Tech & Science

China plans to let top AI firms buy Nvidia H200 chips

China is planning to let its leading artificial intelligence companies purchase a limited number of Nvidia H200 chips, The Information reported on Wednesday, a move that could end months of deadlock over advanced AI chip deliveries to Chinese buyers.

Global PC shipments fall for first time in two years amid memory crunch

The global PC market posted its first year-over-year decline in more than two years during the second quarter of 2026, with shipments falling 4.9% to 68.2 million units, according to preliminary data from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker…

Mystery spheres on Queensland beach identified as rocket debris

Six metallic spheres that washed ashore on Forrest Beach in northeastern Queensland have been identified as pressure vessels from a foreign rocket body that recently re-entered Earth's atmosphere, the Australian Space Agency announced on Monday.

TSMC plans 30-fold expansion of photonic chip capacity by 2028

TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited is planning a dramatic expansion of its photonic integrated circuit manufacturing capacity, with output projected to grow from roughly 500 wafers per month to at least 25,000 wafers per month by 2028, according to…

Ex-GitHub CEO launches distributed Git network for AI coding agents

Thomas Dohmke, the former chief executive of GitHub Microsoft Corporation, launched a preview on Wednesday of a distributed Git network built by his startup Entire, aiming to relieve the pressure that AI coding agents place on centralized code-hosting platforms.

Mistral AI releases its first robotics model

Mistral AI has released Robostral Navigate, a model designed to enable robots to autonomously navigate complex environments using only a single RGB camera and simple language prompts. The announcement, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, marks the French startup's formal entry…

Tesla launches AI home energy platform, books $9B in Megapack orders

Tesla has accumulated more than $9 billion in new Megapack utility-scale energy storage orders over the past six weeks, totaling more than 43 GWh of battery capacity, while simultaneously unveiling a residential energy management platform that marks the company's deepest…

Human-safe drug repairs DNA damage in Alzheimer’s mouse model

Neuroscientists at King's College London have found that a drug already shown to be safe in humans can reduce multiple features of Alzheimer's disease in mice by repairing broken DNA in neurons and reducing brain inflammation, according to a study…

Cook and incoming CEO Ternus meet Bavaria’s leader amid EU AI standoff

Apple CEO Tim Cook and his designated successor John Ternus held a virtual meeting on Monday with Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder, in a session underscoring the company's deepening engagement with European leaders as it navigates a fraught regulatory landscape and…

Amazon’s secret ‘Moonraker’ aims to turn Alexa into AI agent

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. is building a previously unreported initiative codenamed Moonraker that would turn Alexa into a full AI agent capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks from a single voice command, according to internal planning documents first reported by Business…

Meta’s Muse Image uses public Instagram photos for AI without consent

Meta on Tuesday rolled out Muse Image, its first in-house AI image generation model built by Meta Superintelligence Labs, immediately igniting a privacy firestorm after users discovered the tool can pull photos from public Instagram accounts to generate AI images…

Musk says xAI will release Grok 4.5 to public Thursday

Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public on Thursday, July 9, marking the first major AI model to emerge from SpaceX's pending $60 billion acquisition of Cursor-maker Anysphere. Musk described the 1.5-trillion-parameter…

Meta tests AI glasses that record without warning light

Meta has begun testing prototypes of smart glasses equipped with "super sensing" capabilities that can continuously record audio and capture images to build a persistent awareness of a wearer's surroundings, according to a Financial Times report published Tuesday. The development…

AMI Labs co-founder uses ICML keynote to challenge LLM dominance

The main conference program at ICML 2026 in Seoul opened on Monday with an invited talk that took direct aim at the dominant paradigm in artificial intelligence. Pascale Fung, co-founder and Chief Research and Innovation Officer of Advanced Machine Intelligence…

Apple tests Chinese military-linked DRAM chips for devices sold in China

Apple has begun testing DRAM chips from China's state-backed ChangXin Memory Technologies for use in devices sold within mainland China, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, a move that could reshape the global memory-chip supply chain and deepen ties between…

