| Hello, When a technology race becomes a geopolitical race, governments quickly find themselves in the engineering business. This week’s reports paint a picture of a government getting into the technical weeds. With its blacklist of Chinese companies now expanding from defense to technology and energy firms, the Pentagon is reaching deep into global supply chains. The Department of Health and Human Services is reworking clinical trials in an effort to keep the U.S. ahead of China in biotech. And AI’s voracious appetite for electricity is forcing a rethink of grid infrastructure — and creating new markets in the process. Read on. 📅 Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern: Join me and Lead Energy & Climate Analyst Kathryn Clay for a virtual briefing, “Lessons from the 2026 Energy Shock.” From gasoline to electricity, what tools does Washington have to keep energy affordable? RSVP here. 📅 Friday July 10 at 11 a.m. Eastern: Join Deputy Editor Yun-Hee Kim and Lead Health Care Analyst Rebecca Adams for a virtual briefing, “The biotech race: Can America stay ahead of China?” RSVP here.
🇺🇸🇨🇳 Back to our regularly scheduled economic war That U.S.-China timeout didn’t last long. Lead National Security Analyst Josh Rogin examines the fallout from the dramatic expansion this month of the Pentagon’s blacklist of Chinese companies allegedly tied to the People’s Liberation Army. This time it swept in some of China’s biggest commercial champions, including EV giant BYD, tech leaders Alibaba and Baidu, biotech companies BGI Group and WuXi AppTec, robotics maker Unitree, and solar manufacturers JA Solar and Trina Solar. That helps explain why Beijing responded so quickly. On Sunday, China placed 10 U.S. companies on its export control list and barred 46 mostly defense-linked firms from government procurement. Notable among the targets: MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, two companies central to Washington’s push to build a domestic rare earth supply chain. - This isn’t just China’s problem. If you do business with the Defense Department, it’s time to take a hard look at your suppliers, recommends Josh, and review your lobbying firms. New restrictions kick in Tuesday, with broader supply chain requirements following in 2027.
- The cycle could escalate. If the Trump administration decides to respond in kind, it still has a wide range of sanctions and blacklisting tools it has yet to deploy.
- September offers an off-ramp. With President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping expected to meet in September, both sides have an incentive to keep the dispute from spiraling before they sit down.
👉 Read the full report: “The next phase in the U.S.-China economic war is here.” (Registration required.) 💊 The race after the breakthrough When DeepMind showed in 2020 that AI could solve problems that had stumped biologists for decades, it fueled hopes that AI could unlock a flood of medical breakthroughs. But the promise of AI-accelerated drug discovery is running into real-world constraints, writes Rebecca in her latest report. And addressing them is taking on new urgency as China’s biotech ambitions accelerate. Concerned that an unnecessarily plodding U.S. regulatory system is driving clinical research overseas, the Department of Health and Human Services this week launched “Operation Trailblazer.” Rebecca breaks down what HHS is trying to change to help realize the potential of AI — and to protect America’s lead position in biotech: - Less waiting for the FDA. Faster feedback, clearer rules and more flexibility could shave months off early drug development.
- Faster patient recruitment. The administration wants to make it easier to match patients with clinical trials and modernize how studies are designed.
- Less paperwork, more science. Officials are taking aim at lengthy ethics reviews and contract negotiations that can delay trials long before the first patient is enrolled.
