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“Now there is money everywhere and if you have a quality company, you will have a lot of funds waiting”

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Like scouts for football or basketball clubs, investment funds and large companies use a figure with the same purpose. They are the ‘scouts’ or startup scouts. Their mission: to find promising companies when they have not yet been discovered, to be the first or among the first to invest or collaborate with them. In silver, arrive before anyone else. “These ‘scout’ programs become popular during approximately 2021-2022, in the midst of valuation hysteria for technology companies. It is a time of prosperity for the funds, which begin to see that the companies’ income multiples begin to grow very quickly,” says Kintxo Cortés, referring to the fact that the investment enthusiasm resulted in the companies’ income having to be multiplied each time by a higher number (x4, then x6, then x11…) to arrive at your assessment. For reference, the current 5 trillion dollars of capitalization of Nvidia are equivalent to multiplying its annual income by 20. In the case of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, the figure would come from multiplying turnover by 11 and in that of Apple, by 10. “In venture capital what is happening is that money is a commodity. There are very good funds, so it is not only a race to see who finds the company that grows the best but also who enters a promising company the earliest,” explains Cortés, who has been a scout for four years. He currently collaborates with the Accel and Samaipata funds, in addition to working at the connectivity company Gigs. “Now there is money everywhere and if you are an entrepreneur and have a quality company, you will have a lot of funds that will want to put money into you.” In an environment like the one Cortés draws, investment funds can only be differentiated in two ways. One of them is with its team of professionals, capable of adequately supporting the startup. The other is with speed. Whoever gets to the entrepreneur first has an advantage when it comes to investing. So the funds have diversified their search for projects with potential. The objective is to enter capital very soon, even with a small position. And this is where the scouting activity unfolds. They are specialists and know the entrepreneurship ecosystem inside out in certain areas or niches. They allow the funds to gain capillarity that they do not have with their staff alone. This way they have access to a greater number of companies and can glimpse promising teams operating in interesting sectors as soon as possible. Although this scout profile is not the only one that scans the landscape in search of attractive startups. Gema García González, director of Open Innovation and Coporte Venturing at Repsol, is in charge of a team of ten people dedicated to reinforcing the company’s technological development with external resources. “We try to be flexible, we work with other research centers, with other corporations and, of course, with startups. The entrepreneurial ecosystem has many pieces, it has grown a lot in recent years and can contribute a lot to us in developments that we want to accelerate,” he explains. In this case the scouts are on staff. Thus, the company has invested in more than 35 startups and today works with 21 companies, detected by its analyst service. “We do not invest in what any investment fund can invest in, we invest in something that can be strategic for the company, in startups with which we want to collaborate,” says García González. Repsol scouts, working within the framework of its R&D center, Tech Lab, comb the entrepreneurial ecosystem in search of circular economy, energy optimization or renewable hydrogen projects. “My team has to dedicate part of its time to being very connected to the ecosystem. It needs to have a good network of contacts with other corporations, with other investment funds, go to conferences and startup events and see which platforms are the best to launch technological challenges,” explains García González. He clarifies that one of the formulas for finding interesting projects is the launch of contests and challenges that reward the best solutions to a given problem. Don’t let the next ‘PayPal Mafia’ escape The connection with the entrepreneurial world is essential. In the technology sector, a trend that has been seen for a few years has been accentuated. “There are companies that are doing very well in technology and have many employees who begin to set up other companies because they have access to liquidity, either because the company goes public or they can move shares in the secondary market,” says Cortés. “They find themselves with a lot of money and the desire to continue building things.” The phenomenon is not new and is reminiscent of the success of ‘PayPal Mafia’a symbol of that diaspora that sometimes occurs in technology companies. Many talented employees and deep pockets who decide to undertake can emerge from them. From the early days of PayPal came Elon Musk, the founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman and the investor Peter Thiel. And other employees started projects such as YouTube, Yelp or the social application Slide, acquired by Google. More recently, the brain drain at OpenAI also illustrates how talent within one startup ends up spawning other startups. That’s where the Amodei brothers came from.which they founded Anthropicformer chief scientist Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence) or former CTO Mira Murati (Thinking Machines Lab). The great value of Kintxo Cortés for the funds with which he collaborates is his network of contacts with employees and former employees of the companies where he has worked, especially Airbnb, Shopify and Trade Republic. That connection is key for investing entities, which do not have the structure on their own to delve into the ins and outs of the projects formed by former employees of the technology companies. Even fewer are able to discern which employees they should pay attention to, whether because they are the sharpest, most talented, or best positioned. A corporation like Repsol must also be clear about which … Read more

