Business

Five key takeaways from report into fire

Published

5 days ago

July 2, 2025

Ben King

Transport correspondent, BBC News

Reuters Sign at an underground station advising people not to travel to Heathrow Airport due to closure following a power failure

A report into a fire at an electricity substation that resulted in Heathrow Airport shutting down for nearly a day, causing chaos for more than 200,000 passengers, has been released.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO) identified the likely cause of the fire, and said that National Grid which operates the substation was warned about a fault seven years ago.

Here are five key findings from the report.

1. The fire was caused by moisture

The NESO report answered one of the key questions – what caused the fire?

The device which caught fire was a “supergrid transformer”, which takes high voltage electricity from the transmission grid and reduces it to a lower voltage for the next stage of its route to Heathrow Airport and surrounding houses.

Inspectors said the likely cause was moisture getting into the high-voltage “bushing” – insulation around the connections.

That caused a short-circuit and “arcing” – electric sparks like those in a spark plug – which resulted in a “catastrophic failure”.

That caused the oil which is used to cool the transformer to catch fire, and took two transformers offline, cutting power to Heathrow.

2. National Grid knew about the problem seven years before the fire

The report said signs of moisture were detected at North Hyde in July 2018.

National Grid’s guidance said these were “an imminent fault” that should be replaced.

But the issue wasn’t fixed at the time.

In 2022, basic maintenance on the transformer was deferred.

Multiple further attempts were made to schedule maintenance, but none went ahead.

3. Heathrow knew a problem with one of its three grid connections would close the airport

Heathrow uses as much electricity as a small city, and it has three connections to the national grid.

But it knew that if one of them went down, it would have to close the airport for 10 to 12 hours while key systems were connected to the other sources of supply.

It did not think it was a likely scenario, so it was not considered worthwhile to spend the money to fix it – which Heathrow has previously said would have cost a billion pounds.

NESO said having three connections to the grid meant there were “opportunities” to improve Heathrow’s resilience of supply.

4. National Grid didn’t know how important the substation was

National Grid and the local network operator SSEN knew that electricity from North Hyde went to Heathrow Airport.

But they did not know that Heathrow would have to shut down if that supply was interrupted.

Energy suppliers do not currently know if their customers are counted as “critical national infrastructure (CNI)” – sectors such as transport, defence, government or communications.

The report calls for better communications between CNI operators and their energy suppliers to ensure that supplies do not get interrupted.

5. Heathrow is not happy

Heathrow came under a lot of criticism after the fire – including the revelation that the chief executive Thomas Woldbye was asleep in bed when the decision was taken to close the airport.

NESO said its report was not written to “apportion blame”, but Heathrow says it is now considering legal action against National Grid.

In its view the report described “clear and repeated failings” which “could and should” have prevented the fire.

It said it expected National Grid to “take responsibility for those failings.”

National Grid said it had a comprehensive maintenance programme, and would co-operate closely with the Ofgem investigation.

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Business

Can AI run a successful vending business? An AI startup tested it out

Published

1 hour ago

July 7, 2025

Linda Becker

Because AI isn’t (yet) able to physically restock the machine, the AI model could email company employees who handled such tasks. Beyond that, however, the AI model, dubbed Claudius for the experiment, was tasked with many of the responsibilities of a traditional operator, including selecting and maintaining inventory, setting prices and maximizing profit.

The upshot: “If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” the company wrote in its blog.

The experiment showed that while the AI model was effective at tasks such as identifying suppliers, adapting to users’ requests and “jailbreak resistance,” as Anthropic employees tried to trick Claudius into stock sensitive items, Claudius failed as a convenience service operator because it ignored profitable opportunities, instructed customers to make payments at a Venmo address it had imagined (instead of the one created), sold products at a loss, offered excessive discounts and mismanaged inventory.

Although version one of Project Vend wasn’t successful at the bottom line, Anthropic predicts that AI middle managers will come to pass. “It’s worth remembering that the AI won’t have to be perfect to be adopted; it will just have to be competitive with human performance at a lower cost in some cases,” the company wrote in its blog.

Read the full story here.

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Business

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

The Editors

Suntory Global Spirits chooses Globant to build a Commercial Insights AI Agent and unlock Business Intelligence at Scale

PR Newswire

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025

Globant is partnering with Suntory Global Spirits to build a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent
With the Agent, Suntory Global Spirits employees can access data insights and self-service intelligence, speeding up decision-making across product development, marketing, sales and strategy

NEW YORK, July 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native company focused on reinventing businesses through innovative technology solutions, today announced a reinvention partnership with Suntory Global Spirits, the world leader in premium spirits, to build and deploy a generative AI-powered Commercial Insights Agent. By compressing days of work into seconds and supporting real-time decision-making for sales, marketing, and strategy, Globant’s Commercial Insights Agent is transforming operations for the beverage company.

