Schneider Electric has released a study concluding that arc flash risk in 800-volt direct current (VDC) data center power systems can be managed and, in many cases, matches the safety profile of conventional alternating current (AC) systems, the company said.

The French energy technology firm supplies power distribution, industrial automation and data center equipment and software, including the ETAP power system simulation platform it majority owns.

The findings arrive as 800 VDC architectures gain adoption in AI data centers to support denser server racks beyond 400 kilowatts, a shift driven partly by NVIDIA’s push for higher power AI computing hardware. Unlike AC systems, converter-fed 800 VDC systems currently lack an industry-wide standard for managing arc flash hazards.

The study used ETAP’s simulation software and digital twins to model fault scenarios.

Two 800 VDC architectures were evaluated: a rack-level “sidecar” design and a centralized, facility-level design, both reflecting deployment patterns already used by major hyperscale operators.

The rack-level case study found incident energy remained well below the referenced 1.2 cal/cm² threshold for personal protective equipment (PPE), even without protection devices installed. The facility level design showed slightly higher incident energy under conservative assumptions with no overcurrent protection, though adding standard protection devices brought energy in line with typical AC architectures.

Capacitor discharge dominates the first milliseconds of a fault event, and standard assessment methods tend to overestimate risk in capacitor-dominated systems, the study found.

“800 VDC power distribution represents a significant shift in data center design, but it also introduces safety considerations that need to be studied extensively,” said Manish Kumar, executive vice president of secure power and data centers at Schneider Electric. “Our work with major hyperscalers provides engineers and safety professionals with one of the first practical frameworks for evaluating arc flash risks.”

“Industry standards remain essential for arc flash and electrical safety, but traditional methods can be overly conservative because they do not fully reflect how complex DC systems operate,” said Tanuj Khandelwal, chief executive of ETAP.

The study also found that fault locations upstream and downstream of reverse blocking diodes affected back-feed and peak current, shaping facility-level outcomes. Schneider Electric said the work builds on its history of arc flash safety testing, including validation of live swap power capabilities in 800 VDC systems.

Online retail has become the world’s most heavily targeted industry by cybercriminals, driven by a rapid shift toward agentic commerce, a model in which autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents browse, compare and purchase on behalf of human users. As that shift accelerates, it is creating a new class of security vulnerability that traditional defenses are failing to catch.

By December 2025, nearly half of all commerce traffic across Akamai’s global network consisted of AI bots. Commerce accounted for 48% of all AI bot activity across every industry the firm monitors, more than three times the share of the second most targeted sector.

“We are securing a digital frontier where the ‘customer’ is increasingly an AI agent operating on behalf of the human user,” Patrick Sullivan, chief technology officer of security strategy at Akamai, said in a press release. “This report reveals how and why security leaders must embrace ‘agentic readiness’ to architect sites that welcome legitimate AI while aggressively shutting down malicious bots.”

The findings come from Akamai’s State of the Internet (SOTI) report, Securing the Agentic Storefront: Attacks on Commerce, published July 15, covering January 2024 through December 2025.

The report’s most alarming finding concerns fraud enabled by agentic commerce itself. Because AI shopping agents precisely mimic human browsing behavior, traditional bot detection has been rendered largely obsolete. Threat actors exploit this through agent hijacking, compromising a legitimate AI assistant to abuse its stored payment credentials and execute unauthorised purchases before the customer or retailer notices.

Large language models (LLMs) are also being deployed to generate synthetic identity fraud through “Frankenstein” accounts, fabricated profiles blending genuine personal data with invented elements to bypass standard fraud checks.

Application programming interface (API) exposure compounds the problem. Web attacks targeting APIs rose 9% year over year between the fourth quarters of 2024 and 2025. A companion Akamai API Security Impact Study found that 85% of commerce respondents experienced at least one API-related incident in the past year, yet only 22% know which of their APIs expose sensitive data.

Commerce platforms were targeted by application-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks nearly 3 trillion times in 2025, with retail absorbing 84% of that volume. Attackers use HTTP botnets timed to peak shopping periods, blending into genuine traffic surges to exhaust servers and halt sales.

