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Besxar is building an orbital semiconductor factory, one SpaceX rocket at a time
If you want to manufacture in space—and bring the products back again—there’s a limited set of options: Wait to go to the International Space Station, or partner with a handful of start-ups launching spacecraft that spend time in orbit before they return to Earth. But the vehicle that goes to space and comes back to Earth more often than any other is a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster, which made that round-trip 163 times last year and has already flown more than 100 times this year. Now, a startup says it has talked Elon Musk’s space company into letting it prototype an orbital semiconductor factory across a dozen flights with the booster. Besxar, a start-up founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, wants to make the key precursors for advanced semiconductors by taking advantage of the vacuum of space. A key reason chip fabs on Earth are such hugely insane infrastructure projects is the need to create pressurized clean rooms to keep out even microscopic dust and contaminants that could ruin a chip during production. Pilipiszyn argues that a new generation of rockets could offer an alternative to all that infrastructure and to do it, she has raised almost $14 million, including a $9 million seed round led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC. “We’re at a time where it’s actually more cost-effective to go where the physics already works,” she told TechCrunch. “Don’t do it on Earth where you’re fighting physics.” The company’s first two “fabships”—small canisters designed to carry and test semiconductor materials in orbit—flew on a July Starlink mission and were intended to prove that the canisters could survive a launch, protect wafer samples from contamination, and expose them to the vacuum of space. Besxar succeeded in these objectives despite a malfunction in the flight data system in one canister, which the company is currently investigating. “The flown samples were the cleanest and had the least amount of particulate matter compared to … non-flown terrestrial wafers, which is fantastic for us as we scale up,” Pilipiszyn told TechCrunch. Besxar expects to keep iterating over the next two years, with the ultimate goal of flying larger fabs onboard a vehicle like SpaceX’s Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket still in development. Pilipiszyn first approached SpaceX three years ago to talk about buying flights on Starship and eventually settled on the booster payload deal as a way to de-risk her technology in the meantime. Next up is heating the wafers, then depositing one material on the wafers, then two materials, and so forth. Once it is producing qualification samples, Besxar—named after “beskar,” the metal used inStar Warsto make Mandalorian armor—wants to supply leading chipmakers with the wafers used to make the kinds of advanced chips that regulate electrical power in data centers, robots and electric vehicles. There are a number of companies working to leverage the space environment for higher-quality semiconductors, including United Semiconductors and Space Forge, but all face the same difficulty: the limited ability to return a meaningful volume of product. Pilipiszyn expects to start to scale up to hundreds and then thousands of wafers per fab, but that path depends on cheap rockets. That in turn requires SpaceX to get Starship operational—or competitors like Rocket Lab and Stoke Space getting their own next-generation rockets off the ground. “We believe that there is a solid transport layer now, so we can focus on the application layer,” she told TechCrunch. “We can just focus on our core manufacturing and getting our products back down to earth to market as quickly as possible.”
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The OpenAI Navier–Stokes Controversy, Explained
OpenAI claims to have solved a 90-year-old mathematical problem, but its credibility and path to the proof are now being disputed by mathematicians.
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C5i Certified as a Best Firm for Data Scientists
Founded in 2000 as Course5 Intelligence, C5i has evolved into a pure-play AI and analytics provider serving some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies.
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300 Employees, 34 Teams, 24 Hours: Inside Aurigo’s Agentic AI Hackathon
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Arrowhead AI Wants to Turn Voice Agents Into the New BFSI Workforce
Arrowhead initially analysed human-led sales conversations. It pivoted after realising that voice AI could eventually replace them.
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Bengaluru’s QNu Labs Raises ₹200 Cr in Series A1 Round
The funding takes the quantum cybersecurity company’s total capital raised to ₹375 crore.
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Grok Bot Was Built in Just Four Weeks
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Adobe Announces Project Music GenAI Control, an Experimental AI-Based Music Generation Tool
Adobe announced a new experimental artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool on Wednesday that can generate music from simple text prompts. Named Project Music GenAI Control, Adobe says the AI tool not only generates music, but also gives users “pixel-level control for music” by letting them edit, lengthen, shorten, remix, and create loops. There are more edit options available that allow for granular control of the generated clip. Adobe's latest AI tool arrives after the company announced an AI assistant for Acrobat and Reader last week that can summarise and analyse long PDFs.
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Brave Browser Is Bringing its AI Assistant Leo to Android Devices
Brave browser , known for its privacy-focused features, is bringing its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Leo to Android devices. The software firm first announced its AI chatbot in November 2023, when Leo was added to the desktop browser. The company's chatbot can run on several large language models, which are available for both the free version (with rate limits) and the premium version. Leo can perform all the general tasks of an AI assistant including summarising pages, answering queries, conversing, as well as writing codes.
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Microsoft Introduces Copilot for Finance, an AI Tool to Streamline Enterprise Finance Tasks
Microsoft unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Copilot for Finance on Thursday, aiming to help financial professionals easily navigate everyday mundane tasks. The Copilot tool is not a new AI model, and instead builds on the existing Copilot for Microsoft 365 stack to bring new features specific to financial operations. It is an enterprise-focused AI tool and currently is available in public preview. Notably, the tech giant also announced new features and major improvements for Windows 11 through a new update.
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AI Models in India Will Require MeitY Approval, Government Says in Advisory: Report
Artificial intelligence (AI) models and generative AI models that are in any phase of testing or unreliable in any way will need to receive “explicit permission of the government of India” before it is deployed in India, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ( MeitY ) issued in an advisory, as per reports. The advisory comes just days after some users found that Google's Gemini AI chatbot was responding with inaccurate and misleading information regarding the Prime Minister of the country.
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