The Asian Development Bank’s new $70 billion connectivity push is best understood as an attempt to tackle two of Asia’s biggest structural bottlenecks at the same time: fragmented energy systems and uneven digital infrastructure.

The program, announced at the ADB’s annual meeting in Samarkand, will run through 2035 and is split between a $50 billion Pan-Asia Power Grid Initiative and a $20 billion digital-connectivity effort. The stated aim is to strengthen cross-border power links, increase electricity trade, and expand broadband access across the region.

The United States has opened a new front in its long-running solar trade campaign by imposing preliminary antidumping duties on solar cells and panels from India, Indonesia, and Laos. The Commerce Department concluded that exporters in those three countries were selling into the U.S. market at unfairly low prices, with preliminary dumping margins set at 123.04% for India, 35.17% for Indonesia, and 22.46% for Laos.

Together, those three countries supplied roughly $4.5 billion of U.S. solar imports last year, accounting for about two-thirds of the total, so this is not a niche trade action. It strikes directly at one of the main supply channels feeding the fast-growing American solar market.

The US Department of Energy is deploying one of the most pragmatic tools available for rapidly expanding domestic electricity supply: squeezing more power from nuclear reactors that already exist.

The UPRISE program, announced in March, aims to add 2.5 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2027 and five gigawatts by 2029 through a combination of reactor uprates and facility restarts, effectively delivering the equivalent of five new nuclear plants without the decade-long construction timelines and multi-billion-dollar capital costs that have made new nuclear development prohibitively slow in the United States.