Spain had a master plan for the European fighter. The problem is that Germany just got a girlfriend with a lot of “money”

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In 1986, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom decided to join forces to build the Eurofighter Typhoon. It took almost two decades to turn it into realitybut that project left a key lesson: in Europe, fighters are not built with engineering alone, but with industrial and political balances that sometimes last longer than the technology itself. The collapse and plan B. It we count last week. He collapse of the Future Combat Air System has not only been the failure of a large European military program of 100,000 million euros, it has also been the moment in which Spain understood that he could not wait for France and Germany to resolve their industrial wars. For years, the FCAS It was sold as the large sixth-generation European fighter, but tensions between Airbus and Dassault Aviation they ended up blocking the distribution of work, leadership and technological architecture. When Berlin withdrew, Madrid lost more than just a partner: it lost the pillar that supported its own bet. FCAS concept The Spanish exit. Spain had been moving in silence for some time. With Indra gaining weight in defense and with growing conversations with Saab, the idea was clear: if FCAS sank, there was room to build an alternative axle with Germany and Sweden around satellite technologies such as sensors, combat cloud, accompanying drones and command systems. It was not yet a “new fighter” as such, but it was a survival platform industrial so as not to be tied to Paris. It was a lateral route to keep the Spanish option alive within the sixth European generation. Italy changes the board. And then Italy has appeared. Leonardo’s new management has made it clear that it would be delighted to open the door of the Global Combat Air Program to Germany. On paper, that is a logical invitation: Berlin brings money, industry and experience accumulated with the Eurofighter Typhoon. But strategically it is a bomb for Spain. Because the centerpiece of your plan B (Germany) could stop looking towards the Swedish axis and turn towards Rome, London and Tokyo. In a matter of weeks, the Spanish escape route could become a dead end. Germany is looking for a leading role. The German movement also has internal logic. Berlin does not want to be a secondary partner. He made it clear within the FCAS and he is repeating it now: if he enters another program, he wants a role proportional to your investment and its industrial weight. That sits poorly with France, where Dassault Aviation never wanted to let go control, but it fits much better with Italian flexibility. Furthermore, BAE Systems and the German branch of Airbus already they cooperated successfully on the Eurofighter. For Berlin, GCAP is starting to look less like an alternative and more like a logical continuation. The Spanish dilemma. And here is the big crack for Spain. If Germany joins GCAP, Madrid stays trapped between two worlds: a mortally wounded FCAS and an alternative plan that loses its most important partner before consolidating. Spain can try to continue punch to France, but that would mean accepting a (much) more subordinate role. You could also look for a direct approach to Italy or even Japan and the United Kingdom, but arriving late to an already structured program reduces a lot the negotiation margin. The risk is brutal: being left out of the table where the next great European air combat ecosystem is decided. Europe repeats its old problem. All this once again reveals the great industrial drama European: too many projects, too many egos and, above all, too much overlap. While the United States and China move forward with centralized programs, Europe continues to fragment its resources between rival blocs. In that sense, Spain believed it had found a safety net after the FCAS. The problem is that this network depended on Germany… and now Germany has a new dance couple. Image | Picryl In Xataka | Spain, France and Germany had joined together to illuminate the “European fighter” of the future: now that path is dead In Xataka | The European fighter has died, but Europe still has one last bullet to avoid the F-35: the alliance of Spain and Sweden

It can save you a lot of time every day (and now it’s cheaper)

