company

The only photo you need to understand the scale of what Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ company, has just done

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In the absence of bananas, there is nothing like having five human operators in the photo to understand the scale of the New Glenn rocket, whose first stage is 57 meters high and seven meters in diameter. landed successfully on a barge in the Atlantic. SpaceX has company. So far, the club of companies capable of landing their orbital-class rockets so they can be reused had only one partner: SpaceX. For a decade now, Elon Musk’s company has single-handedly dominated the reuse game, landing and taking off again up to 500 times with the Falcon 9 thanks to a reliability that is now more than routine. What you see in this photo is the breaking of that monopoly. The first successful landing of the enormous New Glenn rocket, achieved on only its second flight, demonstrates that orbital reuse is no longer a matter of a single company. Although Blue Origin, founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, is far behind SpaceX, it has just taken a giant leap that Bezos summarized with a Latin expression: Gradatim Ferociter (“step by step, fiercely”). As large as graceful. Unlike the Falcon 9, which measures 70 meters and can put about 22 tons of cargo into low orbit, the New Glenn stands out with 98 meters in height and a planned capacity of 45 tons. If we had not seen SpaceX catch the Super Heavy (the first stage of Starship) three times with the arms of the launch tower, it would seem more unlikely to us that a rocket like the New Glenn would be able to land gracefully in the center of a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. And without getting covered in soot. There is another fundamental detail in the photo: the rocket fuselage is clean. Unlike the Falcon 9 boosters, which return covered in the characteristic black soot caused by kerosene combustion, the New Glenn appears almost pristine. The reason is that its seven powerful BE-4 engines use methane and liquid oxygen (a combination of cryogenic propellants known as methalox). This fuel is not only more efficient and cheaper, but it burns much cleaner, facilitating inspection and reconditioning tasks for the next flight. With this landing, the New Glenn has become the first methalox rocket to successfully recover a first stage from an orbital flight, ahead of the Zhuque 3 from the Chinese company Landspace (and with permission from Starship, which also uses methalox, but has never reached orbit). Things are coming. Blue Origin’s sweet moment begins now. In an interview with Ars Technicathe company’s CEO, Dave Limp, has confirmed that the aggressive 2026 goal is to complete between 12 and 24 missions. The company has announced a launch price of about $70 million, a figure almost identical to what SpaceX charges for a Falcon 9. But the New Glenn not only competes with the Falcon 9, but also threatens to burst the market by competing directly in the league of the Falcon Heavy, but with the advantage of a unique and fully reusable first stage. As for the rocket that has landed, its next payload will not be a probe or a satellite, but the Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar module, which the company plans to launch in the first quarter of 2026 to demonstrate to NASA They are ready for the moon race. Image | Jeff BezosBlue Origin In Xataka | Blue Origin now has a golden opportunity to overtake SpaceX on trips to the Moon. And he is taking advantage of it

Duolingo was the fun, brave company we loved that taught us languages. Today it is sinking in the stock market

