural gas supply through multiple receipt points, including Northern Border Pipeline, WBI Energy’s existing transmission and storage network, and direct connections to six Bakken natural gas processing plants, creating a highly integrated supply platform from Bakken and Canadian production”, the online statement added. “The pipeline is designed to operate without compression fuel surcharges, reducing operational complexity while enhancing reliability and tariff transparency for shippers. “Uncommitted capacity on phase I supports incremental gas-fired generation along the planned pipeline corridor and at Coal Creek Station, leveraging existing power transmission infrastructure, a strategic geographic location and a proven operating platform. “The 36-inch pipeline enables future throughput increases without the need for duplicative greenfield infrastructure as demand continues to develop”. Rainbow chief executive Stacy Tschider said, “By leveraging established assets like Coal Creek and integrating directly with basin supply and interstate systems, this project is positioned to meet near-term needs while remaining expandable for the next generation of load growth”. The project would proceed in two phases. Phase 1 would build a 136-mile, 36-inch pipeline with a capacity of about 1.1 million dekatherms a day (Dthd). The phase 1 line would
The Download: introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies
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. Introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies It’s easy to be cynical about technology these days. Many of the “disruptions” of the last 15 years were more about coddling a certain set of young, moneyed San Franciscans than improving the world. Yet you can be sympathetic to the techlash and still fully buy into the idea that technology can be good. We really can build tools that make this planet healthier, more livable, more equitable, and just all-around better. And some people are doing just that, pushing progress forward across a number of fundamental, potentially world-changing technologies.
These are exactly the technologies we aim to spotlight in our annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. These are 10 technologies that we believe are poised to fundamentally alter the world, and they’re a matter of hot debate across the newsroom for months before being unveiled. So, without further ado… Here’s the full list. Do you think we’ve missed something? You have until April to cast your vote for the 11th breakthrough!
Why some “breakthrough” technologies don’t work out —Fabio Duarte is associate director and principal research scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab. Today marks the 25th year the MIT Technology Review newsroom has compiled its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited the publication’s original list, finding that while all the technologies were still relevant, each had evolved and progressed in often unpredictable ways. I lead students through a similar exercise in a graduate class I teach with James Scott for MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, asking them what we can learn from the failures. Although it’s less glamorous than envisioning which advances will change our future, analyzing failed technologies is equally important. Read about why that is. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Iran has almost completely shut its internet down Which makes it very hard for the world to witness its government killing people. (AP)+ The shutdown is chillingly effective, and likely to last. (The Guardian)+ President Trump is considering military strikes against Iran. (NYT $)2 ICE is gaining powerful new surveillance capabilitiesIt’s purchased tools that give it the ability to track individuals across entire neighborhoods. (404 Media $)+ The ICE shooting shows why reality still matters. (The Verge $)+ It’s time for Apple to reinstate ICEBlock. (Engadget) 3 Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok They are the first in the world to ban the AI tool, which is being used to make explicit non-consensual deepfakes. (BBC)+ How Elon Musk’s platform unleashed a torrent of abuse upon women and girls. (The Guardian)4 Silicon Valley’s billionaires are panicking over a proposed 5% wealth taxPoor dears. (Wired $) 5 Meta signed a deal with three nuclear companiesIt’s becoming a favored power source for tech companies as their AI ambitions grow. (TechCrunch)+ Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? (MIT Technology Review) 6 AI has a memorization problem The fact it reproduces copyrighted work shows it might not work the way its makers claim. (The Atlantic $)+ DeepSeek is poised to release a new flagship AI model. (The Information $)7 Here’s the stuff from CES you might actually consider buying It’s always a bit of a gimmick fest—but these items made their way onto reporters’ wishlists. (The Verge $)+ On the flipside, you absolutely should not purchase anything on the ‘worst in show’ list. (The Register)8 How WhatsApp took over the world 🌍It’s used by more than three billion people every month—nearly half the global population. (New Yorker $)9 AI music is here to stayLove it or hate it, it’s only going to play a bigger role going forward. (Vox)+ It’s complicating our definitions of authorship and creativity in the process. (MIT Technology Review)10 We’re crying out for better experiences onlineThe question is: who will give them to us? (WP $) Quote of the day “Things here are very, very bad. A lot of our friends have been killed. They were firing live rounds. It’s like a war zone, the streets are full of blood. They’re taking away bodies in trucks.” —An anonymous source in Iran’s capital Tehran tells the BBC how the government is cracking down on protests.
One more thing This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel
Found Energy aims to harness the energy in scraps of aluminum metal to power industrial processes without fossil fuels. Since 2022, the company has worked to develop ways to rapidly release energy from aluminum on a small scale. Now it’s just switched on a much larger version of its aluminum-powered engine, which it claims is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. Soon, it will be installed to supply heat and hydrogen to a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US, using the aluminum waste produced by the plant itself as fuel. If everything works as planned, this technology, which uses a catalyst to unlock the energy stored within aluminum metal, could transform a growing share of aluminum scrap into a zero-carbon fuel. Read the full story. —James Dinneen
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + I enjoyed this heartwarming story of love across the generational divide ❤️ + It turns out you can cook an egg in an air fryer. The big question is—should you?+ Of course Japan has a real-life Pokémon Fossil Museum.+ If you haven’t already, make 2026 the year you get a hobby. Your life will be all the richer for it.
TotalEnergies Gets New Block around Lebanon-Israel Border
TotalEnergies SE and its partners in Block 9 have signed an agreement with the Lebanese government to enter the adjacent Block 8 around the Israeli-Lebanese maritime border. “Although the drilling of the Qana well on Block 9 did not give positive results, we remain committed to pursue our exploration activities in Lebanon”, TotalEnergies chair and chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said in a statement on the company’s website. France’s TotalEnergies is to own 35 percent in Block 8 as operator. Italy’s state-backed Eni SpA would get 35 percent. QatarEnergy would hold 30 percent. “The consortium’s initial work program on Block 8 consists of the acquisition of a 1,200 km2 [463.32 square miles] 3D seismic survey, in order to further assess the area’s exploration potential”, TotalEnergies said. Block 8 sits about 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) off the southern coast of Lebanon in waters about 1,700-2,100 meters (6,889.76 feet) deep, according to a separate statement by QatarEnergy. About three years ago TotalEnergies contracted Transocean Ltd to start drilling in Block 9, as announced by the block operator May 2, 2023. TotalEnergies launched exploration after Lebanon and Israel agreed to delineate their maritime border, around which Block 9 lies. Under the treaty brokered by the United States and signed by the Mediterranean neighbors October 2022, Israel agreed not to develop hydrocarbon deposits in Block 9 in exchange for remuneration by developers. The treaty stated no Israeli or Lebanese corporation shall hold exploration and exploitation rights in Block 9. “The parties understand that there is a hydrocarbon prospect of currently unknown commercial viability that exists at least partially in the area the parties understand to be Lebanon’s Block 9, and at least partially in the area the parties understand to be Israel’s Block 72”, read the agreement, as shared by the websites of the Israeli parliament
Ukraine Strikes Lukoil Drilling Platforms in Caspian Sea
Ukraine overnight targeted three drilling platforms in the Caspian Sea owned by Russian oil major Lukoil in the latest move to weaken Russia’s economic capacity to fund its war effort. The platforms, V. Filanovsky, Yuri Korchagin, and Valery Grayfe, sustained direct hits, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on its Telegram channel. The extent of the damage is being assessed, it added. The facilities were targeted multiple times by Ukraine in December. Lukoil didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside of regular business hours. In a separate operation, Kyiv’s forces struck a Buk-M3 medium-range air defense missile launcher in a part of Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine that’s under Russian control, with preliminary reports indicating multiple hits and explosions, according to a statement. Another strike targeted a warehouse of a material and technical support unit in Kherson region, aiming to disrupt Russia’s logistics and combat capabilities. Ukraine has intensified attacks on Russia’s energy assets – from refineries to sea terminals and so-called shadow fleet tankers – as a way to reduce the revenue that helps Moscow fund its war effort. Russian forces have targeted energy infrastructure across its neighbor’s territory, including power plants, with strikes leading to widespread electricity and heading outages across Ukraine. Separately, local officials said one person was killed and at least four wounded overnight in a Ukrainian drone strike on the city of Voronezh in southwestern Russia. Governor Alexander Gusev said 17 UAVs were neutralized in what he called one of the largest drone attacks on the city since the start of the war. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you, join the conversation on the Rigzone Energy Network. The Rigzone Energy Network is a new social experience created for you and all energy professionals to Speak Up about
Uniper Gets Tolling Rights for 30 MW Arneburg Battery
Neoen has signed a deal granting Uniper SE the full tolling rights for the 30-megawatt/78-megawatt-hour Arneburg Battery in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. The seven-year contract will start 2027, the companies said Thursday. The battery energy storage project is under construction. Neoen, a Paris-based renewables company under New York City-based Brookfield Asset Management, expects Arneburg Battery to become operational this year. “Uniper will have full control of the charging and discharging of the battery while Neoen will continue to manage the asset’s operation and maintenance”, Neoen said in a statement on its website. “Uniper intends to optimize the asset across all revenue market channels from ancillary grid services to the wholesale market”. Neoen said separately, “The company intends to become a major player in the country’s [Germany] storage market, leveraging its extensive expertise in developing and operating large-scale batteries around the globe”. Globally Neoen’s portfolio of battery energy storage systems in operation or under construction totals 2.7 gigawatts or 8.1 gigawatt hours, Neoen said. “With a substantial pipeline of projects in Germany, I am confident this marks the beginning of a strong collaboration between our two companies”, said Neoen energy management director Christophe de Branche. Uniper chief commercial officer Carsten Poppinga said, “Agreeing battery tolls like this offers a way for us to further diversify our portfolio and support the energy transition”. Last month Uniper said it had received full approval for the construction and operation of a 50-MW battery energy storage facility at the site of its former Wilhelmshaven power plant. The site, which produced coal electricity until December 2021, already has a solar plant under construction. Targeted to start operation July, the plant is designed to product up to 17.5 gigawatt hours a year, according to Uniper. “With the battery storage system, we are creating a link between security of supply and
Venezuela Oil Being Held at Sea Swells
The volume of Venezuelan crude floating at sea has spiked to the highest level in more than three years after the US seized the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and asserted control over its energy resources. More than 29 million barrels of Venezuelan oil are now on vessels stationary at sea, up from about 20 million barrels earlier this week, according to data from Kpler. Most of the increase has been seen in waters in Asia, where China has long been the largest importer of the South American nation’s output. “Chinese teapots are already bracing for the possibility that the barrels now in transit will be their last,” said Muyu Xu, a senior crude analyst at Kpler, referring to independent Chinese processors. The oil market has been rocked this week by the US intervention into OPEC member Venezuela, which sits on the world’s largest proven crude reserves. The Trump administration has said it plans to control future sales of Venezuelan oil and hold the proceeds, with the new arrangement to last “indefinitely,” according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright. It has also maintained a naval blockade on flows, although US-bound cargoes have been allowed. The upheaval has cast doubt on where the Venezuelan oil that’s now in transit or floating storage will end up. Still, Wright also said Washington would not prevent China from accessing Venezuelan oil, according to comments to Fox News. “We’re not going to cut off China,” he said. “The illicit trade in oil with Iran and Russia, the illegal gun-running stuff, that’s going to be cut off.” WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.
