RESHAPING THE PHYSICAL WORLD: GRAVIS ROBOTICS RAISES $200M FOR CONSTRUCTION AUTONOMY
Gravis Robotics secured $200 million in Series A funding from SoftBank to scale its hardware and software autonomy kits for heavy construction equipment.
2026.09.02
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415 matchesRESERVOIR ANNOUNCES $10 MILLION MULTI-YEAR PARTNERSHIP WITH JOHN DEERE TO ACCELERATE RUGGED AI FOR AGRICULTURE
Reservoir, an early-stage agricultural robotics incubator, announced a three-year, $10 million R&D partnership with John Deere to fast-track the field development and commercialization of rugged AI for specialty crop farming.
2026.09.02
LEROBOT ROS 2 ZENOH INTEGRATION
This repository bridges the LeRobot framework with ROS 2 by leveraging the ultra-fast Zenoh communication protocols.
2026.09.02
NAV2 LYRICAL RELEASE
Nav2, the team behind one of the most widely used robot navigation stacks, released a major update for ROS 2 Lyrical with new navigation tools, performance upgrades, smoother path planning, and better overall mobility for autonomous systems.
2026.09.02
A16Z LAUNCHES A $1.1B "MACHINE AGE" FUND TO BANKROLL AI'S PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Andreessen Horowitz raised $1.1 billion for a new "Machine Age" fund, a notable pivot for a firm best known for backing software, explicitly aimed at chips, memory, interconnects, data centers, cooling, and power-efficient edge devices rather than another model or app layer. The firm frames the bet around needing faster, more efficient systems, cheaper high-bandwidth memory, and better interconnects between nodes to keep the AI buildout from being bottlenecked by physical infrastructure, alongside broader materials, electrical, and real estate build-out to support it all.
2026.08.31
CXMT SUES THE PENTAGON, ARGUES ITS DRAM IS CIVILIAN JEDEC SPEC, NOT DEFENSE HARDWARE
CXMT is suing the Department of Defense to overturn its January 2025 classification as a Chinese military-linked company, arguing it has no ties to the PLA and that the designation lacks evidence and violated due process. The company says the Pentagon's original case leaned on a distributor's unauthorized "military grade" ad, later admitted erroneous, and that its DRAM actually conforms to civilian JEDEC commercial standards, lacking the temperature, packaging, testing, and oversight requirements imposed on genuine Chinese military-grade semiconductors.
2026.08.31
NVIDIA MOVES THE MEMORY CONTROLLER INTO THE HBM STACK
NVHBM is a design that moves NVIDIA's custom memory controller from the accelerator into the high-bandwidth-memory base die. The change frees compute-die area and lets multiple memory providers build compatible stacks, with Amazon's Annapurna Labs as the first collaborator.
2026.08.31
META TESTS ROBOTS THAT SWAP CABLES AND RESET SERVERS INSIDE ITS DATA CENTERS
Meta is piloting robots from Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB to handle physical data center work, evaluating whether a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm can power-cycle servers, testing a separate robot for swapping networking cables, and running ABB units mounted on wheeled platforms to reseat components at its newer Prometheus campus in New Albany, Ohio. It builds on simpler automation already in place, including self-driving tugger robots that move heavy server racks and wheeled inventory robots that scan equipment. One Meta worker estimates a successful cable-swapping robot alone could replace up to 80% of that specific role's workload.
2026.08.31
EPFL'S CHARGE-BALANCED GAN TRANSISTOR HITS 3,400 VOLTS, 5X TODAY'S COMMERCIAL PARTS
Pushing gallium nitride to higher voltages usually causes charge to pile up in one spot when the transistor switches off, triggering electrical breakdown. EPFL's POWERlab fixed this by engineering an additional layer that produces a sheet of mobile holes nearly matching the electron sheet GaN naturally generates, letting the two charges cancel out so the electric field spreads evenly instead of spiking, all from the material's own polarization rather than temperature-sensitive doping. The result: diodes breaking down above 3.9 kV and transistors sustaining 3.4-3.5 kV, more than 5x the rating of many commercial GaN devices, holding up at 125°C with under 15% resistance drift during repeated high-voltage cycling.
