2025-12-18 03:15:24
Fast, direct-current charging can charge an EV’s battery from about 20 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes. That’s not bad, but it’s still about six times longer than it takes to fill the tank of an ordinary petrol-powered vehicle.
One of the major bottlenecks to even faster charging is cooling, specifically uneven cooling inside big EV battery packs as the pack is charged. Hydrohertz, a British startup launched by former motorsport and power-electronics engineers, says it has a solution: fire liquid coolant exactly where it’s needed during charging. Its solution, announced in November, is a rotary coolant router that fires coolant exactly where temperatures spike, and within milliseconds—far faster than any single-loop system can react. In laboratory tests, this cooling tech allowed an EV battery to safely charge in less than half the time than was possible with conventional cooling architecture.
Hydrohertz calls its solution Dectravalve. It looks like a simple manifold, but it contains two concentric cylinders and a stepper motor to direct coolant to as many as four zones within the battery pack. It’s installed in between the pack’s cold plates, which are designed to efficiently remove heat from the battery cells through physical contact, and the main coolant supply loop, replacing a tangle of valves, brackets, sensors, and hoses.
To keep costs low, Hydrohertz designed Dectravalve to be produced with off-the-shelf materials, seals, and tolerances. Keeping things simple and comparatively cheap could improve Dectravalve’s chances of catching on with automakers and suppliers notorious for frugality. “Thermal management is trending toward simplicity and ultralow cost,” says Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical and chemical engineering professor at Penn State whose research areas include dealing with issues related to internal fluids in batteries and fuel cells. Automakers would prefer passive cooling, he notes—but not if it slows fast charging. So, at least for now, Intelligent control is essential.
“If Dectravalve works as advertised, I’d expect to see a roughly 20-percent improvement in battery longevity, which is a lot.”
–Anna Stefanopoulou, University of Michigan
Hydrohertz built Dectravalve to work with ordinary water-glycol, otherwise known as antifreeze, keeping integration simple. Using generic antifreeze avoids a step in the validation process where a supplier or EV manufacturer would otherwise have to establish whether some special formulation is compatible with the rest of the cooling system and doesn’t cause unforeseen complications. And because one Dectravalve can replace the multiple valves and plumbing assemblies of a conventional cooling system, it lowers the parts count, reduces leak points, and cuts warranty risk, Hydrohertz founder and CTO Martyn Talbot claims. The tighter thermal control also lets automakers shrink oversized pumps, hoses, and heat exchangers, improving both cost and vehicle packaging.
The valve reads pack temperatures several times per second and shifts coolant flow instantly. If a high-load event—like a fast charge—is coming, it pre-positions itself so more coolant is apportioned to known hotspots before the temperature rises in them.
Multi-zone control can also speed warm-up to prevent the battery degradation that comes from charging at frigid temperatures. “You can send warming fluid to heat half the pack fast so it can safely start taking load,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who specializes in control systems, energy, and transportation technologies. That half can begin accepting load, while the system begins warming the rest of the pack more gradually, she explains. But Dectravalve’s main function remains cooling fast-heating troublesome cells so they don’t slow charging.
Quick response to temperature changes inside the battery doesn’t increase the cooling capacity, but it leverages existing hardware far more efficiently. “Control the coolant with more precision and you get more performance for free,” says Talbot.
In early 2025, the Dectravalve underwent bench testing conducted by the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, England, that works with transport companies to improve the manufacturability of battery systems and other technologies. WMG compared Dectravalve’s cooling performance with that of a conventional single-loop cooling system using the same 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack. During 10–80 percent fast-charge trials, Dectravalve held peak cell temperature below 44.5 °C and kept cell-to-cell temperature variation to just below 3 °C without intervention from the battery management system. Similar thermal performance for the single-loop system was only made possible by dialing back the amount of power the battery would accept—the very tapering that keeps fast charging from being on par with gasoline fill-ups.
Keeping the cell temperatures below 50 °C was key, because above that temperature lithium plating begins. The battery suffers irreversible damage when lithium starts coating the surface of the anode—the part of the battery where electrical charge is stored during charging—instead of filling its internal network of pores the way water does when it’s absorbed by a sponge. Plating greatly diminishes the battery’s charge storage capacity. Letting the battery get too hot can also cause the electrolyte to break down. The result is inhibited flow of ions between the electrodes. And reduced flow within the battery means reduced flow in the external circuit, which powers the vehicle’s motors.