Iran Turmoil Pushes Oil to Weekly Gain Streak
Oil notched its longest streak of weekly gains since June as Iran intensified a crackdown on protests across the country and US President Donald Trump threatened repercussions if demonstrators were targeted. West Texas Intermediate futures settled near $59 a barrel after rising more than 5% over the prior two sessions. Tehran said that “rioters” who damage public property or clash with security forces will face the death penalty, just a day after the US president warned the country’s regime would “pay hell” if protesters were killed. The unrest is the most significant challenge to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since a nationwide uprising in 2022. Protests are disrupting air travel in and out of the country, which produces more than 3 million barrels a day of crude. The scale of risk shows up clearest in options markets, where the skew toward bullish calls is the biggest for US crude futures since July. The Iranian turmoil shifted the focus away from Venezuela, where Trump said further attacks were canceled, citing improved cooperation from the country, leading to a brief dip in oil prices earlier. An energy quarantine is still in effect, though, and the US continues to have its military in position for further action in the region after the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last week. Trump met with oil executives at the White House on Friday and said the US intends to decide which companies will be allowed to go into Venezuela. “We’re dealing with the country, so we’re empowered to make that deal,” he said, adding that “giant” oil companies will spend $100 billion of their own money in investment. Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez, for her part, issued a statement Friday saying the country is a victim of an “illegitimate and illegal criminal aggression” by the
Russia’s Crude Output in December Made Deep Plunge
Russia’s crude oil production plunged by the most in 18 months in December, pincered by western sanctions that are causing the nation’s barrels to pile up at sea and a surge of Ukrainian drone attacks on its energy infrastructure. The nation pumped an average 9.326 million barrels a day of crude oil last month, according to people with knowledge of government data, who asked not to be identified discussing classified information. The figure — which doesn’t include output of condensate — is more than 100,000 barrels a day below November, and almost 250,000 barrels a day lower than Russia is allowed to pump under agreement with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies. The slump comes at a time when Ukraine has been carrying out wide ranging drone attacks on Russian oil infrastructure — directly curbing output and affecting refineries that consume the barrels. At the same time, Russian cargoes are amassing at sea amid signs of reticence among some buyers to take them following sweeping US sanctions targeting the nation’s two largest producers, Rosneft PJSC and Lukoil PJSC. Russia’s Energy Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a Bloomberg request for comment on the December crude production figures. It’s a public holiday in Russia. The December decline was also the deepest since June 2024 — a period when Russia was supposed to be cutting its production anyway under an agreement with OPEC+. The producer group agreed to return barrels to the market between April and December 2025, and then hold output steady in the first quarter of 2026. Until December, Russia’s output had been rising, even if growth had been petering out before year end. Russia’s required level of production for the final month of 2025 was 9.574 million barrels a day, according to OPEC data. Historically, Russia had been a laggard in complying with
AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it
We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, it’s just fetching information that’s already out there on the internet and showing it to you, in some sort of structured way. But all that is up for grabs. We are at a new inflection point. The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way. Of course, Google—the company that has defined search for the past 25 years—is trying to be out front on this. In May of 2023, it began testing AI-generated responses to search queries, using its large language model (LLM) to deliver the kinds of answers you might expect from an expert source or trusted friend. It calls these AI Overviews. Google CEO Sundar Pichai described this to MIT Technology Review as “one of the most positive changes we’ve done to search in a long, long time.”
AI Overviews fundamentally change the kinds of queries Google can address. You can now ask it things like “I’m going to Japan for one week next month. I’ll be staying in Tokyo but would like to take some day trips. Are there any festivals happening nearby? How will the surfing be in Kamakura? Are there any good bands playing?” And you’ll get an answer—not just a link to Reddit, but a built-out answer with current results. More to the point, you can attempt searches that were once pretty much impossible, and get the right answer. You don’t have to be able to articulate what, precisely, you are looking for. You can describe what the bird in your yard looks like, or what the issue seems to be with your refrigerator, or that weird noise your car is making, and get an almost human explanation put together from sources previously siloed across the internet. It’s amazing, and once you start searching that way, it’s addictive.
And it’s not just Google. OpenAI’s ChatGPT now has access to the web, making it far better at finding up-to-date answers to your queries. Microsoft released generative search results for Bing in September. Meta has its own version. The startup Perplexity was doing the same, but with a “move fast, break things” ethos. Literal trillions of dollars are at stake in the outcome as these players jockey to become the next go-to source for information retrieval—the next Google. Not everyone is excited for the change. Publishers are completely freaked out. The shift has heightened fears of a “zero-click” future, where search referral traffic—a mainstay of the web since before Google existed—vanishes from the scene. I got a vision of that future last June, when I got a push alert from the Perplexity app on my phone. Perplexity is a startup trying to reinvent web search. But in addition to delivering deep answers to queries, it will create entire articles about the news of the day, cobbled together by AI from different sources. On that day, it pushed me a story about a new drone company from Eric Schmidt. I recognized the story. Forbes had reported it exclusively, earlier in the week, but it had been locked behind a paywall. The image on Perplexity’s story looked identical to one from Forbes. The language and structure were quite similar. It was effectively the same story, but freely available to anyone on the internet. I texted a friend who had edited the original story to ask if Forbes had a deal with the startup to republish its content. But there was no deal. He was shocked and furious and, well, perplexed. He wasn’t alone. Forbes, the New York Times, and Condé Nast have now all sent the company cease-and-desist orders. News Corp is suing for damages. People are worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. It could spell the end of the canonical answer. It was precisely the nightmare scenario publishers have been so afraid of: The AI was hoovering up their premium content, repackaging it, and promoting it to its audience in a way that didn’t really leave any reason to click through to the original. In fact, on Perplexity’s About page, the first reason it lists to choose the search engine is “Skip the links.” But this isn’t just about publishers (or my own self-interest). People are also worried about what these new LLM-powered results will mean for our fundamental shared reality. Language models have a tendency to make stuff up—they can hallucinate nonsense. Moreover, generative AI can serve up an entirely new answer to the same question every time, or provide different answers to different people on the basis of what it knows about them. It could spell the end of the canonical answer. But make no mistake: This is the future of search. Try it for a bit yourself, and you’ll see.
Sure, we will always want to use search engines to navigate the web and to discover new and interesting sources of information. But the links out are taking a back seat. The way AI can put together a well-reasoned answer to just about any kind of question, drawing on real-time data from across the web, just offers a better experience. That is especially true compared with what web search has become in recent years. If it’s not exactly broken (data shows more people are searching with Google more often than ever before), it’s at the very least increasingly cluttered and daunting to navigate. Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need? Who wants to navigate links when you can have straight answers? And maybe: Who wants to have to learn when you can just know? In the beginning there was Archie. It was the first real internet search engine, and it crawled files previously hidden in the darkness of remote servers. It didn’t tell you what was in those files—just their names. It didn’t preview images; it didn’t have a hierarchy of results, or even much of an interface. But it was a start. And it was pretty good. Then Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, and all manner of web pages sprang forth. The Mosaic home page and the Internet Movie Database and Geocities and the Hampster Dance and web rings and Salon and eBay and CNN and federal government sites and some guy’s home page in Turkey. Until finally, there was too much web to even know where to start. We really needed a better way to navigate our way around, to actually find the things we needed. And so in 1994 Jerry Yang created Yahoo, a hierarchical directory of websites. It quickly became the home page for millions of people. And it was … well, it was okay. TBH, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think we all thought it was much better back then than it actually was. But the web continued to grow and sprawl and expand, every day bringing more information online. Rather than just a list of sites by category, we needed something that actually looked at all that content and indexed it. By the late ’90s that meant choosing from a variety of search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb and WebCrawler and HotBot. And they were good—a huge improvement. At least at first. But alongside the rise of search engines came the first attempts to exploit their ability to deliver traffic. Precious, valuable traffic, which web publishers rely on to sell ads and retailers use to get eyeballs on their goods. Sometimes this meant stuffing pages with keywords or nonsense text designed purely to push pages higher up in search results. It got pretty bad.
And then came Google. It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary Google was when it launched in 1998. Rather than just scanning the content, it also looked at the sources linking to a website, which helped evaluate its relevance. To oversimplify: The more something was cited elsewhere, the more reliable Google considered it, and the higher it would appear in results. This breakthrough made Google radically better at retrieving relevant results than anything that had come before. It was amazing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes AI Overviews as “one of the most positive changes we’ve done to search in a long, long time.”JENS GYARMATY/LAIF/REDUX For 25 years, Google dominated search. Google was search, for most people. (The extent of that domination is currently the subject of multiple legal probes in the United States and the European Union.)
But Google has long been moving away from simply serving up a series of blue links, notes Pandu Nayak, Google’s chief scientist for search. “It’s not just so-called web results, but there are images and videos, and special things for news. There have been direct answers, dictionary answers, sports, answers that come with Knowledge Graph, things like featured snippets,” he says, rattling off a litany of Google’s steps over the years to answer questions more directly. It’s true: Google has evolved over time, becoming more and more of an answer portal. It has added tools that allow people to just get an answer—the live score to a game, the hours a café is open, or a snippet from the FDA’s website—rather than being pointed to a website where the answer may be. But once you’ve used AI Overviews a bit, you realize they are different. Take featured snippets, the passages Google sometimes chooses to highlight and show atop the results themselves. Those words are quoted directly from an original source. The same is true of knowledge panels, which are generated from information stored in a range of public databases and Google’s Knowledge Graph, its database of trillions of facts about the world. While these can be inaccurate, the information source is knowable (and fixable). It’s in a database. You can look it up. Not anymore: AI Overviews can be entirely new every time, generated on the fly by a language model’s predictive text combined with an index of the web.
“I think it’s an exciting moment where we have obviously indexed the world. We built deep understanding on top of it with Knowledge Graph. We’ve been using LLMs and generative AI to improve our understanding of all that,” Pichai told MIT Technology Review. “But now we are able to generate and compose with that.” The result feels less like a querying a database than like asking a very smart, well-read friend. (With the caveat that the friend will sometimes make things up if she does not know the answer.) “[The company’s] mission is organizing the world’s information,” Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, tells me from its headquarters in Mountain View, California. “But actually, for a while what we did was organize web pages. Which is not really the same thing as organizing the world’s information or making it truly useful and accessible to you.” That second concept—accessibility—is what Google is really keying in on with AI Overviews. It’s a sentiment I hear echoed repeatedly while talking to Google execs: They can address more complicated types of queries more efficiently by bringing in a language model to help supply the answers. And they can do it in natural language.
That will become even more important for a future where search goes beyond text queries. For example, Google Lens, which lets people take a picture or upload an image to find out more about something, uses AI-generated answers to tell you what you may be looking at. Google has even showed off the ability to query live video. When it doesn’t have an answer, an AI model can confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous. “We are definitely at the start of a journey where people are going to be able to ask, and get answered, much more complex questions than where we’ve been in the past decade,” says Pichai. There are some real hazards here. First and foremost: Large language models will lie to you. They hallucinate. They get shit wrong. When it doesn’t have an answer, an AI model can blithely and confidently spew back a response anyway. For Google, which has built its reputation over the past 20 years on reliability, this could be a real problem. For the rest of us, it could actually be dangerous. In May 2024, AI Overviews were rolled out to everyone in the US. Things didn’t go well. Google, long the world’s reference desk, told people to eat rocks and to put glue on their pizza. These answers were mostly in response to what the company calls adversarial queries—those designed to trip it up. But still. It didn’t look good. The company quickly went to work fixing the problems—for example, by deprecating so-called user-generated content from sites like Reddit, where some of the weirder answers had come from. Yet while its errors telling people to eat rocks got all the attention, the more pernicious danger might arise when it gets something less obviously wrong. For example, in doing research for this article, I asked Google when MIT Technology Review went online. It helpfully responded that “MIT Technology Review launched its online presence in late 2022.” This was clearly wrong to me, but for someone completely unfamiliar with the publication, would the error leap out? I came across several examples like this, both in Google and in OpenAI’s ChatGPT search. Stuff that’s just far enough off the mark not to be immediately seen as wrong. Google is banking that it can continue to improve these results over time by relying on what it knows about quality sources. “When we produce AI Overviews,” says Nayak, “we look for corroborating information from the search results, and the search results themselves are designed to be from these reliable sources whenever possible. These are some of the mechanisms we have in place that assure that if you just consume the AI Overview, and you don’t want to look further … we hope that you will still get a reliable, trustworthy answer.” In the case above, the 2022 answer seemingly came from a reliable source—a story about MIT Technology Review’s email newsletters, which launched in 2022. But the machine fundamentally misunderstood. This is one of the reasons Google uses human beings—raters—to evaluate the results it delivers for accuracy. Ratings don’t correct or control individual AI Overviews; rather, they help train the model to build better answers. But human raters can be fallible. Google is working on that too. “Raters who look at your experiments may not notice the hallucination because it feels sort of natural,” says Nayak. “And so you have to really work at the evaluation setup to make sure that when there is a hallucination, someone’s able to point out and say, That’s a problem.” The new search Google has rolled out its AI Overviews to upwards of a billion people in more than 100 countries, but it is facing upstarts with new ideas about how search should work. Search Engine GoogleThe search giant has added AI Overviews to search results. These overviews take information from around the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph and use the company’s Gemini language model to create answers to search queries. What it’s good at Google’s AI Overviews are great at giving an easily digestible summary in response to even the most complex queries, with sourcing boxes adjacent to the answers. Among the major options, its deep web index feels the most “internety.” But web publishers fear its summaries will give people little reason to click through to the source material. PerplexityPerplexity is a conversational search engine that uses third-party largelanguage models from OpenAI and Anthropic to answer queries. Perplexity