US deputy health secretary: Vaccine guidelines are still subject to change

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US deputy health secretary: Vaccine guidelines are still subject to change

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country’s federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US’s deeply controversial new vaccine schedule. He’s also a longevity enthusiast. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this month, O’Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. At the same time, he defended reducing the number of broadly recommended childhood vaccines, a move that has been widely criticized by experts in medicine and public health. In MIT Technology Review’s profile of O’Neill last year, people working in health policy and consumer advocacy said they found his libertarian views on drug regulation “worrisome” and “antithetical to basic public health.” He was later named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, putting him in charge of the nation’s public health agency. But fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope O’Neill will bring attention and funding to their cause: the search for treatments that might slow, prevent, or even reverse human aging. Here are some takeaways from the interview. Vaccine recommendations could change further Last month, the US cut the number of vaccines recommended for children. The CDC no longer recommends vaccinations against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, or meningococcal disease for all children. The move was widely panned by medical groups and public health experts. Many worry it will become more difficult for children to access those vaccines. The majority of states have rejected the recommendations. In the confirmation hearing for his role as deputy secretary of health and human services, which took place in May last year, O’Neill said he supported the CDC’s vaccine schedule. MIT Technology Review asked him if that was the case and, if so, what made him change his mind. “Researching and examining and reviewing safety data and efficacy data about vaccines is one of CDC’s obligations,” he said. “CDC gives important advice about vaccines and should always be open to new data and new ways of looking at data.” At the beginning of December, O’Neill said, President Donald Trump “asked me to look at what other countries were doing in terms of their vaccine schedules.” He said he spoke to health ministries of other countries and consulted with scientists at the CDC and FDA. “It was suggested to me by lots of the operating divisions that the US focus its recommendations on consensus vaccines of other developed nations—in other words, the most important vaccines that are most often part of the core recommendations of other countries,” he said. “As a result of that, we did an update to the vaccine schedule to focus on a set of vaccines that are most important for all children.” But some experts in public health have said that countries like Denmark and Japan, whose vaccine schedules the new US one was supposedly modeled on, are not really comparable to the US. When asked about these criticisms, O’Neill replied, “A lot of parents feel that … more than 70 vaccine doses given to young children sounds like a really high number, and some of them ask which ones are the most important. I think we helped answer that question in a way that didn’t remove anyone’s access.” A few weeks after the vaccine recommendations were changed, Kirk Milhoan, who leads the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that vaccinations for measles and polio—which are currently required for entry to public schools—should be optional. (Mehmet Oz, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, has more recently urged people to “take the [measles] vaccine.”) “CDC still recommends that all children are vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), Pneumococcal conjugate, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and human papillomavirus (HPV), for which there is international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox),” he said when asked for his thoughts on this comment. He also said that current vaccine guidelines are “still subject to new data coming in, new ways of thinking about things.” “CDC, FDA, and NIH are initiating new studies of the safety of immunizations,” he added. “We will continue to ask the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review evidence and make updated recommendations with rigorous science and transparency.” More support for longevity—but not all science O’Neill said he wants longevity to become a priority for US health agencies. His ultimate goal, he said, is to “make the damage of aging something that’s under medical control.” It’s “the same way of thinking” as the broader Make America Healthy Again approach, he said: “‘Again’ implies restoration of health, which is what longevity research and therapy is all about.” O’Neill said his interest in longevity was ignited by his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, around 2008 to 2009. It was right around the time O’Neill was finishing up a previous role in HHS, under the Bush administration. O’Neill said Thiel told him he “should really start looking into longevity and the idea that aging damage could be reversible.” “I just got more and more excited about that idea,” he said. When asked if he’s heard of Vitalism, a philosophical movement for “hardcore” longevity enthusiasts who, broadly, believe that death is wrong, O’Neill replied: “Yes.” The Vitalist declaration lists five core statements, including “Death is humanity’s core problem,” “Obviating aging is scientifically plausible,” and “I will carry the message against aging and death.” O’Neill said he agrees with all of them. “I suppose I am [a Vitalist],” he said with a smile, although he’s not a paying member of the foundation behind it. As deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, O’Neill assumes a level of responsibility for huge and influential science and health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research) and the Food and Drug Administration (which oversees drug regulation and is