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Emro rides agentic AI boom into US, Europe markets - The Korea Herald
Korean supply chain management software provider Emro is stepping up its expansion in North America and Europe as growing geopolitical uncertainty, reshoring tr
Transition to autonomous manufacturing with artificial intelligence and digital thread integration - Global IT Research
World Brought to you · Legacy systems and disconnected operations leave production lines vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and critical skill shortages. Shifting to an intelligent manufacturing model connects design, engineering and service data into a single automated workflow.
A.I. Doesn’t Have to Mean Layoffs - The New York Times
A French multinational, Schneider Electric, decided to use artificial intelligence in manufacturing to make workers more productive, rather than to replace them. Here’s how that’s going.
Data center frenzy is spurring a jobs boomlet for blue-collar workers - CBS News
The rush to build thousands of U.S. data centers is driving demand for some workers, though economists project fewer permanent jobs.
A.I. Doesn’t Have to Mean Layoffs
A French multinational, Schneider Electric, decided to use artificial intelligence in manufacturing to make workers more productive, rather than to replace them. Here’s how that’s going.
Why China is right and why the West is now paying the price for a historic mistake
In response to Western sanctions ... such as gallium, germanium, and rare earth elements as a geopolitical weapon. The strategy has long since gone beyond mere export bans: with new, extraterritorial controls, the People's Republic is directly intervening in global supply ...
VFEAgent: A Multimodal Agent Framework for End-to-End Automated Finite Element Analysis
arXiv:2605.28978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite Element Analysis (FEA) serves as the cornerstone of modern engineering design. However, its workflow is inherently complex and relies heavily on domain expertise. Although recent efforts have integrated Large Language Models (LLMs) into FEA, existing approaches face limitations in handling multimodal inputs and executing complex tasks. To address these limitations, we propose VFEAgent, an end-to-end multi-agent system designed to automate FEA modeling and simulation directly from input images and problem descriptions. Our methodology integrates two core components: (1) a multimodal vision-language multi-agent pipeline that employs ReAct-driven reasoning to extract structured FEA specifications from heterogeneous inputs and (2) a verification-first code synthesis framework, incorporating robust self-debugging and fallback mechanisms to ensure executability and physical validity. We systematically evaluated the system across various engineering mechanics scenarios. The results demonstrate that VFEAgent achieves a high success rate in generating complete and physically valid simulations, outperforming LLM-based baseline methods in reliability and correctness. These findings validate the feasibility of automating the complete FEA workflow, highlighting the framework's potential to liberate engineers from tedious manual analysis.
Mistral Signs Airbus, BMW as It Brings AI to Manufacturing
French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI is expanding into advanced manufacturing, striking deals with new customers Airbus SE and BMW AG as it looks to so-called physical AI to fuel growth.
DynaSchedBench: Calibrated Dynamic Scheduling Benchmarks and Observability Paradox in LLM-based Scheduling Agents
arXiv:2605.27566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in neural combinatorial optimization for Dynamic Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (DFJSP) is currently hindered by a methodological tension: static benchmarks encourage benchmark overfitting, while uncalibrated generators obscure algorithmic capability with stochastic noise. To resolve this, we introduce \textbf{DynaSchedBench}, a diagnostic framework for DFJSP that rigorously controls the instance-generation process. Instead of relying on parameter sampling, our approach utilizes Sequential Event-Space Calibrator (SESC) that computes a novel Schedule Stress Index (SSI) to stratify instances by difficulty. We demonstrate that SESC is substantially more computationally efficient than evolutionary baselines while converging reliably to the target metrics. The framework integrates modular components for instance generation, snapshot-based simulation, agents, evaluation, and visualization, thereby enabling rigorous testing of reactive and lookahead-based policies. Leveraging this calibrated environment, we identify key limitations of LLM-based scheduling agents. Specifically, in step-wise online decision-making for dynamic scheduling, we identify an ``Observability Paradox'': providing agents with oracle access to full structural information can degrade policy performance, underperforming concise information. Furthermore, despite substantial token overhead, tool-augmented and refinement strategies fail to reliably improve performance, and most LLM agents fail to consistently surpass strong dispatching baselines-behaving more like robust heuristic approximators than superior optimizers.
Mistral AI launches Vibe, expands into industrial AI and announces data center push to challenge OpenAI
Mistral AI used its inaugural conference on Wednesday to announce a sweeping expansion into industrial manufacturing, a new inference data center south of Paris, and a rebranding of its consumer-facing assistant — moves that collectively signal the three-year-old French startup's ambition to become the enterprise AI provider of record for companies that refuse to hand their most sensitive data to American hyperscalers. At the AI NOW Summit, held at a venue in central Paris, co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch took the stage alongside CTO Timothée Lacroix and Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample to lay out a strategy that stretches from bare-metal GPU clusters to physics simulations for aircraft wings. The company disclosed that it now employs 1,000 people and is targeting €1 billion ($1.17B USD) in revenue for 2026 — a figure that, if achieved, would be an extraordinary growth trajectory for a company that began with 15 employees collaborating with its first customer, BNP Paribas, in 2023. "We have two convictions at Mistral," Mensch told the audience. "The first is that in order to deploy AI in the enterprise, you actually need, as an AI provider, to own the full stack." He described Mistral's business as fundamentally about "transforming electrons into tokens and intelligence," arguing that physical infrastructure control matters as much as model quality. The announcements come at a pivotal moment for Mistral and for the broader European AI ecosystem. The company has raised at least $3.9 billion across nine funding rounds, according to Clay's funding tracker, including a massive €1.7 billion Series C led by Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML in September 2025 at an €11.7 billion valuation, and an $830 million debt financing round in March 2026 from a consortium of seven banks to fund data center construction. Mistral now finds itself in a peculiar competitive position: too large to be dismissed as a research lab, but still dwarfed by the resources of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. Its answer, articulated across nearly an hour of presentations Wednesday, is vertical depth — going industry by industry, workflow by workflow, and building the infrastructure to keep everything on premises. Why Mistral is betting that physics AI will reshape how Airbus and BMW design products The centerpiece announcement was Mistral for Industrial Engineering, a fully integrated AI stack that combines Mistral's large language models with physics simulation capabilities acquired through its purchase of Emmi AI, completed earlier in May 2026. The platform targets the aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor industries with tools for accelerating product design, validating simulations, and optimizing production. The launch came with headline partnerships. Mistral announced it is working with Airbus across its commercial aircraft, helicopter, defense, and space divisions, implementing AI from initial design through to on-board capabilities. For BMW Group, Mistral is serving as a central partner for what the automaker calls its "Large Industry Model" initiative, focused on multimodal reasoning models for crash simulation and other complex engineering tasks. ASML, already Mistral's largest shareholder, is also an early adopter. Mensch framed the industrial push as addressing a fundamental gap in how AI is currently deployed. "AI is great today at automating tasks for knowledge workers and for people that are doing software engineering," he told the summit audience. "But once you move to all the kind of engineers, well, they are underserved." The reason, he explained, is structural. Simulating the behavior of a wing or a factory process requires compute-intensive physics solvers that can take hours or weeks per design variant. Traditional simulation creates a bottleneck that makes AI-assisted iteration impractical. Mistral's answer is what it calls "physics AI" — data-driven models trained on solver outputs that can predict physical behavior in seconds rather than hours, running on a single GPU. As Mistral's own blog post on the technology acknowledges, physics AI is "not a replacement for first-principles solvers in every regime" — it is a throughput accelerator for the majority of design-loop iterations, with traditional solvers reserved for verification and edge cases. "We now have both the language intelligence and the physical intelligence models, and by combining them together we are building delegation loops that allow us to create better tools, that allow us to create better objects that actually have an impact on the physical world," Mensch said. The ASML partnership offered a concrete illustration. In a video testimonial shown at the summit, an ASML representative described how the company's lithography machines run around the clock at customer fabrication plants, and field service engineers need to diagnose issues as rapidly as possible. By combining ASML's internal engineering expertise with Mistral's models, "we were able to develop a solution that's 120 times faster with a similar accuracy as we have today," the representative said. Another ASML speaker described AI agents acting as "an always-on code reviewer" to catch software defects before they reach customers. Inside Mistral's €4 billion infrastructure gamble to build Europe's most powerful AI data centers Mistral's full-stack ambitions extend all the way down to the physical layer. Launched in June 2025, Mistral Compute is a €4 billion ($4.66B USD) investment in data centers in France and Sweden, with a stated roadmap of 200 MW of capacity by 2027 and 1 GW by 2030. Lacroix described the company's existing 40 MW facility at Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris, which was built in collaboration with Eclarion and has been training models since early 2026. "It's been very interesting to see how we can transfer rigor, which is one of our company values, into down to the hardware layer," he said, describing the process of "fixing compute trays and fixing fibers, allowing us to reach the very best speeds possible on that hardware for training." On Wednesday, Mistral announced a new 10 MW facility at Les Ulis in the Essonne department, also south of Paris, dedicated to inference operations and scheduled to open in Q3 2026. Lacroix also referenced a site in Borlänge, Sweden, planned for development through 2027, which will host NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin GPUs. "One of the benefits for us of owning the hardware layer is also that it lets us be at the very bleeding edge of what infrastructure provides," he told the audience. The infrastructure push is funded in part by the $830 million debt financing round announced in March 2026, which Clay's funding tracker attributes to a consortium of seven banks: Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis CIB. And this infrastructure ownership is not merely a hedge against GPU scarcity — it is central to Mistral's pitch to security-conscious enterprise and government customers. The company's February 2026 acquisition of serverless platform Koyeb has been integrated into Mistral Studio to support both hosted and on-premises deployments, giving customers a choice between running inference on Mistral's hardware or their own. "More and more, the compute world has been getting supply constrained," Lacroix told the audience. "One of the reasons we've been doing all of this and developing all of this data center capacity is to secure compute capacity not only for ourselves but also for our customers." Le Chat is dead, long live Vibe: How Mistral's new agent platform takes aim at enterprise productivity In a consumer-facing rebrand with significant enterprise implications, Mistral announced that Le Chat — its conversational AI assistant launched in February 2024 — is being renamed Vibe and reimagined as a unified agent platform for enterprise productivity and software development. "We are transitioning Le Chat to the Vibe family," Lacroix told the audience, explaining that the evolution was driven by the growing power of agentic models, particularly the new Mistral Medium 3.5. As the team used Vibe's coding CLI internally with