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the largest battery company in the world is no longer just about batteries

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The Chinese company specialized in the development of batteries has published results for the first quarter of 2026 that have left analysts speechless. Not because they are good, but because no one saw them coming. And the income has exceeded the forecasts of several analysis firms by 40%. The margin of error is so large that it only shows the obvious: that CATL It has long ceased to be just a battery company. What the numbers say. In the first quarter of 2026, CATL had a turnover of 129.1 billion yuan (about $18.9 billion), 52.5% more than in the same period of the previous year, according to they count from Reuters. Net profit grew 48.5% to 20.7 billion yuan. Analysts expected revenue growth of 35.7% and profit growth of 20.9%. The reality is that the numbers almost double the estimates. If the context of the successful year they had in 2025 is added, the image is just as groundbreaking, since according to the annual report The company’s own revenue that year reached 423.7 billion yuan, with a growth of 17%, and net profit rose 42%. Why analysts They have failed so much. Market consensus continued to treat CATL as a supplier of cells for electric cars. The problem is that this approach ignores two movements that are redefining the company. The first: energy storage, a business with higher margins than vehicle batteries, already represented around a quarter of the product the company shipped in the first quarter. According to data Production data collected by Hello China Tech, in April storage had climbed to 41.3% of total cell production, up from less than 20% a year earlier. The second movement: internationalization. Approximately a third of CATL’s revenue already comes from outside China. A Bet that explains everything. Energy storage is not a segment that CATL has joined by inertia. It is the logical consequence of a thesis: the world needs to store renewable energy on a massive scale. The war in Iran has skyrocketed global energy costs and accelerated demand for renewables, making storage systems critical infrastructure. CATL, which already led that market with a global share of 30.4% in 2025, according to SNE Research (for the fifth consecutive year), has arrived at the exact moment with the necessary capacity. And its shipments of batteries for storage have grown by 80% year-on-year in 2025. Europe as a lever for internationalization. The Debrecen plant, in Hungary, went into mass production during the first quarter of 2026. An investment of 7.3 billion euros to supply Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Stellantis and Volkswagen, with a planned capacity of 100 gigawatt-hours annually and a planned workforce of 9,000 people. This factory is proof that CATL is not content with being a supplier that exports cells, but rather a manufacturer with an industrial presence in the markets it serves. At home, dominating like never before. At the same time, CATL has reached a milestone in China that it had not achieved for five years. According to data from the Chinese Passenger Car Association collected According to CarNewsChina, its production share of electric vehicle batteries in the domestic market exceeded 50% in the first quarter of 2026. In the NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) type battery segment, that share reaches 81.6%. And in the LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) segment, where there is more competition, it reaches 41%, the highest level in four years. The world’s second largest manufacturer, BYD, fell to 13.4% global share, from 16% a year earlier. What CATL is today, beyond batteries. The company itself has been trying to change the story for some time. In your 2025 annual reportstates its ambition to become “a leading global zero-carbon technology company.” It may sound like corporate rhetoric, but it is worth noting that CATL has storage systems deployed in nearly 2,300 projects around the world. Its batteries power artificial intelligence data centers, including SenseTime’s in Shanghai, which the company says reduces electricity consumption by more than 10 million kilowatt-hours annually. It also has subsidiaries in the electric aviation sector and solutions for maritime transport zero emissions. It operates more than 1,000 battery exchange stations for passenger cars and more than 300 for heavy trucks. And it is building what it describes as the world’s first zero-carbon off-grid industrial park, in Shandong. ANDThe market has not yet it has finished processing. It’s not all good news. Morningstar analyst Vincent Sun warns that the automakers’ strategy of diversifying suppliers and cutting costs could “dilute CATL’s pricing power and put pressure on its unit profit.” When you are the dominant supplier, customers have incentives to reduce their dependence. Here it would be necessary to see if CATL’s diversification towards storage, energy services and internationalization builds a sufficient barrier. Cover image | CATL In Xataka | China and the US are dancing the AI ​​dance. And more and more they dance ‘agarraos’

South Korea overtakes China as ASML’s largest market. Sanctions are already changing the world

