All posts tagged: Boom

T1 Energy buys KORE Power to cash in on the AI power boom

T1 Energy buys KORE Power to cash in on the AI power boom

Published by skeptic

Photo: T1 Energy T1 Energy, formerly known as FREYR Battery, is buying battery storage and software company KORE Power in a deal aimed at growing its presence in the fast-expanding energy storage and AI data center markets. The deal is valued at around $32 million in equity, cash, and assumed debt, and is expected to close in Q2 2026. The highlight of T1’s acquisition is KORE Power’s NRI division, which designs, installs, and operates large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS). T1 says KORE’s NRI team has worked on around 1,100 battery storage projects worldwide and has provided energy storage solutions to the US government, national laboratories, utilities, developers, and industrial customers for more than 50 years. T1 said it plans to rename KORE Power as T1 NRI after the deal closes. Advertisement – scroll for more content The acquisition gives T1 an entry into the growing battery storage market, driven by rising electricity demand and the rapid expansion of AI data centers that require massive amounts of power. Research firm Rystad Energy projects that the …

I saw the first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops – these 4 models will lead the new ultrabook boom

I saw the first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops – these 4 models will lead the new ultrabook boom

Published by skeptic

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. After years of speculation, Nvidia announced a new CPU for consumer laptops, competing with industry giants Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Its new RTX Spark chip will be found on laptops and desktops from all the big PC brands: HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Microsoft, MSI, and Dell, with some available as early as this fall. Nvidia, in partnership with Microsoft, says its new Arm-based RTX Spark is a reinvention of the PC to reflect the age of AI agents, offering up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, full-stack graphics technology, and up to 128GB of unified memory to power creative tasks. Also: Dell’s new XPS 13 is a MacBook Neo rival that costs $599 and retains premium features Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the partnership on stage at Computex 2026 in Taipei, promising a native Windows experience centered around personal agents, with agentic AI features soon to be accessible directly from the Windows taskbar itself. “We’ve worked with Microsoft for two and a half …

Analysis:How a nudge from Nvidia propelled frugal Micron into the AI boom and a trillion market cap

Analysis:How a nudge from Nvidia propelled frugal Micron into the AI boom and a $1 trillion market cap

Published by Sam Flores

SAN FRANCISCO, June 2 : Micron Technology’s march toward a $1 trillion valuation is nothing if not dramatic: a year ago it was a little over $100 billion. That surge, though, was not built on its famed frugality, but on a nearly too-late push from Nvidia that pulled the U.S. memory chipmaker into the center of the AI boom. For decades, the Idaho-based company survived by building factories on a shoestring budget, adopting used equipment and avoiding cutting-edge bets. That discipline helped it endure brutal boom-bust cycles in memory chips and outlast rivals, leaving it one of three global suppliers alongside South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. But that approach of treating memory chips as a commodity clashed with Nvidia’s vision for AI. Three years ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met Micron boss Sanjay Mehrotra and outlined how he expected the memory market to evolve, Huang said in a media interview last month. Huang had long bet early that memory, and not just processors, would become a critical bottleneck for AI, forcing suppliers like …

The groupthink boom: what three top VCs really think about the AI frenzy

The groupthink boom: what three top VCs really think about the AI frenzy

Published by skeptic

This week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathenea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom. With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market? Andreas Stavropoulos: I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, …

Europe’s Deindustrialization vs America’s Quiet Investment Boom

Europe’s Deindustrialization vs America’s Quiet Investment Boom

Published by Jenni Sidey

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe German Chancellor Friedrich Merz appears disoriented, whiny-apathetic, and remarkably weak in leadership these days. Perhaps the chancellor senses that the project of his political generation is entering its final phase. Is he aware that the construction of eco-socialism has failed? That both his reckless debt policies and Germany’s rapid deindustrialization are consequences of this ideological insanity? The fact that Friedrich Merz still found the audacity — despite the catastrophic domestic political and economic situation at home — to publicly accuse U.S. President Donald Trump of lacking strategy in the Iran conflict speaks to an almost immeasurable degree of stubborn arrogance and self-delusion. There he was again: the German know-it-all. The type of politician who once lectured Europe’s neighbors over debt problems while failing to compare his own actions with the present condition of his own country. Merz would have done well to take a look at the American economy and the U.S. labor market before stepping onto such embarrassingly thin rhetorical ice. In April, the private sector in the United States …