is fantastic at putting together deeper dives in response to user queries, producing answers that are like mini white papers on complex topics. It’s also excellent at summing up current events. But it has gotten a bad rep with publishers, who say it plays fast and loose with their content. ChatGPTWhile Google brought AI to search, OpenAI brought search to ChatGPT. Queries that the model determines will benefit from a web search automatically trigger one, or users can manually select the option to add a web search. Thanks to its ability to preserve context across a conversation, ChatGPT works well for performing searches that benefit from follow-up questions—like planning a vacation through multiple search sessions. OpenAI says users sometimes go “20 turns deep” in researching queries. Of these three, it makes links out to publishers least prominent. When I talked to Pichai about this, he expressed optimism about the company’s ability to maintain accuracy even with the LLM generating responses. That’s because AI Overviews is based on Google’s flagship large language model, Gemini, but also draws from Knowledge Graph and what it considers reputable sources around the web. “You’re always dealing in percentages. What we have done is deliver it at, like, what I would call a few nines of trust and factuality and quality. I’d say 99-point-few-nines. I think that’s the bar we operate at, and it is true with AI Overviews too,” he says. “And so the question is, are we able to do this again at scale? And I think we are.” There’s another hazard as well, though, which is that people ask Google all sorts of weird things. If you want to know someone’s darkest secrets, look at their search history. Sometimes the things people ask Google about are extremely dark. Sometimes they are illegal. Google doesn’t just have to be able to deploy its AI Overviews when an answer can be helpful; it has to be extremely careful not to deploy them when an answer may be harmful. “If you go and say ‘How do I build a bomb?’ it’s fine that there are web results. It’s the open web. You can access anything,” Reid says. “But we do not need to have an AI Overview that tells you how to build a bomb, right? We just don’t think that’s worth it.” But perhaps the greatest hazard—or biggest unknown—is for anyone downstream of a Google search. Take publishers, who for decades now have relied on search queries to send people their way. What reason will people have to click through to the original source, if all the information they seek is right there in the search result? Rand Fishkin, cofounder of the market research firm SparkToro, publishes research on so-called zero-click searches. As Google has moved increasingly into the answer business, the proportion of searches that end without a click has gone up and up. His sense is that AI Overviews are going to explode this trend. “If you are reliant on Google for traffic, and that traffic is what drove your business forward, you are in long- and short-term trouble,” he says. Don’t panic, is Pichai’s message. He argues that even in the age of AI Overviews, people will still want to click through and go deeper for many types of searches. “The underlying principle is people are coming looking for information. They’re not looking for Google always to just answer,” he says. “Sometimes yes, but the vast majority of the times, you’re looking at it as a jumping-off point.” Reid, meanwhile, argues that because AI Overviews allow people to ask more complicated questions and drill down further into what they want, they could even be helpful to some types of publishers and small businesses, especially those operating in the niches: “You essentially reach new audiences, because people can now express what they want more specifically, and so somebody who specializes doesn’t have to rank for the generic query.” “I’m going to start with something risky,” Nick Turley tells me from the confines of a Zoom window. Turley is the head of product for ChatGPT, and he’s showing off OpenAI’s new web search tool a few weeks before it launches. “I should normally try this beforehand, but I’m just gonna search for you,” he says. “This is always a high-risk demo to do, because people tend to be particular about what is said about them on the internet.” He types my name into a search field, and the prototype search engine spits back a few sentences, almost like a speaker bio. It correctly identifies me and my current role. It even highlights a particular story I wrote years ago that was probably my best known. In short, it’s the right answer. Phew? A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing answers from its language model with information from across the web. If the model thinks a response would benefit from up-to-date information, it will automatically run a web search (OpenAI won’t say who its search partners are) and incorporate those responses into its answer, with links out if you want to learn more. You can also opt to manually force it to search the web if it does not do so on its own. OpenAI won’t reveal how many people are using its web search, but it says some 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are potentially exposed to it. “There’s an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be a better super-assistant for you.” Kevin Weil, chief product officer, OpenAI According to Fishkin, these newer forms of AI-assisted search aren’t yet challenging Google’s search dominance. “It does not appear to be cannibalizing classic forms of web search,” he says. OpenAI insists it’s not really trying to compete on search—although frankly this seems to me like a bit of expectation setting. Rather, it says, web search is mostly a means to get more current information than the data in its training models, which tend to have specific cutoff dates that are often months, or even a year or more, in the past. As a result, while ChatGPT may be great at explaining how a West Coast offense works, it has long been useless at telling you what the latest 49ers score is. No more. “I come at it from the perspective of ‘How can we make ChatGPT able to answer every question that you have? How can we make it more useful to you on a daily basis?’ And that’s where search comes in for us,” Kevin Weil, the chief product officer with OpenAI, tells me. “There’s an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be able to be a better super-assistant for you.” Today ChatGPT is able to generate responses for very current news events, as well as near-real-time information on things like stock prices. And while ChatGPT’s interface has long been, well, boring, search results bring in all sorts of multimedia—images, graphs, even video. It’s a very different experience. Weil also argues that ChatGPT has more freedom to innovate and go its own way than competitors like Google—even more than its partner Microsoft does with Bing. Both of those are ad-dependent businesses. OpenAI is not. (At least not yet.) It earns revenue from the developers, businesses, and individuals who use it directly. It’s mostly setting large amounts of money on fire right now—it’s projected to lose $14 billion in 2026, by some reports. But one thing it doesn’t have to worry about is putting ads in its search results as Google does. “For a while what we did was organize web pages. Which is not really the same thing as organizing the world’s information or making it truly useful and accessible to you,” says Google head of search, Liz Reid.WINNI WINTERMEYER/REDUX Like Google, ChatGPT is pulling in information from web publishers, summarizing it, and including it in its answers. But it has also struck financial deals with publishers, a payment for providing the information that gets rolled into its results. (MIT Technology Review has been in discussions with OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and others about publisher deals but has not entered into any agreements. Editorial was neither party to nor informed about the content of those discussions.) But the thing is, for web search to accomplish what OpenAI wants—to be more current than the language model—it also has to bring in information from all sorts of publishers and sources that it doesn’t have deals with. OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, Varun Shetty, told MIT Technology Review that it won’t give preferential treatment to its publishing partners. Instead, OpenAI told me, the model itself finds the most trustworthy and useful source for any given question. And that can get weird too. In that very first example it showed me—when Turley ran that name search—it described a story I wrote years ago for Wired about being hacked. That story remains one of the most widely read I’ve ever written. But ChatGPT didn’t link to it. It linked to a short rewrite from The Verge. Admittedly, this was on a prototype version of search, which was, as Turley said, “risky.” When I asked him about it, he couldn’t really explain why the model chose the sources that it did, because the model itself makes that evaluation. The company helps steer it by identifying—sometimes with the help of users—what it considers better answers, but the model actually selects them. “And in many cases, it gets it wrong, which is why we have work to do,” said Turley. “Having a model in the loop is a very, very different mechanism than how a search engine worked in the past.” Indeed! The model, whether it’s OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude, can be very, very good at explaining things. But the rationale behind its explanations, its reasons for selecting a particular source, and even the language it may use in an answer are all pretty mysterious. Sure, a model can explain very many things, but not when that comes to its own answers. It was almost a decade ago, in 2016, when Pichai wrote that Google was moving from “mobile first” to “AI first”: “But in the next 10 years, we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally available—be it at home, at work, in the car, or on the go—and interacting with all of these surfaces becomes much more natural and intuitive, and above all, more intelligent.” We’re there now—sort of. And it’s a weird place to be. It’s going to get weirder. That’s especially true as these things we now think of as distinct—querying a search engine, prompting a model, looking for a photo we’ve taken, deciding what we want to read or watch or hear, asking for a photo we wish we’d taken, and didn’t, but would still like to see—begin to merge. The search results we see from generative AI are best understood as a waypoint rather than a destination. What’s most important may not be search in itself; rather, it’s that search has given AI model developers a path to incorporating real-time information into their inputs and outputs. And that opens up all sorts of possibilities. “A ChatGPT that can understand and access the web won’t just be about summarizing results. It might be about doing things for you. And I think there’s a fairly exciting future there,” says OpenAI’s Weil. “You can imagine having the model book you a flight, or order DoorDash, or just accomplish general tasks for you in the future. It’s just once the model understands how to use the internet, the sky’s the limit.” This is the agentic future we’ve been hearing about for some time now, and the more AI models make use of real-time data from the internet, the closer it gets. Let’s say you have a trip coming up in a few weeks. An agent that can get data from the internet in real time can book your flights and hotel rooms, make dinner reservations, and more, based on what it knows about you and your upcoming travel—all without your having to guide it. Another agent could, say, monitor the sewage output of your home for certain diseases, and order tests and treatments in response. You won’t have to search for that weird noise your car is making, because the agent in your vehicle will already have done it and made an appointment to get the issue fixed. “It’s not always going to be just doing search and giving answers,” says Pichai. “Sometimes it’s going to be actions. Sometimes you’ll be interacting within the real world. So there is a notion of universal assistance through it all.” And the ways these things will be able to deliver answers is evolving rapidly now too. For example, today Google can not only search text, images, and even video; it can create them. Imagine overlaying that ability with search across an array of formats and devices. “Show me what a Townsend’s warbler looks like in the tree in front of me.” Or “Use my existing family photos and videos to create a movie trailer of our upcoming vacation to Puerto Rico next year, making sure we visit all the best restaurants and top landmarks.” “We have primarily done it on the input side,” he says, referring to the ways Google can now search for an image or within a video. “But you can imagine it on the output side too.” This is the kind of future Pichai says he is excited to bring online. Google has already showed off a bit of what that might look like with NotebookLM, a tool that lets you upload large amounts of text and have it converted into a chatty podcast. He imagines this type of functionality—the ability to take one type of input and convert it into a variety of outputs—transforming the way we interact with information. In a demonstration of a tool called Project Astra this summer at its developer conference, Google showed one version of this outcome, where cameras and microphones in phones and smart glasses understand the context all around you—online and off, audible and visual—and have the ability to recall and respond in a variety of ways. Astra can, for example, look at a crude drawing of a Formula One race car and not only identify it, but also explain its various parts and their uses. But you can imagine things going a bit further (and they will). Let’s say I want to see a video of how to fix something on my bike. The video doesn’t exist, but the information does. AI-assisted generative search could theoretically find that information somewhere online—in a user manual buried in a company’s website, for example—and create a video to show me exactly how to do what I want, just as it could explain that to me with words today. These are the kinds of things that start to happen when you put the entire compendium of human knowledge—knowledge that’s previously been captured in silos of language and format; maps and business registrations and product SKUs; audio and video and databases of numbers and old books and images and, really, anything ever published, ever tracked, ever recorded; things happening right now, everywhere—and introduce a model into all that. A model that maybe can’t understand, precisely, but has the ability to put that information together, rearrange it, and spit it back in a variety of different hopefully helpful ways. Ways that a mere index could not. That’s what we’re on the cusp of, and what we’re starting to see. And as Google rolls this out to a billion people, many of whom will be interacting with a conversational AI for the first time, what will that mean? What will we do differently? It’s all changing so quickly. Hang on, just hang on.
Subsea7 Scores Various Contracts Globally
Subsea 7 S.A. has secured what it calls a “sizeable” contract from Turkish Petroleum Offshore Technology Center AS (TP-OTC) to provide inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM) services for the Sakarya gas field development in the Black Sea. The contract scope includes project management and engineering executed and managed from Subsea7 offices in Istanbul, Türkiye, and Aberdeen, Scotland. The scope also includes the provision of equipment, including two work class remotely operated vehicles, and construction personnel onboard TP-OTC’s light construction vessel Mukavemet, Subsea7 said in a news release. The company defines a sizeable contract as having a value between $50 million and $150 million. Offshore operations will be executed in 2025 and 2026, Subsea7 said. Hani El Kurd, Senior Vice President of UK and Global Inspection, Repair, and Maintenance at Subsea7, said: “We are pleased to have been selected to deliver IRM services for TP-OTC in the Black Sea. This contract demonstrates our strategy to deliver engineering solutions across the full asset lifecycle in close collaboration with our clients. We look forward to continuing to work alongside TP-OTC to optimize gas production from the Sakarya field and strengthen our long-term presence in Türkiye”. North Sea Project Subsea7 also announced the award of a “substantial” contract by Inch Cape Offshore Limited to Seaway7, which is part of the Subsea7 Group. The contract is for the transport and installation of pin-pile jacket foundations and transition pieces for the Inch Cape Offshore Wind Farm. The 1.1-gigawatt Inch Cape project offshore site is located in the Scottish North Sea, 9.3 miles (15 kilometers) off the Angus coast, and will comprise 72 wind turbine generators. Seaway7’s scope of work includes the transport and installation of 18 pin-pile jacket foundations and 54 transition pieces with offshore works expected to begin in 2026, according to a separate news
Driving into the future
Welcome to our annual breakthroughs issue. If you’re an MIT Technology Review superfan, you may already know that putting together our 10 Breakthrough Technologies (TR10) list is one of my favorite things we do as a publication. We spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the list. We try to highlight a mix of items that reflect innovations happening in various fields. We look at consumer technologies, large industrial-scale projects, biomedical advances, changes in computing, climate solutions, the latest in AI, and more. We’ve been publishing this list every year since 2001 and, frankly, have a great track record of flagging things that are poised to hit a tipping point. When you look back over the years, you’ll find items like natural-language processing (2001), wireless power (2008), and reusable rockets (2016)—spot-on in terms of horizon scanning. You’ll also see the occasional miss, or moments when maybe we were a little bit too far ahead of ourselves. (See our Magic Leap entry from 2015.) But the real secret of the TR10 is what we leave off the list. It is hard to think of another industry, aside from maybe entertainment, that has as much of a hype machine behind it as tech does. Which means that being too conservative is rarely the wrong call. But it does happen. Last year, for example, we were going to include robotaxis on the TR10. Autonomous vehicles have been around for years, but 2023 seemed like a real breakthrough moment; both Cruise and Waymo were ferrying paying customers around various cities, with big expansion plans on the horizon. And then, last fall, after a series of mishaps (including an incident when a pedestrian was caught under a vehicle and dragged), Cruise pulled its entire fleet of robotaxis from service. Yikes.