increasingly complex tasks, "we realized that this really didn't need to be bound to the CLI, it didn't need to be limited to code, and we could do a lot more with it," he said. Vibe encompasses two primary modes. Vibe for Work is a web and mobile agent that connects to enterprise tools — Google Workspace, Outlook, SharePoint, Slack, GitHub — to perform multi-step tasks such as summarizing emails, analyzing spreadsheets, drafting reports, and scheduling recurring workflows. Vibe for Code is a coding agent available through a web interface, a new VS Code extension, and the existing CLI, capable of building features, fixing bugs, refactoring code, and shipping pull requests. Critically, the same underlying agent powers both modes. "When you access it through our web app or through the CLI, you have access to the same connections, the same tools, the same understanding of who you are, what you do, and what you're trying to achieve," Lacroix said. Pricing starts at free for basic use, $14.99 per month for Pro, $24.99 per user per month for Teams, and custom pricing for Enterprise deployments. Alongside Vibe, Mistral also launched Search Toolkit, an open-source framework for building production search pipelines already in use by shipping giant CMA CGM, which uses it alongside Voxtral to process audio from multiple data sources and return alerts within 15 seconds. Mistral's model strategy signals a new phase: fewer products, more capabilities per model Chief Scientist Guillaume Lample used his portion of the keynote to describe a philosophical shift in Mistral's model strategy: consolidation of capabilities into fewer, more versatile models rather than maintaining separate specialized products. Mistral Medium 3.5, the company's current flagship, absorbs capabilities that previously required distinct models. Pixtral (image processing), Magistrale (reasoning), and DevStral (coding) have all been deprecated as standalone products, with their capabilities folded natively into Medium 3.5. "Now all our models are natively multimodal," Lample said. "We no longer have Magistrale. This model is deprecated, because all our models will natively be doing reasoning." The company is also working on Mistral Large 4, which Lample said would arrive "in a couple of months at most, during the summer," with expanded capabilities in industrial applications such as fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, computer-aided design, and cybersecurity. On the smaller end of the spectrum, Lample highlighted Mr. Lossier, a 1-billion-parameter OCR model that can process thousands of pages per minute on a single GPU, and the Voxtral speech model family, which has expanded from automatic speech recognition to include text-to-speech with voice cloning. A "duplex" model for real-time conversational speech is planned for release within months. Lample also made the case for open-weight models becoming more — not less — important in the agentic era. "Today we are building these agentic workflows, these models are running in the background, they are doing a lot of actions, a lot of tool calls, so they are extremely token-hungry, much more than before," he said. "What we are seeing today is actually a comeback of this small model and the efficient model." Upcoming models will be trained on more than 200 languages, a multilingual strength now powering a partnership with Amazon to improve non-English interactions on Alexa+. How Mistral's enterprise playbook stacks up against OpenAI and Anthropic Mistral's positioning stands in sharp contrast to the strategies of its most prominent American rivals. While OpenAI and Anthropic have each attracted hundreds of millions of consumer users and derive significant revenue from subscription products, Mistral has leaned almost entirely into enterprise and government deployments. As TechCrunch reported in March when Mistral announced its Forge customization platform at Nvidia GTC, CEO Mensch has described the company as being "on track to surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue" — a figure driven largely by corporate clients. The Forge platform, which lets enterprises train custom models on their own data rather than simply fine-tuning or applying retrieval-augmented generation to existing models, represents the foundation on which the company's industry-specific solutions are built. As Mistral's head of product, Elisa Salamanca, told TechCrunch, Forge "lets enterprises and governments customize AI models for their specific needs." Early partners include Ericsson, the European Space Agency, Italian consulting company Reply, and Singapore's DSO and HTX, alongside ASML. Mistral has also built an expanding network of systems integration partnerships to drive enterprise adoption. In February 2026, Accenture and Mistral announced a multi-year strategic collaboration, with Accenture itself becoming a Mistral customer. Mauro Macchi, Accenture's CEO for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, said at the time that the partnership brings together "sovereign models and the capability to scale technology across industries, geographies and business functions." The BNP Paribas relationship offers the most detailed public case study. In a video testimonial at the summit, a BNP Paribas representative described deploying Mistral's models on-premises to satisfy strict security requirements, developing AI agents for KYC processes that reduced incomplete files from 80% to 10% and compressed processing time from weeks to days. The bank's LLM platform at its Corporate and Institutional Banking division has now rolled out to 65,000 users. Mensch noted the significance: "We started to collaborate in 2023 where we were 15 people, so that was, I think, really a leap of faith at the time." The industrial vertical is also being extended to government clients. Mistral disclosed that it is working with France, Luxembourg, Singapore, Morocco, Greece, and Slovakia to build citizen-facing AI services — from deploying agents that help job-seekers through France Travail to building models that understand Moroccan Darija and Amazigh languages. "We think that AI needs to be specialized and understand structural nuances," Mensch told the audience. "It needs to speak languages as good as it speaks English." The road ahead for Europe's most ambitious AI company For Mistral, Wednesday's announcements amount to a declaration that the company intends to compete not by matching American AI giants on any single dimension, but by assembling capabilities none of them are willing or able to offer in combination: open-weight models, owned infrastructure, on-premises deployment, physics simulation, and deep vertical customization — all under a single roof. The strategy demands execution on multiple fronts simultaneously, each requiring enormous capital and specialized talent. The competition is formidable and accelerating. OpenAI has been rapidly expanding its enterprise offerings. Anthropic, backed by billions from Amazon, is building its own corporate AI practice. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all offer AI platforms deeply integrated with cloud infrastructure that most enterprises already use. But Mistral is wagering that the world's most consequential AI deployments — the ones governing how aircraft get designed, how banks process compliance, how governments interact with citizens — will ultimately go to providers that offer sovereignty over data, models, and compute. "AI is too strategic to be left in the hands of a few," Mensch said, echoing the conviction he described from Mistral's founding three years ago. Three years in, the company that started as a Paris research lab with a handful of employees now trains models in its own data centers, simulates physics for the manufacturers that build the world's planes and cars, and is rewriting its assistant into an agent that can file your pull requests and summarize your inbox in the same conversation. Whether that sprawling ambition coheres into a durable business or stretches Mistral too thin is the €11.7 billion ($13.6B USD) question. The 1,000 people now working there are betting that in enterprise AI, owning the full stack is not a liability — it is the product.
London’s Orbital Industries bags €43 million to build industrial hardware from the atoms up
Orbital Industries, a British company building industrial hardware from the atoms up using AI, has raised €43 million ($50 million) in Series B funding in order to scale their data centre products, grow its AI and engineering teams and develop its platform for industrial applications beyond data centres. The round was led by Plural. Existing […]
Are robots nearing their ChatGPT moment? – podcast
Last month at Beijing’s half marathon, a robot named Lightning beat the human world record by nearly seven minutes. It’s the latest in a string of AI-powered milestones that have got people wondering whether robots are about to enter our everyday lives, just as chatbots have. And the country leading the charge is China, where the government has pledged to invest more than £100bn in robotics over the next 20 years. To find out how robots are already entering the workforce, and what needs to happen to get them cleaning our homes and weeding our gardens, Ian Sample hears from the Guardian’s senior China correspondent, Amy Hawkins, and from Nathan Lepora, professor of robotics and AI at Bristol University, who researches how robots can achieve human-like dexterity Clips: Global News, BBC, CGTN Continue reading...
DC, AI investments set to boost country’s coffers | The Star
Global technology companies are increasingly viewing Malaysia not just as a manufacturing base, but as a strategic hub for advanced engineering, digital operations and artificial intelligence (AI)-related infrastructure amid rising semiconductor and data centre (DC) investments in South-East Asia.
AI infrastructure spending lifts Taiwan electronics sector outlook
Cloud providers' large-scale investments in AI infrastructure have strengthened demand for Taiwan's electronics supply chain, boosting optimism among local manufacturers, according to a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) survey. The survey noted that nearly 40% of Taiwan's electronics ...
Physical AI in the Digital Omnibus – Update
Physical AI in the Digital Omnibus – Update Share this page - Share this page On this page Author Dr. Benedikt Rohrßen Partner Author Dr. Benedikt Rohrßen Partner - On this page Share this page - Share this page # Physical AI in the Digital Omnibus – Update - Briefing Co authors: Ramona Ahmadi, Julius Haas ## What is the current status? On May 6, 2026, the chief negotiators of the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament agreed on a provisional draft of the Digital Omnibus on AI [1], a legislative package aimed at simplifying the digital legal framework („ Digital Omibus on AI“).[2] Significant changes are expected, particularly for physical/industrial AI. This includes machines equipped with (high-risk) AI, such as autonomous machines and robots. ## What changes are expected? New deadlines for the application of the rules on high-risk AI systems - T
AI Is Colliding With the Analog Semiconductor Supply Chain
AI infrastructure demand is now colliding with supply chain, creating new risks across automotive, industrial, networking, and board-level components.
Taiwan’s economy is booming thanks to AI. Not everyone sees the benefits | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera
Taiwan’s economy is booming thanks to AI. Not everyone sees the benefits | Business and Economy News | Al Jazeera Listen (8 mins) Save Share Add Al Jazeera on Google People stand on the street as they shop for food at Nanjichang Night Market in Taipei, Taiwan, May 17, 2026 [Ann Wang/Reuters] Taipei, Taiwan – For Li, an engineer at Taiwanese computer giant ASUS, the AI boom sweeping Taiwan has made it an exciting time to work in tech. Taiwan is a semiconductor powerhouse, producing about 90 percent of the most advanced chips used to power leading AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude. ## Recommended Stories - Caitriona Graham recounts violent treatment after Gaza flotilla raid - Malaysia orders TikTok to address ‘defamatory’ content about king - US pausing $14bn arms sale to Taiwan due to Iran war, navy chief says - Turkish opposition leader vows to stay after court ousts him “I’
Emerson and SiMa.ai Launch Physical AI for Edge Analytics in Harsh Industrial Environments
Emerson and SiMa.ai have partnered to integrate Physical AI for real-time edge analytics on industrial PCs, aiming to boost operational efficiency and safety.
Council Post: AI In Manufacturing: Adoption And The Path To Practical Impact
Rather than aiming for transformation overnight, we must emphasize incremental progress with measurable outcomes.
Council Post: Orchestrating Your AI-Powered Supply Chain For Growth And Profitability
As supply chain disruptions intensify, AI-powered orchestration is helping organizations move beyond fragmented systems and reactive firefighting toward real-time coordination, faster decisions and more resilient operations.
Physical AI Market Research Report to 2032 - Star Players are NVIDIA Corporation (US), ABB (Switzerland), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (US), Moog (US) and Festo (Germany)
The global industrial and technology sectors are entering the era of Embodied Intelligence as detailed in the latest strategic intelligence disclosure by Market Research Corridor titled Physical AI Market Research Report 2026 2032 As artificial intelligence transitions from digital only ...