Because the Dectravalve kept temperatures low and uniform—and the battery management system didn’t need to play energy traffic cop and slow charging to a crawl to avoid overheating—charging time was cut by roughly 60 percent. With Dectravalve, the battery reached 80-percent state of charge in between 10 and 13 minutes, versus 30 minutes with the single-cooling-loop setup, according to Hydrohertz.
Using Warwick’s temperature data, Hydrohertz applied standard degradation models and found that cooler, more uniform packs last longer. Stefanopoulou estimates that if Dectravalve works as advertised, it could boost battery life by roughly 20 percent. “That’s a lot,” she says.
Still, it could be years before the system shows up on new EVs, if ever. Automakers will need years of cycle testing, crash trials, and cost studies before signing off on a new coolant architecture. Hydrohertz says several EV makers and battery suppliers have begun validation programs, and Talbot expects licensing deals to ramp up as results come in. But even in a best-case scenario, Dectravalve won’t be keeping production-model EV batteries cool for at least three model years.
2025-12-18 03:00:02
In the modern era of rapid digital transformation, engineering leaders are expected to be more than project managers and technical experts. They need to be vision-setters, innovation enablers, and mentors shaping the next generation of talent.
Leadership and mentorship, when paired with intention, do more than advance business goals. They create an ecosystem where innovation flourishes and careers accelerate.
I want to share how my professional journey, spanning leadership roles at retail giant Walmart and cloud communications company Twilio, has underscored the profound synergy between the two dimensions.
Innovation rarely happens by accident. It is cultivated in environments where leaders articulate a compelling vision, empower their teams to experiment, and then remove obstacles that stifle creativity.
As a senior engineering manager at Walmart Global Tech in Sunnyvale, Calif., I have led efforts to address one of the retail industry’s most persistent challenges: shrinkage. This loss of inventory, commonly due to shoplifting, theft, and return fraud, results in a difference between the amount of stock a retailer is supposed to have and the amount it actually has.
Globally, retailers lose more than US $100 billion annually due to shrinkage. Walmart alone faces multibillion-dollar losses each year.
The scale of the problem demands more than incremental improvements. By aligning the challenge with cutting-edge technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence, I framed a plan that transformed a business imperative into a technological frontier. We focused on deploying computer vision models at the store front-end, supported by an edge and cloud pipeline that allowed rapid experimentation. The system combined real-time detection of high-risk events with predictive analytics that highlighted emerging patterns of loss, and it integrated directly with store operations so actions could be taken quickly.
The impact was twofold. Engineers were energized by the opportunity to solve a problem of global relevance, and the company gained a system that significantly reduced losses while protecting customer trust. The role of leadership in this context was not to dictate solutions but to create clarity of purpose and provide the latitude for teams to innovate boldly.
As a senior engineering manager at Twilio, I led the billing platform team during a period of exponential growth, and innovation manifested itself differently.
Working on a billing system is not typically met with excitement, yet it is mission-critical because billions of dollars are processed annually. By giving engineers ownership of architectural decisions and encouraging experimentation in scalability and fault tolerance, we achieved breakthroughs that enabled the company to scale reliably. There, leadership meant empowering teams with autonomy and fostering a culture where innovation could emerge from the ground up.
If leadership provides the framework for innovation, mentorship provides the scaffolding for individual growth. In my experience, mentorship is not a one-time act but a continuous relationship built on guidance, challenge, and advocacy.
One effective approach I have employed is the use of stretch projects, which are tasks beyond an employee’s current skill set, experience, or job responsibilities.
At Twilio, I formed the Tiger Team, bringing together individuals from across the organization who expressed interest in learning new skills and solving complex billing challenges. They were encouraged to generate new ideas, conduct experiments, and develop improvements to the billing platform. The initiative not only advanced the platform’s capabilities but also gave employees a rare opportunity to develop and grow outside of their day-to-day responsibilities.
At Walmart, I also used stretch assignments to accelerate an employee’s professional growth. For example, when an engineer expressed a strong interest in applying AI to improve our on-call operations, I encouraged him to lead the design and development of a solution leveraging the model context protocol (MCP) standard to reduce on-call workload. MCP standardizes AI models that connect with and use external tools and data sources to automate tasks and simplify integrations.
The effort was successful, attracting contributions from the broader team and reducing the staff’s labor for dealing with incidents by more than 1,500 hours annually.