globally influential) as well as the CDC. Today, he said, he sees support for longevity science from his colleagues within HHS. “If I could describe one common theme to the senior leadership at HHS, obviously it’s to make America healthy again, and reversing aging damage is all about making people healthy again,” he said. “We are refocusing HHS on addressing and reversing chronic disease, and chronic diseases are what drive aging, broadly.” Over the last year, thousands of NIH grants worth over $2 billion were frozen or terminated, including funds for research on cancer biology, health disparities, neuroscience, and much more. When asked whether any of that funding will be restored, he did not directly address the question, instead noting: “You’ll see a lot of funding more focused on important priorities that actually improve people’s health.” Watch ARPA-H for news on organ replacements and more He promised we’ll hear more from ARPA-H, the three-year-old federal agency dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in medical science and biotechnology. It was established with the official goal of promoting “high-risk, high-reward innovation for the development and translation of transformative health technologies.” O’Neill said that “ARPA-H exists to make the impossible possible in health and medicine.” The agency has a new director—Alicia Jackson, who formerly founded and led a company focused on women’s health and longevity, took on the role in October last year. O’Neill said he helped recruit Jackson, and that she was hired in part because of her interest in longevity, which will now become a major focus of the agency. He said he meets with her regularly, as well as with Andrew Brack and Jean Hébert, two other longevity supporters who lead departments at ARPA-H. Brack’s program focuses on finding biological markers of aging. Hebert’s aim is to find a way to replace aging brain tissue, bit by bit. O’Neill is especially excited by that one, he said. “I would try it … Not today, but … if progress goes in a broadly good direction, I would be open to it. We’re hoping to see significant results in the next few years.” He’s also enthused by the idea of creating all-new organs for transplantation. “Someday we want to be able to grow new organs, ideally from the patients’ own cells,” O’Neill said. An ARPA-H program will receive $170 million over five years to that end, he adds. “I’m very excited about the potential of ARPA-H and Alicia and Jean and Andrew to really push things forward.” Longevity lobbyists have a friendly ear O’Neill said he also regularly talks to the team at the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives. The organization, led by Dylan Livingston, played an instrumental role in changing state law in Montana to make experimental therapies more accessible. O’Neill said he hasn’t formally worked with them but thinks that “they’re doing really good work on raising awareness, including on Capitol Hill.” Livingston has told me that A4LI’s main goals center around increasing support for aging research (possibly via the creation of a new NIH institute entirely dedicated to the subject) and changing laws to make it easier and cheaper to develop and access potential anti-aging therapies. O’Neill gave the impression that the first goal might be a little overambitious—the number of institutes is down to Congress, he said. “I would like to get really all of the institutes at NIH to think more carefully about how many chronic diseases are usefully thought of as pathologies of aging damage,” he said. There’ll be more federal funding for that research, he said, although he won’t say more for now. Some members of the longevity community have more radical ideas when it comes to regulation: they want to create their own jurisdictions designed to fast-track the development of longevity drugs and potentially encourage biohacking and self-experimentation. It’s a concept that O’Neill has expressed support for in the past. He has posted on X about his support for limiting the role of government, and in support of building “freedom cities”—a similar concept that involves creating new cities on federal land. Another longevity enthusiast who supports the concept is Niklas Anzinger, a German tech entrepreneur who is now based in Próspera, a private city within a Honduran “special economic zone,” where residents can make their own suggestions for medical regulations. Anzinger also helped draft Montana’s state law on accessing experimental therapies. O’Neill knows Anzinger and said he talks to him “once or twice a year.” O’Neill has also supported the idea of seasteading—building new “startup countries” at sea. He served on the board of directors of the Seasteading Institute until March 2024. In 2009, O’Neill told an audience at a Seasteading Institute conference that “the healthiest societies in 2030 will most likely be on the sea.” When asked if he still thinks that’s the case, he said: “It’s not quite 2030, so I think it’s too soon to say … What I would say now is: the healthiest societies are likely to be the ones that encourage innovation the most.” We might expect more nutrition advice When it comes to his own personal ambitions for longevity, O’Neill said, he takes a simple approach that involves minimizing sugar and ultraprocessed food, exercising and sleeping well, and supplementing with vitamin D. He also said he tries to “eat a diet that has plenty of protein and saturated fat,” echoing the new dietary guidance issued by the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture. That guidance has been criticized by nutrition scientists, who point out that it ignores decades of research into the harms of a diet high in saturated fat. We can expect to see more nutrition-related updates from HHS, said O’Neill: “We’re doing more research, more randomized controlled trials on nutrition. Nutrition is still not a scientifically solved problem.” Saturated fats are of particular interest, he said. He and his colleagues want to identify “the healthiest fats,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country’s federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US’s deeply controversial new vaccine schedule.

