After Mexican government cracked down on solar geoengineering, startup lets off balloons in Nevada
Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, is about to launch a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
The solar geoengineering startup that had to cease operations in Mexico after the government cracked down on the idea of putting chemicals into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth has reemerged to launch balloons in Nevada.
On Tuesday, Make Sunsets announced it had completed three balloon launches near Reno, Nevada, each of which contained less than 10 grams of sulfur dioxide, which is the most commonly sited aerosol particle discussed in conversations about solar geoengineering. Two of the balloons launched also had location trackers, and one had a camera, too.
The idea of solar geoengineering has been around for decades and generally refers to spraying aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect the sun’s rays away from earth and back to space, cooling the earth and temporarily mitigating the effects of climate change.
Essentially, solar geoengineering is mimicking what happens when a volcano erupts, and it’s known to work. When Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines released thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in the 1991 eruption, the global temperature of the earth was lowered on average by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Solar geoengineering is not a solution to climate change, and nobody who studies it rigorously suggests it should be. It’s a temporary stopgap measure.
In addition, while releasing sulfur dioxide particles will cool the earth quickly and relatively inexpensively, it’s also dangerous. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere could damage the ozone layer, cause respiratory illness and create acid rain.
But as the effects of climate change become more obvious, people are beginning to take the idea more seriously.
The White House is coordinating a five-year research plan into solar geoengineering, the quadrennial U.N.-backed Montreal Protocol assessment report included an entire chapter addressing stratospheric aerosol injection (more colloquially called solar geoengineering), and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, is funding solar geoengineering research via his philanthropic organization, Open Philanthropy.
While momentum is building, there isn’t any international governance rules about how to study and potentially regulate the idea.
Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator, launched Make Sunsets in October in an effort to push that envelope. San Mateo-headquartered venture capital firm BoostVC invested $500,000 in the startup and Iseman brought in a co-founder, Andrew Song.
The launches in Nevada earlier in February occurred at the Rancho San Rafael Regional Park in Reno, , where an annual hot-air balloon festival takes place, Iseman told CNBC.
They chose Nevada “because it’s in the U.S., we’re very confident we know and followed all applicable rules, know the terrain well from past adventures, and, we didn’t want to interfere with a friend’s efforts to get a marine cloud brightening project permitted in California,” Iseman told CNBC.
The Nevada launch was previously detailed by Time reporters, who were there. It was a shoe-string MacGyver-ed event orchestrated out of a hotel room, with a grill and weather balloon equipment. But, as evidenced by the images embedded below, shared with CNBC by Make Sunsets, the balloons lifted off.
Make Sunsets team is filling sulfur dioxide in a bag preparing for launch.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Make Sunsets team is weighing the bag filled with sulfur dioxide gas in a bag preparing for launch.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Make Sunsets is filling the balloon with helium here.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Here, founder Luke Iseman is preparing to release the weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the atmosphere. Make Sunsets says this is the first deployment of SAI, or stratospheric aerosol injection, another and more specific name for solar geoengineering.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Luke Iseman, the founder of Make Sunsets, is about to launch a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Make Sunsets launching a weather balloon filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air in Nevada.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
A view from the Make Sunsets balloon launched in Nevada.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
A view from the Make Sunsets balloon launched in Nevada.
Photo courtesy Make Sunsets
Iseman has both idealistic and practical goals.
“Most importantly: We need to cool earth to save millions of lives, hundreds of thousands of species, and buy the time we need to decarbonize,” Iseman told CNBC.
To make the business sustainable, Make Sunsets is selling cooling credits, which gives companies and individuals a way to offset the effects of their carbon emissions. But the startup has yet to deliver.
“We have 2,790 cooling credits ordered by 58 paying customers that we haven’t yet delivered,” Iseman told CNBC. “On one hand, we’re working hard on a controversial project to cool earth. On the other, we’re a startup with the same basic challenge as any other: get customers to pay more for what we’re selling than it costs to make it.”
Make Sunsets said it made the FAA aware that it was releasing a balloon.
The FAA provided the following statement: “The FAA has comprehensive regulations for safely operating unmanned free balloons. Among other things, the regulations require the balloon to be equipped so it can be tracked by radar, and the operator to notify the FAA prior to and at the time of launch, monitor and record the balloon’s course, make position reports to the FAA as requested, and notify the FAA when the balloon begins its descent and its expected trajectory.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated what the balloons contained. All three of them had sulfur dioxide.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
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