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When working in front of the computer, anything we can do or have to save time, the better. An example that we all have very internalized is having one ultrawide monitor or two monitors above the desktop, something that allows you to work with more windows open at the same time. But be careful how good a Stream Deck can be for us: you have this MK.2 model in white reduced to 129.99 euros. Elgato Stream Deck MK.2 White – Studio Controller, 15 Macro Keys, Activate Actions in Apps and Software like OBS, Twitch, YouTube and Others, Works on Mac and PC The price could vary. We earn commission from these links If this is out of your budget and you want a cheaper option, you also have the Stream Deck Mini available for 77.25 euros. It is true that it is not its lowest price, but it’s cheaper than the previous one. And the only difference is that, instead of having 15 keys, it only has 6. A very versatile and customizable gadget to work with This device has always been closely associated with the world of streaming, but it is useful in many other areas. It is a composite panel, in this model, by 15 keys that we can customize almost to the millimeter. There are thousands of possible options: from assigning an application to one of those buttons (for example, to open Spotify or the email manager) to much more complex actions. What do we mean by that? Let’s imagine that, to work, you need to have three or four programs open, such as the Internet browser or Photoshop. With Elgato software, you can customize one key to open everything at once, ideal when starting the work day. You can also customize the keys for certain specific functions of tools such as Excelso it will also help you once you get to work on your day. Furthermore, since they are LCD keys, they also you can customize the look they havewhich makes it very intuitive to use. It is true that it is not a cheap gadget, but it is very useful to improve daily ‘workflow’. And, although it is not at an all-time low (which is approximately 92 euros), it is a great price if we take into account that it was costing almost 170 euros a few weeks ago. Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Elgato In Xataka | DDR4 or DDR5? What RAM to choose so as not to pay even more than necessary in the middle of the price crisis In Xataka | This is the gaming tower that I would buy. The computers with the best quality-price ratio for gaming recommended by Xataka

There are a lot of people who want to turn potato omelette into the “new pizza”

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The potato omelette is almost certainly the most ‘homemade’ dish in the Spanish recipe book. In fact, more than a ‘dish’ it is a ‘symbol’ of traditional cuisine, of all life. And yes, it’s true: it has always been available in bars, cafes and restaurants; but the queen of tortillas was (proudly) something that was made at home. But not anymore. When one stands in front of the Navarra factory of Natural Prepared (the manufacturer of the 60 million tortillas that Mercadona sells each year) it is inevitable to think that this train has already passed. As they say in DAP, the industrial process is fascinating (each tortilla is fried at a different temperature!) and, at the same time, it is a clear piece of how the industry is betting everything to ensure that Juan Roig’s vision comes true: let’s stop cooking. And the tortilla is the battlefield. We will return to the Mercadona tortilla, but it is not the only actor at play. Martinuca was born just after the pandemic and, with the impetus of Maria Pombohas achieved a turnover of more than seven million euros for its premium tortillas at home in 2025 alone – more than double that of the previous year. And that’s only with four locations in Madrid and Barcelona. Its objective is quite clear: “elevate the Spanish tortilla to a global icon, as the Italians did with pizza“. And the reference is interesting because, de facto, the tortilla is following a ‘pattern’ similar to the one that pizza followed 20 or 30 years ago: the sector is growing in the hypermassive industrial product and in the premium (with a huge step in delivery). And why now and not 20 years ago? First of all, for a technical issue. As our colleague Miguel Ayuso explainswe are talking about the first fresh tortillas that hit the shelves. “Until then there were only tortillas that were pasteurized in their own packaging and the juiciness was greatly compromised,” Sergio Beni told DAP. Since Palacios/Fuentetaja began to grow the market a decade ago, until Elaborados Naturales has managed to become the first player at a national level, the technical, logistical and distribution revolution has been enormous. But “being able to do it” has only been part of the process. The other is that we have stopped cooking. We are doing it, in fact. According to the report “Convenience, the super power that changes everything” that has just been published, the average daily time spent cooking has fallen to 24.5 minutes, 41% of consumers usually eat in a hurry and ready-to-eat dishes grew by 55% between 2022 and 2025. Mercadona takes a third of that pie. What’s interesting is that, for the first time, respondents say they go to these products for price. It is not clear that this is true because the prices are high compared to food prepared at home; but even if it were a simple rationalization, it is interesting. It is not in vain that the majority of Spaniards continue to say that they like to cook. But weren’t we wanting to stop cooking? In DAP, Beni explained that “people no longer want to cook at home. They want to cook as a hobby, but you want that time you use to cook for your things, to play paddle tennis, to go to the gym, to read a book, to study or to make your life. You don’t want to spend that time cooking. Before our mothers spent two hours cooking and we don’t want that anymore, we want to spend that time on other things and products that are good and that are good.” However, even though There is a lot of data that proves them right.this is still a business story. “Cooking” is becoming “plating things.” It is true that the 20th century has been a century in which more and more stages of food processing have been taken outside of domestic kitchens. Today, our country only 28% of Spaniards cook from fresh foods. In fact, if we go to the dataWe can see that millennials eat 30% more often in restaurants than any other generation; When they cook, they spend less time (one hour less per week than Generation It’s US data, but we can find a similar process in all Western countries. That is to say, the discourse that kitchens are going to disappear is the framework for the next step of integration between the agri-food industry and domestic kitchens. A regulative ideal, a scenario that helps normalize what we already do (but without feeling bad about it). Will they be successful? Nobody knows, but it is clear that they are going to try hard. The Spanish tortilla is the best example. Image | instagram / Miguel Ayuso In DAP | We visited the Navarra factory where Mercadona’s potato tortillas are made: they make one and a half per Spaniard per year

There’s a reason you stop to pet any cat you pass on the street (and it says a lot more about you than you think).

