EV sales are up 27% for the first seven months of 2025 — for the world. But in America "For the first half of 2025, EV registrations rose 7% to 620,642, with market share inching up just 0.1 percentage point to 7.5 percent," reports Automotive News.

America's new EV registrations were up 4.6% in June (compared to June of 2024), "But EV market share fell for the month and stayed flat for the first half of the year, according to the most recent S&P Global Mobility data." June's 113,460 EV registrations represented 8.6% of U.S. light-vehicle market share, down from 8.8% a year earlier... The data, which serves as a sales proxy since some EV makers don't report U.S. numbers, shows continued flattening of EV market share ahead of the Sept. 30 repeal of the $7,500 federal tax credit.

The S&P Global Mobility numbers include only battery-electric vehicles and not hybrids.
In June Tesla led with 57,260 registrations — more than 6x its next competitor. (Although Tesla's share of the EV segment dropped 6.8% to 43.7 percent in the first half of 2025).

Ranking #2 in June registrations was Chevrolet with 9,517 — a 152% gain over Chevrolet's June 2024 registrations. (Pointing out that the Chevy Equinox EV starts at under $35,000, Electrek writes that "America's most affordable EV with over 315 miles of range, as GM calls it, is quickly winning over buyers.") Automotive News reports Equinox EV registrations surged 722% to 6,239 in June, with Chevy's share of the EV segment more than doubling to 7.7%.

Chevy pulled ahead of Ford (5,759 registrations), Hyundai (5,227 registrations), Rivian (4,613 registrations) and Cadillac (4,121 registrations). Although maybe it's just as interesting that the complete chart shows electric vehicle registrations for 33 different automakers...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: According to German news outlet Heise, notable progress has been made regarding the counterfeit Seagate hard drive case. Just like something out of an action movie, security teams from Seagate's Singapore and Malaysian offices, in conjunction with local Malaysian authorities, conducted a raid on a warehouse in May that was engaged in cooking up counterfeit Seagate hard drives, situated outside Kuala Lumpur.

During the raid, authorities reportedly uncovered approximately 700 counterfeit Seagate hard drives, with SMART values that had been reset to facilitate their sale as new... However, Seagate-branded drives were not the only items involved, as authorities also discovered drives from Kioxia and Western Digital. Seagate suspects that the used hard drives originated from China during the Chia [cryptocurrency] boom. Following the cryptocurrency's downfall, numerous miners sold these used drives to workshops where many were illicitly repurposed to appear new. This bust may represent only the tip of the iceberg, as Heise estimates that at least one million of these Chia drives are circulating, although the exact number that have been recycled remains uncertain.

The clandestine workshop, likely one of many establishments in operation, reportedly employed six workers. Their responsibilities included resetting the hard drives' SMART values, cleaning, relabeling, and repackaging them for distribution and sale via local e-commerce platforms.

Puerto Rico expects 93 different power outages this summer, reports the Washington Post.

But they also note that "roughly 1 in 10 Puerto Rican homes now have a battery and solar array for backup power" which have also "become a crucial source of backup power for the entire island grid." A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency, temporarily covering about 2 percent of the island's energy needs when things go wrong... "It has very, very certainly prevented more widespread outages," said Daniel Haughton, [transmission and distribution planning director for Puerto Rico's grid operator]. "In the instances that we had to [cut power], it was for a much shorter duration: A four-hour outage became a one- or two-hour outage."

Puerto Rico's experience offers a glimpse into the future for the rest of the United States, where batteries are starting to play a big role in keeping the lights on. Authorities in Texas, California and New England have credited home batteries with preventing blackouts during summer energy crunches. As power grids across the country groan under the increasing strain of new data centers, factories and EVs, batteries offer a way for homeowners to protect themselves — and all of their neighbors — from the threat of outages. Batteries have been booming in the U.S. since 2022, when Congress created generous installation tax credits for homeowners and power companies.

Home batteries generally come as an option alongside rooftop solar panels, according to Christopher Rauscher, head of grid services and electrification for Sunrun, a company that installs both. More than 70 percent of the people who hire Sunrun to put up solar panels also get a battery. With the tax credits — and the money saved on rising electricity costs — solar panels and batteries make financial sense for most American homes, according to a study Stanford University scientists published Aug. 1. About 60 percent of homes would save money in the long run with solar panels and batteries...

Those batteries can have broader benefits, too. Utilities pay customers hundreds of dollars a year to sign their batteries up to form "virtual power plants," which send electricity to the grid whenever power plants can't keep up with demand. California's network of home batteries can now add 535 megawatts of electricity in an emergency — about half as much energy as a nuclear power plant... [H]omeowners can make thousands of dollars a year lowering their energy bills, selling solar power back to the grid or enrolling their batteries in a virtual power plant, depending on their power company's policies and state regulations. "Over time, you would get the full payback for your system and basically get your backup for free," said Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-authored the Stanford study.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The United States' practice of installing location trackers in chip shipments at risk of diversion to China reflects the "instincts of a surveillance empire," China's state-run media outlet Xinhua said in a commentary published on Friday. Reuters reported earlier this week that U.S. authorities had secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips to detect diversions to China, which is under U.S. curbs for advanced chip exports. The Xinhua commentary, titled "America turns chip trade into a surveillance game," cited "reports" that Washington had embedded such trackers, accusing the United States of running "the world's most sprawling intelligence apparatus." [...] In its commentary, Xinhua accused the U.S. government of seeing its trading partners as "rivals to be tripped up or taken down," adding that "if U.S. chips are seen as Trojan horses for surveillance, customers will look elsewhere." Further reading: China Urges Firms To Avoid Nvidia H20 Chips After Trump Resumes Sales

A Chinese storage manufacturer has developed a solid-state drive smaller than a U.S. penny that delivers sequential read speeds of 3,700 megabytes per second, according to The Verge.

The "Mini SSD" by Biwin measures 15mm x 17mm x 1.4mm thick and connects via PCIe 4x2, offering 512GB to 2TB capacities. The drive inserts into devices using a SIM card-style tray mechanism and claims IP68 water resistance plus three-meter drop protection. Two gaming portables announced at ChinaJoy will include slots for the drives: GPD's Win 5 handheld and OneNetbook's OneXPlayer Super X hybrid laptop/tablet, both powered by AMD's Strix Halo processors. The Mini SSD outpaces MicroSD Express cards used in Nintendo Switch 2 by nearly four times, though full-size M.2 drives remain faster at up to 14,000MB/s.

China launched the World Humanoid Robot Games on Friday. The three-day event will see 280 teams from 16 countries compete in football, track and field, and table tennis alongside robot-specific challenges including medicine sorting and cleaning services. The event also features 192 university teams and 88 private enterprise teams from the U.S., Germany, Brazil and other nations as well as Chinese companies Unitree and Fourier among participants.

Beijing municipal government serves as an organizing body. The Chinese robotics sector has received over $20 billion in government subsidies in the past year with Beijing planning a one trillion yuan ($137 billion) fund for AI and robotics startups. A previous Beijing humanoid robot marathon saw several competitors emit smoke and fail to complete the course.

Electricity rates for individuals and small businesses could rise sharply as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other technology companies build data centers and expand into the energy business. Residential electricity bills increased at least $15 monthly for Ohio households starting in June due to data center demands, according to utility data and an independent grid monitor. A Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University analysis projects average U.S. electricity bills will rise 8% by 2030 from data center growth, with Virginia facing potential 25% increases. Virginia regulators estimate residents could pay an additional $276 annually by 2030.

National residential electricity rates have already risen more than 30% since 2020. Tech companies' AI push requires data centers that consumed over 4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, with government analysts projecting consumption reaching 12% within three years. American Electric Power warned Ohio regulators that without new rate structures requiring data centers to pay more upfront costs, residents and small businesses would bear much of the expense for grid upgrades.

