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What’s next for carbon removal?

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers. Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector. Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry. “We’re past the peak of expectations,” he says. “And with that, we could see a lot of companies go out of business, which is natural for any industry.” The open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there?  The odd quirk of carbon removal is that it never made a lot of sense as a business proposition: It’s an atmospheric cleanup job, necessary for the collective societal good of curbing climate change. But it doesn’t produce a service or product that any individual or organization strictly needs—or is especially eager to pay for. To date, a number of businesses have voluntarily agreed to buy tons of carbon dioxide that companies intend to eventually suck out of the air. But whether they’re motivated by sincere climate concerns or pressures from investors, employees, or customers, corporate do-goodism will only scale any industry so far.  Most observers argue that whether carbon removal continues to bobble along or transforms into something big enough to make a dent in climate change will depend largely on whether governments around the world decide to pay for a whole, whole lot of it—or force polluters to.  “Private-sector purchases will never get us there,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “We need policy; it has to be policy.” What’s the problem? The carbon removal sector began to scale up in the early part of this decade, as increasingly grave climate studies revealed the need to dramatically cut emissions and suck down vast amounts of carbon dioxide to keep global warming in check. Specifically, nations may have to continually remove as much as 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury to have a solid chance of keeping the planet from warming past 2 °C over preindustrial levels, according to a UN climate panel report in 2022. A number of startups sprang up to begin developing the technology and building the infrastructure that would be needed, trying out a variety of approaches like sinking seaweed or building carbon-dioxide-sucking factories. 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 matters And they soon attracted customers. Companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, and others began agreeing to pre-purchase tons of carbon removal, hoping to stand up the nascent industry and help offset their own climate emissions. Venture investments also flooded into the space, peaking in 2023 at nearly $1 billion, according to data provided by PitchBook. From early on, players in the emerging sector sought to draw a sharp distinction between conventional carbon offset projects, which studies have shown frequently exaggerate climate benefits, and “durable” carbon removal that could be relied upon to suck down and store away the greenhouse gas for decades to centuries. There’s certainly a big difference in the price: While buying carbon offsets through projects that promise to preserve forests or plant trees might cost a few dollars per ton, a ton of carbon removal can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the approach.  That high price, however, brings big challenges. Removing 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at, say, $300 a ton adds up to a global price tag of $3 trillion—a year.  Which brings us back to the fundamental question: Who should or would foot the bill to develop and operate all the factories, pipelines, and wells needed to capture, move, and bury billions upon billions of tons of carbon dioxide? The state of the market The market is still growing, as companies voluntarily purchase tons of carbon removal to make strides toward their climate goals. In fact, sales reached an all-time high in the second quarter of this year, mostly thanks to several massive purchases by Microsoft. But industry sources fear that demand isn’t growing fast enough to support a significant share of the startups that have formed or even the projects being built, undermining the momentum required to scale the sector up to the size needed by midcentury. To date, all those hundreds of companies that have spun up in recent years have disclosed deals to sell some 38 million tons of carbon dioxide pulled from the air, according to CDR.fyi. That’s roughly the amount the US pumps out in energy-related emissions every three days.  And they’ve only delivered around 940,000 tons of carbon removal. The US emits that much carbon dioxide in less than two hours. (Not every transaction is publicly announced or revealed to CDR.fyi, so the actual figures could run a bit higher.) Another concern is that the same handful of big players continue to account for the vast majority of the overall purchases, leaving the health and direction of the market dependent on their whims and fortunes.  Most glaringly, Microsoft has agreed to buy 80% of all the carbon removal purchased to date, according to  CDR.fyi. The second-biggest buyer is Frontier, a coalition of companies that includes Google, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify, which has committed to spend $1 billion. If you strip out those two buyers, the market shrinks from 16 million tons under contract during the first half of this year to just 1.2 million, according to data provided to MIT Technology Review by CDR.fyi.  Signs of trouble Meanwhile, the investor appetite for carbon removal is cooling. For the 12-month period ending in the second quarter of 2025, venture capital investments in the sector fell more than 13% from the same period last year, according to data provided by PitchBook. That tightening funding will make it harder and harder for companies that aren’t bringing in revenue to stay afloat. Companies that have already shut down also include the carbon removal marketplace Noya and Alkali Earth, which was attempting to use industrial by-products to tie up carbon dioxide. Still other businesses are struggling. Climeworks, one of the first companies to build direct-air-capture (DAC) factories, announced it was laying off 10% of its staff in May, as it grapples with challenges on several fronts. The company’s plans to collaborate on the development of a major facility in the US have been at least delayed as the Trump administration has held back tens of millions of dollars in funding granted in 2023 under the Department of Energy’s Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. It now appears the government could terminate the funding altogether, along with perhaps tens of billions of dollars’ worth of additional grants previously awarded for a variety of other US carbon removal and climate tech projects. “Market rumors have surfaced, and Climeworks is prepared for all scenarios,” Christoph Gebald, one of the company’s co-CEOs, said in a previous statement to MIT Technology Review. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.” But purchases from direct-air-capture projects fell nearly 16% last year and account for just 8% of all carbon removal transactions to date. Buyers are increasingly looking to categories that promise to deliver tons faster and for less money, notably including burying biochar or installing carbon capture equipment on bioenergy plants. (Read more in my recent story on that method of carbon removal, known as BECCS, here.) CDR.fyi recently described the climate for direct air capture in grim terms: “The sector has grown rapidly, but the honeymoon is over: Investment and sales are falling, while deployments are delayed across almost every company.”“Most DAC companies,” the organization added, “will fold or be acquired.” What’s next? In the end, most observers believe carbon removal isn’t really going to take off unless governments bring their resources and regulations to bear. That could mean making direct purchases, subsidizing these sectors, or getting polluters to pay the costs to do so—for instance, by folding carbon removal into market-based emissions reductions mechanisms like cap-and-trade systems.  More government support does appear to be on the way. Notably, the European Commission recently proposed allowing “domestic carbon removal” within its EU Emissions Trading System after 2030, integrating the sector into one of the largest cap-and-trade programs. The system forces power plants and other polluters in member countries to increasingly cut their emissions or pay for them over time, as the cap on pollution tightens and the price on carbon rises.  That could create incentives for more European companies to pay direct-air-capture or bioenergy facilities to draw down carbon dioxide as a means of helping them meet their climate obligations. There are also indications that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN organization that establishes standards for the aviation industry, is considering incorporating carbon removal into its market-based mechanism for reducing the sector’s emissions. That might take several forms, including allowing airlines to purchase carbon removal to offset their use of traditional jet fuel or requiring the use of carbon dioxide obtained through direct air capture in some share of sustainable aviation fuels. Meanwhile, Canada has committed to spend $10 million on carbon removal and is developing a protocol to allow direct air capture in its national offsets program. And Japan will begin accepting several categories of carbon removal in its emissions trading system.  Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back funding for the development of carbon-sucking projects, the US does continue to subsidize storage of carbon dioxide, whether it comes from power plants, ethanol refineries, direct-air-capture plants, or other facilities. The so-called 45Q tax credit, which is worth up to $180 a ton, was among the few forms of government support for climate-tech-related sectors that survived in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill. In fact, the subsidies for putting carbon dioxide to other uses increased. Even in the current US political climate, Burns is hopeful that local or federal legislators will continue to enact policies that support specific categories of carbon removal in the regions where they make the most sense, because the projects can provide economic growth and jobs as well as climate benefits. “I actually think there are lots of models for what carbon removal policy can look like that aren’t just things like tax incentives,” she says. “And I think that this particular political moment gives us the opportunity in a unique way to start to look at what those regionally specific and pathway specific policies look like.” The dangers ahead But even if more nations do provide the money or enact the laws necessary to drive the business of durable carbon renewal forward, there are mounting concerns that a sector conceived as an alternative to dubious offset markets could increasingly come to replicate their problems. Various incentives are pulling in that direction. Financial pressures are building on suppliers to deliver tons of carbon removal. Corporate buyers are looking for the fastest and most affordable way of hitting their climate goals. And the organizations that set standards and accredit carbon removal projects often earn more money as the volume of purchases rises, creating clear conflicts of interest. Some of the same carbon registries that have long signed off on carbon offset projects have begun creating standards or issuing credits for various forms of carbon removal, including Verra and Gold Standard. “Reliable assurance that a project’s declared ton of carbon savings equates to a real ton of emissions removed, reduced, or avoided is crucial,” Cynthia Giles, a senior EPA advisor under President Biden, and Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent editorial in Science. “Yet extensive research from many contexts shows that auditors selected and paid by audited organizations often produce results skewed toward those entities’ interests.” Noah McQueen, the director of science and innovation at Carbon180, has stressed that the industry must strive to counter the mounting credibility risks, noting in a recent LinkedIn post: “Growth matters, but growth without integrity isn’t growth at all.” In an interview, McQueen said that heading off the problem will require developing and enforcing standards to truly ensure that carbon removal projects deliver the climate benefits promised. McQueen added that to gain trust, the industry needs to earn buy-in from the communities in which these projects are built and avoid the environmental and health impacts that power plants and heavy industry have historically inflicted on disadvantaged communities. Getting it right will require governments to take a larger role in the sector than just subsidizing it, argues David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who focuses  on ocean-based carbon removal. He says there should be a massive, multinational research drive to determine the most effective ways of mopping up the atmosphere with minimal environmental or social harm, likening it to a Manhattan Project (minus the whole nuclear bomb bit). “If we’re serious about doing this, then let’s make it a government effort,” he says, “so that you can try out all the things, determine what works and what doesn’t, and you don’t have to please your VCs or concentrate on developing [intellectual property] so you can sell yourself to a fossil-fuel company.” Ho adds that there’s a moral imperative for the world’s historically biggest climate polluters to build and pay for the carbon-sucking and storage infrastructure required to draw down billions of tons of greenhouse gas. That’s because the world’s poorest, hottest nations, which have contributed the least to climate change, will nevertheless face the greatest dangers from intensifying heat waves, droughts, famines, and sea-level rise. “It should be seen as waste management for the waste we’re going to dump on the Global South,” he says, “because they’re the people who will suffer the most from climate change.”