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There’s something that happens to me every time I walk down the street and pass a cat. It doesn’t matter if you’re perched on a wall, looking out of a window, or just sitting on the sidewalk watching the world go by. Arrest. Greetings. I extend my hand slowly, wait to see if it comes closer, and if it does, I pet it. It is not a conscious decision: it is automatic. It also happens to me with dogs or any other animal that crosses my path. For a long time I thought it was just a personal quirk. But it turns out not. Psychology and neuroscience have been studying exactly that gesture for years—that almost uncontrollable impulse to seek contact with a cat—and what they have found says much more about who we are than what appears at first glance. The first thing to understand is that in this bond, the cat has the last word. It’s not like petting a dog, which usually comes alone and enthusiastically. Cats are selective, unpredictable and much less invasive in their displays of affection. Therefore, what science says about this exchange has a particular complexity. a study, collected by Science Alert measured the hormone levels of owners and cats during 15-minute sessions of physical contact at home. The results were eloquent: when contact was relaxed—stroking, gentle hugs, rocking—oxytocin levels rose in both people and animals. But there was an indispensable condition: the interaction could not be forced. Cats had to be able to walk away if they wanted to.. “The hormone flows when the cat feels safe and comfortable,” the study authors wrote. What would happen when that condition was not met was just as revealing. According to Vice owners who tried to hug cats that didn’t want to be hugged saw their oxytocin levels drop, not rise. And the same would happen in the animal. The forced hug does not activate love: it turns it off. There is something deeply human in that. Oxytocin, cortisol and a 150 hertz purr Oxytocin is the hormone that scientists call “love” or “bonding.” It is the same one that is triggered when we hug someone we love, when a mother sees her newborn child, when there is real trust between two people. That it also appears in contact with a cat—and that it appears in the cat as well—is not a minor fact. The connection with animals and the increase in oxytocin is not new in scientific research. A review published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2012 already documented that interaction with animals produced measurable increases in oxytocin and reductions in cortisol, the hormone associated with stress. But studies on cats in particular came later and with important nuances. Researchers in Japan published in MDPI Animals an experiment with 32 cat owners: those who freely interacted with their animals showed significant hormonal changes compared to non-contact rest periods. A 2002 study already documented that the increase in oxytocin generated by gentle contact with cats helped reduce cortisol and, consequently, blood pressure and even the perception of pain. It is one of the works collected by Laura Elin Pigott, professor of Neuroscience at London South Bank University, in his analysis published in The Conversation. But there is a third player in this equation that is often overlooked: the purr. According to a synthesis of research collected by PetShun the frequency of a cat’s purr—which ranges wildly between 25 and 150 hertz—falls within what specialists call the “biomechanical stimulation range.” It is literally the same range of frequencies used in clinical vibration therapy to promote tissue repair and bone density. Some studies suggest that Listening to that sound can reduce cortisol levels by 10% to 20% in just 15 minutes of exposure. It’s not magic or intuition new age. It is physics and biochemistry. With a dog the bond is automatic. With a cat, you have to earn it But not all animals produce this effect in the same way. And understanding that difference is key to understanding what it says about you that you are looking for cats. In a 2016 experiment, scientists measured oxytocin in pets and their owners before and after ten minutes of play. The dogs saw an average 57% increase in their oxytocin levels. Cats, just 12%. The difference, according to researchers collected by Science Alertdoes not reflect feline coldness but rather evolutionary history: dogs were domesticated for millions of years for constant visual contact and dependence on humans. Cats, no. That’s why they reserve that hormonal surge—and that confidence—for the moments when they feel truly safe. In other words: with a dog, the emotional bond is almost automatic. With a cat, you have to earn it. And that completely changes what it says about the person looking for it. What stopping on the street to greet a cat says about you A study from Nottingham Trent University, published in PLOS ONE by Lauren Finka and her team with a sample of more than 3,300 cat owners, found something that at first seems striking: certain personality traits observed in the owners also appeared in their cats. The researchers’ hypothesis is that cats could be reflecting, in part, the personalities of those who care for them. It is not a minor fact: it suggests that the relationship is not one-way and that the human-feline bond is so real that it leaves a mark on both. On the other hand, research on people who prefer the company of cats consistently points to certain shared traits. a study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications analyzed 319 young adult cat owners and found that pet attachment was positively correlated with empathy, emotional regulation, and perceived social support. In other words, Those who build a solid bond with their cat tend to also have greater empathic capacity in their human relationships. This finding connect with what Faunalyticsan organization that synthesizes research on the human-animal bond, has documented: people who live with companion animals are … Read more