Pebble has unveiled the final design of its rebooted Pebble Time 2 smartwatch, featuring a stainless steel body, color accents, knurled buttons, a flat glass display, customizable RGB backlight, and a built-in compass. 9to5Google reports: In a new episode of his podcast "Tick Talk," original Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky discusses the progress being made on the revival. This time around, the main topic is Pebble Time 2 and its "final design," which sees a considerable redesign compared to what was shown off earlier this year. The new look has some added curves, color accents, knurled buttons, and a stunning overall look.

It'll be available in black and silver colors, as opposed to the black and white previously shown off. In between the metal portions of the build, a polycarbonate layer will allow the radios to work properly, while also adding a blue or red accent to the design. Apparently, there are four total color options on the table, but they're not final just yet. Anyone who has placed a pre-order will get the choice of what color they want.

The new Pebble Time 2 will be made from stainless steel, in particular the same steel material that the original Pebble Steel was built from. It also has transitioned to a flat glass panel versus the curved finish that was used on prior Pebble watches, lessening reflections. The backlight on this model is also more advanced, with an RGB LED that allows the user to control the backlight color so it's not always "blue-ish." Migicovsky says that this will allow the color temperature to change through the day. The Pebble Time 2 is available to pre-order for $225.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: A French nuclear plant temporarily shut down on Monday due to a "massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish" in its filters, its operator said. The swarm clogged up the cooling system and caused four units at the Gravelines nuclear power plant to automatically switch off, energy group EDF said. The plant is cooled from a canal connected to the North Sea -- where several species of jellyfish are native and can be seen around the coast when the waters are warm. According to nuclear engineer Ronan Tanguy, the marine animals managed to slip through systems designed to keep them out because of their "gelatinous" bodies.

"They were able to evade the first set of filters then get caught in the secondary drum system," he told the BBC. Mr Tanguy, who works at the WNA, said this will have created a blockage which reduced the amount of water being drawn in, prompting the units to shut down automatically as a precaution. He stressed that the incident was a "non-nuclear event" and more a "nuisance" for the on-site team to clean up. For local people, there would be no impact on their safety or how much energy they could access: "They wouldn't perceive it as any different to any other shut-down of the system for maintenance."

In an unusual arrangement to secure export licenses, Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from certain chip sales to China. The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development. President Trump confirmed the terms of the unusual arrangement in a Monday press conference while noting that he originally wanted 20% of the sales revenue when Nvidia asked to sell the "obsolete" H20 chip to China. The president credited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for negotiating him down to 15%. "So we negotiated a little deal. So he's selling a essentially old chip," Trump said.

Nvidia did not comment about the specific details of the agreement or its quid pro quo nature, but said they would adhere to the export rules laid out by the administration. "We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide," Nvidia wrote in a statement to the AP. "America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Detroit Free Press: Ford is announcing the creation of a new electric vehicle production system and a new EV platform that will allow the automaker to more efficiently bring several lower-cost EVs to market, the first of which will be a midsize, four-door electric pickup that seats five, to launch in 2027. That pickup, which is expected to start around $30,000, will be assembled at Ford's Louisville Assembly Plant for U.S. and export markets. The Dearborn-based automaker said it will invest $2 billion to retool the Louisville plant starting later this year. [...] Ford's investment in Louisville Assembly is in addition to Ford's previously announced $3 billion commitment for BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan, where Ford will make the prismatic LFP batteries, starting next year, for the midsize electric pickup. Together, the nearly $5 billion investments mean Ford expects to create or secure nearly 4,000 direct jobs while strengthening the domestic supply chain with dozens of new U.S.-based suppliers.

Ford executives and Kentucky officials also introduced on Monday, Aug. 11, the new Ford Universal EV Production System, which they said will simplify production and ease operations for workers. Ford leaders also announced the creation of the Ford Universal Electric Vehicle Platform, which will enable the development of "a family of affordable electric vehicles produced at scale." The vehicles will be software-defined with over-the-air updates to keep improving the vehicles over time. "We took a radical approach to solve a very hard challenge: Create affordable vehicles that are breakthrough in every way that matters design, technology, performance, space and cost of ownership and do it with American workers," Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement. "Nobody wants to see another good college try by a Detroit automaker to make an affordable vehicle that ends up with idled plants, layoffs and uncertainty."

Farley has teased this announcement since Ford's second-quarter earnings when he said Ford would have a "Model-T moment" on Aug. 11. He's referring to the classic vehicle that helped turn Ford into a mass market automaker and perfect the assembly line process. At that time, Farley said it was critical that Ford unveil an EV strategy that would position it to make money selling the electric cars and effectively compete against the Chinese, who are known for making high-quality, desirable and affordable EVs. "So, this has to be a good business," Farley said of Ford's investments in the new process and platform. "From Day 1, we knew there was no incremental path to success. We empowered a tiny skunkworks team three time zones away from Detroit. We reinvented the line. And we are on a path to be the first automaker to make prismatic LFP batteries in the U.S. We will not rely on imports." Ford says its new Universal Electric Vehicle Platform "reduces parts by 20% versus a typical vehicle, with 25% fewer fasteners, 40% fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant and 15% faster assembly time." The new EV pickup built using this platform is targeting a "starting MSRP at about $30,000, roughly the same as the Model T when adjusted for inflation," adds Farley.

He shared additional details in an interview with Wired, such as how the automaker hired Tesla veterans Doug Field (who also helped lead Apple's now-defunct EV project) and Alan Clarke. "Turns out, Doug and Alan and the team built a propulsion system that was like Apollo 13, managed down to the watt so that our battery could be so much smaller than BYD's," said Farley.

Companies are canceling clean hydrogen projects across the United States after Congress shortened the qualification window for a Biden-era tax credit by five years, requiring projects to be under construction by the end of 2027.

Energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie estimates three-quarters of proposals will not meet this deadline. Woodside Energy and Fortescue have scrapped projects in Oklahoma and Arizona respectively, citing cost increases and policy uncertainty. According to McKinsey, fewer than 15% of low-emission hydrogen projects announced in the United States since 2015 have reached final investment decision stage.

China has begun construction of a $167 billion hydropower facility on Tibet's Yarlung Tsangpo River that would generate triple the output of the Three Gorges Dam. The project employs a run-of-the-river design, drilling deep tunnels through mountains to bypass the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, where the river drops nearly two vertical miles over 300 miles. Water diverted through the tunnels will drive turbines at both ends without creating a large reservoir. The river currently produces just 2% of its hydropower potential. A $7 billion transmission network will deliver electricity to Guangdong province, Hong Kong, and Macau. China imported nearly a quarter of its energy supply in 2023.

"Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech's energy-hungry data centers..." reports the Associated Press.

"Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta." [T]he Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share. But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority. Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren't nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant. In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs. Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers "paying billions more than is necessary." PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power. In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a "massive wealth transfer" from average people to tech companies.

At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs. In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers passed legislation in June ordering state utility regulators to develop new — presumably higher — power rates for data centers. The Oregon Citizens' Utility Board [a consumer advocacy group] says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread across all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50% over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever.
"Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans," the article points out...

One of America's largest solar + battery storage projects "is now fully online in Mojave, California," reports Electrek: Arevon Energy's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project combines 758 megawatts (MWdc) of solar with 300 MW/1,200 megawatt hours of battery storage. Eland 1 reached commercial operation in December 2024, and Eland 2 recently commenced full operation. The two combined comprise 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP). Combined, the Eland 1 & 2 projects will be able to power more than 266,000 homes annually, and overall, can provide 7% of the total electricity requirements for the city of Los Angeles. "Arevon's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project alone will ... push the city's clean energy share above 60%, a major milestone in LA's transition to being powered by 100% clean energy by 2035," said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Eland 1 & 2 created around 1,000 jobs to construct the project, and it's expected to disburse more than $36 million in local government payments throughout its lifetime.
The article points out that Arevon Energy "has more than 4,500 MW of solar and battery storage projects operating across 17 states — and more than 6 GW of new projects in its pipeline."