The timing was pretty miserable, as we were in the process of putting some of the finishing touches on the issue. I made the decision to pull it. That was a mistake. What followed turned out to be a banner year for the robotaxi. Waymo, which had previously been available only to a select group of beta testers, opened its service to the general public in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024. Its cars are now ubiquitous in the City by the Bay, where they have not only become a real competitor to the likes of Uber and Lyft but even created something of a tourist attraction. Which is no wonder, because riding in one is delightful. They are still novel enough to make it feel like a kind of magic. And as you can read, Waymo is just a part of this amazing story.
The item we swapped into the robotaxi’s place was the Apple Vision Pro, an example of both a hit and a miss. We’d included it because it is truly a revolutionary piece of hardware, and we zeroed in on its micro-OLED display. Yet a year later, it has seemingly failed to find a market fit, and its sales are reported to be far below what Apple predicted. I’ve been covering this field for well over a decade, and I would still argue that the Vision Pro (unlike the Magic Leap vaporware of 2015) is a breakthrough device. But it clearly did not have a breakthrough year. Mea culpa. Having said all that, I think we have an incredible and thought-provoking list for you this year—from a new astronomical observatory that will allow us to peer into the fourth dimension to new ways of searching the internet to, well, robotaxis. I hope there’s something here for everyone.
Oil Holds at Highest Levels Since October
Crude oil futures slightly retreated but continue to hold at their highest levels since October, supported by colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere and China’s economic stimulus measures. That’s what George Pavel, General Manager at Naga.com Middle East, said in a market analysis sent to Rigzone this morning, adding that Brent and WTI crude “both saw modest declines, yet the outlook remains bullish as colder temperatures are expected to increase demand for heating oil”. “Beijing’s fiscal stimulus aims to rejuvenate economic activity and consumer demand, further contributing to fuel consumption expectations,” Pavel said in the analysis. “This economic support from China could help sustain global demand for crude, providing upward pressure on prices,” he added. Looking at supply, Pavel noted in the analysis that “concerns are mounting over potential declines in Iranian oil production due to anticipated sanctions and policy changes under the incoming U.S. administration”. “Forecasts point to a reduction of 300,000 barrels per day in Iranian output by the second quarter of 2025, which would weigh on global supply and further support prices,” he said. “Moreover, the U.S. oil rig count has decreased, indicating a potential slowdown in future output,” he added. “With supply-side constraints contributing to tightening global inventories, this situation is likely to reinforce the current market optimism, supporting crude prices at elevated levels,” Pavel continued. “Combined with the growing demand driven by weather and economic factors, these supply dynamics point to a favorable environment for oil prices in the near term,” Pavel went on to state. Rigzone has contacted the Trump transition team and the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs for comment on Pavel’s analysis. At the time of writing, neither have responded to Rigzone’s request yet. In a separate market analysis sent to Rigzone earlier this morning, Antonio Di Giacomo, Senior Market Analyst at
What to expect from NaaS in 2025
Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at EMA, says that network execs today have a fuller understanding of the potential benefits of NaaS, beyond simply a different payment model. NaaS can deliver access to new technologies faster and keep enterprises up-to-date as technologies evolve over time; it can help mitigate skills gaps for organizations facing a shortage of networking talent. For example, in a retail scenario, an organization can offload deployment and management of its Wi-Fi networks at all of its stores to a NaaS vendor, freeing up IT staffers for higher-level activities. Also, it can help organizations manage rapidly fluctuating demands on the network, he says. 2. Frameworks help drive adoption Industry standards can help accelerate the adoption of new technologies. MEF, a nonprofit industry forum, has developed a framework that combines standardized service definitions, extensive automation frameworks, security certifications, and multi-cloud integration capabilities—all aimed at enabling service providers to deliver what MEF calls a true cloud experience for network services. The blueprint serves as a guide for building an automated, federated ecosystem where enterprises can easily consume NaaS services from providers. It details the APIs, service definitions, and certification programs that MEF has developed to enable this vision. The four components of NaaS, according to the blueprint, are on-demand automated transport services, SD-WAN overlays and network slicing for application assurance, SASE-based security, and multi-cloud on-ramps. 3. The rise of campus/LAN NaaS Until very recently, the most popular use cases for NaaS were on-demand WAN connectivity, multi-cloud connectivity, SD-WAN, and SASE. However, campus/LAN NaaS, which includes both wired and wireless networks, has emerged as the breakout star in the overall NaaS market. Dell’Oro Group analyst Sian Morgan predicts: “In 2025, Campus NaaS revenues will grow over eight times faster than the overall LAN market. Startups offering purpose-built CNaaS technology will
UK battery storage industry ‘back on track’
UK battery storage investor Gresham House Energy Storage Fund (LON:GRID) has said the industry is “back on track” as trading conditions improved, particularly in December. The UK’s largest fund specialising in battery energy storage systems (BESS) highlighted improvements in service by the UK government’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) as well as its renewed commitment to to the sector as part of clean power aims by 2030. It also revealed that revenues exceeding £60,000 per MW of electricity its facilities provided in the second half of 2024 meant it would meet or even exceed revenue targets. This comes after the fund said it had faced a “weak revenue environment” in the first part of the year. In April it reported a £110 million loss compared to a £217m profit the previous year and paused dividends. Fund manager Ben Guest said the organisation was “working hard” on refinancing and a plan to “re-instate dividend payments”. In a further update, the fund said its 40MW BESS project at Shilton Lane, 11 miles from Glasgow, was fully built and in the final stages of the NESO compliance process which expected to complete in February 2025. Fund chair John Leggate welcomed “solid progress” in company’s performance, “as well as improvements in NESO’s control room, and commitment to further change, that should see BESS increasingly well utilised”. He added: “We thank our shareholders for their patience as the battery storage industry gets back on track with the most environmentally appropriate and economically competitive energy storage technology (Li-ion) being properly prioritised. “Alongside NESO’s backing of BESS, it is encouraging to see the government’s endorsement of a level playing field for battery storage – the only proven, commercially viable technology that can dynamically manage renewable intermittency at national scale.” Guest, who in addition to managing the fund is also
Creating psychological safety in the AI era
In partnership withInfosys Topaz Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. First, understanding and implementing the tech itself. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are significant, the human element can be even more consequential; fear and ambiguity can stall momentum of even the most promising initiatives. Psychological safety—feeling free to express opinions and take calculated risks without worrying about career repercussions1—is essential for successful AI adoption. In psychologically safe workspaces, employees are empowered to challenge assumptions and raise concerns about new tools without fear of reprisal. This is nothing short of a necessity when introducing a nascent and profoundly powerful technology that still lacks established best practices. “Psychological safety is mandatory in this new era of AI,” says Rafee Tarafdar, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Infosys. “The tech itself is evolving so fast—companies have to experiment, and some things will fail. There needs to be a safety net.” To gauge how psychological safety influences success with enterprise-level AI, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 500 business leaders. The findings reveal high self-reported levels of psychological safety, but also suggest that fear still has a foothold. Anecdotally, industry experts highlight a reason for the disconnect between rhetoric and reality: while organizations may promote a safe to experiment message publicly, deeper cultural undercurrents can counteract that intent.
Building psychological safety requires a coordinated, systems-level approach, and human resources (HR) alone cannot deliver such transformation. Instead, enterprises must deeply embed psychological safety into their collaboration processes. Key findings for this report include:
Companies with experiment-friendly cultures have greater success with AI projects. The majority of executives surveyed (83%) believe a company culture that prioritizes psychological safety measurably improves the success of AI initiatives. Four in five leaders agree that organizations fostering such safety are more successful at adopting AI, and 84% have observed connections between psychological safety and tangible AI outcomes. Psychological barriers are proving to be greater obstacles to enterprise AI adoption than technological challenges. Encouragingly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents indicated they feel safe to provide honest feedback and express opinions freely in their workplace. Still, a significant share (22%) admit they’ve hesitated to lead an AI project because they might be blamed if it misfires. Achieving psychological safety is a moving target for many organizations. Fewer than half of leaders (39%) rate their organization’s current level of psychological safety as “very high.” Another 48%report a “moderate” degree of it. This may mean that some enterprises are pursuing AI adoption on cultural foundations that are not yet fully stable. Download the report. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
The Download: why 2025 has been the year of AI hype correction, and fighting GPS jamming
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. The great AI hype correction of 2025 Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry—and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more.Well, 2025 has been a year of reckoning. For a start, the heads of the top AI companies made promises they couldn’t keep. At the same time, updates to the core technology are no longer the step changes they once were.To be clear, the last few years have been filled with genuine “Wow” moments. But this remarkable technology is only a few years old, and in many ways it is still experimental. Its successes come with big caveats. Read the full story to learn more about why we may need to readjust our expectations. —Will Douglas Heaven
This story is part of our new Hype Correction package, a collection of stories designed to help you reset your expectations about what AI makes possible—and what it doesn’t. Check out the rest of the package here, and you can read more about why it’s time to reset our expectations for AI in the latest edition of the Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up here to make sure you receive future editions straight to your inbox.
Quantum navigation could solve the military’s GPS jamming problem Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, thousands of flights have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of using radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system.The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it’s somewhere else.One approach that’s emerging from labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that can allow vehicles to navigate independently, without depending on satellites. Read the full story.—Amos Zeeberg The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The Trump administration has launched its US Tech Force programIn a bid to lure engineers away from Big Tech roles and straight into modernizing the government. (The Verge)+ So, essentially replacing the IT workers that DOGE got rid of, then. (The Register)2 Lawmakers are investigating how AI data centers affect electricity costsThey want to get to the bottom of whether it’s being passed onto consumers. (NYT $)+ Calculating AI’s water usage is far from straightforward, too. (Wired $)+ AI is changing the grid. Could it help more than it harms? (MIT Technology Review)3 Ford isn’t making a large all-electric truck after allAfter the US government’s support for EVs plummeted. (Wired $)+ Instead, the F-150 Lightning pickup will be reborn as a plug-in hybrid. (The Information $)+ Why Americans may be finally ready to embrace smaller cars. (Fast Company $)+ The US could really use an affordable electric truck. (MIT Technology Review)4 PayPal wants to become a bank in the USThe Trump administration is very friendly to non-traditional financial companies, after all. (FT $)+ It’s been a good year for the crypto industry when it comes to banking. (Economist $)5 A tech trade deal between the US and UK has been put on iceAmerica isn’t happy with the lack of progress Britain has made, apparently. (NYT $)+ It’s a major setback in relations between the pair. (The Guardian)6 Why does no one want to make the cure for dengue?A new antiviral pill appears to prevent infection—but its development has been abandoned. (Vox) 7 The majority of the world’s glaciers are forecast to disappear by 2100At a rate of around 3,000 per year. (New Scientist $)+ Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”. (MIT Technology Review) 8 Hollywood is split over AIWhile some filmmakers love it, actors are horrified by its inexorable rise. (Bloomberg $)
9 Corporate America is obsessed with hiring storytellersIt’s essentially a rehashed media relations manager role overhauled for the AI age. (WSJ $)10 The concept of hacking existed before the internetJust ask this bunch of teenage geeks. (IEEE Spectrum) Quote of the day “So the federal government deleted 18F, which was doing great work modernizing the government, and then replaced it with a clone? What is the point of all this?” —Eugene Vinitsky, an assistant professor at New York University, takes aim at the US government’s decision to launch a new team to overhaul its approach to technology in a post on Bluesky. One more thing How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youthAs DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that have deep roots in Chinese culture.Across Chinese social media, users are sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling prompt engineering, and revisiting ancient spiritual texts—all with the help of DeepSeek.The surge in AI fortune-telling comes during a time of pervasive anxiety and pessimism in Chinese society. And as spiritual practices remain hidden underground thanks to the country’s regime, computers and phone screens are helping younger people to gain a sense of control over their lives. Read the full story.
—Caiwen Chen
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Chess has been online as far back as the 1800s (no, really!) ♟️+ Jane Austen was born 250 years ago today. How well do you know her writing? ($)+ Rob Reiner, your work will live on forever.+ I enjoyed this comprehensive guide to absolutely everything you could ever want to know about New England’s extensive seafood offerings.
