MIDLAND, Texas, Aug. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Robert Stitzel Scholarship for Entrepreneurs officially launches today, offering a dedicated platform for undergraduate students across the United States to advance their business leadership goals. Established by Robert Stitzel, a Professional Engineer and recognized business leader with over three decades of experience in the energy sector, this one-time award aims to cultivate the next generation of entrepreneurial thinkers. Robert Stitzel leverages his extensive background in engineering excellence, operational leadership, and company development to provide a meaningful educational opportunity for emerging innovators.

Eligibility for the Robert Stitzel Scholarship for Entrepreneurs requires applicants to hold current enrollment in an accredited undergraduate institution within the United States. Candidates must display a documented interest in entrepreneurship, innovation, or business leadership. The application process requires students to submit a comprehensive packet containing their contact information, university details, field of study, and an optional resume highlighting academic and extracurricular achievements.

A central component of the application involves a substantive essay ranging from 750 to 1,000 words. Robert Stitzel requests that applicants explore a specific challenge they wish to solve through entrepreneurial means. The essay prompts students to articulate a proposed solution, explain the value it generates for others, and detail the leadership qualities necessary to execute the vision successfully. To maintain academic integrity, Robert Stitzel stipulates that all submitted essays must consist of original, unpublished work. Essays generated entirely by artificial intelligence or copied from external sources do not meet the eligibility requirements.

Applicants must compile all required documents into a single PDF file and submit the materials via email. The submission deadline stands as April 15, 2027. Following a thorough review process, the organization announces the selected recipient on May 15, 2027. Because this initiative functions as a one-time award rather than a recurring annual program, undergraduate students are encouraged to prepare their materials well in advance of the spring deadline to ensure consideration.

Through this focused initiative, Robert Stitzel  bridges the gap between academic theory and practical business execution. The Robert Stitzel Scholarship for Entrepreneurs serves as a strategic investment in the future of the American business landscape, prioritizing actionable problem-solving over conventional academic metrics.

Contact Information
Spokesperson: Robert Stitzel
Organization: Robert Stitzel Scholarship for Entrepreneurs
Website: robertstitzelscholarship.com
Email: apply@robertstitzelscholarship.com

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/robert-stitzel-scholarship-for-entrepreneurs-launches-to-fund-undergraduate-innovation-across-the-us-302863062.html

SOURCE Robert Stitzel Scholarship

Financing for NVIDIA AI Infrastructure deployment draws on Blue Owl’s digital infrastructure operating and underwriting experience

NEW YORK, Aug. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Blue Owl Capital Inc. (NYSE: OWL) (“Blue Owl”), a leading alternative asset manager, today announced that funds managed by Blue Owl led a $2.4 billion compute equipment financing for IREN Limited (NASDAQ: IREN) (“IREN”), a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference.

The financing comprises a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion of senior secured notes, with proceeds to fund IREN’s purchase of air-cooled NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Infrastructure including NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs for IREN’s Mackenzie data center campus in British Columbia, Canada. The facility is structured to fund equipment purchases in tranches over a defined draw period, allowing capital to be deployed alongside the delivery and commissioning of hardware. The transaction supports IREN’s continued build-out of its AI Cloud infrastructure, which is underpinned by a more than 5GW global data center development pipeline.

“Customer demand for AI compute is accelerating, and we are scaling rapidly to meet it. This financing supports the continued build-out of our AI Cloud infrastructure at Mackenzie, expanding our capacity to serve a growing customer base across both AI training and inference workloads,” said Anthony Lewis, Chief Financial Officer, IREN.

“Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) makes NVIDIA AI factories fungible across any customers and workloads—and better over time. That makes NVIDIA AI infrastructure an investable infrastructure asset class for long-term capital. Blue Owl’s $2.4 billion asset-backed GPU financing for IREN is another great proof point—and a repeatable model for financing AI infrastructure at scale,” said Nico Caprez, Vice President, Global AI Infrastructure Growth at NVIDIA.

“This is equipment finance at AI scale, and it demands the same discipline,” said Kurt Tenenbaum, Senior Managing Director at Blue Owl. “Our investment track record, combined with operating experience across more than 100 data centers worldwide, lets us tailor this facility to how AI Infrastructure is actually delivered and deployed. That’s what makes us a partner of choice for the AI compute ecosystem, while providing our investors with strong risk-adjusted returns.”

About Blue Owl Capital Inc.

Blue Owl (NYSE: OWL) is a leading asset manager that is redefining alternatives®. With $319 billion in assets under management as of June 30, 2026, we invest across three multi-strategy platforms: Credit, Real Assets and GP Strategic Capital. Anchored by a strong permanent capital base, we provide businesses with private capital solutions to drive long-term growth and offer institutional investors, individual investors, and insurance companies differentiated alternative investment opportunities that aim to deliver strong performance, risk-adjusted returns, and capital preservation.

Together with over 1,380 experienced professionals globally, Blue Owl brings the vision and discipline to create the exceptional. To learn more, visit www.blueowl.com or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blue-owl-capital.

