The U.S. Navy has inked its largest robotics deal yet as the military branch looks to use robots to keep up with its fleet maintenance.

Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes robots and sensors for inspecting large industrial assets, has signed a five-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) deal with the U.S. Navy and U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the company announced on Tuesday. The deal starts with an initial $54 million award and has a $71 million ceiling.

The Navy will use Gecko’s robots and sensors to monitor the status and health of the U.S. Navy’s assets and fleets of ships, starting with 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Gecko founder and CEO Jake Loosararian told TechCrunch that the company’s robots will crawl into every nook and cranny of the ships to create a detailed digital replica — sometimes called a “digital twin” — of each vessel. The company’s software will help the organization monitor the assets and recommend maintenance, trying to get ahead of problems before they arise and reduce maintenance times and cost.

“Once you create that digital representation using the robotic systems of the health and the condition of these assets, and even the digitization of the environment itself, then you can accelerate how quickly you can make decisions and repair,” Loosararian said. “You want to be able to build this living, breathing model that ensures that you’re reducing days into the future that these assets have to spend [out of service].”

This deal is meant to help the Navy reach its goal of having 80% ship readiness by 2027. Today, about 40% of the Navy’s fleet is unavailable at any given time due to the long maintenance cycles on these vessels.

“It’s like $13 billion to $20 billion a year in maintenance,” Loosararian said. “At a time when you need every asset you can get, that’s pretty critical. And these assets aren’t getting any younger either.”

Gecko has been working with the U.S. Navy for four years. After a port engineer stationed in Japan reached out to learn more about the company, Gecko conducted an evaluation and a drew up a preventative maintenance plan. The Navy was impressed, and the relationship grew from there, leading up to Tuesday’s deal.

“We’re helping to ensure that our critical assets live as long as they can and never are down,” Loosararian said. “I want to live in a world where we don’t have ships going through maintenance cycles, because we just know what’s broken and what to fix while they’re actually deployed. That’s my vision of the future, whether it’s a military asset or it’s a power plant.”

Amazon is launching one-hour and three-hour delivery options across many cities in the U.S. as the e-commerce giant looks to compete with instant delivery companies like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.

The e-commerce giant is making more than 90,000 items available via this new delivery system. If an item can be delivered to a user within one or three hours, they’ll see a label saying so next to that item on the Amazon app. There’s also a filter for these new delivery options in the app and on the site.

Amazon Prime subscribers will be charged $9.99 for one-hour deliveries and $4.99 for three-hour deliveries. If you don’t have a Prime subscription, you’ll pay $19.99 for one-hour deliveries and $14.99 for three-hour deliveries.

Amazon said it is making the one-hour delivery option available in hundreds of cities in the U.S., including parts of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as Des Moines, Boise, and American Fork. The three-hour option is available in over 2,000 U.S. cities and towns.

The company is also launching a dedicated storefront to house items eligible for these new delivery options.

“Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running. We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members,” Udit Madan, senior vice president of Worldwide Operations at Amazon, said in a statement.

The company said it is using its existing, same-day fulfillment sites for the new delivery options.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has tried its hand at instant deliveries. The company previously launched one-hour deliveries under the “Prime Now” service in 2014, but it was discontinued in 2021. And then in December 2025, it piloted a 30-minute delivery option in Seattle and Philadelphia.

The company has been trying to get into the quick-commerce game worldwide. In India, the company in 2024 launched Amazon Now, a 10-minute delivery service for groceries and other items, and last year expanded it to several cities. Amazon launched the service in the United Arab Emirates last October, promising deliveries within 15 minutes.

Electricity is a key raw material for artificial intelligence, but new processing techniques outstrip the ability of data center operators to manage their relationship with the power grid, forcing them to throttle down by as much as 30%.

“There is so much power squandered in these AI factories,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a keynote speech at the company’s annual GTC customer conference. “Every unused watt is revenue lost,” the company proclaimed during the annual presentation.

Today, startup Niv-AI has emerged from stealth with $12 million in seed funding to solve this problem by precisely measuring GPU power use with new sensors and developing tools to manage it more efficiently.

The Tel Aviv-based startup was founded last year by CEO Tomer Timor and CTO Edward Kizis, and is backed by Glilot Capital, Grove Ventures, Arc VC, Encoded VC, Leap Forward, and Aurora Capital Partners. The company declined to share its valuation.

As frontier labs operate thousands of GPUs in concert to train and run advanced models, there are frequent, millisecond-scale power demand surges as the processors switch between computation tasks and communicating with other GPUs.

These surges make it difficult for data centers to manage the power they draw from the grid. To avoid being left without sufficient electricity, data centers pay for temporary energy storage to cover surges, or throttle their GPU usage. Both cases reduce the return on investments in expensive chips.

“We just can’t continue building data centers the way we build them now,” said Lior Handelsman, a partner at Grove Ventures who sits on Niv’s board.

The first step in Niv’s roadmap is understanding what’s going on; the company is now deploying rack-level sensors that detect power usage at the millisecond level on GPUs that it owns and alongside design partners. The goal is to understand the specific power profiles of different deep learning tasks, and develop mitigation techniques that allow data centers to unlock more of their existing capacity.

Naturally, the engineers expect to build an AI model on the data they collect, with the goal of training it to predict and synchronize power loads across the data center — a “copilot” for data center engineers.

Niv-AI expects to have an operational system in a handful of U.S. data centers in the next six to eight months. It’s an attractive idea as hyperscalers trying to build new data centers face difficult land-use and supply chain hiccups. The founders see their ultimate product as a missing “intelligence layer” between data centers and the electrical grid.

“The grid is actually afraid of the data center consuming too much power at a specific time,” Timor told TechCrunch. “The problem we’re looking at is a problem with two sides of the rope. One is to try to help the data centers utilize more GPUs, and hopefully make more of the power that they’re already paying for. On the other hand, you can also create much more responsible power profiles in between the data centers and the grid.”