The new facility will require ‘no additional grid power’, Equinix has claimed.

Equinix has begun construction on a new $92m data centre in Dublin’s Blanchardstown, expected to be operational from 2028.

This adds to nine data centres that Equinix already owns in Dublin, according to Data Centre Map, including two from BT, which it acquired for €59m in 2025. The company owns more than 270 data centres worldwide.

The new centre, called DB7x, will be “100pc flexible to support the national grid” and “will require no additional grid power”, said Equinix. According to the company, the new building will be constructed on an existing Equinix site and use the power already allocated to that facility.

DB7x will be situated close to two of the company’s existing data centres for “enhanced connectivity”, Equinix added. Investment is expected to be split into $78m for the facility and $14m to support a retail International Business Exchange (IBX) buildout.

The company’s retail IBX data centres provide enterprises with digital infrastructure to tackle growing AI workloads and scale services locally while connecting to customers internationally.

Equinix said that retail capacity in its new data centre will directly support foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland, adding to the 200 FDI corporations that the company already provides its infrastructure to.

“This is an exciting development for Equinix’s operations in Ireland, as we celebrate 10 years of being in Ireland, investing in its infrastructure and economy,” said Peter Lantry, the managing director of Equinix Ireland.

“This announcement strongly supports the Government’s recently published Digital and AI Strategy, which outlines a path for keeping Ireland at the forefront of global digital innovation. It also reaffirms our commitment to Ireland and its importance to businesses worldwide.”

He added: “This is positive news for the Irish economy. By expanding colocation capacity in Dublin, we will enable domestic and international enterprises to scale, innovate and connect across Equinix’s global digital infrastructure platform with ease.”

Last month, Equinix announced the creation of 200 new jobs in Louth via a new facility expected to cost the company as much as $700m.

Data centre providers in Ireland are set to benefit from the Government’s new strategy for large energy users, which aims to improve hyperscale data centre developments with better State coordination and national infrastructure planning.

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Singapore-based, but founded by Irishman Dr Joe Fitzsimons, Horizon Quantum begins trading on the Nasdaq today under the HQ symbol.

Horizon Quantum Computing specialises in software infrastructure for quantum applications, and yesterday (19 March) announced it had completed the previously announced merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) dMY Squared Technology Group.

“Recent rapid progress in advancing quantum computing hardware and breakthroughs in error correction mean that the field is reaching an inflection point,” said Dr Joe Fitzsimons, Founder and CEO of Horizon Quantum. “With today’s closing and our Nasdaq listing, Horizon Quantum is positioned to deliver the software infrastructure that will power this next phase of computing and help enable broad quantum advantage across tough computational problems.”

“While there is still much work needed before quantum computers reach their full potential, with more than 20 years in quantum computing research, I have never been more excited about the prospects and future of the technology.”

“Horizon Quantum is compelling because the company is approaching the quantum industry with hardware-agnostic software infrastructure that stands to benefit regardless of which way the market share ultimately falls across the competing quantum modalities, including the cloud,” said Harry You, Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas-based dMY.

Horizon Quantum says the closing of the merger yesterday provides it with gross proceeds of some $120m before transaction costs. It says this injection of cash will be used to “accelerate its investments in research and development, strengthen its hardware testbed, and further advance its integrated development environment Triple Alpha”.

Horizon Quantum is developing a way to transform programmes written in conventional programming languages such as C or Python into accelerated quantum applications. To accomplish this, the company has created a method to automatically construct quantum algorithms from conventional languages in a way that preserves the code’s original functioning in a process called algorithm synthesis.

Fitzsimons, a former professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and the president of the Southeast Asia Quantum Industry Association, also co-invented universal blind quantum computing – technology used to secure cloud-based quantum systems. Horizon Quantum raised $18.1m in a Series A funding round in 2023.

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The internet you use every day could soon be dominated by artificial intelligence. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that AI bots may generate more traffic than humans within the next year or two, marking a major shift in how the web works.

Speaking about the current trends with TechCrunch, Prince said bot activity is growing rapidly as AI systems crawl and interact with websites at scale.

Before the rise of generative AI, bots were responsible for only 20% of internet traffic. Most of that traffic came from search engines like Google, and some malicious activity. Now, that number is climbing much faster.

Why is AI bot traffic growing faster?