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers.

Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector.

Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.

The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry.

“We’re past the peak of expectations,” he says. “And with that, we could see a lot of companies go out of business, which is natural for any industry.”

The open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there? 

The odd quirk of carbon removal is that it never made a lot of sense as a business proposition: It’s an atmospheric cleanup job, necessary for the collective societal good of curbing climate change. But it doesn’t produce a service or product that any individual or organization strictly needs—or is especially eager to pay for.

To date, a number of businesses have voluntarily agreed to buy tons of carbon dioxide that companies intend to eventually suck out of the air. But whether they’re motivated by sincere climate concerns or pressures from investors, employees, or customers, corporate do-goodism will only scale any industry so far. 

Most observers argue that whether carbon removal continues to bobble along or transforms into something big enough to make a dent in climate change will depend largely on whether governments around the world decide to pay for a whole, whole lot of it—or force polluters to. 

“Private-sector purchases will never get us there,” says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. “We need policy; it has to be policy.”

What’s the problem?

The carbon removal sector began to scale up in the early part of this decade, as increasingly grave climate studies revealed the need to dramatically cut emissions and suck down vast amounts of carbon dioxide to keep global warming in check.

Specifically, nations may have to continually remove as much as 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury to have a solid chance of keeping the planet from warming past 2 °C over preindustrial levels, according to a UN climate panel report in 2022.

A number of startups sprang up to begin developing the technology and building the infrastructure that would be needed, trying out a variety of approaches like sinking seaweed or building carbon-dioxide-sucking factories.

Ask AI

Why it matters to you?BETA
Here’s why this story might matter to you, according to AI. This is a beta feature and AI hallucinates—it might get weird

And they soon attracted customers. Companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, and others began agreeing to pre-purchase tons of carbon removal, hoping to stand up the nascent industry and help offset their own climate emissions. Venture investments also flooded into the space, peaking in 2023 at nearly $1 billion, according to data provided by PitchBook.

From early on, players in the emerging sector sought to draw a sharp distinction between conventional carbon offset projects, which studies have shown frequently exaggerate climate benefits, and “durable” carbon removal that could be relied upon to suck down and store away the greenhouse gas for decades to centuries. There’s certainly a big difference in the price: While buying carbon offsets through projects that promise to preserve forests or plant trees might cost a few dollars per ton, a ton of carbon removal can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the approach. 

That high price, however, brings big challenges. Removing 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at, say, $300 a ton adds up to a global price tag of $3 trillion—a year. 

Which brings us back to the fundamental question: Who should or would foot the bill to develop and operate all the factories, pipelines, and wells needed to capture, move, and bury billions upon billions of tons of carbon dioxide?

The state of the market

The market is still growing, as companies voluntarily purchase tons of carbon removal to make strides toward their climate goals. In fact, sales reached an all-time high in the second quarter of this year, mostly thanks to several massive purchases by Microsoft.

But industry sources fear that demand isn’t growing fast enough to support a significant share of the startups that have formed or even the projects being built, undermining the momentum required to scale the sector up to the size needed by midcentury.

To date, all those hundreds of companies that have spun up in recent years have disclosed deals to sell some 38 million tons of carbon dioxide pulled from the air, according to CDR.fyi. That’s roughly the amount the US pumps out in energy-related emissions every three days. 