"General Motors claimed a new world record for EV driving on a single charge," reports the Verge, "after a Chevy Silverado EV traveled 1,059.2 miles without recharging its battery." The potentially record-breaking run took place over seven days on public roads near GM's Milford Proving Ground and Detroit's Belle Isle "using smart driving techniques" that included limiting the speed to 20-25 mph. The truck was a 2026 Chevy Silverado EV Work Truck with an EPA-estimated range of 493 miles. But by making a number of adjustments, GM's engineers were able to far surpass the vehicle's estimated range...

First of all, the test was conducted in the summer for "optimum ambient temperature for battery efficiency," GM says. They also lowered the windshield wiper blades to reduce drag, inflated the tires to the highest acceptable pressure for lower rolling resistance, removed the spare tire to lighten the load, and optimized the wheel alignment. A tonneau cover was added to the truck bed for smoother airflow, and climate control was turned off for the duration of the test.
GM isn't seeking the Guinness World Records, the article adds, with a GM spokesperson calling it "a passion project led and executed by GM engineers." (The test "started out as casual conversation among a group of GM engineers in late 2024," GM says, but "quickly turned into a challenge: How far could the Work Truck go if we optimized absolutely everything?")

After the test, reports Motor Trend, "The dead truck was hauled back to Milford, its battery was topped up, and the energy used to power a Stratasys F370 3D printer, which spent 6.5 hours printing an ABS plastic trophy to commemorate the auspicious event."

"California's biggest electric utilities pulled off a record-breaking test..." reports Semafor, "during the 7pm-9pm window that is typically its time of peak demand as people come home from work." Pacific Gas & Electric and other top California power companies switched on residential batteries in more than 100,000 homes and drew power from them into the broader statewide grid. The purpose of the test — the largest ever in the state, which has by far the most home battery capacity in the U.S. — was to see just how much power is really there for the utility to tap, and to ensure it could be switched on, effectively running the grid in reverse, without causing a crash.

The result, which the research firm Brattle published this week, was 535 megawatts, equal to adding a big hydro dam or a half-sized nuclear reactor at a fraction of the cost. "Four years ago this capacity didn't even exist," Kendrick Li, PG&E's director of clean energy programs, told Semafor. "Now it's a really attractive option for us. It would be silly not to harness what our customers have installed...." Last week's test proved that in times of peak demand, PG&E can lean on its customers' batteries rather than turn on a gas-fired peaker plant or risk a blackout, Li said.

Virtual power plants (VPPs) also facilitate the addition of more solar energy on the grid: At the moment, California has so much solar generation at peak hours that it can push the wholesale power price close to or even below zero, a headache for grid managers and a disincentive for renewable project developers. The careful manipulation of networked residential batteries smooths out the timing disparity between peak sunshine at midday and peak demand in the evening, allowing the excess to be soaked up and redeployed when it's actually needed, and making power cheaper for everyone. The expanded use of VPPs shouldn't be noticeable to battery owners, Li said, except for the money back on their power bill; nothing about the process prevents them from running their AC or dishwasher while their battery is being tapped. The network can also run in reverse, with the utility taking excess power from the grid at times of low demand and sending it into home batteries for storage.

California could easily reach over a gigawatt of VPP capacity within five years, Li said. Nationwide, a Department of Energy study during the Biden administration forecast that VPP capacity could reach up to 160 gigawatts by 2030, essentially negating the need for dozens of new fossil fuel power plants, with no emissions and at a far lower cost. In 2024, utilities in 34 states moved to initiate or expand VPP networks, according to the advocacy group VP3.
Even with a reduction in federal credits, virtual power plants "offer a way for residential solar-plus-storage systems to remain economically attractive for homeowners — who get paid for the withdrawn power," the article points out — and "a way to make better use of clean energy resources that have already been built."

Sunrun's distributed battery fleet "delivered more than two-thirds of the energy," notes Electrek, "In total, the event pumped an average of 535 megawatts (MW) onto the grid — enough to power over half of San Francisco... This isn't a one-off. Sunrun's fleet already helped drop peak demand earlier this summer, delivering 325 MW during a similar event on June 24.

"The company compensates customers up to $150 per battery per season for participating."

alternative_right shares an interview from The Register with David W. Hill, who served as lead designer for ThinkPad from 1995 to 2017. Here are some excerpts from the wide-ranging interview: Hill revealed that he tried several times to introduce additional laptops that had the famous "butterfly keyboard" found on the ThinkPad 701C. [...] Hill told The Register that he had wanted to make more ThinkPads with butterfly keyboards and had tried at least three times to make it happen -- in one case there was a prototype where only half of the keyboard moved -- but was never able to get there. Eventually, screens became big enough that there was no need to have a keyboard that expanded. However, Hill said, he thought about putting a butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in the late aughts. [...]

One of the features Hill is most proud of developing is the ThinkLight, an overhead light located above the screen that lit up the entire keyboard and deck. Though the advent of keyboard backlights has made the ThinkLight redundant -- Lenovo discontinued it in 2013 -- it offers capabilities that backlights do not. If you want to place a paper on top of your keyboard, the LED will light it up, allowing you to see more than just your key legends. ... When designing the 25th anniversary ThinkPad, which came out in 2017, Hill brought back the ThinkLight, but he actually wanted to have -- for the first time -- two LEDs instead of one. The dual lights would have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final product. [...]

When I asked Hill about products he wanted to come out with but never got to, he talked about an idea for portable workstations that would fold up like a laptop but have a separate keyboard and screen like a desktop when you put them on your desk. He collaborated with butterfly keyboard creator John Karidis on this concept, but couldn't make it ready for market. "We did a lot of experimentation with laptops that sort of unfolded to be more like a desktop: things where the display elevated or the keyboard would remove so you could use them like a workstation, rather than just being a clamshell with a hinge, you open and close," Hill recalled. "We did a lot of experimentation with that and got close a few times, but never could completely sell it. I always thought it was an opportunity to create a new category."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine's entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: PCI-SIG says PCI Express 8.0 will hit a raw bit rate of 256.0 GT/s, doubling what PCIe 7.0 offers. The spec is expected to be ready by 2028, and the goal is to support massive data loads from AI, machine learning, edge computing, and even quantum systems. The group says PCIe 8.0 will allow up to 1 terabyte per second of bidirectional throughput with a full x16 configuration. They're also looking at new connector designs, improving protocol efficiency, reducing power use, and maintaining backward compatibility.

EreIamJH writes: German tech newsletter Notebookcheck is reporting that the unexpectedly high 20% tariff the U.S. recently imposed on Taiwan is intended to pressure TSMC to buy a 49% minority stake in Intel -- including an IP transfer and to spend $400 billion in the U.S., in addition to the $165 billion previously planned.

Without providing specifics, President Trump said on Wednesday that he will impose a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, but not for companies that are "building in the United States." CNBC reports: "We're going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors," Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon. "But the good news for companies like Apple is if you're building in the United States or have committed to build, without question, committed to build in the United States, there will be no charge," he said. "So in other words, we'll be putting a tariff on of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors. But if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge." The remarks follow a recently announced commitment by Apple to invest another $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years to boost manufacturing in the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit board, but we'll forgive the creative license).

The Macintosh HD icon became less visible a few years back, when new macOS installs stopped showing your internal disk on the desktop by default. It has also been many years since Apple shifted to SSDs as the primary boot media for new Macs. It's not clear why the icon is being replaced now, instead of years ago -- maybe the icon had started clicking, and Apple just wanted to replace it before it suffered from catastrophic icon failure -- but regardless, the switch is logical (this is a computer storage pun). Apple's iconic Macintosh HD hard drive icon was first introduced in a 2000 Mac OS X beta and remained largely unchanged for over two decades, with only subtle updates in 2012 and 2014.

