This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.

as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)

maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.