Nearfield Instruments, a Rotterdam firm that inspects chips at the atomic scale, has raised $380mn at a $1.6bn valuation. It is the largest deep-tech round in Dutch history, and sovereign funds are paying close attention. Everyone knows the headline na…
Robot.com, the San Francisco startup formerly known as Kiwibot, is expanding from campus delivery robots into workplace humanoids. The company told Business Insider it will launch R-noid, a humanoid on wheels designed to package orders, load and unload…
The AI-driven memory shortage has now reached the oldest DRAM standard still in production. DDR2 contract prices rose 55 to 60 percent in the second quarter of 2026, according to Taiwanese market intelligence firm TrendForce, with a further 35 to 40 pe…
Apple’s industrial design studio, once the most influential product design operation in the technology industry, has been gutted. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the team no longer has a true seat at the executive table, has less influence and cre…
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has built a rover prototype that covered 16 miles in 37 hours of driving, making it roughly 10 times faster than any rover the agency currently operates on Mars. The four-wheeled machine, called ERNEST, reached speeds o…
The number of fusion startups that have raised more than $100 million has reached 17, according to a TechCrunch tally published Thursday, with total private investment in the sector now exceeding $13 billion. Two of the most recent rounds, Helion Energ…
Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will n…
AI’s next bottleneck is not the chips. It is the wiring between them. As clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the copper links that shuttle data between them are running out of road. So the industry is racing to move that traffic onto light …
France has found another €13bn for its tech sector. And it barely cost the state a thing. The money comes through Tibi, a programme that nudges French insurers and pension funds to back venture and growth funds instead of safer, lower-yield assets. The…
A Miami startup says it has cracked a maths problem that has made AI models slow and power-hungry for almost a decade. The claim was bold enough to draw comparisons with Theranos. Now, though, the company has independent test results that back much of …