Between July and December 2025, the retail vertical in EMEA recorded 26 billion AI bot counts, representing 12.4% of all AI bot activity.

EMEA commerce platforms faced 40 billion web attacks between January 2024 and December 2025. Average daily phishing volume rose from 56,600 in February 2026 to 134,600 in April, fuelling account takeover (ATO) attempts and loyalty point theft.

The report urges security leaders to adopt risk-based bot governance, continuously inventory API estates, and deploy microsegmentation to contain the damage from breaches. Only 35% of organisations have achieved true microsegmentation despite 92% applying basic network segmentation.

Akamai is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based cybersecurity and cloud computing company whose network spans approximately 340,000 servers across 130-plus countries.

Schneider Electric will present its latest artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure solutions at Datacloud Global Congress next week, including validated AI factory blueprints for NVIDIA’s GB300 NVL72 platform and the Grace Blackwell Ultra architecture.

The energy technology company, which employs 160,000 people across more than 100 countries, will demonstrate liquid cooling systems, 800-volt direct current (VDC) power architectures, digital twin capabilities and end-to-end software tools designed to help operators build and run large-scale AI data centers.

The showcase comes as AI infrastructure investment accelerates sharply. Nearly $3 trillion of AI-related spending is expected to flow through the global economy by 2028, according to Morgan Stanley Research, while Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will exceed $2.5 trillion in 2026 alone.

Several Schneider Electric executives will lead keynote panels and technical sessions at the congress, which runs from June 1 to 4 in Cannes, France, and will also co-host an invitation-only executive briefing with NVIDIA on the future of AI-driven infrastructure.

“AI is fundamentally reshaping the future of digital infrastructure, creating new demands around power, cooling and resiliency at unprecedented scale,” said Marc Garner, Global President, Cloud and Service Provider Segment at Schneider Electric. “At Datacloud Global Congress, we will demonstrate how collaboration across the ecosystem is enabling the next generation of AI factories and helping organizations build scalable, resilient and sustainable infrastructure built for the AI era.”

Neoclouds, cooling, 10MW

On June 2, Frédéric Godemel, Executive Vice President of Energy Management Business at Schneider Electric, will join executives from Oracle, DATA4, QTS Data Centers and CBRE for a keynote panel on how the data center ecosystem is keeping up with AI demand, covering the rise of neoclouds, European competitiveness and the gap between hyperscale and enterprise requirements.

Also on June 2, Thierry Chamayou, Vice President of Cloud and Service Providers in EMEA at Schneider Electric, will join a panel with GreenScale, Trench Group, Kao Data, JSM Group and Solar Turbines to explore how operators can de-risk energy investments through smarter project structures and closer collaboration with utilities and government.

On June 1, Sébastien Cruz-Mermy, Vice President of Datacenter Innovation at Schneider Electric, will lead a technical session on AI factory infrastructure, focusing on ultra-high-density rack design, next-generation DC power delivery and resilient cooling. Schneider Electric and NVIDIA will also co-host an invitation-only executive briefing on NVIDIA’s 5-Layer Cake framework and the DSX Blueprint, supported by digital twin tools.

At Stand 122, highlights will include the MCDU-70, a 2.5-megawatt coolant distribution unit (CDU) from Motivair by Schneider Electric that can scale to 10 megawatts and beyond, as well as EcoStruxure IT data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software, NVIDIA Omniverse integrations, and NVIDIA Reference Designs for the GB300 NVL72 platform.

The company’s goal is to help customers design, simulate, build, operate and maintain AI-ready infrastructure at scale, with energy efficiency and sustainability as central requirements.

Photonic Inc has closed an investment round of more than US$200 million, giving the Vancouver-based quantum computing company a post-money valuation of US$2 billion.

The final close brings Photonic’s total capital raised to more than US$350 million, the company said on Tuesday. The round was led by Planet First Partners, a UK-based sustainable technology growth equity firm, and included new investors Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Export Development Canada (EDC), Bell Ventures, Firgun Ventures, InBC Investment Corp. and existing investor Mubadala Capital.

