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Oil prices spiked again in response to the president’s announcement. Already, as Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reported last week, the war has cost Americans $17 billion at the pump. And even with the ceasefire in place, the end of the energy shock looked hazy at best, analyst Rory Johnston said on the most recent episode of the Heatmap podcast Shift Key.
The Russian and Hungarian flags fly side by side at the Paks II building site. Janos Kummer/Getty Images
For nearly two decades, Viktor Orbán ruled over Hungary with an increasingly tight-gripped fist, maintaining the closest relationship between Russia and any NATO country and providing what’s widely considered a blueprint for the West’s illiberal right to reduce checks on the power of the ruling party in a democracy. In February, his government oversaw the official start of construction on Paks II, a major new nuclear project Hungary hired the Russian state-owned Rosatom to build. Now Orbán’s 16-year tenure is coming to an end after rival conservative Péter Magyar won Sunday’s election in a landslide. During the heated campaign, which saw Vice President JD Vance visit Hungary to campaign on Orbán’s behalf in the closing days, Magyar depicted the incumbent right-wing ruler as a corrupt authoritarian selling out the country to its former Soviet imperial rulers in Moscow and vowed to rebuild Budapest’s ties with the European Union and NATO. That could spell trouble for Paks II. The project has stood out as the Kremlin’s last new commercial foothold in the West’s nuclear industry. At the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, Finland canceled a domestic joint venture with Rosatom. The U.S. nuclear giant Westinghouse, meanwhile, has cut deal after deal to supply Russian-made VVER reactors in Slovakia and Bulgaria with America-made fuel assemblies. Last summer, the Orbán administration said it had, as a result of its chummy relationship with the Trump administration, persuaded Washington to exempt Paks II from U.S. sanctions. The project’s fate under a Magyar government is uncertain, though at least one expert I spoke to on Sunday afternoon suggested the new prime minister may seek to renegotiate the deal with Rosatom to provide for more EU oversight or better terms. Canceling Paks II, which would significantly bolster the grid in a country already reliant on nuclear power for nearly half its electricity, seems unlikely at this point.
Meanwhile, Russia is getting some new competition from a European rival. Until recently, Rosatom was the only foreign company willing to invest in nuclear reactors in India, where a civil liability law passed in 2010 threatened to bankrupt developers if any accident occurred. In December, as I reported to you at the time, India passed legislation reforming the statute in a bid to attract more overseas investments into its growing atomic power sector. It’s working. The U.S. nuclear heavyweight Holtec International, which is attempting to build its 300-megawatt small modular reactors in Michigan, has expressed interest. Now the French nuclear giant EDF is exploring potential projects in the world’s most populous nation, World Nuclear News reported last week. In another bullish sign, regulators in South Korea, the democratic world’s most competent reactor builder, just approved the country’s latest plant to start up.
Argentina’s right-wing President Javier Milei notched a major legislative win last week after lawmakers in the lower house of the country’s legislature approved an overhaul of a landmark glacier protection law in a 137-to-11 vote. The victory opens “the door to mining near some of South America’s most important freshwater reserves,” the Financial Times reported, by giving provincial authorities greater discretion to determine which glacial areas warrant protection. The bill already passed in the Argentinian Senate, meaning Milei only needs to sign the legislation. He’s expected to do so. Milei pitched the bill as a way to free up areas “incorrectly classified as glaciers” to mineral extraction as his government seeks to tap Argentina’s rich lithium resources. But critics aren’t so sure. “This will not give investors the legal certainty they are looking for,” Andrés Nápoli, executive director of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, told the newspaper.
Milei signed a critical minerals pact with the U.S. in February as the Trump administration looks to secure non-Chinese supplies of key metals.
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Maybe the attacker was angry about data centers. Maybe the assailant took issue with OpenAI itself, or the way Sam Altman — a lightning rod figure in the American tech industry and the subject of a recent investigation in The New Yorker that raised questions about a uniquely powerful executive’s judgment — operates. Maybe the man who threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home on Friday was just compelled by illness or altered brain chemistry to act out violently against a public figure who’s been unmissable in the media. But the fact that the incident occurred less than a week after a gunman fired bullets into the home of an Indianapolis city councilmember who spoke out in support of a data center project does appear to be part of a worrying trend of violence. As Heatmap’s Jael Holzman wrote last week, the Indianapolis shooting, in which (thankfully) the lawmaker and his young son were not hurt, was the third such incident this year, “indicating the bubbling angst against data centers really does have potential to turn violent.”