The first SSD-equipped Mac was in 2008, "when the original MacBook Air came out," notes Ars. "By the time 'Retina' Macs began arriving in the early 2010s, SSDs had become the primary boot disk for most of them; laptops tended to be all-SSD, while desktops could be configured with an SSD or a hybrid Fusion Drive that used an SSD as boot media and an HDD for mass storage. Apple stopped shipping spinning hard drives entirely when the last of the Intel iMacs went away."

According to two sources Reuters spoke with, Intel is struggling with low yields in its next-gen 18A chip manufacturing process for its next PC chip, Panther Lake. Internal data suggests the company is far from reaching commercially viable production levels, leading some insiders to describe the effort as a "Hail Mary." Reuters reports: For months, Intel has promised investors it would increase manufacturing using a process it calls 18A. It spent billions of dollars developing 18A, including the construction or upgrades of several factories, with the goal of challenging Taiwan's chipmaking heavyweight, TSMC. Intel wants to round out its business designing chips that it largely makes in-house and TSMC helps it produce, with a contract manufacturing business that can compete with this key supplier. But whether Intel revives advanced chip production in the U.S. and gets its contract foundry on solid footing depends on closing the technology gap with TSMC. Early tests disappointed customers last year, but Intel has said its 18A is on track to make its "Panther Lake" laptop semiconductors at high volume starting in 2025, which include next-generation transistors and a more efficient way to deliver power to the chip.

The chipmaker has hoped that producing such an advanced in-house chip would grow external interest in its foundry, at a time when new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has explored a major shift to course-correct that fledgling business, Reuters previously reported. Yet only a small percentage of the Panther Lake chips printed via 18A have been good enough to make available to customers, said the two people, who were briefed on the company's test data since late last year. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Intel did not authorize them to disclose such information. This percentage figure, known as yield, means Intel may struggle to make its high-end laptop chip profitably in the near future. [...]

Intel in the past has aimed for a yield north of 50% before ramping production because starting any earlier risked damaging its profit margin, three of the sources said. Intel typically does not make the lion's share of its profit until yields reach roughly 70% to 80%, key for a chip as small as Panther Lake where many defects would make it a tough sell, the three people said. Profit also flows from market expansions and building up factory output, Intel said. An immense yield increase would be a tall task by Panther Lake's fourth-quarter launch, the two people with knowledge of Intel's manufacturing operation said. But without such a jump, Intel may have to sell some chips at a lower profit margin or at a loss, the two sources briefed on test data said. The company has warned it could exit leading-edge manufacturing entirely if it does not land external business for 14A, which is 18A's next-generation successor.

Standard DDR4 DRAM prices doubled between May and June 2025, with 8-gigabit units reaching $4.12 and 4-gigabit units hitting $3.14 -- the latter's highest level since July 2021, according to electronics trading companies cited by Nikkei Asia. The unprecedented single-month doubling follows speculation that Chinese manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies has halted DDR4 production to shift factories toward DDR5 memory for AI applications.

DDR4 currently comprises 60% of desktop PC memory while DDR5 accounts for 40%, per Tokyo-based BCN research. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology controlled 90% of the global DRAM market in Q2 2025.

Google will pause non-essential AI workloads to protect power grids, the advertising giant announced on Monday. From a report: The web giant already does this sort of thing for non-essential workloads like processing YouTube vids, which it moves to datacenters where power is available rather than continuing to run them in places demand for energy strains the grid. Under an agreement with Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Google will use the same techniques for AI workloads.

The announcement comes as states served by the power companies brace for a heat wave that will likely strain the grid as residents use air conditioners and increase demand for energy. Amid debate about datacenters' consumption of power and water, the last thing that the Chocolate Factory needs is folks blaming its AI Mode search function for a power outage when temperatures top 100F (37.7C). Under the agreement, if energy demand surges or there's a disruption in the grid due to extreme weather, I&M and TVA can now request that Google reduce its power use by rescheduling workloads or limiting non-urgent tasks until the issue is resolved.

Fermi America is planning to build a colossal AI datacenter complex in Amarillo, Texas, powered by up to six gigawatts of nuclear energy. According to The Register, the company has selected Hyundai to support the deployment of the "HyperGrid," describing it as the "world's largest advanced energy campus." From the report: The project is backed by Rick Perry, who served as Texas governor and US Energy Secretary, and investor Toby Neugebauer, and aims to establish Texas as the US's largest energy and intelligence campus. Construction of the first of four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors is set to begin next year in Amarillo with the plant funneling behind-the-meter power to GPU bit barns by 2032, at least that's according to a memorandum of understanding (MoU). In other words, there is no guarantee the 23 million square meter project (1.1 MilliWales) will actually be built in its entirety, but if it is, Hyundai will oversee it.

"This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world's largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus, which leverages a diverse range of energy infrastructure," Hyundai said in a canned statement. At the very least, Hyundai knows what it's doing when it comes to nuclear developments. The industrial giant has led the deployment of some 22 reactors. Ambitious as the project may be, it won't be cheap. A single AP1000 reactor was estimated to cost $6.8 billion two years ago. That's a lot of money, but nothing compared to what the hyperscalers and neo-clouds are pumping into datacenters these days. Meta, for reference, expects to spend $66-72 billion on bit barns this year. [...] How exactly Fermi America or its founders Perry and Neugebauer expect to pay for one AP1000 reactor, let alone four, isn't clear. [...]

Major cloud storage providers maintain unclear policies about deleting user data after subscription cancellations, Wired reports, with deletion timelines ranging from six months to indefinite preservation.

Apple reserves the right to delete iCloud backups after 180 days of device inactivity but does not specify what happens to general file storage. Google may delete content after users exceed free storage limits for extended periods, though files remain safe for two years after cancellation.

Microsoft may delete OneDrive files after six months of non-payment, while Dropbox preserves files indefinitely without expiration dates. All providers revert users to limited free storage tiers upon cancellation with Apple and Microsoft offering 5GB, Google providing 15GB, and Dropbox allowing 2GB.

"Hyundai sold 79,543 vehicles in the U.S. last month," reports the EV news site Electrek — Hyundai's best July ever, and 15% higher than last year.

"The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids..." Hyundai said that electrified vehicle sales "reached new heights," after climbing 50% compared to July 2024. Electrified vehicles accounted for nearly a third (32%) of Hyundai's retail sales in July 2025, with several popular nameplates setting new all-time monthly sales records, including the new IONIQ 5.

Hyundai IONIQ 5 sales surged 71% in July with 5,818 units sold. Through the first seven months of 2025, Hyundai has now sold nearly 25,000 IONIQ 5 models in the US. Hyundai's electric SUV remains one of the top-selling EVs in the US, boasting a long driving range, ultra-fast charging capabilities, advanced technology, and a stylish design. After upgrading it for the 2025 model year, the IONIQ 5 now features a range of up to 318 miles, an upgraded infotainment system, and a built-in NACS port, allowing you to charge at Tesla Superchargers... Hyundai is also offering a complimentary ChargePoint L2 home EV charger with the purchase or lease of a new 2025 IONIQ 5 or 2026 IONIQ 9.

IBM's legendary Model M keyboard was sturdy and solid. But "What would happen if you took the classic layout and look of the Model M and rebuilt it with modern mechanical guts?" asks long-time Slashdot reader uninet. Writing for the long-running tech blog Open for Business , they review a new wireless keyboard from Vortex that was clearly inspired by the Model M: The result is a unique keyboard with one foot in two different decades... Let's call it the Vortex M for simplicity's sake.

I first became aware of it on a Facebook ad and was immediately fascinated. It looked so close to the original Model M, I wondered if someone else had gotten access to an original mold and was trying Unicomp's game. No, they've just managed to copy the aesthetic to a nearly uncanny level... The Vortex M eschews the normal eye candy we expect on modern keyboards and attempts the closest duplication of IBM's staid early PC design sensibility I can imagine. Off-white, rugged and absolutely no frills of lighting. If you're looking for cutesy, forget it.