AI-Driven Controlled Environment Agriculture as Resilient Infrastructure for U.S. Fresh-Produce Supply Chains
arXiv:2605.23946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate volatility, regional production concentration, labor constraints, cyber risk, and dependence on long-distance fresh-produce supply chains expose vulnerabilities in U.S. fresh-produce and specialty-crop systems. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) can reduce some exposure by moving selected production into protected, sensor-rich environments, but recent failures in venture-backed vertical farming show that CEA cannot be treated as a universal food-security solution. This paper proposes the Controlled Environment Agriculture Resilience Infrastructure Framework, Version 2.0 (CEA-RIF 2.0), for evaluating AI-driven CEA as targeted regional fresh-produce continuity infrastructure. The framework assesses seven dimensions: supply continuity, climate isolation, energy and grid integration, water and nutrient circularity, cyber-physical reliability, economic viability, and governance and deployment. Drawing on U.S. government reports, peer-reviewed CEA and energy literature, demand-response research, cybersecurity standards, international smart-agriculture programs, 2025-2026 financing and policy signals, and public autonomous-greenhouse datasets, the paper argues that AI creates resilience value only when it improves measured operational outcomes such as climate stability, energy flexibility, yield consistency, anomaly detection, labor productivity, and safe recovery from faults. The analysis reframes AI-driven CEA as a cyber-physical infrastructure problem: energy-aware, grid-interactive, secure, interoperable, regionally distributed, financially disciplined, and connected to public resilience goals. The paper concludes with a research agenda for interagency testbeds, open datasets, standardized metrics, demand-response pilots, and cyber-physical reference architectures.
You can’t repair your tractor because Hollywood was terrified of the VCR
The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act accidentally handed John Deere the legal right to lock farmers out of their own tractors.
GCCs & India’s Semiconductor Ambitions: Strategic Partnership
India’s GCC ecosystem is accelerating semiconductor innovation through chip design, AI hardware, embedded systems, and R&D expansion.
Singapore upgrades 2026 key exports growth forecast as AI-related demand surges | The Straits Times
Singapore revises its 2026 key exports growth forecast upwards due to surging AI-related demand for electronics, despite global risks. Read more at straitstimes.com.
Ample Electronic says AI demand is boosting MLCC-related passive components
Ample Electronic said rising demand from artificial intelligence end customers has driven a stronger market for multilayer ceramic capacitors and related passive components, lifting orders, driving inventory builds, and prompting a shift toward longer-term material lock-in agreements.
How Visteon’s Dividend And AI Cockpit Wins At Visteon (VC) Have Changed Its Investment Story
Earlier this week, Visteon Corporation’s board declared a regular quarterly dividend of US$0.375 per share, payable on June 15, 2026 to shareholders of record as of June 1, 2026. This dividend decision comes as Visteon balances recent macro-driven volatility with solid first-quarter results, ...
Automation and AI: Masters in Business with the CEO of Honeywell
Barry sits down with Vimal Kapur, Chairman and CEO of Honeywell. They discuss the future of Honeywell as well as Kapur's plan to split the company into three separate entities. They also break down how the company uses automation and what to expect from AI. (Source: Bloomberg)
Samsung Chip Workers Face Colleagues’ Resentment Over Bonus Deal
Samsung Electronics Co. staved off a potentially catastrophic strike this week, reaching a tentative deal with leaders of its largest union at the last minute to share more profits from the AI boom. But inside the $1.1 trillion technology behemoth, not everyone is happy.
The Growing Cybersecurity Risks To The Supply Chain In The AI Era
Supply chains are a primary target for cybercriminals and provide the foundation of global commerce in the hyper-connected digital ecosystem of today
Stellantis, Qualcomm Expand Partnership for Vehicle Tech
Qualcomm's head of Automotive, Robotics and IoT Businesses Nakul Duggal said that the new vehicle technology partnership the semiconductor company announced with Stellantis will allow the automaker to modernize technology across the board and move fast as the automation and self-driving landscape grows. Duggal said that the automotive industry is moving quickly and he sees more intelligent cars becoming out over the next few years. (Source: Bloomberg)
Evaluating Temporal Semantic Caching and Workflow Optimization in Agentic Plan-Execute Pipelines
arXiv:2605.20630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial asset operations workflows are latency-sensitive because a single user query may require coordination over sensor data, work orders, failure modes, forecasting tools, and domain-specific agents. We evaluate this problem on AssetOpsBench (AOB), an industrial agent benchmark whose plan-execute pipeline exposes repeated overhead from tool discovery, LLM planning, MCP tool execution, and final summarization. Existing LLM caching techniques such as KV-cache reuse and embedding-based semantic caching were designed for chatbot serving and break down when output validity depends on time, asset, or sensor parameters. We propose two complementary optimization layers for AOB plan-execute pipelines: a temporal semantic cache and a set of MCP workflow optimizations combining disk-backed tool-discovery caching and dependency-aware parallel step execution. MCP workflow optimizations corresponded to a 1.67x speedup and reduced median end-to-end latency by about 40.0% while the temporal-cache benchmark achieved a median of 30.6x speedup on cache hits. Beyond the speedup, our results expose a concrete failure mode of pure semantic caching for parameter-rich industrial queries, providing a critical analysis of how caching choices interact with evaluation correctness in MCP-backed agent benchmarks.
AI adoption surges among machine builders, survey finds
High costs and data gaps are slowing wider rollout, even as most machine builders use AI in operations and service work.
VBFDD-Agent for Electric Vehicle Battery Fault Detection and Diagnosis: Descriptive Text Modeling of Battery Digital Signals
arXiv:2605.20742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid proliferation of electric vehicles, the safety and reliability of lithium-ion batteries have become critical concerns. Effective anomaly detection is essential for ensuring safe battery operation. However, as battery systems and operating scenarios become increasingly complex, battery fault diagnosis and maintenance require stronger cross-domain adaptability and human-AI collaboration. Traditional fault detection and diagnosis methods are usually designed for specific scenarios and predefined workflows, making them less effective in complex real-world applications. To address the scarcity of open-source battery fault report corpora and the lack of unified maintenance knowledge representation, this study proposes a descriptive text modeling approach for battery signal reports. Monitoring signals, statistical features, anomaly records, and state assessment results are transformed into structured and readable natural language descriptions, forming a language corpus for battery health diagnosis and maintenance. Based on this corpus, we propose VBFDD-Agent, a vehicle battery fault detection and diagnosis agent for automotive-grade battery systems. VBFDD-Agent integrates descriptive battery-state texts, historical case retrieval, local maintenance manuals, and large language model reasoning to generate structured diagnostic results and maintenance recommendations. Experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately perform anomaly monitoring based on descriptive textual representations and provide flexible, efficient, and actionable maintenance suggestions. Expert evaluation further confirms the practical value of the generated recommendations. Overall, VBFDD-Agent extends traditional battery diagnosis from label prediction to interpretable and maintenance-oriented decision support.
UK AI startup Scope raises €17.3 million funding led by Index Ventures to speed up industrial inspection workflows
Scope, a London-based AI workflow platform transforming inspections for the TIC (testing, inspection, certification) industry, has raised €17.2 million ($20 million) in funding to grow its London-based team and accelerate adoption among leading inspection companies globally. The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from Susa Ventures, Entrepreneurs First and Syndicate 1. Notable angels […]
Tool-Augmented Agent for Closed-loop Optimization,Simulation,and Modeling Orchestration
arXiv:2605.20190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Iterative industrial design-simulation optimization is bottlenecked by the CAD-CAE semantic gap: translating simulation feedback into valid geometric edits under diverse, coupled constraints. To fill this gap, we propose COSMO-Agent (Closed-loop Optimization, Simulation, and Modeling Orchestration), a tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) framework that teaches LLMs to complete the closed-loop CAD-CAE process. Specifically, we cast CAD generation, CAE solving, result parsing, and geometry revision as an interactive RL environment, where an LLM learns to orchestrate external tools and revise parametric geometries until constraints are satisfied. To make this learning stable and industrially usable, we design a multi-constraint reward that jointly encourages feasibility, toolchain robustness, and structured output validity. In addition, we contribute an industry-aligned dataset that covers 25 component categories with executable CAD-CAE tasks to support realistic training and evaluation. Experiments show that COSMO-Agent training substantially improves small open-source LLMs for constraint-driven design, exceeding large open-source and strong closed-source models in feasibility, efficiency, and stability.
Presien Reduces Critical Safety Events on Construction Sites by 70%+ with Claude
Presien utilizes Claude for real-time construction site safety monitoring, demonstrating how Generative AI can be applied to physical operations and risk reduction.
EU Seeks to Lift Ban on Chinese Chips It Only Barred in April
The European Union will propose temporarily lifting sanctions on a major Chinese semiconductor supplier after automakers warned of impending supply chain chaos if the ban isn’t removed.
Samsung reaches last-minute deal to avert strike over AI riches
Work stoppage had threatened to disrupt Korean economy and global artificial intelligence boom
Procurement leaders urge incremental AI adoption to avoid heavy spend | Supply Chain Dive
Managing the cost of using AI rests on starting low-risk pilots and scaling the technology slowly, executives said at the Institute for Supply Management World 2026 conference.
The AI Productivity Gap: Why AI Transformation in Engineering Requires More Than Automation | Aras
AI productivity needs context and often becomes fragmented. Learn how Aras is bridging the AI productivity gap with the digital thread.
Munich-based ClearOps raises €8.6 million Series A to build AI operating system for industrial after-sales
ClearOps, a Munich-based enterprise SaaS startup building an AI-powered after-sales platform for industrial OEMs, has today announced the closing of an €8.6 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Hitachi Ventures, with Schoeller Group and Barkawi Group. This marks the company’s first institutional capital raise. William Barkawi, founder and CEO of ClearOps, […]
The adoption of AI by industrial sectors | PIIE
Artificial intelligence (AI) appears destined to impact the entire economy but could affect industries and companies very differently. Some sectors are more susceptible to the application of AI than others. Within sectors, some firms will exhibit greater expertise in adopting AI than others.
