You’re tired of reading about tariffs. Honestly, we’re tired of writing about them. But amid the ever-shifting landscape of announcements, backtracks, court decisions, and Truth Social missives, where do things stand right now?

As part of Morning Brew’s Quarter Century Project, the Tech Brew team homed in on the ABCs of tech industries—automobiles, batteries, and chips—to illustrate how tariffs are impacting those sectors, the US economy, and your wallet.

Automobiles: What’s the latest with automotive tariffs? According to Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s ILR School, the situation is “still as messy now as we were when we began.”

“There’s not a lot of clarity,” he told us late last month. “There is no final deal for Mexico. No final deal for Canada. There’s no final deal for China. So everything is still in flux for three of the biggest trading partners we have.”

In April, the Trump administration implemented tariffs of 25% on imported vehicles. Since then, the US has announced trade deals to lower auto tariff rates for several trading partners, including the UK, Japan, South Korea, and the EU.

“It’s really created a lot of confusion—which, if you ask the current administration, they like,” Wheaton said. “They like keeping everybody on their toes, but the auto industry hates uncertainty.”

Keep reading here.—JG, TC, PK

Good news for East Coast EV drivers: You’ve got plenty of public chargers to choose from. As for the rest of the country? Well, there’s still some work to do.

That’s according to the third annual EV Index from mapping and location data company HERE Technologies and automotive research firm SBD Automotive, which ranks all 50 US states and Washington, DC, on their EV infrastructure and uptake maturity.

The headline from this year’s report is that “the US is entering the early stages of widespread electric vehicle deployment,” per a news release. However, although “EV infrastructure and adoption improved across all categories,” researchers found that “growth slowed compared to last year as the country faces expiring tax incentives and heightened consumer expectations for infrastructure.”

The rankings are based on four factors: how far drivers have to travel to find a charger, how quickly they can charge, the number of EVs on the road versus ICE vehicles, and the likelihood of finding an unoccupied charger.

This year’s analysis found that the US added 37,000 charging points, up 19% from 2024, and increased total charge power by 52%. But growth was slower than in 2024, when the US had a 32% YoY increase in charge point installations and an 82% jump in total charge power.

The findings highlight “a pivotal moment where infrastructure deployment is falling behind rising EV demand,” according to the release.

Keep reading here.—JG

Extreme weather is becoming a more frequent part of day-to-day life, and long-range forecasting can help governments and businesses alike prepare for severe weather.

Planette’s subscribers are usually businesses with physical assets that might be environmentally vulnerable. But now, the company is working with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences to forecast extreme weather using AI and quantum computing algorithms.

In an interview with Tech Brew, Planette CEO Hansi Singh said the company trains AI on existing models of Earth, like those used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that contain the physics of how the ocean and atmosphere interact with each other. Then, its AI is able to forecast extreme weather up to six months in advance.

“If you invest in the training [the AI], then the actual inference where you produce the forecast, either daily or weekly, is super, super, super cheap,” Singh said. “That is the advantage of the AI, because you can learn the physics, but you can run it extremely efficiently.”

Through the company’s partnership with NASA, Singh said they’re working on QubitCast, which will forecast “one-off events”—like extreme weather—using “quantum algorithms that are even more efficient” than AI algorithms.

Keep reading here.—TC

Virtual power plants (VPPs) turn excess solar and wind energy into a reliable grid resource. By connecting batteries and managing energy loads, VPPs reduce waste, stabilize the grid, and replace traditional power plants. See how this technology helps utilities and consumers balance growing renewable energy production with rising electricity demand.

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