TLDR Hardware 2026-11-09

Huang told employees he was unfaithful and said he supports the probe, which independent directors and outside counsel will oversee, and Nvidia says he stays on as CEO. The spy allegations against Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, which is accused of smuggling $2B of chips, remain reported assessments, not proven, and China has called them unsubstantiated.

AST is building Blacklift, a 20-ton, three-stage rocket with two reusable lower stages, to launch up to five stacked BlueBirds per flight from late 2028. It sized the vehicle around its own constellation after launch delays, including a New Glenn failure, slowed deployment, though it keeps outside launch deals for 100+ satellites. The engines come from Firefly: 27 Miranda and 9 Vira for the first three rockets, plus a license to build them itself, in a deal valued above $1.3 billion.

NASA's six VADR launch task orders (about 400M and drill about 1 m for ice. The CLPS 2 lander contract targets 2 to 6 metric ton landers. The miniCAST power-and-comms tower combines Redwire's roll-out solar arrays, which retract during landings to avoid dust, with wireless power transfer and storage.

BYD's electric hypercar, driven by Marc Basseng on a closed Abu Dhabi highway, is the first production car that can accelerate past 500 km/h. Four motors make about 2,220 kW and spin to 30,000 rpm, on custom Giti semi-slick tires. After early runs topped out near 490 km/h, engineers adjusted rear-wing angle, rebound damping in the suspension software, and tire pressures.

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Using data from 100,000+ operating hours, Boston Dynamics redesigned its trailer-unloading robot around downtime. It cut internal cabling 81% (about half a mile of wire), switched to automotive-grade connectors, and added continuous-rotation joints that no longer hit hard stops. A full swerve drive swap drops from a day to about an hour. It unloads up to 1,000 cases per hour (varies with weight and stacking) and fast-charges to 90% in about 75 minutes.

Superconductors carry current when electrons team up in pairs, but in cuprates (compounds containing copper in an anionic state), scientists couldn't tell if the pairs form early or just don't exist until the material gets cold enough. The team measured electrical noise, which gets louder when charge moves in pairs, and found the extra noise appearing early. That suggests the pairs are already there and are just failing to move together, which could be what limits how warm cuprates can superconduct.

Groq, which used to build inference chips and now operates data centers selling inference capacity, is pitching investors a Series B at $8 billion before new money, versus $3.15 billion in August. Executive chairman Alex Davis criticizes rivals' reliance on debt and projects revenue up eightfold next year and $2 billion in EBITDA by 2028. The pitch comes as listed neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius sell off on debt concerns.

The Information reported that TSMC began planning 3D DRAM production, possibly by converting an existing fab, to give Nvidia a fourth memory source, but TSMC says it stays a pure-play logic foundry with no plans to make commodity memory. The engineering case against it is that 3D DRAM, which stacks memory cells vertically, is years out even for Micron, whose roadmap has at least four more planar nodes first, and TSMC has no competitive planar DRAM process to build on.

A truck carrying six pallets of Nvidia hardware valued at $11.4 million left Oakland on August 29 and was lost near San Bernardino County.

Tau's 4.5-foot robots are piloted remotely over head and wrist cameras and use 3D-printed claws, so the company has done only a couple hundred cleanings, though it claims vacuuming and mopping already run autonomously.

Submerging sealed pods could cut cooling costs and sidestep the community opposition that land sites face.

Omarchy, an Arch-based Hyprland desktop distro, shipped 4.5 with Apple Silicon as a primary target through the Omarchy M team via a dual-boot installer.