And they’ve only delivered around 940,000 tons of carbon removal. The US emits that much carbon dioxide in less than two hours. (Not every transaction is publicly announced or revealed to CDR.fyi, so the actual figures could run a bit higher.)

Another concern is that the same handful of big players continue to account for the vast majority of the overall purchases, leaving the health and direction of the market dependent on their whims and fortunes. 

Most glaringly, Microsoft has agreed to buy 80% of all the carbon removal purchased to date, according to  CDR.fyi. The second-biggest buyer is Frontier, a coalition of companies that includes Google, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify, which has committed to spend $1 billion.

If you strip out those two buyers, the market shrinks from 16 million tons under contract during the first half of this year to just 1.2 million, according to data provided to MIT Technology Review by CDR.fyi. 

Signs of trouble

Meanwhile, the investor appetite for carbon removal is cooling. For the 12-month period ending in the second quarter of 2025, venture capital investments in the sector fell more than 13% from the same period last year, according to data provided by PitchBook. That tightening funding will make it harder and harder for companies that aren’t bringing in revenue to stay afloat.

Companies that have already shut down also include the carbon removal marketplace Noya and Alkali Earth, which was attempting to use industrial by-products to tie up carbon dioxide.

Still other businesses are struggling. Climeworks, one of the first companies to build direct-air-capture (DAC) factories, announced it was laying off 10% of its staff in May, as it grapples with challenges on several fronts.

The company’s plans to collaborate on the development of a major facility in the US have been at least delayed as the Trump administration has held back tens of millions of dollars in funding granted in 2023 under the Department of Energy’s Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. It now appears the government could terminate the funding altogether, along with perhaps tens of billions of dollars’ worth of additional grants previously awarded for a variety of other US carbon removal and climate tech projects.

“Market rumors have surfaced, and Climeworks is prepared for all scenarios,” Christoph Gebald, one of the company’s co-CEOs, said in a previous statement to MIT Technology Review. “The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and we’re working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.”

But purchases from direct-air-capture projects fell nearly 16% last year and account for just 8% of all carbon removal transactions to date. Buyers are increasingly looking to categories that promise to deliver tons faster and for less money, notably including burying biochar or installing carbon capture equipment on bioenergy plants. (Read more in my recent story on that method of carbon removal, known as BECCS, here.)

CDR.fyi recently described the climate for direct air capture in grim terms: “The sector has grown rapidly, but the honeymoon is over: Investment and sales are falling, while deployments are delayed across almost every company.”

“Most DAC companies,” the organization added, “will fold or be acquired.”

What’s next?

In the end, most observers believe carbon removal isn’t really going to take off unless governments bring their resources and regulations to bear. That could mean making direct purchases, subsidizing these sectors, or getting polluters to pay the costs to do so—for instance, by folding carbon removal into market-based emissions reductions mechanisms like cap-and-trade systems. 

More government support does appear to be on the way. Notably, the European Commission recently proposed allowing “domestic carbon removal” within its EU Emissions Trading System after 2030, integrating the sector into one of the largest cap-and-trade programs. The system forces power plants and other polluters in member countries to increasingly cut their emissions or pay for them over time, as the cap on pollution tightens and the price on carbon rises. 

That could create incentives for more European companies to pay direct-air-capture or bioenergy facilities to draw down carbon dioxide as a means of helping them meet their climate obligations.

There are also indications that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN organization that establishes standards for the aviation industry, is considering incorporating carbon removal into its market-based mechanism for reducing the sector’s emissions. That might take several forms, including allowing airlines to purchase carbon removal to offset their use of traditional jet fuel or requiring the use of carbon dioxide obtained through direct air capture in some share of sustainable aviation fuels.

Meanwhile, Canada has committed to spend $10 million on carbon removal and is developing a protocol to allow direct air capture in its national offsets program. And Japan will begin accepting several categories of carbon removal in its emissions trading system. 

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back funding for the development of carbon-sucking projects, the US does continue to subsidize storage of carbon dioxide, whether it comes from power plants, ethanol refineries, direct-air-capture plants, or other facilities. The so-called 45Q tax credit, which is worth up to $180 a ton, was among the few forms of government support for climate-tech-related sectors that survived in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill. In fact, the subsidies for putting carbon dioxide to other uses increased.

Even in the current US political climate, Burns is hopeful that local or federal legislators will continue to enact policies that support specific categories of carbon removal in the regions where they make the most sense, because the projects can provide economic growth and jobs as well as climate benefits.