He’s also a longevity enthusiast. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this month, O’Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. At the same time, he defended reducing the number of broadly recommended childhood vaccines, a move that has been widely criticized by experts in medicine and public health.

In MIT Technology Review’s profile of O’Neill last year, people working in health policy and consumer advocacy said they found his libertarian views on drug regulation “worrisome” and “antithetical to basic public health.”

He was later named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, putting him in charge of the nation’s public health agency.

But fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope O’Neill will bring attention and funding to their cause: the search for treatments that might slow, prevent, or even reverse human aging. Here are some takeaways from the interview.

Vaccine recommendations could change further

Last month, the US cut the number of vaccines recommended for children. The CDC no longer recommends vaccinations against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, or meningococcal disease for all children. The move was widely panned by medical groups and public health experts. Many worry it will become more difficult for children to access those vaccines. The majority of states have rejected the recommendations.

In the confirmation hearing for his role as deputy secretary of health and human services, which took place in May last year, O’Neill said he supported the CDC’s vaccine schedule. MIT Technology Review asked him if that was the case and, if so, what made him change his mind. “Researching and examining and reviewing safety data and efficacy data about vaccines is one of CDC’s obligations,” he said. “CDC gives important advice about vaccines and should always be open to new data and new ways of looking at data.”

At the beginning of December, O’Neill said, President Donald Trump “asked me to look at what other countries were doing in terms of their vaccine schedules.” He said he spoke to health ministries of other countries and consulted with scientists at the CDC and FDA. “It was suggested to me by lots of the operating divisions that the US focus its recommendations on consensus vaccines of other developed nations—in other words, the most important vaccines that are most often part of the core recommendations of other countries,” he said.

“As a result of that, we did an update to the vaccine schedule to focus on a set of vaccines that are most important for all children.”

But some experts in public health have said that countries like Denmark and Japan, whose vaccine schedules the new US one was supposedly modeled on, are not really comparable to the US. When asked about these criticisms, O’Neill replied, “A lot of parents feel that … more than 70 vaccine doses given to young children sounds like a really high number, and some of them ask which ones are the most important. I think we helped answer that question in a way that didn’t remove anyone’s access.”

A few weeks after the vaccine recommendations were changed, Kirk Milhoan, who leads the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that vaccinations for measles and polio—which are currently required for entry to public schools—should be optional. (Mehmet Oz, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, has more recently urged people to “take the [measles] vaccine.”)

“CDC still recommends that all children are vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), Pneumococcal conjugate, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and human papillomavirus (HPV), for which there is international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox),” he said when asked for his thoughts on this comment.

He also said that current vaccine guidelines are “still subject to new data coming in, new ways of thinking about things.” “CDC, FDA, and NIH are initiating new studies of the safety of immunizations,” he added. “We will continue to ask the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review evidence and make updated recommendations with rigorous science and transparency.”

More support for longevity—but not all science

O’Neill said he wants longevity to become a priority for US health agencies. His ultimate goal, he said, is to “make the damage of aging something that’s under medical control.” It’s “the same way of thinking” as the broader Make America Healthy Again approach, he said: “‘Again’ implies restoration of health, which is what longevity research and therapy is all about.”

O’Neill said his interest in longevity was ignited by his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, around 2008 to 2009. It was right around the time O’Neill was finishing up a previous role in HHS, under the Bush administration. O’Neill said Thiel told him he “should really start looking into longevity and the idea that aging damage could be reversible.” “I just got more and more excited about that idea,” he said.

When asked if he’s heard of Vitalism, a philosophical movement for “hardcore” longevity enthusiasts who, broadly, believe that death is wrong, O’Neill replied: “Yes.”

The Vitalist declaration lists five core statements, including “Death is humanity’s core problem,” “Obviating aging is scientifically plausible,” and “I will carry the message against aging and death.” O’Neill said he agrees with all of them. “I suppose I am [a Vitalist],” he said with a smile, although he’s not a paying member of the foundation behind it.

As deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, O’Neill assumes a level of responsibility for huge and influential science and health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research) and the Food and Drug Administration (which oversees drug regulation and is globally influential) as well as the CDC.