“I think it’s the most valid criticism of AI right now, there is a lot of expense”

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The artificial intelligence race is causing large technology companies to squander enormous sums of money to have the best AI, the one that the most people use and, above all, the one that generates the most money (three concepts that are far from the same thing and, rather, let them tell Google). According to Goldman Sachs databig tech and their infrastructure providers have on their roadmap to spend more than a trillion dollars on chips, data centers and software. The million dollar question is: is there a return after that investment? The CEO of OpenAI, one of the companies in the fight and certainly one of the most interested (it does not have the muscle of veterans like Google, Meta or Microsoft), has already recognized it in an interview for CNBC: It is absolutely normal to worry about that spending on AI due to the waste and the uncertainty of when they will get their reward (if it ever arrives). Sam Altman’s statements. Asked about the doubts generated by AI, he responded bluntly that it is “the fairest criticism that can be made of AI at this moment.” And he added: “I know big things are happening, but I know there is a lot of waste.” He also put on the table the two questions that companies that adopt AI in their processes ask: how long do they have to wait for this change to be noticed in their income and how long for costs to be under control. Spoiler: taking into account the latest movements from Uber and Microsofttwo completely successful companies, things are looking bad. The most interesting thing about this display of honesty is where they come from. Altman is the person who has raised the most money for fund OpenAIone of the leading companies in the AI ​​sector but also one of the newcomers, a baby compared to mythical companies that have been dominating the technology for decades. That Altman talks about waste is a before and after in the industry’s discourse. Why is it important. Until now, the ROI of AI has been a concept on the lips of skeptical analysts, economists and people who disbelieve this boom who point directly to a bubble about to burst. But Altman has integrated it into his corporate discourse and that represents a paradigm shift: it is no longer a critical position from outside the sector, it is that the most influential company verbalizes it to users and investors. As we mentioned in the intro, Goldman Sachs already considered this same question back in 2024 with its “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”. Economist and 2024 Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu of MIT published a study called “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” where he estimated that the real impact of AI on economic productivity in the next decade would be a paltry (especially if we take into account the speeches and investments) of just 0.5%. Context. That in this phase of expansion and training of AI It is not profitable it is no secretbut this is both an economic and a technical problem. With data in hand, there are reasons to worry. This recent Cast AI report It includes the analysis of 23,000 computing clusters, revealing that the average utilization of GPUs is only 5%. That is, 95% of the most expensive and advanced hardware on the market (those highly sought-after NVIDIA graphics cards) is operating well below its capacity. Part of the explanation lies in FOMO: explains Venture Beat that there are many companies acquiring AI chips not because they need them right now, but out of fear of running out of them in the future. The phenomenon is not new, we already saw it during the pandemic with semiconductors (and on a domestic scale, with toilet paper). There is someone who wins. In this story of companies investing to win the AI ​​race and other companies adopting it to modernize, there is someone who is winning from the first minute: NVIDIA bills the same whether its chips work at 5% or 100%. And he is breaking all his records. In 2024 record revenues of $60.9 billion (126% more than the previous year) thanks to this excessive demand for data centers. The large cloud providers, the holy trinity composed of Amazon, Microsoft and Google (the three occupy 70% of the market, according to Synergy data) bill the same regardless of whether the client is achieving results. According to Synergy Research Groupthe global cloud infrastructure market will exceed $330 billion in 2024. The underlying problem is incentives: those who have the most weight in the pace of investment in AI are precisely those who lose the least, hence no one is taking measures against waste. Yes, but. Making a catastrophic reading of Altman’s statements would be a mistake and in fact, the CEO of OpenAI himself expressed his confidence “the industry will solve it quickly.” After all, in that initial phase it is normal to incur losses and if not, tell Netflix with streaming. Current waste may simply be the cost of setting up infrastructure whose value will be realized later. Even the Goldman Sachs report acknowledges that bubbles take time to burst, meaning there is room for AI to deliver on its promises. Of course, a good part of the current artificial intelligence expenditure is linked to GPUs with specific architectures that could become obsolete in the face of more efficient models or specific architectures. In Xataka | The problem is not spending a lot of tokens, it’s that most of them are being wasted In Xataka | Anthropic has moved ahead of OpenAI in its race to go public. This is very bad news for Sam Altman Cover | TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0) and Giorgio Trovato

