In an announcement today, Ben Yeh, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, said that in 2025, “mainstream PC memory and storage costs rose by 40 percent to 70 percent, resulting in cost increases being passed through to customers.”
On Monday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he plans to integrate Elon Musk's AI tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks later this month. During remarks at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas reported by The Guardian, Hegseth said the integration would place "the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department."
The announcement comes weeks after Grok drew international backlash for generating sexualized images of women and children, although the Department of Defense has not released official documentation confirming Hegseth's announced timeline or implementation details.
During the same appearance, Hegseth rolled out what he called an "AI acceleration strategy" for the Department of Defense. The strategy, he said, will "unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future."
On Tuesday Microsoft announced a new initiative called "Community-First AI Infrastructure" that commits the company to paying full electricity costs for its data centers and refusing to seek local property tax reductions.
As demand for generative AI services has increased over the past year, Big Tech companies have been racing to spin up massive new data centers for serving chatbots and image generators that can have profound economic effects on the surrounding areas in which they are located. Among other concerns, communities across the country have grown concerned that data centers are driving up residential electricity rates through heavy power consumption and by straining water supplies due to server cooling needs.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 TWh, with the United States responsible for nearly half of total electricity demand growth over that period. This growth is happening while much of the country's electricity transmission infrastructure is more than 40 years old and under strain.
The IEEE Board of Directors has received petition intentions from IEEE Senior Member Gerardo Barbosa and IEEE Life Senior Member Timothy T. Lee as candidates for 2027 IEEE president-elect. The petitioners are listed in alphabetical order and indicate no preference.
The winner of this year’s election will serve as IEEE president in 2028. For more information about the petitioners and Board-nominated candidates, visit ieee.org/pe27. You can sign their petitions at ieee.org/petition.
Signatures for IEEE president-elect candidate petitions are due 10 April at 12:00 p.m. EST/16:00 p.m. UTC.
IEEE Senior Member Gerardo Barbosa
Gerardo Sosa
Barbosa is an expert in information technology management and technology commercialization, with a career spanning innovation, entrepreneurship,and an international perspective. He began his career designing radio-frequency identification systems for real-time asset tracking and inventory management. In 2014 he founded CLOUDCOM, a software company that develops enterprise software to improve businesses’ billing and logistics operations, and serves as its CEO.
Barbosa’s IEEE journey began in 2009 at the IEEE Monterrey (Mexico) Section, where he served as chair and treasurer. He led grassroots initiatives with students and young professionals. His leadership positions in IEEE Region 9 include technical activities chair and treasurer.
As the 2019—2020 vice chair and 2021—2023 treasurer of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities, Barbosa became recognized as a trusted, data-driven, and collaborative leader.
He has been a member of the IEEE Finance Committee since 2021 and is now its chair due to his role as IEEE treasurer on the IEEE Board of Directors. He is deeply committed to the responsible stewardship of IEEE’s global resources, ensuring long-term financial sustainability in service of IEEE’s mission.
IEEE Life Senior Member Timothy T. Lee
Nikon/CES
Lee is a Technical Fellow at Boeing in Southern California with expertise in microelectronics and advanced 2.5D and 3D chip packaging for AI workloads, 5G, and SATCOM systems for aerospace platforms. He leads R&D projects, including work funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He previously held leadership roles at MACOM Technology Solutions and COMSAT Laboratories.
Lee was the 2015 president of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society. He has served on the IEEE Board of Directors as 2025 IEEE-USA president and 2021–2022 IEEE Region 6 director. He has also been a member of several IEEE committees including Future Directions, Industry Engagement, and New Initiatives.
His vision is to deliver societal value through trust, integrity, ownership, innovation, and customer focus, while strengthening the IEEE member experience. Lee also wants to work to prepare members for AI-enabled work in the future.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and a master’s degree in systems architecting and engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
In 2018, Justin Kropp was restoring a fire-damaged transmission circuit in Southern California when disaster struck. Grid operators had earlier shut down the 115-kilovolt circuit, but six high-voltage lines that shared the corridor were still operating, and some of their power snuck onto the de-energized wires he was working on. That rogue current shot to the ground through Kropp’s body and his elevated work platform, killing the 32-year-old father of two.