“I actually think there are lots of models for what carbon removal policy can look like that aren’t just things like tax incentives,” she says. “And I think that this particular political moment gives us the opportunity in a unique way to start to look at what those regionally specific and pathway specific policies look like.”

The dangers ahead

But even if more nations do provide the money or enact the laws necessary to drive the business of durable carbon renewal forward, there are mounting concerns that a sector conceived as an alternative to dubious offset markets could increasingly come to replicate their problems.

Various incentives are pulling in that direction.

Financial pressures are building on suppliers to deliver tons of carbon removal. Corporate buyers are looking for the fastest and most affordable way of hitting their climate goals. And the organizations that set standards and accredit carbon removal projects often earn more money as the volume of purchases rises, creating clear conflicts of interest.

Some of the same carbon registries that have long signed off on carbon offset projects have begun creating standards or issuing credits for various forms of carbon removal, including Verra and Gold Standard.

“Reliable assurance that a project’s declared ton of carbon savings equates to a real ton of emissions removed, reduced, or avoided is crucial,” Cynthia Giles, a senior EPA advisor under President Biden, and Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent editorial in Science. “Yet extensive research from many contexts shows that auditors selected and paid by audited organizations often produce results skewed toward those entities’ interests.”

Noah McQueen, the director of science and innovation at Carbon180, has stressed that the industry must strive to counter the mounting credibility risks, noting in a recent LinkedIn post: “Growth matters, but growth without integrity isn’t growth at all.”

In an interview, McQueen said that heading off the problem will require developing and enforcing standards to truly ensure that carbon removal projects deliver the climate benefits promised. McQueen added that to gain trust, the industry needs to earn buy-in from the communities in which these projects are built and avoid the environmental and health impacts that power plants and heavy industry have historically inflicted on disadvantaged communities.

Getting it right will require governments to take a larger role in the sector than just subsidizing it, argues David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who focuses  on ocean-based carbon removal.

He says there should be a massive, multinational research drive to determine the most effective ways of mopping up the atmosphere with minimal environmental or social harm, likening it to a Manhattan Project (minus the whole nuclear bomb bit).

“If we’re serious about doing this, then let’s make it a government effort,” he says, “so that you can try out all the things, determine what works and what doesn’t, and you don’t have to please your VCs or concentrate on developing [intellectual property] so you can sell yourself to a fossil-fuel company.”

Ho adds that there’s a moral imperative for the world’s historically biggest climate polluters to build and pay for the carbon-sucking and storage infrastructure required to draw down billions of tons of greenhouse gas. That’s because the world’s poorest, hottest nations, which have contributed the least to climate change, will nevertheless face the greatest dangers from intensifying heat waves, droughts, famines, and sea-level rise.

“It should be seen as waste management for the waste we’re going to dump on the Global South,” he says, “because they’re the people who will suffer the most from climate change.”

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Baker Hughes Plans to Buy Into Tamboran

Tamboran Resources Corp on Thursday confirmed an underwritten public offering of about 2.32 million common shares, under which Baker Hughes expressed interest to subscribe for up to $10 million. RBC Capital Markets LLC and Wells Fargo Securities LLC are underwriters in the placement. “The company expects to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 348,666 shares of common stock from the company”, Sydney-based Tamboran said in a stock filing with the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Tamboran’s common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). At ASX, it holds CHESS Depositary Interests (CDIs), each representing 1/200th of one common share, according to Tamboran. “The company intends to use the net proceeds of the offering to fund Tamboran’s development plan, working capital and other general corporate purposes”, the early-stage, Beetaloo basin-focused natural gas exploration and production company said. “Tamboran is in the process of conducting a bookbuild and price discovery process in relation to the public offering”, Tamboran added. In a prospectus filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, Tamboran said, “Baker Hughes Energy Services LLC (the Interested Purchaser) has indicated an interest in purchasing up to an aggregate of approximately $10,000,000 of shares of common stock in this offering at the public offering price per share”. “Because this indication of interest is not a binding agreement or commitment to purchase, we can provide no assurances with respect to whether the Interested Purchaser will purchase shares in this offering or, if they elect to purchase shares, the number of shares they ultimately will acquire”, Tamboran said. “In addition, the underwriters may elect to sell fewer shares or not to sell any shares in this offering to the Interested Purchaser”. The prospectus added, “Concurrently with this offering, we are also offering to

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Merz Expects US Exemption for Rosneft in Germany

