WindBorne wins a hefty US Air Force contract for its balloon data

A startup has won a contract worth up to $49 million from the U.S. Air Force to provide atmospheric data collected by its fleet of autonomous weather balloons. The company operates about 700 balloons globally and feeds the sensor readings into an AI weather forecasting model, and this is described as the single largest contract the company has participated in. AI weather forecasting has become increasingly productive as a deep-learning application, with models now proving more accurate than traditional forecasts that rely on expensive supercomputers running physics equations. The contract was awarded without competitive bidding, with the government determining that this company was the only organization able to provide the capability in the way that met their operational needs.