Two stories dominated the tech conversation this week: Europe’s record-breaking heat is breaking its power grid, and IBM has built a chip that pushes the limits of what silicon can do.
The heat wave is forcing people to crank up fans and AC, and demand is outstripping supply. Some plants aren’t even online — Europe traditionally scheduled maintenance outages for summer, since winter was always the peak demand season. That seasonal assumption is falling apart. Growing AC adoption is shifting the demand curve, and climate change means these heat waves will only get more frequent and intense. Grid planners need a lot more supply, fast.
Meanwhile, IBM has a different kind of infrastructure problem in mind — the approaching end of Moore’s Law. Their new prototype chip packs roughly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-sized area. That’s double the density of their 2021 state-of-the-art. The trick? Building up instead of out, like urban planners stacking floors instead of spreading sprawl. Transistors have been shrunk close to their physical limits; they can’t get smaller without function deteriorating. Going vertical could buy the industry another decade.
Elsewhere: Anthropic accused Alibaba of running a “brazen” distillation campaign to extract Claude’s capabilities. NASA’s Perseverance rover detected complex carbon on Mars — possible signatures of ancient microbial life. OpenAI and Broadcom revealed Jalapeño, their first jointly designed AI chip. And a new report shows ICE has assembled a vast surveillance system including facial recognition, drones, and data scraping.
