TLDR Hardware 2026-11-02

Boom opened a roughly 200,000-square-foot factory in Centennial, Colorado, to build Superpower, a 42 MW natural gas turbine for AI data centers, with deliveries targeted for mid-2027 and output rising to 25 turbines a year in 2028 and 50 in 2029. Superpower and the Overture airliner's Symphony engine are meant to share a core, and a prototype called Sprint Core is due for first firing before Thanksgiving. Launch customer Crusoe has since backed out of its 29-turbine order.

Samsung confirmed new 2nm GAA chip production contracts with major cloud hyperscalers and AI companies during its Q3 2026 earnings call, marking a significant step in its foundry recovery. This move comes amid competition from TSMC, with Samsung emphasizing its first-to-market GAA transistor technology and improved yield rates. Samsung's foundry division remains unprofitable but expects future gains as it ramps up production and opens its US fab, aiming to capture market demand amidst supply constraints.

Project Suncatcher is a research effort by Google that aims to power AI compute in space. Its prototype satellite, launched on October 1, has now returned the first AI output from a data center-class TPU in orbit. A ground station uplinked a prompt to the onboard Gemma 4 model, and a haiku came back during a pass over Svalbard, Norway. Thermal stress and radiation tests come next, with two interconnected satellites planned for 2027.

Meta built a household humanoid prototype, codenamed Max, in about three months with Chinese robotics firm Fourier. It's about 1.5 m tall, runs on Nvidia Jetson Thor, and has a face display, speaker, and hands for small objects. Max 2, in work since September, redesigns the torso and hands and adds a projector and extra sensors for stairs. No launch date has been set.

Sensors and cameras capture the physical world, but interpreting this data means custom models: collect, train, tune, repeat. On Nov 5, discover how Archetype AI's Newton helps developers build agents that generalize across machines and run at the edge. Save your spot.

Satlyt's software successfully tested to distribute computing tasks among orbiting satellites on a NASA-funded project with the University of Houston. The software, already on three satellites, uses available compute resources and communication capacity to manage tasks, aiming to enhance data processing efficiency in space. Future plans include broader validation and integration, ultimately enabling developers to create space applications without rebuilding infrastructure for every mission.

Altermagnets are a third kind of magnet alongside ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Like antiferromagnets, they have no net magnetization, so stray fields can't flip them, but they can still carry spin-polarized currents, so their data can be read out. A SLAC-lead team shot polarized X-rays at maganese telluride and saw a directional signal that a conventional antiferromagnet can't produce. This work, published in Science, targets a usecase within spintronic memory.

On October 14, an explosion at Intel's Fab 28 in Kiryat Gat, Israel, killed two workers and halted the plant for about two weeks. The fab makes 10nm-class server chips such as Xeon 6 I/O dies, and Intel expects about $600 million in lost revenue across Q4 and Q1. Wafers take roughly six months to finish, so scrapped work delays supply into 2027 on top of an already tight server market.

After years of building humanoids that run, dance, and backflip, Chinese companies are pouring money into the AI that would make them useful across more jobs, meaning software that lets robots understand their surroundings and learn new tasks without per-job programming. Chinese embodied AI companies raised 93.5 billion yuan across 322 deals in the first half of 2026, five times a year earlier, with funding increasingly going to specialist robot-intelligence developers as well as manufacturers.

Sam Altman says that with silicon capacity constrained, it's poor global allocation for individuals to each hold a slice of the world's limited DRAM to run local models, and that utilization is highest in the cloud.

Toyota and Waymo will test autonomous Toyota bZ4X vehicles in Japan by 2027 and expand to the UK and other markets later.

NASA issued a Request for Information asking industry about reboosting Hubble to a higher orbit, servicing it, or disposing of it with a controlled reentry.

K2 Space's CEO says it wants to build about 100 high-power satellites a year, after a $500 million round at roughly a $7 billion valuation, and that its 165 kW satellite is the size where hosting a compute rack becomes possible.