Zurich-based AVIAN raises €2.2 million to prevent industrial fires with always-on AI thermal monitoring
AVIAN, a Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for high-risk operations, has raised a €2.2 million ($2.6 million) pre-Seed round, led by Founderful. The company was profitable and entirely bootstrapped for two years before raising capital. With this round, it plans to expand engineering and deployment capacity and scale beyond its stronghold in […]
Decentralized autonomous organization and blockchain-based incentivization framework for community-based facilities management
arXiv:2605.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional facility management often relies on centralized decision-making structures that limit stakeholder participation, leading to misalignment with occupant needs and reduced satisfaction. This paper proposes a novel blockchain- and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)-based framework for community-based facilities management in smart buildings. The framework comprises two key components: a decentralized governance platform that facilitates transparent collective decision-making through blockchain-based voting, and a maintenance management platform with an incentivization mechanism that encourages building occupants to actively contribute to facility upkeep through tokenized rewards. System evaluation includes cost analysis, scalability, data security considerations, usability testing, and semi-structured interviews with facility managers and researchers to assess the platform's usefulness, challenges, and adoption potential. The findings demonstrate the framework's potential as a viable incentivization solution for engaging stakeholders in the collective upkeep and improvement of building infrastructure.
CircuitHub takes $28m from Plural to make PCBs the way clouds make compute
CircuitHub has raised $28m led by Plural to expand its automated PCB-manufacturing 'Grid' factories across Europe and the US.
Samsung Faces Chip Plant Strike That Threatens Global Supply
Talks between Samsung Electronics Co. and its largest labor union broke down, raising the prospect of a strike that may disrupt global chip supply and hamper an important engine of Korean economic growth.
KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition
arXiv:2605.19031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.
AI and autonomous agents set to transform ERP systems, says McKinsey Report
Artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous agent networks are rapidly transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, reshaping the way companies manage operations, according to a recent McKinsey Technology report.
Green steel startup Boston Metal is doubling down on critical metals
The startup Boston Metal has raised a $75 million funding round to produce critical metals, MIT Technology Review can exclusively report. The company has been known largely for its efforts to clean up steel production, an industry that’s responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse emissions today. With the additional money, the new focus could…
Industry Op-Ed AI Special: Why AI outcomes depend on governance, not tools
These incidents reveal the primary ... as organizations move past early adoption and focus on turning AI into a sustainable advantage. To achieve this, companies must go beyond simply deploying tools and implement the governance, risk controls and employee practices required to manage AI at ...
Rockwell Automation Announces New Research Showing UK manufacturers Shift from AI Adoption to Industrial Execution
/PRNewswire/ -- Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, today...
Mistral AI buys Austrian physics AI startup in industrial push | Reuters
Europe's leading artificial intelligence firm, France's Mistral AI, said on Tuesday it has acquired Linz-based Emmi AI for an undisclosed sum, aiming to enhance its offering for industrial clients across Europe.
IMR to lead €6.9m project to double EU remanufacturing output
'Rewire' aims to double remanufactured output, lower resource use and emissions, and build new skills. Read more: IMR to lead €6.9m project to double EU remanufacturing output
The AI economy is rewriting the American Dream — and blue-collar workers are poised to win
AI-driven hiring slowdowns are hitting some entry-level jobs for college graduates as companies like Ford and AT&T ramp up recruiting for skilled trade workers.
Airbus gets HPC-as-a-service supercomputer from Bull
Aerospace giant rents new system over 5 years to help develop new aircraft
Samsung, labor union to resume talks on Wednesday
Samsung Electronics and its South Korean labor union will resume talks on Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Commission said
SMIC founder and AMEC CEO urge Chinese fabs to test domestic chipmaking tools on active production lines — equipment makers post record revenue but falling margins | Tom's Hardware
The broadcast itself is ultimately ... supply lines are cut. ... Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. ... Tech Industry Chinese fabs import record volumes of US chipmaking equipment via Singapore and Malaysia · Semiconductors China's top ...
AI Omnibus Implementation Rollbacks — Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute (BISI)
The European Union (EU) is attempting to preserve its manufacturing dominance through decoupling industrial AI from the AI Act, risking a fragmented regulatory landscape that favours established companies over startups to keep the industrial growth stable.
U.S. Home Builder Sentiment Improved in May But Affordability Challenges Persist
Confidence among U.S. home builders improved in May but still remains in negative territory amid rising mortgage rates, elevated costs and economic uncertainty tied to the war in Iran.
Samsung strike talks closing as global chip supply chains at risk
All eyes are on South Korea today as officials bid to avert a strike by more than 45,000 Samsung workers that could impact global semiconductor supply chains. Read more: Samsung strike talks closing as global chip supply chains at risk
AMEC semiconductor technology becomes China’s industry standard
This shift lowers the risk from geopolitical disruptions and makes China’s chip supply chain more resilient. As export controls get stricter, Chinese chipmakers are swapping foreign equipment for local alternatives, which speeds up the growth of homegrown tech and gets them ready for global competition...
Semiconductor Chokepoints Define U.S.-China Tech Rivalry and Supply Chain Risks – ICO Optics
The article digs into how the U.S.–China rivalry now plays out in the world of semiconductors and rare-earths. Japan, meanwhile, […]
NIMO Controller: a self-driving laboratory orchestrator based on the Model Context Protocol
arXiv:2605.15227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) have attracted increasing attention as a means of accelerating scientific discovery; however, developing SDL software remains technically demanding. To improve accessibility, orchestration software frameworks have been proposed to coordinate SDL components. Nevertheless, existing frameworks are primarily designed for human interaction and do not provide standardized interfaces suitable for AI agents. In this work, we propose an SDL software architecture based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), in which all SDL functionalities are exposed through MCP servers. Following this design principle, we introduce an MCP-based SDL orchestrator, named NIMO Controller. It provides a visual programming interface automatically generated through MCP-based tool discovery, allowing human users to design experimental workflows without writing code. The same MCP backend can also be accessed by AI agents, providing a unified interface for both human users and AI agents. We demonstrate the proposed system through a case study on a color-matching SDL. The results validate the usability of the proposed MCP-based SDL architecture.
CAX-Agent: A Lightweight Agent Harness for Reliable APDL Automation
arXiv:2605.15218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed for MAPDL finite-element simulation face practical reliability challenges: without structured execution control, tool encapsulation, and fault recovery, outputs may be inconsistent and task failures are common. The Agent Harness paradigm addresses this by inserting domain-specific orchestration middleware that manages tool lifecycles, workflow state, and recovery escalation. This paper presents the architecture of CAX-Agent, a lightweight agent harness purpose-built for MAPDL automation, and empirically evaluates one of its core components -- the recovery policy.CAX-Agent organizes execution into three layers -- LLM service, agent harness, and solver backend -- with a recovery ladder that escalates from deterministic rule patching through model-driven regeneration to context enrichment and human intervention. We evaluate three recovery strategies (no_recovery, rule_only, and model_only) on 50 standard structural benchmarks with three repeated runs per strategy (450 case-runs total). Two independent human raters score task completion under blind conditions; inter-rater agreement is strong (quadratic weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.84, 96 percent of score pairs within one point). Model_only achieves the best completion rate (0.9267), task score (3.59/4), total score (9.16/10), and zero-intervention rate (0.84), outperforming rule_only (0.7733, 3.17/4, 7.03/10, 0.00) and no_recovery (0.6933, 2.74/4, 5.60/10, 0.00) with large effect sizes (Cliff's delta = 0.81-0.87). The benchmark uses deliberately simple geometries to isolate recovery-policy effects; we discuss the scope of these findings and directions for broader validation.
From Backup Restoration to Minimum Viable Factory Recovery: A Systematization of Ransomware Recovery in Manufacturing Systems
arXiv:2605.16167v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ransomware recovery in critical manufacturing infrastructure is not only a backup-restoration problem. Production capability depends on coupled information-technology, operational-technology, physical-process, quality, logistics, identity, and supplier systems. After ransomware, a plant may rebuild servers yet remain unable to schedule work, authenticate operators, trust engineering workstations, release product, reconnect OT assets, or coordinate suppliers. This paper reframes manufacturing ransomware recovery as a critical-infrastructure continuity and interdependency problem. We conduct a PRISMA-guided multivocal review of academic literature, standards and government guidance, threat frameworks, public incident material, and verified full-text/source-page evidence anchors. The review identifies nine evidence-backed recovery failure modes: dependency blindness, untrusted restore point and backup over-trust, identity trust collapse, lack of proof-of-recovery, unsafe OT reconnection, segmentation assumption failure, capability mismatch, unmanaged degraded operation, and supplier dependency failure. We then introduce Minimum Viable Factory Recovery (MVF Recovery): the smallest safe, trusted, and operationally meaningful production capability that can be resumed under current dependency, evidence, identity, data, network, OT, and supplier constraints. MVF Recovery is an analytical objective rather than a claim of full recovery, implementation, or safety certification. The paper derives a recovery lifecycle and benchmarking directions as secondary outputs. The contribution is an evidence-calibrated foundation for capability-centric ransomware recovery in critical manufacturing infrastructure.
Not the Allbirds effect: Japan’s top bidet maker Toto has been quietly making chip supplies for decades, and the stock market finally noticed
Toto didn't just flush its old business to make chips: it's been making the same components to power the world's AI infrastructure for years.
Why China is positioned to capture the bulk of the economic robotic value
Investing.com -- The global race for artificial intelligence supremacy is increasingly being determined by industrial scale rather than compute power alone, according to an Alpine Macro report published on May 12, 2026.
Exclusive: At Samsung, the global AI boom spurred a looming strike and deep divisions | Reuters
But employees in its other businesses who work primarily on logic chips, such as "base die" which are crucial components of AI chips, would receive bonuses of 50% to 100%, according to the documents.
McKinsey Report: Ag Merchants Need AI-Driven Restructuring of Trading Operations - News and Statistics - IndexBox
McKinsey & Company, covered by AgTechNavigator, calls for agricultural merchants to overhaul trading operations using agile models, advanced analytics, and agentic AI to manage volatility and close information gaps.
SPIN: Structural LLM Planning via Iterative Navigation for Industrial Tasks
arXiv:2605.14051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial LLM agent systems often separate planning from execution, yet LLM planners frequently produce structurally invalid or unnecessarily long workflows, leading to brittle failures and avoidable tool and API cost. We propose \texttt{SPIN}, a planning wrapper that combines validated Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning with prefix based execut
Berlin-based Elephant Company raises over €5 million to bring AI-powered training to frontline workers
Elephant Company (Elephant), a Berlin-based startup aiming to unlock the potential of blue-collar workers with AI-powered training, has closed a funding round of over €5 million to grow its team and scale its platform. The round was led by EnBW New Ventures and Wepa, with participation from business angels from Flix, home24 SE, SB21, Ventic […]
China Just Made Physical AI the Center of Its Economy. What's Washington's Answer?
Embodied AI sits alongside quantum technology, biomanufacturing, hydrogen and fusion energy, brain-computer interfaces, and 6G as the six designated engines of what the document calls the “intelligent economy.” But its placement is broader than that grouping suggests.
