Level up GeForce NOW experiences this summer with 40% off Performance Day Passes. Enjoy 24 hours of premium cloud gaming with RTX ON, delivering low latency and shorter wait times. The hot deal comes just in time for the cloud’s highly anticipated launch of Dune: Awakening — a multiplayer survival game on a massive scale set on the unforgiving sands of Arrakis. It’s perfect to pair with the nine games available this week, including the Frosthaven demo announced at Steam Next Fest. Try Before You Buy One day, all in. Level up to the cloud, no commitment required. For a limited time, grab a Performance Day Pass at a price that’s less than an ice cream sundae and experience premium GeForce NOW gaming for 24 hours. With RTX ON, enjoy shorter wait times and lower latency for supported games, all powered by the cloud. Dive into popular games with upgraded visuals and smoother gameplay over free users, whether exploring vast open worlds or battling in fast-paced arenas. Take the experience even further by applying the value of the Day Pass toward a six-month Performance membership during the limited-time summer sale. It’s the perfect way to try out premium cloud gaming before jumping into a longer-term membership. Survive and Thrive Join the fight for Arrakis. Dune: Awakening, a multiplayer survival game on a massive scale from Funcom, is set on an ever-changing desert planet called Arrakis. Whether braving colossal sandworms, battling for spice or forging alliances, gamers can experience the spectacle of Arrakis with all the benefits of GeForce NOW. Manage hydration, temperature and exposure while contending with deadly sandworms, sandstorms and rival factions. Blend skills-based third-person action combat — featuring ranged and melee weapons, gadgets and abilities — with deep crafting, base building and resource management. Explore and engage in large-scale player vs. player and player vs. environment battles while vying for control over territory and the precious spice. The spice is flowing — and so is the power of the cloud. Stream it on GeForce NOW without waiting for lengthy downloads or worrying about hardware requirements. Dune: Awakening is available for members to stream from anywhere with the power of NVIDIA RTX for ultra-smooth gameplay and stunning visuals, even on low-powered devices. Chill Out Time to bundle up. Experience the highly anticipated Frosthaven demo in the cloud during Steam Next Fest with GeForce NOW. For a limited time, dive into a preview of the game directly from the cloud — no high-end PC required. Frosthaven — a dark fantasy tactical role-playing game from Snapshot Games and X-COM creator Julian Gollop — brings to life the board game of the same name. It features deep, turn-based combat, unique character classes, and single-player and online co-op modes. Play the Frosthaven demo on virtually any device with GeForce NOW and experience the magic of gathering around a board game — now in the cloud. Enter the frozen north of Frosthaven, strategize with friends and dive into epic battles without the hassle of setup or cleanup. With GeForce NOW, game night is just a click away, wherever members are playing from. Seize New Games A new era of “Rainbow Six Siege” has begun. Rainbow Six Siege X, the biggest evolution in the game’s history, is now available with free access for new players. It introduces a new 6v6 “Dual Front” game mode, where teams attack and defend simultaneously with respawns and new strategic objectives. R6 Siege X also brings new and improved gameplay features — such as modernized maps with enhanced visuals and lighting, new destructible environmental elements, advanced rappel, smoother movement, an audio overhaul and a communication wheel for precise strategic plays, as well as weapon inspections to showcase gamers’ favorite cosmetics. Look for the following games available to stream in the cloud this week: Frosthaven Demo (New release on Steam, June 9) Dune: Awakening (New release on Steam, June 10) MindsEye (New release on Steam, June 10) Kingdom Two Crowns (New release on Xbox, available on PC Game Pass, June 11) The Alters (New release on Steam and Xbox, available on PC Game Pass, June 13) Lost in Random: The Eternal Die (New release on Steam and Xbox, June 13, available on PC Game Pass, June 17) Firefighting Simulator – The Squad (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass) JDM: Japanese Drift Master (Steam) Hellslave (Steam) What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on X or in the comments below.

