Sarah Eberle says she is “deeply honoured and quietly humbled” to be recognised for her services to horticulture.

The Witney-based garden designer, one of the most decorated in RHS history, has spent more than 50 years in the industry.

News of the honour broke while she was at this year’s show.

She said: “It was completely out of the blue and a real excitement. When I do Chelsea I’m not focused on anything else, so when the email came in I had to look again to check I wasn’t imagining it.”

Eberle, famed for her bold, immersive show gardens, says she feels like she has “never worked a day”.

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“I love imparting my passion and helping people, almost showing off,” she said.

In an exclusive interview with the Oxford Mail, she laughed about her relationship with the outdoors, which has not been without challenges.

Even severe allergies, including a spell in hospital after pollen lodged in her lungs at Chelsea, have not kept her away from the showground. “It doesn’t stop me,” she said.

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Eberle went straight into landscape architecture after school, studying environmental subjects at A-level before training for five years at what is now the University of Greenwich.

After early corporate work in urban landscapes, she set up on her own in the South and “fell into garden design” because it gave her the creative freedom she craved.

Over the decades she has worked with everyone from Oxfordshire families to royalty and celebrities, including a commission in Monaco in 2011.

She jokes that gardening is “seriously addictive and can be seriously expensive”, but insists it remains one of the few passions with no social boundaries.

She says she has been “fortunate to work with extraordinary people who share a belief in the power of plants and places to connect us, restore us, and tell stories over time”.

Eberle hopes the honour will spotlight the role horticulture can play in tackling climate change and biodiversity loss.

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She said: “I take this as encouragement to continue — observing closely, working thoughtfully, and helping to create gardens that feel both rooted and resonant for those who experience them.

She wants more people to see planting as a powerful, everyday way to protect wildlife, care for their wellbeing and shape the landscapes future generations will inherit.

“Nature is so connected to mental health and wellbeing that I’m almost driven to show how gardens and landscape should be an intrinsic part of people’s worlds,” she added.

Orbital Industries has raised USD $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Plural.

Other investors included NVentures, Nvidia’s venture arm, along with Radical Ventures, Compound and Fly Ventures. The funding will support wider commercial deployment of Orbital’s data centre products, hiring in London and San Francisco, and development of its AI system for other industrial applications.

The London-based company develops hardware for AI infrastructure. Its first products are a modular data centre system and a cooling fluid for dense GPU environments, both of which have become pressure points as demand for AI computing rises and newer chips generate more heat.

Orbital’s modular data centre product is designed to cut deployment times to as little as six months, compared with conventional projects that can take up to three years. The system is manufactured off-site and delivered as ready-to-deploy units, with SLB as Orbital’s manufacturing partner.

The company has also developed a dielectric two-phase cooling fluid for current and next-generation GPUs. It says the fluid is non-toxic and free from PFAS, a class of chemicals facing tighter scrutiny and possible restrictions in the US and Europe.

Data centre focus

The business is entering the market through Orbital IT, its brand for data centre infrastructure. It is targeting operators, sovereign AI programmes and companies that want to bring high-density compute online without building large internal engineering teams.

Orbital is also working with data centre operators through a multi-year partnership with AWS to develop cooling and efficiency technologies. The aim is to move its systems closer to use in hyperscale facilities.

The company was co-founded by Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Godwin, who previously worked at DeepMind on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design, with Chief Technology Officer James Gin-Pollock and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Miodovnik. Orbital employs about 50 people across London and San Francisco.

At the centre of the company is Orb, an AI model used to simulate the quantum mechanical behaviour of atoms. Orbital says the system shortens the time needed to discover and test new materials, including those used in cooling systems, compared with traditional development cycles.

The approach reflects a broader push by AI companies to move beyond software and address the physical constraints shaping the sector. As AI models grow and data centres become more power-intensive, limits in cooling, power supply and construction speed are becoming a commercial issue for cloud providers and operators.

Orbital sees those constraints as an opening to build industrial products rather than only software tools. It has said it intends to apply the same model beyond data centres in areas such as semiconductors, critical minerals, aerospace and energy.

For investors, the pitch is that growth in AI infrastructure will depend not only on better models and chips, but also on faster deployment of the physical systems around them. In that context, companies that can reduce build times or offer alternatives to regulated cooling materials may find a market among operators trying to expand capacity.