Today, he said, he sees support for longevity science from his colleagues within HHS. “If I could describe one common theme to the senior leadership at HHS, obviously it’s to make America healthy again, and reversing aging damage is all about making people healthy again,” he said. “We are refocusing HHS on addressing and reversing chronic disease, and chronic diseases are what drive aging, broadly.”

Over the last year, thousands of NIH grants worth over $2 billion were frozen or terminated, including funds for research on cancer biology, health disparities, neuroscience, and much more. When asked whether any of that funding will be restored, he did not directly address the question, instead noting: “You’ll see a lot of funding more focused on important priorities that actually improve people’s health.”

Watch ARPA-H for news on organ replacements and more

He promised we’ll hear more from ARPA-H, the three-year-old federal agency dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in medical science and biotechnology. It was established with the official goal of promoting “high-risk, high-reward innovation for the development and translation of transformative health technologies.”

O’Neill said that “ARPA-H exists to make the impossible possible in health and medicine.” The agency has a new director—Alicia Jackson, who formerly founded and led a company focused on women’s health and longevity, took on the role in October last year.

O’Neill said he helped recruit Jackson, and that she was hired in part because of her interest in longevity, which will now become a major focus of the agency. He said he meets with her regularly, as well as with Andrew Brack and Jean Hébert, two other longevity supporters who lead departments at ARPA-H. Brack’s program focuses on finding biological markers of aging. Hebert’s aim is to find a way to replace aging brain tissue, bit by bit.

O’Neill is especially excited by that one, he said. “I would try it … Not today, but … if progress goes in a broadly good direction, I would be open to it. We’re hoping to see significant results in the next few years.”

He’s also enthused by the idea of creating all-new organs for transplantation. “Someday we want to be able to grow new organs, ideally from the patients’ own cells,” O’Neill said. An ARPA-H program will receive $170 million over five years to that end, he adds. “I’m very excited about the potential of ARPA-H and Alicia and Jean and Andrew to really push things forward.”

Longevity lobbyists have a friendly ear

O’Neill said he also regularly talks to the team at the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives. The organization, led by Dylan Livingston, played an instrumental role in changing state law in Montana to make experimental therapies more accessible. O’Neill said he hasn’t formally worked with them but thinks that “they’re doing really good work on raising awareness, including on Capitol Hill.”

Livingston has told me that A4LI’s main goals center around increasing support for aging research (possibly via the creation of a new NIH institute entirely dedicated to the subject) and changing laws to make it easier and cheaper to develop and access potential anti-aging therapies.

O’Neill gave the impression that the first goal might be a little overambitious—the number of institutes is down to Congress, he said. “I would like to get really all of the institutes at NIH to think more carefully about how many chronic diseases are usefully thought of as pathologies of aging damage,” he said. There’ll be more federal funding for that research, he said, although he won’t say more for now.

Some members of the longevity community have more radical ideas when it comes to regulation: they want to create their own jurisdictions designed to fast-track the development of longevity drugs and potentially encourage biohacking and self-experimentation.

It’s a concept that O’Neill has expressed support for in the past. He has posted on X about his support for limiting the role of government, and in support of building “freedom cities”—a similar concept that involves creating new cities on federal land.

Another longevity enthusiast who supports the concept is Niklas Anzinger, a German tech entrepreneur who is now based in Próspera, a private city within a Honduran “special economic zone,” where residents can make their own suggestions for medical regulations. Anzinger also helped draft Montana’s state law on accessing experimental therapies. O’Neill knows Anzinger and said he talks to him “once or twice a year.”

O’Neill has also supported the idea of seasteading—building new “startup countries” at sea. He served on the board of directors of the Seasteading Institute until March 2024.

In 2009, O’Neill told an audience at a Seasteading Institute conference that “the healthiest societies in 2030 will most likely be on the sea.” When asked if he still thinks that’s the case, he said: “It’s not quite 2030, so I think it’s too soon to say … What I would say now is: the healthiest societies are likely to be the ones that encourage innovation the most.”

We might expect more nutrition advice

When it comes to his own personal ambitions for longevity, O’Neill said, he takes a simple approach that involves minimizing sugar and ultraprocessed food, exercising and sleeping well, and supplementing with vitamin D. He also said he tries to “eat a diet that has plenty of protein and saturated fat,” echoing the new dietary guidance issued by the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture. That guidance has been criticized by nutrition scientists, who point out that it ignores decades of research into the harms of a diet high in saturated fat.