About IREN

IREN is a vertically integrated AI Cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute and software for AI training and inference. IREN’s platform is underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid connected power in renewable-rich regions across North America, Europe and APAC.

Investor Contact:
Ann Dai
Head of Investor Relations
blueowlir@blueowl.com

Media Contact
Andrew Williams
Head of Communications
media@blueowl.com 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blue-owl-managed-funds-lead-2-4-billion-ai-factory-financing-for-iren-302863057.html

SOURCE Blue Owl Capital

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — IDrive today announced the launch of IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving, a low-cost, licenseable L2+ driver-assistance platform designed to give automotive companies a practical path to deploying advanced driving assistance without having to build an autonomous-driving system from the ground up.

The company is positioning L2+ as the industry’s practical sweet spot: sophisticated enough to deliver meaningful driving automation on everyday roads, while keeping the human driver responsible for the vehicle. IDrive Autonomy is available for licensing now and is already operating on a production vehicle for real-world demonstration.

The announcement comes as automakers face a difficult choice in advanced driver assistance. Traditional L2 systems can be limited, fragmented and difficult to improve after launch, while pursuing true full self-driving is an extraordinarily difficult engineering, validation and liability challenge.

“The industry has spent years chasing the dream of full self-driving, but FSD is an entirely different problem,” said Raghu Kulkarni, CEO of IDrive. “You are not just solving a perception and driving problem, you are taking on an enormous safety, validation, regulatory and liability burden. That makes a fully autonomous system extremely difficult to commercialize and even harder to license as a general-purpose product. We believe L2+ is where the real opportunity is today. Automakers want better driver assistance, but they don’t want to reinvent the entire autonomy stack.”

L2+ Is the Opportunity Today.

Achieving reliable full self-driving across virtually every road, weather condition and unpredictable driving scenario requires solving an enormous number of edge cases. It also changes the liability equation: when a vehicle is expected to drive without human responsibility, the technology provider and vehicle manufacturer face substantially greater consequences when the system fails.

That makes a turnkey, general-purpose FSD stack exceptionally difficult for an automotive company to simply license and deploy.

L2+ offers a fundamentally different model.

The driver remains responsible and supervises the system, while the vehicle handles increasingly sophisticated tasks such as lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, stop-and-go driving and lane-change assistance. Companies can therefore deliver a significantly more capable driving experience without taking on the same technological and liability burden associated with fully autonomous operation.

“L2+ is the sweet spot,” said Kulkarni. “Companies are already trying to deliver it, but the market lacks a compelling solution that is low-cost, adaptable, transparent and actually available as a layer they can license and ship. That’s the gap IDrive Autonomy is designed to fill.”

A Driver-Assist Layer Automakers Can License and Ship

IDrive Autonomy is built as a single learned driving system rather than a collection of disconnected driver-assistance functions. The system is designed for ordinary driving environments, including urban streets, open freeways and mixed traffic.

Current capabilities include:

Lane keeping through curvesAdaptive cruise controlStop-and-go traffic managementLane-change assistanceObject and lead-vehicle trackingLane-departure warningsA real-time driver display showing what the system sees

The system is currently being demonstrated on public roads, with more than 1,100 real-world miles engaged, more than 25 hours of engaged driving, and an engaged top speed of 70 mph. IDrive says system changes are evaluated with a safety driver on the road and in simulation, with driving data feeding back into the underlying model.

Designed for a Low-Cost Hardware Footprint

IDrive has designed the system around a deliberately lean hardware configuration rather than expensive, specialized sensor suites.

The complete assisted-driving stack is approximately $1,500 in hardware, consisting of:

Two camerasAn inertial measurement unit (IMU)Compute

The cameras can be installed behind the rearview mirror without modifying the vehicle, providing a universal-fit approach intended to simplify integration across vehicle platforms.

One Foundation for the Road Ahead

While IDrive Autonomy is launching with L2+ assisted driving, IDrive has designed the underlying technology with a longer-term autonomy roadmap in mind.

The company’s roadmap progresses through three stages: Assisted Driving, Collaborative Driving and, ultimately, Robotaxi applications. The immediate focus is Stage 1, delivering practical L2+ capabilities today, while continuing research toward increasingly autonomous driving systems.

IDrive describes the approach as “one model, three stages”, allowing experience and data from real-world driving to contribute to future system improvements.

IDrive Autonomy Is Available for Licensing

IDrive Autonomy Assisted Driving is available now for automotive companies interested in licensing and integrating the technology into their vehicle platforms.

Automotive manufacturers and mobility companies can learn more about IDrive Autonomy, its technology and licensing opportunities at: IDrive Autonomy

About IDrive

IDrive Inc. is a privately held company specializing in cloud storage, cloud backup, file sharing, remote access, compliance and related technologies. Core services include IDrive®, RemotePC™ and IBackup. The company’s services help over 5 million customers back up over 1 Exabyte of data.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/idrive-launches-autonomy-assisted-driving-bringing-a-licenseable-l2-driver-assist-stack-to-automotive-companies-302863072.html

SOURCE IDrive Inc.