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There aren’t enough AI chips to support data center projections, report says

Dive Brief: Projections around U.S. data center growth and the electricity necessary to power AI are almost certainly overstated due to global constraints in semiconductor chip production, according to a new analysis completed by London Economics International for the Southern Environmental Law Center. Demand forecasts have alarmed utilities that are rushing to add energy resources, […]

Dive Brief:

  • Projections around U.S. data center growth and the electricity necessary to power AI are almost certainly overstated due to global constraints in semiconductor chip production, according to a new analysis completed by London Economics International for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
  • Demand forecasts have alarmed utilities that are rushing to add energy resources, despite concerns over impacts on power bills.
  • Projected data center demand from the U.S. power market would require 90% of global chip supply through 2030, according to London Economics. “Such a scenario is unrealistic,” the report concluded.

Dive Insight:

The United States is rushing to add new generation and transmission to power a variety of sectors — including transportation, buildings and industry — but data centers are expected to require an outsized portion of the resources.

The U.S. Department of Energy on Monday published a report estimating an additional 100 GW of new peak capacity is needed by 2030, with half of it needed for data centers. Schneider Electric’s 2030 AI power demand scenarios range from about 16 GW to 65 GW. 

The uncertainty, and an “upward bias” in projections identified by London Economics, is putting ratepayers at risk, according to SELC.

“Such speculative infrastructure investment creates significant economic risks for ratepayers, who ultimately bear the financial burdens,” SELC Senior Attorney Megan Gibson said in a statement. “Regulators must urgently prioritize transparent, realistic, and evidence-based analyses to ensure infrastructure developments are truly necessary and beneficial, safeguarding communities and promoting sustainable growth in the Southeast and throughout the country.” 

The report appears to reinforce some analyst observations that many data center requests appear to be duplicative.

Astrid Atkinson, a former Google senior director of software engineering and now co-founder and CEO of grid optimization software provider Camus Energy, told Utility Dive earlier this year that utilities are seeing five to 10 times more interconnection requests than data centers that will actually be built.

London Economics said it developed an approach to examining the “reasonableness” of data center forecasts by comparing the projected electricity demand increases reported by U.S. grid operators and balancing authorities with the global implied need for semiconductor chips.

The analysis is “meant to be a sanity check on the scale of projected data center growth and by extension the forecast of the aggregated electricity demand growth,” the report said. “LEI found evidence that the high-level forecast is not credible.”

According to the report, AI chip manufacturing capacity has grown about 6.1% annually over the last decade. If that rate were to rise significantly, to 10.7%, it would mean the chip sector could supply an incremental 63 GW of data center-related demand globally through 2030. But U.S. grid operators say they anticipate data center demand growth of 57 GW over the next six years.

“For the forecasts to hold water, this would mean the US would require more than 90% of the world’s new supply of semiconductor chips from 2025 through 2030,” London Economics concluded. “Such a scenario is unrealistic … The United States currently accounts for slightly less than 50% of global semiconductor chip demand, and other regions in the world are also projecting strong demand.”

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A timeline of Broadcom/VMware and Siemens licensing dispute

June 24: VMware responds, saying that Siemens distributed infringing VMware products to its US subsidiaries in violation of US copyright law by accessing VMware’s US server. July 1: Nah uh, says Siemens. First, any actions taken by the parent company occurred in Germany. Also, downloading allegedly copyrighted software does not

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JPMorgan launches carbon market blockchain app

Dive Brief: JPMorgan Chase is working to allow voluntary carbon markets to issue blockchain tokens at the registry level that represent ownership of carbon credits, permitting market participants to issue, transfer and retire credits, the bank announced Wednesday. JPMorgan is currently exploring testing processes with carbon registries from S&P Global

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IBM Power11 challenges x86 and GPU giants with security-first server strategy

The IBM Power Cyber Vault solution is designed to provide protection against cyberattacks such as data corruption and encryption with proactive immutable snapshots that are automatically captured, stored, and tested on a custom-defined schedule, IBM said. Power11 also uses NIST-approved built-in quantum-safe cryptography designed to help protect systems from harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks

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NZ Needs ‘Significant’ Funding to Enable Conventional LNG Importation