2026.08.31
EX-DEEPMIND TEAM CUTS ROBOT TASK TEACHING FROM ONE DAY TO 10 MINUTES
Reimagine Robotics, founded by former Google DeepMind applied-robotics lead Jonathan Scholz and other ex-DeepMind engineers, is building robots that factory workers can post-train directly through demonstrations and physical corrections. In one industrial deployment involving recovery of critical materials from used hard drives, Reimagine says the approach reduced the time needed to teach a new task from one day to 10 minutes. The architecture shifts adaptation from centralized robotics engineers toward workers operating the robots in production environments.
2026.08.31
LAMBDA RAISES $1B IN PRIVATE DEBT TO BUY GPUS MICROSOFT WILL LEASE
Lambda raised roughly $1 billion in private short-dated debt, arranged by JPMorgan, to buy Nvidia GPUs that Microsoft will then lease, borrowing against Microsoft's willingness to keep paying rather than its own revenue, letting Microsoft get the compute without carrying the debt itself. It's Lambda's second such raise this month, following a $917 million loan two weeks ago secured against a contract with Nvidia, which is simultaneously its investor, supplier, and customer, and the company is reportedly in talks for up to $3 billion more ahead of a possible IPO next year
2026.08.31
SPACEX BUILDS ITS OWN TURBINE-BLADE FOUNDRY TO CUT GAS POWER DELAYS BY 18 MONTHS
Elon Musk has confirmed that a secretive SpaceX foundry in Bastrop, Texas is meant to cast turbine blades in-house, tackling a manufacturing bottleneck he says currently limits how fast natural gas turbines can come online for AI data centers, up to 18 months faster if it works. The blades sit in a turbine's hottest section at 3,000-3,600°F, roughly 800°F above the melting point of their own alloy, survivable only through internal cooling channels, thermal coatings, and a single-crystal casting process grown slowly in a vacuum furnace, a technique just four companies worldwide have mastered at industrial scale, and all are currently sold out.
2026.08.31
POLLEN ROBOTICS MAKES A $399 OPEN-SOURCE DESKTOP ROBOT
Pollen Robotics and Hugging Face opened pre-orders for Microduck, a 25 cm open-source biped whose policies are trained in MuJoCo and then deployed to the physical robot.
2026.08.31
SK HYNIX BREAKS GROUND ON $4B HBM PACKAGING PLANT AT PURDUE
SK hynix held a ceremonial groundbreaking for its first US high-bandwidth memory production hub, a $4 billion advanced packaging and R&D facility in Indiana's Purdue Research Park first announced back in April 2024.
2026.08.31
CXMT'S LPDDR6 LANDS IN XIAOMI'S NEXT FOLDABLE, AHEAD OF SAMSUNG AND SK HYNIX
ChangXin Memory Technologies has started mass production of LPDDR6, its most advanced mobile DRAM yet, and confirmed it will supply the chips for Xiaomi's upcoming 18 Fold, launching in September, pairing the memory with Xiaomi's own 3nm Xring O3 processor
2026.08.31
IBM'S NEXT-GEN MAINFRAME RUNS Z/ARCHITECTURE AND ARM ON THE SAME CORE, NATIVELY
At Hot Chips 2026, Chips and Cheese sat down with IBM's Christian Zoellin and Christian Jacobi to dig into the engineering behind IBM's next-gen mainframe chip, the first to run both z/Architecture and Arm instructions natively on one core, plus the shift to HBM in its upcoming Spyre AI accelerator.
2026.08.31
INSIDE THE MAGNETIC CORE MEMORY THAT FLEW ABOARD SPACE SHUTTLE SPACELAB
Ken Shirriff takes apart the core memory module from a 1980 Spacelab computer.
