For years, China has been talking a big game about the Arctic.
The country lies far from the Arctic Circle — more than 800 miles — but still, it has declared itself a “near-Arctic state.”
It has teamed up with Russia on coast guard patrols in the Arctic Ocean and explored a flurry of resource and technology projects in Arctic towns. (Most never materialized.)
Casablanca is moving ahead with a major waste-to-energy project aimed at tackling two infrastructure pressures at once: rising municipal waste volumes and demand for dependable electricity generation.
The planned facility, to be built northwest of the Mediouna landfill in the Casablanca-Settat region, is designed to process about 1.5 million tons of non-recyclable waste annually and generate 126 MW of baseload electricity.
The Environmental Protection Agency has opened another round of public comment on three key terms in a rule defining which bodies of water are subject to regulation, also known as the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, rule, further lengthening the agency’s timeline for finalizing the rules.
The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers announced on Friday that they would issue a supplemental notice seeking public input on additional options for defining “relatively permanent” and “continuous surface,” and including a new proposed definition for “perennial.”
President Trump signed an executive order Friday directing the Interior Department to assess whether gray wolves should lose their endangered-species protections as part of his administration’s efforts to address livestock depletion and bring down domestic beef prices.
The president also ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to allow ranchers to kill these animals, if necessary, to protect their herds.
This article was initially published in the National Interest.
Americans just lived through one chip shortage. They’re about to live through another, and this one could hit their wallets even harder. The culprit this time isn’t a pandemic disrupting factories; it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) boom devouring the world’s memory chip supply. If Washington isn’t careful, the policy response could make the problem worse, not better.
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Memory chips, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and NAND hold the data and storage for the modern economy. They sit inside laptops, cell phones, gaming consoles, cars, dishwashers, MRI machines, missile-defense systems, and the routers that carry our internet traffic. Nearly every sector Americans touch daily depends on them. And right now, the supply of that memory is being redirected, at scale, toward data centers.
According to Bloomberg Intelligence, AI accounted for just 32 percent of global DRAM consumption in 2020. That share hit 50 percent by 2025 and is projected to reach 60 percent by 2030. Other estimates put data centers’ share of 2026 memory-chip demand at roughly 70 percent.
Prices have responded accordingly. TrendForce’s February 2026 forecast projected conventional DRAM contract prices would rise 90 to 95 percent in the first quarter alone, and its March update forecast another 58 to 63 percent jump in the second quarter. Spot prices for short-term memory have surged as much as 700 percent over the past year. The Wall Street Journal reports that Micron’s contract price for one data center memory chip rose from $350 to $1,300, a 271 percent increase.
American families will feel this directly as businesses pass the higher costs of memory chips onto consumers. Gartner estimates the combined price of DRAM and solid-state drives could rise 130 percent by year’s end, pushing PC prices up 17 percent and smartphone prices up 13 percent, while cutting worldwide PC shipments by 10.4 percent and smartphone shipments by 8.4 percent in 2026. IDC’s forecast is grimmer. It expects global smartphone shipments to fall 13.9 percent year-over-year in 2026, to 1.09 billion units, the steepest annual contraction on record, driven primarily by the memory shortage.
>>>READ: Critical Minerals Policy Needs Clear Guardrails
Low-income families who depend on cheaper devices will likely suffer the most. Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal put it bluntly, saying the increase “removes vendors’ ability to absorb costs, making low-margin entry-level laptops nonviable.” As a result, the sub-$500 PC segment could disappear by 2028.
Granted, part of the price change is the market at work. Three companies, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, control more than 90 percent of the memory market, and they’re rationally chasing higher margins in AI-grade High Bandwidth Memory.
However, ratcheting up supply isn’t as easy as a farmer planting more corn when prices rise. It takes years to build new plants to produce more chips, and substitutes may be even further out.
Furthermore, the structure and intricacy of the memory market, along with the barriers to entry, make it difficult to meet rising demand quickly. DRAM manufacturing is incredibly complex. Manufacturing memory requires cutting-edge fabrication processes, advanced packaging technologies, and highly specialized equipment and engineering expertise.
In addition to manufacturing complexity, market concentration creates its own challenges for market entry. The larger firms hold most of the world’s accumulated process knowledge, IP, and equipment relationships necessary to build out new capacity. Market entry from a new supplier would still likely require partnering with or licensing from one of the larger incumbents.
None of this is an argument for slowing AI or data center growth. AI is going to help cure cancer, empower a new generation of workforce, make people’s lives easier, and be a tremendous boon to local economies. However, at a time when the cost of living is the top concern among voters and families across the country, Congress and the Trump administration can’t sit idle, either.
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1. Resist protectionist policies that would worsen price impacts.
The Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware Act (MATCH) Act would impose export controls on Chinese memory makers CXMT and YMTC and threaten allied nations with expanded US jurisdiction if they don’t align within 150 days. By slowing global DRAM capacity at exactly the wrong moment, it would raise prices for the same American consumers it claims to protect.
