Due to budget cuts by the Trump administration, a Silicon Valley weather startup will produce AI-powered weather balloons for the government, replacing those used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Semafor reported.
WindBorne, founded in 2019, said it can provide valuable weather balloon data for a fraction of the cost by keeping the balloons in the sky for weeks by using a combination of off-the-shelf computer parts and novel software, Semafor said.
Weather balloons from the NOAA can only be used for a single day. The NOAA has seen its budget slashed by 25%, due to cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by tech mogul Elon Musk.
The NOAA has been slashing its daily weather balloon flights since March, allowing its partnership with WindBorne to expand, according to Semafor.
WindBorne’s balloons have a higher initial cost than NOAA’s, but because they stay up in the air much longer, they end up gathering data at a lower cost, Semafor reported.
The balloons use AI to determine how to use elevation to steer over specific locations where data is needed, and their weather prediction model is considered one of the best in the world, Semafor said. The company’s goal is to have 10,000 balloons in the air at any given time, allowing it to cover the world.
John Dean, the co-founder and CEO of WindBorne told Semafor that in the long run, DOGE’s cuts may improve the NOAA’s ability to predict the weather.
“It’s created chaos that, long term, will probably get us more data,” Dean said, also noting that some of DOGE’s cuts were “reckless.”
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