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A number of airlines are waiving change fees ahead of what is expected to be a major winter storm forecast to hit the Northeast on Friday afternoon, affecting millions of people traveling after Christmas, during one of the busiest times of the year. A winter storm warning from the National Weather Service (NWS) is in effect for New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut from Friday afternoon through Saturday, for up to 9 inches of snow and freezing temperatures, creating the potential hazardous travel conditions, flight delays, and cancellations. 1-6 inches of snow is expected from northeastern Pennsylvania up into New England; while freezing rain and sleet, are expected south into Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and West Virginia. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and JetBlue Airways have issued fee waivers for travelers flying into a number of airports including, New Yorks John F. Kennedy International Airport, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport, and Philadelphia International Airport, according to CNBC. The big three carriers, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and American Airlines, have issued travel alert for the following airports, and are allowing those whose plans may be affected, to rebook without change fees. DELTA AIR LINES Airports: New York, NY (JFK), New York, NY (LGA), Newark, NJ (EWR) , Philadelphia, PA (PHL), White Plains, NY (HPN) Impacted travel dates: December 26-27, 2025 Ticket must be reissued on or before: December 30, 2025 Booked travel must begin no later than: December 30, 2025 UNITED Airports: Allentown, PA (ABE), Albany, NY (ALB), Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, PA (AVP), Hartford, CT (BDL), Boston, MA (BOS), Newark, NJ (EWR), Ithaca, NY (ITH), New York, NY (JFK), Johnstown, PA (JST), New York, NY (LGA), Harrisburg, PA (MDT), Philadelphia, PA (PHL), Providence, RI (PVD), Rochester, NY (ROC), State College, PA (SCE) Syracuse, NY, US (SYR) For tickets booked before or on: December 23, 2025 Impacted travel dates: December 26-27, 2025 Ticket must be reissued on or before: December 31, 2025 AMERICAN AIRLINES Airports: Boston, MA (BOS), New York, NY (JFK), New York, NY (LGA), Newark, NJ (EWR) , Philadelphia, PA (PHL), White Plains, NY (HPN) For tickets booked before or on: December 24, 2025 Impacted travel dates: December 26-27, 2025 Ticket must be reissued on or before: December 31, 2025 For the most up-to-the-minute information, travelers should check the status of their flights frequently. For international travelers flying on Singapore Airlines, the airline has already announced multiple cancellations for flights between New York’s JFK and New Jersey’s Newark airports, and its Singapore and Frankfurt hubs.
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High-speed rail systems are found all over the globe. Japans bullet train began operating in 1964. China will have 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) of high-speed track by the end of 2025. The fastest train in Europe goes almost 200 mph (320 kph). Yet high-speed rail remains absent from most of the U.S. Stephen Mattingly, a civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, explains why high-speed rail projects in much of the country so often go off track. Dr. Stephen Mattingly discusses the problems that come with implementing high-speed rail in the U.S. The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, edited for brevity and clarity. How is high-speed rail different from conventional trains? Stephen Mattingly: With conventional rail, were usually looking at speeds of less than 80 mph (129 kph). Higher-speed rail is somewhere between 90, maybe up to 125 mph (144 to 201 kph). And high-speed rail is 150 mph (241 kph) or faster. Theres also a difference in the infrastructure for these different rail lines. Is there anything in the U.S. thats considered high-speed rail? Mattingly: The Acela train operates in the Northeast Corridor and serves Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. In some parts of the corridor, the Acela runs on infrastructure that accommodates the trains maximum 150 mph (241 kph) speed. Why has the U.S. been slow to adopt this? Mattingly: Except for some in the northeastern U.S., not many cities have enough travel between them and are at the correct distance to support an investment in high-speed rail, because its not necessarily going to take a huge number of cars off the road. Trains are not a replacement for auto travel; they compete more directly with air. High-speed rail competes best with air when the trip is between one-and-a-half to three hours. Within that range, a trains door-to-door travel time is typically faster than air. Thats because of the additional security time required for air travel: sitting around in the airport, the time it takes to load and unload and all of that. For longer distancesmore than three hoursthe trains travel time starts to get noncompetitive with air. Thats because for every three or four hours of high-speed rail travel, air travel only takes one hour. Go lower than thata trip of less than an hour-and-a-halfand cars become the more attractive choice. That said, what are the advantages of high-speed rail? Mattingly: First, the environmental benefit is an advantage. High-speed rail has lower carbon emissions than air travel, especially on a per passenger basis. You can load more people onto a train than most planes. Then, of course, its speed makes it a viable way to commute when compared with conventional rail. Our current Amtrak system, outside the Northeast Corridor, is really a leisure travel mode, as opposed to business travel mode. What large-scale projects are in the works here in the U.S.? Mattingly: Some higher-speed rail is in Florida, and Brightline, a private train company, is proposing to improve the existing line with more of a high-speed capability. Theres also a proposed line in Texas to run between Dallas and Houston. The Texas project has a lot of challenges with eminent domain, which is the right of government to take private property for public use after providing compensation. A federal grant to help fund the line was recently terminated, and a strategic partner pulled out of the project. With delays, costs inevitably begin to increase. Californias high-speed rail project for its Central Valley actually has about 120 miles (193 kilometers) of track laid down. And its working on slowly building that out. There are some other proposals in the Pacific Northwest, but those are more ideas than projects at this point. When these systems are proposed, theyre often positioned as a replacement for auto travel. But Im incredibly skeptical that auto travel will significantly decrease with a new public transit mode that deposits you within a larger metropolitan destination, which may not even have the public transportation to take you to your final destination. Regional networks of high-speed