Modern Hydrogen — a clean energy startup with technology that at one time seemed to delight Bill Gates and attracted his investment — has now laid off most of its employees and left contractors and vendors anxious about unpaid invoices.

The Seattle-area company has not publicly offered an explanation for the downsizing or said how many workers were impacted. In a recent email to business partners, officials referenced recent funding changes and said it was undergoing a “broader restructuring effort.”

Modern Hydrogen raised $125 million since launching a decade ago. It developed a device for cracking natural gas molecules, producing hydrogen as a climate friendly fuel and a material known as solid carbon that has a variety of industrial uses, including as a key ingredient in asphalt.

Gates explored that application during a visit to Modern Hydrogen last year. The Microsoft co-founder grabbed a wheelbarrow and shovel to fill a parking lot pothole with the carbon-trapping asphalt.

The layoffs hit as the company was preparing to finish its first commercial unit for a customer in Texas and had performed two successful pilot projects with utilities in Portland, Ore., and Miami.

In January, Modern Hydrogen announced a memorandum of understanding with Puget Sound Energy, a major Seattle-area utility, to collaborate in identifying industrial customers interested in the clean hydrogen technology. That was expected to include steel and cement makers and pulp-and-paper manufacturers that use processes requiring ultra-high temperatures that could be met by hydrogen.

Given that the company had seemingly solved the new technology’s technical hurdles and was building commercial momentum, employees and business partners were surprised by the layoffs.

“A lot of folks were rooting for us,” Michael Jung, Modern Hydrogen’s former government affairs and public policy lead, told GeekWire. “I think we would have solved some key problems in the energy transition.”

On Oct. 30, Amir Moftakhar, Modern Hydrogen’s chief financial officer, sent an email to some of its subcontractors and vendors disclosing the change of course.

“We wanted to inform you that, due to recent changes in our funding situation and a significant reduction in company operations, we must terminate our engagement with you effective 10/30/2025,” stated the email, which was shared with GeekWire by one of its recipients.

“This decision is part of a broader restructuring effort which is being developed and does not reflect on your work,” Moftakhar continued. “We want to sincerely thank you for the professionalism, dedication, and quality you’ve shown throughout our collaboration and for your understanding.”

It is unclear if the company is closing entirely, what will happen with the machinery and technology, and if some component of the effort will continue in a different form.

GeekWire reached out to Modern Hydrogen CEO Tony Pan for an official comment and will update the story if he responds. We contacted a Gates’ representative for a comment as well.

One subcontractor, who asked not to be named, said that until the email went out, “things were cooking along” in their collaboration with Modern Hydrogen. Now the company is anxious about if and when it will get paid for outstanding invoices that total tens of thousands of dollars.

Modern Hydrogen got its start in 2015 at Intellectual Ventures, an innovation hub created by former Microsoft researcher Nathan Myhrvold with backing from Gates. The startup, which was originally called Modern Electron, initially focused on devices that paired with home furnaces and hot water tanks to capture the appliances’ wasted heat and turn it into electricity.

In 2023 it pivoted to focus on hydrogen and changed its name. The company’s most recent round was $25 million raised a year ago. It had approximately 80 employees at the time, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. Modern Hydrogen co-founder and former CTO Max Mankin left the company in January.

Gates has in the past been an enthusiastic supporter of hydrogen fuel. In June 2022, he posted a Gates Notes touting the so-called “Swiss Army knife” of clean energy given its versatile applications. He was a prominent investor in the company, whose other backers included NextEra Energy, one of the world’s largest utilities; Miura; National Grid Partners; IRONGREY; Starlight Ventures; Valo Ventures and Metaplanet.

Hydrogen saw a surge of interest during the Biden administration, which created hydrogen hubs around the U.S. to bolster the technology. That support has been curtailed under the Trump administration, which canceled funding for hubs in the Pacific Northwest and California, while the remaining five hubs appear to be at risk of losing support.

And on Oct. 28, Gates posted a memo on his personal blog that dampened his earlier excitement around climate efforts.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise,” Gates wrote. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

Editor’s note: Information added Dec. 4 to provide detail on the hydrogen hubs.

Nuclear power company TerraPower has passed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff’s final safety evaluation for a permit to build a reactor in Wyoming. The Washington-based company backed by Bill Gates and NVIDIA could be the first to deploy a utility-scale, next-generation reactor in America.

TerraPower’s Natrium design pairs a small modular reactor (SMR) with an integrated thermal battery. The SMR generates 345 megawatts of continuous electrical power. The thermal battery, which stores excess heat in molten salt, allows the system to surge its output to 500 megawatts for more than five hours, generating enough energy to power 400,000 homes at maximum capacity.

“Today is a momentous occasion for TerraPower, our project partners and the Natrium design,” said company CEO Chris Levesque in a statement issued Monday. The favorable assessment “reflects years of rigorous evaluation, thoughtful collaboration with the NRC, and an unwavering commitment to both safety and innovation.”

The company launched in 2006 and is building on technology used in an experimental breeder reactor in Idaho that operated for nearly 30 years before shutting down.

TerraPower set a goal of producing power at the Kemmerer, Wyo., site by 2030. The reactor is located near a retiring coal plant.

There is tremendous renewed interest in nuclear as tech giants and data center operators scramble for new energy sources to power AI operations. Microsoft, Amazon and others have invested in a combination of existing nuclear plants that can be restarted and construction of new facilities. The Trump administration has pledged to expedite permitting.

“We’ve finished our technical work on the Kemmerer review a month ahead of our already accelerated schedule, as we aim to make licensing decisions for new, advanced reactors in no more than 18 months,” said Jeremy Groom, acting director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

“We thank TerraPower for promptly addressing the agency’s questions to ensure safety and enable the NRC to efficiently process the application,” he added in a statement.