In a post on his personal blog, Altman shared a photo of his husband, Oliver Mulherin, and their 1-year-old son and said he had “underestimated the power of words and narratives” amid what he admitted was an “extremely intense, chaotic, and high-pressure few years in the artificial intelligence industry. “A lot of the criticism of our industry comes from sincere concern about the incredibly high stakes of this technology. This is quite valid, and we welcome good-faith criticism and debate,” Altman wrote. “I empathize with anti-technology sentiments and clearly technology isn’t always good for everyone. But overall, I believe technological progress can make the future unbelievably good, for your family and mine.”
Battery recycling startup Ascend Elements will file for bankruptcy this Thursday, according to Bloomberg. The Massachusetts-based company raised more than $1.1 billion in equity and grants over the past 11 years as it sought to build out production from its factory reprocessing old batteries into cathode material in Georgia. But “the financial difficulties were insurmountable,” the company said.
Last summer, I told you about an abandoned green hydrogen project in Australia amid a spate of cancellations worldwide. But now a new 1.5-gigawatt project, the Murchison Green Hydrogen facility in Western Australia, has been selected for a fast-track approval under the national government’s new pilot program to speed up permitting, according to Hydrogen Insight. The program is reserved for projects of “national significance.”
It’s not yet clear whether the company could still increase its investment in existing projects or when it might resume purchases in the future.
In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson denied that the company was indefinitely pausing all of its purchases. “We continually review and assess our carbon removal portfolio along with market conditions for the optimal balance on our path to carbon negative,” she said.
Industry data suggests that Microsoft has done more than any other private company — and arguably any organization on Earth — to support early-stage technologies that could withdraw or eliminate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It has purchased 45 million tons of carbon removal, according to its own releases. The next-largest buyer of carbon removal credits — Frontier, a coalition of large companies led by the payments processing firm Stripe — has bought 1.8 million tons of carbon removal.
Microsoft made 90% of all carbon removal purchases worldwide last year, according to data from the third-party industry monitor CDR.fyi. The company is generally cited as making somewhere between 79% to 90% of all historic carbon removal purchases.
Microsoft also published guidelines about what it considered “ideal” carbon removal projects, setting de facto early industry standards for technologies including direct air capture, soil carbon management, and enhanced rock weathering.
The tech company has backed carbon removal in large part to meet its aggressive internal climate goals. Microsoft has pledged to become “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning that it must remove more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than it emits within four years. The company also aims to eliminate its half century of historic carbon emissions by 2050.
Like other major tech firms, including Google and Meta, Microsoft has struggled to square its years-old climate goals with the urgent need to power energy-hungry AI data centers. But it has generally been seen as more environmentally friendly than other tech firms.
When Heatmap polled climate insiders late last year, Microsoft and Google were seen as the two AI tech developers who were “best” on climate. (Meta and Amazon got failing marks.)
Microsoft was making carbon removal announcements as recently as this week. It announced its most recent purchase of CDR credits only three days ago, when it bought more than 620,000 tons of credits from an indigenous-owned bioenergy carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan, Canada.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers carbon removal — technologies and methods that can reduce the amount of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere on century-long time scales — to be essential to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.
By 2050, the world will need to remove 7 to 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year in order to hold to its Paris targets, according to an independent 2024 report.
Microsoft’s apparent pause comes at a lean time for the carbon removal industry, because the Trump administration has declined to spend — and in some cases even reassigned — funds previously authorized to encourage the development of the technology. For instance, the Energy Department says it plans to use more than $500 million in carbon removal funding to prop up aging coal plants.
Congress has been more generous to carbon removal, which has historically drawn more bipartisan support than other clean energy technologies. The 2026 federal spending law included more than $116 million to support carbon removal research and set up a federal purchasing program. With Microsoft’s shift, that purchasing scheme will be more important than ever.
