Companies are taking control of their own data to tailor AI for their needs. The challenge lies in balancing ownership with the safe, trusted flow of high quality data needed to power reliable insights. This conversation from MIT Technology Review's EmTech AI conference examines how AI factories unlock new levels of scale, sustainability, and governance--positioning data control as a strategic imperative for governments and enterprises. Chris Davidson is Vice President of HPC & AI Customer Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He leads HPE's global strategy for AI Factory solutions and Sovereign AI, working with governments, enterprises, and research institutions to build secure, scalable national-and enterprise-grade AI capabilities. He also directs Product Management and Performance Engineering across HPE's HPC and AI portfolio, including large-model training platforms and Cray exascale systems.

Trump's mass firing just dealt another blow to American science Ambitious research is on the chopping block following yet more cuts at the National Science Foundation. This past week delivered another gut punch for science in the US. This time, the target was the National Science Foundation--a federal agency that funds major research projects to the tune of around $9 billion. The foundation's efforts were overseen by a board of 22 prominent scientists. On Friday last week, they were all fired . The NSF has been without a director since April 2025, when former director Sethuraman Panchanathan stepped down in the wake of DOGE-led funding cuts and mass firings.

Launching next week on T-Mobile's network, the cell plan takes a nuclear approach to online safety. A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can't be turned off even by adult account owners. It's also rolling out a filter on sexual content aimed at blocking material related to gender and trans issues, which will be optional but turned on by default across all plans. The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don't own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).

This startup's new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs Goodfire wants to make training AI models more like good old-fashioned software engineering. The San Francisco-based startup Goodfire just released a new tool, called Silico, that lets researchers and engineers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters--the settings that determine a model's behavior --during training. This could give model makers more fine-grained control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible. Goodfire claims Silico is the first off-the-shelf tool of its kind that can help developers debug all stages of the development process, from building a data set to training a model. LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. The company says its mission is to make building AI models less like alchemy and more like a science.

Plus: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all set AI spending records. In the past, getting to the North Pole involved a treacherous trip through ice many meters thick. But last year, a research vessel encountered open water and thin ice, which created an easy passage. It provided a reminder of how quickly the Arctic is changing. Now scientists are digging deep below the seabed to find out if the Arctic Ocean was ever ice-free--and what that could mean for the future of Earth's northernmost waters. Here's what they hope to discover .

It's time to make a plan for nuclear waste With growing interest in nuclear power, handling waste should be part of the deal. Geologist Tuomas Pere walks down a disposal tunnel inside the Posiva Onkalo nuclear waste repository on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. Today, nuclear energy enjoys a rare moment of support across the political spectrum in the US. Interest from tech companies that are scrambling to meet demand for massive data centers has sparked a resurgence of money and attention in the industry. That newfound interest is exactly why it's time to talk about an old problem: nuclear waste. In the US alone, nuclear reactors produce about 2,000 metric tons of high-level waste each year.

Plus: OpenAI has ended its exclusive partnership with Microsoft. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI's future Ahead of OpenAI's IPO, the court could rule on whether the company can exist as a for-profit enterprise. It could even oust its leadership. Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, claims he was deceived into bankrolling the firm under false pretenses. Find out how the trial could upend the global AI race . In a celebrated episode, a community of gnomes sneak out at night to steal underpants.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI's future Elon Musk says he's suing to save the company's mission. The case could have huge consequences for OpenAI and the AI race. After a yearslong legal feud, Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are heading to trial this week in Northern California in a case that could have sweeping consequences. Ahead of OpenAI's highly anticipated IPO, the court could rule on whether the company is allowed to exist as a for-profit enterprise and might even oust its current executive leadership, including Altman. Musk is suing OpenAI, alleging that Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman deceived him into bankrolling the company in its early days by promising to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI that benefits humanity, only to later restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary. Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015, but he left in 2018 after a bitter power struggle.

Enterprise AI hinges on high-accuracy outputs, requiring better data context, unified architectures, and rigorous measurement frameworks, says Bavesh Patel, senior vice president at Databricks, and Rajan Padmanabhan, unit technology officer at Infosys. Artificial intelligence may be dominating boardroom agendas, but many enterprises are discovering that the biggest obstacle to meaningful adoption is the state of their data. While consumer-facing AI tools have dazzled users with speed and ease, enterprise leaders are discovering that deploying AI at scale requires something far less glamorous but far more consequential: data infrastructure that is unified, governed, and fit for purpose. That gap between AI ambition and enterprise readiness is becoming one of the defining challenges of this next phase of digital transformation. As Bavesh Patel, senior vice president of Databricks, puts it, "the quality of that AI and how effective that AI is, is really dependent on information in your ...

The Download: DeepSeek's latest AI breakthrough, and the race to build world models Plus: China has blocked Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus. On Friday, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released a preview of V4, its long-awaited new flagship model. Notably, the model can process much longer prompts than its last generation, thanks to a new design that handles large amounts of text more efficiently. While the model remains open source, its performance matches leading closed-source rivals from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Here are three ways V4 could shake up AI . AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world remains humanity's domain.