An industry-commissioned assessment found the importation of natural gas into New Zealand is technically viable, but one of the companies that ordered the study said Thursday building liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure in the country appears to be “more challenging than anticipated”. The study, commissioned following a rapid fall in domestic gas that prompted a reversal on climate policy, looked at conventional-scale LNG import infrastructure and smaller-scale solutions. The “New Zealand LNG Import Feasibility Assessment” was conducted by the United Kingdom-based Gas Strategies Group Ltd. with support from New Zealand-based Wood Beca Ltd. for about 10 weeks from mid-September 2024. For LNG importation through conventional-size vessels, capital cost estimates to build the needed infrastructure range from NZD 189 million ($113.75 million) to NZD 1 billion. The cost depends on port modifications at a given location, pipeline upgrades and onshore regasification installations. The range is “a significant investment given the uncertainty around how often LNG imports would be needed”, Clarus, one of the companies that commissioned the study, said in a statement online. “The global LNG trade has standardized around large vessels (carrying around 170,000-180,000m3, or 4.5 PJ of gas), with much of the storage and regasification equipment located on permanently moored ships (known as Floating Storage and Regasification Units or FSRUs)”, Clarus, formerly Firstgas Group, said.  The study identified six preferred sites across the North Island. “No single location in New Zealand has the existing combination of sufficient water depth, benign metocean condition and existing gas pipeline capacity to meet demand scenarios”, the first of two findings reports said. “Therefore, all locations will require financial investment to address one or more of these issues. “LNG imports are unlikely to be achieved in less than four years unless the existing permitting and consenting process is fast-tracked and / or some financial risk

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Mideast Oil Giants Say OPEC+’s Supply Surprise Needed by Market

Senior officials from three of OPEC’s core producer nations – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait – lined up on Wednesday to say that the super-sized addition of supply by the producer club at the weekend was needed by the global market. Oil prices eked out gains this week, a sign that the market has largely shrugged off the larger-than-expected output hike announced on Saturday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies. Despite the current tightness, forecasters are pointing out that supply growth is at risk of outpacing demand later in the year. “You can see that even with the increase in several months, we haven’t seen a major buildup in the inventories, which means the market needed those barrels,” Suhail Al Mazrouei, the United Arab Emirates energy minister said on the sidelines of a conference that the group is holding in Vienna. His comments were echoed by officials at the state oil companies of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Signs of a tight market include crude oil stockpiles at the key US storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma that are at their lowest seasonally since 2014, as well as a collapse in America’s diesel inventories. Timespreads point to tight supply-and-demand dynamics in the near term. Bloomberg News hasn’t received accreditation to cover the OPEC seminar, despite multiple requests. No explanation has been given.  Healthy Demand Saudi Aramco, which hiked its key oil prices for customers in Asia a day after the weekend meeting, sees “healthy global oil demand,” despite trade challenges, tariffs and their impact on the global economy, President and CEO Amin Nasser said at the OPEC Seminar in Vienna, according to a video posted on the X platform. In April, OPEC+ announced – to the surprise of the market – the addition of 411,000 barrels a day of production

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BP Sells Dutch Retail, EV Charging Assets to Catom

BP PLC said Wednesday it had signed a deal to divest its convenience, mobility and BP Pulse businesses in the Netherlands to local fuels distributor Catom BV. “The transaction includes around 300 bp-owned or branded retail sites – some with on-site EV charging infrastructure – as well as 15 operational bp pulse EV charging hubs, eight under development and the associated Dutch fleet business”, a joint statement said. BP Pulse is BP’s multinational electric vehicle charging business. The parties did not disclose the price of the transaction, expected to be completed by year-end subject to regulatory approvals. The assets will grow Catom’s retail network to over 400 sites across the Netherlands. Catom sells conventional and renewable fuels and lubricants under the OK brand. “With this acquisition, we’re on our way to becoming the number one brand in our industry in the Netherlands”, commented Catom chief executive Jan Willem Westerhuis. “Catom was ultimately selected as the successful bidder as they presented the best overall offer, including future plans for the business and protection of terms and conditions of employees”, the statement said. Emma Delaney, BP executive vice president for customers and products, said, “We have built a high-quality retail and convenience business in the Netherlands but as we look to focus our downstream as part of a reset bp, we believe a new owner is best placed to take our Dutch business forward”. BP expects to sell $3-4 billion worth of assets this year, including $1.5 billion signed or completed in the first quarter. “Further progress on divestment proceeds will be provided as part of 2Q25 results”, Wednesday’s announcement said. Under a “reset” plan announced February, which involves scaling down renewables investment and cutting costs, BP targets $20 billion in divestment proceeds by 2027, including from solar developer Lightsource BP Renewable Energy Investments