The NRC said there are no safety aspects that would preclude issuing a construction permit for the reactor. TerraPower last year broke ground in Wyoming on non-nuclear components of the facility.

In June the company announced $650 million in new funding from Gates, who helped start TerraPower, as well as the venture arm of chip giant NVIDIA. It previously raised more than $1 billion, including investments from Gates as well as South Korea-based SK Inc. and SK Innovation, according to PitchBook. TerraPower has additionally been awarded roughly $2 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy.

There are still additional permitting hurdles to complete:

• In the coming weeks, the NRC staff will provide a safety evaluation and final environmental impact statement to the Commission for the final phase of the licensing.
• The Commission then determines whether the staff’s review supports the findings required to issue the permit, and votes on whether to direct the staff to issue the permit.
• If the NRC issues the permit, TerraPower will need to submit an operating license application for approval.

This story first appeared on Real Estate News.

Home search leader Zillow has changed the way that it shares climate risk information — directing visitors to the website of data partner First Street rather than surfacing it on Zillow home detail pages.

“This update ensures consumers continue to have access to important information to help them consider factors such as insurance, repair costs and long-term homeownership planning, and reflects our long-standing commitment to empowering consumers with transparent information,” a Zillow spokesperson shared with Real Estate News over email when asked about the move.

What’s less clear is the role one of the nation’s largest MLSs played in the change.

First reported by The New York Times in late November, Zillow’s removal of climate risk data from its listings comes as industry stakeholders vigorously debate over the ownership of listing data and as home insurance prices continue to skyrocket.

Why Zillow made the change — for all its listings

The New York Times story highlighted complaints from real estate agents along with the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS) and its CEO Art Carter about perceived discrepancies and inconsistencies in the climate risk data, and implied that Zillow’s change was done under pressure from CRMLS.

In a statement shared with Real Estate News, a Zillow spokesperson said that the change was made to comply with different MLS requirements but did not highlight CRMLS specifically. Zillow’s change in the way it displays climate risk data has been applied to all listings on the site, not just homes in California or those within CRMLS’ jurisdiction. 

“Zillow remains committed to providing consumers with information that helps them make informed real estate decisions. We updated our climate risk product experience to adhere to varying MLS requirements and maintain a consistent experience for all consumers,” the spokesperson said.

However, other leading portals are still showing climate data in home listings. “You can still find property level climate risk scores on Redfin,” Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather wrote in a social media post that linked to the New York Times story. 

CRMLS’s role and response

“There was no change in the rules,” a CRMLS spokesperson said over email when asked if there was a specific update in MLS standards and practices that would have led to Zillow’s move.  

So why now? If Zillow has implied that the change was made in order to remain in compliance with MLS practices, what exactly was CRMLS’s role in the change to home search site’s display of climate data? The dispute between Zillow and CRMLS could also be viewed as another example of the ongoing fight among major industry stakeholders over the control of listings and listing data. 

In October, CRMLS and Compass engaged in a feud over the MLS’s end user licensing agreement, which Compass CEO Robert Reffkin argued forced “over 100,000 agents to accept a 10-page agreement giving CRMLS the right to sell the agents’ content and contribution.” Carter said the MLS serves its users by managing the data they provide “as a set, not as a bunch of individual fragments” and the agreement reflects that.

The impact of skyrocketing insurance rates

As organized real estate and home search sites debate the accuracy of climate data and the merits of displaying it on property listings, one issue that isn’t being disputed is the rising cost of home insurance. Zillow’s move to point consumers off the site to explore climate risks comes at a time when more homeowners are seeing major increases in their insurance premiums and others are actually seeing the steep costs of insurance eat into their home value. 

While speaking at a November event for ResiClub, Cotality Chief Data and Analytics Officer John Rogers said the average annual change in homeowners insurance premiums was 14% for both 2023 and 2024 and is expected to be 10% in 2025. Rogers also forecasted an 8% rise in premiums for 2026 and in 2027. 

But California home owners and buyers are being hit particularly hard. According to the California Association of Realtors’ latest State of the Market annual report and survey, over a quarter of member agents signaled that their buyers were having difficulty obtaining insurance. And the number of buyers losing out on a home because of issues with home insurance has been increasing. Last year, over 14% of member agents reported that at least one sale fell through because buyers could not secure homeowners insurance while the number rose to over 16% in 2025.

The University of Washington is powering up its vision for a brighter, more sustainable future with a newly completed solar canopy installed in a sprawling parking lot north of Husky Stadium.

The 84-kilowatt solar array is paired with Level 2 EV charging that can accommodate 20 vehicles simultaneously. The $3.7 million project includes electrical infrastructure to support the future installation of panels capable of nearly 30 times more power generation — up to 2.5 megawatts. That’s enough capacity to power roughly 2,000 homes.

The solar canopy is a pilot project supporting the UW’s goals to cut its carbon footprint, said Mark Huppert, interim director of UW Transportation Services.

“Located on the site of the former Montlake landfill, the pilot demonstrates how the land can be put to work to achieve more sustainable outcomes,” Huppert said via email.

Project partners include Sea Con as the general contractor and Prime Electric as the electrical contractor. The canopy system was fabricated by Trinity Structures, which has since rebranded as Trinity Energy.

The installation is connected to electrical grids powering the City of Seattle and the UW’s campus. The ability to generate energy onsite can curb the university’s reliance on the utility grid while reducing the impacts of power outages and fluctuating electricity costs.

“Generating solar power from a parking lot may sound modest, but the strategic value is enormous,” said Darin Leonard, president of Trinity Energy, in a statement.

The idea for the project grew out of a collaboration between the student organization UW Solar; Anne Eskridge, the retired director of UW Transportation Services; and Jan Whittington, director of the UW’s Urban Infrastructure Lab.

