plan

Amazon has a plan to stand up to Starlink

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Until recently, losing coverage meant being left off the grid until you found another terrestrial antenna. That logic is beginning to break down: low-orbit satellites can now communicate directly with certain mobile phones and maintain basic services where conventional infrastructure does not reach or stops working. We are not yet talking about replacing the networks we use every day, but rather extending them beyond their limits. In that race, Starlink already provides service and Amazon has outlined a large-scale plan to try to achieve it. Amazon’s plan. The company has requested to the United States Federal Communications Commission authorization to deploy up to 5,105 satellites in low orbit. The future network, called Amazon Leo Direct-to-Device, would be designed to communicate with compatible mobile phones and Internet of Things devices using spectrum bands assigned to Globalstar. Amazon plans to begin deployment in 2028, so we are still talking about a proposal subject to approval. Its objective covers voice, data, messaging, connected vehicles and remote operations outside the reach of conventional networks. It is not the same broadband constellation. Surely you are wondering if those 5,105 satellites will be limited to reinforcing the network that Amazon is already deploying. The answer is no. The D2D system would work alongside that constellation, but would have a different mission: to connect directly with compatible mobile phones, while the current broadband service requires specific terminals such as Leo Nano, Leo Pro or Leo Ultra. Amazon already has more than 390 satellites of this first network in orbit and hopes to begin providing fixed service during 2026. A network in five layers. The project distributes the constellation at 510, 540, 560, 570 and 580 kilometers in height to extend coverage across mid, high latitudes and near the poles. Communication with the devices will use the L and S bands, while the links with the ground will operate through Ka and V. The design foresees that each satellite incorporates signal processing, optical connections and digital beams. Amazon estimates a useful life of six to eight years before lowering them up to 360 kilometers to complete their natural retreat. The key was in Globalstar. Amazon does not intend to build this new network completely from scratch. In April it agreed to acquire the satellite operator for about 11.6 billion dollars, an operation that it hopes to complete in 2027 and that includes authorized spectrum, infrastructure and the HIBLEO and C-3 constellations. These assets would work in coordination with Amazon Leo systems. Globalstar also has a long-term agreement with Apple, which uses its satellites for services available on select iPhone and Apple Watch models, from messaging to roadside assistance. It’s already happening. forest fires near Madrid they offered a concrete example of this technology. Starlink confirmed that it provided Free SMS connectivity to MasOrange and Movistar customers located in the affected areas, as long as they used compatible LTE smartphones. Phones could automatically connect to Starlink Mobile when the ground network was unavailable, although the service worked best with a clear view of the sky. Movistar, Orange and Vodafone also reported the activation of emergency satellite connectivity to help maintain communications. Starlink starts with advantage. By the end of 2025, its direct connection service to mobile phones had already reached 22 countries and six continents, according to Teslarati. The publication placed the network at over 650 satellites, with 27 associated operators and more than six million monthly customers. Faced with this deployment, Amazon plans to start its own in 2028, as long as it obtains the necessary authorizations. What we have before us, therefore, is not only a race to deploy more satellites, but to extend mobile coverage beyond terrestrial antennas. Images | amazon In Xataka | If you live in Madrid and want to see the total eclipse on August 12, write down these 52 towns

The solar eclipse on August 12 is approaching and your prescription glasses can complicate your plan: this is how you can solve it