rail could connect more exurban or rural areas to hub airports and enhance economic development in these regions. In this case, a public high-speed rail system could receive public money, just like the federal government has done with the interstate highway system and all the other road investments that weve made over the past century and longer. But Im not sure that high-speed rail will be a solution for congested freeways between cities for any place outside of the Northeast Corridor. What is your central message about high-speed rail? Mattingly: I love high-speed rail as a technology. For specific applications, its beneficial, especially from an environmental perspective. But thecountry has to be very careful in its choices on where those public investments in high-speed rail would actually make sense and be worthwhile investments. So Im hesitant to make large investments without really understanding what the outcomes are. SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories. Stephen Mattingly is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Nvidia has agreed to license technology from AI startup Groq for use in some of its artificial intelligence chips, marking the chipmaker’s largest deal and underscoring its push to strengthen competitiveness amid surging demand. Here is a list of multi-billion-dollar AI, cloud and chip deals signed recently: OPENAI DEALS Amazon and OpenAI Amazon is considering an investment of around $10 billion in OpenAI, though talks remain “very fluid,” according to a source who requested anonymity due to the private nature of their talks. Disney and OpenAI Walt Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and will let the ChatGPT-parent use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel franchises in its Sora AI video generator – a move that could transform Hollywood content creation. As part of the three-year licensing agreement, Sora and ChatGPT Images will begin generating videos featuring licensed Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and Mufasa early next year. The deal excludes any talent likeness or voices. Broadcom and OpenAI OpenAI has partnered with Broadcom to produce its first in-house artificial intelligence processors, the latest tie-up for the world’s most valuable startup for computing power amid surging demand for its services. AMD and OpenAI AMD agreed to supply artificial intelligence chips to OpenAI in a multi-year deal that would also give the ChatGPT creator the option to buy up to roughly 10% of the chipmaker. Nvidia and OpenAI Nvidia is set to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and supply it with data center chips, in a deal giving the chipmaker a financial stake in OpenAI. OpenAI is already an important customer for Nvidia. Oracle and OpenAI Oracle is reported to have signed one of the biggest cloud deals ever with OpenAI, under which the ChatGPT maker is expected to buy $300 billion in computing power from the company for about five years. CoreWeave and OpenAI CoreWeave signed a five-year contract worth $11.9 billion with OpenAI in March, before the Nvidia-backed startup’s IPO. Stargate Datacenter Project Stargate is a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle to build data centers. The project was announced in January by U.S. President Donald Trump, who said that the companies would invest up to $500 billion to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence. META DEALS Meta and CoreWeave CoreWeave has signed a $14 billion agreement with Meta to supply computing power to the Facebook parent. Meta and Oracle Oracle is in talks with Meta for a multi-year cloud computing deal worth about $20 billion, underscoring the social media giant’s drive to secure faster access to computing power. Meta and Google Google struck a six-year cloud computing deal with Meta Platforms worth more than $10 billion, Reuters had reported in August. Meta and Scale AI Meta took a 49% stake for about $14.3 billion in Scale AI and brought in its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to play a prominent role in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence strategy. NVIDIA DEALS Nvidia and Groq Nvidia has agreed to license chip technology from startup Groq and hire its CEO Jonathan Ross, who helped Google start its AI chip program, among other engineers at the company. CNBC reported that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Groq’s assets for $20 billion. Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion and Nvidia up to $10 billion in Anthropic, while the Claude maker will pledge $30 billion to run its workloads on Microsoft’s cloud. Under the agreement, Anthropic will commit up to 1 gigawatt of compute, powered by Nvidia’s advanced Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin hardware. The company will also team up with Nvidia to improve chips and AI models for better performance. Nvidia-backed group and Aligned Data Centers An investor group including BlackRock, Microsoft and Nvidia is buying U.S.-based Aligned Data Centers, one of the world’s biggest data center operators with nearly 80 facilities, in a deal worth $40 billion. Nvidia and Intel Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel, giving it roughly 4% of the company after new shares are issued. CoreWeave and Nvidia CoreWeave signed a $6.3 billion initial order with backer Nvidia, a deal that guarantees that the AI chipmaker will purchase any cloud capacity not sold to customers. GOOGLE DEALS Google and Texas Google will invest $40 billion in three new data centers in Texas through 2027. One of the data centers will be in Armstrong County, in the Texas Panhandle, and the other two in Haskell County, a stretch of West Texas near Abilene. The company is also continuing to invest in its existing Midlothian campus and Dallas cloud region, part of the company’s global network of 42 cloud regions. Google and Windsurf Google hired several key staff members from AI code generation startup Windsurf and will pay $2.4 billion in license fees as part of the deal to use some of Windsurf’s technology under non-exclusive terms. OTHERS Nebius Group and Microsoft Nebius Group will provide Microsoft with GPU infrastructure capacity in a deal worth $17.4 billion over a five-year term. Intel and Softbank Group Intel is getting a $2 billion capital injection from SoftBank Group, making the Japanese tech investor one of the top-10 shareholders of the troubled U.S. chipmaker. Tesla and Samsung Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal to source chips from Samsung Electronics, with the EV maker’s CEO Elon Musk saying that the South Korean tech giant’s new chip factory in Texas would make Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip. Amazon and Anthropic Amazon.com pumped $4 billion into OpenAI competitor Anthropic, doubling its investment in the firm known for its GenAI chatbot Claude. Juby Babu, Deborah Sophia, Arnav Mishra, Jaspreet Singh, and Zaheer Kachwala, Reuters
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