The solar industry is disappointed: After months of lobbying Congress to preserve clean energy tax credits for solar power, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which President Trump signed last month, phases out tax credits for investment in and production of solar power.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act granted subsidies for solar projects that started construction before 2033. Under Trump’s budget bill, those credits will only be available for projects that commence construction within the next year or are in service before the end of 2027.

Brendan Bell, COO and managing director of clean energy firm Aligned Climate Capital, told Tech Brew that the policy changes are bad for the climate and the US economy.

“All of the manufacturing that had come to the US to support these new rules—which was creating jobs in places that haven’t had jobs in a long time, creating an economic industrial base here in the US—that’s gone,” he said. “If there’s anything that is most disastrous about this, it is, there is no longer a reason to have a solar manufacturing plant in the United States.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Most retailers are still adding AI to their carts.

A survey from customer data platform Amperity found that 58% of retailers expect to increase AI investments in the next 12 months. And 26% of the 1,000 retail professionals polled also believe that AI will increase their organization’s headcount rather than slashing it (20%).

But the numbers also show that some retailers may be facing a familiar struggle. Like other adoption reports find, dabbling with AI experimentation is easy (a third of respondents said their companies are either still in this stage or not using AI at all), and regular use around the office is also doable (two-thirds said their orgs used it at least weekly). But full-scale implementations? That can sometimes be more elusive (only 16% said their businesses had fully adopted AI across multiple business units).

Retailers are also perhaps warier about using AI in customer-facing applications—only 43% of respondents said their organizations were doing so.

Keep reading here.—PK

Predictions of a hot sales summer for EVs before federal incentives go away appear to be coming true.

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s tax and budget bill, the $7,500 tax credit on new EVs and a $4,000 tax credit for used EVs will soon sunset. Industry sales reports for July suggest that consumers are, in fact, rushing to get deals on EVs while they still can.

“The EV market is experiencing a sharp uptick in demand as consumers rush to take advantage of the $7,500 federal incentive before it expires Sept. 30,” Tyson Jominy, SVP of data and analytics at JD Power, said in a statement. “July marks the first month of this surge, with EVs projected to hit 10.9% retail share, up 1.9 percentage points from June. It’s also the first time this year that the segment has reached double digits.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

The bangles: Would you wrap AI around your wrist? Amazon and Meta think you just may. Both Big Tech giants are rolling out AI wristbands, Retail Brew notes.

As advertised? AI-aided “surveillance pricing” could change what consumers pay based on a variety of metrics: the user’s location, a phone’s battery life, even the time of day. The Markup reports on a California legislator’s bill to limit the practice.