The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar.

Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the US’s reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

There’s an argument to be made about reducing reliance on any single source of a crucial energy technology. But all this tension raises a broader question for me: How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?

This is hardly America’s first push to move away from Chinese influence in the battery supply chain. One of the major policy tools used in recent years is restricting the tax credits designed to incentivize use of the new technologies. Limiting the types of projects that are eligible can help reduce the cost of local technologies so they’re more competitive with otherwise cheaper imported options.

Back in 2022, the US government designed the tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act to restrict where a battery’s minerals could be mined, processed, or recycled, as well as where a battery and its components were assembled.

Those tax credits underwent a makeover in 2025, but the Trump administration has taken a similar tack. New legislation requires that starting in 2026, 55% of the cost of materials used for new energy storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries or the projects won’t qualify for tax credits. 

And we can’t forget about tariffs. Import taxes for batteries increased to 25% in January, up from 7.5%.

But the new executive order is a more drastic move. It bans the installation of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment” that poses a national security risk. The order specifically calls out battery energy storage systems, as well as inverters and transformers.

“An outright ban was a bit of a surprise, and it does create a bit of concern for domestic players in the US,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an energy industry analyst.

The move is likely to slow deployment of grid-connected energy storage projects in the near term, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy. Projects could face delays as developers wait for clarity on the rules.

Depending on the detailed guidance from the Department of Energy, which is expected by the end of the year, some projects may need to find alternative sources for their cells, whether they’re domestically produced or imported from other countries. These will likely be more expensive than Chinese imports, says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. “Worst case, those projects could get canceled,” he says.

Technically, the order applies even to existing energy storage plants, though it’s unlikely that they’ll be taken offline because of their batteries’ origin. Since most of these plants currently use Chinese batteries, enforcing the order to the letter would essentially mean removing most installed battery energy storage from the US grid, Kikuma says.

In the longer term, the US will eventually be able to meet its own demand for batteries. The country could have enough capacity by about 2030, though some factories may not ramp up or run at their full capability, meaning domestic supply won’t actually meet demand until later in the 2030s. 

New factories from LG Energy Solutions, Samsung SDI, Ford, and SK On are set to come online or ramp up by next year. In an ironic twist, a slowing EV market is helping, as some factories originally designed for vehicle batteries are retooling to build cells for grid storage instead. 

But it will come at a cost. Today, batteries produced in the US are still significantly more expensive than those made in China. Even switching to imports from other countries like South Korea would likely be more expensive.

This is a crucial issue that goes beyond the US and even beyond batteries. China is miles ahead of much of the rest of the world on technologies like solar panels and batteries. Through years of government support and experience with research and manufacturing, the nation is an energy powerhouse.

There’s a delicate political balance to maintain as the world figures out how to navigate this situation. There’s cheap technology on offer, which can help drastically reduce emissions and energy costs. But there can be risks associated with relying too much on any one player for crucial technologies.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

A Meta anunciou hoje o Muse, um agente de inteligência artificial generativa pessoal e privado que foi projetado pela empresa para ajudar usuários a explorar novas ideias e cumprir suas metas.

Focado no público em geral, ele é bem simples de usar. Basta dizer ao Muse o que precisa ser feito para que ele execute a tarefa — sem curva de aprendizado ou necessidade de experiência.

Usuários podem pedir-lhe que faça tarefas como enviar um email ou até mesmo reservar uma viagem, graças à capacidade do Muse de abrir o navegador, preencher formulários ou clicar em elementos da tela.

Ele se conecta aos apps e serviços que você usa no dia a dia, um por vez e sempre por sua escolha, em categorias como email e calendário, pagamentos, fitness e saúde, música e eventos ao vivo, restaurantes e compras, e casa inteligente. Os conectores integrados estão disponíveis nas configurações, e outros estão por vir. Se um serviço não estiver lá, mas tiver uma API pública, seu Muse pode configurar uma conexão usando credenciais fornecidas por você; e se não tiver API nenhuma, ele pode usar o serviço por meio de um navegador, do mesmo jeito que você faria.

Com a capacidade de continuar trabalhando mesmo depois de os usuários fecharem o app, o Muse é capaz de realizar pagamentos via Stripe e, futuramente, também suportará o Shop Pay.

Bastante proativo, o Muse se lembra do que é importante para o usuário e pode fazer sugestões sem a inserção de um prompt ou atuar com base em detalhes mencionados apenas uma vez.

Construído com base no Muse Spark, o modelo mais poderoso da Meta, o agente também conta com mecanismos avançados de segurança para proteger a sua interação com o usuário final.

Ele é executado em seu próprio computador dedicado na nuvem — que é onde os dados e credenciais para qualquer serviço conectado a ele são armazenados com segurança.

O Muse foi lançado nos Estados Unidos para a web, iOS e Android. Ele é grátis “para a maioria do que as pessoas precisam”, com planos de assinatura para pessoas que querem “fazer mais”.

Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.

Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.

