Iceberg v3 Gets Native Geo Types. It's More Than a Format Upgrade Iceberg v3 geospatial types bring native geometry and geography to the open lakehouse. What changed, how Wherobots designed and contributed the spec, and what it means for spatial data across engines.

The Wherebots blog celebrates the support for geometry/geography types in Snowflake, based on the Apache Iceberg v3 table specs. Now, geospatial is a first-class type in all the lakehouse engines (including Databricks).

wherobots.com/blog/iceberg...

Here we are, another example of the Goodhart's law - quite expensive I would say. The same people selling AI computing (tokens) say that tokens should be the way to measure the performance of an engineer (go and ask your barber if you need a haircut).
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/t...

Rabobank invests in Domyn to advance sovereign-AI adoption in financial services - Rabo Investments 20 April 2026 – Rabo Investments Corporate Venturing (RICV) announces a minority equity investment in Domyn, a European leader in sovereign-AI for regulated industries, as part of a broader strategic…

Rabobank invests in Domyn to advance sovereign-AI adoption in financial services raboinvestments.com/rabobank-inv...

Electricity generation in Europe (no UK) from 2015 to March 2026. #energyviz based on the data from ENTSO-E Transparency Platform using a 365-day rolling average. Renewable generation is underestimated in this dataset.

"With Asian countries, including China, restricting exports of fuels due to the fear of shortages created by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, Australia is now pulling in diesel along some of the longest and most expensive trade routes in the world."

www.ft.com/content/56b4...

The LNG Shock Isn’t Driving Asia Back to Coal If you’re given to the Sickos Guy view of world events, there’s one obvious way to make the current crisis in the Middle East look just that little bit more disastrous: As well as starving us of…

Is the current LNG show driving back Asia to coal? According to David Fickling, this is not happening: "a boom in rooftop solar is far more likely than a return to coal" he writes. Interesting analysis, let's wait and see.
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

Let's say welcome to the potential geopolitical buzzword of the year: “electrostate”.

CitriniResearch has released an interesting scenario for AI, it is a well-done thought exercise starting with the question "What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish?. Are they describing a plausible 2028? Enjoy the read: www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

Unfortunately, today’s global landscape feels like the textbook definition of "polycrisis"

Nvidia, Emerald AI team with energy companies on "flexible" data centers The effort reflects a growing push to turn AI data centers from massive power consumers into more dynamic grid participants.

Finally someone is discussing the possibility to increase demand flexibility of future data centres, to simplify the integration with the power system. www.axios.com/2026/03/23/u...

Mistral AI launches Forge to help companies build proprietary AI models, challenging cloud giants Mistral AI launches Forge, an enterprise AI training platform that lets companies build custom models on proprietary data and challenge cloud giants.

Mistral launched a platform called Forge, that can be used to train models using proprietary data. Organisations will be able to customise AI models for their needs using the same "recipe" that Mistral is using to train their flagship models. Interesting move.
venturebeat.com/infrastructu...

Nscale and Microsoft Announce Collaboration with NVIDIA and Caterpillar to Deliver 1.35GW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs at Flagship AI Factory Campus in West Virginia | Press Release | Nscale Nscale and Microsoft Announce Collaboration with NVIDIA and Caterpillar to Deliver 1.35GW of NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs at Flagship AI Factory Campus in West Virginia . Press release from Nscale.

Microsoft announced an off-grid data center with 1.35 GW of Nvidia chips. It will be in West Virginia and it will run 100% on natural gas.

www.nscale.com/press-releas...

Americans’ electricity bills are up. Don’t blame AI Rising electricity prices in America stem mainly from grid upgrades and equipment costs rather than artificial-intelligence data centres, despite growing power demand.

Electricity prices started going up in US before the launch of ChatGPT and the AI boom, so probably it's not AI driving them up: www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Good storytelling from Carbon Brief: How extreme weather is destroying crops around the world. The article has been updated two days ago adding 40 extreme events for 2025.