“It went in both of his hands and came out his stomach where he was leaning against the platform rail,” says Justin’s father, Barry Kropp, who is himself a retired line worker. “Justin got hung up on the wire. When they finally got him on the ground, it was too late.”
Budapest-based Electrostatics makes conductive suits that protect line workers from unexpected current. Electrostatics
Justin’s accident was caused by induction: a hazard that occurs when an electric or magnetic field causes current to flow through equipment whose intended power supply has been cut off. Safety practices seek to prevent such induction shocks by grounding all conductive objects in a work zone, giving electricity alternative paths. But accidents happen. In Justin’s case, his platform unexpectedly swung into the line before it could be grounded.
Conductive Suits Protect Line Workers
Adding a layer of defense against induction injuries is the motivation behind Budapest-based Electrostatics’ specialized conductive jumpsuits, which are designed to protect against burns, cardiac fibrillation, and other ills. “If my boy had been wearing one, I know he’d be alive today,” says the elder Kropp, who purchased a line-worker safety training business after Justin’s death. The Mesa, Ariz.–based company, Electrical Safety Consulting International (ESCI), now distributes those suits.
Conductive socks that are connected to the trousers complete the protective suit. BME HVL
Eduardo Ramirez Bettoni, one of the developers of the suits, dug into induction risk after a series of major accidents in the United States in 2017 and 2018, including Justin Kropp’s. At the time, he was principal engineer for transmission and substation standards at Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy. In talking to Xcel line workers and fellow safety engineers, he sensed that the accident cluster might be the tip of an iceberg. And when he and two industry colleagues scoured data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found 81 induction accidents between 1985 and 2021 and 60 deaths, which they documented in a 2022 report.
“Unfortunately, it is really common. I would say there are hundreds of induction contacts every year in the United States alone,” says Ramirez Bettoni, who is now technical director of R&D for the Houston-based power-distribution equipment firm Powell Industries. He bets that such “contacts”—exposures to dangerous levels of induction—are increasing as grid operators boost grid capacity by squeezing additional circuits into transmission corridors.
Electrostatics’ suits are an enhancement of the standard protective gear that line workers wear when their tasks involve working close to or even touching energized live lines, or “bare-hands” work. Both are interwoven with conductive materials such as stainless steel threads, which form a Faraday cage that shields the wearer against the lines’ electric fields. But the standard suits have limited capacity to shunt current because usually they don’t need to. Like a bird on a wire, bare-hands workers are electrically floating, rather than grounded, so current largely bypasses them via the line itself.
Induction Safety Suit Design
Backed by a US $250,000 investment from Xcel in 2019, Electrostatics adapted its standard suits by adding low-resistance conductive straps that pass current around a worker’s body. “When I’m touching a conductor with one hand and the other hand is grounded, the current will flow through the straps to get out,” says Bálint Németh, Electrostatics’ CEO and director of the High Voltage Laboratory at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
A strapping system links all the elements of the suit—the jacket, trousers, gloves, and socks—and guides current through a controlled path outside the body. BME HVL
The company began selling the suits in 2023 and they have since been adopted by over a dozen transmission operators in the United States and Europe, as well as other countries including Canada, Indonesia, and Turkey. They cost about $4,500 in the United States.
Electrostatics’ suits had to meet a crucial design threshold: keeping body exposure below the 6-milliampere “let-go” threshold, beyond which electrocuted workers become unable to remove themselves from a circuit. “If you lose control of your muscles, you’re going to hold onto the conductor until you pass out or possibly die,” says Ramirez Bettoni.
The gear, which includes the suit, gloves, and socks, protects against 100 amperes for 10 seconds and 50 A for 30 seconds. It also has insulation to protect against heat created by high current and flame retardants to protect against electric arcs.
Kropp, Németh, and Ramirez Bettoni, are hoping that developing industry standards for induction safety gear, including ones published in October, will broaden their use. Meanwhile, the recently enacted Justin Kropp Safety Act in California, for which the elder Kropp lobbied, mandates automated defibrillators at power-line work sites.
On Sunday, Google removed some of its AI Overviews health summaries after a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk by false and misleading information. The removals came after the newspaper found that Google's generative AI feature delivered inaccurate health information at the top of search results, potentially leading seriously ill patients to mistakenly conclude they are in good health.
