TLDR Hardware 2026-11-06

Agility begins trading Thursday after merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, becoming the first US-listed company focused on humanoid robots. The deal values it at roughly $2.5 billion and expects about $465 million in gross proceeds, including $100 million already received. In 2025, it booked $1.8 million of revenue, over half from five robots bought by one investor, against a $138.1 million net loss. About $38 million of that was non-cash stock compensation, and it burned $99.8 million in cash.

Waymo will move rides in Austin and Atlanta to its own app in January 2028, ahead of the Uber deal's May 2028 expiry. Riders on Uber never knew whether they'd get a robotaxi or a human driver. Waymo wants a direct rider relationship.

Northstar is a methalox booster engine that Blue Origin says cuts mass by 30% and parts count by 50% versus the BE-4 while raising thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 lbf, with assembly in under a day. No first-flight date is given, and New Glenn is still recovering from a pad explosion that happened in May.

SpaceX has signed a multiyear deal for Qualcomm's Dragonwing infrastructure platforms: the QRU100 radio unit and QDU100 distributed unit, with 64T64R massive MIMO and physical-layer RAN software. They'll go into base stations at what's planned as tens of thousands of US sites, starting in 2027, to complement Starlink's satellite service. Qualcomm calls this its biggest 5G deal yet.

A Northwestern-led team built FLIP, which makes a physics-based digital twin of the telescope's optics and adjusts it until it reproduces the observed starlight, then subtracts that simulated glare. On existing NIRCam data at 4.3 microns, it improved sensitivity up to 15x over the conventional KLIP method and recovered the giant planet 51 Eridani b, which standard processing couldn't separate from residual glare.

LumiTac pairs five photoemitters with five RGBW photoreceivers on opposing circuit boards joined by translucent silicone, so load-driven motion between the layers shifts the internal light field under compression, shear, bending, and torsion. The head is 12 mm across, 4.75 mm thick, under 2 g, and made with about $7 in components. Independent testing gave R² of 0.966 to 0.994, with mean absolute errors of 0.054 to 0.190 N in force and 0.304 to 1.419 mN·m in moment.

Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has pledged to halt all data center approvals until the legislature passes new laws when it meets in January. Outgoing Governor Abbott had already paused new grid connections and ordered an audit. Texas holds about 25% of planned US data center capacity. It is estimated that 13.3 GW of announced projects are at risk.

CXMT says its 4F² DRAM uses a vertical surrounding gate transistor and builds the memory cells and peripheral circuitry on separate wafers joined by hybrid bonding, which an analyst says could raise density by about 30%. Yields are unknown, and a server product is promised before year-end. The claim cut Samsung and SK Hynix about 13% in a day, even though CXMT holds roughly 10% of DRAM against Samsung's 38%.

UK startup Shield Space wants carrier-deployed cubesat swarms using lasers, microwaves, or kinetic standoff to defend satellites, even when ground contact is lost, for under £100M per 100.

Starfish's Otter 24C launched October 1, made two-way contact, and downlinked telemetry, then lost contact during commissioning.

Thea Energy's Eos stellarator uses flat coils instead of hard-to-build 3D magnets.

Walmart signed a multi-year deal to add 300 Zipline drone sites.