Inside the Luxury Sports Tourism Boom

Inside the Luxury Sports Tourism Boom

Published by Sam Flores

When Seattle Seahawks fan Stephanie Daniel and her husband wanted to attend Super Bowl LX in VIP fashion, they couldn’t call any old travel agent. Instead they tapped On Location, a company that designs bespoke experiences for the Olympics, FIFA, the NFL, and more—ensuring those with deep enough pockets don’t just enjoy a game, but feel like they’re running plays. Seventy-five hundred dollars later, the couple were mingling with NFL legends Earl Thomas and Adam Vinatieri at an all-inclusive pregame tailgate. From their vantage point behind the end zone, Bad Bunny’s halftime show felt more like being serenaded, and witnessing their team win before their very eyes, “was electric in every way,” says Daniel, a voice actor. An even more eye-popping “tier” included private concerts by Sting and the Killers; a Napa Valley brunch hosted by Julian Edelman and Megan Rapinoe; club-level sideline seating; a chef-curated menu and open bar; and an opportunity for clients to trot their designer footwear onto the field as the Seahawks were hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy, showered in blue …

The Gulf’s AI Boom Has an Undersea Cable Problem

The Gulf’s AI Boom Has an Undersea Cable Problem

Published by skeptic

The Gulf’s AI ambitions depend on something surprisingly fragile: a handful of undersea cables running through some of the world’s most volatile waterways. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent billions building AI infrastructure, attracting hyperscalers and positioning themselves as future exporters of compute capacity. But as the region shifts from oil wealth to AI-driven economies, the infrastructure carrying that data is increasingly becoming a strategic vulnerability. Undersea cables have long powered the global internet. Now, they are becoming geopolitical assets. Following the escalation between the US, Israel, and Iran earlier this year, experts warned that regional conflict could threaten critical cable infrastructure in the Gulf. In May, media reports claimed Iran was considering taking control of all seven undersea cables running through the Strait of Hormuz. Undersea cables carry an estimated 95 percent of all international data traffic. For the Gulf, the problem is concentration: Much of the region’s connectivity to Europe and the US still depends on just a few routes through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. The …

Resolve AI says the AI coding boom is breaking production systems. It wants to fix that.

Resolve AI says the AI coding boom is breaking production systems. It wants to fix that.

Published by skeptic

Resolve AI, the production-operations startup backed by Greylock and Lightspeed Venture Partners, today announced a sweeping expansion of its platform that introduces always-on background agents, a redesigned investigation architecture, and a shared workspace where engineers and AI agents collaborate in real time on live incidents. The centerpiece of the release is a new multi-agent investigation system developed by Resolve AI’s in-house research lab. Instead of deploying a single AI agent to diagnose a production failure — analogous to a lone engineer pulling an on-call shift — the platform now dispatches a coordinated team of specialized agents that pursue multiple hypotheses in parallel, independently verify each other’s conclusions, and construct complete causal chains from root cause to symptom. The company says the architecture delivers more than a twofold improvement in root cause accuracy on its internal evaluation benchmarks compared to earlier versions of its platform. “Think of a single agent being on call, the way a human would be,” Resolve AI CEO and co-founder Spiros Xanthos told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. …

SEIA: AI is fueling a massive US energy storage boom

SEIA: AI is fueling a massive US energy storage boom

Published by skeptic

Photo: Fluence Energy The US energy storage industry kicked off 2026 with its strongest Q1 on record, despite the Trump administration continuing to attack clean energy. According to the latest US Energy Storage Market Outlook released today from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the US installed 9.7 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of new energy storage capacity in Q1 2026. That’s a 32% year-over-year jump. Global instability is causing growth Utility-scale batteries made up the vast majority of new installations, with 7.8 GWh added during the quarter. The commercial and industrial segment installed 648 megawatt-hours (MWh), while residential storage added 515 MWh. And the industry expects even more growth ahead. The report has been revised upward to forecast more than 610 GWh of energy storage installations by 2030. Advertisement – scroll for more content A major reason is instability in the global fossil fuel market due to the war in Iran. As gas prices remain volatile and supply disruptions continue to affect natural gas and gas turbines, solar and battery storage are increasingly …