👉 Read the full report: “Trump administration tackles drug development bottlenecks.” (Registration required.) Are you a business executive, policymaker or key decision-maker? See how WP Intelligence can work for you: Contact us to book a quick demo of our new platform. 🔋 Go with the flow: Why AI needs a new kind of battery As the U.S. works to keep its AI edge, energy access has been critical to the data center buildout and a driver of community backlash. Kathryn’s newest report surfaces an eye-popping — and little-discussed — aspect of AI data center energy use. Unlike traditional industrial loads, AI computing workloads can swing by hundreds of megawatts in fractions of a second, leading to volatility the grid was never designed to handle. To smooth those swings, data centers sometimes run so-called “dummy loads” that deliberately draw extra power to keep demand more stable. But what if there were a better way — one that reduced both volatility and the need for those energy-wasting dummy loads? Enter “flow” batteries. Think of a flow battery as part battery, part chemical plant. Instead of storing energy in solid materials, flow batteries store it in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks. When the liquids circulate through the system, they generate electricity through an electrochemical reaction. - Yes, the grid already uses batteries. Lithium-ion has become the default technology for stationary energy storage. But lithium-ion batteries degrade with repeated charge-and-discharge cycles, making them poorly suited to the large, frequent power swings created by AI data centers.
- Flow batteries tolerate those intense fluctuations far better, making them an attractive option for smoothing workloads and stabilizing data center demand.
- The technology has existed for decades, but its larger physical footprint, and the falling cost of lithium-ion batteries, have limited adoption of flow batteries. AI could change that.
👉 Read the full report: “AI data centers are supercharging a new battery market.” (Unlocked link.) 🛰️ The WPI Conversation: The internet is looking up For decades, satellites were mostly about broadcasting television. Now they’re becoming part of the internet itself. As businesses demand cloud connectivity everywhere — from remote mines to cargo ships to military operations — low Earth orbit satellites (LEOs) are emerging as a critical piece of digital infrastructure. Reporter Nour Wood spoke with Telesat Chief Commercial Officer Glenn Katz about why LEOs are reshaping telecommunications, and where the technology is headed. - On why LEOs matter: “Over the last 15 years or so, we’ve seen everything move to the cloud, and that requires massive amounts of bandwidth. If you’re in a remote location, and you’re trying to have your applications sit in the cloud, that geostationary delay is just unusable.”
- On the business case: “The digital desert is real. A terrestrial provider could serve 80 to 85 percent of a business’s locations …. But that means you can’t have the same experience across all your other branch locations.”
- On defense: “You’re seeing the importance of communication in the Middle East and other recent conflicts …. When you bring in LEO, low-latency communications with high bandwidth, that’s important.”
- On where the industry is headed: “In 10 years, they probably won’t even think about it. It’ll just become part of the overall telecommunications fabric.”
👉 Read the full interview. (Registration required.) 🔍 From the WPI Councils WP Intelligence Councils are invite-only memberships for senior executives engaged in industry-shaping discussion and high-level networking. Here are some notable quotes from some of our WP Intelligence Council members. “If the long-term drought is as bad as it could be, and you are starting off already with severe drought, this raises the real possibility of a ‘mini-Dust Bowl. Soybeans will be stressed further in the months and years ahead, and yields on some of these crops will be reduced in parts of the country. If that happens, it will have a negative impact on food production, leading to price inflation. Furthermore, water supplies will be harmed as well.” — Joel Myers, AccuWeather founder and executive chair and a member of the WPI Energy & Climate Council, in a statement to Fortune following an AccuWeather warning that the rare “Super El Niño” now forming could cause a multiyear drought in the Plains states. “The industry spent years focused on keeping attackers out. But, in the AI era, the biggest question facing defenders is what happens after they get in. … The organizations that adapt fastest will shift from perimeter-only thinking to containment: limiting lateral movement, reducing blast radius and ensuring attacks cannot bring down a business.” — Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and a member of the WPI Global Security Council, commenting on a recent report by Zero Networks showing that 80 percent of enterprise servers can be accessed from any point inside a network. “I would first and foremost say when technology is in the hunt for a business problem, it’s failure out of the gate. Point one is starting with a governance view of what type of use case, what type of economic value,” Jay Allardyce, chief product officer at Octave and a member of the WPI AI & Tech Council, told engineering.com. Please stay in touch. Luiza 📩 Email me at luiza.savage@washpost.com Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to get it sent directly to your inbox every Friday. |