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Most people never manage to turn their ideas into business successes. Luis von Ahn (Guatemala City, 1978) has achieved it twice. The first, when he created reCAPTCHA and sold it to Google in 2009 for a small fortune. The second, years later, started from a much simpler concept. Learning languages ​​was a painso von Ahn wanted to turn that into just the opposite: something fun. This is how it was born Duolingoa company that taught how to speak languages ​​with a strong component of gamification. You already had to go to an academy or spend long periods of time in online courses: you could learn words, phrases and pronunciation through small tests when you were on the bus or waiting in a queue. Duolingo achieved the most difficult thing: making us like each other (and fall in love) Learning with Duolingo was fun and comforting. The small rewards worked and turned it almost into a video game that little by little more people became fond of. The snowball got bigger and bigger and Duolingo became one of those companies that already seemed likeable at first. It seemed that everything it did was done well, and little by little the company took important steps to become the giant it is today. The certifications arrived who wanted to rival the famous TOEFL exams, their platform for schools, and more and more languages. Some, like japanesewere a challenge. Others, like the Klingon or the high valyriumwere above all a diversion that consolidated the fun and cool image of the company. Then things started to get interesting because Duolingo wanted to not only teach us languages ​​to speak, but also programming languages. He was encouraged to want to serve as a tool so that the little ones They learned to read and write. And for the young and not so young, Duolingo wanted to become private mathematics teacherof music or even chess. All of this ensured that over the years Duolingo managed to solidify that company image that Not only did he solve real problems, but he did it in a friendly, friendly and fun way.. In 2021 the company decided go public and after a couple of relatively calm years, the shares began to rise in value significantly. Everything seemed to be going great for the company. And then everything went wrong. AI has mortally wounded Duolingo, but not because of what we think When OpenAI presented GPT-4o in June 2024, many of us saw the future. One in which you no longer typed on your computer or on your mobile screen: it was enough to talk to him. That promised to transform many segments and kill some others, and among those threatened were companies like Duolingo. At the time it wasn’t so obvious, but when we saw that kid solving a math problem With the help of AI, it was not difficult to imagine that education, as we had known it, could have an expiration date. Curiously, that didn’t seem to affect Duolingo too much. The company continued to grow, but then two things happened. First and foremost, a major blunder. Luis von Ahn advertisement in April an “AI First” vision in which I would bet on artificial intelligence as a new great tool for your growth. The message sounded like “let’s do without the human being,” and although von Ahn tried to clarify things, the damage was done. After that, the debacle. Duolingo shares began to plummet. But the thing didn’t end there. The second of those turning point events occurred in August, when GPT-5 demonstrated that one could build a custom Duolingo for, for example, learn french in a fun way. People stopped being in love with Duolingo and they began to criticize her precisely because of what had made her succeed. There was too much gamification and, as i said a user on Reddit, “for me the reward for learning a language is learning the language.” Source: Cinco Días. Stocks continued to fall almost steadily. These days Duolingo presented financial results, and the curious thing is that although they were good, they were not good enough for Wall Street. The firm reached 135 million active monthly users (50 million use it daily), 20% more than in the same period of the previous year. It also rose 34% in paying users. Although one would think those numbers were fantastic, they also warned that the forecasts for the fourth quarter were not so optimistic. Result: new stock market debacle. So much so that the shares have plummeted 64% since reaching their highs on May 1, just after the “AI First” announcement. Since then, Duolingo’s drift has been worrying, and the coming months will undoubtedly mark its future even more. The company is in a difficult moment, and the rise of AI may end up causing those experimenting with their chatbot to realize that starting to learn languages ​​​​is as easy as telling ChatGPT “I want to practice my English with you a little. Correct me when I say something else and suggest small exercises” out loud. That is the great challenge for Duolingo going forward. In Xataka | How to practice languages ​​using artificial intelligence

Madrid has so many tourists that a company tried to do business with paid bathrooms. Now it has entered bankruptcy