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The time for the solar eclipse has arrived. You have taken all necessary precautions and you have bought some approved glassesbut you go to put them on and discover how uncomfortable it is to wear them over your prescription glasses. If you wear prescription glasses and think you can live this story next August 12, do not leave the issue of approved glasses to the last minute. At some observation points they will be given to attendees, but if you have not tried them in advance you may discover that they do not fit your eyes well and, therefore, are neither comfortable nor protective. It is better to bring your own protection and also test it in advance. Let’s see some ideas. The cardboard gives a lot of itself. In addition to to reduce costs manufacturing, the frames of glasses approved for eclipses are usually made of cardboard to fit well to any face. As a result, they can often be worn over prescription glasses without any problem. You may have to hold them by hand; but, as long as you make sure they cover your field of vision well, there is no problem. There are also glasses that, without being made of cardboard, are deliberately large to accommodate other glasses underneath. It is the case of these that show in an article of The Country. However, not everything is going to be big glasses. There are other options too. Clips are a good option. There are some clip options with filters approved for solar eclipses that fit the lens of almost any glasses. They are generally sold in opticians. or specialized stores and, since they are much more exclusive, they have slightly higher prices than typical cardboard frame glasses. Still, they are a great option if you don’t want to gamble. Ask your optician what they recommend. Yes indeed. Even if they are made as universal as possible, they may not fit your glasses specifically well. Always try them first. You can wear contact lenses. If you usually wear contact lenses, now is a good time to do so. Thus, the approved glasses you use will fit your face better. Remember what is important. It doesn’t matter if you use approved glasses or clip-on filters. The important thing is that you make sure they have the certificate EN ISO 12312-2:2015 and that both the seal of the European Community and the instructions for use are indicated on the packaging. Additionally, you should make sure that the filters are not scratched, as this would decrease the level of protection. And, of course, remember that neither x-rays nor photo negatives are valid. They are myths that have damaged many retinas along the way. Image | Magnific/NASA In Xataka | The trio of eclipses that await Spain on the horizon: an unprecedented and historic chain between 2026 and 2028

Navarra’s plan to achieve more housing without building

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Housing prices in the state they are out of controlit is estimated that there is a residential deficit of about 700,000 homes and although there are those who believe that the problem would be solved by building more, others they are not so clear. So the Foral Community of Navarra has looked for an alternative “solidarity, sustainable and far from speculation compared to the traditional market”, as explained Begoña Alfarothird vice president and counselor of Housing, Youth and Migration Policies of the regional Government: a residential model of cooperation open to rehabilitating unique buildings. Towards collaborative housing. The Government of Navarra has authorized the sending to the Council of Navarra of the new draft of Regional Law on Collaborative Housingthat is, residential complexes whose ownership falls on a cooperative made up of members with the right to individual and long-term use and enjoyment of the home and its common spaces. That is, an intermediate regime between classic permanent private property and rental. This preliminary project contemplates three types of collaborative housing: affordable, non-profit, scale or need for prior registration in the Census. the one intended for seniors between 50 and 70 years old, with healthcare and socio-health spaces. In architectural heritage, rehabilitating unique buildings such as farmhouses, old mills, convents, railway stations, old barracks. Why is it important. Because your goal is offer a stable, supportive and non-speculative residential model compared to full ownership and traditional rental and the mechanisms that have promoted speculation and prevented or made it difficult for citizens to access housing. How has declared for eldiario.es economist Ignacio Ezquiaga, the Navarrese model of public housing policies should be considered “a model to follow” by other communities, which provides added value to this law as part of a comprehensive strategy and not as an isolated measure. This law is aimed at the segments of the population that need it most: people with few resources and/or the elderly. In the latter case, it constitutes a kind of alternative to the residence business model. In addition, it is a way to take advantage and give a second useful life to unique buildings. Context. In 2025, Navarra declared a stressed residential market area in 21 municipalities where rental prices have already fallen. Furthermore, it is the only autonomous community in which housing became cheaper last April by 3.9%. Of course, in the previous quarter it rose 10.5%, although it was the second community that increased the least. In addition, last year it led the construction of protected housing: builds twice as much per inhabitant as the Community of Madrid. Thus, more than 20% of the homes are protected: of the 870 homes completed in 2025, 449 had some type of protection. According to expertsamong the reasons that explain why Navarra is one of the few places with green shoots in the Spanish state is that the regional community has been committed to promoting public housing policies for some time. This Regional Law on Collaborative Housing does not come from nowhere: it has been going through public participation processes for months. Meanwhile, the regional community has been building a legal housing ecosystem, with a Registry of Large Homeowners or the first state law that regulates the rental of rooms. In detail. Collaborative housing in architectural heritage is understood to be “that which is promoted in unique buildings, whether or not they have some level of protection” and that are not susceptible to segregation into different housing units with the minimum conditions required by regulations on habitability. This rehabilitation will give rise to collaborative housing that guarantees that they have interior spaces of at least 30 useful square meters per living unit, that each of these units has a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom (unless there is a collective kitchen) and common spaces and facilities. Yes, but. At the moment this is a draft bill and the process for it to become law is long: the Council of Navarra needs to give its opinion, the Government must approve the final bill and it must go through Parliament, where it will be debated, voted on and changes will be introduced. On the other hand, the collaborative housing model is still a minority and slow to be deployed, so its impact on the short-term housing access crisis will foreseeably be limited compared to other potential measures such as rent control in stressed areas. In Xataka | If the question is how much does it cost to buy an island in Scotland, the answer is: like a flat in Madrid In Xataka | Spain has a housing deficit and a huge problem to solve it: a land jam that blocks millions of apartments Cover | José Luis Filpo Cabana and Thomas