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In the first quarter of 2026, South Korea has accounted for 45% of ASML salesthe Dutch manufacturer of lithography machinery without which no advanced chip exists. China, which until now led the same ranking with 36%, has fallen to 19%. The order of the semiconductor world has been inverted in the duration of a ‘Q’. Why is it important. ASML is the only company on the planet capable of manufacturing extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machinesessential to produce chips less than 7 nanometers. Whoever controls access to ASML controls, to a large extent, which countries can manufacture elite semiconductors. That is why the figures for the first quarter of 2026 are not just another balance sheet but a way to understand the geopolitical map in real time. Or at least with “only” three weeks of latency. In figures: South Korea: 45% of ASML sales in Q1 2026 (up from 22% in the previous quarter). China: 19% (up from 36%). Taiwan: 23% (up from 13%). ASML’s total net sales in the quarter: €8.8 billion. Net profit: 2,760 million euros (+17% year-on-year). Sales forecast for 2026, revised upwards: between 36,000 and 40,000 million euros. The context. The United States has been building a sanctions architecture for years designed to disconnect China from access to advanced semiconductor technology. ASML, a Dutch company but with technology whose development has also involved American and British partners, stopped selling its EUV machines to China years ago. In 2023 added restrictions on more advanced DUV/UVP systems. What the first quarter data show is that this fence already has measurable effects on real sales flows. Between the lines. South Korea’s jump is not explained only by the Chinese fall. Samsung and SK Hynix They are in full race to build high-end memory capacity (the type of chip that powers AI data centers), and both companies have accelerated their orders for EUV machines. SK Hynix has committed nearly 12 trillion won (about 8.2 billion euros) in EUV lithography equipment for its Cheongju and Yongin factories. And Samsung, for its part, has placed a bulk order for approximately 20 EUV machines as part of a larger purchase of 70 systems for its P5 plant in Pyeongtaek. The underlying message is that the demand for AI is already sold in advance. According to ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, customers in the memory segment have already exhausted their capacity for the entire year. Supply will not meet demand in the foreseeable future and prices continue to skyrocket. Main loser? China, without access to EUV, has been using older DUV systems for years and multiple exposure techniques to approach the 7 nanometer nodes. This translates into chips that are more expensive to produce and have lower yields. Companies like SMIC, ChangXin or Yangtze Memory Technologies operate under increasing financial pressure: the more exposures you need to compensate for the absence of EUV, the worse the production economics. The big question. Can China build its own ASML? There are prototypes in development and the ambition to achieve mass production of EUVs before 2030 is public and no one hides it. That doesn’t mean we can take it for granted: neither Nikon nor Canonwho have dominated lithography for decades, have managed to develop EUV systems. ASML is where it is because it spent years working to achieve it, and it also did so with a very well-coordinated ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, specialized laser technology, thousands of components from suppliers around the world… Replicating that from scratch, under sanctions, in less than five years, is a titanic task even for a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants and an excessive ambition. Yes, but. The restrictions, in fact, have not sunk China, but have forced it to adapt. SMIC produces 7 nanometer chips using alternative techniques, although at higher cost and on a smaller scale. The pace of state investment in semiconductors has not slowed down. And the fact that several engineers who have worked at ASML have ended up in Chinese projects has raised alarms on the other side of the Pacific. China has built its current position on a long-term mindset. The sanctions close the shortest path, but that does not mean that other paths do not exist. In Xataka | China prepares a 2nm AI chip to end NVIDIA’s dominance. Your problem is how you are going to manufacture it Featured image | ASML

James Webb has bad news for the largest natural laboratory for rocky planets, but there is still some hope

