Author: Andry

American Electric Power (AEP), which said in July that it had secured about 13 GW of gas turbines for deployment through 2031, this week announced plans for a $4 billion, 702-MW Bloom Energy fuel cell plant in Wyoming to supply Google and purchased 190 MW of Mainspring Energy linear generators under an agreement for up to 1.6 GW through 2034. Combined, the two announcements represent 892 MW of planned generation and purchased equipment, and pose the potential to reach approximately 2.3 GW if AEP buys the full amount available under the Mainspring agreement. AEP said on Oct. 14 that Google…

Microsoft Corp. has developed a new large language model that it says is significantly more efficient than leading open-source alternatives.  The company’s artificial intelligence research group detailed the algorithm on Thursday. MAI-Base-2 is not a full-fledged LLM but rather a base model, a kind of no-frills prototype. Developers turn base models into LLMs by putting them through several additional rounds of training. That extra training usually focuses on adding reasoning features and safety guardrails. The most capable open-source base model on the market today is DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. Microsoft says that MAI-Base-2 outperformed it on a series of internal benchmarks that contained…

Photo: Wallbox Montréal Metropolitan Airport now has 120 EV chargers online, with another 48 on the way as the airport expands. The installation at Montréal Metropolitan Airport’s YHU Terminal uses Wallbox Pulsar Pro EV chargers to serve employees, visitors, and airport operations. The next batch will bring the total to 168 charging points once a building currently under construction is completed, according to Wallbox. The airport, known as MET, is in Longueuil, Quebec, and offers more than 2,600 parking spaces across short-, mid-, and long-term lots. Wallbox lists the Level 2 North American Pulsar Pro’s maximum output at 11.5 kW,…

Polskie Elektrownie Jądrowe (PEJ) has commissioned Westinghouse Electric Co. to begin procuring long-lead items (LLIs) for the first AP1000 unit of the Lubiatowo-Kopalino nuclear power plant project. This is one of the most important stages in preparing for the start of construction and ensuring that the project is completed on schedule. “This is an extremely important moment for the entire project. Securing long-lead items is of direct significance for the construction schedule of Poland’s first nuclear power plant. We want energy from the first reactor to reach our power outlets in 2036. This is a strategic project by the Polish…

A startup called North Cloud Holdings Inc. says it’s going to help companies prevent the costs of cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure spiraling out of control after raising $60 million in funding today. The Series B round was led by PeakSpan Capital and saw participation from a host of others, including Litquidity Ventures, Companyon Ventures, Alpaca, Gaingels, Uncommon Denominator and Mana Ventures. With the funding, North.cloud plans to invest in the development of its autonomous financial operations platform, expand its third-party integrations and scale its marketing efforts. AI has really taken off, and the vast majority of autonomous systems…

When you first start up the Alexa Tablet, it’s obvious that this is an Amazon-first affair. The home screen has shortcuts to a variety of the company’s apps like Kindle, Luna, Prime Video, Audible and Amazon’s own Silk browser. But there’s also a folder with a bunch of Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Meet, YouTube and more ready to go. And as a full-fledged Android tablet, I was able to quickly download Chrome and a variety of other apps from the Play Store. So while Amazon’s services are right up front, it’s easy enough to swap them out with your…

Tesla has unveiled a new version of its next-generation Roadster. As expected, it received Tesla’s latest design “cyberfication” and cold-gas thrusters to allow it to jump and flip through the air. The livestream featured impressive stunts but offered few details. Tesla released more information on X after the event, but there’s still no price and no production date. Nine years in the making Tesla first unveiled the next-gen Roadster as a prototype in November 2017 and promised production in 2020. That date came and went, and so did several more. This year alone, Elon Musk promised an unveil in April,…

Proposed reliability standards that would require qualifying data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, and cryptocurrency operations to provide grid data, coordinate protection settings, and respond to grid operators’ instructions have passed their final stakeholder ballot, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) announced Oct. 15. The standards and associated implementation plans will next go before NERC’s Board of Trustees for adoption, followed by submission to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for U.S. regulatory approval, the organization said in its announcement. The Project 2026-02 package includes three new computational-load standards and revisions to two existing facility-interconnection standards. The new standards would…

SimpleClosure added data sales to its services in April. Its Asset Hub platform helps founders sell their code and workspace data—emails, chats, documents. Buyers include foundation AI labs, vendors that construct simulated workspaces for AI training, and mature tech companies building their own models. Asset Hub has handled over 150 deals and expects to return over $10 million to startups by the end of 2026. CEO Dori Yona has seen these transactions, once rare and “somewhat taboo,” become increasingly routine, with 47% of SimpleClosure deals now including code or data sales.  And it’s got company. Industry rival Sunset also has…

AI data centers have spent heavily on faster accelerators, denser racks and liquid cooling to keep that hardware running. The data pipeline that feeds those processors has not kept up, and expensive compute ends up waiting on memory and storage. That gap is getting more attention as AI infrastructure bottlenecks become central to data center planning. The fix is to rethink the external memory and storage tiers behind the GPU, according to Hao Zhong (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of ScaleFlux Inc. “GPU and TPU performance has been advancing incredibly fast, almost more than 1,000 times in the last…