The Path to the Autonomous Enterprise: SAP Announces New Sustainability AI Agents
New sustainability AI agents from SAP cut compliance review hours by 50% and reduce GHS classification effort by 80%.
AI and operational agility set to reshape agriculture trading, McKinsey analysis shows
McKinsey & Company’s latest analysis highlights a fundamental transformation in agricultural commodity trading, driven by rising market volatility, digital competition, and the adoption of AI and agentic systems. The report argues that traditional, experience-based and regionally siloed ...
Introducing Perceptron Mk1
Perceptron Mk1 is a new vision-language model designed for video and image reasoning, targeting applications in robotics, warehousing, and physical AI.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the future of procurement: From traditional systems to intelligent supply chains - The Business & Financial Times
By Alvin A. Mingle The procurement space has always been one of the most dynamic functions within organisations, particularly in Ghana, where supply chains are often stretched across borders and shaped by global dependencies. From sourcing critical inputs in the telecom, oil and gas, and ...
Honeywell CEO Discusses Company's Dealmaking, Spinoffs
Global events like the Iran conflict and the rise of artificial intelligence are creating increased demand for Honeywell International Inc. products ahead of its split later this month, according to the companies chief executive officer Vimal Kapur. He speaks with Dani Burger on "Bloomberg Deals." (Source: Bloomberg)
Rivian CEO’s Robotics Company Raises $400 Million
The funding for the AI-powered industrial robot project now exceeds $1 billion.
Wolfspeed Stock Surges 23% on AI Infrastructure Hype and Short Squeeze Momentum
Global demand for silicon carbide is projected to grow rapidly as AI energy consumption soars and electrification accelerates. The company's Mohawk Valley and other U.S. fabs position it to capture domestic content advantages amid supply chain security concerns. Challenges remain significant.
Foxconn confirms cyberattack on North American facilities
Ransomware group Nitrogen claimed to have exfiltrated 8TB of data, included files related to projects involving Intel, Apple, Google, Dell, Nvidia and other companies. Read more: Foxconn confirms cyberattack on North American facilities
4 ways AI is enabling the future of industrial work - Source
Examples from Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia show how AI is transforming high-skill workflows in manufacturing and industrial companies.
Industrial Robotics Intelligence Software Market to Add US$49.17 Billion by 2031 as AI, Digital Twins and Physical AI Shift Factory Robotics From Programmed Motion to Adaptive Automation
NEW YORK and TOKYO May 13 2026 The global Industrial Robotics Intelligence Software Market is entering a new investment cycle as manufacturers move beyond robot installation and begin upgrading robotic fleets with software that can see learn simulate optimize and ...
GM Cuts 600 IT Roles as AI Productivity Gains Outpace Headcount Needs | Futurism
Read Time 6 minutes Tags AI Automation ... Broader enterprise signal GM is not isolated Amazon Meta Oracle and Block have announced rounds of job cuts with some emphasizing AI role in automating work and boosting productivity with lower head counts The pattern is consistent across sectors with large ...
Will investors embrace China’s humanoid robot champion?
Unitree aims to go public later this year in a crucial test for android industry
AI-Fueled Rally Pushes Industrials to Tech-Like Valuations, Data Show - Bloomberg
Optimism surrounding the potential for industrial companies to profit from the artificial intelligence boom has fueled record-setting momentum in the sector. Now worries are mounting that the group’s link to AI may be getting too tight.
Trustworthiness in Digital Twin Systems: Systematic Review and Research Horizons
arXiv:2605.08208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Digital Twins (DTs) are increasingly deployed across application domains, yet the treatment of trust-related issues remains unevenly addressed. To examine whether and how trust is discussed in the current landscape, we conducted a systematic review of existing DT review papers and a mapping of their abstracts. Seven trust-related challenges and seven trust-enhancing strategies were defined to guide the analysis, enabling the trust focus of each paper to be characterised. By aggregating the challenges and strategies referenced across domains, distinct patterns of emphasis were observed. With certain domains consistently sharing similar spectrum of trust concerns, four integration types, including human-centred, safety-critical, context-specific, and technologically-driven, were identified as emergent categories reflecting how trust is prioritised in different deployment contexts. Drawing on the characteristics of these types, several preliminary directions for future research were proposed. These include the development of trust-by-design principles to inform early-stage decision-making, the inclusion of trust metadata in platform schemas to prompt systematic developer consideration of trust factors, and the exploration of how architectural choices, such as federated DTs, influence user trust.
From substrates to servers, Taiwan industry gains from the AI infrastructure surge
April results across Taiwan's electronics hardware supply chain underscored how deeply artificial intelligence infrastructure is reshaping demand patterns — from advanced materials to server systems.
How workers can fight the wave of AI layoffs - World Socialist Web Site
In the auto industry, the United Auto Workers has said nothing about the thousands of layoffs over the last two-and-a-half years. Last week, it canceled a strike vote at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant at the last second. In Australia, the national union federation has signed a formal agreement with Microsoft under which union officials will be trained by Microsoft on how to present AI-driven restructuring to workers as beneficial, and will lobby alongside Microsoft against any regulatory interference with AI deployment in the workplace.
ProcurePro Raises $11M to Deliver AI-Powered Procurement Control for Construction’s $13 Trillion Supply Chain
Backed by QIC Ventures, Airtree, and ISAI, the Brisbane-founded company will expand its AI product suite, scale internationally, and grow its team across key global markets. LONDON, BRISBANE, Australia and DUBAI, UAE, May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ProcurePro, the first end-to-end construction procurement platform, has secured US$11 million in a funding round led by QIC Ventures […]
How Chinese PCB Manufacturers Are Supporting the AI Industry
The focus is not only on “who can make a PCB,” but on which companies appear relevant to the AI hardware supply chain through high-speed PCB, HDI PCB, AI server PCB, turnkey PCBA, and EMS support. AI computing creates a different kind of challenge for PCB manufacturing.
Caterpillar targets mining skills gap with US$1M challenge - Canadian Mining Journal
As mining and heavy industry accelerate their adoption of automation, digitalization and advanced technologies, Caterpillar is looking to address another growing challenge […]
Rethinking the Architecture Firm for the AI Era | ArchDaily
Learn how AI-driven tools are transforming how architects work today, enhancing coordination and research through collaborative workflows.
Inside the ‘architectural mismatch’ between AI capabilities & dealer needs | Auto Remarketing
Explore the latest trends and insights in the automotive remarketing industry. Stay updated on strategies for franchise and used car dealers.
Why Caterpillar Could Be the AI Stock of the Year | The Motley Fool
Data center construction is driving the demand for Caterpillar's products.
Power chip shortages deepen as AI server demand and GaN battles escalate
Global power semiconductor suppliers are entering a new upcycle marked by tightening supply, rising prices, and intensifying technology competition, fueled by accelerating investment in AI infrastructure and electric vehicles.
Global Manufacturers Look to AI in Supply Chain | Supply Chain Magazine
In today's operations, manufacturers ... adopt AI technology in order to develop supply chain resilience and risk mitigation · Manufacturing supply chains have undergone significant transformation in recent years, driven by the need to adapt to geopolitical instability and increasing global ...
ROX Expands AI Manufacturing in Abu Dhabi to Boost UAE's Operation 300Bn Initiative
ROX is expanding its operations in Abu Dhabi, focusing on AI-driven manufacturing and regional growth, aiming to produce 300,000 vehicles annually by 2030.
LANTERN: LLM-Augmented Neurosymbolic Transfer with Experience-Gated Reasoning Networks
arXiv:2605.05478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning in reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to accelerate learning in new tasks by leveraging knowledge from related sources. Existing neurosymbolic transfer methods, however, typically rely on manually specified task automata, assume a single source task, and use fixed knowledge-integration mechanisms that cannot adapt to varying source relevance. We propose LANTERN, a unified framework for multi-source neurosymbolic transfer that addresses these limitations through three components: (i) deterministic finite automata generated from natural language task descriptions using large language models, (ii) semantic embedding-based aggregation of multiple source policies weighted by cross-task similarity, and (iii) adaptive teacher-student gating based on temporal-difference error and semantic uncertainty. Across domains spanning resource management, navigation, and control, LANTERN achieves 40-60% improvements in sample efficiency over existing baselines while remaining robust to poorly aligned sources. These results demonstrate that multi-source, adaptively weighted neurosymbolic transfer can improve scalability and robustness in symbolic RL settings.
Cognex Launches In-Sight 3900: High-Speed AI Vision System
Cognex has launched the In-Sight 3900, an AI-driven vision system designed to enhance factory floor operations without the need for an external PC.
Nvidia and Corning Team Up to Boost AI Manufacturing in US
Nvidia and Corning are partnering to boost U.S. manufacturing for AI infrastructure, specifically focusing on fiber and optical components for data centers.
Automated Large-scale CVRP Solver Design via LLM-assisted Flexible MCTS
arXiv:2605.03339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Solving large-scale CVRP (LSCVRP) with hundreds to thousands of nodes remains difficult for even state-of-the-art solvers. Divide-and-conquer can scale by decomposing the instance into size-reduced subproblems, but designing decomposition logic and configuring sub-solvers is highly expertise- and labor-intensive. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools for automated algorithm design. However, existing LLM-driven approaches struggle with LSCVRP primarily due to the difficulty in generating sophisticated search strategies within a limited context window. To bridge this gap, we propose the LLM-assisted Flexible Monte Carlo Tree Search (LaF-MCTS), a novel framework that automates the design of high-performance LSCVRP solvers. We develop a three-tier decision hierarchy to enable incremental design of decomposition policies and sub-solvers for LSCVRP. To enable efficient search within the algorithmic hypothesis space, we introduce semantic pruning to eliminate semantically and structurally redundant codes, and branch regrowth to regenerate codes and preserve diversity. Extensive experiments on CVRPLib demonstrate that LaF-MCTS autonomously composes and optimizes decomposition-enhanced solvers that surpasses various state-of-the-art CVRP solvers.
MolmoAct 2: An Open Foundation for Robots that Work in the Real World
MolmoAct 2 is an open robotics foundation model featuring a vision-language-action pipeline designed for real-world robot manipulation tasks.
GlobalFoundries turns three-continent footprint into geopolitical hedge
In a recent assessment of the semiconductor landscape, GlobalFoundries emphasized the critical need for supply chain resilience amid a "fragmented geopolitical environment." The company is positioning its three-continent manufacturing presence—spanning the US, Germany, and Singapore—as ...