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The news revealed it in February Antonio Giraldo, geographer, urban planner and PSOE councilor in the Madrid City Council. In a tweet that ended up going viral told how a commercial ground floor in the city center that had once housed a bank branch was living a second life as a private bathroom. It might seem like a curiosity without much significance, but that ‘transmutation’ says a lot about Madrid and the tourism that other destinations in Spain experience. Now the toilets are back in the news, but for a very different reason: although Madrid tourism moves in record numbersthe business hasn’t taken off. Where I said bench, I say bathroom. To understand the controversy we have to go back a few months, to February 5, the day Giraldo published the tweet in which he warned of the change of use of a ground floor located in the heart of Madrid, to be more precise in the Plaza de San Miguel, near the Plaza Mayor. The space, which had once housed a bank branch, had been converted into private bathrooms. And to demonstrate it Giraldo included several photographs in which you could see the window with a huge ‘WC’ logo and the access to the new business, with automatic turnstile, lights, fence and card reader included. Click on the image to go to the tweet. “The tourism uncontrolled from the center”. Is it news that a commercial premises changes its use, that they open private bathrooms in the center of Madrid? The answer is yes. It may seem like a curiosity, but the change represents a much deeper and broader transformation: the loss of services aimed at residents in favor of others focused on passing customers, such as tourists. From BBVA office to private toilet that is accessed after payment by card. “The phenomenon of uncontrolled touristification in the center of Madrid brings us something new: a traditional commercial premises transformed into private toilets at a cost of one euro that you pay with a card at an entrance turnstile,” I was reflecting. “If the ultra-pressure that tourists put on public services, such as public bathrooms, is not passed on via a tax, ignore the fact that the private sector is already arriving.” Private bathrooms and much more. In reality, private toilets were just one piece of a much larger phenomenon. The residents of the Plaza de San Miguel may have seen how a commercial ground floor was converted into a paid toilet instead of hosting a pharmacy, fruit shop, shoe store, a supermarket or any other neighborhood business, but something similar has happened in other areas of the city with establishments clearly oriented towards tourism, such as slogans, accommodations or souvenir shops. It is nothing strange or exclusive to the capital. Not long ago in Santiago de Compostela they did the math and they discovered that in the historic center it is now easier to buy a souvenir than a loaf of bread. Another clear example Malaga leaves it. Over there a report of the City Council warns that “mass tourism can lead to the proliferation of low-quality gastronomic establishments” and points out the risks entailed by “the expulsion of native and value-added businesses, replaced by souvenir shops and other businesses for tourists.” A business not so business? The news about the private bathrooms in the center of Madrid could have stopped there, in another example of urban tourism. A few days ago, however, he once again made another headline, in this case in an information advanced by The Confidential: although Madrid has reached a record of overnight stays by foreign tourists, paying toilets have turned out to be less business than was believed. According to reveals the newspaper, the company behind it, The Mad Toilets, has filed bankruptcy proceedings overwhelmed by the losses. The news is even more interesting because initially the project was linked to Victor de Aldamaa businessman associated with such controversial episodes as the Ábalos case wave hydrocarbon plot. Political issues aside, The Confidential explains that the company presented the special procedure for microenterprises before the commercial court, suffocated by the accounts. In court they declared the opening of the special liquidation procedure and the company’s attorney opted for a continuation process. Now a Madrid firm specialized in restructuring has been chosen. Is there anything else known about the firm? Yes. According to the data sent to the court, the company found itself with losses that made its continuity unfeasible: the turnover was zero while the liabilities exceeded 750,000 euros. Consequently, the judge opted for the special procedure for liquidating the microenterprise. On the Empresite platform can be seen that its current status is that of competition. To provide the service, the company had four workers who were in charge of cleaning and supervision, for example. In its day, the premises were equipped with individual cubicles, paper dispensers, sinks and dryers. Searching for the causes. The question at this point is… Why didn’t the project work? Why has it not managed to become a profitable business in the midst of a tourism boom? From the outset, the place had a significant handicap: not far from there, a few minutes walk, there is public toilets that are part of the 129 WC network free access whose maintenance, clarifies the City Councilis paid for with advertising. Added to this competition is that exercised by other businesses such as cafes, bars and restaurants available to tourists. To access the private toilets it was necessary to pay one euro by card and the service was not available 24 hours a day either. In February elDiario explained that the business was operating with a provisional schedule, although the objective was to operate from nine in the morning to twelve at night. To do this, however, an employee explained, more staff would be necessary. In a post Published on LinkedIn, Esteban Mancuso points out that and some other key that explain what happened. Specifically speaks of an “underestimation of real … Read more

Meta’s star AI scientist plans to leave the company, according to the FT. The new goal is eating the old goal.