Kimi K3 forces Trump to resume his plan to stop Chinese AI

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The Trump Administration likes to veto things. Now they seem to want to do it with the AI ​​models of Chinese companies, which are becoming increasingly competitive. The launch of Kimi K3 seems to have been the trigger for this new plan to be activated, but there is a problem: vetoing those models is a terrible idea. This comes from afar. The US Department of Commerce I had already studied last year included several Chinese AI startups, including DeepSeek, in its famous Entity List. With this they wanted to limit the access of these companies to sensitive hardware and technology developed in the US. Companies at risk for using Chinese models. Recently it has even been proposed drafting an executive order to hold US companies responsible for security breaches that appear due to using Chinese models in their systems. The objective was always the same: to discourage the use of these Chinese models as much as possible. Why US companies use Chinese models. The reason is simple: Chinese open weights like DeepSeek V4 or Kimi K3 allow companies to download and run them on their own servers, dramatically reducing inference costs and keeping all data private. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong himself has indicated that use models such as GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7 in local production, which has allowed them to cut their total spending on AI in half despite the fact that token consumption has skyrocketed. Duopolies without competition. David Sacks, White House AI advisor, posted a message on X on Sunday in which he warned of the risk of using these models: “We are at a critical turning point in AI policies. The leading laboratories with proprietary models, which are already a duopoly in terms of revenue from their AI models, want the government to eliminate Open Source competition.” A Axios report reveals that indeed both OpenAI and Anthropic could have part of the responsibility in promoting this ban. This could be a shot in the foot for the US.. An analysis published in The Washington Post raises an argument worth considering. Treating open models as a security threat is confusing competition with a danger that must be contained. This text recalls how the Sears chain was not allowed to ban Walmart, nor IBM to ban Compaq or Dell, nor traditional airlines to veto the operators that lowered prices. In each case the same thing happened: an established company ran into a rival that was lowering costs, so it had only two options: compete or lose. Linux and Open Source have already shown the way. As the author of the article says, open source eliminated the barriers of commercial software, which locked users into an alternative from which they had no way out. That did not make these companies disappear, but rather boosted competition. Red Hat, MongoDB, Android or Kubernetes showed that “giving away” the product was not incompatible with building profitable businesses around that product. Danger, duopoly. That analysis shows that almost all companies prefer a scenario in which open models remain available. The only ones who have a direct interest in maintaining closed models are precisely Anthropic and OpenAI, because their businesses depend precisely on there being no free (or very cheap) competitive alternatives. If they are so good, why are they afraid? What’s ironic is that if Anthropic and OpenAI really claim to be so far ahead of Chinese AI companies, they shouldn’t have to worry about the competition. Nor would they have to ask the government for help to stop their competition. The US antitrust laws themselves exist precisely to prevent a market from falling into the hands of one or two companies. This veto would precisely allow them to create that monopoly (or duopoly) to lock users and companies into it. In Xataka | A few days after the Kimi K3 “shock”, Alibaba has launched Qwen 3.8: it is the sign that the US has a problem