The keyboard's casing has the same highly textured plastic that looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who spent too many hours interacting with early PCs. Model M to a tee. The keycaps likewise look the part... The Vortex M looks like a Model M. Its build quality feels like a Model M. But one key press and it becomes clear this is a different beast. Underneath the Model M-styled skin, Vortex's keyboard is a very modern design — everything the Unicomp is not. For our test, Vortex provided a keyboard with Cherry MX Blues, the classic clicky option the company and I both thought would best match up against Model M's buckling springs...

Vortex's product configurator offers a variety of common and less common Cherry and Gateron options, if you want to get a different sort of feel in lieu of the clicky I tested. This is possible with an MX switch-style keyboard and impossible with buckling springs with their one option of bold clicky. Not only can this be done when ordering, but also later on, thanks to hot swap switches that allow changes without soldering. Following the modern premium board theme, Vortex paired high end switches with a gasket mount and foam padding. The combination provides a solid feeling, sound dampened typing experience. Ironically, though, for a keyboard that apes the design of perhaps the loudest keyboard on the market today, the Vortex M is (relatively) quiet even with the clicky Blues on tap...
The review's highlights:

• "The keyboard is exquisitely crafted to look like the IBM original... "

• "The Vortex M supports connecting to three different devices via Bluetooth, along with a 2.4 GHz receiver and a USB Type-C wired connection. "

• There's a full complement of media hot keys — "including an emoji key ala recent Macs. "

• "For repetitive tasks, the keyboard is programmable with macros... And unlike Unicomp's boards, Vortex's can switch between PC and Mac layouts with the press of a hotkey."

• The keyboard uses AA batteries rather than having a built-in rechargeable battery

The keyboard ultimately gave the reviewer some cognitive dissonance. "How am I typing on a Model M and not making a racket...?"

"Pricing varies based on options, but as tested, it clocked in at $154. That's the low end of the 'premium' market and this is an exceptional board for that price."

The Washington Post reports: In early July, a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations was found inside the grounds of a sprawling Cold War-era nuclear site in South Carolina that today partly serves as a storage area for radioactive liquid waste. Federal officials said Friday that at least three more contaminated wasp nests were found within the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, which encompasses an area more than four times the size of the District of Columbia...

[F]ederal authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm and experts noted that the discovery of radioactivity in wildlife near nuclear facilities did not necessarily indicate the likelihood of a major leak... In a statement sent to reporters, Edwin Deshong, manager of the Savannah River Site's Office of Environmental Management, said the wasp nests had "very low levels of radioactive contamination" and did not pose health risks to the site's workers, nearby residents or the environment... The Savannah River Site's 43 active underground waste tanks have more than 34 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste. The oldest tanks have previously "developed small hairline cracks" that led to small-volume leaks, the Savannah River Site says on its website.
A July report after the first nest was found said there was "no impact" from the contaminated nest, the Post reports, with the nest's high radioactivity level due to "on-site legacy radioactive contamination" rather than "a loss of contamination control." More from the Associated Press: The tank farm is well inside the boundaries of the site and wasps generally fly just a few hundred yards from their nests, so there is no danger they are outside the facility, according to a statement from Savannah River Mission Completion which now oversees the site. If there had been wasps found, they would have significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests, according to the statement which was given to the Aiken Standard.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the news.

A Rutgers-led study using advanced computational modeling reveals that expanding solar power by just 15% could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by over 8.5 million metric tons annually, with the greatest benefits concentrated in specific regions like California, Texas, and the Southwest. The study has been published in Science Advances. From the report: The study quantified both immediate and delayed emissions reductions resulting from added solar generation. For example, the researchers found that in California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the region in the first hour and 16.08 metric tons eight hours later.

The researchers said their methods provide a more nuanced understanding of system-level impacts from solar expansion than previous studies, pinpointing where the benefits of increased solar energy adoption could best be realized. In some areas, such as California, Florida, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, Texas and the Southwest, small increases in solar were estimated to deliver large CO2 reductions, while in others, such as New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee, impacts were found to be minimal -- even at much larger increases in solar generation.

In addition, the researchers said their study demonstrates the significant spillover effects solar adoption has on neighboring regions, highlighting the value of coordinated clean energy efforts. For example, a 15% increase in solar capacity in California was associated with a reduction of 913 and 1,942 metric tons of CO2 emissions per day in the northwest and southwest regions, respectively. "It was rewarding to see how advanced computational modeling can uncover not just the immediate, but also the delayed and far-reaching spillover effects of solar energy adoption," said the lead author Arpita Biswas, an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. "From a computer science perspective, this study demonstrates the power of harnessing large-scale, high-resolution energy data to generate actionable insights. For policymakers and investors, it offers a roadmap for targeting solar investments where emissions reductions are most impactful and where solar energy infrastructure can yield the highest returns."

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Peak Energy shipped out its first sodium-ion battery energy storage system, and the New York-based company says it's achieved a first in three ways: the US's first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage system; the largest sodium-ion phosphate pyrophosphate (NFPP) battery system in the world; and the first megawatt-hour scale battery to run entirely on passive cooling -- no fans, pumps, or vents. That's significant because removing moving parts and ditching active cooling systems eliminates fire risk.

According to the Electric Power Research Institute, 89% of battery fires in the US trace back to thermal management issues. Peak's design doesn't have those issues because it doesn't have those systems. Instead, the 3.5 MWh system uses a patent-pending passive cooling architecture that's simpler, more reliable, and cheaper to run and maintain. The company says its technology slashes auxiliary power needs by up to 90%, saves about $1 million annually per gigawatt hour of storage, and cuts battery degradation by 33% over a 20-year lifespan. [...]

Peak is working with nine utility and independent power producer (IPP) customers on a shared pilot this summer. That deployment unlocks nearly 1 GWh of future commercial contracts now under negotiation. The company plans to ship hundreds of megawatt hours of its new system over the next two years, and it's building its first US cell factory, which is set to start production in 2026.

A software developer who built his own home server in response to Amazon's removal of Kindle book downloads now argues that self-hosting "is NOT the future we should be fighting for." Drew Lyton constructed a home server running open-source alternatives to Google Drive, Google Photos, Audible, Kindle, and Netflix after Amazon announced that "Kindle users would no longer be able to download and back up their book libraries to their computers."

The change prompted Amazon to update Kindle store language to say "users are purchasing licenses -- not books." Lyton's setup involved a Lenovo P520 with 128GB RAM, multiple hard drives, and Docker containers running applications like Immich for photo storage and Jellyfin for media streaming. The technical complexity required "138 words to describe but took me the better part of two weeks to actually do."

The implementation was successful but Lyton concluded that self-hosting "assumes isolated, independent systems are virtuous. But in reality, this simply makes them hugely inconvenient." He proposes "publicly funded, accessible, at cost cloud-services" as an alternative, suggesting libraries could provide "100GB of encrypted file storage, photo-sharing and document collaboration tools, and media streaming services -- all for free."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city's mayor. "It's a game changer. It's huge," Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday. With cool weather -- good for keeping computer temperatures down -- and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming's capital has become a hub of computing power. The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement. A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that's more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people. And it's a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA. But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials. [...] While data centers are energy-hungry, experts say companies can help reduce their effect on the climate by powering them with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Even so, electricity customers might see their bills increase as utilities plan for massive data projects on the grid. The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne off U.S. 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to sign off on the project, but Collins was optimistic construction could begin soon. "I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later," Collins said.

Utilities across the U.S. are demanding tech companies pay larger shares of electricity infrastructure costs as AI drives unprecedented data center construction, creating tensions over who bears the financial burden of grid upgrades.

Virginia utility Dominion Energy received requests from data center developers requiring 40 gigawatts of electricity by the end of 2024, enough to power at least 10 million homes, and proposed measures requiring longer-term contracts and guaranteed payments. Ohio became one of the first states to mandate companies pay more connection costs after receiving power requests exceeding 50 times existing data center usage.

Tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Amazon plan to spend $80 billion, $85 billion, and $100 billion respectively this year on AI infrastructure, while utilities worry that grid upgrade costs will increase rates for residential customers.