According to Prince, the key reason behind this surge is how AI systems operate. He explains that a human might visit a handful of websites to complete a task. An AI agent, on the other hand, can hit thousands of pages in seconds to gather information and complete the same task.

This creates a huge spike in traffic. AI systems constantly scan and collect information to function, which means they generate far more requests than human users ever could. That growing demand is what could push bot traffic past human activity in the coming years.

How sandboxing could help manage the AI traffic surge

Prince believes this shift will require entirely new systems built for AI. One idea is creating temporary ‘sandboxes’ where AI agents can run tasks, then shut down once finished.

For example, if you ask an AI to plan a vacation, it could spin up a dedicated environment to browse, compare, and organize information before disappearing.

These sandboxed environments would allow bots to perform tasks without overwhelming websites or infrastructure.

Prince imagines millions of these sandboxes could be created every second. However, handling traffic at this scale would also require major infrastructure, including more data centers and servers to support constant AI activity.

For Prince, this is not just another tech trend. “I think the thing that people don’t appreciate about AI is it’s a platform shift,” he said, comparing it to the move from desktop to mobile. “AI is another platform shift … the way that you’re going to consume information is completely different.”

A group of former Twitter investors have prevailed at a federal civil trial over Elon Musk’s actions amid his $44 billion acquisition of the social platform in 2022. A jury in San Francisco found Friday that tweets made by Musk about fake accounts on the platform had defrauded investors in the company. The jury sided with Musk on other allegations in the case.

It’s not yet clear how much Musk will owe in damages as a result of the case but, as the Associated Press reports, it could amount to billions of dollars. Jurors calculated that shareholders should get “between about $3 and $8 per stock per day.”

The class action lawsuit, one of several brought against Musk in the months following his takeover of the company, cited Musk’s tweets about fake accounts on the platform. Facing a sinking Tesla share price in the days after announcing he would buy Twitter for $54.20 a share, the suit said Musk made tweets and statements that were intentionally meant to drive down Twitter’s share price in an attempt to renegotiate or exit the deal.

The suit called out Musk’s May 13, 2022, tweet that claimed the Twitter deal was “temporarily on hold” due to the number of fake accounts and bots on the platform, as well as one a few days later that suggested fake accounts might account for more than 20 percent of users. Twitter’s stock dropped significantly following the May 13 tweet.

During the trial, Musk said the tweets were him “speaking his mind” and maintained that Twitter executives had “lied” about the number of bots on the platform, according to KQED. Former Twitter shareholders, on the other hand, said “they sold shares at deflated prices amid Musk’s public waffling.”

Musk faced several lawsuits during and after his $44 billion takeover of the company. That includes other shareholder lawsuits related to his delay in disclosing his stake in the company, as well as one from former executives related to unpaid severance benefits (Musk later settled those claims). He also narrowly avoided a trial over his attempts to back out of the deal.

Liberty IT’s Emma Mullan explores how modern organisations can address workplace transformation and growth.

Emma Mullan is a senior director of talent at Liberty IT, leading the human resources and communications function. Her core focus is on shaping culture and fostering an environment that supports innovation. 

“Transformation is fundamentally about driving and managing change, and my priority is to create as much certainty as possible so people can focus on opportunity rather than fear,” Mullan told SiliconRepublic.com. 

She explained that the organisation approaches large-scale transformation as if it were a collaborative exercise, mapping impact and developing a foundational people-first culture.

She said: “When people feel safe to ask questions, experiment, learn from one another and share insights, capability grows sustainably – which is critical as the pace of change accelerates, especially with AI. To make this culture tangible, we’ve introduced the Culture Playbook and the Culture Stars programme.

“The Culture Playbook defines our purpose and the behaviours that guide how we work together, how we collaborate, share knowledge, support one another and continually raise the bar on quality as skills and technology evolve.”

Can you discuss recent programmes or initiatives introduced at Liberty IT?

A great example is our GenAI Learning Mission, which is a curated collection of events and resources to help everyone at Liberty IT navigate, share and develop in an AI‑augmented workplace. It’s designed to support our transformation in a practical way, by building the capabilities we’ll need for tomorrow, while reinforcing the culture and standards that matter today. It creates clear learning pathways for different roles and starting points and importantly, it’s not just for engineers. With tools like LibertyGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot, GenAI is critical across the organisation, so our mission starts with foundational capability for everyone to encompass advanced upskilling in emerging technologies for many of our engineers

It also supports a mindset transformation. The biggest shift isn’t learning new tools, it’s about learning and adopting new ways of working. With the rapid advancement of GenAI, skills such as critical thinking, flexibility, curiosity and creativity are more important than ever. That’s why we’re investing in leadership enablement and team conversations, so people feel supported to ask questions, experiment and learn by doing. 