That not only created measurable operational impact but also provided the engineer with a platform to develop his leadership skills and drive innovation at scale.
A feedback-rich environment is advisable. At Walmart, I instituted weekly one-on-one sessions with each of my staff members that extended beyond project updates to cover their career aspirations, strengths, and areas for growth. The conversations uncovered career blind spots, exposed leadership potential, and helped prepare people to step into broader roles.
Equally important is advocacy. Mentorship does not stop at giving advice; it involves opening doors to opportunities. I have nominated mentees for conference speaking roles, cross-team leadership positions, and recognition programs. The platforms advanced their careers and amplified our teams’ work.
Another powerful mechanism to accelerate innovation and growth is intentionally allocating time for self-directed exploration. At both Walmart and Twilio, we designated a dedicated week every six months during which engineers were encouraged to work on anything they found meaningful, even if it was outside their team or organizational responsibilities.
“Engineering leadership and mentorship are not optional complements to technical execution; they are fundamental drivers of sustainable success.”
Some chose to collaborate with colleagues across different departments, while others pursued new projects. The experience gave the employees the freedom to follow their curiosity, sharpen their skills, and explore areas aligned with their personal growth. Beyond skill development, it often led to surprising innovations, as cross-pollination of ideas from different parts of the organization produced creative solutions that likely would not have emerged doing traditional project work.
Leadership and mentorship are not parallel tracks. They are interdependent areas that reinforce each other. Innovative projects provide fertile ground for engineers to grow, while their professional growth feeds back into innovation by broadening their perspectives and capabilities.
The AI-powered shrink-prevention initiative at Walmart exemplifies the dynamic. Engineers who contributed to the project gained technical expertise in machine learning and computer vision, as well as career-defining opportunities. Some presented their work at internal company forums. Others became mentors to new engineers. And many transitioned into leadership roles. Innovation was not an isolated outcome but part of a virtuous cycle of growth.
Reflecting on my experiences, here are several lessons for those aspiring to lead with impact:
Engineering leadership and mentorship are not optional complements to technical execution; they are fundamental drivers of sustainable success. Leadership provides the vision and structure for innovation, while mentorship nurtures the individuals who bring that vision to life. Together, they create a multiplier effect that advances both technological innovation and career growth.
My experience demonstrates that when leaders intentionally combine the two practices, organizations not only deliver transformative technologies but also cultivate the next generation of innovators and leaders.
That dual impact is what makes engineering leadership such a powerful force in shaping both the future of technology and the careers of those who drive it.
2025-12-18 01:00:02
For decades, atomic clocks have provided the most stable means of timekeeping. They measure time by oscillating in step with the resonant frequency of atoms, a method so accurate that it serves as the basis for the definition of a second.
Now, a new challenger has emerged in the timekeeping arena. Researchers recently developed a tiny, MEMS-based clock that makes use of silicon doping to gain record stability. After running for 8 hours, the clock deviated only by 102 nanoseconds, approaching the standard of atomic clocks while both requiring less physical space and less power to run. Doing so has been a challenge in the past because of the chaos that even slight temperature variations can introduce into timekeeping.
The group presented their new clock at the 71st Annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting last week.
The MEMS clock is built from a few tightly connected parts, all integrated on a chip smaller than the face of a sugar cube. At its center, a silicon plate topped with a piezoelectric film vibrates at its natural frequencies, while nearby electronic circuitry measures those vibrations. A tiny, built-in heater gently keeps the whole structure at an optimal temperature. Because the resonator, electronics, and heater are all close together, they can work as a coordinated system: The resonator creates the timing signal, the electronics monitor and adjust it, and the heater prevents temperature swings from causing drift.
This clock is unique in a few ways, explains project advisor and University of Michigan MEMS engineer Roozbeh Tabrizian. For one, the resonator is “extremely stable amid variations in environment,” he says. “You could actually change the temperature from -40 °C all the way to 85 °C and you essentially don’t see any change in the frequency.”
The resonator is so stable because the silicon from which it’s crafted has been doped with phosphorus, Tabrizian says. When a material is doped, impurities are added into it, typically to change its conductive properties. Here, though, the group used doping specifically to stabilize mechanical properties. “We’re controlling the mechanics in a very tight way so that the elasticity of the material does not change upon temperature variations,” he says.