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In June 2024, a small company called Zanskar purchased a geothermal power plant in New Mexico that was failing fast. The water coming from the underground reservoir was getting colder by the day, making the plant uneconomical to run.

Now, two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again, thanks to a new well. With the help of advanced modeling and modern drilling technology, the company was able to identify a better potential well site, drill down thousands of feet, and revive the entire operation.

As the world looks for more sources of emissions-free electricity that are available 24-7, Lightning Dock shows there’s still hidden potential deep beneath our feet. 

Conventional geothermal power plants rely on having the right underground conditions. Water flows through fractured hot rocks to harvest heat and then through a power plant to generate electricity. If the water isn’t hot enough or not enough flows, the power plant can’t work efficiently.

Lightning Dock came online in 2013, and the site historically had two production wells that were used to feed the power plant. It’s common to see temperatures drop at a well site over time, typically at a rate of 1 to 2 °F per year. In the period before Zanskar took over the site, Lightning Dock saw temperatures drop by 50 °F over five years, a rate of 10 °F per year. When the company purchased the facility, the water going into the power plant was just 250 °F, while the plant was designed to operate at temperatures of at least 310 °F. 

When Zanskar mapped the underground conditions at Lightning Dock using advanced modeling techniques, they discovered that the wells were only hitting the very top of the reservoir there. Those production wells were quite shallow (at just 2,500 feet deep) and not in the best location, says Joel Edwards, Zanskar’s cofounder and CTO.

The company’s modeling predicted that if the company were to drill another, deeper well in a new spot, the plant would be able to run efficiently. The team drilled a new well that reaches a depth of 8,000 feet and started operation in May 2025.

After a full year, the well is still flowing at more than 4,000 gallons per minute. The plant has “completely turned around,” Edwards says. “It looks really exciting.”

The data so far shows that the plant should be successful for years to come. “Ultimately you need to run these things for long time frames to get confidence in their performance over long time frames,” Edwards says.

The progress at Lightning Dock could be good news for other geothermal sites too. The conventional wisdom in geothermal energy is that the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. But there’s usually a trade-off: With those depths come rocks that are packed tighter together. So drilling deeper could mean the hot water can’t flow as effectively, a problem for anyone trying to use it to generate electricity in a power plant.

What the team found, however, was that the flow actually increased in the area where they drilled the new well. “That fundamentally changes how you think about not just Lightning Dock but all hydrothermal assets in America and what the potential can be for all of them,” says Ben Brenner, director of federal affairs at Zanskar. 

Over the past year of operation, Lightning Dock generated over twice the electricity it would have with the old wells. This is a relatively small power plant, with a capacity of 15 megawatts going to the local grid (about enough to power 11,000 US homes).

Oil and gas developers have chased resources deeper underground over the past few decades. Operations started relatively close to the surface, but oil and gas production can stretch down 20,000 feet or more today. “I think that arc is going to play out in geothermal,” Edwards says. While typical geothermal well fields range from 3,000 to 5,000 feet deep, it could become more common to go deeper in the future, he adds.  

The company plans to do further development at the Lightning Dock site: with a few years of development and an upgrade to the power plant, it could get even more electricity out of this area, Edwards says.

There’s been a lot of buzz and investment in enhanced geothermal systems—projects that aim to expand where geothermal resources can be used. Fervo Energy, for example, uses fracking techniques to open up rock that would otherwise be too closed off for traditional geothermal energy.

But there’s still plenty of “low-hanging fruit” in the geothermal world, Edwards says. Many of these conventional resources have plenty of potential—they just need a second look.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the title of Joel Edwards. He is Zanskar’s CTO, not CEO.

On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day.

Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE). It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America.

An underground power line might not sound all that exciting, but this could be a big deal for the state’s grid planning, and for emissions. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.

One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. Let’s look at how the CHPE transmission line could help shape the future of our grid, and what barriers it needs to overcome to make a difference.

Planning for the CHPE (which is charmingly pronounced “chippy”) started 15 years ago, with the permitting process formally beginning in March 2010. The vision was to build infrastructure to better connect Quebec and southern New York.

Over 99% of Quebec’s electricity comes from renewable sources; most demand is met with hydropower, though the province’s wind capacity is growing quickly. New York has some hydropower of its own, as well as nuclear and wind, but the state still relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy generation.

Transmission Developers, a company owned by the alternative asset management firm Blackstone, and Hydro-Québec, the province’s manager of generation and transmission, partnered to build CHPE. Construction began in late 2022 and wrapped up earlier this year. The total cost for the privately funded project turned out to be  $6 billion.

The construction of this line was a feat. It’s made up of a bundle of two high-voltage direct-current power cables, each measuring roughly five inches across. Developers buried the bundle underground or underwater across the length of New York State. Much of the line was laid at the bottom of the Hudson River, requiring special boats that shot water jets deep into the sediment to create trenches for the cable.

Connecting grids together can help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. The ability to move electricity to where it’s needed could also help limit the amount of new capacity we need to build. Research has shown that interconnection can help cut emissions and lower system costs.