Aragon’s plan to rejuvenate the Pyrenees

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Summer arrives and the ski resorts close, but that doesn’t mean they will be abandoned until the snow returns. In fact, it is the ideal time to regenerate the mountain after months of the bustle of skiers and machinery with a shock treatment to fix the soil with hoses of water, seeds and plant fiber, a recipe with which the Aragonese Pyrenees reinvents itself every summer to be ready when the cold returns. To the rich hydroseeding. Hydroseeding is a technique for restoring slopes and degraded surfaces that uses seeds, plant fiber, water and fertilizer and is applied under pressure to maximize adhesion and promote germination in steep places. In the Aragonese Pyrenees, stations such as Formigal-Panticosa, these works are carried out between the months of May and June and then in September, months of good weather where periods of high humidity are concentrated. As explains Juanjo Pesdirector of the station: “By the time winter arrives, the seeds have already germinated. If it is delayed too long and the cold begins, they can freeze inside the ground.” Why is it important. Because in addition to being beautiful, the vegetation cover is essential: it stabilizes the soil, reduces erosion caused by melting ice and torrential rains and also favors the recovery of use as a ski resort (where compactors frequently pass by). There is studies that confirm that revegetation through hydroseeding manages to control erosion and that native species take hold in the soil compared to those lands where it is not applied. Context. In the standard hydroseeding method, generic commercial seed mixtures used to be used, but now it has been imposed to use native seeds and it has its reason: A study in the French Pyrenees indicates that traditional seeds, although they help stop erosion, are not always adapted to the harsh conditions of the high mountains. Hence Formigal works with a botanical conservatory to obtain local seeds. In detail. The mixture formula for this type of hydroseeding It includes a binder that works as a kind of glue that retains the seeds even on steep slopes. Historically, commercial species are the most convenient, because they are cheaper and grow quickly, but in complicated scenarios such as in the Pyrenees, native species are more interesting because they can withstand that climate better. Once planted, the vegetation takes about two years to develop. Yes, but. Hydroseeding is a consolidated and convenient technique, but its results are neither immediate nor uniform. In fact, A study conducted in northern Europe found that the positive effect of hydroseeding on vegetation cover formation was relatively small and short-lived, with no significant differences in species richness between hydroseeding and conventional seeding, suggesting that it greatly depends on local soil and climate conditions. In Xataka | There is a corner of Spain where global warming is wreaking havoc: the Pyrenees are becoming “Mediterraneanized” In Xataka | Aragon’s ‘cure’ for the abandoned Pyrenees: growing medicinal herbs Cover | Maria Cassagne and Jose Noguera

China has a plan to win the AI ​​war against the US. And DeepSeek is its champion

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Liang Wenfeng is the most elusive person in the Chinese manufacturing industry. artificial intelligence (AI). The founder of DeepSeekwho also runs the hedge fund High-Flyer, recently held a four-hour video call with potential investors from Hangzhou, China, an unusual format in every sense: only two representatives per institution, and for most of the attendees it was the first time they had seen the founder. “We are a very normal group of people,” Wenfeng told them. And this apparent simplicity hides the company that, in just over a year, has rewritten the economic rules of generative AI. However, what began as a start-up reluctant to any outside investment has come full circle. DeepSeek recently closed a financing round of around $7 billion, with a valuation of $52 billion. The most revealing data, however, is provided by SCMP: This company is already negotiating a second round that is expected to raise that figure to $71 billion just weeks after closing the first. The power map of Chinese AI Reuters has confirmed that DeepSeek develops its own ASIC chip aimed at inference and not training. With it, it aims to reduce its dependence on Nvidia and Huawei, its two current suppliers. If the project succeeds, it would mark a huge strategic shift for a company that until now has built its entire reputation on software efficiency rather than hardware control. Be that as it may, this move would add additional pressure to Huawei, which competes for the same space within China. Huawei now integrates DeepSeek into its cloud services in sub-Saharan Africa In this scenario we are interested in focusing on the real magnitude of this phenomenon. According to FortuneChinese open source models (led by Qwen, MiniMax and DeepSeek) already represent a third of global use of large language models, compared to an almost non-existent presence at the end of 2024. Emerging companies in Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia adopt them due to their openness, transparency and a much lower operating cost than American alternatives. Huawei, in fact, already integrates DeepSeek into its cloud services in sub-Saharan Africa. As expected after such an escalation in valuation, several sources suggest that DeepSeek could present its IPO this year, following in the wake of other low-cost Chinese startups such as Zhipu AI and MiniMax, which are already listed on public markets. A successful placement would give DeepSeek the institutional capital necessary to scale its computing infrastructure and sustain its long-term price war against large American players. DeepSeek is no longer just the startup that sparked Nvidia’s biggest stock scare in a single day: it is the battering ram with which China tries impose its open and cheap AI model as a global standard. Image | Generated by Xataka with ChatGPT More information | Bloomberg In Xataka | While most oppose AI data centers, there is one group enthusiastic about them: merchandise thieves