2026.08.31
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2026.08.28
ANTHROPIC PREVIEWS A UNIVERSAL DRIVER LETTING CLAUDE CONTROL ANY LAB OR FACTORY HARDWARE
Anthropic opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a shared driver spec that lets AI agents discover and operate lab and manufacturing instruments, microscopes, liquid handlers, robotic arms, and laser systems through a single interface instead of the bespoke, vendor-specific integrations that normally take weeks or months to build. The driver uses simple read/write primitives any device can implement, plus natural-language tags that capture physical characteristics (like a robot arm's weight) that used to live only in paper manuals or an engineer's head, giving the agent everything it needs.
2026.08.28
PERPLEXITY AND NVIDIA UNVEIL "PORTABLE COMPUTER" FOR OFFLINE LOCAL AI EXECUTION
Perplexity has partnered with Nvidia to launch Portable Computer, an agentic Computer platform designed to execute advanced AI agent workflows entirely on-device without continuous cloud API dependency or recurring token costs. Powered by Nvidia's compact edge silicon architecture, the system runs quantized local inference models to process multimodal search, complex reasoning, and persistent agentic tasks directly at the edge.
2026.08.28
NVME 2.4 SPECIFICATION ADDS POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY AND GRANULAR POWER MANAGEMENT
The NVM Express organization has released the NVMe 2.4 specification, integrating quantum-resistant encryption algorithms and advanced telemetry to address future-proofed enterprise security and datacenter energy constraints. These enhancements formalize a critical hardware-level bridge between next-generation flash controllers and high-efficiency datacenter storage architectures.
2026.08.28
ADVANCED PACKAGING AND THERMAL BOTTLENECKS COMPLICATE HIGH-LAYER HBM SCALING
As high-bandwidth memory (HBM) architectures scale to 12-high and 16-high vertical DRAM stacks, semiconductor packaging faces severe physical limits across thermal dissipation, mechanical stress, and die warpage. Thinner DRAM silicon substrates required to maintain JEDEC package height profiles exacerbate through-silicon via (TSV) structural fatigue and increase susceptibility to micro-cracking during thermal cycling. The escalating complexity and defect density risks underscore that packaging and thermal reliability—rather than pure lithography—now dictate the economic scaling and memory bandwidth roadmap for frontier AI hardware accelerators.
2026.08.28
ROS2SMOLVLA: DEPLOYING VLA MODELS ON AN INDUSTRIAL CO-BOT
ROS2SmolVLA is an open-source ROS 2 interface that deploys Hugging Face's lightweight SmolVLA model directly onto an industrial Universal Robots UR10e arm for local, vision-guided pick-and-place. If you have been playing with an SO-101 arm and would like to graduate up to controlling an industrial co-bots, this looks like a great starter solution.
2026.08.28
NVIDIA COMPASS: CROSS-EMBODIMENT ROBOT NAVIGATION POLICY
NVIDIA just dropped a new tutorial on COMPASS, an agent-assisted residual reinforcement learning framework designed to adapt pretrained X-Mobility locomotion policies to different robotic platforms (such as Boston Dynamics' Spot). It offers developers a powerful methodology to reuse general navigation and locomotion skills across varied physical platforms, vastly reducing the time and cost required to train new hardware embodiments from scratch.
2026.08.28
SIFIVE DEBUTS BIGSKY 2U SERVER PLATFORM WITH 32 P870-D RISC-V CORES
BigSky SF-2U870 is an enterprise-grade 2U rackmount development platform designed to accelerate RISC-V datacenter software validation and workload porting. Built around 32 high-performance P870-D cores clocked at 2.0 GHz, the system features full compliance with the RVA23 profile standard alongside support for 256 GB of DDR5-5600 memory, 64 PCIe Gen 5 lanes across four x16 slots, and dual U.2 NVMe storage. In addition to running enterprise distributions like Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and RHEL 10 out of the box, the platform can act as an accelerated host node, running Nvidia CUDA workloads directly on RISC-V hardware ahead of future NVLink Fusion integration.