The university is currently drafting its 2050 Sustainability Action Plan, which includes the long-term expansion of the parking lot solar canopies.

The UW Solar students “will continue to support the efforts to achieve the vision of a complete build-out,” Huppert said.

The project was funded by UW Transportation Services, Seattle City Light and Washington state’s Climate Commitment Act, administered through the Washington State Department of Commerce’s electric vehicle charging program.

Editor’s note: Story updated to provide additional information on project partners.

When Ambika Singh, the CEO and founder of the online clothing rental company Armoire, began exploring AI applications, she had to thread the needle between embracing cutting-edge tech and deploying it mindfully.

The Seattle startup has always been “a very human-powered business,” Singh said, with a strong sustainability mission to curb clothing waste through rentals. Consequently, employees were anxious about turning tasks over to bots and troubled by the environmental impacts of data centers and AI computing — despite its potential to remove tedium and boost the company’s finances.

In Armoire’s first big AI splash, the company recently launched a virtual stylist to support customers in their search for the perfect tops, pants, jackets and dresses.

The AI initiative is just the latest challenge Singh has navigated since founding Armoire nearly a decade ago. The company survived the pandemic, pivoting from professional attire to leisure wear during lockdowns, before returning to its roots as in-office mandates took effect. She has responded to an evolving customer base, louder calls for resort and après ski outfits, and demand for an in-person storefront for trying on clothes.

Now, the business is weathering the current economic uncertainties driven by layoffs, fluctuating tariffs and rising prices. But while these conditions could raise expenses for Armoire, they are expected to bolster its customer base as clothing rentals become a cost-saving strategy to maintain professional and personal wardrobes.

“Renting your closet is another way to maintain the lifestyle that you want under different budgetary constraints,” Singh said.

‘No chatbot energy here’

The new Armoire AI app helps customers quickly find curated recommendations in a sea of apparel. The assistant asserts itself quietly with a prompt woven into the display of blouses and pants, asking what it can help find. Once a user clicks on it, the tech suggests items to search for and also allows for user-generated questions.

The app takes a few seconds to cross-reference the customer’s preferences — based on past rentals and items she’s liked or voted down — with clothes currently in stock and ready to ship. The AI provides chipper dialogue and refines selections based on feedback.

In pitching the tech, the company said the AI “talks to you just like a real stylist would (no chatbot energy here) and helps you discover the best pieces for your style in seconds — no scrolling required.”

Shopping assistants fueled by generative AI are proving an increasingly popular trend for online retailers, including Amazon’s recent introduction of Rufus to dig up product recommendations. The chatty tech is also showing up on sites like Redfin and Zillow to aid in home searches.

Armoire is developing additional AI technologies, such as a tool to help standardize clothing descriptions across different brands. It might sound trivial, but companies can have significantly different definitions for sleeve length, for example, whether short, long, capped or three-quarter.

The startup has worked to distinguish itself from larger competitors by offering consultations with stylists via phone and email, and Singh said this human touch will remain a core feature. And the AI, of course, isn’t perfect. In our own test, the assistant landed on a solid blazer suggestion but went on to pair it with an absurdly frilly blouse that a human stylist would not have picked.

And some components of the business simply can’t be automated. Armoire has a brick-and-mortar space south of Seattle’s downtown for trying on clothes. It regularly hosts in-person events for networking and fashion shows, including a collection of up-cycled athletic wear from former pro-soccer player Lu Barnes and an annual South Asian fashion event.

Trending upward

Armoire’s multi-faceted approach to clothing rentals and connecting to customers has found success, albeit with some snags along the way.

The startup has raised $12 million from investors, including a $3.5 million round in 2021 that included backing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and others. Armoire reached break-even this quarter, a first for the business.

While the pandemic shrank Armoire’s payroll from more than 60 workers down to 25, it has since rebounded to 100 employees. Last April, the company won Workplace of the Year at the annual GeekWire Awards.

The online clothing rental market is worth an estimated $2.6 billion worldwide, according to October data from Future Market Insights Inc., and it’s expected to grow to $6.4 billion over the decade, with China, India and the U.S. leading the expansion. The sector could benefit as cash-strapped customers look to rentals and secondhand.

“Services that can offer consumers the opportunity to keep their wardrobes fresh on an ongoing basis are really benefiting,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said in a recent NPR story about online rentals.

Armoire remains a smaller operation than competitors such as Rent-the-Runway and Nuuly, which is part of a conglomerate including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People. Her customer base is thousands, Singh said, but not hundreds of thousands.

The success of the bigger outlets are useful as they demonstrate that the model works, she said. “Rental continues to grow and so we’re benefiting from that.”

The training of AI models and AI inferencing consumes vast amounts of water. How can energy and water usage be reduced?

The post The Dark Side of LLMs: Rising Energy and Water Demands Spark Sustainability Fears appeared first on TechRepublic.

The training of AI models and AI inferencing consumes vast amounts of water. How can energy and water usage be reduced?

The post The Dark Side of LLMs: Rising Energy and Water Demands Spark Sustainability Fears appeared first on TechRepublic.

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.

After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Brian Pinkard spent six months “flipping rocks,” as he describes it, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The rock-flipping was purposeful work: Pinkard was clearing obstructions and building trails for AmeriCorps, spending every night in a tent.

“I loved it. It was great. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to do something that mattered, that made a difference in the world,” he said. When the program ended, he was inspired to direct his impact to a larger environmental challenge.

His passion to do good, paired with an engineer’s drive for problem solving, led him to a doctoral degree from the University of Washington and then to launching Aquagga, a startup that’s destroying PFAS — a toxic class of pollutants known as “forever chemicals.”

“Brian has been very laser focused on his mission,” said Igor Novosselov, Pinkard’s PhD advisor and research professor at the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “He’s not a typical scientist who would just go and write a bunch of papers. He’s going after impact where it matters.”