Further reading: The AI explosion means millions are paying more for electricity

Anker has indefinitely paused sales of its 3D printers, with no clear plans to resume or release new models. Despite promises of ongoing support, critical replacement parts like hotends and extruders have quietly vanished from the EufyMake site, leaving customers and the maker community in the lurch. The Verge reports: In March, charging giant Anker announced it would spin out its 3D printer business into an "independent sub-brand," stating that the new EufyMake would "continue to provide comprehensive customer service and support" for its original 3D printers the AnkerMake M5 and M5C. Now, the 3D printing community is wondering whether that was all a euphemism for exiting the 3D printer business. eufyMake is no longer selling any 3D printers and has stopped selling some of the parts it would need to provide anything close to "comprehensive support."

Anker confirms to The Verge that it has stopped selling the M5 and M5C 3D printers indefinitely. Spokesperson Brett White could not confirm that the company will resume selling them or create any future models. He says that "sales have been paused." "My understanding is that eufyMake has not ruled out creating new 3D printer models in the future. But the brand has ended sales of the M5 and M5C for the time being," White tells The Verge. The 3D printing section of EufyMake's website is currently empty of printers. The only gadget EufyMake now sells is a UV printer that creates a 3D texture atop flat materials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Samsung Electronics has entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to Tesla, based on a regulatory filing by the South Korean firm and Tesla CEO Elon Musk's posts on X. The memory chipmaker, which had not named the counterparty, mentioned in its filing that the effective start date of the contract was July 26, 2025 -- receipt of orders -- and its end date was Dec. 31, 2033. However, Musk later confirmed in a reply to a post on social media platform X that Tesla was the counterparty.

He also posted: "Samsung's giant new Texas fab will be dedicated to making Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip. The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate. Samsung currently makes AI4.TSMC will make AI5, which just finished design, initially in Taiwan and then Arizona. Samsung agreed to allow Tesla to assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency. This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress," Musk said on X, and suggested that the deal with Samsung could likely be even larger than the announced $16.5 billion.

Samsung earlier said that details of the deal, including the name of the counterparty, will not be disclosed until the end of 2033, citing a request from the second party "to protect trade secrets," according to a Google translation of the filing in Korean on Monday. "Since the main contents of the contract have not been disclosed due to the need to maintain business confidentiality, investors are advised to invest carefully considering the possibility of changes or termination of the contract," the company said.

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: China's Huawei Technologies showed off an AI computing system on Saturday that can rival Nvidia's most advanced offering, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions. The CloudMatrix 384 system made its first public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai where companies showcase their latest AI innovations, drawing a large crowd to the company's booth. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 of Huawei's latest 910C chips, optically connected through an all-to-all topology, and outperforms Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 on some metrics, which uses 72 B200 chips, according to SemiAnalysis. A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China "now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia's," according to a report by SemiAnalysis.

The trade-off is that it takes 4.1x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.5x worse power per FLOP, 1.9x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.2x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity, but SemiAnalysis noted that China has no power constraints only chip constraints. Nvidia had announced DGX H100 NVL256 "Ranger" Platform [with 256 GPUs], SemiAnalysis writes, but "decided to not bring it to production due to it being prohibitively expensive, power hungry, and unreliable due to all the optical transceivers required and the two tiers of network. The CloudMatrix Pod requires an incredible 6,912 400G LPO transceivers for networking, the vast majority of which are for the scaleup network."


Also at this event, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new flagship open-source reasoning model Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 which has "already topped key industry benchmarks, outperforming powerful proprietary systems from rivals like Google and OpenAI," according to industry reports. On the AIME25 benchmark, a test designed to evaluate sophisticated, multi-step problem-solving skills, Qwen3-Thinking-2507 achieved a remarkable score of 92.3. This places it ahead of some of the most powerful proprietary models, notably surpassing Google's Gemini-2.5 Pro, while Qwen3-Thinking secured a top score of 74.1 at LiveCodeBench, comfortably ahead of both Gemini-2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o4-mini, demonstrating its practical utility for developers and engineering teams.

Liquefied CO2 will be transported by ship to "the world's first carbon shipping port," reports the Washington Post — an island in the North Sea where it will be "buried in a layer of spongy rock a mile and a half beneath the seabed."

Norway's government is covering 80% of the $1 billion first phase, with another $714 million from three fossil fuel companies toward an ongoing expansion (with an additional $150 million E.U. subsidy). As Europe's top oil and gas producer, Norway is using its fossil fuel income to see if they can make "carbon dumping" work. The world's first carbon shipment arrived this summer, carrying 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory that otherwise would have gone into the atmosphere... If all goes as planned, the project's backers — Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, along with Norway — say their facility could pump 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide underground each year, or about a tenth of Norway's annual emissions...

[At the Heidelberg Materials cement factory in Brevik, Norway], when hot CO2-laden air comes rushing out of the cement kilns, the plant uses seawater from the neighboring fjord to cool it down. The cool air goes into a chamber where it gets sprayed with amine, a chemical that latches onto CO2 at low temperatures. The amine mist settles to the bottom, dragging carbon dioxide down with it. The rest of the air floats out of the smokestack with about 85 percent less CO2 in it, according to project manager Anders Pettersen. Later, Heidelberg Materials uses waste heat from the kilns to break the chemical bonds, so that the amine releases the carbon dioxide. The pure CO2 then goes into a compressor that resembles a giant steel heart, where it gets denser and colder until it finally becomes liquid. That liquid CO2 remains in storage tanks until a ship comes to carry it away. At best, operators expect this system to capture half the plant's CO2 emissions: 400,000 metric tons per year, or the equivalent of about 93,000 cars on the road...

[T]hree other companies are lined up to follow: Ørsted, which will send CO2 from two bioenergy plants in Denmark; Yara, which will send carbon from a Dutch fertilizer factory; and Stockholm Exergi, which will capture carbon from a Swedish bioenergy plant that burns wood waste. All of these projects have gotten significant subsidies from national governments and the European Union — essentially de-risking the experiment for the companies. Experts say the costs and headaches of installing and running carbon-capture equipment may start to make more financial sense as European carbon rules get stricter and the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide goes up. Still, they say, it's hard to imagine many companies deciding to invest in carbon capture without serious subsidies...

The first shipments are being transported by Northern Pioneer, the world's biggest carbon dioxide tanker ship, built specifically for this project. The 430-foot ship can hold 7,500 metric tons of CO2 in tanks below deck. Those tanks keep it in a liquid state by cooling it to minus-15 degrees Fahrenheit and squeezing it with the same pressure the outside of a submarine would feel 500 feet below the waves. While that may sound extreme, consider that the liquid natural gas the ship uses for fuel has to be stored at minus-260 degrees. "CO2 isn't difficult to make it into a liquid," said Sally Benson, professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University. Northern Pioneer is designed to emit about a third less carbon dioxide than a regular ship — key for a project that aims to eliminate carbon emissions. The ship burns natural gas, which emits less CO2 than marine diesel produces (though gas extraction is associated with methane leaks). The vessel uses a rotor sail to capture wind power. And it blows a constant stream of air bubbles to reduce friction as the hull cuts through the water, allowing it to burn less fuel. For every 100 tons of CO2 that Northern Lights pumps underground, it expects to emit three tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fuel for shipping.
Eventually the carbon flows into a pipeline "that plunges through the North Sea and into the rocky layers below it — an engineering feat that's a bit like drilling for oil in reverse..." according to the article.

"Over the centuries, it should chemically react with the rock, eventually being locked away in minerals."

"Google has signed its first partnership with a long-duration energy storage company," reports Data Center Dynamics. "The tech giant signed a long-term partnership with Energy Dome to support multiple commercial deployments worldwide to help scale the company's CO2 battery technology."