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he’s optimistic that the US will exempt Rosneft PJSC’s German unit from Washington’s latest sanctions against Russia. “We will discuss this with the Americans,” Merz told reporters at a European Union summit in Brussels on Thursday. “I assume that a corresponding exemption for Rosneft will be granted.” The chancellor added that it was actually unclear whether the German business, Rosneft Deutschland, “even needs” an exemption, as the penalties say Rosneft must own at least 50 percent of the business. “It is 50 percent,” he said.  There are concerns that Rosneft’s German unit may be cut off from key customers without a US sanctions exemption, Bloomberg reported earlier. Oil traders, banks and oil companies have already threatened to end relationships with the company. Merz welcomed the latest US sanctions against Russia on Thursday as an indication of President Donald Trump’s determination to pressure Russia into ending its war against Ukraine. The new US sanctions give customers until Nov. 21 to withdraw from “any entity” that’s more than 50 percent-owned by the penalized Russian firms.  While Germany put Rosneft’s local assets under a temporary trusteeship after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it stopped short of nationalizing the business. That means Berlin will likely have to negotiate a carve out from the latest restrictions. 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 our industry, share knowledge, connect with peers and industry insiders and engage in a professional community that will empower your career in energy.

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Saipem Posts Higher Profit for First 9 Months

Saipem SpA has reported EUR 221 million ($256.45 million) in net income and adjusted net income for the first three quarters, up 7.3 percent from the same nine-month period last year. Third-quarter (Q3) net result was EUR 81 million, up from EUR 63 million for Q2 but down from EUR 88 million for Q3 2024, the Italian energy engineering company said in a statement on its website. Saipem said it did not record any non-recurring item for January-September 2025. “The trend of improvement in operational, economic and financial performance that started in 2022 continues in the third quarter of 2025”, it said. January-September 2025 operating profit and adjusted operating profit totaled EUR 464 million, up 11.3 percent. “The positive change in adjusted operating profit of EUR 47 million, to which is added the effect of the improvement in the balance of tax operations of EUR 14 million, is partly offset by the worsening of the balance of financial operations of EUR 46 million”, Saipem, backed by state-controlled energy producer Eni SpA, said. Q3 2025 operating profit was EUR 159 million, up from Q2’s EUR 148 million but down from EUR 162 million for Q3 2024. January-September 2025 revenue totaled EUR 10.98 billion, up 8.4 percent against the first nine months of 2024. Q3 2025 revenue increased both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year to EUR 3.77 billion. Backlog as of Q3 was EUR30.56 billion: EUR20.01 billion in Asset-Based Services, EUR 9.42 billion in Energy Carriers and EUR 1.13 billion in Offshore Drilling. “The Offshore Drilling backlog of EUR 1,129 million reflects the impact of the cancellation of the Perro Negro 12 jack-up rental contract, valued at EUR 35 million, following the notification of the termination for convenience by the client Saudi Aramco, in the second quarter of 2025”, Saipem said. Saipem expects to

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How to set up an AI data center in 90 days

“Personally, I think that a brownfield is very creative way to deal with what I think is the biggest problem that we’ve got right now, which is time and speed to market,” he said. “On a brownfield, I can go into a building that’s already got power coming into the building. Sometimes they’ve already got chiller plants, like what we’ve got with the building I’m in right now.” Patmos certainly made the most of the liquid facilities in the old printing press building. The facility is built to handle anywhere from 50 to over 140 kilowatts per cabinet, a leap far beyond the 1–2 kW densities typical of legacy data centers. The chips used in the servers are Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell processors, which run extraordinarily hot. To manage this heat load, Patmos employs a multi-loop liquid cooling system. The design separates water sources into distinct, closed loops, each serving a specific function and ensuring that municipal water never directly contacts sensitive IT equipment. “We have five different, completely separated water loops in this building,” said Morgan. “The cooling tower uses city water for evaporation, but that water never mixes with the closed loops serving the data hall. Everything is designed to maximize efficiency and protect the hardware.” The building taps into Kansas City’s district chilled water supply, which is sourced from a nearby utility plant. This provides the primary cooling resource for the facility. Inside the data center, a dedicated loop circulates a specialized glycol-based fluid, filtered to extremely low micron levels and formulated to be electronically safe. Heat exchangers transfer heat from the data hall fluid to the district chilled water, keeping the two fluids separate and preventing corrosion or contamination. Liquid-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers are used for immediate heat removal.