Space data centers seem crazy. They make a lot more sense than it seems

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“Space, the final frontier” became a classic pop culture phrase thanks to the series Star Trek. Now there are those who complete it with “… data centers”, because that is what Elon Musk certainly wants to achieve, and he has a plan to achieve it. At first glance it seems crazybut it turns out that the idea is not at all crazy. Free cooling, nothing. As explained in a very deep report in Semianalysismany analysts support the idea by defending erroneous premises. The space, for example, does not offer free cooling. Since there is no atmosphere, heat is not dissipated by convection, and huge and expensive thermal radiators are necessary. Solar energy is also interrupted in low orbits (LEO), so satellites must be placed in sun-synchronous orbits, a resource that is beginning to become saturated. The current cost does not compensate. The analysis carried out in this study for the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a currently standard 30.5 kW cluster (with two servers with 16 Nvidia B300 GPUs) does not add up. Deploy this infrastructure In space it is necessary to invest 4.1 million dollars, when doing the same on Earth costs 1.4 million dollars. Space data centers are currently 260% more expensive than on the planet’s surface. Bad business. Space transportation makes everything more expensive. He biggest problem What affects these costs is the costs of transporting the material to space. In that proposed example, of the $3.1 million total cost of space infrastructure, $1.6 million is due to launch. But there is also the problem of the useful life of this data center: on Earth these facilities pay for themselves in 15 years, but in space wear and radiation in orbit reduce the operational life of the particular satellite to only five years, which multiplies those capital expenses dedicated to the project almost by 20. The first bottleneck is the chips. Even solving these problems, the main obstacle is simply semiconductor manufacturing capacity. The demand for TSMC’s N3 wafers and the supply of HBM memories is much higher than the supply even without this idea of ​​​​space data centers. That would add even more demand to an absolutely saturated system. But there is also the (lack of) energy. The reason why Musk wants to promote this idea as soon as possible is that obtaining power supply for terrestrial data centers is increasingly complicated. Thus, getting a connection to the electrical grid in Virgnia (USA) already takes seven years. Companies are creating their own power generation plants to solve this problem. Even so, according to the study, it will become increasingly more expensive to access this supply: they estimate that the cost of “terrestrial energy” will be above 20 million dollars per MW when this decade ends. That’s why Terafab. To solve this first bottleneck, Elon Musk has launched its colossal Terafab project in Austin. It is a huge chip manufacturing factory that will need 10 GW of electrical power to produce one million semiconductor wafers each month. The plan takes into account that 80% of the chips produced are destined precisely for space data centers. Starship changes the equation. But Starship stands in front of all these problems. SpaceX hopes to be able to reduce launch costs significantly in the coming years, going from the current $1,400-1,800 per kilo for the Falcon 9 to just $250 per kg for the Starship. This, together with the improvement in radiator and solar panel technology, will reduce the cost gap with terrestrial infrastructure. Now it is 260% more expensive, but at the beginning of the next decade it will be only 30% more expensive and will achieve economic parity by 2040. But. The accounts could therefore come out in the medium term, but it is necessary to take into account other factors as the so-called long-term computing cost. On Earth, between 3% and 6% of GPUs in data centers fail each year and require manual replacement by a technician. In space that option disappears, so it is necessary to oversize the satellites with 20% chips to provide redundancy and thus absorb potential radiation failures. In Xataka | Aragón is quietly becoming a data center “powerhouse” – now it has taken a crucial step

The problem is not spending a lot of tokens, it’s that most of them are being wasted

