Europe’s attempt at building a battery manufacturing powerhouse announced that it had halted work on a factory expansion and laid off about 20% of its employees.

Swedish battery maker Northvolt said on Monday it was cutting a fifth of its workforce and scaling back expansion plans in response to "headwinds."

Northvolt plans to cut 1,600 jobs at its base in Sweden, or about a fifth of its global workforce, as Europe's biggest hope in the electric vehicle battery market struggles with production problems, sluggish demand and competition from China.

We benchmarked a retail model Asus Zenbook S 14 with Intel's new and true AI-ready Lunar Lake platform and saw standard-setting battery results.

Ultra-thin and light laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 14 live and die by their battery life. No one likes forever hunting for outlets, and that's particularly frustrating with computers designed to be highly mobile;

Astounding battery life and massive leaps forward in CPU and GPU performance prove that Intel is done messing around. Click here for Lunar Lake benchmarks.