This is an ongoing series on investors focused on rebuilding the physical layer. Previous interviews in the series were with ex-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, founder of Gigascale Capital, and Peter Barrett, a decade-long investor at Playground Global. Schneider Electric has spent nearly two centuries adapting to successive industrial revolutions ' evolving from a 19th century steel and heavy machinery company into a global leader in energy management and automation. Now, through its 1 billion Euro venture fund, SE Ventures, the company is betting that the next transformation will be driven by AI's collision with the physical world, from data centers and power grids to robotics and industrial automation. For Amit Chaturvedy, who joined SE Ventures in 2022 after leading corporate investments at Cisco, AI's biggest opportunities extend well beyond software. As demand for compute strains energy infrastructure and accelerates reindustrialization, the firm is backing startups building the technologies that underpin the AI economy ' investing in everything from data center infrastructure and grid resilience to robotics and industrial AI....

Frontier labs and hyperscalers promise world-shifting innovation. And most deliver it. But, as we're seeing with the Anthropic policy flip-flop and the evolving Hugging Face and OpenAI security incident, they operate without stability. That's deeply concerning because technology organizations that build their entire AI operations and business on top of Anthropic, OpenAI and other paid models need to be able to depend on their reliability. Meanwhile, open-source organizations like OpenClaw and DeepSeek offer cost-free models with similar quality. The difference in price is stark. And the gaps in utility, safety and accessibility that kept the enterprise away are closing fast. This evolving dynamic leaves CTOs, CIOs and engineering leaders with a question: How can we keep reliability up and costs down when it's impossible to predict whether hyperscalers will drop or raise prices of their next models' The answer isn't clear-cut ' yet. But it's never been clearer that engineering leaders need systems that allow their teams to quickly swap models and shift how AI agents work with people and access real data and tools. Building the right foundational layer keeps organizations nimble enough to evolve alongside the industry without cutting corners by chasing the latest trends....

Will a warming climate and changing weather patterns lead to more grid blackouts and other energy disruptions' Answering that question requires studying both regional climate forecasts and local energy systems, including emerging renewable generation, storage, transmission lines, and demand forecasts. The lack of such studies is one reason why energy developers and grid operators rarely consider climate change when deciding where to build their next project. Now MIT researchers have created a way to make more climate-informed energy siting choices, and shown how it can be used to make energy systems more resilient and reduce blackouts. The researchers' framework, described today in Nature Energy, combines fine-scale meteorology with detailed simulations of energy infrastructure. It shows how the location of new energy projects will play a significant role in meeting future demand in a changing climate. The researchers applied their framework to decarbonized energy systems in New England and Texas, finding that energy systems designed for historic climate conditions could face up to a fivefold increase in energy shortfalls, potentially leading to blackouts, by 2050. Taking climate change into account when designing the system, conversely, improved the resilience of both regions' energy systems at no or very little additional costs....

At the Baradal Aftab Uddin Collegiate School in the Satkhira district, the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet) opened its first 'adaptation fortress,' a solar-powered community shelter designed to protect residents from extreme heat and tropical storms. When the heat arrives in southwestern Bangladesh, people have traditionally looked for relief under the shade of trees or near bodies of water. Now, during heatwaves, temperatures can reach 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit), levels at which shade is no longer enough. The facility offers residents protection from two of the region's fastest-growing climate threats. During government-declared heat emergencies, it can host up to 200 people in four air-conditioned rooms supplied with clean drinking water. As a cyclone shelter, it can accommodate up to 500 people in additional rooms. For the 30 million residents in southwestern Bangladesh, caught in a compounding cycle of cyclones and record-breaking heatwaves, the fortress represents something larger: a shift from reacting to disasters to preparing for them....