Building vehicles is a hugely complex process. Hundreds of different companies provide parts, materials, electronics, and more to vehicle manufacturers, and these expansive supply chain networks often relyupon “just-in-time” manufacturing. That means they order parts and services to be delivered in the specific quantities that are needed and exactly when they need them—large stockpiles of parts are unlikely to be held by auto makers.
“The supplier networks that are supplying into these manufacturing plants, they’re all set up for efficiency—economic efficiency, and also logistic efficiency,” says Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, a professor in systems security at Swansea University. “There’s a very carefully orchestrated supply chain,” Shaikh adds, speaking about automotive manufacturing generally. “There’s a critical dependency for those suppliers supplying into this kind of an operation. As soon as there is a disruption at this kind of facility, then all the suppliers get affected.”
One company that makes glass sun roofs has started laying off workers, according to a report in the Telegraph. Meanwhile, another firm told the BBC it has laid off around 40 people so far. French automotive company OPmobility, which employs 38,000 people across 150 sites, told WIRED it is making some changes and monitoring the events. “OPmobility is reconfiguring its production at certain sites as a consequence of the shutdown of its production by one of its customers based in the United Kingdom and depending on the evolution of the situation,” a spokesperson for the firm says.
While it is unclear which specific JLR systems have been impacted by the hackers and what systems JLR took offline proactively, many were likely taken offline to stop the attack from getting worse. “It’s very challenging to ensure containment while you still have connections between various systems,” says Orla Cox, head of EMEA cybersecurity communications at FTI Consulting, which responds to cyberattacks and works on investigations. “Oftentimes as well, there will be dependencies on different systems: You take one down, then it means that it has a knock on effect on another.”
Whenever there’s a hack in any part of a supply chain—whether that is a manufacturer at the top of the pyramid or a firm further down the pipeline—digital connections between companies may be severed to stop attackers from spreading from one network to the next. Connections via VPNs or APIs may be stopped, Cox says. “Some may even take stronger measures such as blocking domains and IP addresses. Then things like email are no longer usable between the two organizations.”
The complexity of digital and physical supply chains, spanning across dozens of businesses and just-in-time production systems, means it is likely that bringing everything back online and up to full-working speed may take time. MacColl, the RUSI researcher, says cybersecurity issues often fail to be debated at the highest level of British politics—but adds this time could be different due to the scale of the disruption. “This incident has the potential to cut through because of the job losses and the fact that MPs in constituencies affected by this will be getting calls,” he says. That breakthrough has already begun.
Organisations increasingly rely on cloud services to drive innovation and operational efficiency, and as more artificial intelligence (AI) workloads use public cloud-based AI acceleration, organisations’ AI strategies are linked to the security and availability of these services.
However, as John Bruce, chief information security officer (CISO) at Quorum Cyber, points out, CISOs face the persistent challenge of figuring out how to map a cloud provider’s service level agreement (SLA), which does not align with the enterprise’s security and availability requirements (see box: A strategic framework for SLA gap management).
Aditya Sood, vice-president of security engineering and AI strategy at Aryaka, says that while SLAs typically cover metrics like uptime, support response times and service performance, they often overlook critical elements such as data protection, breach response and regulatory compliance.
This, he says, creates a responsibility gap, where assumptions about who is accountable can lead to serious blind spots. For instance, a customer might assume that the cloud provider’s SLA guarantees data protection, only to realise that their own misconfigurations or weak identity management practices have led to a data breach.
“Organisations may mistakenly believe their provider handles more than it does, increasing the risk of non-compliance, security incidents and operational disruptions,” he says.
Sood recommends that IT decision-makers ensure they take into account the nuances between SLA commitments and shared security responsibilities. He believes this is vital for organisations to make the most of cloud services without undermining resilience or regulatory obligations.
In Bruce’s experience, misalignment of an SLA with corporate IT requirements is more common than many leaders realise. “Whether it’s a cutting-edge AI platform from a startup, specialised software as a service (SaaS) with limited security guarantees, or even established cloud providers whose standard SLAs fall short of regulatory requirements, the gap between what providers offer and what enterprises need can be substantial,” he says.