But a few steps before PFAS, Pinkard was focused on nerve gas in the Middle East.

‘Nobody knows how to treat this stuff‘

When Pinkard joined Novosselov’s lab, it had U.S. Department of Defense funding to develop an in-the-field, mobile strategy for treating barrels of abandoned chemical weapons in the Syrian desert. The previous solution was to truck the barrels to the Mediterranean Sea, load them on a boat and incinerate the material.

“If you’re the guy who’s got to transport a nerve agent,” Pinkard noted, “it’s not a very good job.”

Within five years, the lab came up with a workable solution, but the need was no longer urgent and DoD shelved its application of the technology, though Novosselov continued to work on it.

Pinkard appreciated the tremendous power of the strategy for treating dangerous materials and wondered if there was another use case. Then as he was preparing to finish his PhD in June 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, derailing his plans to apply for a university postdoctoral fellowship as no one was hiring.

So he made a pivot to entrepreneurship — a role he had never considered.

Pinkard teamed up with engineer and tech innovator Nigel Sharp to explore the potential for using the tech, called supercritical water oxidation, to treat sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but they realized the market wasn’t viable.

There was, however, buzz about PFAS.

“Everybody was talking about PFAS,” he said, and if anyone could figure out how to destroy the chemicals, it would be a breakthrough. That realization became his lightbulb moment.

Destroying PFAS

PFAS is a family of chemicals that for decades have been added to firefighting foams, food packaging, carpets and fabrics, water-repellent clothing and non-stick pans. The resilient chemicals are great at deflecting water, stains and grease — but they escape from products and now contaminate drinking water across the nation and are even in mothers’ breast milk.

PFAS are still in use, while researchers and regulators are increasingly concerned by their serious health impacts.

Pinkard and Sharp launched Aquagga in 2019 in Tacoma, Wash., and were soon joined by co-founder Chris Woodruff. The team kept the idea of modular treatment units but shifted to a related but different chemistry (hydrothermal alkaline treatment) for destroying PFAS, securing a patent for the approach from the Colorado School of Mines.

“Brian has been a great partner from the beginning,” said Timothy Strathmann, a Colorado School of Mines professor. “Unlike many entrepreneurs I’ve interacted with, he is also deeply interested in understanding the limitations and technical challenges associated with the technology. He’s keenly aware that the long-term success of Aquagga will only be achieved by addressing the critical barriers to deployment.”

Aquagga’s devices annihilates PFAS under super hot, high pressure conditions made caustic and corrosive through the addition of lye.

The company has done nine field demonstrations of its technology, including a project at an airport in Alaska, a DoD-funded project in North Carolina involving firefighting foams, and a wastewater demo with the City of Tacoma. It’s now close to signing its first long-term commercial deployment, Pinkard said, “which will be a huge milestone for us.”

“It’s really cool to see how much PFAS we’ve destroyed … even in our short journey,” Pinkard said. “And to think about where it could go, what it could enable at scale. So [I’m] very optimistic about Aquagga’s future. I’m very optimistic about the impact we could create, the lives we could save.”

Zap Energy shared news that its fusion device has generated a pressure that’s roughly 10,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level, or 10 times the pressure at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench.

“This is a proof of principle that was designed to hit a particular set of milestones and to validate the principle, and it did that with flying colors,” said Ben Levitt, Zap’s head of R&D.

The Everett, Wash., company is in a race to efficiently smash together light atoms, simulating the reactions that fuel the sun. To do that on Earth, physicists need to create super hot temperatures and incredibly dense conditions and sustain that long enough for fusion to take place, releasing energy that can be captured and put on the grid.

Zap also shared that next month it will commission its fifth fusion device to continue testing and optimizing the different systems required by the technology. The new machine will be called FuZE-A.

The company is still operating two other machines, the FuZE-Q and FuZE-3, which is the device that hit the new pressure milestone.

“We can design and build one in half a year,” Levitt said of the fusion machines. “And that’s what our superpower is — this rapid iteration that we have at our fingertips.”

Different paths to fusion

Dozens of companies globally are trying to unlock fusion energy, which has eluded humanity for decades. But physicists are closer than ever to seizing the so-called Holy Grail of clean power, which is in great demand from tech companies running data centers and AI computations, as well as electrified transportation, industrial processes and building cooling and heating.

Physicists are chasing fusion with different kinds of reactors in various configurations using high-powered magnets and lasers to create and hold plasmas, which are super heated gases needed for fusion. Zap’s solution is to run a high current through the plasma in its reactor, which produces a magnetic field called a Z-pinch that contains and compresses the matter.

Helion Energy, a competitor located a short drive from Zap, is taking a different scientific strategy for fusion. It’s building larger fusion generators and has broken ground on a commercial facility in Eastern Washington that is supposed to begin operating in 2028, but essential technical hurdles still must be overcome.

Helion has been largely secretive in its efforts, citing concerns about thefts of intellectual property, while Zap has emphasized a more transparent approach to sharing its science and progress.

Data and progress

Zap will present data on its new 1.6 gigapascal pressure milestone at the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics meeting held this week in Long Beach, Calif., and later submit the research to a peer-reviewed journal.

“We’re going to share it in front of the entire fusion science community and in gory detail,” Levitt said. “So it’s not hot air, it’s hot plasma.”

Zap will also disclose details to the U.S. Department of Energy, which in 2023 selected the company to participate in the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The company has also raised $330 million from investors and is No. 12 on the GeekWire 200, which ranks the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

The recent milestone was achieved by splitting one of the two electrodes in the fusion generator that provide the energy needed to create and contain the plasma. The third electrode gave the device a new, metaphorical “knob” to turn, allowing the machine to crank up compression of the plasma.

The pressure achieved was 10-fold higher than previous efforts and tracks with the largely exponential gains that new iterations of the technology have produced at Zap.

