Environment

• Automakers like Ford and GM are jumping into a whole new business where Tesla is a serious player - Automakers Ford and GM are trying to figure out what to do with battery factories now that EV sales are falling way short of forecasts
• Big Tech is poaching energy talent to fuel its AI ambitions - Hires of energy-related talent by Big Tech was 30% higher in 2025 than pre-AI levels.
• Bill Gates is still optimistic about the world's future—depending on these 3 questions - Bill Gates is optimistic that our lives will continue to improve in the coming decades despite "many challenges and so much polarization," he wrote on Friday.
• The Trump Administration Approved a Big Lithium Mine. A Top Official’s Husband Profited. - Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 at the Interior Department, didn’t disclose a $3.5 million water-rights contract between her husband and the developers of a Nevada mine, records show.
• From data center spas to servers in space: How the energy crunch is reshaping cloud computing - Data centre developers and designers are starting to get creative.
• Europe at 'fork in the road' between AI competition and climate: fund managers - As power-hungry infrastructure scales and demand for electricity surges, friction between competition and climate goals becomes harder to ignore.
• Trump Tosses Lifelines to the Struggling Coal Industry - The Energy Department ordered two coal-burning power plants to remain open, and the Environmental Protection Agency gave utilities more time to tackle toxic coal ash.
• What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal could mean for Europe's gas supplies - While pipeline infrastructure could be salvageable, turning the tap back on is set to be politically controversial.
• Red hot Texas is getting so many data center requests that experts see a bubble - Cheap land and and cheap energy are helping to fuel a boom in proposals to build data centers in Texas.
• ‘Greetings, earthlings’: Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space as orbital data center race heats up - The company's Starcloud-1 satellite is running Gemma, an open model from Google, marking the first time in history that an LLM has been trained in outer space.