NEWS

Nvidia is pitching Apollo on retrofitting over 130 Brightspeed phone buildings for roughly 1 GW of existing AI inference power.

Nvidia sent a written proposal this week to retrofit Apollo-backed Brightspeed's more than 130 legacy telecom buildings across up to 20 states, aiming at roughly 1 GW of existing power and Q1 2027 Vera Rubin rack installs to sidestep new-build moratoriums, according to The Information via Yahoo Finance. Sites would still need local cooling permits, and no deal is signed or end chip customer named yet. For grid and project teams, existing utility hookups inside aging phone exchanges are becoming fast-track AI real estate.

Row of NVIDIA Vera Rubin rack-scale AI server systems against a dark background
Image: NVIDIA

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NEWS

Skydio locks in Axon's US and Canada first-responder channel with a $1.2B minority stake instead of selling the company.

Axon is putting $1.2B in cash and stock into U.S. drone maker Skydio at a $5.2B pre-money valuation, lifting its non-voting stake by about 20% and locking in exclusive U.S. and Canada public-safety distribution. Skydio says it expects roughly $1B in bookings this fiscal year and stayed independent after weighing a full sale so it can keep expanding across energy, construction, transportation and defense. Closing is expected in stages across Q4 2026 and Q1 2027.

HOW-TO

Nine mostly free checks starting with who owns the plant-room router show whether your controllers sit open on the internet.

After attackers changed supermarket refrigeration setpoints across Europe, including a Swedish store that found its freezers at 50 C, Erik Huisman wrote a nine-step checklist where most checks cost nothing and avoid scanning live OT gear. The walkdown starts with checking cabinets for undocumented vendor 4G or 5G routers, looking up site public IPs in Shodan, auditing NAT rules and contractor logins, and testing manual operation plus an independent alarm. He also links an early open-source Shodan and questionnaire script called otcheck that has only been tested on simulated sites.

For plant, facilities and OT teams: a nine-step walkdown to find internet-exposed controllers and contractor routers without probing live equipment.

TOOL

Controls engineers can turn plain-English specs into compiled, input-verified IEC 61131-3 PLC code with Midea's open-source SemaPLC IDE (110 stars).

SemaPLC is an MIT-licensed localhost web IDE and 16-tool MCP server from Midea AI that turns plain-language control specs into IEC 61131-3 Structured Text, compiles and runs it on OpenPLC Runtime v4 in Docker, forces inputs and traces variables to verify behavior, and renders a live ladder and process simulation. Everything runs locally apart from the model API you configure. Because it targets OpenPLC rather than proprietary vendor runtimes out of the box, treat it as a verification and prototyping harness before porting logic to plant hardware.

For controls engineers and OT teams: generating and behavior-testing IEC 61131-3 Structured Text against a local OpenPLC runtime before touching hardware.

SemaPLC web IDE showing agent verification steps, IEC 61131-3 Structured Text code and a conveyor sorting simulation
Image: Midea AI (MIT License)