According to Bruce, the modern cloud ecosystem presents a complex landscape. He says: “While major cloud providers like AWS [Amazon Web Services], [Microsoft] Azure and Google Cloud have matured their security offerings and SLAs considerably, the broader ecosystem includes thousands of specialised providers.”
Bruce notes that while many offer innovative capabilities that can provide significant competitive advantages, their SLAs often reflect their size, maturity, or focus areas rather than enterprise security requirements.
For instance, IT decision-makers can face an innovation paradox. This occurs, says Bruce, if a promising AI or machine learning (ML) platform offers breakthrough capabilities but provides only basic security guarantees and 99.5% uptime commitments when the organisation requires 99.99% availability.
While an SLA guarantees the cloud provider’s commitment to “the security of the cloud”, ensuring the underlying infrastructure’s uptime, resilience and core security, in Sood’s experience, it explicitly does not cover the customer’s responsibilities for security in the cloud.
He says that even if a provider’s SLA promises 99.99% uptime for its infrastructure, a customer’s misconfigurations, weak identity management or unpatched applications can still lead to data breaches or service outages, effectively nullifying the perceived security and uptime benefits of the provider’s SLA.
Even if a provider’s SLA promises 99.99% uptime for its infrastructure, a customer’s misconfigurations, weak identity management or unpatched applications can still lead to data breaches or service outages
Another factor to consider is what Bruce calls the “compliance gap”. This is when the SaaS provider offers essential functionality, but its data residency, encryption or audit logging capabilities do not meet the regulatory requirements of the organisation.
Then there is the case of a service provider’s inability to scale to meet certain requirements needed by enterprise IT. This “scale mismatch”, as Bruce calls it, occurs in a situation where the specialised software house provides unique industry-specific tools, but its incident response procedures and security monitoring do not meet enterprise standards.
Sood recommends using a shared responsibility model (SRM), which plays a central role in defining how security and operational duties are split between cloud providers and their customers. The SRM directly impacts the adequate security and availability experienced by the enterprise, making diligent customer-side security practices crucial for realising the full value of any cloud SLA.
Public cloud lock-in
Beyond managing how responsibility for IT security is coordinated, IT leaders should also be wary of the extent to which they use the value-added services provided in a public cloud platform.
For instance, egress fees to transfer data out of a public provider’s datacentre are opaque. McCluggage says that egress fees combined with proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and binding enterprise agreements often make the cost of switching public cloud providers too high.
“Beyond just stifling competition, this lock-in also undermines the UK government’s ambition to become an AI powerhouse. With AI workloads increasingly dependent on high-performance cloud infrastructure, continuing to rely on just two dominant hyperscalers risks concentrating capability, control and innovation in the hands of a few,” he says.
According to McCluggage, customers using certain public cloud services can face “economic entrapment”. As an example, Microsoft’s recent Office 365 Personal and Family subscriptions price increase in the UK – from £59.99 to £84.99 – was justified by the addition of AI-powered Copilot features.
“Customers can avoid the hike by choosing the ‘Classic’ subscription,” says McCluggage, pointing out that Microsoft has made this subscription much harder for people to find. “Most individuals – and organisations – won’t know they have a choice until it’s too late. This isn’t value creation,” he adds.
Being realistic about contract terms
The cloud ecosystem will continue to evolve, with new providers offering compelling capabilities alongside varying security guarantees. Quorum Cyber’s Bruce warns that attempting to eliminate all SLA gaps would mean forgoing potentially transformative technologies. Instead, he says, successful CISOs need to develop frameworks for making informed risk decisions that enable innovation while maintaining appropriate controls.
“By taking a structured approach to SLA gap management, organisations can access innovative cloud services while maintaining strong security postures and regulatory compliance,” says Bruce, for whom the key is moving beyond simple accept/reject decisions to sophisticated risk management that enables business objectives while protecting against genuine threats.
Organisations that develop mature approaches to SLA gap management will be best positioned to take advantage of these innovations while maintaining appropriate risk management standards.
Every technology decision involves risk trade-offs. Should IT make the most of new cloud and AI innovation, even if it may not fully meet corporate IT standards, or go with established public cloud providers where there is the potential of being locked in and facing the opaque egress fees that McCluggage refers to.
Aryaka’s Sood urges IT decision-makers to adopt proactive governance, risk and compliance (GRC) by updating the organisation’s internal security policies and procedures to account for the new cloud service and its specific risk profile. “Map the provider’s security controls and your compensating controls directly to relevant regulatory requirements,” he says.
