How one climate startup aims to use AI to protect the power grid
As fires intensify in the western United States, utility companies are on the front lines, working to protect the power lines that serve millions of customers. And as the frequency of fires and severe storms increases, so does the amount of technology that utility companies use to keep things running.
The U.S. has roughly 5.5 million miles of power lines on more than a quarter billion poles surrounded by even more trees, and keeping a human eye on all of it is impossible.
That’s why artificial intelligence is taking the lead.
Enter new software companies like Pano AI, Satelytics and California-based AIDash, which are tapping high tech to lower risk.
“Using satellites, we can monitor each and every tree, each and every pole, as frequently as we want, identify the challenges and fix them before they cause an accident,” Abhishek Singh, CEO and co-founder of AIDash, told CNBC.
Utility companies are often required by local governments to scan 100% of their lines and address any issues before fire season.
“This entire exercise of maintaining trees along power lines is a $10 billion annual spend in us alone,” Singh added. “With the labor cost increasing, and shortage of labor, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the problems without technology.”
AIDash uses its tech to not only identify current issues but also potential future ones, integrating weather data with detailed vegetation data to gauge risk levels throughout the fire season and address them. The company does the same for extreme wind and precipitation events.
National Grid, which services customers in much of the northeast, is both a client of and investor in AIDash through its venture capital arm, National Grid Partners.
“The most important thing for us is the grid reliability,” Andre Turenne, VP of investments at National Grid Partners, told CNBC, adding that the company has seen a 30% reduction in outages and a 55% reduction in the duration of outages since using AIDash.
“Their differentiator was they built an end-to-end platform, a workflow platform designed for utility engineers to actually deploy and do predictive analytics, deploy the crews on the ground and generally provide a platform for our engineers to use end-to-end,” said Turenne.
In addition to National Grid Partners, AIDash is backed by Duke Energy, Edison International, Shell Ventures, Lightrock and SE Ventures. Its total venture capital funding so far is $91.5 million.
As part of the green transition, and as more industries make the switch to all-electric power, grid capacity and reliability will become even more vital. Over the next five years, National Grid said it plans to spend $75 billion in its jurisdictions in the United Kingdom, as well as in New York and Massachusetts, to upgrade for both.
— CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed reporting.
Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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