2026 Roadmap on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Smart Manufacturing
arXiv:2605.00839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is reshaping smart manufacturing by providing new capabilities for efficiency, adaptability, and autonomy across industrial value chains. However, the deployment of AI and ML in industrial settings still faces critical challenges, including the complexity of industrial big data, effective data management, integration with heterogeneous sensing and control systems, and the demand for trustworthy, explainable, and reliable operation in high-stakes industrial environments. In this roadmap, we present a comprehensive perspective on the foundations, applications, and emerging directions of AI and ML in smart manufacturing. It is structured in three parts. The first highlights the foundations and trends that frame the evolution of AI in smart manufacturing. The second focuses on key topics where AI is already enabling advances, including industrial big data analytics, advanced sensing and perception, autonomous systems, additive and laser-based manufacturing, digital twins, robotics, supply chain and logistics optimization, and sustainable manufacturing. The third section explores non-traditional ML approaches that are opening new frontiers, such as physics-informed AI, generative AI, semantic AI, advanced digital twins, explainable AI, RAMS, data-centric metrology, LLMs, and foundation models for highly connected and complex manufacturing systems. By identifying both opportunities and remaining barriers across these areas, this roadmap outlines the advances needed in methods, integration strategies, and industrial adoption. We hope this roadmap will serve as a guide for researchers, engineers, and practitioners to accelerate innovation, align academic and industrial priorities, and ensure that AI-driven smart manufacturing delivers reliable, sustainable, and scalable impact for the future of manufacturing ecosystems.
A Knowledge-Driven LLM-Based Decision-Support System for Explainable Defect Analysis and Mitigation Guidance in Laser Powder Bed Fusion
arXiv:2605.01100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents a knowledge-driven decision-support system that integrates structured defect knowledge with LLM-based reasoning to provide explainable defect diagnosis and mitigation guidance in manufacturing, using LPBF as a representative, safety-critical case study. The proposed ontology-integrated LLM-based decision support system for LPBF defect analysis and mitigation guidance is built on a knowledge base containing 27 known LPBF defect types organized into hierarchical categories and causal relationships. The developed system supports fuzzy natural language queries for systematic knowledge retrieval, literature-supported explanation of defects, and guidance on defect causes and mitigation strategies derived from encoded process knowledge. Furthermore, a multimodal image-assessment module based on foundation models enables descriptor-guided interpretation of representative microscopic defect images through semantic alignment scoring. The proposed framework was evaluated through qualitative comparisons with general-purpose vision-language models, an ablation study, and an inter-rater reliability analysis. Evaluation on the literature-derived dataset showed that the fully integrated configuration outperformed the other three evaluated system configurations, achieving a macro-average F1 score of 0.808. Additionally, inter-rater reliability analysis using Cohen's kappa indicated substantial agreement between the model outputs and the literature-derived reference labels. These findings suggest that ontology-guided knowledge representation can improve the consistency, interpretability, and practical usefulness of LLM-assisted LPBF defect analysis.
Veeco Instruments Surges 19% on Massive $250M AI Laser Orders Despite Q1 Miss
The move reflects broader enthusiasm ... to AI infrastructure buildout, even if quarterly results are not perfect. ... Despite the positive momentum, Veeco faces ongoing challenges. Reduced shipments to China due to export controls impacted Q1 results, and the company continues navigating a complex geopolitical environment. Competition in the ...
Gartner: The Cost of Reducing Entry-Level Hiring for AI | Supply Chain Magazine
As more businesses look to save money and fill workforce gaps with AI, Gartner warns that pausing entry-level hiring could result in higher business costs
AI era forces Korea's labor, capital to negotiate new ‘survival pact' - The Korea Times
As artificial intelligence (AI) spreads from coding assistants to factory robots and hiring tools, experts say Korea’s familiar labor disputes over...
French startup unveils AI model for robots and human-like hand | Reuters
May 6 (Reuters) - Genesis AI , a French robotics startup backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and telecoms tycoon Xavier Niel, on Wednesday unveiled an AI model designed to make robots more adaptable, along with a human-like robotic hand.
Thinking in Text and Images: Interleaved Vision--Language Reasoning Traces for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation
arXiv:2605.00438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires plans that are both logically coherent and geometrically grounded. Existing Vision-Language-Action policies usually hide planning in latent states or expose only one modality: text-only chain-of-thought encodes causal order but misses spatial constraints, while visual prediction provides geometric cues but often remains local and semantically underconstrained. We introduce Interleaved Vision--Language Reasoning (IVLR), a policy framework built around \trace{}, an explicit intermediate representation that alternates textual subgoals with visual keyframes over the full task horizon. At test time, a single native multimodal transformer self-generates this global semantic-geometric trace from the initial observation and instruction, caches it, and conditions a closed-loop action decoder on the trace, original instruction, and current observation. Because standard robot datasets lack such traces, we construct pseudo-supervision by temporally segmenting demonstrations and captioning each stage with a vision-language model. Across simulated benchmarks for long-horizon manipulation and visual distribution shift, \method{} reaches 95.5\% average success on LIBERO, including 92.4\% on LIBERO-Long, and 59.4\% overall success on SimplerEnv-WidowX. Ablations show that both modalities are necessary: without traces, LIBERO-Long success drops to 37.7\%; text-only and vision-only traces reach 62.0\% and 68.4\%, while the full interleaved trace reaches 92.4\%. Stress tests with execution perturbations and masked trace content show moderate degradation, suggesting that the trace can tolerate local corruption and moderate execution drift, but remains limited under stale or incorrect global plans.
Paris-based Lithosquare raises €21.4 million to accelerate transition-critical mineral discovery with Geology AI
Lithosquare, a Paris-based startup that deploys Geology AI and geologist-led intelligence to amplify and accelerate the discovery of transition-critical minerals, has raised €21.3 million ($25 million) in fresh funding. The round was co-led by World Fund and Kindred Capital, with participation from Daphni, Omnes Capital and Ovni Capital. The company plans to use this funding […]
Integrated Digital Management System for Railway Workshops: A Modular Multi-Workflow Architecture for Machine, Permit, Contract, and Incident Management
arXiv:2605.00840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indian Railway workshops form a critical component of rolling stock maintenance infrastructure, employing more than 2.5 lakh personnel across 44 major workshops nationwide. However, safety management in many workshops still relies on fragmented manual processes, resulting in delayed approvals, incomplete documentation, and increased exposure to operational hazards. Field safety observations indicate that lacerations (28.7%) and abrasions (21%) remain among the most frequent workplace injuries, highlighting the need for structured digital safety workflows. This paper presents the Integrated Digital Management System for Railway Workshops, a modular multi-workflow digital platform developed to improve safety governance and workflow transparency. The proposed system integrates four primary modules: Machine and Plant Management, Permit-to-Work (PTW) Management, Contract Management, and Incident Management. The Permit-to-Work module digitizes hazardous work authorization in accordance with IS 17893:2022, while the Contract Management module supports workforce validation and regulatory oversight. The Incident Management module enables rapid reporting, investigation tracking, and corrective action workflows. Functional evaluation in a railway workshop-oriented deployment scenario demonstrated measurable operational improvements, including a reduction in permit processing time by approximately 35%, improved incident reporting response time by nearly 40%, and enhanced workflow traceability across multiple safety modules. The proposed system establishes a scalable foundation for digital safety governance in large-scale railway workshop environments.
Rheinmetall’s first-quarter revenues fail to meet expectations
German company’s shares under pressure over profitability concerns and questions about the future of warfare
Asia Manufacturing Sector Feeling Strain From Middle East Conflict
Gauges of factory activity showed more evidence of supply-chain disruptions from the war, with stockpiling buoying production as cost pressures intensify.
An Aluminum Crisis Is Roiling the Auto Industry
America’s top-selling vehicle, the Ford F-150, bears the brunt of metal-supply-chain woes.
National Safety Council and Wolters Kluwer Enablon Report Finds Adoption of AI Growing Rapidly Among EHS Pros | ISHN
Enthusiasm for AI accompanied by caution, as 90% of safety professionals agree guardrails are needed.
How AI Tools Generate Technical Debt in IoT Systems — and What to Do About It
AI tools speed up IoT development, but the same code that looks correct can silently break thousands of devices at once.
Physical AI Startup Statistics
Physical AI startup statistics for 2026: robotics funding, robot foundation models, industrial robots, warehouses, drones, autonomous systems, and founder opportunity.
CISA and partners release agentic AI security guidance to protect critical infrastructure, outline mitigation action - Industrial Cyber
CISA and partners release agentic AI security guidance to protect critical infrastructure, outline mitigation action
Always Be Curious #305: EUV's engineering story, earnings bonanza, and prediagnostic AI
Japanese researchers built an AI tool that designs thermoelectric generators 10,000 times faster than conventional approaches, with prototypes performing on par with today’s best devices — potentially
India roundup: India accelerates AI, semiconductor, and manufacturing push with major investments and startup bets
India's technology ecosystem is seeing rapid expansion across AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and electronics manufacturing. From startup bets on AI inference to multi-billion-dollar data center plans and OSAT capacity buildouts, global and domestic players are deepening commitments.
AI data center demand boosts IDM growth in industrial market
Recovery in the industrial chip market, driven by AI data center demand, is poised to reshape manufacturers and supply chains worldwide, as Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors report stronger performance in their industrial segments. Improved demand visibility and projected growth through ...
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Unionized workers form alliance with rich tech giants on AI data centers, pushing back on local opposition and redrawing political lines
The U.S. will raise tariffs on automobiles from the European Union to 25% from 15%, President Trump said Friday
The president said tariffs will go from 15% to 25% and accused the bloc of failing to comply with a trade agreement signed last year.
‘Temu Range Rover’: what the bestselling Jaecoo 7 says about China’s electric car ascendancy
Loaded with extras and produced at a cut price, the crossover SUV has overtaken rival cars from US, Japanese and Korean firms The UK is no stranger to foreign cars. The bestseller lists in recent years have been dominated by the US’s Ford Puma, Japan’s Nissan Qashqai, Korea’s Kia Sportage and occasionally even Tesla’s Model Y. But in March the top 10 provided a shock: a Chinese car leapt into the lead.
Meta buys robotics startup to bolster its humanoid AI ambitions
Meta has acquired a robotics company to accelerate its development of humanoid AI technologies.
Inside A Fabricator’s Digital Reinvention
CEO Lance Thrailkill is pushing a 70-year-old family business beyond traditional fabrication—investing in Industry 4.0, vertical integration and critical infrastructure to drive speed, precision and long-term growth.
Dyad 3.0: Revolutionizing Industrial Design with AI and Digital Twins at Live Launch Event
JuliaHub's Dyad 3.0 platform uses AI-enabled digital twins to automate engineering processes and reduce development time for industrial design.
AI chip boom sends Korea exports to record highs, supply crunch deepens
South Korea's export surge is entering a new phase, with artificial intelligence-driven semiconductor demand powering record shipments even as geopolitical risks and cost pressures mount.
Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold
Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027
Dyad 3.0 Revolutionizes Industrial Design
JuliaHub's Dyad 3.0 platform, an AI-enabled digital twin system, is set to revolutionize industrial design by automating engineering processes and reducing development time.
AI chip boom sends Korea exports to record highs, supply crunch deepens
South Korea's export surge is entering a new phase, with artificial intelligence-driven semiconductor demand powering record shipments even as geopolitical risks and cost pressures mount.
Shares in Japanese toilet maker Toto soar on AI-related pivot
Investors cheer after company unveils plans to boost output of semiconductor components
AI’s Bottleneck Is Steel, Silicon and Ships
Boris Kriuk is right: AI does not fail when a model misbehaves; it falters when the supply chains beneath it do. The real constraint on AI is no longer clever code, but the physical and institutional systems that make large‑scale computation possible.
EU Chips Act Overhaul Aims to Boost Investment - Bloomberg
EU Chips Act Overhaul Aims to Boost Investment - Bloomberg Chip Wars: US AI Export Control BackForward Semiconductor wafer fabrication in Germany. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg Gift this article Contact us:Provide news feedback or report an error Confidential tip?Send a tip to our reporters Site feedback:Take our Survey By Gian Volpicelli and Alberto Nardelli April 30, 2026 at 12:34 PM U
Humanoid Maker 1X Opens New US Factory, Plans to Build 10,000 Home Robots in First Year
1X Technologies AS, the Norway-founded robotics startup backed by OpenAI, has opened a new 58,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California, where it aims to be one of the first players to build humanoids for consumers at scale.
No question the AI megatrend continues, Taiwan's MediaTek says
No question the AI megatrend continues, Taiwan's MediaTek says | Reuters Exclusive news, data and analytics for financial market professionalsLearn more aboutRefinitiv A Mediatek logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab - Summary - Companies - MediaTek upbeat on AI demand - MediaTek is Taiwan's top chip design company - MediaTek shares have leapt more than 80% this year - Taiwanese tech firms key suppliers for AI darling Nvidia TAIPEI, April 30 (Reuters) - The CEO of MediaTek(2454.TW), opens new tab, Taiwan's top chip design company, on Thursday said he has no doubts about the strength of the artificial intelligence wave, adding that demand for data centres is accelerating. Taiwanese tech companies like MediaTek and TSMC(2330.TW), opens new tab, the world's largest contract chipmak
EU legislators fail to clinch deal to delay AI law – POLITICO
Talks derailed over request backed by Germany to weaken rules for manufacturing and medical devices.
Supermicro opens largest US campus in Silicon Valley, producing AI infrastructure
Supermicro's new 32.8-acre Silicon Valley campus will add hundreds of US positions and expand domestic production of AI infrastructure, signaling increased US capacity for enterprises and cloud providers worldwide. The expansion may affect global AI deployment timelines and supply-chain choices ...
The Race to Merge AI With Humanoid Robots
Humanoid robots that use AI are going mainstream, but they’re far from proven. With billions of dollars invested, can they deliver real-world value or will they fall short of the hype? (Source: Bloomberg)
SoftBank plans to list new AI and robotics company in the US
Masayoshi Son plots IPO for business named Roze as soon as this year
As Europe pushes for AI sovereignty, Germany’s SPREAD raises €25 million to scale industrial AI
SPREAD AI, a Berlin-based Engineering Intelligence Platform innovating how complex products are developed and operated, today announced it has raised €25 million ($30 million) in Series B funding to expand across Europe and the U.S., scale within the Salesforce ecosystem, and strengthen its presence in aerospace, defense, and heavy machinery sectors. The round was backed […]
NSK and Accenture Forge Strategic Collaboration to Drive Business Reinvention Through AI and Digital Technology | MarketScreener
NSK Limited and Accenture today announced a strategic collaboration to drive the reinvention of NSK's business through AI and digital technology, with the goal of achieving sustainable growth and...
AI-related spending propels US core capital goods orders in March | Reuters
New orders for key U.S.-manufactured capital goods increased by the most in nearly six years in March while their shipments rose solidly, suggesting that business spending on equipment helped drive economic growth in the first quarter.
Exclusive: How one venture firm is investing in an increasingly fragmented world | TechCrunch
Geopolitical turmoil has made venture investing challenging, leading Kompas VC to carve out a niche in startups focused on the physical world.
Applied Materials Faces New China Export Halt And Revenue Exposure Questions - Simply Wall St News
The U.S. Department of Commerce has halted shipments of certain semiconductor manufacturing tools to China’s Hua Hong, directly affecting Applied Materials’ cross border business. The action targets sales of advanced equipment that Hua Hong uses for chip production, adding a fresh layer ...
Steelmaker Cliffs Taps Palantir Technologies for AI Overhaul
Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. struck a three-year agreement with Palantir Technologies Inc. to deploy artificial intelligence tools across its operations, as the US steelmaker steps up efforts to modernize its manufacturing footprint.
Foxconn Industrial Falls Short of Lofty AI Expectations
Foxconn Industrial Internet Co. benefited less than expected from China’s artificial intelligence boom as sales and earnings growth fell short of lofty expectations.
Nvidia-Supplier Victory Giant’s Sales Surge on Solid AI Demand
Victory Giant Technology Huizhou Co. reported a 28% increase in quarterly sales on stronger demand for printed circuit boards critical for development of AI servers.
The Real ROI of AI Coworkers in Manufacturing ( With Cost Models) - Programming Insider
AI coworkers in manufacturing are no longer pilot-stage experiments. In 2025, they will live on production floors at mid-market and enterprise manufacturers alike, reducing downtime, compressing onboarding cycles, and delivering measurable cost savings within 12–18
Open source Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5 and V2.5-Pro are among the most efficient (and affordable) at agentic 'claw' tasks
Xiaomi's new open-source MiMo-V2.5 models are setting new benchmarks for efficiency and affordability in agentic robotic tasks.
Unlocking AI: IBM’s ‘Client Zero’ Strategy and Key Insights for Indian Manufacturers, ETEnterpriseai
Discover how IBM's 'client zero' approach enhances AI deployment for manufacturers in India. Learn valuable lessons on data management, AI ownership, talent constraints, and the future of agentic AI in industry.
The Impact of Dodd-Frank and the Huawei Shock on DRC Tin Exports
arXiv:2512.21645v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the structural transformation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) tin market induced by the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act. Focusing on the breakdown of the pricing mechanism, we estimate the price elasticity of export demand from 2010 to October 2022 using a structural identification strategy that overcomes the lack of reliable unit value data. Our analysis reveals that the regulation effectively destroyed the price mechanism, with demand elasticity dropping to zero. This indicates the formation of a ``captive market'' driven by certification requirements rather than price competitiveness. Also, we find strong hysteresis; deregulation alone failed to restore market flexibility. The structural rigidity was finally broken not by policy suspension, but by the 2019 ``Huawei shock,'' an external demand surge that forced supply chain diversification.
Amazon Web Services unveils agentic AI supply chain tool | Supply Chain Dive
Amazon Web Services today launched ... that aims to help businesses improve planning, data analysis and decision making. The product combines more than 25 specialized supply chain tools into a set of artificial intelligence agents, called “teammates,” to make calculations on behalf of the user, VP of AWS Supply Chain Ozgur Dogan told Supply Chain Dive. “Every variance, invisible patterns — the system learns and ...
Inside China’s robotics revolution – podcast
How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find out By Chang Che. Read by Vincent Lai Continue reading...
AI Startup Sereact Raises $110 Million for Robots That Predict Consequences
Sereact, a German robotics software company, has raised $110 million in fresh funding to develop its artificial intelligence model that makes robots smarter and more adaptable to different tasks.
Iran War Disrupts Circuit Board Supply Chain
The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supplies of crucial raw materials and pushed up prices of the printed circuit boards.
Semiconductors core to Tyndall’s five-year strategy
The institute said its strategy is aligned with government policies such as Silicon Island and Impact 2030 while helping towards Ireland’s obligations under the European Chips Act. Read more: Semiconductors core to Tyndall’s five-year strategy
STMicroelectronics Q1 FY 2026 Earnings Show Early AI and Satellite Upside
Brendan Burke, Research Director, analyzes STMicroelectronics’ Q1 FY 2026 earnings, focusing on AI data center and LEO satellite momentum, photonics ramp timing.
The sovereign shift as Asia accelerates industrial realignment amid global tensions | Domain-b.com
Asia is accelerating investments in defense, sovereign AI, and energy transition as geopolitical risks reshape global supply chains and industrial strategy.
‘World models’ are AI’s latest sensation: what are they and what can they do?
Training AI world models on data about physical environments could improve their real-world capabilities in technologies such as robotics. Training AI world models on data about physical environments could improve their real-world capabilities in technologies such as robotics.
Roadmap to Autonomous Manufacturing: An AI driven Approach Based on Engineering Foundations - Edge AI and Vision Alliance
This article was originally published at HCLTech’s website. It is reprinted here with the permission of HCL Tech. Autonomous manufacturing can be achieved through a structured journey built on foundational engineering, converged data and human-led AI Key takeaways Autonomous manufacturing ...
Activist Palliser takes stake in Japan's SMC, proposes $3.8 billion buyback
Activist Palliser takes stake in Japan's SMC, proposes $3.8 billion buyback.
BMW and PepsiCo robotics partner Sereact raises €93 million Series B to scale across the US
Stuttgart-based Sereact, an innovator in physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing, has raised a €93 million ($110 million) Series B round in order to scale their ‘Cortex 2’ offering and to open its first office in the U.S. in Boston at some point during the coming summer – aiming to hire new staff locally. The […]
The Biggest Risk of Embodied AI is Governance Lag
arXiv:2604.21938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied AI is widely discussed as a job-displacement problem. The deeper risk, however, is governance lag: the inability of public institutions to keep pace with how fast the technology spreads through the physical economy. As reusable robotic platforms are combined with increasingly general AI models, embodied AI may scale across manufacturing, logistics, care, and infrastructure faster than governance systems can observe, interpret, and respond. We argue that this lag appears in three connected forms: observational, institutional, and distributive. The central policy challenge, therefore, is not automation alone, but whether governance and compliance systems can adapt before disruption becomes entrenched.