Some other materials, like the commonly used timing-crystal quartz, can also be doped for robustness. But “you cannot miniaturize [quartz] and you have a lot of limitations in terms of packaging,” Tabrizian explains. “Semiconductor manufacturing benefits from size miniaturization,” so it is an obvious choice for next-generation clocks.
The doping also allows the electronics to actively tune out any small drifts in frequency over long periods. This attribute is “the most distinctive aspect of our device’s physics compared to previous MEMS clocks,” Tabrizian says. By making the silicon conductive, the doping lets the electronics subtly adjust how strongly the device is mechanically driven, which counteracts slow shifts in frequency.
This system is also unique in its integration of autonomous temperature sensing and adjustment, says Banafsheh Jabbari, a graduate student at the University of Michigan who led the project. “This clock resonator is operating in two modes [or resonant frequencies], essentially. The main mode of the clock is very stable and we use it as the [time] reference. The other one is the temperature sensor.” The latter acts like an internal thermometer, helping the electronics automatically detect temperature shifts and adjust both the heater and the main timing mode itself. This built-in self-correction helps the clock maintain steady time even as the surrounding environment changes.
These features mean that it’s the first MEMS clock to run for 8 hours and only deviate by 102-billionths of a second. Linearly scaled up to a week of operation, that equates to just over 2 microseconds of drift. That’s worse than the top-of-the-line laboratory atomic clocks by a few orders of magnitude, but it rivals the stability of miniaturized atomic clocks.
What’s more, the MEMS clock has a significant space and power savings advantage over its atomic competition. The more isolated from their environments and the more power they use, the more precisely atomic clocks can probe the oscillations of atoms, Tabrizian explains, so they’re typically the size of a cabinet and draw a lot of power. Even chip-scale atomic clocks are 10 to 100 times as large as the MEMS clock, he says. And, “more importantly,” this new clock requires 1/10th to 1/20th the power of the mini atomic clocks.
Jabbari’s work came out of a DARPA project with the goal of making a clock that could operate for a week and deviate by only 1 µs, so there’s still more to be done. One challenge the team faces is how the doped silicon will behave over longer operating periods, like a week. “You see some diffusion and some changes in the material,” Tabrizian says, but only time will tell how well the silicon will hold up.
It’s important to both researchers that they continue their efforts because of the wide-ranging applications they foresee for a small, power-efficient MEMS-based clock. “Essentially all modern technology that we have needs some sort of synchronization,” Jabbari says, and she thinks the clock could fill gaps in time synchronization that currently exist.
For situations in which technology has robust access to GPS satellites, there’s no problem to solve, she says. But in more extreme scenarios, like space exploration and underwater missions, navigation technology is forced to rely on internal timekeeping—which must be extremely bulky and power hungry to be accurate. A MEMS clock could be a small and less power-intensive replacement.
There are also more day-to-day applications, Tabrizian says. In the future, when more information will need to be delivered faster to each phone (or whatever devices we’ll be using in 50 years), accurate timing will become crucial for data-packet delivery. “And, of course, you cannot put a large atomic clock in your phone. You cannot consume that much power,” he says, so a MEMS clock could be the answer.
Even with promising applications, it could be a tough road ahead for this project because of existing competition. SiTime, a company already producing MEMS clocks, is even now integrating its chips in Apple and Nvidia devices.
But Tabrizian is confident about his team’s capabilities. “Companies like SiTime put a lot of emphasis on system design,” thus increasing system complexity, he says. “Our solution, on the other hand, is entirely physics based, looking into the very intricate, very fundamental physics of a semiconductor. We’re trying to get around the need for a complex system by making the resonator 100 times more accurate than the SiTime resonator.”
2025-12-17 23:07:51
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At the end of every job interview, you will get asked, “Do you have any questions for me?”
There is only one correct answer here: yes! You absolutely should have questions for the interviewer, for two reasons:
But not all questions are created equal. Here’s what to keep in mind for the 5 to 10 minute reverse interview at the end of each job interview.
First, what not to do: Don’t ask about the interviewer’s favorite flavor of coffee in the microkitchen—at least not as your first question! Your questions should demonstrate a thoughtful consideration of the job’s responsibilities, rather than a frivolous detail about a perk.