2026.08.28
ROS 2 PACKAGES FOR ROBOTIQ ADAPTIVE GRIPPERS
Robotiq's official, first-party ROS 2 driver release for its 2F-85 and 2F-140 adaptive grippers brings optimized C++ SDK communication, Modbus-cycle grouping for 200 Hz control, and integrated hardware simulation. This release is critical for commercial integrators, as transitioning from community drivers to official manufacturer support guarantees long-term driver stability, API safety, and reliable end-effector control.
2026.08.28
AMAZON TO DEPLOY 2 MILLION NVIDIA GPUS ACROSS GLOBAL DATA CENTER FLEET
Amazon is set to purchase two million Nvidia graphics processing units for its global data center infrastructure over the next two years to support frontier AI model training and cloud inference workloads.
2026.08.28
ANTHROPIC SIGNS $45 BILLION INFRASTRUCTURE DEAL WITH NSCALE FOR VERA RUBIN COMPUTE
Anthropic has entered into a six-year, $45 billion cloud computing agreement with London-based infrastructure provider Nscale to secure 460 megawatts of dedicated capacity at the Monarch campus in Mason County, West Virginia.
2026.08.28
AMAZON HIKES HARDWARE PRICES UP TO 60% CITING AI-DRIVEN MEMORY SHORTAGES
Amazon has raised retail pricing across its consumer hardware portfolio by as much as 60%, citing severe cost inflation for memory and storage components driven by enterprise AI infrastructure demand.
2026.08.28
PLAUD UNVEILS PLAUD ONE AI EARBUDS WITH BUILT-IN 4G LTE CONNECTIVITY
Plaud has announced the Plaud One Explorer Edition, a $250 pair of true wireless AI earbuds paired with an eSIM-enabled 4G LTE charging case designed for standalone voice capture and agentic task execution without a paired smartphone.
2026.08.28
OPENAI CLAIMS CUSTOM JALAPEÑO CHIP BYPASSES NVIDIA GB300 IN EFFICIENCY BENCHMARKS
OpenAI announced that its custom-designed AI inference processor, dubbed Jalapeño and developed in partnership with Broadcom, outperformed Nvidia's flagship GB200 and GB300 systems in internal benchmark evaluations. The custom silicon demonstrated a 1.5x to 1.9x improvement in workload throughput per watt alongside a 1.7x to 3.6x reduction in response latency across frontier reasoning and open-weights workloads like GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1, and Kimi K2.5
2026.08.26
D-MATRIX STACKS LOGIC ON 3D DRAM TO TARGET 100 TB/S INFERENCE BANDWIDTH
d-Matrix's Raptor accelerator stacks an N4 logic die directly on 3D DRAM and uses stream blocking, pinless data-bus inversion, thermal-aware refresh, and bank chaining to hold bandwidth near 100 TB/s. The company claims a 72-card rack can serve a 3-trillion-parameter-class model at 1M context at roughly 1,000 tokens per second per user, but the live Hot Chips report explicitly says working-system evidence and drawbacks remain to be shown.
2026.08.26
SAMSUNG ZHBM: DIRECT 3D DRAM STACKING REPLACES SILICON INTERPOSERS
Samsung detailed its vision for evolving HBM base dies from passive interposers into active logic, culminating in "zHBM." By using hybrid copper bonding to mount DRAM stacks directly onto the processor die, the architecture removes power-hungry SERDES layers, cutting package power by ~100W on a 1,200W accelerator while boosting memory bandwidth.
2026.08.26
NVIDIA INTRODUCES JETSON ORIN NANO 2 FOR ENTRY-LEVEL EDGE AI
NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano 2 is a lower-cost computer for robotics and edge inference. The module packages GPU compute, memory, and the Jetson software stack so builders can prototype perception and control without a server connection. Performance and efficiency figures are first-party, and suitability depends on the actual model and power envelope.