Sood also suggests that IT leaders should ensure documentation of the organisation’s risk assessments, mitigation strategies and any formal risk acceptance decisions are meticulously managed.
By adopting these strategies, IT and security leaders can confidently embrace innovative cloud technologies, minimising inherent risks and ensuring a strong compliance posture, even when faced with SLAs that don’t initially meet all desired criteria.
With such measures and policies in place, IT decision-makers understand the risk and their mitigation strategies, which should put them in a better place to select the best AI and cloud innovations for their organisations. “The question isn’t whether to accept risk, but how to manage it intelligently in pursuit of business objectives,” says Bruce.
Floating turbines are particularly well suited to Japan as its deep coastal waters make fixing them to seabeds tricky.
Close to a small fishing port in southwestern Japan, the slim white turbines of the country’s first commercial-scale floating wind farm glimmer offshore, months before a key project in Tokyo’s green-energy strategy begins.
Still heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels, Japan has declared offshore wind energy a “trump card” in its drive to make renewables its top power source by 2040, and reach carbon neutrality a decade later.
That’s despite rising project costs and fears over inadequate infrastructure to produce turbines en masse.
Floating turbines are particularly well suited to Japan as its deep coastal waters make fixing them to seabeds tricky, while the country is also prone to natural disasters.
“Floating structures are relatively stable even in the case of earthquakes or typhoons,” said Kei Ushigami, head of marine renewable energy for construction company Toda, a key player in the project.
The eight turbines—sitting five kilometers (three miles) off the coast of the Goto Islands in waters up to 140 meters deep—will officially start turning in January.
It’s hoped they’ll aid the archipelago in reaching ambitious new targets laid out this year that should see wind’s contribution to the energy mix soar to between 4% and 8% by 2040—up from around 1% today.
Fishermen receive part of the revenue from electricity sales and some of the property taxes generated by the project.
But it’s a long, hard road ahead for resource-scarce Japan—the world’s fifth-largest carbon dioxide emitter—to wean itself off fossil fuels.
In 2024, 65% of its electricity needs were met by coal and hydrocarbon-powered thermal plants, while just over a quarter came from renewables, according to Japan’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies.
Herculean task
Costs are also rising sharply, and at the end of August Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi pulled out of three key wind power projects deemed no longer profitable.
Other project operators have asked for better support from the government.
“It is important for the government to address shortcomings in the current bidding system, which failed to anticipate rapid global inflation after bids were awarded,” said Yoko Mulholland from the think tank E3G.
The streamlining of regulatory processes and easing construction restrictions would “shorten lead times and also lower capital expenditure”, she told AFP.
Coexistence with local industries, especially fishing, is also crucial.
Hidenori Yonekura, from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, sees the nascent floating wind energy as a path to eventually lower costs, by installing more turbines in Japan’s vast Exclusive Economic Zone of 4.5 million square kilometers.
The task, however, appears Herculean: to meet the 2040 wind target, around 200 15-megawatt turbines a year need to go up.
But “the infrastructure is not yet in place”, warned Yonekura. “Japan lacks turbine manufacturers and large production sites.”
Fishers’ livelihoods
Construction companies also face technical challenges with these still-novel systems: defects discovered in the floating structure of a wind turbine at Goto meant Toda had to make replacements, delaying the project by two years.
Coexistence with local industries, especially fishing, is also crucial.
Toda said it had conducted an environmental assessment and found a pilot project had “no negative impact on fish”.
Japan is facing rising project costs and fears over inadequate infrastructure to produce turbines on mass.
Fishermen also receive part of the revenue from electricity sales and some of the property taxes generated by the project, while some have been hired to monitor the construction site with their vessels.
But according to Takuya Eashiro, head of the Fukue fishing cooperative in Goto, the wind project was imposed “from the top” and presented as “a done deal”.
Nevertheless, “fishermen understand the importance of such a project for Japan”, he said.
The National Federation of Fisheries Co-operative Associations protested to the government after Mitsubishi withdrew, reminding them that fishermen had worked with these projects, hoping for positive economic impacts.