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The head of artificial intelligence at Meta, Yann LeCun, would be preparing to leave the company to found his own startup, according to inform Financial Times. The departure of the prestigious researcher, winner of the Turing Award and considered one of the fathers of modern AI, symbolizes the radical change that Mark Zuckerberg is giving to Meta’s strategy around AI. The changing of the guard. LeCun, who led the Fundamental AI Research Laboratory (FAIR) since 2013, is now in an uncomfortable position within Meta. This summer, Zuckerberg hired Alexander Wang28, to lead a new “superintelligence” team, paying $14.3 billion to take 49% of Scale AI, the data labeling startup Wang had founded. As a result of this restructuring, LeCun went from reporting to chief product officer Chris Cox to reporting to Wang, according to account Financial Times. A philosophical divorce. The tension is not only organizational, but conceptual. LeCun has long publicly defended that the language models on which Zuckerberg has focused his strategy are “useful” but will never be able to reason or plan like humans. His bet from FAIR has been different: the so-called “world models”AI systems that learn from the physical environment through videos and spatial data, not just language. A path that, according to LeCun himself, could take a decade to bear fruit. Meta’s problems with AI. Zuckerberg’s reorganization comes after several setbacks. The launch of Call 4 It has not gone as the company would have liked, falling below the most advanced proposals from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Additionally, Meta AI, the company’s chatbot, has also not gained traction among users. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has hired dozens of engineers and competing researchers with pay packages of up to $100 million, creating a dedicated team called TBD Lab to accelerate the development of new versions of its language models. The cost of pivoting. The shift toward practical AI appears to have generated internal chaos. Sources cited by TechCrunch In August they revealed the frustration of new hires when facing the bureaucracy of a large company, while the previous generative AI team saw its scope reduced. In October, Meta laid off 600 people of its AI research unit to cut costs and accelerate product launches. Also in May Joelle Pineau left the companyvice president of AI research, who joined Canadian startup Cohere. What’s coming now. According to two sources Cited by the Financial Times, LeCun’s new project will focus on continuing his work on world models, and he has already started talks to raise funding. His departure, scheduled for the coming months, represents more than the departure of a brilliant scientist: it is confirmation that Meta’s old long-term focus has been relegated by the urgency of competing in the short term with more practical solutions. As Wall Street pressures Zuckerberg to justify an investment in AI that could exceed $100 billion In 2025, the company would be losing one of its most recognized brains along the way. Cover image | Goal and AFP In Xataka | AI was supposed to reduce costs and reduce staff. The Coca-Cola ad illustrates how much we were wrong