The AI-powered agent can interpret complex business questions across dashboards, reports, and unstructured documentation for Suntory Global Spirits, eliminating the need for manual insight requests. By automating insight retrieval, the Commercial Insights Agent reduces operating costs tied to traditional business intelligence workflows and significantly reduces time-to-action. What once required multiple cycles of back-and-forth between business and analytics teams can now be executed on demand, freeing up employees to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.

“Our work with Suntory Global Spirits exemplifies how visionary companies can harness the power of agentic and generative AI to fundamentally transform the way they operate,” said Santiago Noziglia, Retail, CPG and Automotive AI Studio CEO at Globant. “The Commercial Insights Agent is more than a productivity tool; it’s a strategic enabler that redefines how teams access knowledge, make decisions, and unlock growth. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when building an AI-powered enterprise.”

Additional benefits of the Commercial Insights Agent include:

Self-serve decision support at scale: Teams at Suntory Global Spirits, especially across marketing, sales and product management, can independently access data insights, ask questions, or generate reports without bottlenecks or dependencies on other teams.
Contextual recommendations powered by GenAI: The Commercial Insights Agent is trained on internal data to provide contextual GenAI recommendations that speed up decision-making.
AI Agent foundation: The Commercial Insights Agent is just the beginning for Suntory Global Spirits, which can now use the agent as a template for new use cases across brand planning, commercial forecasting and innovation pipelines.

To learn more about Globant’s AI-powered tools, visit https://www.globant.com/enterprise-ai.

About Globant

At Globant, we create the digitally-native products that people love. We bridge the gap between businesses and consumers through technology and creativity, leveraging our expertise in AI. We dare to digitally transform organizations and strive to delight their customers.

We have more than 31,100 employees and are present in 36 countries across 5 continents, working for companies like Google, Electronic Arts, and Santander, among others.
We were named a Worldwide Leader in AI Services (2023) and a Worldwide Leader in Media Consultation, Integration, and Business Operations Cloud Service Providers (2024) by IDC MarketScape report.
We are the fastest-growing IT brand and the 5th strongest IT brand globally (2024), according to Brand Finance.
We were featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
We are active members of The Green Software Foundation (GSF) and the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

Contact: pr@globant.com
Sign up to get first dibs on press news and updates.
For more information, visit www.globant.com.

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Business

AI Company Buys Bitcoin Miner in $9 Billion Deal to Expand Data Power

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

CPI

AI cloud provider CoreWeave announced it will acquire bitcoin mining firm Core Scientific in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $9 billion, according to Reuters.

As AI workloads continue to surge, energy-hungry data centers have become a crucial asset. Firms like CoreWeave, which began as a crypto miner and later transitioned into AI infrastructure, are aggressively expanding their access to power and physical computing capacity. Per Reuters, the acquisition will give CoreWeave control of Core Scientific’s 1.3 gigawatts of contracted power and its development pipeline, a major boost in the race to scale AI operations.

Under the terms of the deal, Core Scientific shareholders will receive 0.1235 shares of newly issued CoreWeave stock for each Core Scientific share they hold. The offer values Core Scientific at $20.40 per share—a 66% premium over the stock’s price before deal discussions became public in late June, Reuters noted.

Despite the premium, Core Scientific’s stock dropped 22% in early trading Monday, while CoreWeave, which is backed by Nvidia, saw its shares decline 4.5%.

The acquisition is expected to help CoreWeave reduce more than $10 billion in projected future lease expenses tied to current site agreements over the next 12 years. The move not only expands CoreWeave’s energy footprint but also signals a broader trend of bitcoin miners diversifying into AI to remain viable in a rapidly shifting tech landscape.

“This acquisition accelerates our strategy to deploy AI and HPC (high-performance computing) workloads at scale,” said CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, in a statement released alongside the announcement.

Industry analysts see the transaction as a potential inflection point. Gautam Chhugani of Bernstein told Reuters the deal could become a blueprint for other miners looking to reposition themselves in the AI economy. Power access, he emphasized, remains the chief bottleneck for the expansion of AI-focused data centers.

Founded in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation, CoreWeave exited the crypto mining business following Ethereum’s 2022 shift to a proof-of-stake model, which dramatically reduced miner incentives. Since then, the company has grown rapidly, with revenue surging more than eightfold last year, per its IPO filing.

Source: Reuters

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