We can expect to see more nutrition-related updates from HHS, said O’Neill: “We’re doing more research, more randomized controlled trials on nutrition. Nutrition is still not a scientifically solved problem.” Saturated fats are of particular interest, he said. He and his colleagues want to identify “the healthiest fats,” he said.

“Stay tuned.”

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@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:[email protected]&display=swap’); a { color: var(–color-primary-main); } .ebm-page__main h1, .ebm-page__main h2, .ebm-page__main h3, .ebm-page__main h4, .ebm-page__main h5, .ebm-page__main h6 { font-family: Inter; } body { line-height: 150%; letter-spacing: 0.025em; font-family: Inter; } button, .ebm-button-wrapper { font-family: Inter; } .label-style { text-transform: uppercase; color: var(–color-grey); font-weight: 600; font-size: 0.75rem; } .caption-style { font-size: 0.75rem; opacity: .6; } #onetrust-pc-sdk [id*=btn-handler], #onetrust-pc-sdk [class*=btn-handler] { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-policy a, #onetrust-pc-sdk a, #ot-pc-content a { color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-sdk .ot-active-menu { border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-accept-btn-handler, #onetrust-banner-sdk #onetrust-reject-all-handler, #onetrust-consent-sdk #onetrust-pc-btn-handler.cookie-setting-link { background-color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } #onetrust-consent-sdk .onetrust-pc-btn-handler { color: #c19a06 !important; border-color: #c19a06 !important; } <!–> Verde Clean Fuels Inc., Houston, has suspended development of a natural gas-to-gasoline (GTG) project in the Permian basin. The company cited “changing market conditions driven by increasing demand for natural gas,” in the region. ]–> <!–> –><!–> –> June 5, 2024 In 2024, Verde Clean Fuels and Midland-based Diamondback Energy Inc. subsidiary Cottonmouth Ventures LLC agreed to a joint development of a GTG plant in Martin County, Tex., in the Permian’s Midland basin. The project was originally slated to combine Verde’s technology with a feedstock of stranded or otherside-flared associated natural from Diamondback’s Permian basin operations for commercial-scale production of almost 3,000 b/d of fully finished reformulated blend stock for oxygenate blending (RBOB) gasoline. A front-end engineering and design (FEED) study was completed in December 2025. Verde’s chief executive officer, Ernest Miller, said knowledge collected from the work completed “will continue to be useful as we explore other opportunities to deploy our technology.” He said the company will devote resources toward other opportunities “in regions where natural gas is stranded or flared without access to a higher value outlet to market.”

Oil prices ride the Iran seesaw

Oil, fundamental analysis Crude prices were up-and-down this week as traders eyed both optimistic and pessimistic signs regarding the proposed US/Iran talks held Friday. A large drop in crude and distillate inventories were the main fundamental factors noticed. Despite the rollercoaster ride, US prices remained above the key $60/bbl level. WTI had a High of $65.55/bbl on Wednesday with a weekly Low of $61.10 on Tuesday. Brent crude’s High was $69.75/bbl on Wednesday while its Low was $65.75 Monday. Both grades settled lower week-on-week. The WTI/Brent spread has tightened to ($4.50). The week started with a bearish tone as US President Trump spoke with optimism about the upcoming US/Iran talks. However, later in the week, the Iranian government objected to the specific topics the US wants to discuss beyond their nuclear developments and the meeting appeared doomed. The two sides did decide to follow through with the planned meeting Friday with Iranian officials labeling the meeting as a ‘very good start.’ Meanwhile, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGCC) attempted to stop a US-flagged vessel in the Strait of Hormuz and sent drones to a US Navy ship in the area. Both attempts were thwarted by US naval forces. Some Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCC) are said to have been increasing their normal speeds for faster passage through the Strait of Hormuz while it’s still open. It is estimate that slightly more than 25% of global oil supplies move through the Strait. Russia is now relying heavily on its relationship with China to buy its oil exports after the US offered India a deal whereby tariffs could be cut if India halts buying Russian Urals. Additionally, Indian refiners would have access to Venezuelan exports. No official action has yet to be taken by the Indian government in terms of such a