The best question reveals an understanding of the company’s future, your future, and how those two paths could mutually benefit each other. Some examples:
A template for good interviewer questions doesn’t exist because the questions are inherently unique to the company, your role, and your background. However, here are some general ideas for inspiration:
—Rahul
Levi Unema doesn’t work in a typical office setting. Rather, the engineer spends weeks at a time in the open ocean, maintaining and piloting remotely operated vehicles aboard ships exploring the seas. But, when he first started his engineering career, Unema didn’t think he would work on underwater robotics—until his high-school science teacher gave him an unexpected call.
The United Kingdom’s technology sector is the largest in Europe. But what roles will define the U.K. tech workforce in 2026? The London School of Economics and Political Science ranked the 10 most in-demand jobs, noting the demand, job satisfaction, and salary for each role. One key takeaway: “By 2026, the most sought-after professionals will combine AI literacy and data analytics with human problem-solving, working confidently alongside intelligent systems.”
AI tools and autonomous intelligent systems are now being used by nearly every organization. Despite the benefits, they also bring risks. To help AI developers and companies ensure systems are trustworthy and ethically sound, the IEEE Standards Association just launched an ethics program offering two certifications: one for individuals and one for products.
2025-12-17 22:39:37
The United States aims to embark on its most active new nuclear construction program since the 1970s. In its most high-dollar nuclear deal yet, the Trump administration in October launched a partnership to build at least $80 billion worth of new, large-scale nuclear reactors, and chose Westinghouse Electric Company and its co-owners, Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco, for the job.
The money will support the construction of AP1000s, a type of pressurized water reactor developed by Westinghouse that can generate about 1,110 megawatts of electric power. These are the same reactors as units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, which wrapped up seven years behind schedule in 2023 and 2024 and cost more than twice as much as expected—about $35 billion for the pair. Along the way, Westinghouse, based in Cranberry Township, Penn., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Chief executives of investor-owned utilities know that if they were to propose committing to similar projects on the same commercial terms, they’d be sacked on the spot. As a result, the private sector in the United States has been unwilling to take on the financial risk inherent in building new reactors.
The $80 billion deal with the federal government represents the U.S. nuclear industry’s best opportunity in a generation for a large-scale construction program. But ambition doesn’t guarantee successful execution. The delays and cost overruns that dogged the Vogtle project present real threats for the next wave of reactors.
What might be different about the next set of AP1000s? On the positive side, delivering multiple copies of the same reactor ought to create the conditions for a steady decline in costs. Vogtle Unit 3 was the first AP1000 to be built in the United States, and the lessons learned from it resulted in Vogtle Unit 4 costing 30 percent less than Unit 3. (Six AP1000s are currently operating outside the United States, and 14 more are under construction, according to Westinghouse.)
There’s been a bipartisan effort in the United States to streamline regulatory procedures to ensure that future projects won’t be delayed by the same issues that hampered Vogtle. The Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act that was signed into law by former U.S. President Joe Biden in 2024, includes several measures intended to improve processes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The last nuclear reactors to be built in the United States—Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Waynesboro, Georgia—were completed seven years behind schedule and cost more than twice as much as expected.Georgia Power Co.
That included a mandated change in the NRC’s mission statement, setting a goal of “enabling the safe and secure use and deployment of civilian nuclear energy technologies”. It was a symbol of Congress’s intent to encourage the commission to support nuclear development.
In May President Trump built on that legislation with four executive orders intended to speed up reactor licensing and accelerate nuclear development—a framework that has yet to be tested in practice. In November the NRC published regulations setting out how it planned to implement the president’s orders. The changes are focused on removing redundant and duplicative rules.
One of President Trump’s orders included a series of provisions intended to help build the U.S. nuclear workforce, but it’s clear that that will be a challenge. The momentum gained in training skilled workers during the construction at Vogtle is already dissipating. Without other active new reactor projects to move on to immediately in the United States, many of the people who worked there have likely gone into other sectors, such as liquified natural gas (LNG) plants.
Around the time that construction was wrapping up at Vogtle, many employers in the industry were already reporting difficulties in finding the staff they need, according to the Department of Energy’s 2025 United States Energy and Employment Report. Surveyed in 2024, 22 percent of employers in nuclear construction said it was “very difficult” to hire the workers they needed, and 63 percent said it was “somewhat difficult”. In nuclear manufacturing, 63 percent of employers said hiring was “very difficult”.
If reactor construction really begins to pick up, there is clearly a danger that those numbers will rise.
