Ultra-high performance concrete has been in labs and specialty projects for three decades. What’s different now is where it’s turning up: on aging viaducts in Switzerland, a busy interstate crossing between Delaware and New Jersey, county bridges in Iowa and New Mexico, and a 100% UHPC superstructure in Michigan. Together, those projects show why many bridge owners now see UHPC as a practical tool for extending deck life—not just a science project.

Stand on the departures level of a new terminal, or in the atrium of a major hospital, and the engineering story usually points your eyes up to the roof. But for project directors and CFOs, one of the most important decisions sits under their feet: the floor slab.

 
As AI workloads explode, the world’s largest tech companies are no longer just grid customers—they are becoming power marketers, anchor tenants for multi-gigawatt generation, and, in some cases, de-facto utilities. For infrastructure CEOs, this isn’t a side story in Silicon Valley. It’s a structural shift in how generation, transmission and capital will be deployed over the next decade.

From social media to power marketing

Just before dawn in Western Australia’s Pilbara, more than a hundred 250-tonne haul trucks wake up with no one climbing a ladder. From a control room hundreds of kilometres away in Perth, a handful of supervisors watch icons move across a digital pit map as driverless trucks roll out, talk to each other over private LTE and begin shifting millions of tonnes of iron ore.

Scenes like this were a curiosity in 2008. Today, they are becoming routine – and they are quietly rewriting how mines are designed, powered and built.