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Uniper Sells Stake in Baltic Gas Distributor to Energy Investments

Germany’s Uniper SE said Wednesday it had sold its 18.26 percent interest in AS Latvijas Gaze, which is involved in natural gas trading and sales in the Baltic neighborhood primarily in Latvia, to co-venturer Energy Investments SIA. “The sale of this non-strategic minority equity participation in AS Latvijas Gaze is part of the conditions that Uniper must fulfill under EU state aid law”, the gas and power utility said in a brief statement online. Uniper was referring to fair-competition guardrails imposed by the European Commission in approving its bailout by the German government in late 2022. Latvijas Gaze sells gas in Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. In Latvia’s household sector, it is the biggest gas supplier, Latvijas Gaze says on its website. Latvijas Gaze had a EUR 159.8 million ($187.59 million) revenue last year, according to Uniper. Energy Investments has now increased its stake to 41.11 percent. JSC Rietumu Banka owns 28.97 percent, LLC ITERA Latvija 16 percent, UAB Haupas 6.15 percent and Port Investment Co. SARL 5 percent. Other shareholders hold 2.77 percent, Latvijas Gaze confirmed separately on Wednesday. In February Uniper completed the sale of its North American power portfolio also as part of the conditions under the European Commission’s approval for the German state aid. The divestment covered “power purchase and sale contracts and energy management agreements in the North American power markets ERCOT (North, South, West and Houston), WEST (WECC and CAISO) and CENTRAL (MISO and SPP) through a number of transactions with several counterparties”, Uniper said in a press release. The North American dispositions excluded Uniper’s gas portfolio and hydrogen-related activities. In January Uniper completed the sale of its natural gas-fired power plant in Gonyu, Hungary, to the local subsidiary of France’s Veolia SA. Commissioned 2011, the power plant generates up to 430 megawatts, according

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Kuwait Oil Giant Says OPEC+ Hikes Suggest Tighter Market

Kuwait’s state energy company said OPEC+’s latest super-sized supply hike and recent interactions with customers suggest persistent demand growth beyond the summer driving season.   “We’re seeing some potential tightness in the market, which gives us an opportunity to capture market share in the future,” Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, chief executive officer of Kuwait Petroleum Corp., told Bloomberg TV in an interview on the sidelines of a seminar held by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna.  Tanker tracking by Bloomberg shows that the Gulf state’s crude exports surged to a 19-month high in June as the OPEC+ alliance brought curbed barrels back. Most of Kuwait’s oil flows to Asian countries, including China, Japan and South Korea. Sheikh Nawaf said recent demand has been driven by Asia in particular, noting that KPC’s global business partners have been asking the company if it has additional barrels. There are indications that the customer isn’t concerned about a peak in demand, “certainly in China, and also is looking toward quality of the supplier, and that is us, because we are committed to a low-cost and low-carbon intensity barrel, and will continue for decades to come.” Producers are seeing a market that will continue to grow, Sheikh Nawaf said, with anywhere between 1 million to 1.3 million barrels a day of additional demand growth over the year.  Bloomberg News hasn’t received accreditation to cover the OPEC seminar, despite multiple requests. No explanation has been given. Sheikh Nawaf spoke outside the event. As tensions between Israel and Iran escalated last month into open conflict, KPC communicated closely with its Gulf partners to ensure a steady supply of oil to the market, according to Sheikh Nawaf. There had been concerns that the fighting could disrupt tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint

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Oil Holds Gains Despite US Crude Surge