But orders of magnitude of additional improvement are needed to reach the state where the system produces enough energy to feed the electrical grid.

Levitt said it’s hard to say when that could happen as the gains in the system aren’t linear but arrive in punctuated leaps forward. He hinted that scientific breakeven — getting more energy out of the fusion reaction than went into it, but not enough for power production — is possible by the end of the decade.

The new milestone is “great progress” but the work isn’t done, he said. “We’re not waving our flag and resting on our laurels.”

Below: A Zap video from a high-speed camera that captures a flash of plasma formed inside the FuZE-3 device. The camera is pointed straight toward the column of fusion plasma and the compression wave is visible as it collapses inward.

EVERETT, Wash. — It’s a bold ambition to try and replicate on earth the physics that power the sun and the stars.

But clean power innovator Helion Energy is doing much more than that. It’s building its seventh-generation fusion prototype to prove that its technology will deliver energy to the grid while simultaneously constructing a commercial power plant in Central Washington and establishing manufacturing operations to assemble future facilities.

It all rides on Helion’s technology for smashing atoms to work as planned.

“Our goal is not just to do fusion, not just to make energy, but to make electricity,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley.

Helion’s multi-track strategy — developing the prototype while standing up industrial-scale production — reflects the belief that speed will be key once fusion is proven viable.

The company recently signed a lease near its Everett headquarters for a 166,000 square-foot space dubbed Omega where the company will install an assembly line to build the thousands of capacitors needed to deliver massive surges of electricity to its fusion generator and capture the energy it produces.

“Helion is a manufacturing company,” said Sofia Gizzi, Helion’s senior manager of production. “It’s not an R&D company. It’s not a science experiment. It’s very much a manufacturing company.”

To meet its lofty goals, Helion has charted rapid growth in recent years — landing huge investments, hitting a headcount of more than 500 employees, and spreading its footprint across an industrial region north of Seattle that’s also home to aviation titan Boeing.

All of that expansion is built on the promise of fusion — though no company or research institution has yet demonstrated it can create affordable electricity from fusion, the so-called Holy Grail of clean energy.

If it works, the demand is there. Data centers and AI expansion, plus economy-wide efforts to electrify transportation, building heating and cooling, and industrial operations are all hungry for clean power.

Microsoft, which is investing heavily in AI-related data center infrastructure, has agreed to buy the electricity produced by the 50-megawatt Orion plant.

“While the path to commercial fusion is still unfolding, we’re proud to support Helion’s pioneering work here in Washington state as part of our broader commitment to investing in sustainable energy,” said Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, when Orion broke ground in July.

Manufacturing strategies

Building fusion plants requires more than physics breakthroughs — it demands industrial muscle. That’s where Helion’s Omega facility comes in.

The company has long aimed to keep its manufacturing and assembly in-house. The approach avoided supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, could help skirt fluctuating tariffs and, perhaps most importantly, allows for quick adjustments as facility designs and operations are fine-tuned.

Standing inside Omega’s freshly painted, gleaming white space just minutes from Helion’s headquarters, Gizzi explained that the proximity between engineering and manufacturing is strategic.

“If you want to scale quickly, and if you want to be able to build an intelligent manufacturing process, you have to have [manufacturing] engineers with a really good understanding of how the thing works,” Gizzi said. “And you have to have design engineers with a really good understanding of what’s hard about manufacturing.”

Helion’s manufacturing-first philosophy aligns with a broader push to restore American production capacity. Washington state congressional leaders Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Suzan DelBene recently introduced the bipartisan Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act, which would provide large tax credits for fusion supply chain components.

“The state of Washington is the world’s leading hub for fusion energy, which one day soon could provide vast amounts of the type of power we need to keep electricity prices down and increase America’s economic competitiveness,” Cantwell said in announcing the bill last month.

Looking to 2030

Outside of public support, Helion raised $425 million in January specifically to finance its manufacturing build out in the Omega facility. Investors in the round included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, steel manufacturer Nucor, Mithril Capital, SoftBank and others.

The fusion company will begin installing assembly line equipment inside Omega early next year with production starting in late 2026.

The facility will help produce the roughly 2,500 capacitor units needed for the Orion power plant in Malaga, Wash., using both workers and robotics that include off-the-shelf and custom automation technology to significantly expedite the current processes.

With the effort to scale its manufacturing capacity, Helion is focused on the future and what comes after the first plant is running.

“These high volume lines are not for our Orion machine, but for the next machine,” Gizzi said. “A factory operating at 50% of its design capacity or less can spit out Orion, no problem. But we’re really looking beyond that into 2030.”

Salesforce launches a three-pillar water plan for data centers, power, and watersheds — backing restoration in Brazil and Mexico ahead of COP30.

The post Salesforce Unveils Three-Pillar Water Plan, Linking Data Center Efficiency to Global Watershed Health appeared first on TechRepublic.

Salesforce launches a three-pillar water plan for data centers, power, and watersheds — backing restoration in Brazil and Mexico ahead of COP30.

The post Salesforce Unveils Three-Pillar Water Plan, Linking Data Center Efficiency to Global Watershed Health appeared first on TechRepublic.

Clean energy startup ExoFusion today announced it has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy through its Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) program.

The FIRE award will support research into the use of liquid metal walls in fusion generators and will be led by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory with ExoFusion co-founder and chief science officer Michael Kotschenreuther spearheading one of the project’s initiatives.

ExoFusion launched in 2022 and is jointly based in Bellevue, Wash., and Austin, Texas, and bills itself as a boutique fusion company supporting the growing energy sector.

Its business model includes selling or licensing patents; providing simulations, testing and other design support for fusion technologies; developing new innovations; and fusion commercialization consulting services.