the company is drowning in the market that it itself created

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The first time I ordered food at home, it was from Telepizza. It’s possible that you do too. In the nineties, Telepizza was the perfect plan for hangouts to watch football or a movie at home. They had no competition. Today yes, and a lot. This, together with decades of treating the company as a financial asset and not as a long-term business, has caused the current situation: the company’s accounts are bleeding and there are serious doubts about its viability. Debt, restructuring and losses According to one PricewaterhouseCooper audit published in Merca2in 2024 Telepizza lost more than 48 million euros and carries a total debt of 150 million euros. The expected turnover for this period was 300 million euros, but they achieved 249.9 million, 18% less. This is in addition to expenses that amounted to 18.6 million euros in 2024 alone. Spain continues to be its strongest market and accounts for 60% of all its income, but also where the loss is greatest (almost 25 million euros). According to PwC, there are “material uncertainty regarding the continuity of the business”, and it is not the first time they have warned of something like this. They did another audit of the company’s accounts in 2022 in which they showed “significant doubts about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” Telepizza is at a crossroads: it needs to generate income quickly to cover expenses and debt, but at the same time it needs to invest if it wants to become competitive again in the current landscape. The accounts don’t work out. Telepizza and the delivery boom The food delivery landscape has radically transformed. Telepizza no longer competes in the market it founded, but in a totally saturated ecosystem where there are more and often better options. According to Dashmote data in 2024between 2019 and 2022 the delivery market in Spain doubled its income, reaching 5,000 million euros and in 2023 it would grow to 6.6 billion. Not all the mountain is oregano, the main delivery operators They also cannot boast of stability and profitsbut for Telepizza the reality is that, where they once reigned, now There are hundreds of thousands of restaurants available. It also happens that pizza is no longer the favorite option to order at home. According to DBK dataIn 2024, hamburger restaurants accounted for 61% of the market. Fried chicken restaurants and “other concepts” also grew, while pizzerias decreased their turnover by 1.8%. There is also the problem that entering this model implies give a third of income in commissionssomething that does not suit Telepizza very well in its delicate situation. Given this panorama, Telepizza has opted to encourage orders through its app and website. Recently They celebrated a pyrrhic victory: They are the pizza brand with the most users through their website and appreaching a total of 1.8 million monthly users. The problem is that the figure is not even striking. To put it in context, Burger King and McDonald’s have 4.7 and 4.5 million users through their apps respectively. Telepizza’s strategy involves reinforcing its own channel and betting on loyal customers who already know them and return to their app, but at the same time has become practically invisible for the rest of the public, who have many more pizzerias to choose from through the apps. It is an isolation strategy. The final chapter of a series that began decades ago To understand how Telepizza is today, you have to look back. The current situation is the consequence of a trend that began in the nineties. After a spectacular IPO in 1996, at the end of 1999 its founder sold his stake (months before the collapse of the dotcom bubbleby the way). This sale marked the beginning of an era in which Telepizza became a financial asset at the hands of venture capital funds and its valuation fell with each movement. In 2007, Telepizza went public after the takeover bid by the Permira and Ballvé fund and was valued at 850 million euros. In 2016, after the entry of the KKR fund, it went public again, although with quite disastrous results. Here the valuation had dropped to 780 million euros, but the worst thing is that not even three years passed when the KKR group launched another takeover bid again for take it out of the bag againvaluing it only in 600 million euros. Paradoxically, 2017 was a good year for the company’s accounts, which achieved record profits. Right after it was signed the agreement with Pizza Hut in which Telepizza committed to opening 1,300 restaurants, almost nothing. The plan ended up going awry internal tensions and the pandemic. In the end Telepizza broke up with Pizza Hut in many of the countries in which it was going to operate. In 2023, the debt caused the KKR fund left the equation and a financial restructuring was signed in which the company passed into the hands of its creditors, among which are Oak Hill and Fortress, two opportunistic funds, also known as vulture funds. Under this new mandate the objective was to try to stabilize the losses with the exit from Latin Americaalthough They couldn’t sell everything. The image speaks for itself In contrast, its most direct competitor, Domino’s Pizza, has had a stable trajectory of growth and is in good financial healthyou just have to look at its growth curve on the stock market. In addition to the global parent company, behind Domino’s Pizza Spain is Alsea, the Mexican restaurant provider which also manages brands such as Starbucks, Burger King or Foster’s Hollywood. Venture capital has squeezed Telepizza so much that has left it without operating marginleading it to a delicate situation that has lasted for years and that calls into question its continuity. In the end, the secret was not in the dough, but in being a restaurant chain and not a financial asset that passes from hand to hand. Image | Telepizza In Xataka | Robotic vans are already key in … Read more

A company claims to have created the first transparent computer monitor: it has borrowed technology from aviation