2. Ease constraints on memory chips, manufacturing equipment, and raw materials.
Keep imported chips, including those from Micron’s Japan operations, entering tariff-free. Expand Section 301 exclusions for DRAM and production inputs like specialty gases and photoresist chemicals and use the ongoing trade talks with Seoul to secure multiyear export licenses and a greater DRAM share of Korean output.
3. Direct the FTC to conduct a Section 6(b) study of memory capacity allocation.
A fact-finding study, not an accusation, into how Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix allocate capacity between HBM and DRAM would give policymakers and the public a transparent record in a market that has faced antitrust scrutiny before, including $300 million and $185 million fines against Samsung and Hynix, respectively, in the early 2000s.
4. Streamline approval pathways for alternative components.
Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should create expedited review pathways for memory-component substitutions in regulated products such as medical devices, vehicles, and communications equipment. Manufacturers and companies can adapt and use subsidies without months- or years-long recertification delays.
Along with food, housing, health care, and energy prices, the memory chip crunch will be yet another affordability challenge facing American families and policymakers alike. The right response isn’t price controls, production mandates, or a new round of subsidies.
Construction of the final segment of the Southwest Intertie Project, a 576-mile transmission corridor connecting an area from Idaho to just south of Las Vegas, Nevada, is underway. Officials celebrated the latest milestone for the installation during a groundbreaking ceremony in Ely, Nevada, on September 3.
Michael Skelly knows it’s hard to build a huge transmission line that connects different regions of the grid. He has spent a decade trying to get one up and running.
But Skelly, now CEO of Grid United, thinks his current attempt to build a first-of-its-kind transmission line is on the right track. And he’s gotten a consortium of utilities from Minnesota to Oregon, and officials in the U.S. Department of Energy through both the Biden and Trump administrations, to back it up.
Grid United’s North Plains Connector will be a 420-mile, 3-gigawatt high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between Montana and North Dakota. It will require an estimated $6 billion in investment across both states, and won’t be completed until 2032 at the earliest.
New details of the Trump administration’s agreement to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program are spurring criticism that the landmark deal doesn’t do enough to head off the risk of nuclear proliferation.
The text of the accord was shared with lawmakers last week along with a raft of related documents. It outlines a road map for how uranium might be enriched in the kingdom’s territory after further consultations, including at a level of nearly 20%.
A set of 13 “high value” inter- and intraregional transmission projects in the Eastern Interconnection could produce up to $15.3 billion in net system value through 2050, according to a study released Tuesday.
Also, the transmission projects would lower retail electricity rates, enhance system reliability and improve resilience to extreme weather events, according to Powering Growth and Affordability: The Role of Transmission in Economic and National Security, which was prepared by S&P Global’s CERA Consulting for the Electricity Customer Alliance, National Grid and Converge Strategies.
Europe’s heat waves and record-breaking droughts are depleting freshwater resources while simultaneously driving up demand for water. This hazardous combination is putting a strain on the Old Continent’s water supply infrastructure, which is already aging and increasingly vulnerable to leaks, overflows, and other climate-related disruptions.
>>>READ: Policy Inaction Threatens the West’s Energy and Water Supplies
This is particularly problematic for European cities, which were built in an era where climate change was largely a non-issue and now must contend with its growing impacts alongside aging infrastructure.
The good thing is, that, for many cities facing these pressures, better does not always mean starting from scratch. Some communities are realizing their capacity to leverage technology to optimize the systems they already have.
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Washington, D.C.-based Xylem is helping communities do exactly that. The water technology provider operates in more than 150 countries, delivering water solutions to a variety of markets, from residential buildings and commercial facilities to the food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries. Its portfolio of offerings spans the entire water cycle, from water transport, treatment, and monitoring.
Its technologies include heavy-duty Flygt and Goulds Water Technology pumps for moving sewage and stormwater, as well as Wedeco disinfection systems and Sanitaire biological treatment technologies for purifying wastewater.
Through its Sensus brand, Xylem also ensures that water is being managed efficiently. To help utilities monitor their water usage, identify leaks, and detect water losses, Xylem leverages a wide array of “smart water” technologies connected to intelligent meters and real-time monitoring systems.
These capabilities translate into real-time savings for customers.
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Leveraging Xylem’s “smart sewer” technology, the community of South Bend, Indiana, was able to save around $400 million in planned infrastructure spending. This is because Xylem was able to retrofit its technology into the city’s existing sewer system, as opposed to building an entirely new system from scratch––the presumed solution at the time. Not only did the city avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs, but roughly one billion gallons of polluted water are now prevented from contaminating the St. Joseph River every year.
This is just one of many success stories enabled by the company.
As deadly heat waves and prolonged dry spells intensify water scarcity, water technology companies like Xylem will become indispensable for helping utilities and communities do more with less.
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