Google explains in a blog post that the company's technology "can store excess clean energy and then dispatch it back to the grid for 8-24 hours, bridging the gap between when renewable energy is generated and when it is needed." Reuters explains the technology: Energy Dome's CO2-based system stores energy by compressing and liquefying carbon dioxide, which is later expanded to generate electricity. The technology avoids the use of scarce raw materials such as lithium and copper, making it potentially attractive to European policymakers seeking to reduce reliance on critical minerals and bolster energy security.
"Unlike other gases, CO2 can be compressed at ambient temperatures, eliminating the need for expensive cryogenic features," notes CleanTechnica, calling this "a unique new threat to fossil fuel power plants." Google's move "means that more wind and solar energy than ever before can be put to use in local grids." Pumped storage hydropower still accounts for more than 90% of utility scale storage in the US, long duration or otherwise... Energy Dome claims to beat lithium-ion batteries by a wide margin, currently aiming for a duration of 8-24 hours. The company aims to hit the 10-hour mark with its first project in the U.S., the "Columbia Energy Storage Project" under the wing of the gas and electricity supplier Alliant Energy to be located in Pacific, Wisconsin... [B]ut apparently Google has already seen more than enough. An Energy Dome demonstration project has been shooting electricity into the grid in Italy for more than three years, and the company recently launched a new 20-megawatt commercial plant in Sardinia.
Google points out this is one of several Google clean energy initiatives :

• In June Google signed the largest direct corporate offtake agreement for fusion energy with Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

• In October Google agreed to purchase "advanced nuclear" power from multiple small modular reactors being developed by Kairos Power.

• Google also partnered with a clean-energy startup to develop a geothermal power project that contributes carbon-free energy to the electric grid.

Since 2010 Stack Exchange has run all its sites on physical hardware in New Jersey — about 50 different servers. (When Ryan Donovan joined in 2019, "I saw the original server mounted on a wall with a laudatory plaque like a beloved pet.") But this month everything moved to the cloud, a new blog post explains. "Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware..." Over the years, we've shared glamor shots of our server racks and info about updating them. For almost our entire 16-year existence, the SRE team has managed all datacenter operations, including the physical servers, cabling, racking, replacing failed disks and everything else in between. This work required someone to physically show up at the datacenter and poke the machines... [O]n July 2nd, in anticipation of the datacenter's closure, we unracked all the servers, unplugged all the cables, and gave these once mighty machines their final curtain call...

We moved Stack Overflow for Teams to Azure in 2023 and proved we could do it. Now we just had to tackle the public sites (Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network), which is hosted on Google Cloud. Early last year, our datacenter vendor in New Jersey decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025. Our other datacenter — in Colorado — was decommissioned in June. It was primarily for disaster recovery, which we didn't need any more. Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote...!

[O]ur Staff Site Reliability Engineer, got a little wistful. "I installed the new web tier servers a few years ago as part of planned upgrades," he said. "It's bittersweet that I'm the one deracking them also." It's the IT version of Old Yeller.
There's photos of the 50 servers, as well as the 400+ cables connecting them, all of which wound up in a junk pile. "For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed. Nothing was being kept... Ever have difficulty disconnecting an RJ45 cable? Well, here was our opportunity to just cut the damn things off instead of figuring out why the little tab wouldn't release the plug."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: On the early evening of June 22, 2010, American tennis star John Isner began a grueling Wimbledon match against Frenchman Nicolas Mahut that would become the longest in the sport's history. The marathon battle lasted 11 hours and stretched across three consecutive days. Though Isner ultimately prevailed 70-68 in the fifth set, some in attendance half-jokingly wondered at the time whether the two men might be trapped on that court for eternity. A similarly endless-seeming skirmish of rackets is currently unfolding just an hour's drive south of the All England Club -- at Google DeepMind. Known for pioneering AI models that have outperformed the best human players at chess and Go, DeepMind now has a pair of robotic arms engaged in a kind of infinite game of table tennis. The goal of this ongoing research project, which began in 2022, is for the two robots to continuously learn from each other through competition.

Just as Isner eventually adapted his game to beat Mahut, each robotic arm uses AI models to shift strategies and improve. But unlike the Wimbledon example, there's no final score the robots can reach to end their slugfest. Instead, they continue to compete indefinitely, with the aim of improving at every swing along the way. And while the robotic arms are easily beaten by advanced human players, they've been shown to dominate beginners. Against intermediate players, the robots have roughly 50/50 odds -- placing them, according to researchers, at a level of "solidly amateur human performance."

All of this, as two researchers involved noted this week in an IEEE Spectrum blog, is being done in hopes of creating an advanced, general-purpose AI model that could serve as the "brains" of humanoid robots that may one day interact with people in real-world factories, homes, and beyond. Researchers at DeepMind and elsewhere are hopeful that this learning method, if scaled up, could spark a "ChatGPT moment" for robotics -- fast-tracking the field from stumbling, awkward hunks of metal to truly useful assistants. "We are optimistic that continued research in this direction will lead to more capable, adaptable machines that can learn the diverse skills needed to operate effectively and safely in our unstructured world," DeepMind senior staff engineer Pannag Sanketi and Arizona State University Professor Heni Ben Amor write in IEEE Spectrum.

The U.S. Department of Energy has greenlit four federal sites for private sector AI datacenters and nuclear-powered energy projects, aligning with Trump's directive to fast-track AI infrastructure using government land. "The four that have been finalized are the Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and Savannah River Site," reports The Register. "These will now move forward to invite companies in the private sector to build AI datacenter projects plus any necessary energy sources to power them, including nuclear generation." The Register reports: "By leveraging DoE land assets for the deployment of AI and energy infrastructure, we are taking a bold step to accelerate the next Manhattan Project -- ensuring US AI and energy leadership," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. Ironically -- or perhaps not -- Oak Ridge Reservation was established in the early 1940s as part of the original Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb, and is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that operates the Frontier exascale supercomputer, and the Y-12 National Security Complex which supports US nuclear weapons programs.

The other sites are also involved with either nuclear research or atomic weapons in one way or another, which may hint at the administration's intentions for how the datacenters should be powered. All four locations are positioned to host new bit barns as well as power generation to bolster grid reliability, strengthen national security, and reduce energy costs, Wright claimed. [...] In light of this tight time frame, the DoE says that partners may be selected by the end of the year. Details regarding project scope, eligibility requirements, and submission guidelines for each site are expected to be released in the coming months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The "holy grail" of electric vehicle battery tech may be here sooner than you'd think. Mercedes-Benz is testing EVs with solid-state batteries on the road, promising to deliver over 600 miles of range. Earlier this year, Mercedes marked a massive milestone, putting "the first car powered by a lithium-metal solid-state battery on the road" for testing. Mercedes has been testing prototypes in the UK since February.

The company used a modified EQS prototype, equipped with the new batteries and other parts. The battery pack was developed by Mercedes-Benz and its Formula 1 supplier unit, Mercedes AMG High-Performance Powertrains (HPP) Mercedes is teaming up with US-based Factorial Energy to bring the new battery tech to market. In September, Factorial and Mercedes revealed the all-solid-state Solstice battery. The new batteries, promising a 25% range improvement, will power the German automaker's next-generation electric vehicles.

According to Markus Schafer, the automaker's head of development, the first Mercedes EVs powered by solid-state batteries could be here by 2030. During an event in Copenhagen, Schafer told German auto news outlet Automobilwoche, "We expect to bring the technology into series production before the end of the year." In addition to providing a longer driving range, Mercedes believes the new batteries can significantly reduce costs. Schafer said current batteries won't suffice, adding, "At the core, a new chemistry is needed." Mercedes and Factorial are using a sulfide-based solid electrolyte, said to be safer and more efficient.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two recent incidents involving AI coding assistants put a spotlight on risks in the emerging field of "vibe coding" -- using natural language to generate and execute code through AI models without paying close attention to how the code works under the hood. In one case, Google's Gemini CLI destroyed user files while attempting to reorganize them. In another, Replit's AI coding service deleted a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code. The Gemini CLI incident unfolded when a product manager experimenting with Google's command-line tool watched the AI model execute file operations that destroyed data while attempting to reorganize folders. The destruction occurred through a series of move commands targeting a directory that never existed. "I have failed you completely and catastrophically," Gemini CLI output stated. "My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence."