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The idea of ​​“seeing through” the screen is not new. For decades, HUDs have projected data onto the windshields of airplanes. and today many cars offer own versions to show speed or navigation without taking your eyes off the road. That principle, project or reflect information on a transparent elementis the one that Visual Instruments ensures have brought to the desktop with Phantom, a monitor that seeks to mix the digital and the physical and that adjusts its transparency in real time. Phantom does not use a panel that becomes transparent on its own, but rather an optical assembly similar to that of a teleprompter or HUD. The image is reflected in a tilted glass and thus appears to “float” over what is behind, with an opacity control that allows it to go from transparent to opaque. The company presents it as “the first transparent computer monitor.” The key to the invention is in the optics, not in a futuristic panel According to the manufacturer, Phantom is presented as a 24-inch monitor in 16:9 format with 4K resolution. The company sets the brightness in a range from 5 to 5,000 nits and places the color coverage at 100% sRGB, figures that must be confirmed when the product reaches the hands of users and analysts. As for the connection, it is limited to the most common options: USB-C with DisplayPort and HDMIwithout the need for additional software to operate. {“videoId”:”x87bool”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”How to CALIBRATE your MONITOR for VIDEO GAMES and enjoy it to the fullest”, “tag”:”monitor”, “duration”:”230″} It is worth putting it in context. Transparent screens have been appearing in consumer markets for years. LG has been marketing a 77-inch transparent OLED TV since 2024. Lenovo, for its part, has also developed a concept laptop with a transparent panel. The difference here is key: those products use transparent base panels, while Phantom uses, as we say, HUD-type optics. They are different technological routes, with different commitments and limitations. Aspects such as contrast, color representation with different ambient lights, the presence of reflectionsuniformity or comfort in prolonged use remain unknown. It is also unclear to what extent alternating between the monitor and the background can translate into real relief from eye strain beyond the idea put forward by the manufacturer. Everything will depend on the first independent tests and the measurements that are published when demonstration units exist. In Xataka There is a cheap TV sweeping Amazon: after a week of use it became clear in which situations it can make sense Phantom arrives, therefore, as a suggestive idea that has yet to demonstrate whether it can be sustained in everyday use. The commercial status points to a very early and selective launch. The Founders Edition is limited to ten units intended for early adopters, with shipping expected in Q4 2025, 30-day returns, and a one-year warranty. The price is not final: each unit is custom configured, but the company itself compares it to an Apple Studio Display whose price in Spain starts at 1,779 euros. Images | Visual Instruments | Telstar Logistics In Xataka | Xiaomi TV S Pro MiniLED 2026, analysis: the juggling act of wanting to offer the quality of a high-end and the price of a mid-range (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news A company claims to have created the first transparent computer monitor: it has borrowed technology from aviation was originally published in Xataka by Javier Marquez .

A Spanish company won the “golden” contract for the Stonehenge highway. It came out regular

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The United Kingdom has just shelved a project that has been on the table for 20 years: build a road near Stonehenge connect once and for all the jammed London with the southwest of the country. And along the way it has won a ‘golden’ contract that had been awarded to the Spanish company FCC. The figure? 2,000 million euros that remain on the way and a London connection that will continue to be gibberish. Let’s go in parts. Stonehenge is one of the most visited monuments. It is estimated that every year they come 1.5 million tourists to participate in the mystery of this set of monolithic rocks that someone placed it there more than 5,000 years ago. Everything has been theorized and we have two things clear: it is unlikely that one day we will know the motivation behind the workbut we know that the acoustics were impressive. Less imposing is the A303, the road next to it and which is a real nightmare. London is one of the most congested cities in the world. With a population of nine million, 14 in the metropolitan area, and thousands who go to work daily, that connection with the southwest has become one of the entrance arteries to the city. The tunnel is going to cost how much? The problem? Although it is a highway, in the section that passes through Stonehenge it becomes a two-way road. This implies brutal congestion, and that is why in 1995 work began on a solution. The Highway Agency has explored alternative routes, but in the end the easiest thing was to bury the road. Easy, but not cheap: four kilometers long for a tunnel with a cost My dear of 183 million pounds. Then it doubled up to 470 million, 540 million and up to 1.7 billion pounds that they estimated in 2020. It was a stratospheric increase, but Highways England was clear that it was the only way. In fact, They developed a firm project and, in 2022, was awarded to the Spanish FCC Construction. Next to the Italian Webuild and the Austrian BeMo Tunnelling, would give shape to that tunnel whose cost had promoted up to 2 billion pounds. But in the end it was not even the UNESCO (concerned because the tunnels will pass through a World Heritage site) nor the environmentalists who have managed to stop the project. It was the Labor Party. In 2024, the Conservatives were out of power, Labor came in and they found themselves a £22bn hole. Already last year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves stated that there would be cuts and that if there were projects they couldn’t afford, they wouldn’t do them. He also commented that all transport projects exceeding £1 billion would be subject to a “comprehensive review”. And, as a result of that situation, and after months on the tightrope, a few days ago communicated that The British government had definitively canceled the project of the new Stonehenge road. Apart from the tunnel, there was a viaduct, new intersections between the A303 and local roads and green bridges for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles, but for Reeves and his government, the work was “unaffordable” in the “challenging legacy financial landscape”. The legal battle begins The problem is that something that has been around for 20 years and that was awarded to three companies a year ago has not been frozen in time. At this point, the different companies and Highways England itself had already invested around £180 million in the development, including land assessment, archaeological and heritage preservation studies, as well as public consultations. Although the Government has shelved the A303 Stonehenge project, the problem of which is still there, there is still a way to go for the parties involved. Now the FCC legal fight begins, which, as we read in Expansionhad already completed all the design work for the highway. And it is expected that both the Spanish company and Webuild and BeMo will receive compensation for this cancellation, although the amount has yet to be determined. Images | National Highways In Xataka | They find next to Stonehenge a ring two km in diameter made up of enormous underground wells