On the Hybrid Nature of ABPMS Process Frames and its Implications on Automated Process Discovery
arXiv:2604.22455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A core component of any AI-Augmented Business Process Management System (ABPMS) is the process frame, which gives the system process-awareness and defines the boundaries in which the system must operate. Compared to traditional process models, the process frame should, in principle, provide a somewhat more permissive representation of the managed processes, such that the (semi) autonomous behavior of an ABPMS, referred to as framed autonomy, could emerge. At the same time, it is not limited to a single linguistic or symbolic formalism and may incorporate heterogeneous knowledge ranging from predefined procedures to commonsense rules and best practices. In this paper, we conceptualize the notion of an ABPMS process frame as a hybrid business process representation, consisting of semi-concurrently executed procedural and declarative process models. We rely on our earlier works to outline the execution semantics of this type of process frame, arguing in favor of adopting the open-world assumption of the declarative paradigm also for procedural process models. The latter leads to a constraint-like interpretation, where each procedural model is considered to constrain the activities within that model, without imposing explicit execution requirements nor limitations on activities that may be present in other models. This is analogous to existing declarative languages, such as Declare, where each constraint has a direct effect only on the specific activities being constrained. Given this similarity, we propose mapping subsets of discovered declarative constraints into equivalent semi-concurrently executed procedural fragments, thus laying the foundation for a corresponding process (frame) discovery approach.
Chinese Workers Train AI Replacements
Chinese workers are being directed to train their AI replacements, sparking concerns over job displacement.
AI Revolutionizes Bottle Filling
AI is revolutionizing bottle filling with predictive maintenance, real-time data analysis, and adaptive systems, enhancing efficiency and reducing waste.
After call from Beijing, China's auto industry races to embed AI in just about everything | Reuters
Xiaomi has said its AI -empowered HyperOS operating system in its cars would allow drivers to task the system with complicated to-do lists, making restaurant reservations, placing coffee orders and compiling notes from the road.
America's Largest Landowner Is Mapping And Digitizing Forests With AI, Creating A 'Database Detailing Each Tree In The Forest'
Weyerhaeuser, a timber company that owns roughly 10,400,000 acres of American forest land and 14,000,000 acres of timberland in Canada, is mapping every inch of their land with AI , creating a detailed database containing every tree the company has mapped out.
India-Japan Alliance to Transform Urban Development
India's DataKaveri Systems and Japan's ONESTRUCTION Inc. have teamed up to leverage underutilized construction data for AI-driven urban development.
China's Auto Industry Revolutionizes with AI-Driven Cars
China's AI Plus initiative is driving rapid integration of artificial intelligence into vehicles, with brands like Xpeng and Xiaomi showcasing advanced AI features.
‘Startup Cowboys’ Are Making This Texas Town the New Tech Hotspot
The site near Austin known as Proto-Town is attracting robotics and energy firms whose members work and live in trailer parks on the more than thousand-acre campus.
Jtibot Showcases Autonomous Outdoor Sweeping Innovation at Interclean Amsterdam 2026, Accelerating European Market Expansion
AMSTERDAM, April 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Jtibot, a developer of autonomous outdoor cleaning solutions, concluded a successful showcase at Interclean Amsterdam 2026, highlighting its focus on large-scale, AI-driven sweeping for industrial, municipal, and campus environments. At Hall 8, Booth 538, Jtibot presented its autonomous outdoor sweeper designed for environments exceeding 10,000 sqm. Positioned between traditional […]
Infor launches AI orchestration tools as research shows enterprises struggle to scale AI
Infor has introduced new capabilities across its AI portfolio, alongside research suggesting many businesses are still struggling to scale artificial intelligence beyond pilot stages. The company’s…
The Hidden Cost of AI in Warehouses Is Training Workers - Supply Chain 24/7
The Hidden Cost of AI in Warehouses Is Training Workers - Supply Chain 24/7 - Free newsletters - Become a member - Why join? - Log in # The Hidden Cost of AI in Warehouses Is Training Workers ## New analysis from Resume Now show logistics facing one of the largest AI readiness gaps as adoption grows Source: Getty Images AI is becoming part of daily logistics operations, but workers are not keeping up. Artificial intelligence is becoming part of daily operations in logistics and warehousing, but getting workers up to speed may come with additional costs. What’s Related A new analysis from Resume Now, based on data from Lightcast, finds that logistics and warehousing ranks fourth among industries with the largest gaps between AI adoption and workforce readiness heading into 2026. The report focuses on preparedness, examining where AI-related skill demands are rising faster than th
Renault Revenue Rises on Brand Momentum
Revenue rose 8.8% at constant exchange rates, while the carmaker said it was taking additional steps to mitigate the potential impact of the Middle East conflict.
Ping-pong robot Ace makes history by beating top-level human players | Reuters
Ace, created by the Japanese company Sony's (6758.T), opens new tab AI research division, is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a competitive physical sport, one that requires rapid decisions and precision execution, the project's leader said.
From Data to Theory: Autonomous Large Language Model Agents for Materials Science
arXiv:2604.19789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an autonomous large language model (LLM) agent for end-to-end, data-driven materials theory development. The model can choose an equation form, generate and run its own code, and test how well the theory matches the data without human intervention. The framework combines step-by-step reasoning with expert-supplied tools, allowing the agent to adjust its approach as needed while keeping a clear record of its decisions. For well-established materials relationships such as the Hall-Petch equation and Paris law, the agent correctly identifies the governing equation and makes reliable predictions on new datasets. For more specialized relationships, such as Kuhn's equation for the HOMO-LUMO gap of conjugated molecules as a function of length, performance depends more strongly on the underlying model, with GPT-5 showing better recovery of the correct equation. Beyond known theories, the agent can also suggest new predictive relationships, illustrated here by a strain-dependent law for changes in the HOMO-LUMO gap. At the same time, the results show that careful validation remains essential, because the agent can still return incorrect, incomplete, or inconsistent equations even when the numerical fit appears strong. Overall, these results highlight both the promise and the current limitations of autonomous LLM agents for AI-assisted scientific modeling and discovery.
A Multi-Plant Machine Learning Framework for Emission Prediction, Forecasting, and Control in Cement Manufacturing
arXiv:2604.19903v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cement production is among the largest contributors to industrial air pollution, emitting ~3 Mt NOx/year. The industry-standard mitigation approach, selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR), exhibits low NH3 utilization efficiency, resulting in operational inefficiencies and increased reagent costs. Here, we develop a data-driven framework for emi
TSMC Says ASML’s Latest Chipmaking Gear Is Too Pricey
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will hold off on deploying ASML Holding NV’s most cutting-edge lithography machines for chip production through 2029 to save money. The chipmaker has no plans to adopt ASML’s latest high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, or high-NA EUV, which fetch upwards of €350 million ($410 million) apiece. TSMC is ASML’s largest customer, accor
Infor releases global study on AI adoption barriers and introduces key platform features. -
Infor has published the results of its Infor Enterprise AI Adoption Impact Index, new proprietary research.
How Gen AI Robots Are Reshaping Services
A Harvard Business Review piece explores how generative AI is improving robotic interfaces and enabling new service use cases.
AI brings Foxconn a chance to cut its reliance on Apple
The cloud and networking division, which assembles AI servers, is growing at a pace the smartphone market cannot match
ILO sets first global framework for AI use in manufacturing sector | Digital Watch Observatory
Policy conclusions reveal how ILO is shaping responsible AI use across global manufacturing sectors.
ABB Raises Guidance on Robust Demand Despite Uncertainties
The industrial-technology company now expects comparable revenue growth in high single-digit to low double-digit percentage, up from the range of 6% to 9%.
Tesla boosts spending plans to $25bn as Musk doubles down on AI bet
CEO warns investors to expect ‘very significant’ spending increase on self-driving taxis, trucks, robots and chip factories
Tesla Profit Rises but Remains Below Earlier Highs
The company is investing in robots and self-driving taxis that are not yet generating significant sales.
The agentic transition: how enterprises are scaling AI from pilot to profit | Domain-b.com
AI has entered its execution era. Discover how companies like Valeo and Microsoft are scaling agentic AI systems—from copilots to autonomous workflows driving
SK Hynix’s aspirations for ’Merica-made HBM inch closer to reality
New site set to begin manufacturing and testing HBM memory just in time for Nvidia's Rubin-Ultra GPUs in 2028 SK Hynix has reportedly broken ground on a new advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, that should boost the supply of US-made high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component in high-end AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and AMD.…
Union City Hosts First U.S. Advanced AI Chip Assembly Center – ICO Optics
This article highlights the opening ... advanced semiconductor packaging, operated by Resonac in Union City. It digs into why the facility matters for AI server and smartphone chips, how it fits into the U.S.-Japan tech partnership, and what it means for Silicon Valley’s role in the global chip supply chain. ... The Union City facility marks a big step in efforts to strengthen the packaging stage of chip manufacturing. This step is crucial for the AI hardware ...
BlackBerry's QNX-NVIDIA Partnership Fuels Edge AI in Robotics, Sparks Stock Momentum Amid Overvaluation Concerns
BlackBerry partners with NVIDIA to integrate its QNX OS for Safety 8.0 with NVIDIA's IGX Thor platform, enhancing safety-critical edge AI in robotics.
ABB Robotics launches high-speed PoWa cobot family | RoboticsTomorrow
• New, high-speed, higher payload PoWa cobot family meets need for industrial-grade performance in collaborative robotics, lowering the barrier to automation for both SMEs and large enterprises • Payloads from 7kg to 30kg, best-in-class top speed of 5.8 m/s, longest reach and highest arm ...
Victory Giant Founder on $2.6 Billion HK Listing, AI Boom
Victory Giant Technology Huizhou Co. surged in its Hong Kong trading debut on Tuesday, after raising $2. 6 billion.
Sight Machine Launches AI Agent Crews
Sight Machine has launched autonomous AI agent crews at Hannover Messe, designed to optimize manufacturing by analyzing industrial data for improved output and cost efficiency.
Volkswagen to equip Chinese cars with AI agents
Volkswagen to equip Chinese cars with AI agents, in bid to catch up in tech
Automaker Stellantis aims to reduce data center footprint by 60%, migrates to Microsoft Azure
Netherlands-based automaker Stellantis is plotting a cloud migration and data center consolidation project. The company has signed a five-year agreement with Microsoft that will see it migrating its workloads and “modernizing” its IT, with the aim of reducing its data center footprint by 60 percent by 2029. – Stellantis In addition to the migration, Stellantis […]
Report: 65% of pharma supply chain leaders have limited confidence in AI | DC Velocity
Companies are finding early success with artificial intelligence projects, but results lack enterprise-wide impact, research shows.
Industrial AI for the Physical World: Siemens’s Peter Koerte
In this episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, host Sam Ransbotham talks with Peter Koerte, a member of the managing board and chief strategy and technology officer of Siemens, about how industrial AI is quietly transforming the infrastructure that powers everyday life. While consumer AI grabs headlines, Peter explains how artificial intelligence is […]