Tag: Deep tech

Armenia just opened the region’s biggest AI factory. It exists because Washington signed a licence.

Firebird, a US-based AI cloud company, opened what NVIDIA calls the CIS region’s largest AI factory in Hrazdan, Armenia on Saturday. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended, alongside Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister Zhaslan Madiyev and David Allen, the US chargé d’affaires in Armenia. That guest list is the story. A US company opened a facility in a […]

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China just closed a gap in chipmaking that nobody talks about. The wafer size tells you how far it has to go.

Hwatsing Technology, China’s leading producer of chemical mechanical polishing equipment, announced a metrology system for six-inch wafers on Thursday that can be built directly into the polishing workflow. The company describes it as China’s first six-inch metrology system paired with CMP equipment. The integration is the substantive part. Rather than measuring wafers separately after processing, the system […]

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American models broke into Hugging Face. A Chinese model was used to investigate.

Hugging Face chief executive Clément Delangue told CNBC that China is winning the AI race, with Chinese-developed models accounting for 41% of downloads on his platform over the past year, the largest share of any single country. China has now surpassed the US on both monthly and overall model downloads. “They’re clearly dominating on open models […]

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Anthropic confirmed it is designing custom chips for Claude. It wants engineers who have “shipped silicon.”

TL;DR Anthropic confirmed an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude. Job listing pays $320K-$485K. Multi-chip approach continues with AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD. Anthropic confirmed on Wednesday that it is building an in-house silicon team to design custom chips for Claude, the first time the company has publicly acknowledged the effort. A […]

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A startup says the AI bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s memory, and it ditched the GPU to prove it.

The AI hardware conversation is stuck on one word: compute. A startup out of Tel Aviv wants to change the word to memory. Majestic Labs, founded in 2023 by former Google and Meta engineers, has unveiled a server it says can do the work of a rack of Nvidia GPUs. It does so by attacking […]

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Sequoia leads $1 billion round for Valar Atomics as the nuclear startup triples its valuation to $6 billion

TL;DR Sequoia led a $1B Series B for Valar Atomics at $6B valuation (3x from $2B). Valar powered an Nvidia AI chip from a nuclear reactor in July. Now shifting to volume manufacturing. 30MW Utah facility planned. Sequoia Capital led a $1 billion Series B for Valar Atomics, valuing the nuclear startup at $6 billion. […]

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Alibaba says Qwen3.8 is the world’s No.2 AI model. It has shown no proof.

Days after a rival Chinese lab shook Silicon Valley, Alibaba has fired back. The company previewed Qwen3.8, its most powerful model yet, and made a bold claim: it trails only one model on Earth. Alibaba unveiled the model at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Its Qwen team said on X that Qwen3.8 is […]

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The chip industry has a warning for Trump: hands off the memory market

The memory shortage has become a political problem in Washington. Now the chip industry has a message for the Trump administration: leave the market alone, or the squeeze gets worse. The warning came in a letter from SEMI, a semiconductor industry group, to senior US officials. Any attempt to fix the shortage by steering prices […]

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The $2 trillion AI infrastructure problem no one is talking about, and the engineer solving it

The AI infrastructure earnings calls of the past eight quarters have given the public a precise vocabulary for what the build-out costs in capital. Hyperscaler GPU procurement. Power purchase agreements. Real-estate footprints. The vocabulary they have not given the public is for what it costs to keep the clusters healthy on a recurring basis after […]

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Munich startup ERC System unveils Victor, a heavy-lift cargo eVTOL, at ILA Berlin

TL;DR ERC System unveiled its Victor cargo eVTOL at ILA Berlin 2026, targeting 250kg payload, 300km range, and 2028 deliveries for defence and logistics. Munich-area startup ERC System has unveiled Victor, an uncrewed hybrid-electric cargo eVTOL designed for defence, logistics, and disaster response, at ILA Berlin 2026. The company says the aircraft can carry a […]

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Apple’s real AI story isn’t Siri: it’s a 20-billion-parameter model that runs from your iPhone’s flash

The headline from Apple’s developer conference was a reborn Siri. The more interesting story sits underneath it: the AI models Apple built to run the thing, one of which is far too big to fit in an iPhone’s memory, yet runs on the device anyway. In a technical post published alongside WWDC, Apple detailed the […]

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GoPro warned it may not survive. The AI memory crunch is killing companies that make things people hold.