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A year ago, Sam Altman did a striking prediction: as the production of data centers becomes automated, the cost of intelligence (AI) should at some point converge with the cost of electricity.” Or what is the same: access to AI would be very, very cheap. That has not happened by any means, but in addition to spending a lot of tokens, we are wasting them. So much AI for what?. He phenomenon of tokenmaxxing -he rampant token consumption more like fashion than something useful—has begun to set off alarm bells, because companies have realized that they are spending small fortunes for their employees to try to get the most out of AI. AI dismissal. A study by the startup EntelligenceAI affirms that for every dollar invested in AI, only 18 cents end up reaching production. The remaining 82% ends up being invested in correcting errors, rewriting code and executing review processes that do not generate direct value. This is what they call “unproductive spending,” and it is a warning sign because the success of this technology does not depend on us using AI non-stop, but on using it to improve productivity. Uber warns. Andrew Macdonald, COO of Uber, I questioned openly whether this massive spending by companies like yours on AI is really justified when it is not linked to improvements in productivity. The company has been one of those that has decided to cut spending on Anthropic models because the available annual budget had already been “vented” to use them. Investing in tokens ends up being unprofitable: the “useful part” is less than a fifth of what is invested, according to EIntelligence AI. The uncertainty is there. Other experts They warn just the opposite: This is just the beginning of what is to come, so taking action against AI consumption may be counterproductive. The problem is not so much that AI is being used, but rather that it is being wasted: this obsession with consuming tokens caused the CFO at Amazon, for example, to tell his employees “Don’t use AI just for the sake of using it”. The company rewarded those who used AI the most, so many ended up using it for trivial, redundant or useless tasks. Use AI appropriately. Matan Gringberg, CEO of the AI ​​startup Factory, told in WSJ how a manager at a major financial institution had told him that his employees were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens. The problem was that some were using the most powerful models to answer simple questions or just to chat. The message here is clear: these models must be used appropriately to avoid wasting them: “If your daughter needs private algebra classes, you can probably find someone cheaper than Albert Einstein to give them to her,” he concluded. We are consuming tokens beyond our means. At the Google I/O event Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, explained that the company currently processes more than 3.2 trillion tokens per month, seven times more than a year ago. Faced with this demand, both it and other companies are “punishing” the trivial use of AI models. AI agents consume tokens like there’s no tomorrow. What has also happened is that the arrival and popularization of agentic programming tools, such as Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity, causes many more tokens to be consumed because with them it is possible to automate the execution of programming tasks (or other areas) on a continuous basis. The AI ​​model prepares a plan, executes it, and at each step thinks and evaluates its responses before continuing with the plan. This process is intensive in token consumption, and is the main reason why token consumption has skyrocketed. Flat rates, nothing. Monthly plans like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro offered leeway for developers to consume huge amounts of tokens with hardly any limitations. However, both OpenAI and Anthropic and other companies have begun to change their strategies, limiting the cases in which these flat rates can be used so that users cannot abuse them. If they want to consume more they can, but always through a pay-per-use philosophy: the more you use, the more you pay for something that at least helps users be aware that they cannot use super-powerful models for useless conversations with their chatbots. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | If the question is whether using ChatGPT or Claude in English is more efficient and saves tokens, the answer is: yes

The time since 1940 has changed a lot. We finally have a time machine to see it on an interactive map

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I was born on a Monday in September at noon and, obeying the tradition of the San Miguel summer, the weather was mild and sunny even though October was just around the corner. I know this because my mother has told me a lot of times, but today I also just confirmed it. And be careful, finding out the weather of a day in the 80s was not a priori as easy as knowing what it was last year: it normally involved resorting to scientific databases or finding paper records, which are already old. The good news is that there is a free tool, accessible from any browser and moderately intuitive so that anyone can know what the weather was like on any day (and any time!) from today until 1940, from your date of birth to your wedding or a trip. The not so good news is that it is the best test to see how time is changing due to climate change. His name is Weather Replay and in a few words it works like a meteorological time machine in the form of a weather visualization web application. Behind this website there are two top-level European projects: on the one hand Copernicus Climate Change Serviceintegrated into the EU space program and with the aim of offering rigorous climate data available to everyone. On the other hand, ECMWF, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, the world reference body for numerical weather prediction. Weather Replay Home Screen The climate time machine starts in 1940 The first screen says roughly what it does: you choose a date and time, use the box at the bottom left to write a location and from there you can see a 48-hour animation where the atmospheric conditions of that specific moment are reproduced: temperature, wind, precipitation, pressure and a few other variables. Everything is very visual and available in a few seconds, without installing anything or registering. Layers are a key element to learn more information. Weather Replay Although there is an initial tutorial that may be interesting to follow, the buttons and their function and the legend are easy to understand and despite its simple appearance, it is quite powerful and with practical options to only have what interests us such as zooming, modifying colors and levels or layers. An especially interesting function is being able to compare the time on two specific dates. Swipe left and right to see what the weather was like on two days from 1940 to today. Weather Replay Under the hood of this comprehensive interactive map is ERA5, the ECMWF global atmospheric reanalysis that continuously reconstructs the state of the atmosphere using real data from satellites, sounding balloons, ocean buoys and weather stations with high-resolution numerical models. Thus, it covers the entire Earth with a mesh of about 31 kilometers and 137 vertical layers up to 80 kilometers in altitude. Despite the huge amount of data it handles, the simulations and management are agile thanks to the fact that it is in the cloud DANA Floods of 2024. Weather Replay Beyond tinkering and satisfying curiosity, this tool means that anyone has access to 80 years of atmospheric data in an intuitive and graphic way to see with your own eyes how phenomena have evolved such as heat waves, extreme rain events or wind patterns in the regions you know best. In short: that everyone can see climate change. At a teaching or journalistic level, it constitutes a magnificent resource to contextualize meteorology. For example, reproducing how the tragic Valencia DANA of 2024 began. In Xataka | This is how rain has changed in Spain in the last 30 years, on maps: the result is clear, alarming and there is no turning back In Xataka | The temperature your city will have in 2080, simulated on this disturbing interactive map Cover | Weather Replay

