UK generator Drax teamed with Brookfield and Brookfield's UK AI infrastructure platform Radiant on a joint venture to build up to 1 GW of data center capacity at the 2.6 GW Drax Power Station in Selby, starting with up to 100 MW by Q1 2028 on a site with 4 GW of grid access and existing cooling. Brookfield estimates total investment could top £20B, including £2.5B for phase one, though construction still needs planning, network approvals and a tenant, and Ember put the biomass plant's 2025 emissions at 14.1M tonnes of CO2e.
Colin Hurd, who built tractor-kit startup Smart Ag before Raven and CNH bought it and now works on OEM factory integration at Mach, notes investors put at least $2.3B into aftermarket autonomy kits, including $800M for excavator retrofits in the past six months. At Smart Ag, covering one tractor model took five kit variations, and bolt-on kits split warranty and service blame between dealers, OEMs and kit vendors when a 2 a.m. valve swap or firmware update breaks calibration. Hurd sells Tier-1 OEM integration, so that is his lane, but his five fleet-support questions apply to any operator weighing aftermarket autonomy.
Churchill Capital XI shareholders approved a $2.5B combination with Agility Robotics, which raised $465M and plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT starting Thursday. Agility cites Digit deployments at GXO, Toyota and Schaeffler, plus an Agco Hesston pilot next year, toward 100 customers by end of 2027. The US industrial humanoid bet now has a public ticker; watch whether warehouse hours turn into factory hours.
MUBADER, a multi-agent platform for triage, dispatch, follow-up and insights, won first place at the ADIPEC and ADNOC AI Agents in Energy hackathon by turning field operational reports into work orders, with humans keeping critical decisions. Aletihad names developers Saif Al Falasi and Sarah Ibrahim, and a TAQA Distribution team member posted the win on LinkedIn. This is a hackathon result, not an ADNOC production system, but it aims agents at ops paperwork rather than another reservoir model.