NVIDIA is the most powerful company on the planet because it made a bet and it is winning: Crossover 1×28

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At NVIDIA they can’t stop rubbing their hands. They sell by piece and they don’t stop signing circular financing agreements that do nothing more than enlarge your position current. The company has made gold with the rise of artificial intelligence, and to talk about it we have dedicated this new Crossover 1×28 to recount the history and evolution of a company that is in a state of grace. We started by talking about how NVIDIA gained a privileged position in the world of gaming and how in the 2010s it (briefly) took advantage of the rise of cryptocurrency mining. All of this has managed to make NVIDIA enjoy the leading role in the duopoly that exists in the graphics card market for gamers: only AMD overshadows it, although Intel in recent times has tried to carve out some space for itself. However, what catapulted the company was a singular bet: to ensure that its GPUs could be used for the field of artificial intelligence. That market was still in its infancy. when CUDA emergedbut little by little the researchers working in that field were verifying that this platform was a great ally for their advances. And then, of course, ChatGPT arrived and with it the AI ​​gold rush. NVIDIA has become more essential than ever, and everyone, large and small, wants their AI accelerators for new data centers. It’s non-stop amazing and somewhat disturbingbecause the exaggerated growth of NVIDIA only validates the hypothesis that we are facing a gigantic AI bubble. On YouTube | Crossover

After many years trying to copy the Falcon 9, Elon Musk believes there is a company about to achieve it

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It seems unlikely today that a startup can be 10 years ahead of the competition, but that is the case with SpaceX. Elon Musk’s aerospace company dominates the industry thanks to the Falcon 9, a rocket that has turned 15 years old and has been almost a decade landing vertically without any other orbital rocket having managed to repeat the feat. Until now. The Falcon 9 has company. A few days ago, Elon Musk broke his usual disdain about the rest of the industry to point out a specific contender. The Chinese company Landspace is not only close to matching the Falcon 9, Musk admitted.but it could end up surpassing it. The reason? Its new Zhuque-3 rocket, which combines the general architecture of the Falcon 9 with key elements of Starship, SpaceX’s most modern and experimental rocket. The gigantic Starship “is in another league,” Musk said. However, recognized that the Zhuque-3 could reach “Falcon 9 levels of reliability and launch rate” in about five years. This is the Zhuque-3 rocket. The big bet of LandSpace, one of the private companies most powerful in the Chinese aerospace industryis a two-stage launcher with a first stage capable of landing vertically for reuse. Although it has a very similar power to that of the Falcon 9 (with a payload capacity in its reusable configuration of 18.3 tons), it is built in stainless steel instead of aluminum, and burns methane and liquid oxygen instead of kerosene, the same material and the same fuel as Starship. Landspace is just the first. If Zhuque-3 manages to successfully take off and land in the coming weeks, Landspace will be the first company to close the enormous distance that separates the industry from SpaceX (with permission from Blue Origin’s New Glenn, a larger and heavier rocket, which also hopes to take off and land successfully in November). These two will be followed by other models such as the CZ-12A from the Chinese state company CASC and the Tianlong-3 from the Chinese startup Space Pioneer. Next will come the Hyperbola 3 from iSpace, the Pallas 1 from Galactic Energy and the Gravity 2 from OrienSpace. All Chinese companies, driven by the liberalization of the space industry promoted by Beijing in 2014. Copy what works, then improve. Public incentives, such as very low-interest loans, only tell part of the story. If Chinese companies are on the verge of having their Falcon 9, it is because of their philosophy of first copying what works and then iterating until they improve on their Western rivals. Elon Musk’s recognition is, perhaps, the clearest sign that the race has changed. It’s no longer a question of whether someone will copy the Falcon 9, but rather who will be the first to surpass it using, ironically, SpaceX’s own ideas for its next generation of rockets. In Xataka | The race to become “China’s SpaceX”: who’s who in its private space launch sector