Why it’s time to reset our expectations for AI
Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with me. Truly, I feel kind of stupid even asking the question, like a spoiled brat who has too many toys at Christmas. AI is mind-blowing. It’s one of the most important technologies to have emerged in decades (despite all its many many drawbacks and flaws and, well, issues). At the same time I can’t help feeling a little bit: Is that it? If you feel the same way, there’s good reason for it: The hype we have been sold for the past few years has been overwhelming. We were told that AI would solve climate change. That it would reach human-level intelligence. That it would mean we no longer had to work!
Instead we got AI slop, chatbot psychosis, and tools that urgently prompt you to write better email newsletters. Maybe we got what we deserved. Or maybe we need to reevaluate what AI is for. That’s the reality at the heart of a new series of stories, published today, called Hype Correction. We accept that AI is still the hottest ticket in town, but it’s time to re-set our expectations.
As my colleague Will Douglas Heaven puts it in the package’s intro essay, “You can’t help but wonder: When the wow factor is gone, what’s left? How will we view this technology a year or five from now? Will we think it was worth the colossal costs, both financial and environmental?” Elsewhere in the package, James O’Donnell looks at Sam Altman, the ultimate AI hype man, through the medium of his own words. And Alex Heath explains the AI bubble, laying out for us what it all means and what we should look out for. Michelle Kim analyzes one of the biggest claims in the AI hype cycle: that AI would completely eliminate the need for certain classes of jobs. If ChatGPT can pass the bar, surely that means it will replace lawyers? Well, not yet, and maybe not ever. Similarly, Edd Gent tackles the big question around AI coding. Is it as good as it sounds? Turns out the jury is still out. And elsewhere David Rotman looks at the real-world work that needs to be done before AI materials discovery has its breakthrough ChatGPT moment. Meanwhile, Garrison Lovely spends time with some of the biggest names in the AI safety world and asks: Are the doomers still okay? I mean, now that people are feeling a bit less scared about their impending demise at the hands of superintelligent AI? And Margaret Mitchell reminds us that hype around generative AI can blind us to the AI breakthroughs we should really celebrate. Ask AIWhy it matters to you?BETAHere’s why this story might matter to you, according to AI. This is a beta feature and AI hallucinates—it might get weirdTell me why it mattersLet’s remember: AI was here before ChatGPT and it will be here after. This hype cycle has been wild, and we don’t know what its lasting impact will be. But AI isn’t going anywhere. We shouldn’t be so surprised that those dreams we were sold haven’t come true—yet. The more likely story is that the real winners, the killer apps, are still to come. And a lot of money is being bet on that prospect. So yes: The hype could never sustain itself over the short term. Where we’re at now is maybe the start of a post-hype phase. In an ideal world, this hype correction will reset expectations. Let’s all catch our breath, shall we? This story first appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly free newsletter all about AI. Sign up to read past editions here.
Quantum navigation could solve the military’s GPS jamming problem
In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country’s defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack—not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system. The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of GPS interference since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it’s somewhere else. US military contractors are rolling out new GPS satellites that use stronger, cleverer signals, and engineers are working on providing better navigation information based on other sources, like cellular transmissions and visual data. But another approach that’s emerging from labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that can allow vehicles to navigate independently, without depending on satellites. As GPS interference becomes more of a problem, research on quantum navigation is leaping ahead, with many researchers and companies now rushing to test new devices and techniques. In recent months, the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Defense Innovation Unit have announced new grants to test the technology on military vehicles and prepare for operational deployment.
Tracking changes Perhaps the most obvious way to navigate is to know where you started and then track where you go by recording the speed, direction, and duration of travel. But while this approach, known in the field as inertial navigation, is conceptually simple, it’s difficult to do well; tiny uncertainties in any of those measurements compound over time and lead to big errors later on. Douglas Paul, the principal investigator of the UK’s Hub for Quantum Enabled Precision, Navigation & Timing (QEPNT), says that existing specialized inertial-navigation devices might be off by 20 kilometers after 100 hours of travel. Meanwhile, the cheap sensors commonly used in smartphones produce more than twice that level of uncertainty after just one hour.
“If you’re guiding a missile that flies for one minute, that might be good enough,” he says. “If you’re in an airliner, that’s definitely not good enough.” A more accurate version of inertial navigation instead uses sensors that rely on the quantum behavior of subatomic particles to more accurately measure acceleration, direction, and time. Several companies, like the US-based Infleqtion, are developing quantum gyroscopes, which track a vehicle’s bearing, and quantum accelerometers, which can reveal how far it’s traveled. Infleqtion’s sensors are based on a technique called atom interferometry: A beam of rubidium atoms is zapped with precise laser pulses, which split the atoms into two separate paths. Later, other laser pulses recombine the atoms, and they’re measured with a detector. If the vehicle has turned or accelerated while the atoms are in motion, the two paths will be slightly out of phase in a way the detector can interpret. Last year the company trialed these inertial sensors on a customized plane flying at a British military testing site. In October of this year, Infleqtion ran its first real-world test of a new generation of inertial sensors that use a steady stream of atoms instead of pulses, allowing for continuous navigation and avoiding long dead times. A view of Infleqtion’s atomic clock Tiqker. COURTESY INFLEQTION Infleqtion also has an atomic clock, called Tiqker, that can help determine how far a vehicle has traveled. It is a kind of optical clock that uses infrared lasers tuned to a specific frequency to excite electrons in rubidium, which then release photons at a consistent, known rate. The device “will lose one second every 2 million years or so,” says Max Perez, who oversees the project, and it fits in a standard electronics equipment rack. It has passed tests on flights in the UK, on US Army ground vehicles in New Mexico, and, in late October, on a drone submarine. “Tiqker operated happily through these conditions, which is unheard-of for previous generations of optical clocks,” says Perez. Eventually the company hopes to make the unit smaller and more rugged by switching to lasers generated by microchips. Magnetic fields Vehicles deprived of satellite-based navigation are not entirely on their own; they can get useful clues from magnetic and gravitational fields that surround the planet. These fields vary slightly depending on the location, and the variations, or anomalies, are recorded in various maps. By precisely measuring the local magnetic or gravitational field and comparing those values with anomaly maps, quantum navigation systems can track the location of a vehicle.
Allison Kealy, a navigation researcher at Swinburne University in Australia, is working on the hardware needed for this approach. Her team uses a material called nitrogen-vacancy diamond. In NV diamonds, one carbon atom in the lattice is replaced with a nitrogen atom, and one neighboring carbon atom is removed entirely. The quantum state of the electrons at the NV defect is very sensitive to magnetic fields. Carefully stimulating the electrons and watching the light they emit offers a way to precisely measure the strength of the field at the diamond’s location, making it possible to infer where it’s situated on the globe. Kealy says these quantum magnetometers have a few big advantages over traditional ones, including the fact that they measure the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field in addition to its strength. That additional information could make it easier to determine location. The technology is far from commercial deployment, but Kealy and several colleagues successfully tested their magnetometer in a set of flights in Australia late last year, and they plan to run more trials this year and next. “This is where it gets exciting, as we transition from theoretical models and controlled experiments to on-the-ground, operational systems,” she says. “This is a major step forward.” Delicate systems Other teams, like Q-CTRL, an Australian quantum technology company, are focusing on using software to build robust systems from noisy quantum sensors. Quantum navigation involves taking those delicate sensors, honed in the placid conditions of a laboratory, and putting them in vehicles that make sharp turns, bounce with turbulence, and bob with waves, all of which interferes with the sensors’ functioning. Even the vehicles themselves present problems for magnetometers, especially “the fact that the airplane is made of metal, with all this wiring,” says Michael Biercuk, the CEO of Q-CTRL. “Usually there’s 100 to 1,000 times more noise than signal.” After Q-CTRL engineers ran trials of their magnetic navigation system in a specially outfitted Cessna last year, they used machine learning to go through the data and try to sift out the signal from all the noise. Eventually they found they could track the plane’s location up to 94 times as accurately as a strategic-grade conventional inertial navigation system could, according to Biercuk. They announced their findings in a non-peer-reviewed paper last spring. In August Q-CTRL received two contracts from DARPA to develop its “software-ruggedized” mag-nav product, named Ironstone Opal, for defense applications. The company is also testing the technology with commercial partners, including the defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and Airbus, an aerospace manufacturer. An illustration showing the placement of Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal in a drone.COURTESY Q-CTRL “Northrop Grumman is working with Q-CTRL to develop a magnetic navigation system that can withstand the physical demands of the real world,” says Michael S. Larsen, a quantum systems architect at the company. “Technology like magnetic navigation and other quantum sensors will unlock capabilities to provide guidance even in GPS-denied or -degraded environments.”
Now Q-CTRL is working on putting Ironstone Opal into a smaller, more rugged container appropriate for deployment; currently, “it looks like a science experiment because it is a science experiment,” says Biercuk. He anticipates delivering the first commercial units next year. Sensor fusion
Even as quantum navigation emerges as a legitimate alternative to satellite-based navigation, the satellites themselves are improving. Modern GPS III satellites include new civilian signals called L1C and L5, which should be more accurate and harder to jam and spoof than current signals. Both are scheduled to be fully operational later this decade. US and allied military users are intended to have access to far hardier GPS tools, including M-code, a new form of GPS signal that is rolling out now, and Regional Military Protection, a focused GPS beam that will be restricted to small geographic areas. The latter will start to become available when the GPS IIIF generation of satellites is in orbit, with the first scheduled to go up in 2027. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson says new GPS satellites with M-code are eight times as powerful as previous ones, while the GPS IIIF model will be 60 times as strong. Other plans involve using navigation satellites in low Earth orbit—the zone inhabited by SpaceX’s internet-providing Starlink constellation—rather than the medium Earth orbit used by GPS. Since objects in LEO are closer to Earth, their signals are stronger, which makes them harder to jam and spoof. LEO satellites also transit the sky more quickly, which makes them harder still to spoof and helps GPS receivers get a lock on their position faster. “This really helps for signal convergence,” says Lotfi Massarweh, a satellite navigation researcher at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. “They can get a good position in just a few minutes. So that is a huge leap.” Ultimately, says Massarweh, navigation will depend not only on satellites, quantum sensors, or any other single technology, but on the combination of all of them. “You need to think always in terms of sensor fusion,” he says. The navigation resources that a vehicle draws on will change according to its environment—whether it’s an airliner, a submarine, or an autonomous car in an urban canyon. But quantum navigation will be one important resource. He says, “If quantum technology really delivers what we see in the literature—if it’s stable over one week rather than tens of minutes—at that point it is a complete game changer.”
The fast and the future-focused are revolutionizing motorsport
In partnership withInfosys When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand broadcast in 150 countries, driving both technological innovation and cultural change in sport. “Gen4, that’s to come next year,” says Dan Cherowbrier, Formula E’s chief technology and information officer. “You will see a really quite impressive car that starts us to question whether EV is there. It’s actually faster—it’s actually more than traditional [internal combustion engines] ICE.” That acceleration isn’t just happening on the track. Formula E’s digital transformation, powered by its partnership with Infosys, is redefining what it means to be a fan. “It’s a movement to make motor sport accessible and exciting for the new generation,” says principal technologist at Infosys, Rohit Agnihotri. From real-time leaderboards and predictive tools to personalized storylines that adapt to what individual fans care most about—whether it’s a driver rivalry or battery performance—Formula E and Infosys are using AI-powered platforms to create fan experiences as dynamic as the races themselves. “Technology is not just about meeting expectations; it’s elevating the entire fan experience and making the sport more inclusive,” says Agnihotri.
AI is also transforming how the organization itself operates. “Historically, we would be going around the company, banging on everyone’s doors and dragging them towards technology, making them use systems, making them move things to the cloud,” Cherowbrier notes. “What AI has done is it’s turned that around on its head, and we now have people turning up, banging on our door because they want to use this tool, they want to use that tool.” As audiences diversify and expectations evolve, Formula E is also a case study in sustainable innovation. Machine learning tools now help determine the most carbon-optimal way to ship batteries across continents, while remote broadcast production has sharply reduced travel emissions and democratized the company’s workforce. These advances show how digital intelligence can expand reach without deepening carbon footprints.
For Cherowbrier, this convergence of sport, sustainability, and technology is just the beginning. With its data-driven approach to performance, experience, and impact, Formula E is offering a glimpse into how entertainment, innovation, and environmental responsibility can move forward in tandem. “Our goal is clear,” says Agnihotri. “Help Formula E be the most digital and sustainable motor sport in the world. The future is electric, and with AI, it’s more engaging than ever.” This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with Infosys. Full Transcript: Megan Tatum: From MIT Technology Review, I’m Megan Tatum, and this is Business Lab, the show that helps business leaders make sense of new technologies coming out of the lab, and into the marketplace. The ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, the world’s first all-electric racing series, made its debut in the grounds of the Olympic Park in Beijing in 2014. A little more than 10 years later, it’s a global entertainment brand with 10 teams, 20 drivers, and broadcasts in 150 countries. Technology is central to how Formula E is navigating that scale and to how it’s delivering more powerful personalized experiences. Two words for you: elevated fandom. My guests today are Rohit Agnihotri, principal technologist at Infosys, and Dan Cherowbrier, CTIO of Formula E.