How do culture programmes help build current and future-focused skills?

Culture-focused programmes support positive employee experiences and can make skills development real by shaping what happens day to day. Leaders play a pivotal role in creating the culture of learning within their teams so that they encourage time for learning, sharing and innovating. Over the last year, we have focused on giving our leaders the tools to both manage change themselves and lead their teams through change.

We’ve been leaning into the human aspects of moving through transformation and by supporting our employees in this way, we have created a safe environment for continuous learning and development, setting them up to learn skills that they need for today and the future. As a culture, we encourage mobility as part of supporting skill development. We actively support movement between teams, whether that’s stretching opportunities, cross-team projects or transitioning into emerging areas like GenAI, people can build experience and capability in real contexts. Over time, that creates a workforce that’s more resilient, more engaged and better prepared for whatever skills the future demands.

What’s your advice for tech leaders who want to strengthen culture during transformation?

Leaders shape culture through what they prioritise, what they reward, and the behaviours they role-model every day. During transformation, people need clarity and consistency, clear direction on what’s changing, why it matters, and how teams are expected to work together as priorities and tools evolve. A big part of a positive culture today is enabling future skills development.

Leaders need to create space for learning in the flow of work, encourage knowledge sharing, and invest in the mindsets that enable adaptability, curiosity, critical thinking and confidence to try new approaches, particularly as AI becomes increasingly embedded. It’s also important to recognise the human reality of change. Transformation can bring uncertainty, so actively listening and involving teams in shaping solutions builds trust and resilience. When leaders normalise learning-by-doing, celebrate progress and remove barriers to collaboration, culture becomes a practical support system, not just a set of values.

Over the course of the next 12 months what do you predict for the recruitment landscape?

The industry will continue to be heavily influenced by the rapid acceleration of AI. Organisations across multiple sectors are increasingly seeking talent with experience in these emerging technologies, capability that does not yet exist at scale. This will intensify competition and increasingly require organisations to hire for potential, rather than experience. As roles continue to evolve, greater emphasis will be placed on core, transferrable skills such as problem-solving, communication, collaboration and adaptability. Individuals who demonstrate a growth mindset and curiosity about emerging technologies will remain in high demand, even as job titles and technologies continue to evolve.

In the short term, we also see a risk emerging in the market. Reduced demand for entry-level technical roles, driven by market uncertainty, could create a future shortage of experienced talent, as fewer early-career professionals are given the opportunity to enter and grow within the industry. To respond effectively, organisations will need a balanced approach. At Liberty IT, this means combining targeted hiring for critical skills with sustained investment in developing our people and rethinking how we upskill entry-level talent. 

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The indictment of Super Micro’s co-founder exposes not just a $2.5 billion scheme, it exposes a system that was never built to stop one.

Somewhere in a rented warehouse in Southeast Asia, a man was using a hair dryer on a server box. Not to dry it. To loosen the adhesive on a serial-number sticker, so that it could be carefully peeled away and pressed onto a different machine, one that had never been plugged in, never booted, and was never intended to reach its declared destination.

The real servers, the ones containing Nvidia’s most advanced AI accelerator chips, had already been repackaged into unmarked boxes and shipped to China. The dummy, dressed in borrowed labels, was waiting for the auditors.

That scene, reconstructed from surveillance footage cited in a federal indictment unsealed on 19 March 2026, is the most precise image we have yet of how America’s semiconductor export controls actually work in practice. Not in theory, in practice. The answer, it turns out, involves a hair dryer.

The indictment charges three men: Yih-Shyan ‘Wally’ Liaw, 71, co-founder, board member, and Senior Vice President of Business Development of Super Micro Computer; Ruei-Tsang ‘Steven’ Chang, 53, general manager of the company’s Taiwan office; and Ting-Wei ‘Willy’ Sun, 44, a contractor described by prosecutors as a ‘fixer.’