The Pacific Northwest is a hub for the technology, which aims to replicate the reactions that fuel the sun and the stars to create clean energy on earth. Local companies include Avalanche, Zap Energy, Helion Energy, Kyoto Fusioneering and Altrusion in Washington state, and General Fusion in British Columbia.

Three of ExoFusion’s co-founders are fusion physics professors at the University of Texas, including Kotschenreuther, senior scientific advisor Swadesh Mahajan, and chief technologist David Hatch. Bellevue-based CEO Romi Mahajan has held leadership for multiple startups and is the son of Swadesh Mahajan.

ExoFusion has been awarded approximately $3 million in grants from sources including DOE’s Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), though some of the money is being issued over time.

The startup previously raised less than $800,000 in seed funding.

A new platform from the Allen Institute for AI promises to deliver insights into the state of the planet, in near real-time, by giving organizations without deep AI expertise the ability to monitor deforestation, assess crop health, and predict wildfire risk, among other capabilities.

OlmoEarth, announced Tuesday by the Seattle-based nonprofit AI institute, is an open, end-to-end system that uses AI to analyze current and historical satellite and sensor data.

It runs on a new family of AI models, which Ai2 says it trained on millions of Earth observations totaling roughly 10 terabytes of data. The idea is to give anyone free access to the kinds of capabilities typically restricted to proprietary systems or well-resourced AI labs. 

The platform includes tools such as OlmoEarth Studio, a workspace for creating datasets and fine-tuning models, and OlmoEarth Viewer, a web app for exploring AI-generated maps.

The initiative is “making Earth AI accessible to those working on the front lines,” said Ali Farhadi, Ai2 CEO and University of Washington professor, in a press release announcing OlmoEarth.

Patrick Beukema, lead researcher on the OlmoEarth team, added that the project is meant to encourage collaboration across scientific and technical fields, helping different groups work together on shared data and tools to better understand and respond to environmental challenges.

Ai2 said early adopters of OlmoEarth are already showing the potential, using it to update global mangrove maps twice as fast with 97% accuracy, detect deforestation across the Amazon, and map vegetation dryness in Oregon to improve wildfire prediction and prevention, for example.

It’s the latest example of Ai2’s push for “true openness” in AI, extending the philosophy behind its open-weight language and multimodal models into climate science and conservation.

Geospatial analysis has long been dominated by major tech and research organizations. Platforms like Google Earth Engine and Microsoft’s Planetary Computer provide cloud access to petabytes of satellite data, but often require significant technical expertise for analysis and are not fully open-source. 

Ai2 is positioning OlmoEarth as an end-to-end open alternative, providing not just data access but a complete, usable system for model fine-tuning and deployment.

At the model level, Ai2 is competing with AI-specific tools from other major labs. In its research, Ai2 contrasts OlmoEarth with Google’s AlphaEarth Foundations, noting that Google released “embeddings” rather than the open model itself. Ai2 says a fine-tuned OlmoEarth “outperformed AEF substantially,” and also did well against models from Meta, IBM, and NASA.

The OlmoEarth Viewer is available starting today, and Ai2 has released accompanying code and documentation on GitHub. The full platform, including OlmoEarth Studio, is rolling out to select partners, and Ai2 is inviting additional collaborations.

Less than two weeks ahead of the United Nations climate conference, Bill Gates posted a memo on his personal blog encouraging folks to just calm down about climate change.

“Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote.

The missive seems to run counter to earlier climate actions taken by the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, but also echoes Gates’ long-held priorities and perspectives. In some regards, it’s the framing, timing and broader political context that heighten the memo’s impact.

What the world needs to do, he said, is to shift the goals away from reducing carbon emissions and keeping warming below agreed-upon temperature targets.

“This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives,” he wrote. “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.“

More than four years ago, Gates published “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” a book highlighting the urgency and necessity of cutting carbon emissions and promoting the need to reduce “green premiums” in order to make climate friendly technologies as cheap as unsustainable alternatives.

“It’ll be tougher than anything humanity’s ever done, and only by staying constant in working on this over the next 30 years do we have a chance to do it,” Gates told GeekWire in 2021. “Having some people who think it’s easy will be an impediment. Having people who think that it’s not important will be an impediment.”

Gates’ clean energy efforts go back even earlier. In 2006 he helped launch the next-gen nuclear company TerraPower, which is currently building its first reactor in Wyoming. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion fund to support carbon-cutting startups, which evolved into Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella organization tackling clean tech policies, funding for researchers and data generation.

Earlier this year, however, Gates began taking steps that suggested a cooling commitment to the challenge.

Roughly two months after President Trump took office in January, and as clean energy policies and funding began getting axed, Breakthrough Energy laid off staff. In May Gates announced he would direct nearly all of his wealth to his eponymous global health foundation, deploying $200 billion through the organization over two decades.

At the same time, many of the key points in the memo published today reflect statements that Gates has made in the past.

In both his new post and at a 2022 global climate summit organized in Seattle by Breakthrough Energy, Gates urged people to focus on reducing green premiums more than on cutting emissions as a key benchmark.

“If you keep the primary measures, which is the emissions reductions in the near term, you’re going to be very depressed,” Gates said. At his summit talk, he shared optimism that new innovations were arriving quickly and would address climate challenges.

A curious paradox in Gates’ stance is the reality that people living in lower-income nations and in regions important to the Gates Foundation are often hardest hit by the rising temperatures and natural disasters that are stoked by increased carbon emissions.

Gates acknowledged that truth in his post this week, and said that solutions such as engineering drought tolerant crops and making air conditioning more widespread can address some of those harms. At the Seattle summit three years ago, one of the Breakthrough Energy executives likewise said the organization was going to increase its investment into technologies for adapting to climate change.

On Nov. 10, global climate leaders will meet in Brazil for COP30 to discuss climate progress and issues. Gates has often attended the event, but the New York Times reported that won’t be the case this year.