As fishing becomes less viable owing to warming sea temperatures, “some hope their children or grandchildren will find jobs in wind turbine maintenance”, said Eashiro.
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Floating wind power sets sail in Japan’s energy shift (2025, September 21)
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Planar vs 3D SOC. Credit: Nature Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-025-01811-y
A team of researchers at DTU may have cracked one of the toughest nuts in sustainable energy: how to make fuel cells light and powerful enough for aerospace applications.
An interdisciplinary collaboration between DTU Energy and DTU Construct has developed a radical redesign of the so-called solid oxide cells (or SOCs), using 3D printing and gyroid geometry. This intricate structure is mathematically optimized to improve surface area in a given volume and is employed both by engineers for heat exchangers and by nature in structures such as butterfly wings.
Gyroidal architecture is structurally robust, has a large surface area, and is lightweight. For the first time, DTU scientists have shown how to use the gyroid to make electrochemical conversion devices such as SOCs.
To power a commercial airplane today, you need jet fuel. If you retrofit a regular jet, replacing its 70 tons of fuel with Li-ion batteries of similar capacity, its weight would be 3,500 tons. And so it wouldn’t take off.
The same has been true for fuel cells, mostly confined to flat, heavy stacks that rely on metal parts for sealing and connectivity. So, those are heavy, too. Metal components make up more than 75% of a fuel cell system’s weight, severely limiting their mobility and consequently, their usefulness in, for example, aerospace applications.
Sustainable flight?
In a new paper published in Nature Energy, DTU scientists may have flipped the script. Professor Vincenzo Esposito from DTU Energy, Senior Researcher Venkata Karthik Nadimpalli from DTU Construct, and several colleagues from both departments have designed a new fuel cell that is fully ceramic and is built by 3D printing. The printed structure is known as a triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) and is mathematically optimized for maximum surface and minimum weight.
Their fuel cell—they call it a Monolithic Gyroidal Solid Oxide Cell or The Monolith for short—delivers more than one watt per gram. Not only is this a first, but it also broadens the field of possible fuel cell applications significantly, explains Nadimpalli, corresponding author of the study.
“Currently, using electricity-based energy conversion, such as batteries and fuel cells, doesn’t make sense for aerospace applications. But our new fuel cell design changes that. It’s the first to demonstrate the Watts to gram ratio—or specific power—needed for aerospace, while using a sustainable, green technology,” he says.
Extreme resilience
Fuel cells are nothing new, and their impact is evident in several sectors. While perhaps most visibly in hydrogen cars, they are, for example, also used as power supplies for hospitals and data centers, in ships, and as storage to stabilize renewable energy systems. Their ability to switch between power-generating and power-storing modes (electrolysis) makes them highly versatile in several applications.
There are many other reasons why the new fuel cells from the team of DTU scientists may be a game-changer. Apart from the weight being brought down significantly, the system allows gases to flow efficiently through the cell, improves heat distribution, and enhances mechanical stability. Switching to electrolysis mode, they produced hydrogen at nearly 10 times the rate of conventional designs.
“We also tested the system in extreme conditions, including temperature swings of 100°C, and repeatedly switched between fuel cell and electrolysis modes. The fuel cells held up impressively, showing no signs of structural failure or layers separating,” says Esposito, corresponding author.
The researchers explain that this kind of resilience is vital for space missions like NASA’s Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), which aims to produce oxygen from Mars’ carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere.
This mission currently relies on bulky stacks weighing more than 6 tons. The new design could deliver a similar performance at 800 kg, which would significantly lower the costs of launching the equipment up there.
What makes this design especially compelling is not only its performance but also how it’s made, explains Nadimpalli, “While conventional SOC stacks require dozens of manufacturing steps and rely on multiple materials that degrade over time, our monolithic ceramic design is produced in just five steps, where we eliminate the metal and avoid fragile seals.
“Still, I believe that we can improve the system further using thinner electrolytes, cheaper current collectors, like silver or nickel instead of platinum, and even more compact designs.”
More information:
Zhipeng Zhou et al, Monolithic gyroidal solid oxide cells by additive manufacturing, Nature Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-025-01811-y
Citation:
3D-printed fuel cells could reshape sustainable aerospace applications (2025, September 21)
retrieved 21 September 2025
from https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-3d-fuel-cells-reshape-sustainable.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
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