Together, they allegedly orchestrated the diversion of approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers, many assembled in the United States and integrating Nvidia GPUs, to customers in China, via a front company in Southeast Asia, between 2024 and 2025.

During a single six-week window in the spring of 2025, at least $510 million of hardware made the journey. Liaw and Sun were arrested. Chang, a Taiwanese citizen, remains a fugitive.

The charges include conspiracy to violate the Export Controls Reform Act, conspiracy to smuggle goods from the United States, and conspiracy to defraud the government, offences carrying a combined maximum of 30 years in prison.

Super Micro, the publicly traded San Jose company that makes the hardware at the centre of the scheme, has not been named as a defendant. It placed Liaw and Chang on administrative leave and terminated its relationship with Sun. It said it had been cooperating with investigators and maintained a ‘robust compliance programme.’

That phrase deserves to sit with you for a moment.

According to the indictment, the defendants and their co-conspirators communicated through encrypted messaging applications to coordinate which quantities of servers to order, which locations in China to ship them to, and, critically, how to conceal the scheme from the company’s own compliance team.

When an internal audit was scheduled, they staged thousands of non-working server replicas at a warehouse rented by the front company. When a US Department of Commerce inspector arrived to examine the same facility, they deployed the same props, using heat guns to swap labels and serial numbers before the visit.

The inspector, the indictment notes, did not see the actual servers because they had already been sent to China. An auditor from within the company who should have been on-site at a separate inspection was, according to prosecutors, ‘offsite, entertaining himself at the front company’s expense.’

The loophole that was never a secret

The transshipment route through Southeast Asia is not a discovery. It is a known, documented, and repeatedly flagged feature of the export control architecture — one that US trade analysts, think-tanks, and the Department of Commerce itself have been warning about for years. Countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand have historically, as analysts at the East Asia Forum observed earlier this month, ‘lacked the enforcement infrastructure or political will to rigorously monitor re-exports.’

Between April and July 2025, Vietnamese authorities intercepted more than 2,000 shipments falsely labelled ‘Made in Vietnam’ but traced to Chinese factories, according to an analysis published by The Diplomat. Malaysian tech hubs in Penang and Johor were flagged for similar rerouting practices.

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that became a household name after its January 2025 model release, was accused in reporting by Tom’s Hardware of establishing ‘ghost’ data centres in Southeast Asia to pass audits, then forwarding the GPUs onward.

A Financial Times investigation estimated that China secured roughly $1 billion in advanced AI processors in the three months immediately following the last major tightening of US export controls.

The pattern, in other words, is not aberrant. It is structural. The controls are enforced primarily at the point of sale and first shipment, and they rely, almost entirely, on the declared end use of the buyer and the downstream compliance of every intermediary in the chain. When the incentive to lie is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, the honour system has limits.

The company that keeps surviving itself

Super Micro’s appearance in this case is, in the mildest possible terms, not a surprise. The company has accumulated a regulatory history that would be remarkable in isolation but begins to suggest something more systemic when viewed in sequence.

In 2018, it was temporarily delisted from Nasdaq for failing to file financial statements. In 2020, it paid a $17.5 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission for what the agency described as ‘widespread accounting violations’, more than $200 million in improperly recognised revenue and understated expenses, resulting in artificially elevated sales and profit margins.

The co-founder now facing federal charges, Wally Liaw, resigned from the company during that period. He returned as a consultant in 2021, was named a senior vice president in 2022, and rejoined the board of directors in late 2023.

In 2024, short-seller Hindenburg Research published a report alleging fresh accounting irregularities, undisclosed related-party transactions, and, notably, violations of US export controls.

Ernst & Young, the company’s auditor, resigned shortly after, saying it could no longer vouch for the accuracy of management’s financial representations. Super Micro commissioned an independent special committee review; it found no evidence of fraud. 

Through all of this, Super Micro has remained in the S&P 500. Its revenue for the most recent quarter was $12.7 billion.

There is a reasonable question embedded in that number: at what point does the pattern become the product? The compliance failures keep occurring. The executives implicated keep returning. The stock keeps recovering. The hardware keeps moving.

Whether Super Micro’s board and remaining leadership can provide a credible answer to that question will matter enormously, not just to investors, but to the credibility of the entire export control regime they allegedly helped to circumvent.

