Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

IIoT Platform Consolidation: Schneider’s $3.1B Cognite Bet

Schneider Electric agreed to pay $3.1 billion, roughly 18 times 2025 revenue, for Cognite, an industrial data and AI software company with $170 million in revenue. Cognite will be absorbed into AVEVA CONNECT, folding a third independent IIoT data layer under one corporate roof. The deal reflects real growth math: AI-driven industrial analytics is expanding more than 40% annually while core automation hardware grows in single digits. It also means buyers get fewer independent vendors to negotiate with.

IIoT platform consolidation just got an explicit price tag, and it’s steep enough to explain why the wave of industrial software acquisitions isn’t slowing down. Schneider Electric agreed to acquire Cognite Holding B.V. in an all-cash transaction valued at $3.1 billion, adding industrial data contextualization and agentic AI capabilities to its automation business, according to Drives&Controls’ coverage of the announcement. Cognite reported revenue exceeding $170 million in 2025. That price works out to roughly 18 times revenue, a multiple that says more about where the growth is than about Cognite’s current size.

Cognite’s core technology, a unified data model and knowledge graph called Data Fusion, plus an agentic layer called Atlas AI, will be absorbed directly into AVEVA’s CONNECT platform once the deal closes, according to ARC Advisory Group’s analysis. IIoT platform consolidation at this price only makes financial sense against IoT Analytics’ 2026 finding that AI-driven applications and advanced analytics are growing more than 40% annually from a smaller base, compared with single-digit growth for core industrial hardware and established automation segments. Schneider isn’t paying for Cognite’s current revenue. It’s paying to own the fastest-growing layer of the stack before someone else does.

The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation

However, the trajectory of wearables is evident. Oura is contributing to the widespread use of continuous health and recovery monitoring. Apple is showcasing how wearable technology can integrate safety, communication, and wellness. Hume is a part of the growing trend for health span and longevity. Garmin specializes in navigation and performance tracking. Fitbit provides data analytics with its interaction with Google’s ecosystem. And by trying to quantify the neurological system and cognitive function itself, Pison is pushing the boundaries.

When taken as a whole, these companies and their products suggest a time when wearables will be more than just clothing. It turns into a conduit between the digital world and our biology. The ultimate promise of this technology is not that doctors, coaches, or human judgment will be replaced by machines. It’s that we’ll know more about ourselves, and that knowledge will be accessible when it counts most.

Therefore, the new world of wearables may be less about watches, rings, and bands and more about a much larger transformation: providing people with previously unheard-of visibility into their skills, performance, and health.

Petter Törnberg: Algorithmic Tyranny & Digital Modernity

What do Facebook, Google, and TikTok see when they look at you? And more importantly, what do they miss?

I recorded this conversation with Petter Törnberg almost a year ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning.

Törnberg is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity. His claim is straightforward and uncomfortable: platforms have become the new eyes of power. Industrial modernity ruled from the top down and you could see it. Digital modernity rules through #algorithms you cannot see at all, and it is no less total for being invisible.

Algorithms do not reflect society. They rebuild it. Politics, culture, and your own sense of who you are.

We got into:

Why algorithmic tyranny does not need a tyrant. Why self-organization so often smuggles in a new hierarchy rather than dissolving the old one. Decentralization as camouflage. Whether #AI becomes the ultimate platform of platforms, the layer that sits above and swallows all the others. What is actually left for citizens, activists, and policymakers who want to push back.

Continue reading “Petter Törnberg: Algorithmic Tyranny & Digital Modernity” | >

Scientists Discover a Bizarre New Way Life Can Make DNA… Without DNA

To replicate information, life usually has fairly straightforward ways of doing things.

To copy DNA, you generally use DNA as a template. To make RNA, cells generally use DNA as a template, while RNA in turn provides the instructions for making proteins.

But now a bacterium has revealed a different path, and it’s deeply surprising.

Micron’s TakeorPay Memory Contracts Lock In $100B, No Cancellation Clause

Micron’s customers have put up $22 billion in cash deposits and financial commitments to secure guaranteed memory supply through 2030, under contracts that require payment whether or not they take delivery. Fourteen of the first sixteen agreements lock in roughly $100 billion in minimum revenue. Micron’s own new capacity won’t ship until mid-2027 at the earliest, meaning buyers are financing a factory they won’t benefit from for years.

Take-or-pay memory contracts have become the price of admission to guaranteed AI memory supply, and the terms favor the seller more than most buyers seem to be pricing in. Micron disclosed that customers across data center, consumer, and automotive segments have committed $22 billion in cash deposits and related financial commitments under 16 strategic capacity agreements, according to The Globe and Mail’s coverage of CEO Sanjay Mehrotra’s comments. Fourteen of those sixteen deals add up to roughly $100 billion in contracted minimum revenue over their terms.

Micron’s CFO Mark Murphy has been precise about the structure: roughly $18 billion of the $22 billion is cash, the rest letters of credit, and none of it counts as prepaid revenue, since it returns to customers on a schedule weighted toward the back half of the contract term, according to Futurum’s analysis of the Q3 earnings call. Most agreements run five years, from calendar 2026 through late 2030, with automotive deals typically three years. Take-or-pay memory contracts require the customer to buy a set volume at agreed pricing regardless of whether they ultimately need it, and the biggest deals carry a price floor that holds for the full term.

Active supermassive black holes may help form massive planets

A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra’s research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.

“We’re finding objects that are a thousand times the mass of the Earth, but built of pure dust,” Lyra said. “And not only that, but also some of these objects are approaching the mass of the sun.”

Lyra, an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, began this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow collaborating with Barry McKernan, Saavik Ford and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low at the American Museum of Natural History in 2010.

/* */