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Best of 2025: 6 Stories that Showcase How Digital Twins and AI are Transforming Infrastructure

Protecting sub-sea level New Orleans from flooding. Building atop the shifting, salt-rich soil in Saudi Arabia. Reviving gold mines mothballed decades ago. These are just some of the challenges that engineers are successfully taking on around the world with help from Bentley Systems software. Learn more in the stories below about how engineers are integrating digital twins, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technology to solve major infrastructure challenges and build for the future. A Digital Gold Rush Record gold prices have flipped the script on the economics of mining, which means mines that were closed decades ago are suddenly gleaming again with promise. But reviving a mine isn’t as simple as turning the lights back on. Companies need to know how much gold is left, where to find it, and how much it will cost to get it out. They also need to determine the mine’s impact on the environment—which is where Seequent, Bentley’s subsurface company, and its industry-leading software come in. Mining teams are turning to Seequent’s Evo, a cloud platform that connects data, teams, and tools in a single collaborative environment. Evo’s accurate modeling isn’t just good for the bottom line—it’s essential for sustainability. “If you can move

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World Tour: 5 Great 3D Visualizations from Cesium in 2025

On Christmas Eve, excited children—and the merely curious—can track Santa Claus’ sleigh across the skies thanks to NORAD’s famous Santa tracker. It’s one of the best-known public-facing applications of Cesium, Bentley Systems’ geospatial technology, which can stream massive datasets, render them in 3D, and deliver them to anyone, anywhere, on any device. In 2025, Santa’s journey caps a year of great Cesium 3D visualizations from around the world, including immersive tours of Berlin, Barcelona, the Netherlands, and Belém, Brazil, this year’s host city for the UN Climate Change Conference. Cesium is also helping a professor in Japan to create interactive records of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Keep reading to learn more about the projects—and to experience for yourself how Cesium lets you experience history, explore landmarks, and marvel at ingenious infrastructure old and new. Using 3D Tech to Redefine How We Experience History University of Tokyo professor Hidenori Watanave has spent two decades creating interactive, explorable records of global conflicts, including the World War II atomic bombings of Japan. With a few clicks, you can walk through Hiroshima and see images of the city as it was. You can also watch video accounts of the bombing directly from

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What is the Bentley Tech Summit—and why does it matter?

In this episode of Bentley Talks, Andy Rahden, Vice President of Solutions Engineering & Services, explains how the Bentley Tech Summit brings together solution engineering, services, support teams, and customers to better serve infrastructure users worldwide. Recorded in Berlin, the conversation explores why the city is a fitting backdrop amid major infrastructure investment, how the summit has evolved from product training to industry-focused workflows, and why face-to-face collaboration is essential to solving complex infrastructure challenges. Rahden also shares his long-term vision: building a global community of technologists—inside and outside Bentley—who learn from one another, share best practices, and help shape how infrastructure is designed, built, and experienced. Below is the transcript of the conversation. Tomas Kellner: What is the Bentley Tech Summit? Andy Rahden: We’re so excited. This is our second Bentley Tech Summit that we’ve held. We initiated the first Bentley Tech Summit in 2024, in December. Exactly a year later, we’re here in Berlin, and we’re so excited to bring all of our internal colleagues together, our solution engineering, our services teams, and our support teams to really increase their ability to provide the needs of our accounts and our users every single day. TK: Why are you

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The Events that Defined Bentley in 2025

At Bentley Systems, we’re all about infrastructure. But we’re also about people—from the individual following a groundbreaking hunch to teams strengthening how they work together. Throughout 2025, Bentley held events that gathered infrastructure professionals to collaborate, accelerate innovation, and inspire the next generation of engineers. Here are stories about three of those events. 1. Inside the First Cesium Developer Conference The inaugural Cesium Developer Conference landed in Philadelphia this summer, bringing together a global crowd of developers, climate scientists, engineers, game designers, and space technologists. Over three days, these professionals explored how open 3D geospatial technology is transforming the way we understand and interact with the world—from city streets to outer space, and even inside the infamous Alcatraz prison. Hosted by Cesium, which became part of Bentley in 2024, the conference featured nearly 90 sessions, with speakers from NASA, Google, NVIDIA, Epic Games, and the Open Geospatial Consortium.  Watch the highlights, see Cesium in action, and read about the innovations. https://youtu.be/8bYbYr5B3JY?si=DBM1onPVKzsvcUUD 2. Berlin Hosts Bentley Systems’ Biggest Tech Summit Yet Bentley’s Andy Rahden called it “one of the most collaborative moments of our year.” The Bentley Tech Summit 2025 gathered over 500 infrastructure professionals in the German capital of Berlin

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LSU Launches a First-of-Its-Kind Digital Twin Certificate With Industry at the Table

Digital twins have quietly become one of the most consequential technologies shaping modern infrastructure and industry. Yet formal training in how they are designed, deployed, and evaluated has lagged behind their adoption. Louisiana State University is aiming to close that gap. This month, LSU launched the nation’s first Digital Twin Design and Production Certificate co-developed by academic and industry experts. The online program will train engineers, project managers, and business leaders in a technology now central to how infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and other critical systems are designed, built, and operated. Digital twins — virtual, real-time replicas of physical assets and systems — allow organizations to plan construction, simulate performance, monitor conditions as they change, and identify problems before they become failures. They can also accommodate AI and simplify engineering workflows. The new certificate was developed jointly by LSU’s College of Engineering, LSU Online, Baton Rouge–based consultancy DigiTwin Global, and Bentley. Registration is now open. “The engineers and business leaders of tomorrow need digital twin skills today,” said Vicki Colvin, dean of LSU’s College of Engineering. “Understanding how these systems are built, how they’re used, and when they’re worth the investment is no longer optional.” The program consists of seven online