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The star TRAPPIST-1 and the seven known planets that surround it are a natural laboratory in which the evolution of rocky planets can be studied. This has led many scientists to focus their attention on them, in search of a possible habitable planet. However, observations made by an international team of astronomers with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope They are not very encouraging. Planets without atmosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope has a very powerful infrared radiation analysis instrument, with which it can analyze the temperature of the planets it observes. These emit infrared radiation whose intensity is proportional to their temperature, so a thermal map can be made. That’s what these astronomers have done. They have initially focused on two of the planets that orbit TRAPPIST-1: TRAPPIST-1a and TRAPPIST-1b. The resulting heat map shows that neither planet has an atmosphere. They may have had it one day, but possibly TRAPPIST-1 itself destroyed it. It is a very uninspiring result for the search for habitable planets in this system. Lights and shadows of TRAPPIST-1. So far seven exoplanets have been discovered orbiting TRAPPIST-1. They are all very close together. In fact, its seven orbits are concentrated in the distance between Mercury and the Sun. What happens is that this red dwarf is less energetic than our Sun, so the temperature would not be as suffocating. All of these planets are rocky, like Earth, and in fact, some are very similar in size. There could be an exoplanet with conditions similar to ours. The problem is that red dwarfs They emit a lot of radiation and energetic flows of particles that could destroy their atmosphere.. And of course, without atmosphere, there is no life. Tidal lock. All planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system are tidally locked. This means that its rotation and translation period around the red dwarf they are synchronized. As a result, there is one side continuously exposed to the star and another on the opposite side. On one side it is always day and on the other it is always night. NASA/JPL-Caltech Extreme temperatures. When a planet is tidally locked, there can be two situations, depending on whether it has an atmosphere or not. When there is an atmosphere, heat flows from the light side to the dark side, so that the entire planet has a stable average temperature. On the other hand, if there is no atmosphere, the dark side can be frozen and the illuminated side can be scorched. In the two exoplanets analyzed by James Webb, it has been seen that temperatures are around 100ºC-200ºC on the illuminated side and -200ºC on the dark side. Therefore, it is confirmed that there is no atmosphere. And now what? Despite this hard blow, there is still hope. The two exoplanets that have been analyzed are not in the star’s habitable zone. This is the distance from it at which the temperature is adequate for the water, if any, to remain in a liquid state. At that exact point there are only TRAPPIST-1e, TRAPPIST-1f and TRAPPIST-1g. Furthermore, the former has a density and size very similar to those of Earth. James Webb has all his attention on this exoplanet right now, to repeat the process. If there were an atmosphere on it, it could still remain on the list of possible habitable planets. It’s still interesting. Despite the first blow, TRAPPIST-1 remains a very interesting system for understand the evolution of rocky planets. The Earth was lucky not to lose its atmosphere; but, beyond those, the evolutions can be similar. Furthermore, we have not yet ruled out that TRAPPIST-1e has an atmosphere. Let’s go step by step. Image | NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) In Xataka | There is only one chance in 11,000 years to reach the planet Sedna. Some Italians want to use this nuclear engine

We believed that data centers in space were a thing of the future. Kepler has already activated the largest orbital cluster

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For years, talk of data centers in space sounded like the kind of idea that always seemed a few years away. The conversation existed, of course, but almost always supported by long-term plans, ambitious announcements and an industry that had not yet shown much real muscle in orbit. That is why what has just emerged deserves attention. TechCrunch explains that Kepler Communications has already launched the largest computing cluster currently operating in space, a sign that this race is beginning to leave the field of promise to enter, little by little, the field of infrastructure. What has Kepler put into orbit. It is not a large facility suspended above our heads, but rather a distributed cluster made up of 10 operational satellites. Together they add up to around 40 Nvidia Orin processors aimed at Edge Computingconnected to each other by laser links. That set, launched in January of this year, as we say, is today the largest active computing cluster in orbit. The company itself also frames this network as a constellation designed to move data in space almost in real time. What it really is. So we are not facing a massive orbital data center that replicates the Earth model, but rather a distributed architecture that combines connectivity and processing in the full space environment. This difference matters because it allows us to separate two plans that are often mixed: one thing is the large-scale vision defended by actors like SpaceX or Blue Origin, and quite another is this first step, much more attached to immediate uses and specific needs of missions in orbit. The immediate business. If this orbital computing is starting to be interesting, it is because it addresses a fairly clear problem: it does not always make sense to send all the data to Earth to process it later. The initial value of these systems is in working with the information right where it is generated, something especially useful for more advanced sensors and for applications that require a faster response. Kepler also maintains that its network can serve as a basis for future processing and connectivity services between different space assets, and the media adds that the company already transports and processes data uploaded from the ground, as well as information collected by payloads hosted on its own satellites. Sophia Space. Here a startup comes into the picture that wants to upload its proprietary operating system to one of the satellites in the constellation and try to deploy and configure it on six GPUs spread over two ships. In a terrestrial data center that would be almost routine, but it would be the first time we would see something like this in orbit. For Sophia, in addition, the test has a clear risk reduction value before its first launch scheduled for the end of 2027. And we are not talking about a minor detail: the company is developing space computers with passive cooling, a way with which it seeks to attack one of the big problems in this sector: avoiding overheating. Kepler doesn’t want to be that. In the midst of so much noise around orbital data centers, the company itself is trying to position itself in a somewhat different place on the map. Your corporate presentation insists in a mission much more linked to communications, with a hybrid optical constellation designed to modernize the flow of data in low orbit and beyond. In this sense, it does not define itself as a data center company, but as infrastructure for space applications. The journey has begun. If this step by Kepler makes anything clear, it is that orbital computing no longer belongs only to the realm of great presentations. SpaceX wants to deploy a massive network of satellites for AI, Google prepares in-orbit tests with solar-powered chips and Blue Origin has announced a constellation of more than 5,000 satellites. In parallel, starcloud already launched a satellite in 2025 with an Nvidia H100 GPU and Aetherflux targets 2027 for its first node. Images | Kepler Communications | Sophia Space In Xataka | The mystery of the misinflated balloon: the more we calculate the size of the Universe, the less sense it all makes

