Author: Olsi
The race to build more advanced chips is already moving beyond today’s High NA EUV technology. ASML and ZEISS have revealed details of Hyper NA, a potential next-generation EUV lithography system capable of printing features as small as 5 nanometers. A peer-reviewed paper suggests such a system could be operational in roughly a decade, although ASML has not yet committed to commercial production. What is Hyper NA? Lithography uses light to transfer extremely small patterns onto silicon wafers. ASML currently dominates the market for the most advanced EUV lithography systems. Its High NA platform increased numerical aperture from 0.33 to…
Google has opened its SynthID Detector to users worldwide, providing a public tool for checking whether an image, video or audio file contains the invisible SynthID watermark used to identify AI-generated media. The service was previously tested with journalists, media professionals and researchers before being expanded to the general public. The launch comes as synthetic images, videos and audio become increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic material. What is SynthID Detector? SynthID Detector is a verification system developed by Google DeepMind. Rather than relying only on visual clues, the technology searches for an invisible digital watermark embedded in AI-generated content.…
Boston Dynamics has appointed Rohit Prasad as its new Chief Executive Officer, bringing an artificial intelligence veteran into the top job at one of the world’s best-known robotics companies. Prasad officially takes over on October 7, 2026. Boston Dynamics says his appointment is intended to accelerate its next phase of Physical AI, combining robotics with advanced artificial intelligence to build more autonomous and adaptable machines for real-world environments. From Alexa and AI to physical machines Before joining Boston Dynamics, Prasad held a senior AI leadership role at Amazon. Boston Dynamics says he served as Senior Vice President and Head Scientist…
SpaceX is looking for another mountain of capital for AI SpaceX is in talks with banks and major asset managers to raise approximately $40 billion to finance large purchases of AI chips from NVIDIA. The story was first reported by the Financial Times and subsequently covered by Reuters and Bloomberg, although Reuters stressed that the financing has not been finalized. The reported structure would include: Why does SpaceX need so much compute? This story is not really about rockets. SpaceX is increasingly expanding into AI infrastructure, through data centers associated with Elon Musk’s broader AI ecosystem. A major component is…
Artificial intelligence has made enormous progress in language, vision and protein modeling. The next major challenge may be substantially harder: building models that can predict how living cells behave. On October 7, Biohub announced an expansion of its Virtual Biology Initiative involving the nonprofit research organization, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta. The combined commitment is described as $1.8 billion in funding, data, computing resources and measurement technology. That distinction matters: the figure is not simply $1.8 billion in new cash going into a single fund. What is a “virtual…
The smartphone is gaining a new potential route to the internet: direct communication with satellites without relying on a nearby cellular tower. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that it plans to vote on October 29, 2026 on proposals that would advance a new spectrum auction and modernize rules for direct-to-device (D2D) satellite services. The proposal includes 25 MHz of spectrum for auction and another 482 MHz that could support Supplemental Coverage from Space and related satellite-mobile services. The move places spectrum policy at the center of a rapidly developing contest between traditional What is direct-to-device? Traditional cellular…
Thousands of European solar and wind systems exposed online, raising critical infrastructure concerns Thousands of systems are visible from the public internet Thousands of digital systems used to manage and operate European solar parks and wind farms are exposed to the public internet, creating a significant cybersecurity concern for renewable-energy infrastructure. That is the central finding of research published on October 6 by European internet-intelligence company Modat, together with Bouke van Laethem of the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL). The researchers identified 8,547 internet-facing systems that they could confidently attribute to operating solar parks and wind farms across 35…
Microsoft pushes local AI to a new level with Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark The PC is becoming an AI workstation Microsoft is pushing Windows toward a new computing model in which substantially more artificial-intelligence workloads can run directly on the device rather than continuously relying on cloud infrastructure. At the center of that strategy is the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch laptop built around a new NVIDIA platform combining an Arm CPU and RTX GPU with unified memory. Microsoft advertises up to 1 petaflop of AI compute and up to 128GB of unified memory. This is more than…