The plan to stop the melting of the Arctic is so simple that it sounds crazy: freeze it again

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Global warming does not affect everyone the same way. Without going any further, Europe is the continent that most is warming according to the World Meteorological Organizationbut there is another place where the heat has turned the turbo: the Arctic. The North Pole heats up four times faster than the global average. Additionally, sea ice is at historic lows since records began 125 years ago. Faced with this climate emergency, a research team has come up with something so logical that it is surprising for its apparent simplicity: is there a lack of ice? Well, we manufacture more artificially. So they have left the laboratory and gone to the field to see if it is possible. The idea. The company Real Ice, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, drills into sea ice in the dead of winter and pumps seawater onto its frozen surface. The water, when exposed to that extreme cold, freezes immediately and adds an extra layer of ice. Now that they have the base mechanism, Real Ice is adapting pumps used on skating rinks or oil platforms to power them with renewable energy. According to The GuardianIn a recent test, the team pumped 50,000 tons of water onto 1.5-meter-thick ice at -40ºC and managed to increase its thickness by 0.50 meters. Why is it important. Although emissions reduction is the only long-term sustainable solution, while it arrives it is necessary to explore techniques to save time because the Arctic melting is a problem with chain consequences that affect different scales: At the local level it poses a threat to Inuit ways of life and fauna such as the polar bear or the walrus, in addition to destabilizing the ecosystem. At a global level, it can alter weather patterns. Sea ice is a kind of planetary air conditioner: its white surface reflects solar radiation, something that the dark ocean does not do (albedo feedback). That extra warming of the Arctic is also related to a wavier, slower jet stream which can lengthen and promote heat waves or floods. Furthermore, the thaw goes hand in hand with the thaw of the permafrostwhich releases methane and further accelerates warming. Context. This project is part of the program RASI (Re-thickening Arctic Sea Ice), a public – private initiative in which the University of Cambridge and two private companies, Real Ice and Arctic Reflections, carry out research that combines rigorous scientific models with real experimentation in the Arctic. As a curiosity, it is not the only proposal: there are others more controversial that propose dispersing sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. In detail. The first study in the last 2024/2025 campaign has confirmed that the test areas ended the winter up to 32 centimeters thicker than the control areas. According to the study, this difference is similar to what the Arctic has lost in the last 50 years. Furthermore, at the end of the winter campaign they observed that this new ice remained whiter and brighter during the melting season, so it seemed to melt more slowly, improving the albedo. Yes, but. On paper it looks very good, but the scientific community has its doubts. An analysis of several of these proposals published in the journal Frontiers in Science concluded that they did not successfully overcome the criteria of feasibility, cost, governance and environmental risk. The underlying criticism is that it could give the false sensation that there is a technical shortcut that relaxes the pressure to reduce emissions. On the other hand, a test in a specific area is one thing and the price of scaling this technique to the entire Arctic is another. In Xataka | Living 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole: a Catalan tells of his experience in the northernmost city in the world In Xataka | There is a corner of Spain where global warming is wreaking havoc: the Pyrenees are becoming “Mediterraneanized” Cover | Annie Spratt and Jan Antonin Kolar

Microsoft set a climate goal for 2030. Becoming an AI company has blown up the plan