UN efforts meanwhile continue to emphasize the importance of reducing emissions. A statement today from the organization notes that while carbon emissions are curving downward, it’s not happening fast enough.

The world needs to raise its climate ambitions, the statement continues, “to avoid the worst climate impacts by limiting warming to 1.5°C this century, as science demands.”

EVERETT, Wash. — In an industrial stretch of Everett is a boxy, windowless building called Ursa. Inside that building is a vault built from concrete blocks up to 5 feet thick with an additional layer of radiation-absorbing plastic. Within that vault is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.

Helion Energy is trying to replicate the physics that fuel the sun and the stars — hence the celestial naming theme — to provide nearly limitless power on earth through fusion reactions.

The company recently invited a small group of journalists to visit its headquarters and see Polaris, which is the seventh iteration of its fusion generator and the prototype for a commercial facility called Orion that broke ground this summer in Malaga in Central Washington.

Few people outside of Helion have been provided such access; photographs were not allowed.

“We run these systems right now at 100 million degrees, about 10 times the temperature of the sun, and compress them to high pressure… the same pressure as the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, referencing the deepest part of the ocean.

Polaris and its vault occupy a relative small footprint inside of Ursa. The majority of the space is filled with 2,500 power units. They’re configured into 4-foot-by-4-foot pallets, lined up in rows and stacked seven high. The units are packed with capacitors that are charged from the grid to provide super high intensity pulses of electricity — 100 gigawatts of peak power — that create the temperatures and pressure needed for fusion reactions.

All of that energy is carried through miles and miles of coaxial cables filled with copper, aluminum and custom-metal alloys. End-to-end, the cables would stretch across Washington state and back again — roughly 720 miles. They flow in thick, black bundles from the pallets into the vault. They curl on the floor in giant heaps before connecting to the tubular-shaped, 60-foot-long Polaris generator.

The ultimate goal is for the generator to force lightweight ions to fuse, creating a super hot plasma that expands, pushing on a magnetic field that surrounds it. The energy created by that expansion is directly captured and carried back the capacitors to recharge them so the process can be repeated over and over again.

And the small amount of extra power that’s produced by fusion goes into the electrical grid for others to use — or at least that’s the plan for the future.

‘Worth being aggressive’

Helion is a contender in a global race to generate fusion power for a rapidly escalating demand for electricity, driven in part by data centers and AI. No one so far has been able to make and capture enough energy from fusion to commercialize the process, but dozens of companies — including three other competitors in the Pacific Northwest — are trying.

The company aims by 2028 to begin producing energy at the Malaga site, which Microsoft has agreed to purchase. If it hits this extremely ambitious target — and many are highly skeptical — it could be the world’s first company to do so.

“There is a level of risk, of being aggressive with program development, new technology and timelines,” Kirtley said. “But I think it’s worth it. Fusion is the same process that happens in the stars. It has the promise of very low cost electricity that’s clean and safe and base load and always on. And so it’s worth being aggressive.”

Some in the sector worry that Helion will miss the mark and cast doubt on a sector that is working hard to prove itself. At a June event, the head of R&D for fusion competitor Zap Energy questioned Helion’s deadline.

“I don’t see a commercial application in the next few years happening,” said Ben Levitt. “There is a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and to be applied.”

Others are willing to take the bet. Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime chair of its board of directors. The company is able to unlock an additional $1.8 billion if it hits Polaris milestones.

The generator has been operating since December, running all day, five days a week, creating fusion, Kirtley said.

Energy without ignition

Helion is highly cautious — some would say too cautious — in sharing details on its progress. Helion officials say they must hold their tech close to the vest as Chinese competitors have stolen pieces of their intellectual property; critics say the secrecy makes it difficult for the scientific community to verify their likelihood of success in a very risky, highly technical field.

In August, Kirtley shared an online post about Helion’s power-producing strategy, which upends the conventional approach.

Most efforts are trying to achieve ignition in their fusion generators, which is a condition where the reactions produce more power than is required for fusion to occur. This feat was first accomplished at a national lab in California in 2022 — but it still wasn’t enough energy that one could put electricity on the grid.

Helion is not aiming for ignition but rather for a system that is so efficient it can capture enough energy from fusion without reaching that state.

Kirtley compares the strategy for producing power to regenerative braking in electric vehicles. Simply put, an EV’s battery gets the car moving, and regenerative braking by the driver puts energy back into the battery to help it run longer. In the fusion generator, the capacitors provide that initial power, and the fusion reaction resupplies the energy and a little bit more.

“We can recover electricity at high efficiency,” Kirtley said. Compared to other commercial fusion approaches, “we require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity.”

Hundreds of global leaders gathered in the Pacific Northwest this week for the inaugural One Ocean Week Seattle, a maritime conference with dozens of events that brought together company executives, government officials and advocates charting paths toward cleaner shipping, sustainable fishing and ocean conservation.

The conference, organized by Washington Maritime Blue, was anchored by Wednesday’s One Ocean Summit, where leaders from global companies with Seattle ties discussed their climate progress and the challenges of deploying sustainable technologies.

Seattle-based SSA Marine, a global marine terminal operator, has 200 locations worldwide, moving cargo from ships to terminals and onto trains and trucks. The company has carbon emissions targets and is working to shift from gas and diesel to electrical power for the machines moving moving the cargo, but the move requires juggling sometimes competing factors.

“If you have a piece of electrical equipment, you have to think about charging time that’s required in between shifts, and when can you actually fit it in there?” said Meghan Weinman, SSA Marine’s vice president of sustainability. “One of those big pieces of innovation that we really have to think about is the overlay of technology, labor planning, and can it do the job that we need it to do.”