This episode is produced in partnership with Infosys. Welcome, Rohit and Dan. Dan Cherowbrier: Hi. Thanks for having us. Megan: Dan, as I mentioned there, the first season of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched in 2014. Can you talk us through how the first all-electric motor sport has evolved in the last decade? How has it changed in terms of its scale, the markets it operates in, and also, its audiences, of course? Dan: When Formula E launched back in 2014, there were hardly any domestic EVs on the road. And probably if you’re from London, the ones you remember are the hybrid Priuses; that was what we knew of really. And at the time, they were unable to get a battery big enough for a car to do a full race. So the first generation of car, the first couple of seasons, the driver had to do a pit stop midway through the race, get out of one car, and get in another car, and then carry on, which sounds almost farcical now, but it’s what you had to do then to drive innovation, is to do that in order to go to the next stage. Then in Gen2, that came up four years later, they had a battery big enough to start full races and start to actually make it a really good sport. Gen3, they’re going for some real speeds and making it happen. Gen4, that’s to come next year, you’ll see acceleration in line with Formula One. I’ve been fortunate enough to see some of the testing. You will see a really quite impressive car that starts us to question whether EV is there. It’s actually faster, it’s actually more than traditional ICE. That’s the tech of the car. But then, if you also look at the sport and how people have come to it and the fans and the demographic of the fans, a lot has changed in the last 11 years. We were out to enter season 12. In the last 11 years, we’ve had a complete democratization of how people access content and what people want from content. And as a new generation of fan coming through. This new generation of fan is younger. They’re more gender diverse. We have much closer to 50-50 representation in our fan base. And they want things personalized, and they’re very demanding about how they want it and the experience they expect. No longer are you just able to give them one race and everybody watches the same thing. We need to make things for them. You see that sort of change that’s come through in the last 11 years. Megan: It’s a huge amount of change in just over a decade, isn’t it? To navigate. And I wonder, Rohit, what was the strategic plan for Infosys when associating with Formula E? What did Infosys see in partnering with such a young sport?
Rohit: Yeah. That’s a great question, Megan. When we looked at Formula E, we didn’t just see a racing championship. We saw the future. A sport, that’s electric, sustainable, and digital first. That’s exactly where Infosys wants to be, at the intersection of technology, innovation, and purpose. Our plan has three big goals. First, grow the fan base. Formula E wants to reach 500 million fans by 2030. That is not just a number. It’s a movement to make motor sport accessible and exciting for the new generation. To make that happen, we are building an AI-powered platform that gives personalized content to the fans, so that every fan feels connected and valued. Imagine a fan in Tokyo getting race insights tailored for their favorite driver, while another in London gets a sustainability story that matters to him. That’s the level of personalization we are aiming for. Second, bringing technology innovation. We have already launched the Stats Centre, which turns race data into interactive stories. And soon, Race Centre will take this to the next level with real time leaderboards to the race or tracks, overtakes, attack mode timelines, and even AI generated live commentary. Fans will not just watch, they will interact, predict podium finishes, and share their views globally. And third, supports sustainability. Formula E is already net-zero, but now their goal is to cut carbon by 45% by 2030. We’ll be enabling that through AI-driven sustainability, data management, tracking every watt of energy, every logistics decision. and modeling scenarios to make racing even greener. Partnering with a young sport gives us a chance to shape its digital future and show how technology can make racing exciting and responsible. For us, Formula E is not just a sport, it’s a statement about where the world is headed.
Megan: Fantastic. 500 million fans, that’s a huge number, isn’t it? And with more scale often comes a kind of greater expectation. Dan, I know you touched on this a little in your first question, but what is it that your fans now really want from their interactions? Can you talk a bit more about what experiences they’re looking for? And also, how complex that really is to deliver that as well? Dan: I think a really telling thing about the modern day fan is I probably can’t tell you what they want from their experiences, because it’s individual and it’s unique for each of them. Megan: Of course. Dan: And it’s changing and it’s changing so fast. What somebody wants this month is going to be different from what they want in a couple of months’ time. And we’re having to learn to adapt to that. My CTO title, we often put focus on the technology in the middle of it. That’s what the T is. Actually, if you think about it, it’s continual transformation officer. You are constantly trying to change what you deliver and how you deliver it. Because if fans come through, they find new experiences, they find that in other sports. Sometimes not in sports, they find it outside, and then they’re coming in, and they expect that from you. So how can we make them more part of the sport, more personalized experience, get to know the athletes and the personalities and the characters within it? We’re a very technology centric sport. A lot of motor sport is, but really, people want to see people, right? And even when it’s technology, they want to see people interacting with technology, and it’s how do you get that out to show people. Megan: Yeah, it’s no mean feat. Rohit, you’ve worked with brands on delivering these sort of fan experiences across different sports. Is motor sports perhaps more complicated than others, given that fans watch racing for different reasons than just a win? They could be focused on team dynamics, a particular driver, the way the engine is built, and so on and so forth. How does motor sports compare and how important is it therefore, that Formula E has embraced technology to manage expectations? Rohit: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Motor sports are definitely more complex than other sports. Fans don’t just care about who wins, they care about how some follow team strategies, others love driver rivalries, and many are fascinated by the car technology. Formula E adds another layer, sustainability and electric innovation. This makes personalization really important. Fans want more than results. They want stories and insights. Formula E understood this early and embraced technology.
Think about the data behind a single race, lap times, energy usage, battery performance, attack mode activation, pit strategies, it’s a lot of data. If you just show the raw numbers, it’s overwhelming. But with Infosys Topaz, we turn that into simple and engaging stories. Fans can see how a driver fought back from 10th place to finish on the podium, or how a team managed energy better to gain an edge. And for new fans, we are adding explainer videos and interactive tools in the Race Center, so that they can learn about their sport easily. This is important because Formula E is still young, and many fans are discovering it for the first time. Technology is not just about meeting expectations; it’s elevating the entire fan experience and making the sport more inclusive. Megan: There’s an awful lot going on there. What are some of the other ways that Formula E has already put generative AI and other emerging technologies to use? Dan, when we’ve spoken about the demand for more personalized experiences, for example. Dan: I see the implementation of AI for us in three areas. We have AI within the sport. That’s in our DNA of the sport. Now, each team is using that, but how can we use that as a championship as well? How do we make it a competitive landscape? Now, we have AI that is in the fan-facing product. That’s what we’re working heavily on Infosys with, but we also have it in our broadcast product. As an example, you might have heard of a super slow-mo camera. A super slow-mo camera is basically, by taking three cameras and having them in exactly the same place so that you get three times the frame rate, and then you can do a slow-motion shot from that. And they used to be really expensive. Quite bulky cameras to put in. We are now using AI to take a traditional camera and interpolate between two frames to make it into a super slow image, and you wouldn’t really know the difference. Now, the joy of that, it means every camera can now be a super slow-mo camera. Megan: Wow.
Dan: In other ways, we use it a little bit in our graphics products, and we iterate and we use it for things like showing driver audio. When the driver is speaking to his engineer or her engineer in the garage, we show that text now on screen. We do that using AI. We use AI to pick out the difference between the driver and another driver and the team engineer or the team principal and show that in a really good way. And we wouldn’t be able to do that. We’re not big enough to have a team of 24 people on stenographers typing. We have to use AI to be able to do that. That’s what’s really helped us grow. And then the last one is, how we use it in our business. Because ultimately, as we’ve got the fans, we’ve got the sport, but we also are running a business and we have to pick up these racetracks and move them around the world, and we have all these staff who have to get places. We have insurance who has to do all that kind of stuff, and we use it heavily in that area, particularly when it comes to what has a carbon impact for us. So things like our freight and our travel. And we are using the AI tools to tell us, a battery for instance, should we fly it? Should we send it by sea freight? Should we send it by row freight? Or should we just have lots of them? And that sort of depends. Now, a battery, if it was heavy, you’d think you probably wouldn’t fly it. But actually, because of the materials in it, because of the source materials that make it, we’re better off flying it. We’ve used AI to work through all those different machinations of things that would be too difficult to do at speed for a person. Megan: Well, sounds like there’s some fascinating things going on. I mean, of course, for a global brand, there is also the challenge of working in different markets. You mentioned moving everything around the world there. Each market with its own legal frameworks around data privacy, AI. How has technology also helped you navigate all of that, Dan? Dan: The other really interesting thing about AI is… I’ve worked in technology leadership roles for some time now. And historically, we would be going around the company, banging on everyone’s doors and dragging them towards technology, making them use systems, making them move things to the cloud and things like that. What AI has done is it’s turned that around on its head, and we now have people turning up, banging on our door because they want to use this tool, they want to use that tool. And we’re trying to accommodate all of that and it’s a great pleasure to see people that are so keen. AI is driving the tech adoption in general, which really helps the business. Megan: Dan, as the world’s first all-electric motor sport series, sustainability is obviously a real cornerstone of what Formula E is looking to do. Can you share with us how technology is helping you to achieve some of your ambitions when it comes to sustainability? Dan: We’ve been the only sport with a certified net-zero pathway, and we have to stay that part. It’s a really core fundamental part of our DNA. I sit on our management team here. There is a sustainability VP that sits there as well, who checks and challenges everything we do. She looks at the data centers we use, why we use them, why we’ve made the decisions we’ve made, to make sure that we’re making them all for the right reasons and the right ways. We specifically embed technology in a couple of ways. One is, we mentioned a little bit earlier, on our freight. Formula E’s freight for the whole championship is probably akin to one Formula One team, but it’s still by far, our biggest contributor to our impact. So we look about how we can make sure that we’ve refined that to get the minimum amount of air freight and sea freight, and use local wherever we can. That’s also part of our pledge about investing in the communities that we race in. The second then is about our staff travel. And we’ve done a really big piece of work over the last four to five years, partly accelerated through the covid-19 era actually, of doing remote working and remote TV production. Used to be traditionally, you would fly a hundred plus people out to racetracks, and then they would make the television all on site in trucks, and then they would be satellite distributed out of the venue. Now, what we do is we put in some internet connections, dual and diverse internet connections, and we stream every single camera back. Megan: Right. Dan: That means on site, we only need camera operators. Some of them actually, are remotely operated anyway, but we need camera operators, and then some engineering teams to just keep everything running. And then back in our home base, which is in London, in the UK, we have our remote production center where we layer on direction, graphics, audio, replay, team radio, all of those bits that break the color and make the program and add to that significant body of people. We do that all remotely now. Really interesting actually, a bit. So that’s the carbon sustainability story, but there is a further ESG piece that comes out of it and we haven’t really accommodated when we went into it, is the diversity in our workforce by doing that. We were discovering that we had quite a young, equally diverse workforce until around the age of 30. And then once that happened, then we were finding we were losing women, and that’s really because they didn’t want to travel. Megan: Right. Dan: And that’s the age of people starting to have children, and things were starting to change. And then we had some men that were traveling instead, and they weren’t seeing their children and it was sort of dividing it unnecessarily. But by going remote, by having so much of our people able to remotely… Or even if they do have to travel, they’re not traveling every single week. They’re now doing that one in three. They’re able to maintain the careers and the jobs they want to do, whilst having a family lifestyle. And it also just makes a better product by having people in that environment. Megan: That’s such an interesting perspective, isn’t it? It’s a way of environmental sustainability intersects with social sustainability. And Rohit, and your work are so interesting. And Rohit, can you share any of the ways that Infosys has worked with Formula E, in terms of the role of technology as we say, in furthering those ambitions around sustainability? Rohit: Yeah. Infosys understands that sustainability is at the heart of Formula E, and it’s a big part of why this partnership matters. Formula E is already net-zero certified, but now, they have an ambitious goal to cut carbon emissions by 45%. Infosys is helping in two ways. First, we have built AI-powered sustainability data tools that make carbon reporting accurate and traceable. Every watt of energy, every logistic decision, every material use can be tracked. Second, we use predictive analytics to model scenarios, like how changing race logistics or battery technology impact emissions so Formula E can make smarter, greener decisions. For us, it’s about turning sustainability from a report into an action plan, and making Formula E a global leader in green motor sport. Megan: And in April 2025, Formula E working with Infosys launched its Stats Centre, which provides fans with interactive access to the performances of their drivers and teams, key milestones and narratives. I know you touched on this before, but I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the design of that platform, Rohit, and how it fits into Formula E’s wider plans to personalize that fan experience? Rohit: Sure. The Stats Centre was a big step forward. Before this, fans had access to basic statistics on the website and the mobile app, but nothing told the full story and we wanted to change that. Built on Infosys Topaz, the Stats Centre uses AI to turn race data into interactive stories. Fans can explore key stat cards that adapt to race timelines, and even chat with an AI companion to get instant answers. It’s like having a person race analyst at your fingertips. And we are going further. Next year, we’ll launch Race Centre. It’ll have live data boards, 2D track maps showing every driver’s position, overtakes and more attack timelines, and AI-generated commentary. Fans can predict podium finishes, vote for the driver of the race, and share their views on social media. Plus, we are adding video explainers for new fans, covering rules, strategies, and car technology. Our goal is simple: make every moment exciting and easy to