Qualcomm, the king of the smartphone modem, is in talks to design custom chips for ByteDance. The move would help it escape a shrinking phone market. It also shows US chipmakers will not give up on China. Qualcomm wants to be a chip designer for the AI age. Its first big customer could be Chinese. […]
A supercomputer in Shenzhen just topped the world rankings for the first time since 2017. The headline is the speed. The real story is the silicon: it runs without a single chip from Nvidia, AMD or Intel. China has taken back the supercomputing crown. On Tuesday, organisers declared a machine called LineShine the world’s fastest […]
Cerebras nearly doubled its revenue and guided 2026 sales above Wall Street’s estimates. Its stock still fell about 10%. The reason was a margin squeeze, caused not by a shortage of chips but by a shortage of buildings. Cerebras just learned the price of going public into a mania. On Tuesday the AI chipmaker posted […]
OpenAI just showed off Jalapeño, its first home-grown AI chip, built with Broadcom. It is designed for inference, not training. And it is the clearest sign yet that the company most dependent on Nvidia wants a way out. OpenAI has a chip now. On Wednesday it unveiled Jalapeño, the first piece of silicon it has […]
ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.5 on Tuesday at its Volcano Engine FORCE conference in Beijing, a video generation model that produces 30-second clips at native 4K resolution from a single prompt. The company skipped four intermediate versions entirely, jumping straight from its predecessor to signal what it described as a generational leap. An enterprise beta is […]
Stark Defence, the Berlin-based strike drone startup founded in 2024, has raised €500 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The deal values the company at more than three and a half billion euros, roughly triple the €1 billion mark it crossed earlier this year. […]
Reflection AI will pay SpaceX $150mn a month for Nvidia chips at Colossus 2, a deal worth roughly $6.3bn by 2029. The SpaceX Reflection AI deal puts Nvidia on both sides of the trade. SpaceX has signed another giant compute tenant. This time it is Reflection AI, an open-source startup barely two years old. Reflection […]
Bristol fusion startup Astral Systems has raised £23mn to scale the medical isotopes that cancer scans depend on. The Astral Systems £23M round backs a rare fusion company that already runs reactors and earns revenue. Most fusion companies promise clean power in a decade or two. Astral Systems is trying something different, and getting paid […]
Nearfield Instruments, a Rotterdam firm that inspects chips at the atomic scale, has raised $380mn at a $1.6bn valuation. It is the largest deep-tech round in Dutch history, and sovereign funds are paying close attention. Everyone knows the headline names of the AI chip boom. Nvidia designs the chips. TSMC makes them. ASML builds the […]
Robot.com, the San Francisco startup formerly known as Kiwibot, is expanding from campus delivery robots into workplace humanoids. The company told Business Insider it will launch R-noid, a humanoid on wheels designed to package orders, load and unload boxes, and prep workstations across food service, logistics, and healthcare facilities. CEO Felipe Chavez said the pivot […]