Oil held steady as traders weighed a large gain in US crude stockpiles against fresh US efforts to crimp Iranian crude exports. West Texas Intermediate swung between gains and losses before settling above $68 a barrel, narrowly extending a winning streak to a third day. US crude stockpiles rose 7.1 million barrels last week, the biggest gain since January, the Energy Information Administration said Wednesday. At the same time, the US Treasury Department sanctioned 22 foreign entities for their roles in facilitating the sale of Iranian oil. “Despite a material drop in imports week-on-week, a tick lower in refining activity and subdued exports have encouraged a sizeable crude inventory build,” said Matt Smith, Americas lead oil analyst at Kpler. The sanctions helped to soothe investors’ uncertainty surrounding US policy on Iranian exports, just weeks after US President Donald Trump baffled markets by encouraging China to carry on buying Tehran’s crude. Those surprise remarks represented a reversal of years of US sanctions and briefly allayed concerns that the Israel-Iran conflict would severely disrupt supplies. Still, sanctions news will have limited upside until the market sees a material loss of barrels, said Joe DeLaura, global energy strategist at Rabobank. “It’s all kayfabe,” he said. “By the end of the week, all those sanctioned companies will exist under new names in new locations, and the oil will flow.” Renewed Houthi attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea — a key trade route for oil — have also notably failed to inject a risk premium into oil prices. The attacks have so far killed at least three crew members and sank two vessels. “Most ships are already avoiding the Red Sea,” said Rebecca Babin, a senior energy trader at CIBC Private Wealth Group. The developments “indicate some escalation, but do not really change

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Enterprises will strengthen networks to take on AI, survey finds

Private data centers: 29.5% Traditional public cloud: 35.4% GPU as a service specialists: 18.5% Edge compute: 16.6% “There is little variation from training to inference, but the general pattern is workloads are concentrated a bit in traditional public cloud and then hyperscalers have significant presence in private data centers,” McGillicuddy explained. “There is emerging interest around deploying AI workloads at the corporate edge and edge compute environments as well, which allows them to have workloads residing closer to edge data in the enterprise, which helps them combat latency issues and things like that. The big key takeaway here is that the typical enterprise is going to need to make sure that its data center network is ready to support AI workloads.” AI networking challenges The popularity of AI doesn’t remove some of the business and technical concerns that the technology brings to enterprise leaders. According to the EMA survey, business concerns include security risk (39%), cost/budget (33%), rapid technology evolution (33%), and networking team skills gaps (29%). Respondents also indicated several concerns around both data center networking issues and WAN issues. Concerns related to data center networking included: Integration between AI network and legacy networks: 43% Bandwidth demand: 41% Coordinating traffic flows of synchronized AI workloads: 38% Latency: 36% WAN issues respondents shared included: Complexity of workload distribution across sites: 42% Latency between workloads and data at WAN edge: 39% Complexity of traffic prioritization: 36% Network congestion: 33% “It’s really not cheap to make your network AI ready,” McGillicuddy stated. “You might need to invest in a lot of new switches and you might need to upgrade your WAN or switch vendors. You might need to make some changes to your underlay around what kind of connectivity your AI traffic is going over.” Enterprise leaders intend to invest in infrastructure

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CoreWeave acquires Core Scientific for $9B to power AI infrastructure push

Such a shift, analysts say, could offer short-term benefits for enterprises, particularly in cost and access, but also introduces new operational risks. “This acquisition may potentially lower enterprise pricing through lease cost elimination and annual savings, while improving GPU access via expanded power capacity, enabling faster deployment of Nvidia chipsets and systems,” said Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. “However, service reliability risks persist during this crypto-to-AI retrofitting.” This also indicates that struggling vendors such as Core Scientific and similar have a way to cash out, according to Yugal Joshi, partner at Everest Group. “However, it does not materially impact the availability of Nvidia GPUs and similar for enterprises,” Joshi added. “Consolidation does impact the pricing power of vendors.” Concerns for enterprises Rising demand for AI-ready infrastructure can raise concerns among enterprises, particularly over access to power-rich data centers and future capacity constraints. “The biggest concern that CIOs should have with this acquisition is that mature data center infrastructure with dedicated power is an acquisition target,” said Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights. “This may turn out to create challenges for CIOs currently collocating data workloads or seeking to keep more of their data loads on private data centers rather than in the cloud.”

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CoreWeave achieves a first with Nvidia GB300 NVL72 deployment