CATL is the largest battery manufacturer in the world and has a new goal: electrify the entire sea

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CATL, the Chinese giant that dominates the global battery market for electric vehicles, it has become entrenched to move towards a new front: the electrification of maritime transport. It makes more sense than it seems, but it is still a great technical challenge. Although the company is not caught by surprise. Below these lines we tell you all the details. What you are already doing. The company, which controls 37% of the global market for batteries for electric cars and 22% of the energy storage market in electrical networks and data centers, has been working in the naval sector since 2017. It has so far deployed its battery systems on about 900 vessels, although mainly on small ships operating near the Chinese coast, in ports or on rivers. Its subsidiary dedicated specifically to powering ships already exists, and this year it plans to more than double the team’s staff, reaching around 500 people, according to confirmed Su Yi, the head of that division, told the Financial Times. Why now. As the media shares, the maritime sector is responsible for 3% of global carbon emissions, and the International Maritime Organization has set itself a goal halve those emissions by 2050. But there is another more recent catalyst that has made many companies reconsider: the recent escalation of war between the United States and Israel against Iran and the temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The war in the Middle East has once again highlighted the fragility of energy supply chains and CATL has a good margin of maneuver there. According to counted To FT Neil Beveridge, an analyst at Bernstein specializing in energy in China, the long-term consequence of this type of situation will be an acceleration of the “global mega-migrant towards electrification.” CATL shares on the Shenzhen stock exchange have risen about 13% since the conflict with Iran broke out. The challenges. Electrifying boats is not like electrifying cars, up to this point I think we are all clear. But seriously, batteries have a much lower energy density than traditional fuels, making them impractical for long-distance ocean crossings. The middle shared the study by the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Navigation, in which they concluded that the most promising approach in the short term is hybrid: combining electric propulsion with combustion engines. Added to this are extra risks that come from the marine environment itself: greater exposure to humidity and salinity, much more difficult evacuation conditions in the event of a fire, and the need for more demanding maintenance than in any car. Replicate the truck business model. CATL does not want to limit itself to selling batteries, as it wants to build an entire infrastructure around it, just as share in FT. It already operates in China a network of battery exchange points for trucks on highways, and now intends to take that same model to the sea. The idea is that ship operators can change their batteries in port without having to charge them, which would also eliminate that cost from the ship’s acquisition price. The company is working with municipalities and ports to develop this ecosystem from scratch; Cities like Guangzhou, one of China’s major shipbuilding centers, already offer subsidies for electric-powered vessels, according to share the middle. A personal story. There is a rather curious detail in all this. And just as account FT, Robin Zeng, founder of CATL, studied marine engineering at university before switching to electronics. “Naval engineering was his original discipline and passion,” Su Yi explained to the outlet. It has its advantages, because over time this discipline could end up becoming the next great industrial transformation of your company. Financial muscle. CATL closed 2025 with a net profit of 72.2 billion yuan (about 10.4 billion dollars), 42% more than the previous year, driven mainly by demand for energy storage. From this position of financial strength, the company has the muscle to invest long-term in a sector where margins are still uncertain. We’ll see how the company ends up doing. Cover image | Wikipedia and Elias In Xataka | In 2022, Europe forced energy companies to swallow the cost of the gas crisis. Now she’s willing to do the same.