Data center capex to hit $1.7 trillion by 2030 due to AI boom

Asked on Thursday about the fact that capex is expected to approach the $1 trillion mark in 2026, he said it is somewhat surprising. “Last year, I thought it would take at least three years to get to that trillion dollar mark,” he said. “It seems increases are supported by the result of larger models needed for training infrastructure, and in turn, you need inference as well. You also need a supporting infrastructure in storage, networking, power, and cooling.” AI, he said, has become “the tide that lift all boats, meaning that in addition to the core accelerated compute, AI also positively impacts complementary infrastructure, such as storage, networking, and physical infrastructure.” Fung added that while much of the achievement of projected spending estimates will depend on whether or not this growth is sustainable, he pointed out, “it seems like the large hyperscalers have a lot of weight in optimizing cash flow and cost structures. They’re trying to get as creative as possible, generally moving towards a more vertical, integrated stack with their own custom networking and external financing, which would help [create] more sustainable deployments and operations.” Enterprises thinking of expanding their own infrastructure can learn from this growth. In a recent article on the hyper spending of hyperscalers, Greyhound Research chief analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia said their capex spending levels can help pinpoint where the hyperscalers are expecting bottlenecks, which is useful information for enterprises planning their own cloud strategy across multiple geographies. These and other factors can help enterprises plan their own execution timelines, he said. This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Cisco highlights memory costs, Silicon One growth in Q2 recap

“AI infrastructure orders taken from hyperscalers totaled $2.1 billion in Q2 compared to $1.3 billion just last quarter and equal to the total orders taken in all of fiscal year ’25, marking another significant acceleration in growth across our silicon, systems and optics,” Robbins said. “Given the strong demand for our Silicon One systems and optics, we now expect to take AI orders in excess of $5 billion and to recognize over $3 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers in FY ’26.” Regarding enterprise uptake, Robbins said Cisco took in $350 million in AI orders from enterprise customers in Q2 and has a pipeline in excess of $2.5 billion for its high-performance AI infrastructure portfolio. Cisco is seeing early enterprise use cases for AI around fraud detection and video analytics in sectors such as financial, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, for example. “I also see examples in retail, where customers are leveraging agents on mobile devices in retail to help their staff do a better job engaging with their customers. We’re seeing a combination of both investment in cloud-based architectures as well as on prem,” Robbins said. Networking rules Cisco is experiencing a faster-than-historical ramp-up of next-generation platforms, including its Catalyst 9K, Wi-Fi 7, and smart switches, stated Sebastien Naji, a research analyst with William Blair, in a report after the call. He attributed it to three factors: an accelerated refresh cycle in the data center; early AI-readiness efforts in the enterprise; and end-of-support for legacy Catalyst and Nexus switches. “We are seeing strong demand for our next-generation switching, routing and wireless products, which continue to ramp faster than prior product launches. We’re delivering AI-native capabilities across these products, including weaving security into the fabric of the network and modernizing the operational stack of campus networks,” Robbins said. Co-packaged optics? When asked

Energy providers seek flexible load strategies for data center operations

“In theory, yes, they’d have to wait a little bit longer while their queries are routed to a data center that has capacity,” said Lawrence. The one thing the industry cannot do is operate like it has in the past, where data center power was tuned and then forgotten for six months. Previously, data centers would test their power sources once or twice a year. They don’t have that luxury anymore. They need to check their power sources and loads far more regularly, according to Lawrence. “I think that for that for the data center industry to continue to survive like we all need it, there’s going to have to be some realignment on the incentives to why somebody would become flexible,” said Lawrence. The survey suggests that utilities and load operators expect to expand their demand response activities and budgets in the near term. Sixty-three percent of respondents anticipate DR program funding to grow by 50% or more over the next three years. While they remain a major source of load growth and system strain, 57% of respondents indicate that onsite power generation from data centers will be most important to improving grid stability over the next five years. One of the proposed fixes to the power shortage has been small modular nuclear reactors. These have gained a lot of traction in the marketplace even if they have nothing to sell yet. But Lawrence said that that’s not an ideal solution for existing power generators, ironically enough.