The deployment, Kimball said, “brings Dell quality to the commodity space. Wins like this really validate what Dell has been doing in reshaping its portfolio to accommodate the needs of the market — both in the cloud and the enterprise.” Although concerns were voiced last year that Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell data center processors had significant overheating problems when they were installed in high-capacity server racks, he said that a repeat performance is unlikely. Nvidia, said Kimball “has been very disciplined in its approach with its GPUs and not shipping silicon until it is ready. And Dell almost doubles down on this maniacal quality focus. I don’t mean to sound like I have blind faith, but I’ve watched both companies over the last several years be intentional in delivering product in volume. Especially as the competitive market starts to shape up more strongly, I expect there is an extremely high degree of confidence in quality.” CoreWeave ‘has one purpose’ He said, “like Lambda Labs, Crusoe and others, [CoreWeave] seemingly has one purpose (for now): deliver GPU capacity to the market. While I expect these cloud providers will expand in services, I think for now the type of customer employing services is on the early adopter side of AI. From an enterprise perspective, I have to think that organizations well into their AI journey are the consumers of CoreWeave.”  “CoreWeave is also being utilized by a lot of the model providers and tech vendors playing in the AI space,” Kimball pointed out. “For instance, it’s public knowledge that Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, IBM and others use CoreWeave GPUs for model training and more. It makes sense. These are the customers that truly benefit from the performance lift that we see from generation to generation.”

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Oracle to power OpenAI’s AGI ambitions with 4.5GW expansion

“For CIOs, this shift means more competition for AI infrastructure. Over the next 12–24 months, securing capacity for AI workloads will likely get harder, not easier. Though cost is coming down but demand is increasing as well, due to which CIOs must plan earlier and build stronger partnerships to ensure availability,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO at EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. He added that CIOs should expect longer wait times for AI infrastructure. To mitigate this, they should lock in capacity through reserved instances, diversify across regions and cloud providers, and work with vendors to align on long-term demand forecasts.  “Enterprises stand to benefit from more efficient and cost-effective AI infrastructure tailored to specialized AI workloads, significantly lower their overall future AI-related investments and expenses. Consequently, CIOs face a critical task: to analyze and predict the diverse AI workloads that will prevail across their organizations, business units, functions, and employee personas in the future. This foresight will be crucial in prioritizing and optimizing AI workloads for either in-house deployment or outsourced infrastructure, ensuring strategic and efficient resource allocation,” said Neil Shah, vice president at Counterpoint Research. Strategic pivot toward AI data centers The OpenAI-Oracle deal comes in stark contrast to developments earlier this year. In April, AWS was reported to be scaling back its plans for leasing new colocation capacity — a move that AWS Vice President for global data centers Kevin Miller described as routine capacity management, not a shift in long-term expansion plans. Still, these announcements raised questions around whether the hyperscale data center boom was beginning to plateau. “This isn’t a slowdown, it’s a strategic pivot. The era of building generic data center capacity is over. The new global imperative is a race for specialized, high-density, AI-ready compute. Hyperscalers are not slowing down; they are reallocating their capital to

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Arista Buys VeloCloud to reboot SD-WANs amid AI infrastructure shift

What this doesn’t answer is how Arista Networks plans to add newer, security-oriented Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capabilities to VeloCloud’s older SD-WAN technology. Post-acquisition, it still has only some of the building blocks necessary to achieve this. Mapping AI However, in 2025 there is always more going on with networking acquisitions than simply adding another brick to the wall, and in this case it’s the way AI is changing data flows across networks. “In the new AI era, the concepts of what comprises a user and a site in a WAN have changed fundamentally. The introduction of agentic AI even changes what might be considered a user,” wrote Arista Networks CEO, Jayshree Ullal, in a blog highlighting AI’s effect on WAN architectures. “In addition to people accessing data on demand, new AI agents will be deployed to access data independently, adapting over time to solve problems and enhance user productivity,” she said. Specifically, WANs needed modernization to cope with the effect AI traffic flows are having on data center traffic. Sanjay Uppal, now VP and general manager of the new VeloCloud Division at Arista Networks, elaborated. “The next step in SD-WAN is to identify, secure and optimize agentic AI traffic across that distributed enterprise, this time from all end points across to branches, campus sites, and the different data center locations, both public and private,” he wrote. “The best way to grab this opportunity was in partnership with a networking systems leader, as customers were increasingly looking for a comprehensive solution from LAN/Campus across the WAN to the data center.”

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Data center capacity continues to shift to hyperscalers

However, even though colocation and on-premises data centers will continue to lose share, they will still continue to grow. They just won’t be growing as fast as hyperscalers. So, it creates the illusion of shrinkage when it’s actually just slower growth. In fact, after a sustained period of essentially no growth, on-premises data center capacity is receiving a boost thanks to genAI applications and GPU infrastructure. “While most enterprise workloads are gravitating towards cloud providers or to off-premise colo facilities, a substantial subset are staying on-premise, driving a substantial increase in enterprise GPU servers,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

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

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

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

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

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2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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

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

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

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