2026.08.26
SKILD AI'S S1 LEARNS 10-MINUTE ROBOT TASKS FROM A SINGLE VIDEO, NO FINE-TUNING
Skild AI's S1 is a foundation model that performs in-context learning for robotics, meaning it can be shown a single video of a long-horizon task, over 10 minutes long and never seen during pre-training, and then execute it without any fine-tuning. It's a meaningful step beyond typical robot foundation models, which usually need dedicated training data for each new task rather than picking one up on the fly from a single demonstration. This fits a broader pattern this year of general-purpose robot models learning tasks purely from examples, following similar early demos from Rhoda and Generalist, with Skild's version notably extending the horizon out to a full 10 minutes.
2026.08.26
FIGURE AI LAUNCHES INDEX, TRAINING ITS ROBOTS ON 16 MILLION CROWDSOURCED UPLOADS
Figure AI has come out of stealth with Index, a crowdsourced data platform that's already collected 16 million video uploads from over 264,000 app downloads across 108 countries, paying contributors $15 million so far to film themselves doing everyday tasks like opening drawers or folding laundry. The bet addresses robotics' core data bottleneck: language models could train on internet text, but embodied AI needs real-world physical demonstrations that simply don't exist online at scale. Figure is committing over $1 billion to data and compute over the next 12 months to close that gap.
2026.08.26
IBM UNVEILS NEXT-GENERATION DUAL-ARCHITECTURE PROCESSOR FOR IBM Z AND LINUXONE
IBM announced its first dual-ISA mainframe processor at Hot Chips 2026, engineered to natively execute both IBM z/Architecture and Armv9.3-A instructions on the same physical cores. Fabricated on a 2nm process node, the chip features 11 high-performance cores clocked above 5.7 GHz, integrated AI inference acceleration, a dedicated on-chip Data Processing Unit (DPU) for I/O offload, and large enterprise cache tiers. Rather than using separate physical cores in a heterogeneous layout, each core dynamically switches between z/Architecture and AArch64 execution within nanoseconds, enabling organizations to run unmodified Arm-native Linux software and modern AI frameworks concurrently alongside mission-critical z/OS transaction systems.
2026.08.26
FIRST LOOK INSIDE APPLE'S AI SERVERS REVEALS A DENSELY PACKED M-SERIES DESIGN
Leaked photos of a custom 2U rack server, reportedly from Apple's Houston manufacturing facility, show its Private Cloud Compute hardware for the first time. Each unit packs four columns of eight boards apiece (32 chips total), with a single Apple Silicon package at the center of each board flanked by removable brackets, all cooled by one fan per column pulling air front-to-back through a plastic-enclosed passage. Forum analysis of the board sizes suggests these are more likely base M5-class packages rather than the M5 Ultra chips previously rumored, since an Ultra package (two dies plus eight memory chips) would be roughly four times larger than what's visible in the photos, and the heatsinks look undersized for a 150-watt chip
2026.08.26
INTEL UNVEILS ARCHITECTURE ROADMAP FOR AGENTIC AI
Intel has previewed architectural enhancements in its upcoming Diamond Rapids, Crescent Island, and Wildcat Lake processors targeted at agentic AI workloads.
2026.08.26
OURA REPORTEDLY EYEING A SEPTEMBER IPO THAT COULD VALUE IT ABOVE $16B
Smart ring maker Oura is reportedly planning to raise up to $3 billion in a US IPO as soon as next month, valuing the company at over $16 billion.
2026.08.26
AMD UNVEILS INSTINCT MI455X & HELIOS 72-GPU RACK ARCHITECTURE
AMD has revealed full details for its next-generation Instinct MI455X accelerator and Helios rack platform.
2026.08.26
INTEL EMIB-T SECURES SK HYNIX HBM QUALIFICATION TO EASE PACKAGING CRUNCH
SK hynix and Intel Foundry are collaborating to package next-generation HBM memory using Intel's EMIB-T 2.5D bridge technology.
2026.08.26
SPACEX'S MUSK SEES ORBITAL DATA CENTER LAUNCH NEAR END OF 2027
Elon Musk stated that SpaceX aims to launch its initial fleet of orbital AI data centers by late 2027, powered by Nvidia hardware architecture.