Iryo arrived in Spain with a very ambitious plan to tighten the screws on Renfe. It has just asked its Italian parent company for a ransom

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Iryo has a problem in Spain: it can’t get clients. Or, we should say, it does not get enough clients to start making its railway project profitable in our country. Its occupancy rate in each and every one of the corridors is better than that of Renfe or Ouigo. In some cases it is certainly worrying. This is leading it to lose tens of millions of euros. And they have already asked Italy for help. 32 million euros. They are the ones that Iryo has lost in 2024. The losses are added to the 79 million euros that the company already lost in 2023 and the occupancy rates of 2025 are not inviting optimism. Although the company defends that They aim to be profitable this yearthe truth is that they had to pick up the phone and dial a number that begins with +39. Help. The call for help has reached Italy. In November 2024Trenitalia has already increased its participation in the company to go from 45% of the capital to 51%. The objective was clear: to provide the Italian parent company with full control of the company and, in this way, have greater room for maneuver to provide it with funds. However, the process to achieve profitability has become complicated. Air Nostrum and Globalia, which are part of the company’s shareholders, committed to putting up 15 million euros more to face possible losses this year. This economic push is just one more within a package that provides aid which has already had contributions of 44.7 million euros in April of last year and almost 35 million euros in the summer of 2024. The occupation. One of the problems that Iryo has encountered is that it cannot fill its trains. If we go to the CNMC datathe Italian company has the worst occupancy data of all Spanish high speed. Madrid-Barcelona: Occupancy of 96.4% (Renfe 112%, Ouigo 99%) Madrid-Seville: Occupancy of 83.2% (Renfe 93.3%, Ouigo 86.4%) Madrid Málaga-Granada: Occupancy of 82.2% (Renfe 93.3%, Ouigo 93.9%) Madrid-Valencia: Occupancy of 70.2% (Renfe 73.3%, Ouigo 88.8%) Madrid Alicante: Occupancy of 66.6% (Renfe 75.9%, Ouigo 87.8%) Added to this is that its power to attract customers by price is much smaller than that of Ouigo since only in Madrid-Alicante does it offer cheaper tickets than those of the French company and for just a few cents. In the rest of the corridors, Iryo is more expensive than the services of Ouigo and AVLO (Renfe). The plans. Yet, Iryo continues defending who aspire for 2025 to become their turning point. They plan to balance their accounts this year and make the jump to profits in 2026 and 2027. To do this, they trust in the arrival of new trains that will expand their capacity and allow them to play on price, first by lowering the price of the ticket and, second, by amortizing Adif fees more easily. In the words of its CEO, the company hopes that Galicia can be another beta where it can make money. However, it must be taken into account that the line moves between the Iberian width and the international width. S106 trains that can “jump” between both tracks are committed to Renfe and the only way to operate would be with a transshipment, which is more costly in time and less attractive to the customer. But it is not the only case. Perhaps the most worrying thing about Iryo’s situation is that, at the moment, Renfe and Ouigo are also losing money with high speed in our country. Since the market opened, the benefits have been exceptional. In 2024, Ouigo received an additional 25 million from SCNF, its French parent company, to cover losses. The initial investment of 200 million had to be expanded given that the company plost more than 40 million euros only in 2024. It is one of the reasons why the Government alleged that from France they were doping the company economically to weaken rivals. Despite everything, Renfe has also suffered heavy losses with high speed. In 2023 they exceeded 120 million euros in losses although in 2024 profitability has already been closelosing in this case about three million euros. Of course, Renfe Viajeros (the part of the company that competes with Ouigo and Iryo) did achieve just over five million euros in profits. Photo | Trenduck In Xataka | Spain wanted to turn the train into the great alternative for traveling in summer. Renfe has never had so many dissatisfied customers

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