take advantage of one of the largest sources of renewable energy

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The energy wave drive It has a great advantage over other more popular renewable energy sources, such as the sun or wind: it never rests. Waves are an almost continuous and enormously energetic resource. And yet, it is the ugly duckling of green energies because its unpredictable and far from constant nature turns energy extraction into a titanic task in terms of efficiency. An American startup, Panthalassa, has been testing for a while In Pacific waters, a prototype that rethinks from the ground up how to relate to the ocean: instead of resisting it, it follows the flow. The invention. He Ocean-2 It is a device that at first glance looks like a giant buoy. In fact, in tests in Puget Sound, Washington, several people reported an unidentified floating object. The spherical part of the end (the node) has almost 10 meters in diameter and is mounted on a tubular hull approximately 60 meters long (which is submerged under the sea). But the analogy with the buoy is accurate in that it is a simple structure that sways with the waves. When it is horizontal it moves and when it is vertical (when it looks like a buoy) it starts working. Why it is important. Because the oceans They cover 71% of the Earth and its energy has an advantage that solar and wind power lack: consistency. The ocean generates energy regardless of whether it is day or night, even if it is calm or the sky is cloudy, which makes this energy source the ideal complement to stabilize networks. The endemic problem of this technology is its low efficiency. If this prototype can be scaled, it could become an alternative and complement to clean and independent energy for coastal areas. Context. In the midst of the race for AI and data centers, the great bottleneck of the United States is the energyso much so that they are dusting off old energy solutions as fossil power plants and resurrecting its nuclear industry. Of course, and although his role in the US, Israel and Iran war is different from Europe and so is its access to oil, the reality is that the price of a barrel being uncontrolled does not benefit them either. In that scenario, it is expanding your investment in renewables. Wave energy has been promising and disappointing for decades. Salt, corrosion, biological growth on structures, and the brutal cost of offshore maintenance have literally and figuratively sunk dozens of projects around the world. The result: almost everything has remained in the pilot phase. Nor has efficiency ever been anything to write home about. And while wave power has stagnated, the price of solar and wind has fallen so rapidly that it has left other clean energies without a competitive advantage. However, wave energy faces another opportunity: Ocean Energy Europe figure The portfolio of planned deployments until 2030 is at 165 MW and the United States has invested $591 million in ocean energy in the last five years. How much energy it produces and uses. In the test he managed to generate up to 50 kW in decent wave conditions, enough to power a small coastal town. However, its priority application is not the domestic electrical network, but something more specific such as clean fuels and computing: producing green hydrogen that is transported to shore in autonomous ships, and powering data centers in the ocean. How they do it. The design of the Ocean-2 has a more philosophical than technical point: it is not so much about resisting the ocean but about accompanying it. As the waves oscillate, water is propelled through an internal pipe to the spherical surface and then descends through turbines to generate power. It has hardly any moving partsbeyond the turbine, integrated into the steel structure The buoy does not have nets or elements that can trap marine fauna, it operates silently and with slow movements: Panthalassa’s environmental manager, Dr. Liam Chen, explained for local TV KOMO that its soft, low-impact design allows you to “live in harmony with the ocean.” Testing in Puget Sound showed no visible alterations to the surrounding marine ecosystem. According to the co-founderGarth Sheldon-Coulson, these machines can be made for around $1,500 per kilowatt. What comes next. As account its co-founder, have been working for about ten years: the first four or five years was only R&D, in 2021 they launched their predecessor the Ocean-1, in 2024 the Ocean-2 was released and the Ocean-3 is already in development and It is making steady progress in its financing. Yes, but. So far, everything is testing and prototypes because the project is in the experimental phase, that is, there is not a single commercial kilowatt generated, nor a connected network, nor long-term durability data. And the sea is not exactly an easy environment: knowing how it will withstand storms and the passage of time, what maintenance will be like or simply something as basic as the transfer of energy from the device to the network is essential. Without forgetting the cost, especially given the collapse in the costs of solar or wind energy, both technologies that are already mature, consolidated and very cheap. In Xataka | With oil skyrocketing, Japan has resurrected an old idea to extract infinite energy from the ocean In Xataka | Something is happening in the oceans for which we have no convincing explanation: the waves are disappearing Cover | Panthalassa and Matt Paul Catalano

The largest naval project in German history since World War II is turning out to be a crazy disaster