Google disabled specific queries, such as "what is the normal range for liver blood tests," after experts contacted by The Guardian flagged the results as dangerous. The report also highlighted a critical error regarding pancreatic cancer: The AI suggested patients avoid high-fat foods, a recommendation that contradicts standard medical guidance to maintain weight and could jeopardize patient health. Despite these findings, Google only deactivated the summaries for the liver test queries, leaving other potentially harmful answers accessible.
The investigation revealed that searching for liver test norms generated raw data tables (listing specific enzymes like ALT, AST, and alkaline phosphatase) that lacked essential context. The AI feature also failed to adjust these figures for patient demographics such as age, sex, and ethnicity. Experts warned that because the AI model's definition of "normal" often differed from actual medical standards, patients with serious liver conditions might mistakenly believe they are healthy and skip necessary follow-up care.
On a blustery November day, a Cessna turboprop flew over Pennsylvania at 5,000 meters, in crosswinds of up to 70 knots—nearly as fast as the little plane was flying. But the bumpy conditions didn’t thwart its mission: to wirelessly beam power down to receivers on the ground as it flew by.
The test flight marked the first time power has been beamed from a moving aircraft. It was conducted by the Ashburn, Virginia-based startup Overview Energy, which emerged from stealth mode in December by announcing the feat.
But the greater purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the feasibility of a much grander ambition: to beam power from space to Earth. Overview plans to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to collect unfiltered solar energy where the sun never sets and then beam this abundance back to humanity. The solar energy would be transferred as near-infrared waves and received by existing solar panels on the ground.
The far-flung strategy, known as space-based solar power, has become the subject of both daydreaming and serious research over the past decade. Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project launched a demonstration mission in 2023 that transferred power in space using microwaves. And terrestrial power beaming is coming along too. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in July 2025 set a new record for wirelessly transmitting power: 800 watts over 8.6 kilometers for 30 seconds using a laser beam.
But until November, no one had actively beamed power from a moving platform to a ground receiver.
Wireless Power Beaming Goes Airborne
Overview’s test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. “Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power,” says Overview CEO Marc Berte, “but also it’s the first time anyone’s really done a power beaming thing where it’s all of the functional pieces all working together,” he says. “It’s the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term.”
The approach was compelling enough that power beaming expert Paul Jaffe left his job as a program manager at DARPA to join the company as head of systems engineering. Prior to DARPA, Jaffe spent three decades with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
“This actually sounds like it could work,” –Paul Jaffe
It was hearing Berte explain Overview’s plan at a conference that helped to convince Jaffe to take a chance on the startup. “This actually sounds like it could work,” Jaffe remembers thinking at the time. “It really seems like it gets around a lot of the showstoppers for a lot of the other concepts. I remember coming home and telling my wife that I almost felt like the problem had been solved. So I thought: Should [I] do something which is almost unheard of—to leave in the middle of being a DARPA program manager—to try to do something else?”
For Jaffe, the most compelling reason was in Overview’s solution for space-based solar’s power density problem. A beam with low power density is safer because it’s not blasting too much concentrated energy onto a single spot on the Earth’s surface, but it’s less efficient for the task of delivering usable solar energy. A higher-density beam does the job better, but then the researchers must engineer some way to maintain safety.
Startup Overview Energy demonstrates how space-based solar power could be beamed to Earth from satellites
Space-Based Solar Power Makes Waves
Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, Jaffe says there’s another problem: microwaves are part of what he calls the “beachfront property” of the electromagnetic spectrum—a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks.
“The fact is,” Jaffe says, “if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today—and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today—you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission.”
Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun’s energy during daylight hours. So “your receivers are already built,” Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade.
Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview’s satellite will be built on earth in a folded configuration and it will unfold after it’s brought to orbit, according to the company).
“Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal,” Jaffe says. “Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we’re working on at Overview are squarely focused on that.”
Gerardo Sosa
Nikon/CES
Conductive socks that are connected to the trousers complete the protective suit. BME HVL
A strapping system links all the elements of the suit—the jacket, trousers, gloves, and socks—and guides current through a controlled path outside the body. BME HVL