But CHPE is off to a slow start and has seen two outages so far. The first, on July 1, was reportedly caused by a trip at a converter on the Canadian side of the border. The second outage began on July 4, and the power line is still down as of the morning of July 22.

Some experts say this isn’t unusual for a new infrastructure project. Other power lines have seen similar startup challenges, and the equipment hasn’t really been fully tested until it’s in operation, Normand Mousseau, a physics professor at Université de Montréal, told the Gazette.

Officials traced the issue to a damaged section of cable on the US side of the border, and the company that manufactured the line sent experts to investigate the cause, according to reporting from RTO Insider, a trade publication. 

The damaged portion of the cable has been removed and replaced, says Lynn St-Laurent, a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec. “It is currently estimated that the remaining work, including necessary post-repair testing, will be completed by the weekend.”

Similar woes have afflicted the New England Clean Energy Connect line, which opened in January, stretching 145 miles from Quebec to Maine. That project has also seen outages, and very little additional energy has flowed into the Northeast.

The good news for New York is that the grid wasn’t relying on CHPE yet. “Our planning studies did not assume CHPE would be available this summer, and that was one reason the grid performed reliably during the heat wave earlier this month,” Kevin Lanahan, a spokesperson for the New York Independent System Operator, the state’s grid management company, said in a statement. “A core principle of reliability planning is not relying on any single project.” 

The idea is that eventually, states and regions will be able to rely—at least in part—on these projects, so there is pressure to get them working smoothly: Building massive transmission lines is a major long-term investment. In future years, as the equipment gets stress-tested and utilities begin to feel more confident in the projects’ reliability, they could play a bigger role on the grid.

One thing to keep an eye on moving forward is the condition of Quebec’s hydropower fleet: The region has seen intense drought for the past three years, eating into the water reserves used to generate electricity. That could mean there won’t always be abundant hydropower to ship across the border—even if the transmission lines are able to carry it. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Em 1995, a SEGA investiu 5 milhões de dólares na Nvidia e salvou a empresa da falência. Três décadas depois, Jensen Huang e o CEO da SEGA celebraram a parceria em Akihabara, anunciando que jogos clássicos e novos títulos como o Virtua Fighter Crossroads chegarão aos novos PCs RTX Spark.

The post RTX Spark volta a unir Nvidia com a SEGA 30 anos depois do NV1 appeared first on Tek Notícias.

By the end of a long day, my right thumb clicks, not every time, but often enough that

Au Computex, Jensen Huang n’est pas seulement venu présenter une nouvelle puce ARM pour Windows. À travers RTX Spark, le patron de Nvidia dessine surtout une vision beaucoup plus ambitieuse de l’avenir du PC, qui serait destiné à devenir comme R2-D2.

Nate Snow, diretor da unidade de negócio da Asus, diz que empresas procuram cada vez mais soluções combinadas entre hardware e software que permitam implementar inteligência artificial de forma prática e segura, reduzindo custos de utilização de tokens e com facilidade para escalar o negócio.

The post “Temos a solução para as empresas criarem as infraestruturas para a nova onda de Inteligência Artificial” appeared first on Tek Notícias.

Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. There's Microsoft Scout, an OpenClaw-based "Autopilot" agent that can hook into Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models; an expanded preview of "Codename MDASH," which is a "multi-model agentic scanning system" meant to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.

A few of those announcements stood out to us as particularly interesting, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seem like they may have some utility for those who aren't spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft's recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn't really come up, but there have been plenty of other announcements on that front lately.)

On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.

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Depois daquela que foi considerada a mais relevante apresentação, até agora, na Computex 2026, está na altura de conhecer um pouco melhor o que é o Nvidia RTX Spark, e quais os primeiros equipamentos a virem equipados com o mesmo.

The post Da Asus à Lenovo: Estes são primeiros portáteis equipados com o “super processador” Nvidia RTX Spark appeared first on Tek Notícias.

These days, Nvidia primarily sells AI data center products, and its traditional consumer devices feel like more of a side project. But the company occasionally still releases something designed for consumers. After a couple of years of rumors, Nvidia has announced an Arm-based chip designed to power Windows PCs. Dubbed RTX Spark, the new chip combines a 20-core Nvidia Grace CPU co-developed with MediaTek, up to 6,144 Blackwell-based GPU cores (the same architecture as the RTX 50-series GPUs), and support for up to 128GB of unified LPDDR5x memory.

Nvidia and its partners offered nothing about expected pricing, but both "slim Windows laptops with all-day battery life and premium displays" and "compact desktop PCs" are slated to be "available this fall" from partners including Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte.

This isn't Nvidia's first chip for Windows PCs; earlier chips in the Tegra series powered several of the short-lived Windows RT tablets. But Tegra chips largely stopped appearing in consumer devices following the Tegra X1 in the late 2010s (variants power the original Nintendo Switch and the apparently unkillable Nvidia Shield TV box). Modern Arm-based PCs in the Windows 10 and Windows 11 eras have all used processors from Qualcomm.

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