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In Europe, large military programs often take more than a decade to be completed and, in many cases, end up costing several times more than initially anticipated. It is not uncommon for complex projects to accumulate thousands of technical requirements and go through multiple reviews before reaching production. In this context, some plans are born as emblems of modernization… and end up becoming examples of how difficult it is to bring them to fruition. From something historic to something unsustainable. He program F126 was born as the great symbol of German rearmament and largest naval project of the country since the Second World War, but over time it has become quite the opposite: an example of how an ambitious plan can derail to the point of collapse. Conceived as a latest generation frigateflexible and prepared for decades of service, the project has not only accumulated delays and cost overrunsbut has called into question Germany’s ability to execute large military programs at a time when it aspires to lead European defense. Technical errors and chaos. He told in an extensive report the financial times that the origin of the problem seems as modern as it is devastating: a failed bet on a new software design that was not ready for a project of this scale. What should have been an advanced tool ended up generating cascading errors, from cables incorrectly located on the plans to steel parts manufactured with incorrect shapes, forcing manual corrections and slowing down the entire production. The result was a system that was moving at just a fraction of its planned pace, with delays that pushed the initial delivery several years later than planned. A culture shock. It turns out that the problem was not just technical. Apparently, the media reported that the project was trapped in a deep shock between the Dutch shipyard’s way of working and the German contracting system, known for its extreme rigidity. Thousands of specifications detailed even the smallest elements, while approval processes were they dragged on for months within a complex bureaucracy that required paper documentation and rejected even plans in English. This combination made collaboration a slow, frustrating, and, in many cases, unproductive process. Skyrocketing costs and limit decisions. As the problems piled up, so did made the invoice: The project, initially valued in the billions, began to go off track with significant cost overruns and structural delays. As it is, Germany now faces critical decisions ranging from replacing the main contractor to accepting billions already invested. as irrecoverable losses. At the same time, faster but less ambitious alternative solutions are being studied, reflecting the extent to which the original project has lost credibility. Notice to sailors of rearmament. If you like, the case of the F126 goes beyond a simple industrial failure: it reveals the limits of European military cooperation even among closely integrated countries and raises questions about the continent’s ability to implement complex joint programs. In a context of increasing of defense spending and increasing strategic pressure, the project has become a clear warning: It is not enough to invest more, you also have to know how to manage better. Because otherwise, even the most important projects can end up being, as in this case, a costly and lengthy example of what not to do. Image | Give me In Xataka | Germany is experiencing a new “industrial miracle” that it already experienced 90 years ago: that of weapons In Xataka | Germany was a sleeping military giant: now it has been awakened and it is already surpassing the US in bullets produced per year

EEEU vetoed the largest Chinese drone manufacturer. He did not expect that he would be left without the largest Chinese drone manufacturer

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In December 2025, the US government banned DJI, making it the Huawei of drones. It was an absolutely crazy idea.with American drone pilots themselves warning about the Trump administration’s terrible decision. To no one’s surprise, the play did not go well. what happened. Late last year, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided ban all drones and critical components of these small aircraft that were manufactured in foreign countries. The measure affected the import of new drones, remaining existing ones operational. But the government did not take into account a small detail: DJI is the main reference in drones worldwide and, literally, there are no alternatives. What is happening. Already in 2025, Greg Reverdiau, co-founder of the Pilot Institute in Arizona, conducted a survey in which 8,000 pilots participated. 85% made it clear that they could stay in business for about two years. From then on, without access to DJI drones, the outlook was unsustainable. Photographers Videographers Farmers Surveyors Emergency services Security forces Major figures in the industry make it clear that no one is going to replace the gap that DJI has left, whether in capacity, affordability, reliability or ease of use. The alternative. GoPro launched a drone, Karma, in 2018. It failed and was never heard from again. Companies like Parrot also launched consumer drones almost ten years ago, but today there is no trace of them. American companies like Skydio have pivoted completely towards defense, with drones worth thousands of dollars and million-dollar contracts with the US military. When asked if they intended to manufacture drones for consumption, the answer was a clear no. Goodbye to 90%. DJI dominated the US drone market with a 90% share, and there are no real alternatives to replace drones that are reaching the end of their useful life. With no possible DJI replacement in sight, the question is no longer who will take over, it’s how long the current fleet will last before volunteer firefighters, farmers and rescue teams run out of work tools. In Xataka | Best drones. Which one to buy and recommended models from 50 to 3,500 euros

