A five-year expansion plan at the Port of Savannah aims to help the port stay ahead of growing demand for service in the region, port officials said today.
Georgia Ports Authority (GPA) officials announced the Big Berth/Big Ship program, in which the Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal will be upgraded to handle six 14,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) vessels simultaneously by 2024. The terminal can handle two such vessels now and will be able to handle three by April of this year, port officials said.
"A strong global economy coupled with a growing awareness of Savannah's logistical advantages are driving sustained growth at our deepwater container terminal," GPA Board Chairman Jimmy Allgood said during the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference, held February 3-5, Sea Island, Ga. "GPA's Big Berth/Big Ship program will ensure Georgia stays ahead of demand and ahead of the competition."
Over the next five years, the GPA said it plans to add 21 Neo-Panamax ship-to-shore cranes, replacing 14 of its older models, to bring the total fleet to 37. Dock upgrades are already under way to support the new, larger machines, officials said.
In addition to the ship-to-shore cranes, the GPA said it will add a dozen new rubber-tired gantry (RTG) cranes, giving the Garden City Terminal 158 container-handling cranes. Ten RTGs will be commissioned in July, with another two commissioned in September, port officials said.
Other upgrades include the Mason Mega Rail project, which will double the Port of Savannah's rail lift capacity to 1 million containers per year by late 2020, and the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project—slated for completion in late 2021—which will "deliver the deeper water necessary to better accommodate the larger vessels now calling on the U.S. East Coast," port officials also said.
GPA Executive Director Griff Lynch emphasized the region's growth, noting that the Port of Savannah saw its busiest month ever in January, moving 433,975 TEUs, a 28 percent increase compared with January 2017.
The San Francisco tech startup Vooma has raised $16 million in venture funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) platform designed for freight brokers and carriers, the company said today.
The backing came from a $13 million boost in “series A” funding led by Craft Ventures, which followed an earlier seed round of $3.6 million led by Index Ventures with participation from angel investors including founders and executives from major logistics and technology companies such as Motive, Project44, Ryder, and Uber Freight.
Founded in 2023, the firm has built “Vooma Agents,” which it calls a multi-channel AI platform for logistics. The system uses various agents to operate across email, text and voice channels, allowing for automation in workflows that were previously unaddressable by existing systems. According to Vooma, its platform lets logistics companies scale up their operations by reducing time spent on tedious and manual work and creating space to solve real logistical challenges, while also investing in critical relationships.
The company’s solutions include: Vooma Quote, which identifies quotes and drafts email responses, Vooma Build, a data-entry assistant for load building, and Vooma Voice, which can make and receive calls for brokers and carriers. Additional options are: Vooma Insights and the future releases of Vooma Agent and Vooma Schedule.
“The United States moves approximately 11.5 billion tons of truckloads annually, and moving freight from point A to B requires hundreds of touchpoints between shippers, brokers and carriers,” Vooma co-founder, who is the former CEO of ASG LogisTech, said in a release. “By introducing AI that fits naturally into existing systems, workflows and communication channels used across the industry, we are meaningfully reducing the tasks people dislike and freeing up their time and headspace for more meaningful and complex challenges.”
The new funding brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining the e-commerce giant’s position as a minority investor, according to Anthropic. The partnership was launched in 2023, when Amazon invested its first $4 billion round in the firm.
Anthropic’s “Claude” family of AI assistant models is available on AWS’s Amazon Bedrock, which is a cloud-based managed service that lets companies build specialized generative AI applications by choosing from an array of foundation models (FMs) developed by AI providers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon itself.
According to Amazon, tens of thousands of customers, from startups to enterprises and government institutions, are currently running their generative AI workloads using Anthropic’s models in the AWS cloud. Those GenAI tools are powering tasks such as customer service chatbots, coding assistants, translation applications, drug discovery, engineering design, and complex business processes.
"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," Matt Garman, AWS CEO, said in a release. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration."
The Dutch ship building company Concordia Damen has worked with four partner firms to build two specialized vessels that will serve the offshore wind industry by transporting large, and ever growing, wind turbine components, the company said today.
The first ship, Rotra Horizon, launched yesterday at Jiangsu Zhenjiang Shipyard, and its sister ship, Rotra Futura, is expected to be delivered to client Amasus in 2025. The project involved a five-way collaboration between Concordia Damen and Amasus, deugro Danmark, Siemens Gamesa, and DEKC Maritime.
The design of the 550-foot Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon builds on the previous vessels Rotra Mare and Rotra Vente, which were also developed by Concordia Damen, and have been operating since 2016. However, the new vessels are equipped for the latest generation of wind turbine components, which are becoming larger and heavier. They can handle that increased load with a Roll-On/Roll-Off (RO/RO) design, specialized ramps, and three Liebherr cranes, allowing turbine blades to be stowed in three tiers, providing greater flexibility in loading methods and cargo configurations.
“For the Rotra Futura and Rotra Horizon, we, along with our partners, have focused extensively on energy savings and an environmentally friendly design,” Concordia Damen Managing Director Chris Kornet said in a release. “The aerodynamic and hydro-optimized hull design, combined with a special low-resistance coating, contributes to lower fuel consumption. Furthermore, the vessels are equipped with an advanced Wärtsilä main engine, which consumes 15 percent less fuel and has a smaller CO₂ emission footprint than current standards.”
Roadrunner CEO Chris Jamroz made the move through Prospero Staff Capital, a private equity vehicle that he co-leads with the investor Ted Kellner, buying the stake from Elliott Investment Management L.P.
Kellner, the founder and partner of Fiduciary Management Inc. with over $17 billion in assets under management, and currently CEO of T&M Partners and Chairman of Fiduciary Real Estate Development, is a long-term investor in Roadrunner. Prospero Staff Capital is part of LyonIX Holdings, Jamroz’ investment company with holdings in transportation and logistics, real estate, infrastructure, and cyber security.
"After comprehensively unwinding the prior management's roll-up strategy to get to a pure-play LTL network, Roadrunner now stands as a premium long-haul carrier," Jamroz said in a release. "Today marks the beginning of our growth phase, driven by new capital, strategic investments, and acquisitions. We're committed to organic expansion, as well as pursuing focused and opportunistic M&A to strengthen our market position."
Specifically, loaded import volume rose 11.2% in October 2024, compared to October 2023, as port operators processed 81,498 TEUs (twenty-foot containers), versus 73,281 TEUs in 2023, the port said today.
“Overall, the Port’s loaded import cargo is trending towards its pre-pandemic level,” Port of Oakland Maritime Director Bryan Brandes said in a release. “This steady increase in import volume in 2024 is an encouraging trend. We are also seeing a rise in US agricultural exports through Oakland. Thanks to refrigerated warehousing on Port property near the maritime terminals and convenient truck and rail access, we are well-positioned to continue to grow ag export cargo volume through the Oakland Seaport.”
Looking deeper into its October statistics, loaded exports declined 3.4%, registering 66,649 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 68,974 TEUs in October 2023. Despite that slight decline, the category has grown 6.7% between January and October 2024 compared to the same period last year.
In fact, Oakland’s exports have been declining over the past decade, a long-term trend that is largely due to the reduction in demand for recycled paper exports. However, agricultural exports have made up for some of the export losses from paper, the port said.
For the fourth quarter, empty exports bumped up 30.6%. Port operators processed 29,750 TEUs in October 2024, compared to 22,775 TEUs in October 2023. And empty imports increased 15.3%, with 15,682 TEUs transiting Port facilities in October 2024, in contrast to 13,597 TEUs in October 2023.