understand. Whether you are a hardcore fan or someone watching Formula E for the first time, you’ll feel connected and informed. Megan: Fantastic. Sounds brilliant. And as you’ve explained, Dan, leveraging data and AI can come with these huge benefits when it comes to the depth of fan experience that you can deliver, but it can also expose you to some challenges. How are you navigating those at Formula E? Dan: The AI generation has presented two significant challenges to us. One is that traditional SEO, traditional search engine optimization, goes out the window. Right? You are now looking at how do we design and build our systems and how do we populate them with the right content and the right data, so that the engines are picking it up correctly and displaying it? The way that the foundational models are built and the speed and the cadence of which they’re updated, means quite often… We’re a very fast-changing organization. We’re a fast-changing product. Often, the models don’t keep up. And that’s because they are a point in time when they were trained. And that’s something that the big organizations, the big tech organizations will fix with time. But for now, what we have to do is we have to learn about how we can present our fan-facing, web-facing products to show that correctly. That’s all about having really accurate first-party content, effectively earned media. That’s the piece we need to do. Then the second sort of challenge is sadly, whilst these tools are available to all of us, and we are using them effectively, so are another part of the technology landscape, and that is the cybersecurity basically they come with. If you look at the speed of the cadence and severity of hacks that are happening now, it’s just growing and growing and growing, and that’s because they have access to these tools too. And we’re having to really up our game and professionalize. And that’s really hard for an innovative organization. You don’t want to shut everything down. You don’t want to protect everything too much because you want people to be able to try new things. Right? If I block everything to only things that the IT team had heard of, we’d never get anything new in, and it’s about getting that balance right. Megan: Right. Dan: Rohit, you probably have similar experiences? Megan: How has Infosys worked with Formula E to help it navigate some of that, Rohit? Rohit: Yeah. Infosys has helped Formula E tackle some of the challenges in three key ways, simplify complex race data into engaging fan experience through platforms like Stats Centre, building a secure and scalable cloud data backbone for the real-time insights, and enabling sustainability goals with AI-driven carbon tracking and predictive analytics. This solution makes the sport interactive, more digital, and more responsible. Megan: Fantastic. I wondered if we could close with a bit of a future forward look. Can you share with us any innovations on the horizon at Formula E that you are really excited about, Dan? Dan: We have mentioned the Race Centre is going to launch in the next couple of months, but the really exciting thing for me is we’ve got an amazing season ahead of us. It’s the last season of our Gen3 car, with 10 really exciting teams on the grid. We are going at speed with our tech innovation roadmap and what our fans want. And we’re building up towards our Gen4 car, which will come out for season 13 in a year’s time. That will get launched in 2026, and I think it will be a game changer in how people perceive electric motor sport and electric cars in general. Megan: It sounds like there’s all sorts of exciting things going on. And Rohit too, what’s coming up via this partnership that you are really looking forward to sharing with everyone? Rohit: Two things stand out for me. First is the AI-powered fan data platform that I’ve already spoken about. Second is the launch of Race Centre. It’s going to change how fans experience live racing. And beyond final engagement, we are helping Formula E lead in sustainability with AI tools that model carbon impact and optimize logistics. This means every race can be smarter and greener. Our goal is clear: help Formula E be the most digital and sustainable motor sport in the world. The future is electric, and with AI, it’s more engaging than ever. Megan: Fantastic. Thank you so much, both. That was Rohit Agnihotri, principal technologist at Infosys, and Dan Cherowbrier, CITO of Formula E, whom I spoke with from Brighton, England. That’s it for this episode of Business Lab. I’m your host, Megan Tatum. I’m a contributing editor and host for Insights, the custom publishing division of MIT Technology Review. We were founded in 1899 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you can find us in print, on the web and at events each year around the world. For more information about us and the show, please check out our website at technologyreview.com. This show is available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review us. Business Lab is a production of MIT Technology Review and this episode was produced by Giro Studios. Thanks for listening. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
The Download: introducing the AI Hype Correction package
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. Introducing: the AI Hype Correction package AI is going to reproduce human intelligence. AI will eliminate disease. AI is the single biggest, most important invention in human history. You’ve likely heard it all—but probably none of these things are true.AI is changing our world, but we don’t yet know the real winners, or how this will all shake out.After a few years of out-of-control hype, people are now starting to re-calibrate what AI is, what it can do, and how we should think about its ultimate impact.Here, at the end of 2025, we’re starting the post-hype phase. This new package of stories, called Hype Correction, is a way to reset expectations—a critical look at where we are, what AI makes possible, and where we go next.Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect: + An introduction to four ways of thinking about the great AI hype correction of 2025.+ While it’s safe to say we’re definitely in an AI bubble right now, what’s less clear is what it really looks like—and what comes after it pops. Read the full story.+ Why OpenAI’s Sam Altman can be traced back to so many of the more outlandish proclamations about AI doing the rounds these days. Read the full story.+ It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer. But they’re not giving up.+ AI coding is now everywhere—but despite the billions of dollars being poured into improving AI models’ coding abilities, not everyone is convinced. Read the full story.+ If we really want to start finding new kinds of materials faster, AI materials discovery needs to make it out of the lab and move into the real world. Read the full story.+ Why reports of AI’s potential to replace trained human lawyers are greatly exaggerated.+ Dr. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, explains why the generative AI hype train is distracting us from what AI actually is and what it can—and crucially, cannot—do. Read the full story.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 iRobot has filed for bankruptcyThe Roomba maker is considering handing over control to its main Chinese supplier. (Bloomberg $)+ A proposed Amazon acquisition fell through close to two years ago. (FT $)+ How the company lost its way. (TechCrunch)+ A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? (MIT Technology Review) 2 Meta’s 2025 has been a total rollercoaster rideFrom its controversial AI team to Mark Zuckerberg’s newfound appreciation for masculine energy. (Insider $) 3 The Trump administration is giving the crypto industry a much easier rideIt’s dismissed crypto lawsuits involving many firms with financial ties to Trump. (NYT $)+ Celebrities are feeling emboldened to flog crypto once again. (The Guardian)+ A bitcoin investor wants to set up a crypto libertarian community in the Caribbean. (FT $) 4 There’s a new weight-loss drug in townAnd people are already taking it, even though it’s unapproved. (Wired $)+ What we still don’t know about weight-loss drugs. (MIT Technology Review)5 Chinese billionaires are having dozens of US-born surrogate babiesAn entire industry has sprung up to support them. (WSJ $)+ A controversial Chinese CRISPR scientist is still hopeful about embryo gene editing. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Trump’s “big beautiful bill” funding hinges on states integrating AI into healthcareExperts fear it’ll be used as a cost-cutting measure, even if it doesn’t work. (The Guardian)+ Artificial intelligence is infiltrating health care. We shouldn’t let it make all the decisions. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Extreme rainfall is wreaking havoc in the desertOman and the UAE are unaccustomed to increasingly common torrential downpours. (WP $) 8 Data centers are being built in countries that are too hot for themWhich makes it a lot harder to cool them sufficiently. (Rest of World)
9 Why AI image generators are getting deliberately worseTheir makers are pursuing realism—not that overly polished, Uncanny Valley look. (The Verge)+ Inside the AI attention economy wars. (NY Mag $) 10 How a tiny Swedish city became a major video game hubSkövde has formed an unlikely community of cutting-edge developers. (The Guardian)+ Google DeepMind is using Gemini to train agents inside one of Skövde’s biggest franchises. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “They don’t care about the games. They don’t care about the art. They just want their money.” —Anna C Webster, chair of the freelancing committee of the United Videogame Workers union, tells the Guardian why their members are protesting the prestigious 2025 Game Awards in the wake of major layoffs. One more thing
Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTMLWebsites weren’t always slick digital experiences.There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code.Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. And the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics—it’s about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. Read the full story. —Tiffany Ng
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + Here’s how a bit of math can help you wrap your presents much more neatly this year.+ It seems that humans mastered making fire way, way earlier than we realized.+ The Arab-owned cafes opening up across the US sound warm and welcoming.+ How to give a gift the recipient will still be using and loving for decades to come.
Trump Says He’s Inclined to Exclude XOM From Venezuela
(Update) January 12, 2026, 4:24 PM GMT: Article updated. Adds shares in the fifth paragraph. President Donald Trump signaled he’s leaning toward excluding Exxon Mobil Corp. from his push for US oil majors to rebuild Venezuela’s petroleum industry, saying he was displeased with the company’s response to his initiative. “I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” Trump told reporters late Sunday aboard the presidential plane on the way back to Washington from his Florida estate. “I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.” Trump appeared to be referring to a White House meeting on Friday with almost 20 oil industry executives, where Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods expressed some of the strongest reservations and described Venezuela as “uninvestable.” The president’s latest comments also highlight the challenge of persuading the US oil industry to commit to an ambitious reconstruction of Venezuela’s once-mighty energy sector, which he announced within hours of the capture of former President Nicolás Maduro. Exxon shares fell as much as 1.7% Monday as crude futures were little changed. Reviving the oil industry and undoing years of underinvestment and mismanagement would, by some estimates, require $100 billion and take a decade. Despite US moves over the past week to take full control of Venezuelan oil exports, many questions remain over how major investment on the ground could be guaranteed over such a protracted period in a country beset by corruption and insecurity. When asked Sunday which backstops or guarantees he had told oil companies he was willing to provide, Trump said: “Guarantees that they’re going to be safe, that there’s going to be no problem. And there won’t be.” Trump didn’t specify in what way he might seek to exclude Exxon. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment outside of US office hours.
North America Adds Almost 100 Rigs Week on Week
North America added 94 rigs week on week, according to Baker Hughes’ latest North America rotary rig count, which was published on January 9. Although the total U.S. rig count dropped by two week on week, the total Canada rig count increased by 96 during the same period, pushing the total North America rig count up to 741, comprising 544 rigs from the U.S. and 197 rigs from Canada, the count outlined. Of the total U.S. rig count of 544, 525 rigs are categorized as land rigs, 16 are categorized as offshore rigs, and three are categorized as inland water rigs. The total U.S. rig count is made up of 409 oil rigs, 124 gas rigs, and 11 miscellaneous rigs, according to Baker Hughes’ count, which revealed that the U.S. total comprises 475 horizontal rigs, 57 directional rigs, and 12 vertical rigs. Week on week, the U.S. land rig count dropped by two, and its offshore and inland water rig counts remained unchanged, Baker Hughes highlighted. The U.S. oil rig count dropped by three week on week, its gas rig count dropped by one, and its miscellaneous rig count increased by two week on week, the count showed. The U.S. horizontal rig count dropped by one, its vertical rig count dropped by two, and its directional rig count increased by one, week on week, the count revealed. A major state variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, Louisiana dropped three rigs, and New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming each dropped one rig. Utah added four rigs and Colorado added one rig week on week, the count highlighted. A major basin variances subcategory included in the rig count showed that, week on week, the Permian basin dropped three rigs, the Haynesville, Mississippian, and Williston basins
Scattered network data impedes automation efforts
Solution: Proof-of-concept mindset Smaller companies and deep network engineering teams can often succeed with a homegrown or open-source NSoT solution, at least at in the early stages of a network automation strategy. As complexity, scale, and diversity of use cases grow, many network teams will need to partner with a NSoT vendor. Thus, network teams should approach these projects with a NSoT mindset. They should document the value of such a tool as much as possible and prepare a business case for how a vendor could amplify this success. Challenge: Data pain NSoT isn’t a magic bullet for solving the problems IT organizations have with poor network documentation and scattered operational data. Network engineering teams will need to discover, validate, reconcile, and import data from multiple repositories. This process can be challenging and time-consuming. Some of this data will difficult to find. Once the data is found, engineers need to validate the data is good. For instance, is the spreadsheet for a network’s IP address plan accurate? “In brownfield networks, IP addresses are in one IPAM, VLANs are in another system. Some people have spreadsheet and some use MongoDB,” said a network automation engineer at a Fortune 500 bank. “The sources of data are everywhere, and everyone is doing their own thing.” “There was so much information for the operational team,” said network engineer with a large energy company. “From circuits to IPs to devices, all that was in so many different Excel sheets and different spaces, and each team had its own version.” Solution: Discovery tools, cooperation There is no quick fix for solving data problems during NSoT projects, but network discovery tools can help. Network observability solutions can typically discovery a wide variety of relevant data on the network. IP address management tools also offer discovery. NSoT specialist vendors
Mitigating emissions from air freight: Unlocking the potential of SAF with book and claim
In association withAvelia Emissions from air freight have increased by 25% since 2019, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth. The researchers found that the expansion of cargo-only fleets to transport goods during the pandemic — as air travel halted, slower freight modes faced disruption, but demand for rapid delivery soared — has led to a yearly increase of almost 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, making up 93.8m tonnes from air freight overall. [embedded content] And though fleet modernization and operational improvements by freight operators have contributed to ongoing decarbonization efforts, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) looks set to be instrumental in helping the sector achieve its ambitions to reduce environmental footprint in the long-term. When used neat, or pure and unblended, SAF can help reduce the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation by as much as 80% relative to conventional fuel. It’s why the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that SAF could account for as much as 65% of total reduction of emissions.
