Future Technology[Weekly Roundup] Chips, courtrooms and black holes
Right, here's the week. Five stories, no filler, one thing worth watching before Monday.
This Week's Top Stories
Apple just took OpenAI to court over its own engineers
Apple filed a trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI in a Northern California federal court, pointing to more than 400 former Apple staff now working there, plenty of them pulled straight from its chip design and on-device AI teams. The filing landed the same weekend Elon Musk and Sam Altman were trading jabs about it on X.
Why it matters: when a company sues over who used to work for it, the fight has stopped being about the product. It's about who keeps the engineers who build the thing everyone actually wants, AI that runs well on the device in your pocket.
A South Korean chipmaker just pulled off the biggest US listing you didn't hear about
SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion listing on the Nasdaq under ticker SKHY, the largest US listing ever by a foreign company and the second biggest US share sale ever, beaten only by SpaceX last month. The stock jumped nearly 13% on its first day of trading in New York.
Why it matters: SK Hynix makes the high bandwidth memory sitting next to almost every Nvidia AI chip, and controls roughly 60% of that market. There's a global shortage, and that $26.5bn is going straight into new fabs to fix it.
Musk and Intel are building a $119 billion chip factory in Texas
Terafab, the mega fab backed by Tesla, SpaceX and Intel, now has a filed build cost of up to $119 billion, with $55bn of that just for the first phase. The Grimes County site is aiming for a million wafer starts a month, running on Intel's 14A process, its 1.4 nanometre node.
Why it matters: pull it off and a serious chunk of the world's most advanced chipmaking lands on American soil instead of Taiwan. It's also a bet on an Intel plenty of people had already written off.
Blue Origin raised $10 billion and quietly became a $130 billion company
Blue Origin closed a fresh $10 billion raise at a $130 billion valuation, landing right as a handful of companies, SpaceX among them, start seriously testing hardware for data centres in orbit, where the sun never sets and space does the cooling for free.
Why it matters: launch costs are still brutal, but where we build compute decides who controls the next decade of AI. That answer might genuinely leave the planet.
We've now heard 390 black holes collide. A decade ago it was zero.
Astronomers released the largest gravitational wave catalogue ever assembled, 161 fresh detections pushing the running total to 390 confirmed black hole collisions, picked up by detectors across the US, Europe and Japan.
Why it matters: every one of those is spacetime shaking hard enough to feel from billions of light years away, and the growing tally is sharpening what we actually know about how black holes form and pair up. Ten years ago we'd caught precisely none.
One to Watch Next Week
Qualcomm is reportedly closing in on Tenstorrent, the RISC-V chip startup run by chip legend Jim Keller, in a deal that could land between $8 and $10 billion. If it goes through, the AI chip race stops being a Nvidia-and-everyone-else story.
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