So just how many reactors will $80 billion buy? Assuming an average of $16 billion per AP1000—slightly less than for Vogtle, and allowing for cost reductions from economies of scale and learning-by-doing—the plan would mean five new reactors. That would represent an increase of about 5.7 percent in total U.S. nuclear energy generation capacity, if all the reactors currently in service remain online.
The full details of the $80 billion deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified. But Westinghouse’s co-owner, Brookfield, did disclose that the partnership includes profit-sharing mechanisms that will give the U.S. government some of the upside if the initiative succeeds.
The Washington Post reported that after the U.S. signs the final contracts for $80 billion worth of new reactors, it will be entitled to 20 percent of all Westinghouse’s returns over $17.5 billion. And if Westinghouse’s valuation surpasses $30 billion, the administration can require it to be floated on the stock market. If that happens, the government will get a 20 percent stake.
Enriched uranium is loaded at Vogtle Unit 4.Georgia Power Co.
Japan’s government is also playing a key role. As part of a $550 billion U.S.-Japan trade deal struck in July, the Japanese government pledged large-scale investment in U.S. energy, including nuclear. Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba Group, and IHI Corp., are interested in investing up to $100 billion in the United States to support the construction of new AP1000s and small modular reactors (SMRs), the two governments said.
The Westinghouse deal supports a range of the administration’s objectives, including power for AI and investment and job creation in the American industrial sector. The focus on AP1000s also makes it possible to rely on U.S.-produced fuel, strengthening energy security. (Many of the designs for SMRs, which have garnered a considerable amount of excitement globally, use high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, which is not currently produced on a large scale in the United States).
There have been other recent moves to add additional nuclear capacity in the United States. Santee Cooper, a South Carolina utility, announced plans for completing the construction of two AP1000 reactors that had been abandoned in 2017 at the V.C. Summer site in Jenkinsville, S.C.
Separately, Google announced in October a deal with NextEra Energy to reopen a 615-MW nuclear plant in Iowa. The Duane Arnold Energy Center was shut down in 2020, and the aim is to have it operational again by the first quarter of 2029. Google has agreed to buy a share of the plant’s output for 25 years.
Construction of two AP1000 reactors at the V.C. Summer nuclear site in Jenkinsville, S.C. were abandoned in 2017 after delays and cost overruns. Executives leading the projects were charged with fraud. Chuck Burton/AP
But the plans that have been announced so far pale in comparison to the Trump administration’s nuclear ambitions. Earlier this year, President Trump set a goal of adding a whopping 300 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, up from a little under 100 GW today. That would mean much stronger growth than is currently projected in Wood Mackenzie’s forecasts, which show a near-doubling of U.S. nuclear generation capacity to about 190 GW in 2050.
The main driver behind the Trump administration’s interest in nuclear is its ambitions for artificial intelligence. Chris Wright, the U.S. energy secretary, has described the race to develop advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of our times, critical to national security, and dependent upon a steep increase in electricity generation. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in September, Wright promised: “We’re doing everything we can to make it easy to build power generation and data centers in our country.”
One of the hallmarks of the Trump administration has been its readiness to intervene in markets to pursue its policy goals. Its nuclear strategy exemplifies that approach. In many ways, the Trump administration is acting like an energy company: using its financial strength and its convening power to put together a deal that covers the entire nuclear value chain.
Throughout the history of nuclear power, the industry has worked closely with governments. But the federal government effectively taking a commercial position in the development of new reactors would be a first for the United States. In the first wave of U.S. reactor construction in the 1970s, federal government support was limited to R&D, uranium mining and enrichment, and indemnifying operators against the risk of nuclear accidents.
Before the partial deregulation of U.S. electricity markets that began in the 1990s, utilities could develop nuclear plants with the assurance that the costs could be recovered from customers, even if they went far over budget. With many key markets now at least partially deregulated, nuclear project developers will need other types of guarantees to secure financing and move forward.
The first new plants that result from the $80 billion deal will come online years after President Trump has left office. But they could play an important role in boosting U.S. electricity supply and developing advanced AI for decades.
2025-12-17 04:12:37
On Sunday evening, the legendary robotics company iRobot, manufacturer of the Roomba robotic vacuum, filed for bankruptcy. The company will be handing over all of its assets to its Chinese manufacturing partner, Picea. According to iRobot’s press release, “this agreement represents a critical step toward strengthening iRobot’s financial foundation and positioning the Company for long-term growth and innovation,” which sounds like the sort of thing that you put in a press release when you’re trying your best to put a positive spin on really, really bad news.