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Microsoft is one of the companies that, a few years ago, set out to be less polluting. There were two goals, the first being to become a company.”carbon negative” by 2030. They began to investigate to create more sustainable buildings and to make better use of water and heat from the Azure hubs to pollute less, but then came the final boss of climate goals. Artificial intelligence. The figures. In it last environmental report, the American company indicates that its total emissions went from about 16 million tons of CO2 to about 20 million net tons in the last fiscal year. As we see in The Vergethat implies that, during 2025, they were 25% more than in the previous period. That “net” thing is explained because they really emitted 34 million, but then you have to subtract the carbon that they paid to remove from the atmosphere, which gives us those 20 million tons. As we see in GeekWirethat places Microsoft emitting as much CO2 as Panama or Lithuania. According to Melanie Nakagawa, director of sustainability at the company, Microsoft continues to focus on the 2030 goal. And what has caused this situation is the push for data centers and artificial intelligence. Scope 3. The report itself points out that the main cause of the increase is investments in new data centers for AI and cloud computing, including integrated OpenAI systems in Microsoft products. And where this carbon footprint accumulates the most is in what they qualify as Scope 3, which encompasses the construction materials of data centers (steel and cement, which we already know are highly polluting), as well as the purchased goods and services, which skyrocket with the massive deployment of AI infrastructure. That Scope 3 concentrates around 96% of Microsoft’s entire footprint, far above the direct emissions from its operations. Electricity. But it is not only due to the construction of the buildings, since these facilities must be maintained. Emissions linked to electricity have increased almost ten times between 2024 and 2025 and, although they pride themselves on reducing direct emissions, they recognize that electricity demand has skyrocketed and it is difficult to cover everything with renewable energy alone. There are already independent analyzes that highlight that Microsoft’s electricity consumption went from 23.6 TWh to 29.8 TWh, 26%, in 2024, and we have to wait to see the independent figures for 2025. If with emissions we have that they are higher than those of Panama, with consumption Microsoft ‘swallows’ the same as Ireland. and it is expected that AI consumption will skyrocket by 2030. braking. Due to this boom and fever for artificial intelligence, Microsoft is deviating from the goal set in 2020, exemplifying the tension between being an AI company and being a company with environmental objectives. But let’s not think that it is the only one because the carbon footprint of amazon increased by 16% last year and that of Google 18%. They remain committed, of course, but right now we are talking about non-terrestrial computing, space but. And for that, many rockets have to be sent into space, with their corresponding emissions. Although the end is good, according to Jeff Bezos: sending all pollution away from Earth to return to the state prior to the Industrial Revolution. Something is something. In Xataka | There is a thing called “Ornn price index”, it is out of control and it is bad news for everyone

This is Gotion’s plan to turn Valladolid into the battery hub in Europe

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The Ministry of Industry and Tourism gave the green light a few days ago to the million-dollar aid that will allow the Chinese company Gotion High-Tech to build its first battery “gigafactory” outside of Asia in Valladolid. The resolution of the State Society for Industrial Promotion and Business Development (Sepides) confirmed a subsidy of 138 million euros for a project that mobilizes nearly 950 million and that aspires to turn the city into a reference center for the electric vehicle industry. What has happened? The aid is part of the fifth PERTE of the Electric and Connected Vehicle (PERTE VEC V) and gives definitive shape to a preliminary concession that was advanced last May. The idea is that the money will be distributed between two different plants: one dedicated to the recycling of batteries and recovery of critical materials (known as “black mass”), which will receive 82.3 million euros, and another destined to the manufacture of cathodes, which will receive 55.9 million. So confirmed it the Minister of Industry himself, Jordi Hereu. Components. The cathode is one of the parts that adds the most value to batteries. Around 60%, according to has explained the Ministry of Transport itself, and until now no factory in the European Union produced it. Setting up this plant in Valladolid means that Europe can stop depending exclusively on Asia for one of the most expensive and strategic components of the electric car (stop depending, halfway, since Gotion is still a Chinese manufacturer). It was not about “making batteries, which are already done in many places”, but about “opening a new path”, counted the Minister of Transportation, Óscar Puente, during the presentation of the project. How much money is at stake. The Ministry, through Sepides, estimates the budgets of the two plants at 411.5 and 539.1 million euros. The 138 million in public aid represent around 15% of the total investment in this first phase. Who is behind the project. Gotion High-Tech is a Chinese giant that covers the entire battery industrial chain, from the extraction and transformation of raw materials to final recycling, and that already maintains commercial relations with Volkswagen and its own factories in Germany and Slovakia. The facility in Valladolid will receive raw materials from Morocco and, according to has explained The company will also serve as a platform to export to Latin America. The project comes after the Slovak company Inobat, which at the time also obtained public aid to settle in Valladolid, gave up its plan without presenting the necessary guarantees. Employment. According to the data provided by Gotion itself, the construction of the two plants will provide work about 2,500 peoplewhile the operation of the factories, once up and running, will employ around 1,000 workers directly. Works. The project plans to begin building the first phase, the recycling plant, throughout 2027. The facilities will occupy some 700,000 hectares of industrial land, although Gotion’s own project is conditional on the construction of a macro solar plant that guarantees the energy self-sufficiency of the factories, which will require up to a thousand additional hectares of land. To build the factory they will also be required to modify the General Urban Planning Plan of Valladolid, a procedure that, according to picks up El Economistais expected to receive provisional approval on July 27, although the final decision corresponds to the Junta de Castilla y León. Administrations. The Valladolid City Council, governed by PP and Vox, has already signed a letter of intent to transfer the land that the company needs, with an initial surface of 70 hectares that can be expanded to 120 if the project grows, as shared by El Confidencial. The current mayor, Jesús Julio Carnero, assured maintain “permanent contact” with Chinese managers and has committed to facilitating the corresponding procedures. Impulse. Óscar Puente, mayor of Valladolid between 2015 and 2023 and today Minister of Transport, has been the one who has pushed this operation the most since he traveled to Slovakia in 2023 to negotiate with Inobat the first attempt to install a battery factory in the city. Puente has claimed on several occasions the strategic position of Valladolid, with its own airport, high-speed connection one hour from Madrid, proximity to Portugal and a consolidated industrial hub next to Palencia and Burgos. The minister has qualified the operation as the largest industrial investment in the city since the arrival of the Renault factory in 1953. And now what. Industry’s resolution clears up one of the main administrative obstacles, but there are still pending steps, including the presentation of guarantees, the definitive urban planning approval by the Government of Castilla y León and the start of works in 2027. In addition, Gotion proposes this first phase as the start of a much more ambitious plan, which could reach 5,000 million euros of total investment and adding up to eight plants in Valladolid, according to the company itself. Cover image | Ministry of Transport and DAZE In Xataka | From selling safes to manufacturing armored vehicles for NATO: this is how this company operates in a small town in Ciudad Real