Photonic said the round’s first close, announced in January, had attracted strategic investors Royal Bank of Canada and TELUS, a Canadian telecommunications group, along with returning investors British Columbia Investment Management Corporation and Microsoft. It said the investor base reflected support across Canada, Europe, the UK, the US and the Middle East.

The funding comes as quantum computing companies race to develop machines that can move beyond laboratory demonstrations and support commercial workloads. Photonic is developing distributed quantum computing systems using what it calls its Entanglement First architecture, which combines silicon-based qubits with photonic connectivity. The company says this could allow quantum systems to scale across existing telecom infrastructure.

“This financing unites government, strategic partners, and international investors around a shared conviction: that commercial-scale quantum computing is within reach – and that its economic impact will be transformative,” said Don Mattrick, chief executive of Photonic. “We will use this funding to continue to hit key milestones, grow our team, and deepen the partnerships that will take us there,” he said.

He added that Photonic is already delivering on commitments to customers, including as part of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program and Stage B of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

“Distributed architectures will be an important way to scale quantum technology, and Photonic is an important partner in advancing that future,” said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice-president at Microsoft Quantum.

“Their design allows quantum systems to operate over today’s fiber infrastructure, offering a practical and scalable path toward the large-scale systems that transformative applications will demand,” he said. “We’re pleased to continue our partnership as they take this next step.”

BDC said its investment was made through its StrongNorth Fund, which backs Canadian companies developing defense and dual-use technologies. Peter Suma, managing partner of the fund, said Photonic was building scalable quantum capabilities with global partners while drawing on Canadian talent.

Bell Ventures said it would collaborate with Photonic to develop sovereign, scalable quantum computing capabilities in Canada. TELUS also pointed to the potential integration of Photonic’s architecture with its PureFibre infrastructure.

Photonic, headquartered in Vancouver with operations in the US and the UK, has more than 160 staff members. It is developing quantum computers and quantum networks for applications including materials science, drug discovery, climate change and security.

The full announcement is available here.

Ethos, a London-based artificial intelligence platform that matches skilled professionals with work opportunities, has raised US$22.75 million in Series A funding as investors back new ways to identify human expertise in an AI-driven labor market.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from General Catalyst, which led Ethos’ 2024 seed round. XTX and Evantic also participated in the financing.

Ethos was founded by James Lo and Daniel Mankowitz in 2024. It uses AI to evaluate expertise through voice conversations and existing portfolios of work, including academic papers, code repositories and professional content. The company said AI has made it easier to generate CVs and job applications, but harder for organizations to identify genuine expertise.

“A CV is a poor proxy for what someone is truly capable of,” said James Lo, co-founder and chief executive of Ethos. “Ethos helps people to see the full shape of their expertise and where it fits in an AI-transformed economy - acting as their agent, opening doors they didn’t know existed, and giving companies a far more precise way to find the people they actually need.”

The platform matches users with opportunities across consulting, expert calls, market research, AI data projects and full-time roles. Ethos said more than 35,000 experts are joining the platform each week across accounting, banking, consulting, law, technology and healthcare, as well as skilled trades including electricians and plumbers.

The company said the average expert on Ethos earns £4,500 in additional income each month, while the top 10% of earners make more than £7,000 a month. Since January, the number of experts earning income through the platform has increased sixfold.

“AI is reshaping the labor market faster than our tools for valuing human expertise can keep up. Ethos is built to change that,” Lo said.

“Knowledge is our most precious resource, yet for too long the expertise inside people’s heads has been invisible to the economy,” said Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, president and managing director of General Catalyst.

“Ethos changes the game by capturing the true value of what people know and connecting it to the opportunities that need it most,” she said.

“Our Seed philosophy is simple: back exceptional leaders early,” zu Fürstenberg said. “From our first conversations with James and Daniel, it was clear they were visionaries who understood exactly where the future of work was heading and had the conviction to build for it.”