For Christoph Wolff, CEO of the Smart Freight Centre, “SAF is the main pathway” to decarbonization across both freight and the wider aviation ecosystem. “The great thing about SAF is it’s chemically identical to Jet A fuel,” he says. “You can blend it [which means] you have a pathway to ramp it up. You can start small and you can scale it. By scaling it there is the promise or the hope that the price comes down.”
At at least twice the price of conventional jet fuel, cost is a significant barrier hindering broader adoption. And it isn’t the only one standing between SAF and wider penetration. Bridging the gap between a concentrated supply of SAF and global demand also remains a major hurdle. Though the number of verified SAF outlets has increased from fewer than 20 locations in 2021 to 114 as of April 2025, according to sustainability solutions framework 4Air, that accounts for only 92 airports worldwide out of more than 40,000. “SAF is central to the decarbonization of the aviation sector,” believes Raman Ojha, president of Shell Aviation. “Having said that, adoption and penetration of SAF hasn’t really picked up massively. It’s not due to lack of production capacity, but there are lots of things that are at play. And book and claim in that context helps to bridge that gap.” Bridging the gap with book and claim Book and claim is a chain of custody model, where the flow of administrative records is not necessarily connected to the physical product through the supply chain (source: ISO 22095:2020). Book and claim potentially enables airlines and corporations to access the life cycle GHG emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel even when SAF is not physically available at their location; this model helps bridge the gap between that concentrated supply and global demand, until SAF’s availability improves. “To be bold, without book and claim, no short-term science-based target will be achieved,” says Bettina Paschke, vice president of ESG accounting, reporting and controlling at DHL Express. “Book and claim is essential to achieving science-based targets.”
“SAF production facilities are not everywhere,” she reiterates. “They’re very focused on one location, and if a customer wants to fulfil a mass balance obligation, SAF would need to be shipped around the world just to be at that airport for that customer. That would be very complicated, and very unrealistic.” It would also, counterintuitively, increase total emissions. By using book and claim instead, air freight operators can unlock the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel now, without waiting for supply to broaden. “It might no longer be needed when we have SAF product facilities at each airport in the future,” she points out. “But at the moment, that’s not the case.” At DHL itself, the mechanism has become central to achieving its own three interconnected sustainability pillars, which focus on decarbonizing logistics supply chains, supporting customers toward their decarbonization goals, and ensuring credible emission claims can be shared along the value chain. Demonstrating the importance of a credible and viable framework for book and claim systems is also what inspired the 2022 launch of Shell’s Avelia, one of the first blockchain-powered digital SAF book and claim solutions for aviation, which expanded in 2024 to encompass air freight in addition to business travel. Depending on the offering, Avelia offers freight forwarders the opportunity to share the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions reduction benefits of SAF relative to conventional jet fuel across the value chain with shippers using their services. “It’s also backed by a physical supply chain, which gives our customers — whether those be corporates or freight forwarders or even airlines — a peace of mind that the SAF has been injected at a certain airport, it’s been used and environmental attributes, with the help of blockchain, have been tracked to where they’re getting retired,” says Ojha. He adds: “The most important or critical part is the transparency that it’s providing to our customers to be sure that they’re not saying something which they can’t confidently stand behind.” Moving beyond early adoption To scale up SAF via book and claim and help make it a more commercially viable lower-carbon solution, its adoption will need to be a coordinated “ecosystem play,” says Wolff. That includes early adopters, such as DHL, inspiring action from peers, solution providers such as Shell, working with various stakeholders to drive joint advocacy, and industry associations, like the Smart Freight Centre creating the required frameworks, educational resources, and industry alignment. An active book and claim community made up of many forward-thinking advocates is already driving much of this work forward with a common goal to develop greater standardization and consensus, Wolff points out. “It helps to make sure all definitions on the system are compatible and they can talk to one another, provide educational support, and [also that] there’s a repository of transactions so that it can be documented in a way that people can see and think, ‘oh this is how we do it.’ There are some early adopters that are very experienced, but it needs a lot more people for it to get comfortable.” In early 2024, discussions were held with a diverse group of expert book and claim stakeholders to develop and refine 11 key principles and best practices book and claim models. These represent an aligned set of principles informed by practical successes and challenges faced by practitioners working to decarbonize the heavy transport sector.
Adherence to such a framework is crucial given that book and claim is not yet accepted by the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol nor the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) as a recognized model for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — though there are hopes that might change. “The industrialization of book and claim delivery systems is key to credibility and recognition,” says Wolff. “The Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science Based Targets Initiative are making steps in recognizing that. There’s a pathway that the Smart Freight Centre is very closely involved in the technical working groups for [looking]to build such a system where, in addition to physical inventory, you also pursue market-based inventories.”
Paschke urges companies not to sit back and wait for policy to change before taking action, though. “The solution is there,” she says. “There are companies like DHL that are making huge upfront investments, and every single contribution helps to scale the industry and give a strong signal to the eco-space.” As pressure to accelerate decarbonization gains pace, it’s critical that air freight operators consider this now, agrees Ojha. “Don’t wait for perfection in guidelines, regulations, or platforms — act now,” he says. “That’s very, very critical. Second, learn by doing and join hands with others. Don’t try to do everything independently or in-house. “Third, make use of registries and platforms, such as Avelia, that can give credibility. Join them, utilize them, and leverage them so that you won’t have to establish auditability from scratch. “And fourth, don’t look at scope book and claim as a means for acquiring a certificate for environmental attributes. Think in terms of your decarbonisation commitment and think of this as a tool for exposure management. Think in terms of the bigger picture.” That bigger picture being a significant sector-wide push toward faster decarbonization — and turning the tide on emissions’ steep upward ascent. Watch the full webcast. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review. This content is produced by MIT Technology Review Insights in association with Avelia. Avelia is a Shell owned solution and brand that was developed with support from Amex GBT, Accenture and Energy Web Foundation. The views from individuals not affiliated with Shell are their own and not those of Shell PLC or its affiliates. Cautionary note | Shell Global
Intensity, Rainbow Near FID on North Dakota Gas Pipeline
Intensity Infrastructure Partners LLC and power producer Rainbow Energy Center LLC have indicated they are nearing a positive final investment decision (FID) on a new pipeline project to bring Bakken natural gas to eastern North Dakota. “[T]he firm transportation commitments contained in executed precedent agreements are sufficient to underpin the decision to advance Phase I of their 36-inch natural gas pipeline in North Dakota, reflecting growing confidence in the region’s long-term power and industrial demand outlook”, the companies said in a joint statement. “This approach establishes a scalable, dispatchable power and gas delivery hub capable of adapting to evolving market conditions, supporting sustained data center growth, grid reliability needs and long-term industrial development across North Dakota”. “The system will provide reliable natural gas supply through multiple receipt points, including Northern Border Pipeline, WBI Energy’s existing transmission and storage network, and direct connections to six Bakken natural gas processing plants, creating a highly integrated supply platform from Bakken and Canadian production”, the online statement added. “The pipeline is designed to operate without compression fuel surcharges, reducing operational complexity while enhancing reliability and tariff transparency for shippers. “Uncommitted capacity on phase I supports incremental gas-fired generation along the planned pipeline corridor and at Coal Creek Station, leveraging existing power transmission infrastructure, a strategic geographic location and a proven operating platform. “The 36-inch pipeline enables future throughput increases without the need for duplicative greenfield infrastructure as demand continues to develop”. Rainbow chief executive Stacy Tschider said, “By leveraging established assets like Coal Creek and integrating directly with basin supply and interstate systems, this project is positioned to meet near-term needs while remaining expandable for the next generation of load growth”. The project would proceed in two phases. Phase 1 would build a 136-mile, 36-inch pipeline with a capacity of about 1.1 million dekatherms a day (Dthd). The phase 1 line would
The Download: introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies
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. Introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies It’s easy to be cynical about technology these days. Many of the “disruptions” of the last 15 years were more about coddling a certain set of young, moneyed San Franciscans than improving the world. Yet you can be sympathetic to the techlash and still fully buy into the idea that technology can be good. We really can build tools that make this planet healthier, more livable, more equitable, and just all-around better. And some people are doing just that, pushing progress forward across a number of fundamental, potentially world-changing technologies.
These are exactly the technologies we aim to spotlight in our annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. These are 10 technologies that we believe are poised to fundamentally alter the world, and they’re a matter of hot debate across the newsroom for months before being unveiled. So, without further ado… Here’s the full list. Do you think we’ve missed something? You have until April to cast your vote for the 11th breakthrough!
Why some “breakthrough” technologies don’t work out —Fabio Duarte is associate director and principal research scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab. Today marks the 25th year the MIT Technology Review newsroom has compiled its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited the publication’s original list, finding that while all the technologies were still relevant, each had evolved and progressed in often unpredictable ways. I lead students through a similar exercise in a graduate class I teach with James Scott for MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, asking them what we can learn from the failures. Although it’s less glamorous than envisioning which advances will change our future, analyzing failed technologies is equally important. Read about why that is. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Iran has almost completely shut its internet down Which makes it very hard for the world to witness its government killing people. (AP)+ The shutdown is chillingly effective, and likely to last. (The Guardian)+ President Trump is considering military strikes against Iran. (NYT $)2 ICE is gaining powerful new surveillance capabilitiesIt’s purchased tools that give it the ability to track individuals across entire neighborhoods. (404 Media $)+ The ICE shooting shows why reality still matters. (The Verge $)+ It’s time for Apple to reinstate ICEBlock. (Engadget) 3 Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok They are the first in the world to ban the AI tool, which is being used to make explicit non-consensual deepfakes. (BBC)+ How Elon Musk’s platform unleashed a torrent of abuse upon women and girls. (The Guardian)4 Silicon Valley’s billionaires are panicking over a proposed 5% wealth taxPoor dears. (Wired $) 5 Meta signed a deal with three nuclear companiesIt’s becoming a favored power source for tech companies as their AI ambitions grow. (TechCrunch)+ Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? (MIT Technology Review) 6 AI has a memorization problem The fact it reproduces copyrighted work shows it might not work the way its makers claim. (The Atlantic $)+ DeepSeek is poised to release a new flagship AI model. (The Information $)7 Here’s the stuff from CES you might actually consider buying It’s always a bit of a gimmick fest—but these items made their way onto reporters’ wishlists. (The Verge $)+ On the flipside, you absolutely should not purchase anything on the ‘worst in show’ list. (The Register)8 How WhatsApp took over the world 🌍It’s used by more than three billion people every month—nearly half the global population. (New Yorker $)9 AI music is here to stayLove it or hate it, it’s only going to play a bigger role going forward. (Vox)+ It’s complicating our definitions of authorship and creativity in the process. (MIT Technology Review)10 We’re crying out for better experiences onlineThe question is: who will give them to us? (WP $) Quote of the day “Things here are very, very bad. A lot of our friends have been killed. They were firing live rounds. It’s like a war zone, the streets are full of blood. They’re taking away bodies in trucks.” —An anonymous source in Iran’s capital Tehran tells the BBC how the government is cracking down on protests.
One more thing This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel
Found Energy aims to harness the energy in scraps of aluminum metal to power industrial processes without fossil fuels. Since 2022, the company has worked to develop ways to rapidly release energy from aluminum on a small scale. Now it’s just switched on a much larger version of its aluminum-powered engine, which it claims is the largest aluminum-water reactor ever built. Soon, it will be installed to supply heat and hydrogen to a tool manufacturing facility in the southeastern US, using the aluminum waste produced by the plant itself as fuel. If everything works as planned, this technology, which uses a catalyst to unlock the energy stored within aluminum metal, could transform a growing share of aluminum scrap into a zero-carbon fuel. Read the full story. —James Dinneen
We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + I enjoyed this heartwarming story of love across the generational divide ❤️ + It turns out you can cook an egg in an air fryer. The big question is—should you?+ Of course Japan has a real-life Pokémon Fossil Museum.+ If you haven’t already, make 2026 the year you get a hobby. Your life will be all the richer for it.
Stay Ahead with the Paperboy Newsletter
Your weekly dose of insights into AI, Bitcoin mining, Datacenters and Energy indusrty news. Spend 3-5 minutes and catch-up on 1 week of news.