South Korea has a plan to dominate in memory chips and robotics. One of a billion dollars

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South Korea has put on the table a megaproject for the AI ​​era. This is an initiative made up of three public-private projects spread across semiconductors, data centers and the promising industry of “physical AI”, that is, robots and autonomous systems. The advertisement seeks something very specific: that the country does not depend only on selling memory, but on manufacturing other physical products that it anticipates will be consumed massively. Memory chips rule. The largest item of this ambitious plan is, as we all expected, the one destined for the country’s semiconductor industry. Samsung and SK Hynix have committed to investing $585 billion in new manufacturing plants in the southeast of the country, in addition to strengthening factory construction in the Seoul region. They want to double the production of DRAM memories in five years. The future belongs to data centers. The second large part of this plan corresponds to the data centers that are precisely going to take advantage of a large part of those memory chips. SK Group, CS Group and Naver will invest $357 billion to build large-scale AI data centers in areas until now far from the country’s technology centers. According to the Ministry of Science, the final ambition is to achieve a combined capacity of 18.4 GW by 2035, which would make South Korea one of the world’s great AI “nodes.” Robotics, of course. More surprising is the third leg of the plan: the South Korean government has declared that “physical AI” is a “national strategic industry.” These systems, which allow robots or autonomous vehicles to interact with the real world, also want to be part of the future of the country’s technology industry. In three years they want to create a foundational AI model with the philosophy of “models of the world“—the same in which Yan LeCun or Fei-Fei Li work—. Hyundai has its own plan. The South Korean auto industry giant has set aside $5.8 billion to create a robot manufacturing plant and data center. It’s no coincidence: Hyundai is in fact the parent company of Boston Dynamics since 20221, and is already using its local supply chain to help the American company increase production of its Atlas humanoid robot. The goal: build 30,000 units per year in 2028. Humanoid robots in factories. South Korea wants to commercialize humanoid robots in several key industries before 2028, and to achieve this it wants to train the people who will work with them. The joint plan includes a section that talks about training 10,000 new “AI robotics specialists” in the next five years. But. The announcement coincides with an important internal debate: there are political proposals that seek distribute part of the extraordinary profits of the chip manufacturers, and the unions already see the imminent threat of robotics that will replace positions in all types of assembly chains. The opposition to the South Korean government has also criticized the location of these new production centers, which according to them respond more to a political calculation than to a good industrial strategy. In Xataka | Samsung had been the absolute king of technology in South Korea for decades: SK Hynix has just surpassed it

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