TLDR 2026-07-28
OpenAI's $500B datacenter ⚡, Amazon's Starlink rival 🛰️, Nvidia backs SSI 💰
Amazon Plans to Launch 5,000 New Satellites to Beam Data to iPhones (6 minute read)
Amazon plans to launch 5,105 low-Earth orbiting satellites to build on top of Globalstar's existing network of only a few dozen satellites, which it acquired in an $11.6 billion deal a few months ago. The network will power both voice and mobile data. Amazon has yet to release pricing for its service. In the US, the satellites will use Globalstar's radio spectrum in the 1.6/2.4GHz bands, and orbit between 510 km and 580 km in altitude.
OpenAI Close to Landing $500 Billion Data Center With Nvidia's Backing (8 minute read)
OpenAI is close to leasing a $500 billion data center in southern Ohio. The company is in talks with Nvidia for a $250 billion financial backstop for the project. The US government is still talking to other potential tenants. The deal will not be final until Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick agrees to it.
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Science & Futuristic Technology
ASML Slides on Report of China Starting DUV Tool Production (4 minute read)
A Shanghai-based company has started mass producing immersion deep ultraviolet lithography tools. The unnamed firm aims to make about five DUV machines this year and is targeting about 20 next year. Production is still at an early stage. DUV machines are less advanced than ASML's sophisticated extreme ultraviolet lithography tools. ASML has been banned from exporting its tools to China.
The Data Pyramid in Robotics (11 minute read)
Frontier LLMs were trained on text data from the internet. There's no equivalent source of physical data for robotics. All attempts to solve and get to physical AGI involve working through this data bottleneck. Progress is being made on many fronts, but nobody knows how much data is enough.
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Programming, Design & Data Science
Seal (GitHub Repo)
Seal is an open standard for proving any file is real. It creates sealed artifacts that can be verified by anyone. A seal proves integrity, time, and the issuing certificate. Seals are anchored to a public ledger that can be checked by anyone, forever.
Octane (GitHub Repo)
Octane is a React replacement UI library with improved developer ergonomics. It is incredibly efficient and is designed to stay close to the speed of hand-written DOM code. Developers write with the React API they already know, and Octane's compiler removes the virtual DOM, Suspense waterfalls, rules-of-hooks bookkeeping, and hand-maintained dependency arrays before the app ships.
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Nvidia Bets on Ilya Sutskever's New AI Lab to Expand Compute Reach (3 minute read)
Nvidia has made a substantial investment into Safe Superintelligence, a company started by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. The investment is part of a long-term partnership and will involve Safe Superintelligence receiving access to large amounts of Nvidia's flagship GPUs. Safe Superintelligence had previously been relying primarily on chips made by Google. Nvidia made the investment after getting a rare glimpse into the state of the startup's research, which has so far been kept secret.
YouTube "Hackquires" Peacock (7 minute read)
It appears that Comcast is selling Peacock to YouTube without actually selling Peacock to YouTube. All of Peacock's content will be included in YouTube Premium subscriptions in the US starting early next year. The partnership will allow Peacock's content to be monetized through advertising. Netflix may also be exploring a Peacock add-on option.
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