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior EditorJune 2, 20255 Min ReadJG Photography via Alamy Stock PhotoProviding services to steel mills and mines around the world can call for real-world, heavy lifting. So when Phoenix Global decided it was time for digital transformation as new leadership took the helm, it needed a fresh plan to embrace the cloud.Jeff Suellentrop, chief information and technology officer for Phoenix Global, says the company works with some 17 steel mill sites in the US and abroad, offering slag remediation and metals recovery. “We operate all the heavy equipment, large loaders, dump trucks and basically all the heavy equipment in the steel mill,” he says. “We help process the byproduct of slags.”Slag is the byproduct of steelmaking, in which impurities are removed from the metal. Suellentrop says his company works with slag to help reclaim precious metals to return to the steelmaking process. The part of the byproduct not returned to steelmaking gets crushed and sold to construction and other industrial agencies. “It’s a very renewable process,” he says.Removing the Weight of Legacy TechServicing steel mills is Phoenix Global’s main business, Suellentrop says, with contracts that can last from five through 20 years. “It’s a fairly unique business, fairly complex compared to traditional order-to-cash type of process.Related:That includes very large asset purchases at the onset with tens of millions of dollars spent on equipment to initiate a contract, he says. “We manage all that equipment, all the personnel, and we also maintenance all that equipment.”This all requires a fairly long selling process, with each site built independently. Phoenix Global had a legacy ERP system in place, Suellentrop says, but the unique needs of the sites led to fragmented data that was not very integrated. “Our goal was to get what we call activity-based management, near real-time activity-based management,” he says.The company wanted to start fresh, jettison all the tech debt, and process debt to have a fully integrated, modernized organization. “We’ve replaced every technology in the company in the last two years,” Suellentrop says.Unfettered by the CloudThe core of that change, he says, was cloud-based SAP ERP software, for all of Phoenix Global’s finance, purchasing, processing tech, supply chain, contract management, plans, and telematics. Phoenix Global tapped Syntax Systems to transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.Suellentrop says his company is still deploying SAP at its sites, working toward 100% deployment, which will include mobile assets such as connecting loaders and dump trucks. “You can imagine all the telematics data, hours, fuel consumption,” he says. The system includes connecting some 1,700 associates around the world, integrating data, inventory, and managing maintenance shops through SAP. “We’ve taken out all of the hand offs; it’s all automated," Suellentrop says. “We’ve literally taken days out of the turn-around time and driven up utilization of the equipment, saved millions of dollars on inventory.”Related:Maintenance, for example, has been streamlined to let technicians work directly through SAP to order repair parts that would be available that same day. “It’s a fairly high volume of data when it comes to all the information around the assets, asset maintenance, and then obviously tracking of all the different activities and resources,” he says. “Our goal with activity-based management basically is to see near real-time P&L by site to allow us to make near real-time decisions which help us service our customer better.”In prior years, Phoenix Global saw spot implementations of new solutions for certain needs. After Suellentrop joined the company in March 2023, he was asked to architect the complete digital overhaul and digital transformation for the company. “I’m responsible, from the executive team, for that digital transformation and beginning this activity-based management,” he says. “Digital to me is really delivering it at the speed of business and creating a force multiplier. We literally changed every technology, jettisoned almost all of the legacy processes, and displaced them with best practices.”Related:That allowed Phoenix Global to get rid of unintegrated and poor processes, Suellentrop says, and leapfrog to best practices. “More importantly, it allowed us to standardize the whole data set,” he says, which meant not much data grooming was needed, quickening its use with AI. “We basically took out a whole challenge with deploying AI.”New Leadership, New StrategySuellentrop joined Phoenix Global as it emerged from a reorganization, which he says gave the company the chance to start fresh with a new leadership team that had a goal of driving improvements across the board. That included the adoption of AI and a reimagining of the business model. “The steel industry has not embraced digital quite at the pace of some other industries,” he says.The transformation plan aimed for increased safety, profitability, and efficiency. “We went into this with very distinct outcomes, how we saw this business running in the future, and then we basically align the technology to deliver those outcomes,” Suellentrop says. “I can’t stress the importance of that enough, because we had a very clear vision from the leadership team … it takes immense sponsorship, obviously, to jettison all old processes and go to best practices.”That type of change management, he says, included telling staff that processes they followed day to day, perhaps for as long as 15 years, would change. This included digitizing everything, Suellentrop says, including analog records, even for operators driving trucks. “We got rid of all the paper and pencils,” he says. “We’ve deployed tablets; we automated so they didn’t have to enter some things. We want to minimize the human data entry.”Maintenance technicians now use tablets, he says, which allows them to manage work orders, order parts, and plan their workloads.Phoenix Global plans to finish deploying the new system and operating model in the US this year with international sites to follow in 2026, Suellentrop says. “We’re doing financial planning. We have several new AI value-adders that we’re layering on this year in the plants that are deployed … we can hyper tune our processes and our profitability because we’ve got a much higher level of detail.”About the AuthorJoao-Pierre S. RuthSenior EditorJoao-Pierre S. Ruth covers tech policy, including ethics, privacy, legislation, and risk; fintech; code strategy; and cloud & edge computing for InformationWeek. He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.See more from Joao-Pierre S. RuthWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like