Samsung has made a lot of money from the memory crisis and its employees wanted their cut. Result: bonus of $340,000

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Employees at Samsung’s chip division were in high gear. And it is logical: your company is becoming gold thanks to the rise of data centers for AI. The demand for memory chips is extraordinary and that has caused Samsung’s market capitalization to skyrocket over a billion dollars. The company, yes, was being very selfish, but the threat of a strike He has made her see reason. The bonus of the crisis. Samsung Electronics workers have ratified a multimillion-dollar compensation agreement. One that will see employees of the semiconductor division receive an average bonus estimated at 513 million won (about $340,000). Agreement in extremis. The vote was approved by 74% of members of the majority union, and was closed in extremisbecause there were 90 minutes left before an indefinite strike began that threatened to paralyze this giant’s supply chains. The risk was too high. This agreement avoids a scenario that would have been catastrophic for the AI ​​industry. Samsung is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the worldand its modules power everything from mobile phones and electric vehicles to the GPUs used in AI data centers. Considering that the market is already stressed by the memory crisis and demand that far exceeds supply, adding this bottleneck would have had unforeseeable consequences. Only Saudi Aramco surpasses Samsung in estimated operating profits for 2026. Source: Bloomberg. Memory chips are pure gold. Samsung is on its way to close one of the most profitable years in its history, and its semiconductor division already indicated that its profits had multiplied by 48 in the first quarter of the year, an absolutely extraordinary figure. She is not the only one taking advantage of this phenomenon: SK Hynix and Micron They have broken the trillion-dollar market capitalization barrier for the first time. Some so much and others so little. Although the agreement has avoided a logistical disaster, it has also caused a very uncomfortable situation internally. The bonuses are linked to the financial performance of each business unit, which means that the 28,000 members of the chip division have benefited significantly, but the rest of the company has not. The differences are clear: Engineers in that division will receive bonuses of up to 600 million won ($400,000). They will share 40% of the total allocated as bonuses. Personnel in divisions such as home appliances or telephony will receive a testimonial bonus of just 6 million won ($4,000). They share 60% of the bonus, but there are many more in number, about 260,000 in total. The average salary of Samsung employees in 2025 was 158 million won (about $105,000) according to internal company information published in March. Unions divided. This asymmetry of 100 to 1 has caused great tensions to appear between departments, and this has also been noted in the negotiation and conversations in the union. While the majority bloc (which included the majority of workers in the semiconductor division) supported the agreement with more than 80% of the votes, the secondary union, which brings together employees from other divisions, rejected the document with only 21% of votes in favor. TM Roh takes action. The situation is so worrying that TM Roh, head of the device division, has sent an internal statement to try to calm things down. He has admitted that the results of the negotiation have left thousands of employees feeling “alienated, dispossessed and hurt by the company.” Top management has promised to monitor the conditions of each unit, but while Samsung has managed to control the chaos in its factories, it could have an even more disturbing problem on its hands. Image | Wikimedia Commons (Choi Kwang-mo), IntelUnsplash (Liam Briese) In Xataka | Samsung has just achieved a milestone that has not been recorded for eight years. The problem is that it is a mirage

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