Nokia predicts huge WAN traffic growth, but experts question assumptions

Consumer, which includes both mobile access and fixed access, including fixed wireless access. Enterprise and industrial, which covers wide-area connectivity that supports knowledge work, automation, machine vision, robotics coordination, field support, and industrial IoT. AI, including applications that people directly invoke, such as assistants, copilots, and media generation, as well as autonomous use cases in which AI systems trigger other AI systems to perform functions and move data across networks. The report outlines three scenarios: conservative, moderate, and aggressive. “Our goal is to present scenarios that fall within a realistic range of possible outcomes, encouraging stakeholders to plan across the full spectrum of high-impact demand possibilities,” the report says. Nokia’s prediction for global WAN traffic growth ranges from a 13% CAGR for the conservative scenario to 16% CAGR for moderate and 22% CAGR for aggressive. Looking more closely at the moderate scenario, it’s clear that consumer traffic dominates. Enterprise and industrial traffic make up only about 14% to 17% of overall WAN traffic, although their share is expected to grow during the 10-year forecast period. “On the consumer side, the vast majority of traffic by volume is video,” says William Webb, CEO of the consulting firm Commcisive. Asked whether any of that consumer traffic is at some point served up by enterprises, the answer is a decisive “no.” It’s mostly YouTube and streaming services like Netflix, he says. In short, that doesn’t raise enterprise concerns. Nokia predicts AI traffic boom AI is a different story. “Consumer- and enterprise-generated AI traffic imposes a substantial impact on the wide-area network (WAN) by adding AI workloads processed by data centers across the WAN. AI traffic does not stay inside one data center; it moves across edge, metro, core, and cloud infrastructure, driving dense lateral flows and new capacity demands,” the report says. An

Cisco amps up Silicon One line, delivers new systems and optics for AI networking

Those building blocks include the new G300 as well as the G200 51.2 Tbps chip, which is aimed at spine and aggregation applications, and the G100 25.6 Tbps chip, which is aimed at leaf operations. Expanded portfolio of Silicon One P200-powered systems Cisco in October rolled out the P200 Silicon One chip and the high-end, 51.2 Tbps 8223 router aimed at distributed AI workloads. That system supports Octal Small Form-Factor Pluggable (OSFP) and Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD) optical form factors that help the box support geographically dispersed AI clusters. Cisco grew the G200 family this week with the addition of the 8122X-64EF-O, a 64x800G switch that will run the SONiC OS and includes support for Cisco 800G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) connectivity. LPO components typically set up direct links between fiber optic modules, eliminating the need for traditional components such as a digital signal processor. Cisco said its P200 systems running IOS XR software now better support core routing services to allow data-center-to-data-center links and data center interconnect applications. In addition, Cisco introduced a P200-powered 88-LC2-36EF-M line card, which delivers 28.8T of capacity. “Available for both our 8-slot and 18-slot modular systems, this line card enables up to an unprecedented 518.4T of total system bandwidth, the highest in the industry,” wrote Guru Shenoy, senior vice president of the Cisco provider connectivity group, in a blog post about the news. “When paired with Cisco 800G ZR/ZR+ coherent pluggable optics, these systems can easily connect sites over 1,000 kilometers apart, providing the high-density performance needed for modern data center interconnects and core routing.”

NetBox Labs ships AI copilot designed for network engineers, not developers

Natural language for network engineers Beevers explained that network operations teams face two fundamental barriers to automation. First, they lack accurate data about their infrastructure. Second, they aren’t software developers and shouldn’t have to become them. “These are not software developers. They are network engineers or IT infrastructure engineers,” Beevers said. “The big realization for us through the copilot journey is they will never be software developers. Let’s stop trying to make them be. Let’s let these computers that are really good at being software developers do that, and let’s let the network engineers or the data center engineers be really good at what they’re really good at.” That vision drove the development of NetBox Copilot’s natural language interface and its capabilities. Grounding AI in infrastructure reality The challenge with deploying AI in network operations is trust. Generic large language models hallucinate, produce inconsistent results, and lack the operational context to make reliable decisions. NetBox Copilot addresses this by grounding the AI agent in NetBox’s comprehensive infrastructure data model. NetBox serves as the system of record for network and infrastructure teams, maintaining a semantic map of devices, connections, IP addressing, rack layouts, power distribution and the relationships between these elements. Copilot has native awareness of this data structure and the context it provides. This enables queries that would be difficult or impossible with traditional interfaces. Network engineers can ask “Which devices are missing IP addresses?” to validate data completeness, “Who changed this prefix last week?” for change tracking and compliance, or “What depends on this switch?” for impact analysis before maintenance windows.

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

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

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

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

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

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

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

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

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