“When people imagine a better future, they think about physical things: technologies that give them more freedom, more time, more life. AI will get us there faster. That’s what we set out to do at Orbital Industries. Frontier AI gives us PhD-level expertise across every discipline, meaning small, agile teams can move from materials discovery to commercial hardware in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. What used to take a decade, we can now do in months. We’re starting with some of the most pressing challenges in data centres, but the scope of what this approach can unlock is much, much bigger,” said Jonathan Godwin, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Orbital Industries.

Plural said Orbital is addressing a growing bottleneck in the AI economy. “AI progress is now constrained by the physical world: by energy, heat and infrastructure. Orbital Industries is tackling those constraints directly, including through breakthroughs such as its AI-designed cooling fluid, which enables the next generation of GPUs. The ability to discover and deploy these technologies faster than traditional industry will define the next phase of AI, and there is already strong demand for what the team is building,” said Hogarth.

MiQ has expanded its Sigma advertising platform in the UK with two new tools, adding measurement and browsing analysis functions for marketers.

The UK launch is part of a broader expansion of Sigma, which MiQ describes as an AI-based system that turns consumer signals into advertising decisions.

Sigma Total Measurement is designed to show marketers how different channels contribute across the consumer journey. The tool is intended to help users assess where media spending works together and where budgets could be reinvested.

A second addition, Browsing Intelligence, focuses on consumers in the consideration stage before purchase or donation. It draws on behavioural, contextual, attention and AI trend data to help brands identify and reach people during what marketers often call the mid-funnel stage.

The expansion follows a year in which Sigma was used in more than 40,000 campaigns by over 2,300 advertisers worldwide, according to MiQ. Testing found Sigma campaigns returned £2.22 in value for every £1 spent, compared with standard programmatic campaign setups.

MiQ attributed that performance to the platform’s use of a large pool of data and its ability to make decisions across a fragmented digital market. Consumers now move between watching, browsing and buying across more than 2,500 digital interactions a day, the company said, increasing the need for systems that can process signals quickly.

The latest version also expands the data underpinning Sigma. MiQ said its data spine now includes more than 600 feeds and 2.5 petabytes of information, with sources including Circana, Titan OS and Evertune, as well as broader AI architecture integrations with Databricks.

Sigma is used by agency groups, independent agencies and advertisers directly in the UK. The platform can activate campaigns across 16 media environments spanning the open web and large closed platforms including Google and YouTube, according to MiQ.

John Goulding, Global Chief Strategy Officer at MiQ, said the challenge for advertisers has changed as audiences spread across more digital services. “As consumers move across video, social, commerce and emerging AI chat platforms, the challenge for marketers has shifted. The gap between those who can and cannot turn signals into real-time decisions is widening fast. Sigma was built to bridge that gap.”

Agency use

An early UK example came from independent agency Beyond, which used Sigma in a connected television campaign for Alzheimer’s Research UK.

“Sigma delivers on two crucial elements every agency looks for in AI: deep data intelligence and activation at scale. We’ve been really impressed by Sigma’s ability to leverage AI to connect data and channels instantly and deliver the results our clients want. We’ve already seen this with Alzheimer’s Research UK, where our connected TV campaign drove an eight-fold increase in consideration to donate. I’m excited about this latest evolution and the opportunity to create even more value for our clients,” said Cox.

The case study shows how MiQ is positioning Sigma in a crowded ad technology market, where measurement and signal loss have become central concerns for agencies and brands. Marketers are under pressure to show not only immediate media results but also how spending influences later consumer action across platforms.

Alfie Atkinson, UK Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman, Canada, at MiQ, said the latest changes were intended to give advertisers more confidence in campaign decisions. “AI is creating an opportunity to reimagine the media and adtech industries in a more connected way, but too much of the conversation is still focused on potential rather than proof. With Sigma, MiQ has already been showing what AI can deliver, and these latest innovations take that even further by giving brands and agencies a clearer view of performance and greater confidence in the decisions driving growth.”

MiQ, founded in London, operates from more than 33 offices worldwide. Sigma is live across all of its operating regions, with the latest UK additions available immediately alongside rollout in the US, Canada, Australia and other international markets, the company said.