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

the largest startup incubator in the world

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In recent years, NVIDIA has gone from being a company gaming hardware who was doing interesting things in the field of artificial intelligence to being, directly, the glue of the entire AI industry. And it has achieved this through graphic muscle, but also thanks to deep pockets and a very clear vision: to become the largest AI incubator in the world. Although, for some, there has been become an awkward partner. You can’t talk about AI without talking about NVIDIA, but along the way it has achieved something else: turning its main allies into rivals. NVentures. A few years ago, Jensen Huanghead of NVIDIA, realized something: the AI ​​had to be from NVIDIA or it wouldn’t belong to anyone. The CEO identified the need to become an investor, but also the technical support point for startups that were beginning to buy many of his chips for AI training. Years before, NVIDIA had Inception, a branch focused on non-financial support, but in 2022 it launched NVentures. It is the corporate venture capital arm of the company and was born at the dawn of the generative AI that we know today. In fact, it was launched a few months before ChatGPT public releasewhich was precisely the one that popularized the massive use of NVIDIA GPUs to train large-scale models. If with Inception more than 19,000 AI startups went through the advisory program (with training, cloud credits and discounts on massive GPU purchases, but without direct investment), with NVentures things also escalated quickly. From a direct investment in 2022 they passed to 30 in 2023, 54 in 2024 and 67 in 2025. Some are larger than others, but all are investments of tens of millions of dollars that have served to boost the current ecosystem in a kind of circular economy. Do you think I’m a bank? In this article of TechCruch investments are laid out perfectly and separated into “clubs.” There is the 100 million with companies like Ayar Labs, Hippocratic AI, Kore.ai or Runway that have received more than 100 million dollars. That of hundreds of millions with Cohere, Commonwealth Fusion, Perplexity, Lambda or Black Forest Labs as exponents. And then the billion dollar club. In that bag are the big names such as Cursor, xAI, the French Mistral, Reflection AI, Thinking Machines Lab, Figure AI or Scale AI. Also two uncomfortable partners: OpenAI and Anthropic. The relationship between OpenAI and NVIDIA has been long and symbiotic. Both have helped each other put themselves on the map of generative AI, but NVIDIA is going to cut off the tap. Recently, Huang himself commented that they will put 30 billion in OpenAI, or… and that the two mega-operations will probably be the last. The two companies are expected to go public later this year, so they will have to start fending for themselves. Business turnaround. That does not mean that NVIDIA is going to stop injecting money, it simply implies that they are going to allocate that money to be in more places at the same time. Instead of such large amounts, more financing for more “modest” companies in models, software, infrastructure, robotics, cloud and even autonomous driving and biotechnology to continue expanding the network of companies that scale on their platform. In fact, this investment in small companies that are beginning to grow is very lucrative. An example is the Reflection funding round. Of the 2 billion that the company raised, 800 million came from NVIDIA’s pockets, and much of that money, along with interest, will flow back into his pockets. NVIDIA is so important that the company points out that “when you talk to it, you are talking to NVIDIA.” That dependence on NVIDIA is what makes the company an uncomfortable partner because it has enormous power. Inference. But the other turn is not so much from NVIDIA as from the industry itself. These last few years we have focused on training. More and more powerful chips to power increasingly fat data centers in which increasingly capable models are trained. However, once trained, the model must be useful for something, and that is where inference comes into play. Because it is estimated that the big growth of the future of AI will not be so much training the next ChatGPT, but the ability to manage billions of AI requests cheaply and efficiently. This implies that there must be more specialized chips with different architectures than a classic training GPU. The analysts are already pointing that the speed at which the need for inference increases is faster than expected. From lovers to enemies. and there other companies come into play. On the one hand, classic rivals such as Huawei with equipment both for training and for inference. Also a AMD that is gaining contacts like Samsung to create training GPUs and inference CPUs. Intel, Amazon and Google also have their own chips. But NVIDIA’s biggest customers don’t want NVIDIA to dictate their future. OpenAI is working with Broadcom to develop its own chips that may be focused on that inference and both Tesla and xAI (now part of SpaceX) also They have taken the same path. The two companies have needed NVIDIA until now, but they do not want to depend on it for an inference where there may be more profit margin. Because the idea is to create chips that are very specialized in request management to lower the cost of AI as much as possible. China is an example of this. The country’s big technology companies and startups have focused on one thing: training specialized models and making inference so cheap that the user doesn’t mind paying. There is already someone point that 80% of the cost of AI in the short term will be inference, and solutions are needed. The ace in the hole. But if almost all allies have been preparing their deck for some time to stop depending on NVIDIA’s cards, NVIDIA has also been doing the math and keeping the ace up its sleeve. … Read more

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