TL;DR GoPro issued a going-concern warning after memory prices rose 80-115%. Revenue fell 26%. It’s exploring a sale, a defence pivot, and 23% staff cuts. GoPro warned on Monday that there is “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” The action-camera maker reported a 26% revenue decline in Q1 and […]

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QTREX is betting on the layer beneath quantum computing

The quantum computing industry has spent the last three years measured almost entirely in qubits. Willow’s 105. Nighthawk’s 120. The 540-qubit superconducting platform that integrated nearly 700 control lines into a single cryostat last year. The qubit count is the headline number, and for good reason. But inside the labs trying to push superconducting systems past […]

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This memory chip works at 700 degrees Celsius. The startup behind it is already building AI chips that compute where GPUs cannot.

TL;DR USC researchers built a memristor that operates at 700 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava and far beyond Venus surface temperatures, while TetraMem, the startup commercialising the technology, has already moved its room-temperature AI inference chips to 300mm production wafers with SK hynix and CHIPS Act support. Every probe humanity has sent to Venus […]

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Google is building a four-partner chip supply chain to challenge Nvidia in AI inference

Summary: Google is building the AI industry’s most diversified custom chip supply chain, with four design partners (Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, Intel) and a roadmap stretching from the Ironwood TPU now shipping in the millions to TPU v8 chips at TSMC 2nm in late 2027. The strategy, detailed ahead of Google Cloud Next, splits the next […]

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Google is in talks with Marvell to build custom AI inference chips as it diversifies beyond Broadcom

Summary: Google is in talks with Marvell Technology to develop two new AI chips – a memory processing unit and an inference-optimised TPU – adding a third design partner alongside Broadcom and MediaTek in its custom silicon supply chain. The discussions, which have not yet produced a signed contract, came days after Broadcom locked in […]

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AlixLabs closes €15M Series A to commercialise the atomic etching technology

AlixLabs, the Lund-based semiconductor process startup developing Atomic Pitch Splitting (APS™), has completed its €15M Series A with a strategic top-up from Finnish investor Stephen Industries. The company is targeting beta testing with chipmakers in 2026 and manufacturing deployment by 2027. AlixLabs, a deep-tech semiconductor startup based in Lund, Sweden, has closed its €15 million […]

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The Italian deeptech making graphene-based optical chips gets €211M

CamGraPhIC, a subsidiary of Milan-based 2D Photonics, has received European Commission approval for €211M in Italian state funding to industrialise its graphene photonic interconnect technology and build a pilot manufacturing line near Milan. CamGraPhIC, the graphene photonics subsidiary of 2D Photonics, has received European Commission approval for €211 million in Italian state aid funding under […]

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Kelluu raises €15M to build a persistent aerial intelligence layer for Europe

The Finnish deep tech company, which operates the world’s largest autonomous airship fleet, has closed a Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund, the Fund’s first investment in a Finnish company. Its airships can cover 30,000 square kilometres from a single base and have been tested in live NATO exercises. Kelluu, a Finnish deep […]

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Amazon’s chip business could be worth $50 billion, Jassy says, and he hints it may sell them externally

In short: Andy Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders, published on 9 April 2026, reveals that Amazon’s custom chip business, covering Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro, generates more than $20 billion in annualised revenue growing at triple-digit rates year-on-year. If sold on the open market like Nvidia, Jassy says, the business would be worth roughly $50 billion a […]