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INNIO and VoltaGrid: Landmark 2.3 GW Modular Power Deal Signals New Phase for AI Data Centers

Why This Project Marks a Landmark Shift The deployment of 2.3 GW of modular generation represents utility-scale capacity, but what makes it distinct is the delivery model. Instead of a centralized plant, the project uses modular gas-reciprocating “power packs” that can be phased in step with data-hall readiness. This approach allows staged energization and limits the bottlenecks that often stall AI campuses as they outgrow grid timelines or wait in interconnection queues. AI training loads fluctuate sharply, placing exceptional stress on grid stability and voltage quality. The INNIO/VoltaGrid platform was engineered specifically for these GPU-driven dynamics, emphasizing high transient performance (rapid load acceptance) and grid-grade power quality, all without dependence on batteries. Each power pack is also designed for maximum permitting efficiency and sustainability. Compared with diesel generation, modern gas-reciprocating systems materially reduce both criteria pollutants and CO₂ emissions. VoltaGrid markets the configuration as near-zero criteria air emissions and hydrogen-ready, extending allowable runtimes under air permits and making “prime-as-a-service” viable even in constrained or non-attainment markets. 2025: Momentum for Modular Prime Power INNIO has spent 2025 positioning its Jenbacher platform as a next-generation power solution for data centers: combining fast start, high transient performance, and lower emissions compared with diesel. While the 3 MW J620 fast-start lineage dates back to 2019, this year the company sharpened its data center narrative and booked grid stability and peaking projects in markets where rapid data center growth is stressing local grids. This momentum was exemplified by an 80 MW deployment in Indonesia announced earlier in October. The same year saw surging AI-driven demand and INNIO’s growing push into North American data-center markets. Specifications for the 2.3 GW VoltaGrid package highlight the platform’s heat tolerance, efficiency, and transient response, all key attributes for powering modern AI campuses. VoltaGrid’s 2025 Milestones VoltaGrid’s announcements across 2025 reflect

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Inside Google’s multi-architecture revolution: Axion Arm joins x86 in production clusters

Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy, pointed out that AWS and Microsoft have already moved many workloads from x86 to internally designed Arm-based servers. He noted that, when Arm first hit the hyperscale datacenter market, the architecture was used to support more lightweight, cloud-native workloads with an interpretive layer where architectural affinity was “non-existent.” But now there’s much more focus on architecture, and compatibility issues “largely go away” as Arm servers support more and more workloads. “In parallel, we’ve seen CSPs expand their designs to support both scale out (cloud-native) and traditional scale up workloads effectively,” said Kimball. Simply put, CSPs are looking to monetize chip investments, and this migration signals that Google has found its performance-per-dollar (and likely performance-per-watt) better on Axion than x86. Google will likely continue to expand its Arm footprint as it evolves its Axion chip; as a reference point, Kimball pointed to AWS Graviton, which didn’t really support “scale up” performance until its v3 or v4 chip. Arm is coming to enterprise data centers too When looking at architectures, enterprise CIOs should ask themselves questions such as what instance do they use for cloud workloads, and what servers do they deploy in their data center, Kimball noted. “I think there is a lot less concern about putting my workloads on an Arm-based instance on Google Cloud, a little more hesitance to deploy those Arm servers in my datacenter,” he said. But ultimately, he said, “Arm is coming to the enterprise datacenter as a compute platform, and Nvidia will help usher this in.” Info-Tech’s Jain agreed that Nvidia is the “biggest cheerleader” for Arm-based architecture, and Arm is increasingly moving from niche and mobile use to general-purpose and AI workload execution.

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AMD Scales the AI Factory: 6 GW OpenAI Deal, Korean HBM Push, and Helios Debut

What 6 GW of GPUs Really Means The 6 GW of accelerator load envisioned under the OpenAI–AMD partnership will be distributed across multiple hyperscale AI factory campuses. If OpenAI begins with 1 GW of deployment in 2026, subsequent phases will likely be spread regionally to balance supply chains, latency zones, and power procurement risk. Importantly, this represents entirely new investment in both power infrastructure and GPU capacity. OpenAI and its partners have already outlined multi-GW ambitions under the broader Stargate program; this new initiative adds another major tranche to that roadmap. Designing for the AI Factory Era These upcoming facilities are being purpose-built for next-generation AI factories, where MI450-class clusters could drive rack densities exceeding 100 kW. That level of compute concentration makes advanced power and cooling architectures mandatory, not optional. Expected solutions include: Warm-water liquid cooling (manifold, rear-door, and CDU variants) as standard practice. Facility-scale water loops and heat-reuse systems—including potential district-heating partnerships where feasible. Medium-voltage distribution within buildings, emphasizing busway-first designs and expanded fault-current engineering. While AMD has not yet disclosed thermal design power (TDP) specifications for the MI450, a 1 GW campus target implies tens of thousands of accelerators. That scale assumes liquid cooling, ultra-dense racks, and minimal network latency footprints, pushing architectures decisively toward an “AI-first” orientation. Design considerations for these AI factories will likely include: Liquid-to-liquid cooling plants engineered for step-function capacity adders (200–400 MW blocks). Optics-friendly white space layouts with short-reach topologies, fiber raceways, and aisles optimized for module swaps. Substation adjacency and on-site generation envelopes negotiated during early land-banking phases. Networking, Memory, and Power Integration As compute density scales, networking and memory bottlenecks will define infrastructure design. Expect fat-tree and dragonfly network topologies, 800 G–1.6 T interconnects, and aggressive optical-module roadmaps to minimize collective-operation latency, aligning with recent disclosures from major networking vendors.