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Breaking Walls, Building Value: How Bentley Teams and Users Work Side by Side in Berlin to Solve Real Infrastructure Challenges

More than 500 engineers, service technicians, product managers, and industry experts came together for a hands-on, fast-moving, problem-solving event built around one idea: One Bentley. This video captures the energy inside the summit’s workshops, where Bentley teams and users wrote down ideas, reshaped workflows, and solved real infrastructure problems side by side. Hear from participants like Marina Savenkova, Aritra Lodh, Volaree Rendon, and Ross Brown as they describe a hive-mind environment where collaboration becomes second nature. The curriculum focused on delivering clear value to users—understanding their pain points and creating the workflows and tools that solve them.  This is how One Bentley takes shape: in the rooms where silos fall and solutions rise. Want to read more from our coverage in Berlin? Check out our Q+A with CTO Julien Moutte. Or try our latest visualization of Berlin, using Cesium’s story technology.

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Inside the Bentley Tech Summit 2025: How 500 Experts Came Together in Berlin to Rethink the Future of Infrastructure

Set against the backdrop of the country’s historic half-trillion-euro investment in modernizing its transport, energy, and public-works systems, the Tech Summit 2025 brought Bentley’s global community together. Hear from Bentley leaders, power users, and solution architects as they work side by side to solve real infrastructure challenges. From collaborative, user-led training to breakthrough workflows shaped directly by practitioners, this year marked a major shift: the future of infrastructure is being built by the people who use the tools every day. Featuring insights from:• Nathan Marsh, SVP and Regional Executive, EMEA• Andy Rahden, VP, Solution Engineering & Services• Kierstin Arthur, Senior Technical Enablement Manager• Mehreen Javaid, Senior Solutions Architect• Barritt Lovelace, VP of Emerging Technologies, Collins Engineering• Tomas Kellner, Chief Storyteller The next decade of infrastructure requires new ideas, new talent, and new ways of learning — and it starts here in Berlin.

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Power Couple: How a Marriage of Minds and Expertise Rescued a Sinking Saudi Warehouse

In the humming Saudi Arabian port city of Jazan,  on the Red Sea, grain trucks now rumble through a huge warehouse that once seemed doomed almost from the start. Years before the building was completed, around 2017, cracks laced its concrete slab, walls, and joints. Uneven settlement warped the floor and walls. When heavy cargoes of grain arrived, the damage accelerated. Why had the foundations failed so spectacularly? Hamzah Al-Hashemi has a ready answer: “Welcome to the Bermuda Triangle of ground engineering.” A geotechnical engineer, Al-Hashemi is the CEO and technical director of GeoStruXer, a company he co-founded in 2023 with his spouse, Dana Al-Faleyleh, a structural engineer. They constitute a personal and professional partnership that’s rare in an industry where their disciplines—ground intelligence and structural expertise—tend to keep a respectful distance. But the combination showed its value at the Jazan warehouse.   The couple set out to uncover what the ground was hiding—and then, using Bentley Systems’ software solutions, designed a warehouse rehabilitation plan so efficient and environmentally sensitive that it went on to win the Bentley Envision Award. The award, given by Bentley Systems as part of its annual Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards (YII), is a

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Where the World Meets the Amazon: A 3D Tour COP30’s Host City of Belém

1. Welcome to Belém From floating markets to flood-resilient neighborhoods, Cesium’s interactive 3D experience immerses users in the host city of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP30)—revealing how Belém, Brazil, is balancing climate adaptation, cultural heritage, and economic future at the mouth of the mighty Amazon River. Bentley System is hosting a series of events in Belém and across Brazil tied to COP30.   The annual COP summit is the world’s main stage for global climate action—where nations gather to negotiate, assess progress, and strengthen commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. The conference brings together governments, businesses, NGOs, and communities to foster collaboration and accountability.  This year’s conference will spotlight the Amazon’s role in global climate stability, mobilize funding for sustainable development, and mark a shift from negotiation to implementation.  Follow our Bentley Insights blog and our social media channels to learn more.  Check out the visualization of Belém. 2. COP30 When experts, academics, and world leaders gather for COP30 from November 10–21,  the world’s largest climate summit will be heading straight to the Amazon and the heart of the climate crisis. Brazil will host the event in Belém, a vibrant tropical port city that

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Inside the Race to Build—and Power—the World’s Largest Data Centers 

You know that something extraordinary is happening on the outskirts of Abilene, in the Big Country part of Texas, even before you arrive. By 6 a.m., a line of cars stretches a mile from the highway to where thousands of workers are building one of the biggest data center sites in the world.  Preston Williams of DPR Construction, the project’s general contractor, is part of the team building the Abilene data center. Its size is staggering. One of the largest such centers in the U.S., and possibly the world, the site will span 4 million square feet, roughly 70 football fields, and include eight buildings that will each house up to 50,000 Nvidia artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The center’s power needs will approach 1.2 gigawatts, rivalling the output of a nuclear plant. The center will be part of the $500 billion Stargate program that will provide the massive infrastructure needed to power the boom in AI. “It really is a place to test how to plan a job correctly, because you have to have some way to organize the madness,” Williams says.  Williams sat down with the Bentley Horizons podcast to talk about the massive project, in an episode that’s all

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