Enforcement in a loosening wind

Now, the irony of this week’s indictment is its timing. The Trump administration has, in recent months, been quietly relaxing the export control posture that made the hardware in question illegal to ship.

In December 2025, the White House announced it would permit sales of certain chips directly to approved customers in China.

In January 2026, the Bureau of Industry and Security issued revised licensing rules allowing case-by-case review, rather than a presumption of denial, for exports of earlier-generation AI hardware to mainland China.

A rule known as the Affiliates Rule, designed to close loopholes around Chinese-owned subsidiaries, was suspended for a year almost immediately after it was issued.

This creates a strange political geometry. The Justice Department is prosecuting men for shipping chips that US policy is, in a parallel track, beginning to permit.

There is a version of the story in which that tension resolves cleanly: the administration enforces the current rules while adjusting them for the future, and the two tracks do not contradict each other.

There is another version in which enforcement becomes selective, a tool for signalling toughness while the underlying architecture quietly softens. Which version is actually unfolding is a question worth watching closely.

Congress has been watching, and not quietly. BIS received a 23% budget increase for fiscal year 2026, with bipartisan support and explicit funding earmarked for semiconductor enforcement. Several members have sought congressional control over export licensing, frustrated by what they see as executive branch inconsistency.

What none of that resolves is the fundamental architecture of the problem. Export controls enforced at the point of sale, relying on declared end use, policed by company compliance teams that can be deceived with a hair dryer and a rented warehouse, are not, in the end, a system built for the scale of economic incentive now in play. The chip war has raised the stakes well past what the honour system was designed to hold.

The servers have already arrived. The stickers have been carefully reapplied. The dummy machines stood ready for inspection. And somewhere in a data centre in China, the real hardware is running, training models, refining weights, closing the gap.

The auditors are still on their way.

A new report claims the company plans to phase out PlayStation Network (PSN) branding entirely by September 2026. It will replace it with something that better reflects its broader digital services.

According to Insider Gaming, an internal email sent to developers outlines a “strategic” decision to drop both “PlayStation Network” and “PSN” across all Sony Interactive Entertainment platforms.

In the fictional nation of Beryllia, the 2026 World Chalice Games were set to begin as the country faced an unrelenting heat wave. The grid, already under strain from the circumstances, was dealt a further blow when a coordinated set of attacks including vandalism, drone, and ballistic attacks by an adversary, Crimsonia, crippled the grid’s physical infrastructure.

This scenario, inspired by the upcoming 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, was an exercise in studying how utilities can prevent and mitigate, among other dangers, physical attacks on power grids. Called GridEx, the exercise was hosted by the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) from 18 to 20 November, 2025, and was described in a report released on 2 March. GridEx has been held every two years since 2011.

“We know that threat actors look to exploit certain circumstances,” says Michael Ball, CEO of E-ISAC, which is a program of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), about designing the Beryllia scenario. “The Chalice Games became a good example of how we could build a scenario around a threat actor.”

Physical attacks on the grid are rising in the U.S., and GridEx attendance was up in November as utilities grapple with how to prevent and mitigate attacks. Participation in the exercise was at its highest level since 2019, according to the new report. Given the number of organizations present, GridEx estimates that more than 28,000 individual players participated, including utility workers and government partners, an all-time high since the exercise began.

Rising Physical Threats to Power Grids

The U.S. and Canadian grids face growing security issues from physical threats, including vandalism, assault of utility workers, intrusion of property, and theft of components, like copper wiring. NERC’s 2025 E-ISAC end of year report cites more than 3,500 physical security breaches that calendar year, about 3 percent of which disrupted electricity. That’s up from 2,800 events cited in the 2023 report (3 percent of those also resulted in electricity disruptions). Yet despite a number of recent high-profile attacks in the U.S., physical attacks on the grid are happening worldwide.

“They’re not uniquely a U.S. thing,” says Danielle Russo, executive director of the Center for Grid Security at Securing America’s Future Energy, a nonpartisan organization focused on advancing national energy security. Russo says that while attacks are common in places like Ukraine, they’re not limited to wartime scenarios. “Other countries that are not experiencing direct conflict are experiencing increasing amounts of physical attacks on their energy infrastructure,” she says. Take Germany for example: On 3 January, an arson attack by left-wing activists in Berlin caused a five-day blackout impacting 45,000 households. That comes after a suspected arson attack on two pylons in September 2025 left 50,000 Berlin households without power. Some German officials cite domestic extremism and fears of Russian sabotage in recent years as reasons for heightened security concerns over critical infrastructure.