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Study Finds $4B in Data Center Grid Costs Shifted to Consumers Across PJM Region

In a new report spanning 2022 through 2024, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) identifies a significant regulatory gap in the PJM Interconnection’s planning and rate-making process—one that allows most high-voltage (“transmission-level”) interconnection costs for large, especially AI-scale, data centers to be socialized across all utility customers. The result, UCS argues, is a multi-billion-dollar pass-through that is poised to grow as more data center projects move forward, because these assets are routinely classified as ordinary transmission infrastructure rather than customer-specific hookups. According to the report, between 2022 and 2024, utilities initiated more than 150 local transmission projects across seven PJM states specifically to serve data center connections. In 2024 alone, 130 projects were approved with total costs of approximately $4.36 billion. Virginia accounted for nearly half that total—just under $2 billion—followed by Ohio ($1.3 billion) and Pennsylvania ($492 million) in data-center-related interconnection spending. Yet only six of those 130 projects, about 5 percent, were reported as directly paid for by the requesting customer. The remaining 95 percent, representing more than $4 billion in 2024 connection costs, were rolled into general transmission charges and ultimately recovered from all retail ratepayers. How Does This Happen? When data center project costs are discussed, the focus is usually on the price of the power consumed, or megawatts multiplied by rate. What the UCS report isolates, however, is something different: the cost of physically delivering that power: the substations, transmission lines, and related infrastructure needed to connect hyperscale facilities to the grid. So why aren’t these substantial consumer-borne costs more visible? The report identifies several structural reasons for what effectively functions as a regulatory loophole in how development expenses are reported and allocated: Jurisdictional split. High-voltage facilities fall under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), while retail electricity rates are governed by state public utility

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OCP Global Summit 2025 Highlights: Advancing Data Center Densification and Security

With the conclusion of the 2025 OCP Global Summit, William G. Wong, Senior Content Director at DCF’s sister publications Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF, published a comprehensive roundup of standout technologies unveiled at the event. For Data Center Frontier readers, we’ve revisited those innovations through the lens of data center impact, focusing on how they reshape infrastructure design and operational strategy. This year’s OCP Summit marked a decisive shift toward denser GPU racks, standardized direct-to-chip liquid cooling, 800-V DC power distribution, high-speed in-rack fabrics, and “crypto-agile” platform security. Collectively, these advances aim to accelerate time-to-capacity, reduce power-distribution losses at megawatt rack scales, simplify retrofits in legacy halls, and fortify data center platforms against post-quantum threats. Rack Design and Cooling: From Ad-Hoc to Production-Grade Liquid Cooling NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin compute tray, newly offered to OCP for standardization, packages Rubin-generation GPUs with an integrated liquid-cooling manifold and PCB midplane. Compared with the GB300 tray, Vera Rubin represents a production-ready module delivering four times the memory and three times the memory bandwidth: a 7.5× performance factor at rack scale, with 150 TB of memory at 1.7 PB/s per rack. The system implements 45 °C liquid cooling, a 5,000-amp liquid-cooled busbar, and on-tray energy storage with power-resilience features such as flexible 100-amp whips and automatic-transfer power-supply units. NVIDIA also previewed a Kyber rack generation targeted for 2027, pivoting from 415/480 VAC to 800 V DC to support up to 576 Rubin Ultra GPUs, potentially eliminating the 200-kg copper busbars typical today. These refinements are aimed at both copper reduction and aisle-level manageability. Wiwynn’s announcements filled in the practicalities of deploying such densities. The company showcased rack- and system-level designs across NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 (72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs with 800 Gb/s ConnectX-8 SuperNICs) for large-scale inference and reasoning, and HGX B300 (eight GPUs /

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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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