EU’s agri-food system must prepare for rising climate risks and accelerate emission reductions All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain.

The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change will host a public webinar this Friday on their new report "Climate adaptation and mitigation in the agri-food system – Recommendations for coherent EU policies" climate-advisory-board.europa.eu/news/eus-agr...

Emissions (grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour) from North Sea gas vs LNG imports. Source: Carbon Brief analysis

Factcheck: North Sea gas is not ‘four times cleaner’ than LNG imports | @daisydunne.carbonbrief.org @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org #CBarchive

Read here: buff.ly/IoMIeUt

‘A different set of rules’: thermal drone footage shows Musk’s AI power plant flouting clean air regulations Images confirm xAI is continuing to defy EPA regulations in Mississippi to power its flagship datacenters

I am happy that the SMR by TerraPower got the green light to be built in Wyoming.

But let's focus on the "here and now". This article gives a possible example of the current bring-your-own-capacity mentality to power data centres in the US:
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

I created this visualisation using 15-minute CAISO data from January 2023 to December 2025 to explore how batteries operate in relation to wind & solar generation and overall grid demand.

A Rational Analysis of the Effects of Sycophantic AI People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to explore ideas, gather information, and make sense of the world. In these interactions, they encounter agents that are overly agreeable. We…

Don't tell me. Sycophantic AI serves as a personal echo chamber that can actually keep you from finding good ideas. arxiv.org/abs/2602.14270

Native Geospatial Types in Apache Parquet Native Geospatial Types in Apache Parquet

Very very nice.
Apache Parquet has officially introduced native GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY logical types.
parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02...

Why is AI so bad at reading PDFs? One of the most ubiquitous file formats is stumping the major models

From The Verge: "One of the humblest and most ubiquitous file formats is stumping the world’s most advanced models" 👉 www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Google found a way to connect get its 850MW data center online in Texas in less than two years rather than five. The answer: co-located wind and solar.

www.distilled.earth/p/google-is-...

South Korean farmers sue utility giant KEPCO over climate damage to crops - UPI.com Five farmers in South Korea are plaintiffs in a landmark civil suit against state-owned utility KEPCO for climate-related agricultural damages.

South Korean farmers sue utility giant KEPCO over climate damage to crops: www.upi.com/Top_News/Wor...

‘Daunting but doable’: Europe urged to prepare for 3C of global heating Advisory board member says adapting is ‘not rocket science’ but Europe already paying price for lack of preparation

EU’s climate advisory board (ESABCC) urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Deluge revives concerns about European food price rises Winter ‘pantry’ depleted as rains devastate crops in Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco

Climate change is not "projected to happen" or "on the horizon", it is not even a news any more.

www.ft.com/content/8504...

Hinkley Point C nuclear plant delayed to 2030 as costs climb to £35bn French utility company EDF says operations in Somerset will start a year later as delay costs firm €2.5bn

Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation at the Hinkley Point C site will face further delay, it will begin operations in 2030, a year later than planned: almost 13 years after construction work began www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

I keep coming back to this IPCC chart, and I'm surprised it hasn't become the go-to reference for precipitation extremes. I think it works for two reasons:

1. Clarity and simplicity
2. Honesty about uncertainty: Regions with limited data or low agreement get equal visibility

Electric Vehicle Sales Boom as Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports The East African country is making use of cheap hydropower and Chinese electric vehicles to ditch the internal combustion engine.

Ethiopia: In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country : www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Kenya launches a carbon registry to boost climate finance and credibility Kenya has launched its first national carbon registry, a centralized system to track carbon credit projects, prevent double counting and strengthen transparency in climate markets.

Kenya launches a carbon registry to boost climate finance and credibility: apnews.com/article/carb...

We tend to think of batteries as the ones in our phones. But the real shift is happening at grid scale.

Utility-scale “mega batteries” now have hundreds of millions of times the capacity of a smartphone battery.

Costs are down ~40% since 2024, and capacity in 2024 was 12x higher than in 2020.