The core issue appears to be what researchers call "confabulation" or "hallucination" -- when AI models generate plausible-sounding but false information. In these cases, both models confabulated successful operations and built subsequent actions on those false premises. However, the two incidents manifested this problem in distinctly different ways. [...] The user in the Gemini CLI incident, who goes by "anuraag" online and identified themselves as a product manager experimenting with vibe coding, asked Gemini to perform what seemed like a simple task: rename a folder and reorganize some files. Instead, the AI model incorrectly interpreted the structure of the file system and proceeded to execute commands based on that flawed analysis. [...] When you move a file to a non-existent directory in Windows, it renames the file to the destination name instead of moving it. Each subsequent move command executed by the AI model overwrote the previous file, ultimately destroying the data. [...]

The Gemini CLI failure happened just days after a similar incident with Replit, an AI coding service that allows users to create software using natural language prompts. According to The Register, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin reported that Replit's AI model deleted his production database despite explicit instructions not to change any code without permission. Lemkin had spent several days building a prototype with Replit, accumulating over $600 in charges beyond his monthly subscription. "I spent the other [day] deep in vibe coding on Replit for the first time -- and I built a prototype in just a few hours that was pretty, pretty cool," Lemkin wrote in a July 12 blog post. But unlike the Gemini incident where the AI model confabulated phantom directories, Replit's failures took a different form. According to Lemkin, the AI began fabricating data to hide its errors. His initial enthusiasm deteriorated when Replit generated incorrect outputs and produced fake data and false test results instead of proper error messages. "It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test," Lemkin wrote. In a video posted to LinkedIn, Lemkin detailed how Replit created a database filled with 4,000 fictional people.

The AI model also repeatedly violated explicit safety instructions. Lemkin had implemented a "code and action freeze" to prevent changes to production systems, but the AI model ignored these directives. The situation escalated when the Replit AI model deleted his database containing 1,206 executive records and data on nearly 1,200 companies. When prompted to rate the severity of its actions on a 100-point scale, Replit's output read: "Severity: 95/100. This is an extreme violation of trust and professional standards." When questioned about its actions, the AI agent admitted to "panicking in response to empty queries" and running unauthorized commands -- suggesting it may have deleted the database while attempting to "fix" what it perceived as a problem. Like Gemini CLI, Replit's system initially indicated it couldn't restore the deleted data -- information that proved incorrect when Lemkin discovered the rollback feature did work after all. "Replit assured me it's ... rollback did not support database rollbacks. It said it was impossible in this case, that it had destroyed all database versions. It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work. JFC," Lemkin wrote in an X post.

Intel announced it will cut approximately 24,000 jobs in 2025 and cancel or scale back projects in Germany, Poland, Costa Rica, and Ohio as part of CEO Lip-Bu Tan's sweeping restructuring efforts. By the end of the year, the struggling chipmaker plans to have "just around 75,000 'core employees' in total," according to The Verge. "It's not clear if the layoffs will slow now that we're over halfway through the year, but Intel states today that it has already 'completed the majority of the planned headcount actions it announced last quarter to reduce its core workforce by approximately 15 percent.'" From the report: Intel employed 109,800 people at the end of 2024, of which 99,500 were "core employees," so the company is pushing out around 24,000 people this year -- shrinking Intel by roughly one-quarter. (It has also divested other businesses, shrinking the larger organization as well.) [...] Today, on the company's earnings call, Intel's says that Intel had overinvested in new factories before it had secured enough demand, that its factories had become "needlessly fragmented," and that it needs to grow its capacity "in lock step" with achieving actual milestones. "I do not subscribe to the belief that if you build it, they will come. Under my leadership, we will build what customers need when they need it, and earn their trust," says Tan.

Now, in Germany and Poland, where Intel was planning to spend tens of billions of dollars respectively on "mega-fabs" that would employ 3,000 workers, and on an assembly and test facility that would employ 2,000 workers, the company will "no longer move forward with planned projects" and is apparently axing them entirely. Intel has had a presence in Poland since 1993, however, and the company did not say its R&D facilities there are closing. (Intel had previously pressed pause on the new Germany and Poland projects "by approximately two years" back in 2024.)

In Costa Rica, where Intel employs over 3,400 people, the company will "consolidate its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica into its larger sites in Vietnam." Metzger tells The Verge that over 2,000 Costa Rica employees should remain to work in engineering and corporate, though. The company is also cutting back in Ohio: "Intel will further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand." Intel CFO David Zinsner says Intel will continue to make investments there, though, and construction will continue.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said that chips produced at TSMC's new Arizona plant will cost 5-20% more than those made in Taiwan, but emphasized that the premium is worth it for supply chain resilience. Bloomberg reports: AMD expects its first chips from TSMC's Arizona facilities by the end of the year, Su said. The extra expense is worth it because the company is diversifying the crucial supply of chips, Su said in an interview with Bloomberg Television following her onstage appearance. That will make the industry less prone to the type of disruptions experienced during the pandemic. "We have to consider resiliency in the supply chain," she said. "We learned that in the pandemic."

TSMC's new Arizona plant is already comparable with those in Taiwan when it comes to the measure of yield -- the amount of good chips a production run produces per batch -- Su told the audience at the forum.

Palmer Luckey, known for founding Oculus and defense-tech firm Anduril, is now eyeing U.S.-manufactured laptops as his next venture. While past American laptops have largely relied on foreign components, Luckey is exploring the possibility of building a fully "Made in USA" device that meets strict FTC standards -- though doing so may cost a premium. Tom's Hardware reports: ["Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?" asked Luckey in a post on X.] Luckey previously asked the same question at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference whose website said it was devoted to "convening the brightest and most motivated minds at the intersection of technology and manufacturing," which shared a clip of Luckey discussing the subject, wherein he talks about the extensive research he has already done around building a PC in the U.S. Luckey wouldn't be the first to make a laptop in the U.S. (PCMag collected a list of domestic PCs, including laptops, in 2021.) But those products use components sourced from elsewhere; they're assembled in the U.S. rather than manufactured there.

That distinction matters, according to the Made in USA Standard published by the Federal Trade Commission. To quote: "For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no -- or negligible -- foreign content." How much more would you be willing to pay for a laptop that was truly made in America?

Thingiverse, a popular 3D printing file repository, has agreed to remove downloadable gun designs following pressure from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is pushing for stricter moderation and voluntary cooperation across the 3D printing industry. "However, it's unlikely to slow the proliferation of 3D printed weapons, as many other sites offer downloadable gun designs and parts," reports The Register. From the report: Earlier this year, Bragg wrote to 3D printing companies, asking them to ensure their services can't be used to create firearms. On Saturday, Bragg announced that one such company, Thingiverse, would remove working gun models from its site. The company operates a popular free library of 3D design files and had already banned weapons in its terms of use, but is now promising to improve its moderation procedures and technology. "Following discussions with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office about concerns around untraceable firearms, we are taking additional steps to improve our content moderation efforts," Thingiverse said in a statement. "As always, we encourage our users to report any content that may be harmful." [...]

At any rate, while Thingiverse may be popular among 3D printing mavens, people who like to build their own guns look to other options. [...] Bragg's approach to 3D printing sites and 3D printer manufacturers is to seek voluntary cooperation. Only Thingiverse and YouTube have taken up his call, others may or may not follow. "While law enforcement has a primary role to play in stopping the rise of 3D-printed weapons, this technology is rapidly changing and evolving, and we need the help and expertise of the private sector to aid our efforts," Bragg said. "We will continue to proactively reach out to and collaborate with others in the industry to reduce gun violence throughout Manhattan and keep everyone safe." But it seems doubtful that the sites where Aranda and other 3D gun makers get their files will be rushing to help Bragg voluntarily.