China warns of ‘backdoor’ risk in Anthropic’s Claude Code

A cybersecurity platform operated by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a warning on Wednesday that it had identified a serious security "backdoor" risk in Anthropic's AI coding tool Claude Code, escalating technological tensions between the world's two…

Quantum startup Oratomic emerges with $300M to build fault-tolerant computer

Oratomic, a Pasadena-based neutral-atom quantum computing startup, has emerged from stealth with $300 million in Series A funding and a bold claim: a useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer could be operational by the end of the decade.

Apple loses EU court fight over gatekeeper designation

Europe's General Court on Wednesday dismissed Apple's challenge against the European Union's Digital Markets Act, upholding the European Commission's designation of the company's App Store and iOS operating system as "gatekeeper" services subject to strict competition obligations.

OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 cleared for public launch Thursday after federal review

OpenAI will publicly release its GPT-5.6 model lineup — including its flagship Sol, alongside Terra and Luna — on Thursday, July 9, after the U.S. Department of Commerce approved a broad rollout following weeks of restricted access.

India opens probe into Tata breach that leaked iPhone 18 Pro secrets

John Ternus will take the helm at Apple on September 1, stepping into the chief executive role amid surging product prices, a damaging data breach at a key Indian supplier, and one of the company's most ambitious hardware launches in…

Samsung begins mass production of SSD for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin AI platform

Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday that it has begun mass production of its PM1763 enterprise solid state drive, a PCIe 6.0-based storage solution built for next-generation AI and high-performance computing servers, including Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin AI platform.

Huawei to debut Atlas 950 AI supernode in China at Shanghai conference

Huawei will showcase its Atlas 950 SuperPoD — described as the industry's largest AI computing super node — at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, scheduled to run from July 17 to 20.

WMO says Pacific’s last tropical glacier may vanish by early 2027

The World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday released its annual State of the Climate in the South-West Pacific report, projecting that the region's last remaining tropical glacier will vanish within months as ocean warming, marine heatwaves, and sea-level rise intensify across…

China, Japan release first close-up images from two asteroid flybys

In a striking coincidence of timing, space agencies from China and Japan have each released new closeup images from flybys of two different asteroids, offering fresh views of these rocky worlds within days of each other.

SpaceXAI, Cursor to launch jointly built AI model Wednesday

SpaceXAI and Cursor are poised to release their first jointly developed artificial intelligence model as soon as Wednesday, according to a memo sent to staff, as reported by The Information and confirmed by Reuters. The launch would mark a concrete…

Perplexity to use Nvidia’s new Vera CPU for AI agents

AI startup Perplexity confirmed on Tuesday that it plans to deploy Nvidia's new Vera central processing units, lending further momentum to the chipmaker's push into a server-processor market long dominated by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

EU unveils AI contingency plan after US curbed Anthropic model access

The European Commission unveiled a new action plan on Tuesday addressing the risks and opportunities of advanced artificial intelligence in cybersecurity, including language about contingency measures should access to powerful AI models be withdrawn — a direct response to the…

Perplexity to deploy Nvidia’s Vera CPU for AI agents

AI search startup Perplexity confirmed on Tuesday that it plans to use Nvidia's new Vera central processing unit, lending an early customer endorsement to the chipmaker's push into the data center CPU market long held by Intel and AMD Advanced…

JAXA reveals asteroid Torifune is a rare contact binary after Hayabusa2 flyby

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft completed a high-speed flyby of asteroid Torifune on July 5, passing within roughly 800 meters of the space rock at 5 kilometers per second — about 18,000 km/h — and capturing images that revealed the asteroid to…

Meta rolls out Muse Image AI model across its apps

Meta Platforms on Tuesday began rolling out Muse Image, a new image-generation model and the first such release from Meta Superintelligence Labs, as the company moves to compete more aggressively in the fast-expanding generative AI market.