Ethos was founded by a team from Google DeepMind, McKinsey and SoftBank. Its clients include AI labs, investment funds and corporates seeking access to human expertise on demand.

monday.com has repositioned itself as an “AI Work Platform” in what the company described as the biggest change in its history, as software vendors race to embed artificial intelligence more deeply into workplace tools.

The work management software company said on May 6 that it had rebuilt its platform around collaboration between employees and AI agents, moving beyond task management into systems that can help execute work across departments.

The company said its new AI agents are built directly into monday.com and can be configured by users without technical expertise. The agents are designed to work across live business data, workflows and permissions, while remaining under human supervision.

monday.com said the agents can support tasks such as drafting marketing campaigns, qualifying sales leads, closing support tickets, onboarding new employees and processing purchase requests. The company is positioning the move as a response to a common corporate challenge: large AI investment has not always translated into production use or measurable business impact.

“Our customers are running real businesses in a world that’s changing fast, and they need a platform built for that reality,” said Roy Mann, co-founder and co-chief executive of monday.com. “monday.com is now a place where people and agents work side by side.”

The launch comes as software-as-a-service companies face pressure to prove that AI can deliver practical productivity gains rather than remain an add-on feature. The company said enterprises have widened access to AI, but many organizations still struggle to move experiments into production or use AI to transform operations.

Eran Zinman, co-founder and co-chief executive of monday.com, said the company was “going all-in” on the new strategy.

“We have 250,000 customers running their business on monday.com, and we owe them more than another AI feature,” Zinman said. “We owe them a platform built for what comes next.”

As part of the launch, monday.com is adding one-click connectors to AI platforms including Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company said this would allow customers to bring their preferred AI systems into existing workflows.

Other updates include access to multiple large language models through monday’s AI Platform Gateway, new AI-powered development tools in monday vibe and a redesigned mobile app combining Sidekick and AI agents.

monday.com said the next phase of software-as-a-service will be shaped by companies that can turn AI into reliable business outcomes at scale.

The full announcement is available here.

Schneider Electric, an energy technology company, has signed a partnership with GreenScale to help design AI-ready data centers across the latter’s planned European campuses, as rising computing demand forces operators to rethink how facilities are built and maintained.

The companies said the collaboration will focus on reference architectures for data centers serving artificial intelligence, cloud and high-performance computing workloads. These designs will include automation, predictive analytics, condition-based maintenance and remote monitoring from the start, rather than adding them after construction.

The deal comes as AI workloads are increasing pressure on data-center operators to deliver higher power density, more reliable cooling and tighter operational control. Facilities built for conventional cloud demand are now being adapted or replaced to handle more intensive computing clusters.

“As demand for AI, Cloud and HPC accelerates in Europe, data center operators must rethink how facilities are designed and managed,” said Dan Thomas, chief executive of GreenScale.

Thomas said the partnership showed how “advanced data center architectures and digital innovation can unlock new levels of automation, efficiency and resilience.” He added that the work would help set “a new standard for intelligent design” for GreenScale’s customers.

Schneider Electric and GreenScale said the approach should reduce unnecessary maintenance, improve asset performance and lower lifecycle costs. It is also intended to give operators better visibility into equipment, allowing maintenance teams to focus on targeted interventions rather than fixed service schedules.

The companies said such systems could be particularly useful in remote or emerging regions, where fewer on-site staff, longer supply chains and higher service risks can make traditional maintenance models more difficult.

“GreenScale’s vision for its European data centers represents a new era in advanced design, where automation, efficiency, and real-time visibility are embedded from day one,” said Thierry Chamayou, vice president for cloud and service providers in Europe at Schneider Electric.

Chamayou said Schneider Electric’s role was to help create “a resilient, AI-ready infrastructure platform” that could operate efficiently in demanding environments.

The partnership will also support a unified instrumentation, monitoring and control system linking physical infrastructure with digital systems through sensors and remote tracking. GreenScale said this would help its campuses manage high-density AI clusters and cloud computing workloads across multiple locations.

The full announcement is available here.