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Intel joins Musk’s Terafab as foundry partner in $25B chip megaproject

In short: Intel has signed on as the primary foundry partner for Elon Musk’s Terafab, a $25 billion joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI targeting a terawatt of AI compute per year, handing the struggling chip giant the marquee customer it has been searching for since pivoting to a foundry-first strategy. On 7 April 2026, […]

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Paladin acquires ICT in €60M push to dominate European ITAD

In short: Paladin EnviroTech has acquired ICT, Ireland’s first R2v3-certified ITAD provider, completing a $70 million, nine-month acquisition spree that now spans the U.S., Netherlands, and Ireland, positioning the company to handle the growing wave of hardware disposal from Dublin’s hyperscale data centre cluster. When the servers that power Europe’s cloud infrastructure reach the end of […]

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IBM and Arm are partnering to stop mainframes being left out of the AI era

In short: IBM and Arm announced a strategic collaboration on 2 April 2026 to enable Arm-based software to run on IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframes, the platforms that process the bulk of the world’s regulated enterprise transactions. The partnership targets three areas: virtualisation to host Arm software environments on IBM hardware, security and compliance for regulated […]

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Nvidia’s $2 billion Marvell bet is not an investment. It is a toll booth.

Nvidia has invested $2 billion in Marvell Technology and folded the chipmaker into its NVLink Fusion ecosystem, creating a partnership that covers custom AI accelerators, silicon photonics, and 5G/6G infrastructure. The deal ensures that every custom chip Marvell designs for hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft still generates Nvidia revenue through mandatory platform components, turning […]

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A 27-year-old just raised $450 million to bet that AI’s future runs on nuclear power

Isaiah Taylor was sixteen when he decided the nuclear industry had a size problem. Not that reactors were too dangerous or too expensive, though they are both, but that they were simply too big. The multi-gigawatt monuments to Cold War-era engineering that still dot the American landscape were designed for a grid that moved power […]

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More than 100 Baidu robotaxis froze mid-traffic in Wuhan. The age of the mass fleet failure has arrived.

On Tuesday evening in Wuhan, more than 100 of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis stopped moving. They did not pull over. They did not activate an emergency protocol. They simply froze, scattered across the city’s roads and elevated highways, some in the middle lane of ring roads with traffic streaming past on both sides. Passengers trapped […]

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RepAir Carbon opens a Luxembourg office to scale its electrochemical carbon capture tech across Europe

The Israeli deeptech, which uses 70% less energy than conventional carbon capture methods and has already signed with Shell, Mitsubishi, and C-Questra, is expanding into Europe’s industrial decarbonisation market as EU regulatory frameworks mature. RepAir Carbon, the Israeli developer of electrochemical direct air capture technology, has opened a European office in Luxembourg, the company announced […]

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PaperShell secures €40.3M EU grant to build its first full-scale factory

The Swedish deeptech company has signed a Grant Agreement with the European Commission under the EU Innovation Fund, unlocking €40.3M of a €83M project to expand its Tibro plant to 23,000 tonnes per year capacity by 2030. The material is already NATO-approved and shipping to customers in construction, defence, electronics and transport. PaperShell makes a […]

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Decathlon doubles warehouse output with Exotec’s climbing robots across seven European sites

The world’s largest sporting goods retailer has turned seven of its European warehouses over to robots, and the early results suggest the machines are earning their keep. Decathlon announced on Tuesday that its partnership with Exotec, a French warehouse robotics company, has delivered what it calls significant productivity gains across sites in France, the United […]

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NeuReality taps former Google AI director to steer its inference operating system into the market

When Jensen Huang told 30,000 attendees at GTC last week that the future data centre is a “token factory,” he was describing a world that a small Israeli startup has been quietly building toward for months. NeuReality, the Caesarea-based company behind the NR-NEXUS inference operating system, has appointed Shalini Agarwal, a product management director at […]

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