Good morning. It’s Thursday, March 5. Today we are covering:
Big Tech pledges to cover AI data center power costs
Pentagon eyes Ukrainian interceptor drones to counter Iran
OpenAI brings its Codex coding app to Windows
Microsoft built Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B to know when to think — and when thinking is a waste of time
Google Proposes to Share Play Store Catalog to Resolve Case
Let’s dive in
Big Tech pledges to cover AI data center power costs
By Tim McDonnell via Semafor
Senior executives from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and OpenAI met at the White House and signed a “ratepayer protection pledge” to shoulder more of their AI data centers’ electricity costs, which President Trump said would lower power bills.
The pledge contains no new federal policy commitments to finance or build power projects, leaving the hard work to state and local regulators to set rate structures that incentivize grid investment around data centers.
Even with the pledge, new generation faces real-world constraints — including multi-year backlogs for gas turbines and other equipment — though energy lawyers say it could still drive more power capacity than would otherwise be built.
𝕏: Meta is proud to support President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge. America is in the middle of the biggest infrastructure boom since World War II, as Meta and others build the infrastructure that will underpin the nation’s economy for years to come… - Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan)
Pentagon eyes Ukrainian interceptor drones to counter Iran
By Charles Clover via Financial Times
The Pentagon and at least one Gulf state are in talks to buy Ukrainian-made interceptor drones as a cheaper way to stop Iranian Shahed attacks, as allies burn through costly Patriot PAC-3 missiles and worry about running down air-defense stockpiles.
Ukraine’s industry says its interceptors can cost a few thousand dollars and have been refined in combat against Shahed drones used by Russia since 2022, positioning Kyiv’s “drone-on-drone” approach as an exportable model for layered air defense.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has acknowledged discussions with leaders in the region, while Ukrainian firms highlight multiple interceptor designs, arguing any deals must avoid weakening Ukraine’s own defenses even as demand rises beyond Europe.
𝕏: According to the Financial Times, the USA and one unnamed Gulf State are in talks with Ukraine for the purchase of Ukrainian Interceptor UAVs to counter Iranian Shahed Long-Range One-Way Attack Munitions. - Jeff2146 (@Jeff21461)
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OpenAI brings its Codex coding app to Windows
By Igor Bonifacic via Engadget
OpenAI released a dedicated Codex desktop app for Windows, bringing the same multi-agent coordination features previously introduced alongside the standalone macOS app.
The Windows app supports automations for repetitive workflows (like bug testing) and a Skills section that packages instructions, resources, and scripts to connect agents to specific tools and processes, plus native sandboxing for a more familiar developer setup.
Codex is available to ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, and Pro users, and saves session history to your OpenAI account so you can switch between Mac and Windows without losing work.
𝕏: Big win for Windows developers! Codex on Windows opens the door for millions of developers. Excited to see what builders around the world create with this! - Romain Huet (@romainhuet)
By Michael Nuñez via VentureBeat
Microsoft released Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, an open-weight multimodal model that handles text + images for tasks like math/science reasoning, charts/documents, and GUI navigation, and is available via Microsoft Foundry, Hugging Face, and GitHub under a permissive license.
The company says it achieved strong performance with far less training data: about 200B multimodal tokens, versus 1T+ tokens for several rival multimodal model families, relying on meticulous data curation and regenerating incorrect answers with models like GPT-4o and o4-mini.
A key design choice is “mixed reasoning”: roughly 20% of training samples include explicit chain-of-thought traces and 80% are marked , aiming to reason when it helps (STEM) and skip it when it hurts (captioning/OCR), with users able to override via prompting.
Google Proposes to Share Play Store Catalog to Resolve Case
By Leah Nylen via Bloomberg
Google unveiled a new system for apps on Android phones and tablets that would give rival app stores easier access to the Play Store catalog and reduce developer fees.
The proposal is aimed at resolving US antitrust litigation while also meeting new regulatory requirements in Europe and other markets.
Google executive Sameer Samat said the changes go “well beyond” what laws in Europe and the UK currently require.
𝕏: Android has always driven innovation in the industry through its unique flexibility and openness. At this important moment, we continue to be at the forefront of how developers distribute their apps and games on billions of devices globally… - Sameer Samat (@ssamat)
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