Henrik Beuster, spokesman for grid operator Stromnetz Berlin, stands in front of the Lichterfelde power plant on 7 January after a suspected attack disrupted power supply in the area. Britta Pedersen/picture alliance/Getty Images

The uptick in attacks on the U.S. grid has been anchored by a number of incidents in recent years. In December 2025, an engineer in San Jose, California was sentenced to 10 years in prison for bombing electric transformers in 2022 and 2023. A Tennessee man was arrested in November 2024 for attempting to attack a Nashville substation using a drone armed with explosives. And in 2023, a neo-Nazi leader was among two arrested in a plot to attack five substations around Baltimore with firearms, part of an increasing trend in white supremacist groups planning to attack the U.S. energy sector.

“Since [E-ISAC] started publishing data back in 2016, we’ve seen a large and consistent increase in the number of reported physical security incidents per year,” says Michael Coe, the vice president of physical and cyber security programs at the American Public Power Association, a trade group that works with E-ISAC to plan GridEx. While not all data is publicly available, Coe says there’s been a “tenfold” increase over the past decade in the number of reported physical attacks on the grid.

Drone Attacks: A Grid Security Challenge

During the fictional World Chalice Games scenario, drone attacks destroyed Beryllia’s substation equipment, highlighting a threat that’s gained traction as more drones enter the airspace.

“The question we get all the time is, how do you tell if it’s a bad actor, or if it’s a 12-year-old kid that got the drone for their birthday?” says Erika Willis, the program manager for the substations team at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

One strategy to track and alert utilities to potential threats such as drones is called sensor fusion. The system includes a pan-tilt-zoom camera capable of 360-degree motion mounted on top of a tripod or pole with four installed radars. The radars combine with the camera for a dual system that can track drones even if they’re obstructed from view, says Willis. For instance, if a nearby drone flies behind a tree, hidden from the camera, the radars will still pick up on it. The technology is currently being tested at EPRI’s labs in Charlotte, North Carolina and Lenox, Massachusetts.

EPRI is also exploring how robotics and AI can improve security systems, Willis says. One approach involves integrating AI analysis into robotic technology already surveilling substation perimeters. Using AI can improve detection of break-ins and damage to fencing around substations, Willis says. “As opposed to a human having to go through 200 images of a fence, you can have the AI overlays do some of those algorithms…If the robot has done the inspection of the substation 100 times, it can then relay to you that there’s an anomaly,” Willis says.

Prisma Photonics deploys fiber sensing technology that uses reflected optical signals to detect perturbations from vehicles and other sources near underground fiber cable.Prisma Photonics

Already, a number of utilities in the U.S. are using AI integrations in their security and monitoring processes. That’s thanks in part to the Tel Aviv, Israel-based Prisma Photonics, a software company that launched in 2017 and has since deployed its fiber sensing technology across thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel. A file-cabinet-sized unit plugs into a substation and sends light pulses down existing fiber optic cables 30 miles in each direction. As the pulses travel down the cables, a tiny fraction of the light is reflected back to the substation unit. An AI model processes the results and can classify events based on patterns in the optical signal as a result of perturbations happening around the fiber cable.

“If we identify an event that we don’t have a classification for, and we get a feedback from a customer saying, ‘oh, this was a car crash,’ then we can classify that in the model to say this is actually what happened,” says Tiffany Menhorn, Prisma Photonics’ vice president of North America.

As preparations get underway for the ninth GridEx in 2027, Ball says participation in the exercises alone isn’t enough to bolster grid security. Instead, he wants utilities to take what they learn from the training and apply it in their own operations. “It’s the action of doing it, versus our statistic of saying, ‘here’s what our growth was.’ That growth should relate to the readiness and capability of the industry.”

Wheelchair users with severe disabilities can often navigate tight spaces better than most robotic systems can. A wave of new smart-wheelchair research, including findings presented in Anaheim, Calif., earlier this month, is now testing whether AI-powered systems can, or should, fully close this gap.

Christian Mandel—senior researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen, Germany—co-led a research team together with his colleague Serge Autexier that developed prototype sensor-equipped electric wheelchairs designed to navigate a roomful of potential obstacles. The researchers also tested a new safety system that integrated sensor data from the wheelchair and from sensors in the room, including from drone-based color and depth cameras.