2026.08.26
COURT HEARS CXMT'S DRAM WAS BUILT FROM THE START ON STOLEN SAMSUNG IP
Testimony in a South Korean criminal case alleges that CXMT, now China's largest DRAM maker, was founded with no in-house research capability and a deliberate plan to obtain Samsung's process technology IP rather than develop it independently. Former Samsung engineer Jeon, who moved to CXMT around 2016 after 28 years at Samsung, was sentenced to seven years in prison this April for stealing a 600-step Process Recipe Plan that detailed Samsung's DRAM fabrication process, including its 18nm-class node, information covering deposition and etch conditions, anneals, temperatures, and tool types that can shave years off developing a memory node from scratch.
2026.08.24
NVIDIA CUSTOMERS NOTIFIED ABOUT AI-RELATED PRICE HIKES ABOVE 15%
Nvidia and server contract manufacturers have informed major cloud and enterprise customers that prices for AI server systems will rise by more than 15% across several configurations. The price hikes—slated to take effect on systems shipping in early 2027, including platforms powered by Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures—are primarily driven by sharp cost escalations across high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced DRAM components.
2026.08.24
SPACEX FINALLY RECOVERS STARSHIP AFTER 24 DAYS OF TUGGING IT THROUGH ROUGH WATERS
After Starship's upper stage splashed down intact in the Indian Ocean following its 13th test flight in late July, SpaceX decided to actually recover it, an unplanned bonus given the vehicle survived reentry in one piece. What followed was a grueling 24-day tow through increasingly rough seas, with the 171-foot spacecraft finally reaching calm waters off Christmas Island, Australia, where engineers will now inspect it before deciding how and when to get it back to Starbase. A close physical inspection gives engineers far more detail than onboard sensors and cameras alone, informing modifications ahead of Starship Flight 14, targeted for late August to early September, which will attempt the vehicle's first full orbital test.
2026.08.24
WORLD HUMANOID ROBOT GAMES SHIFTS FROM SPRINT DEMOS TO AUTONOMOUS WORK TESTS
The Beijing competition now includes 21 scenario-based events spanning cable connection, industrial assembly, material loading, EV charging, restaurant work, and emergency response. More than 40% of the 51 total events require full autonomy, forcing robots to handle misalignment, shifting objects, controlled force, and error recovery rather than scripted locomotion. The cable-connection challenge specifically combines vision, hand positioning, mechanical alignment, and force control, making it a much more revealing physical-AI benchmark than sprinting or dancing.
2026.08.24
FASTSWARMSIM: LIGHTWEIGHT MULTI-UAV ROS 2 SIMULATION WITH LOCK-STEP TIME
This newly announced simulator aims to streamline swarm robotics research. By utilizing lock-step time, researchers can guarantee synchronized simulation environments for ROS2 across multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. This allows for more reliable testing of complex swarm behaviors and communication protocols before deploying code to physical drones.
2026.08.24
TIANGONG ULTRA ROBOT CUTS ITS 100M TIME FROM 21.50 S TO 9.39 S IN ONE YEAR
Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center's Tiangong Ultra completed a 100-meter heat in 9.39 seconds, down from 21.50 seconds at last year's World Humanoid Robot Games. Honor's Lightning followed at 9.47 seconds after researchers lengthened its legs by 10 cm. A preparatory run reached 9.32 seconds and a 15.5 m/s peak speed. The results show a greater than 2× year-over-year improvement in full-size humanoid sprint performance.
2026.08.24
NVIDIA IS SPENDING $6 BILLION TO BUILD A US ALTERNATIVE TO CHINESE AI MODELS
Nvidia is deploying roughly $6 billion in a major strategic transaction with AI startup Poolside to develop high-performance open-weight models capable of competing directly with leading Chinese releases like DeepSeek and Kimi. Under the agreement, Nvidia is paying $6 billion to license Poolside's core technology—including its Model Factory platform—and is investing an additional $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation while absorbing over 100 of the startup's engineers. The incoming technical team will focus on expanding Nvidia's open-weight Nemotron project, strengthening Western frontier model development and ensuring competitive parity against state-backed open-source AI initiatives emerging from China.
2026.08.24