A California-based company called Magrathea just turned on a new electrolyzer that can make magnesium metal from seawater. The technology has the potential to produce the material, which is used in vehicles and defense applications, with net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. Magnesium is an incredibly light metal, and it’s used for parts in cars and planes, as well as in aluminum alloys like those in vehicles. The metal is also used in defense and industrial applications, including the production processes for steel and titanium. Today, China dominates production of magnesium, and the most common method generates a lot of the emissions that cause climate change. If Magrathea can scale up its process, it could help provide an alternative source of the metal and clean up industries that rely on it, including automotive manufacturing. The star of Magrathea’s process is an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity to split a material into its constituent elements. Using an electrolyzer in magnesium production isn’t new, but Magrathea’s approach represents an update. “We really modernized it and brought it into the 21st century,” says Alex Grant, Magrathea’s cofounder and CEO. The whole process starts with salty water. There are small amounts of magnesium in seawater, as well as in salt lakes and groundwater. (In seawater, the concentration is about 1,300 parts per million, so magnesium makes up about 0.1% of seawater by weight.) If you take that seawater or brine and clean it up, concentrate it, and dry it out, you get a solid magnesium chloride salt. Magrathea takes that salt (which it currently buys from Cargill) and puts it into the electrolyzer. The device reaches temperatures of about 700 °C (almost 1,300 °F) and runs electricity through the molten salt to split the magnesium from the chlorine, forming magnesium metal. Typically, running an electrolyzer in this process would require a steady source of electricity. The temperature is generally kept just high enough to maintain the salt in a molten state. Allowing it to cool down too much would allow it to solidify, messing up the process and potentially damaging the equipment. Heating it up more than necessary would just waste energy.  Magrathea’s approach builds in flexibility. Basically, the company runs its electrolyzer about 100 °C higher than is necessary to keep the molten salt a liquid. It then uses the extra heat in inventive ways, including to dry out the magnesium salt that eventually goes into the reactor. This preparation can be done intermittently, so the company can take in electricity when it’s cheaper or when more renewables are available, cutting costs and emissions. In addition, the process will make a co-product, called magnesium oxide, that can be used to trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to cancel out the remaining carbon pollution. The result could be a production process with net-zero emissions, according to an independent life cycle assessment completed in January. While it likely won’t reach this bar at first, the potential is there for a much more climate-friendly process than what’s used in the industry today, Grant says. Breaking into magnesium production won’t be simple, says Simon Jowitt, director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and of the Center for Research in Economic Geology at the University of Nevada, Reno. China produces roughly 95% of the global supply as of 2024, according to data from the US Geological Survey. This dominant position means companies there can flood the market with cheap metal, making it difficult for others to compete. “The economics of all this is uncertain,” Jowitt says. The US has some trade protections in place, including an anti-dumping duty, but newer players with alternative processes can still face obstacles. US Magnesium, a company based in Utah, was the only company making magnesium in the US in recent years, but it shut down production in 2022 after equipment failures and a history of environmental concerns.  Magrathea plans to start building a demonstration plant in Utah in late 2025 or early 2026, which will have a capacity of roughly 1,000 tons per year and should be running in 2027. In February the company announced that it signed an agreement with a major automaker, though it declined to share its name on the record. The automaker pre-purchased material from the demonstration plant and will incorporate it into existing products. After the demonstration plant is running, the next step would be to build a commercial plant with a larger capacity of around 50,000 tons annually.

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Macworld Let’s be honest: WWDC 2025 is unlikely to go down in history as one Apple’s greatest ever events, as I’ve warned in a separate article. The company shouldn’t really be forging ahead with new plans until it finishes mopping up the undelivered ones from last year, and the ongoing and unaddressed failures of Siri and Apple Intelligence will hang over the proceedings like a bad smell. But even the dullest Apple event can generally be relied upon to deliver a few gems… and after all, it’s WWDC, the second most important keynote of the year. Here are the seven things I can’t wait to see at WWDC 2025: 1. An iPhone AI feature I’ll actually use With apologies to Mac and Apple Watch owners, iOS is the main event at WWDC. This year’s update promises some major changes, including important accessibility features and an interface redesign, which is already inspiring both positive and negative feelings. But a far more important change will happen under the hood. Reports indicate iOS 19 will feature a new AI-powered battery preservation mode, which will analyze usage patterns to lower power draw at times or in applications where it won’t impact your experience, and thereby extend battery life at minimal cost. Plus, the Lock Screen will finally show how much time is left until your phone is fully charged. Forget Genmoji: this is how AI can actually make a difference in users’ lives. 