Mandel says the team’s smart wheelchairs were both semiautonomous and autonomous.

“Semiautonomous is the shared control system where the person sitting in the wheelchair uses the joystick to drive,” Mandel says. “Fully autonomous is controlled by natural-language input. You say, ‘Please drive me to the coffee machine.’ ”

The researchers conducted experiments (part of a larger project called the Reliable and Explainable Swarm Intelligence for People With Reduced Mobility, or REXASI-PRO) using two identical smart wheelchairs that each contained two lidars, a 3D camera, odometers, user interfaces, and an embedded computer.

In contrast to semiautonomous mode, where the participant controls the wheelchair with a joystick, in autonomous mode, control involves the open-source ROS2 Nav2 navigation system using natural-language input. The wheelchairs also used simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) maps and local obstacle-avoidance motion controllers.

One scenario that Mandel and his team tested involved the user pressing a key on the wheelchair’s human-machine interface, speaking a command, then confirming or rejecting the instruction via that same interface. Once the user confirmed the command, the mobility device guided the user along a path to the destination, while sensors attempted to detect obstacles in the way and adjust the mobility device accordingly to avoid them.

When Are Smart Wheelchairs Bad Value?

According to Pooja Viswanathan, CEO & founder of the Toronto-based Braze Mobility, research in the field of mobile assistive technology should also prioritize keeping these devices readily available to everyday consumers.

“Cost remains a major barrier,” she says. “Funding systems are often not designed to support advanced add-on intelligence unless there is very clear evidence of value and safety. Reliability is another barrier. A smart wheelchair has to work not just in ideal conditions, but in the messy, variable conditions of daily life. And there is also the human factors dimension. Users have different cognitive, motor, sensory, and environmental needs, so one solution rarely fits all.”

For its part, Braze makes blind-spot sensors for electric wheelchairs. The sensors detect obstacles in areas that can be difficult for a user to see. The sensors can also be added to any wheelchair to transform it into a smart wheelchair by providing multimodal alerts to the user. This approach attempts to support users rather than replace them.

According to Louise Devinge, a biomedical research engineer from IRISA (Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems) in Rennes, France, the increased complexity of smart wheelchairs demands more sensing. And that requires careful management of communication and synchronization within the wheelchair’s system. “The more sensing, computation, and autonomy you add,” she says, “the harder it becomes to ensure robust performance across the full range of real-world environments that wheelchair users encounter.”

In the near term, in other words, the field’s biggest challenge is not about replacing the wheelchair user with AI smarts but rather about designing better partnerships between the user and the technology.

This image shows data representations used by the 3D Driving Assistant. These include immutable sensor percepts such as laser scans and point clouds, as well as derived representations like the virtual laser scans and grid maps. Finally, the robot shape collection describes the wheelchair’s physical borders at different heights.DFKI

Where Will Smart Wheelchairs Go From Here?

Mandel says he expects to see smart wheelchairs ready for the mainstream marketplace within 10 years.

Viswanathan says the REXASI-PRO system, while out of reach of present-day smart wheelchair technologies, is important for the longer term. “It reflects the more ambitious end of the smart wheelchair spectrum,” she says. “Its strengths appear to lie in intelligent navigation, advanced sensing, and the broader effort to build a wheelchair that can interpret and respond to complex environments in a more autonomous way. From a research standpoint, that is exactly the kind of work that pushes the field forward. It also appears to take seriously the importance of trustworthy and explainable AI, which is essential in any mobility technology where safety, reliability, and user confidence are paramount.”

Mandel says he’s ultimately in pursuit of the inspiration that got him into this field years ago. As a young researcher, he says, he helped develop a smart wheelchair system controllable with a head joystick.

However, Mandel says he realized after many trials that the smart wheelchair system he was working on had a long way to go because, as he says, “at that point in time, I realized that even persons that had severe handicaps [traveling through] a narrow passage, they did very, very well.

“And then I realized, okay, there is this need for this technology, but never underestimate what [wheelchair users] can do without it.”

The DFKI researchers presented their work earlier this month at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Anaheim, Calif.

This article was supported by the IEEE Foundation and a Jon C. Taenzer fellowship grant.