This whole situation started back in August 2022, when iRobot announced a US $1.7 billion acquisition by Amazon. Amazon’s interest was obvious—some questionable hardware decisions had left the company struggling to enter the home robotics market. And iRobot was at a point where it needed a new strategy to keep ahead of lower-cost (and increasingly innovative) home robots from China.
Some folks were skeptical of this acquisition, and admittedly, I was one of them. My primary worry was that iRobot would get swallowed up and effectively cease to exist, which tends to happen with acquisitions like these, but regulators in the United States had much more pointed concerns: namely, that Amazon would leverage its marketplace power to restrict competition. The European Commission expressed similar objections.
By late January 2024, the deal had fallen through, iRobot laid off a third of its staff, suspended research and development, and CEO and cofounder Colin Angle left the company. Since then, iRobot has seemed resigned to its fate, coasting along on a few lackluster product announcements and not much else, and so Sunday’s announcement of bankruptcy was a surprise to no one—perhaps least of all to Angle.
“iRobot’s bankruptcy filing was really just a public-facing outcome of the tragedy that happened a year and a half ago,” Angle told IEEE Spectrum on Monday. “Today sucks, but I’ve already mourned. I mourned when the deal with Amazon got blocked for all the wrong reasons.” Angle points out that by the early 2020s, iRobot was no longer monopolizing the robot-vacuum market. This was especially true in Europe, where iRobot’s market share was 12 percent and decreasing. But from Angle’s perspective, regulators were more focused on making a point about Big Tech than they were about the actual merits and risks of the merger.
Cofounder Colin Angle says that iRobot’s bankruptcy filing was unsurprising after a failed acquisition by Amazon a year and a half ago.Charles Krupa/AP
“We were roadkilled in a larger agenda,” Angle says. “And this kind of regulation is incredibly destructive to the innovation economy. The whole concept of starting a tech company and having it acquired by a bigger tech company is far and away the most common positive outcome. For that to be taken away is not a good thing.” And for iRobot, it was fatal.
A common criticism of iRobot even before the attempted Amazon merger is that the company was simply being out-innovated in the robot-vacuum space, and Angle doesn’t necessarily disagree. “By 2020, China had become the largest market in the world for robot vacuums, and Chinese robotics companies with government support were investing two or three times as much as iRobot was in R&D. We simply didn’t have the capital to move as quickly as we wanted to. In order for iRobot to continue to innovate and lead the industry, we needed to do so as part of a larger entity, and Amazon was very aligned with our vision for the home.”
This situation is not unique to iRobot, and there is significant concern in robotics about how companies can effectively compete against the massive advantage that China has in the production of low-cost hardware. In some sense, what happened to iRobot is an early symptom of what Angle (and others) see as a fundamental problem with robotics in the United States: lack of government support. In China, long-term government support for robotics and embodied AI (in the form of both policy and direct investment) can be found across industry and academia, something that neither the United States nor the European Union has been able to match. “Robotics is in a global competition against some very fearsome competitors,” Angle says. “We have to decide whether we want to support our innovation economy. And if the answer is no, then the innovation economy goes elsewhere.”
The consequence of companies like iRobot losing this competition can be more than just bankruptcy. In iRobot’s case, a Chinese company now owns iRobot’s intellectual property and app infrastructure, which gives it access to data from millions of highly sensorized autonomous mobile robots in homes across the world. I asked Angle whether or not Roomba owners should be concerned about this. “When I was running the company, we talked a lot about this, and put a lot of effort into privacy and security,” he says. “This was fundamental to Roomba’s design. Now, I can’t speak to what they’ll prioritize.”
While Angle has moved on from iRobot, and has since cofounded a more-mysterious-than-we’d-like company called Familiar Machines and Magic, he still feels strongly that what has happened to iRobot should be a warning to both robotics companies and policymakers. “Make no mistake: China is good at robots. So we need to play this hard. There’s a lot to learn from what we did at iRobot, and a lot of ways to do it better.”
On a personal note, I’m choosing to remember the iRobot that was—not just the company that built a robot vacuum out of nothing and conquered the world with it for nearly two decades, but also the company that built the PackBot to save lives, as well as all of these other crazy robots. I’m not sure there’s ever been a company quite like iRobot, and there may never be again. It will be missed.