Corvus Energy is a Norwegian clean shipping company with Seattle offices and a manufacturing facility in Bellingham, Wash. The business is helping vessels go electric with its maritime battery technologies, serving ferries, cruise ships, tugs, cranes and fishing boats.

It’s an evolving sector and the company spends up to 15% of its annual revenue on research and development to fine-tune its technology to meet demanding oceanic conditions.

“It is totally different to operate a battery in an EV versus a maritime setting,” said Corvus CEO Fredrik Witte. “For an EV, you’re traveling three, four hours a day, maybe. But in a maritime setting, you’re potentially operating 24/7.”

Seattle’s Trident Seafoods operates fishing boats and onshore production facilities, including the largest seafood processing plant in North America in Akutan, Alaska. While seafood typically has a much lower carbon footprint than beef, pork or dairy, the company wants to reduce the climate impacts associated with its operations.

But Paul Doremus, Trident Seafoods’ vice president of policy and sustainability, pointed to a hard reality: the company competes directly with Russian and Chinese seafood companies that are doing business under less stringent environmental regulations.

He said the seafood sector — “which has been kind of famously fragmented, small, fairly scrappy” — needs to come together to collectively make improvements.

Doremus applauded events like One Ocean Week Seattle for gathering maritime interests to draw attention and capital toward “sustainable use of the ocean for the benefit of local communities, regional and national.”

“I think that’s the next wave,” he said.

Collaboration and innovation

The call for collaboration echoed throughout the One Ocean Summit, which also featured former NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, United Nations officials, and Norway’s ambassador to the U.S.

Washington Lt. Gov. Denny Heck gave a welcome address, highlighting the state’s maritime economy while calling out threats from plastic pollution, undersea noise, and environmental degradation.

“To face these challenges, we will need to develop new technologies and strengthen our institutions,” Heck said. “It will require sustainable fuel storage, habitat restoration, quiet propulsion and so many other inventions and innovations. But more importantly, it will require the dedication and teamwork of thousands of people.”

The message was reinforced by Haakon Vatle, leader of the One Ocean Expedition, which is sailing a 111-year-old Norwegian tall ship across the globe. The ship, named the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, was moored just outside Bell Harbor International Conference Center during the event.

“The role of our ship is to create attention and share knowledge of the crucial role of the ocean for a sustainable future,” Vatle said. “We’re going to use a ship to reduce the gap between science and the public — get the people we need for the ocean we want. We cannot save the ocean alone.”

Editor’s note: GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler was the volunteer emcee of the One Ocean Summit.

Seattle agriculture-tech startup Carbon Robotics raised $20 million in new funding to support the creation of another piece of AI-powered machinery for farms.

With its signature LaserWeeder and relatively new Autonomous Tractor Kit (ATK) already being used by hundreds of customers, Carbon founder and CEO Paul Mikesell told GeekWire that “a brand new AI robot” is coming.

Mikesell said the machine, which is at least nine months away from being revealed, will leverage the same AI system used in Carbon’s other equipment but perform tasks beyond weeding.

“It’s very flexible, capable of doing a lot with the world around it, understanding what it’s seeing, what’s happening,” Mikesell said of Carbon’s system that uses an array of AI, computer vision and machine learning technology. “We see our ability to reinvest in that platform and double down on what it can do in some new activities.

“It’ll blow your mind,” he added.

Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics made its name across ag-tech with the LaserWeeder, a machine which can be pulled behind a tractor and uses its tech to detect plants in fields and then target and eliminate weeds with lasers. The latest iteration, the LaserWeeder G2, was released in February.

In March, the company unveiled the Carbon ATK, previously called the AutoTractor. That autonomous platform is designed to fit on and control existing farm equipment and serve as an answer to labor shortages and increased productivity in farming.

Both platforms are continuing to grow and scale, and “things are moving really fast,” according to Mikesell, a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems.

LaserWeeders are active on farms across the U.S. and in 14 countries around the world. Mikesell said revenue continues to grow every year, but Carbon is not yet profitable.

Ranked No. 9 on the GeekWire 200 list of top privately held startups based across the Pacific Northwest, Carbon has previously been backed by NVIDIA and Seattle-based Voyager Capital.

The Series D-2 extension round attracted Giant Ventures as lead investor. The UK-based VC invests across a variety of “purpose-driven” startups, and Mikesell said, “They got what we were trying to do.”

Giant previously invested in a $140 million round for Tidal Vision, a Bellingham, Wash.-based company turning discarded crab shells into a valuable industrial chemical called chitosan.

Beyond the secretive new machine, Carbon is revealing more about the “large plant model” at the heart of how it does computer vision through its AI systems.

Mikesell said the company is at the point where it has enough training data and labeled images that it can teach its AI to learn about the basic structure of the plants it’s seeing. This allows Carbon to run one model on every machine in the world.

“If new weeds pop up in an onion field in France, and those are eventually going to show up in a carrot field in the U.S., the first time we see that weed anywhere it can be part of the model and be ready to go,” Mikesell said. “It also means that if we want to go into a new crop that we’ve never seen before, we can do it immediately.”

A LaserWeeder is designed to target the meristem of a weed to kill it as quickly as possible and the large plant model helps it understand where to precisely target its zap.

Carbon Robotics, which has raised $177 million to date, now employs about 260 people. The company runs a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash., and added another in the Netherlands to offset some trade and tariff issues as well as speed deployment of machines in Europe.

Mikesell said as far as competition, there are some companies in Europe who claim to be building some version of a LaserWeeder, but he’s never seen one in a field or competed against one.

“It’s very hard to create a LaserWeeder,” he said. “The targeting system is so special, and the AI is so special. It’s not just about detecting where the weeds are. The trick to making it work is you need a targeting camera to be able to keep the lasers on target [while moving], and everybody I’ve seen that says they’re gonna build a LaserWeeder doesn’t understand that concept.”