Europe’s biggest weather forecaster is reporting record demand for its data, as energy traders, insurers, shipping lines and tech companies rush to improve the accuracy of their AI models.In 2024, the number of commercial firms buying licenses to access data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts rose almost 20% to over 800. Energy traders seeking profitable bets in Europe’s increasingly wind- and solar-driven power markets were some of the earliest and most aggressive adopters of AI weather tools. Those data are increasingly used to train AI models programmed to predict how the atmosphere and oceans will look in the future by finding patterns in a massive archive held by the European forecaster. That’s had some unintended consequences, such as barring shipping companies from dispatching weather forecasts to their fleets. For scientists at ECMWF, AI is the biggest revolution in weather forecasting since the 1990s.