Power & Sites · United States

California Resources and Bloom Energy eye 1GW of fuel cells across California to power data centers and other offtakers

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com · 2h ago

Photograph · Data Center Dynamics

Intend to couple the systems with carbon capture and storage

Independent energy firm California Resources Corporation (CRC) and Bloom Energy have partnered to evaluate the development of 1GW or more of fuel cell generation in California, with data centers among the targeted offtakers.

The companies signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding that will evaluate the deployment of Bloom's solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), coupled with carbon capture systems.

Bloom is a developer of SOFC generators, dubbed the Bloom Box, which are stationary power generators that convert fuels into electricity through an electrochemical process without combustion. While they can be powered via hydrogen, at present the vast majority rely on natural gas.

The companies said they will look for offtake customers including data centers, utilities, community choice aggregators, municipalities, and other industrial users. In addition, they have said they will complete the interconnection and permitting work needed to bring projects online.

The plan covers front-of-the-meter and behind-the-meter projects in Central and Northern California. The front-of-the-meter projects would connect to utility offtake. The behind-the-meter projects, across CRC’s Central Valley footprint, would serve industrial users seeking on-site power.

Bloom would supply the fuel cells and third-party carbon capture technology. CRC’s carbon management business, Carbon TerraVault (CTV), is expected to handle CO2 transport and storage, with CRC managing the projects.

The companies said Bloom’s fuel cells produce a high-concentration CO2 exhaust stream, which they claim makes capture more efficient and cost-effective. The partners said that up to three million metric tons per annum of CO2 could potentially be captured and stored.

“California needs more clean, firm, reliable, and affordable power generated here at home. We are uniquely positioned with land, vast subsurface storage, and CO2 transportation and storage expertise,” said Francisco Leon, CRC’s president and CEO. “When combined with Bloom’s non-combustion technology with highly efficient carbon capture, we are positioned to deliver clean and affordable energy to power data centers and the grid at scale.”

Aman Joshi, Bloom’s chief commercial officer, added: “Our non-combustion technology makes carbon capture more efficient and economically viable at scale, opening a new path to carbon-neutral power generation and addressing the decarbonization needs of large critical infrastructure.”

Bloom has signed a range of deals across the data center spectrum over recent years.

Earlier this year, it expanded an agreement with cloud firm Oracle to supply it with up to 2.8GW of capacity. The companies inked a deal last year for an initial 1.2GW of capacity. However, deployments of the technology at Oracle’s Jupiter data center in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, have faced roadblocks due to opposition to the extension of a gas pipeline expected to feed the facility's fuel cells.

Bloom has also signed deals with Equinix for deployments across 19 data centers with a capacity exceeding 100MW, as well as an agreement with US utility American Electric Power for up to 1GW of SOFCs to power AI data centers off-grid. In October, AEP signed a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement with Google, which committed to offtake 702MW of power from a fuel cell generation project near Cheyenne, Wyoming, which utilizes Bloom’s fuel cells.

Models & LabsUnited States

LinkedIn Swapped Out OpenAI Models to Keep Its Server Costs Flat

Credited to The Information$ · theinformation.com1h ago

Useful

The more people use AI features in apps, the more the companies selling those apps have to spend on servers to run them, potentially squeezing their profit margins. But some firms have found ways to keep costs in check. For instance, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn says it has…

View the article · $The Information

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Models & Labs · United States

Exclusive: Cogent Security’s VR-1.1 model outscores Claude Code and Codex on vulnerability repair

Credited to SiliconANGLE · siliconangle.com · 5h ago

Photograph · SiliconANGLE

Vulnerability management startup Cogent Security Inc. today released VR-1.1, a new version of its frontier reasoning model that writes fixes for newly disclosed software vulnerabilities.

On a public repair benchmark, the model outscored Anthropic PBC’s Claude Code and OpenAI Group PBC’s Codex.

The release goes after the part of vulnerability management that has not sped up. In July, research group Epoch Artificial Intelligence Inc. counted about 2,500 high- and critical-severity disclosures from major organizations, roughly five times the monthly record set before Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview in April.

Each repair still needs an engineer who understands the flaw well enough to change the code without breaking something else. Co-founder and Chief Executive Vineet Edupuganti called that stage “where security teams are stuck.”

To test the model on that repair work, Cogent turned to LiveCVEBench. Researchers at Harbin Institute of Technology and Kuaishou Technology built the benchmark from vulnerabilities disclosed in recent months and add new ones regularly. VR-1.1 produced a working repair for 57.9% of the benchmark’s 190 tasks. Claude Code and Codex tied at 45.3%.

Each task drops an agent into a real development environment with a vulnerability report and the affected codebase, in one of 14 programming languages. To pass, a patch has to close the vulnerability without breaking the software, which the benchmark checks with separate security and functionality tests.

Cogent blocked outbound network access during repairs and hid the grading tests until each agent was done. Inference budgets differed across the three systems, according to the full methodology Cogent Research has published.

Where the environment allows, VR-1.1 starts by writing its own proof of concept that triggers the reported flaw. From there the model follows the vulnerability through the affected code, including related paths that share the same weakness. The fix itself stays small, for example checking an index before use.

Every patch goes to a separate review that starts from a fresh context and hunts for a way around the fix. New bugs introduced by the change are part of that check. The model also leaves behind regression tests, which fail if a later code change reopens the flaw. When an attempt fails, the diagnosis and failure details carry into the next try.

“A patch might block the exact payload from a bug report, but leave the same vulnerability open via a different endpoint or break core functionality for users,” said Geng Sng, co-founder and chief technology officer of Cogent. “We designed VR-1.1 to check its own work for both problems before it finishes.”

Cogent introduced VR-1 in July to find and prove the attack paths an adversary could reach inside an enterprise. The new release extends the remediation capabilities that model introduced.

Founded in 2025, the company sells artificial intelligence agents that detect and fix vulnerabilities, with customers choosing whether a human signs off on each change. According to Cogent, Fortune 500 users have cut the exposure window for critical vulnerabilities by 97%.

Greylock Partners backed its $11 million launch round in July 2025, and Bain Capital Ventures led the $42 million Series A in February that took total funding to $53 million.

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