2. Apple Intelligence where it belongs I’m a little tired of hearing about Apple Intelligence: its supposed triumphs (from Apple) and its many flaws (from everyone else). Sadly this year’s WWDC is sure to feature more of the same, and we’ll need to prepare ourselves for that. But there’s one aspect of Apple Intelligence I am excited to know more about, and that is its belated debut on the Apple Watch. Pundits predict that the watchOS 12 update will see Apple’s AI platform land on the Apple Watch, which I’ve long said is its natural home. The watch’s small screen means next-gen messaging and voice control would be transformative, rather than a nice option, while its position on the wrist makes it perfectly placed to be a virtual assistant. So far, the main barrier to the Apple Watch joining the AI party has been it comparative lack of processing power, and the new models coming in the fall are unlikely to change that. But according to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, watchOS 12 will see the Apple Watch outsource the AI work to a nearby iPhone, which is a smart stopgap solution until the hardware catches up. 3. The Babel fish becomes a reality The tech industry has long been fascinated by the Babel fish, a fictional creature which, in the Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide novels, sits in a person’s ear and enables them to understand any language. If only the Babel fish were real. Well, it is—sort of—thanks to wireless earbuds with live translation software. Google has been offering this combination for years: the Pixel Buds (or indeed other earbuds paired with the Google Translate app) were capable of it back in 2017, albeit with plenty of drawbacks. But we’re excited to see Apple’s attempt, which is expected to launch later this year as part of iOS 19 and an AirPods firmware update. Whether this feature will be available in the first versions of iOS 19 is unclear, but we’d be very surprised if Apple doesn’t spill some of the details at WWDC this June. Foundry 4. The most powerful Mac ever made WWDC is known as a software event. But when Apple does decide to launch some hardware in June, it doesn’t mess around. It rolls out the big guns. The Mac Pro, the premium deluxe offering in Apple’s Mac line-up, was last updated two years ago: that was the M2 Ultra model, announced at WWDC 2023. It’s slower than the Mac Studio and not all that faster than the maxxed-out MacBook Pro, so the next model should feature an M4 Ultra chip or something higher we haven’t seen before, outclassing even the M4 Max MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models that currently sit at the top of the range. The Mac Pro is the model to deliver unrivalled power for the creative professional users whom Apple has occasionally neglected, so saving it for a grand WWDC entrance makes sense. The Mac Pro doesn’t get updated as often as other Apple products, and it’s possible we’ll have to wait until later in 2025. But if the M4 Ultra Mac Pro does turn up at WWDC, it’ll instantly be the star of the show. 5. The Mac’s new Vision Speaking of the Mac… Apple is certain to announce macOS 16 at WWDC 2025, and like iOS 19, it’s expected to feature a thoroughly redesigned interface. Sources suggest macOS will take its visual cues from Vision Pro, Apple’s groundbreaking mixed-reality headset, as the company looks to achieve more of a consistent UI across platforms. It will be fascinating to see how this fusion between Apple’s oldest and youngest product lines shakes out. Apple 6. News about new Siri Arguably the weakest element in Apple’s ecosystem, and certainly its highest-profile failure, is the lamentably inaccurate voice assistant Siri. An astonishing 14 years after it launched with the iPhone 4s, Siri shows no sign of getting any better, and sometimes seems to be getting worse. At last year’s WWDC, Apple promised to fix Siri by deploying the magic of Apple Intelligence. But the arrival of the new AI-powered Siri keeps getting delayed; it didn’t appear in March’s iOS 18.4 update as expected, or even in May’s iOS 18.5. Hopefully, Apple will have some news for us in June, because Siri really needs to get better at its job. And while we’re on the sore topic of Siri, we’d appreciate some (preferably realistic) announcements about the version of Siri after the new one: the “true modernized, conversational version” which is also known as LLM Siri. New Siri was supposed to be part of iOS 18, and LLM Siri part of iOS 19, but delays compound on delays and the whole thing keeps getting pushed back. I’m excited to see these improvements, Apple, but please let us know what’s going on. 7. Honesty And that leads me to the single thing I want most from WWDC25: pure, unfiltered honesty about the state of play at Cupertino. What’s been going wrong since last year? Why have so many projects been delayed? And is Apple Intelligence really as far behind other AI platforms as it seems to be? This might seem like a desperate long shot. The truth at a marketing event, what a fanciful notion! But Apple has some form here. When Apple Maps suffered disastrous teething pains, Apple admitted this and apologized. When creative pros were neglected, as I mentioned earlier, Apple admitted this and apologized. There is a chance, albeit a slim one, that we’ll get some sort of mea culpa at WWDC. Every company makes mistakes. Announcing Apple Intelligence long before it was ready, and then selling iPhone 16 handsets off the back of features that won’t have launched by the time the iPhone 17 comes out, was a big one, but it doesn’t have to ruin Apple’s reputation. The cure is honesty. Explain what went wrong and why. Then be completely transparent about the features that will actually be ready in time for the iPhone 17. Confidence will return–but not if the spin and bluster continue. That’s my wish list for WWDC 2025. Join us on June 9 to see how much Apple delivers, and to read our coverage of all the announcements.