Elon Musk just unveiled SpaceXAI's first AI satellite. • 150 kW peak power / 120 kW sustained compute power • 150 kW solar array using SpaceX-manufactured solar technology • Centralized AI compute payload designed for high-performance AI workloads • 70-meter wingspan when fully deployed • 110 m² deployable liquid radiators to remove waste heat in space • Redundant cooling loops with integrated micrometeoroid shielding • Designed to launch on Starship, enabling the mass-to-orbit needed for large-scale space computing • Uses laser links while avoiding many of the complex communications systems required by Starlink satellites • SpaceX believes future versions can scale far beyond this first design Elon Musk says the path to scaling AI in space requires 3 things: • Massive launch capability (Starship) • Enormous solar power generation • Large radiators to reject heat from AI chips He also suggested that truly large-scale orbital AI could eventually require hundreds of gigawatts to a terawatt of power, implying millions of tons of infrastructure in orbit.

"Three out of four are defective"... China's CXMT struggles with HBM yields, with immature TSV technology to blame ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest DRAM maker, has begun trial production of fourth generation high bandwidth memory (HBM3), but initial yields are barely improving. Yields are reported to have stalled at 25%, roughly one third of the so called "golden yield" of 80% that the semiconductor industry treats as the threshold for volume production. The gap is stark compared with SK hynix, which has been mass producing the same product since 2022 and has secured yields above 90%. Industry sources point to the gap in maturity of through-silicon via (TSV) technology, the core process for stacking and connecting multiple DRAM layers, as the root cause. ◇ "DRAM has caught up, but HBM stacking is a different problem" According to a senior official at a semiconductor equipment company familiar with CXMT's situation on the 9th, the yield of CXMT's HBM3 8-High product is stuck at around 30% in the front end process. Of the products that survive that stage, only about 70% are recognized as final good units after passing through the back end process. In simple terms, if 100 HBM3 units are started, close to 80 of them fail the final test. CXMT is reported to be supplying the small volumes of HBM samples it produces this way to Chinese companies such as Alibaba's T-Head and Cambricon while continuing its yield improvement work. The problem is that the issue does not lie in the fine process technology of the DRAM itself. A semiconductor equipment industry official explained, "There is no major problem with the standard DRAM that CXMT makes on its 'G4' (17nm class) process used for HBM. However, the DRAM dies used for HBM are larger in area than standard products and have more demanding electrical specifications, so even on the same process they are much harder to pass the acceptance criteria." In other words, CXMT's fundamental capability in making standard DRAM has risen to a considerable level, but a bottleneck is emerging at the stage of converting it into the high performance product that is HBM. At the heart of that bottleneck, according to industry sources, is the TSV process. ◇ The real hurdle is TSV... "Impossible to catch up without years of accumulated know how" TSV stands for "Through Silicon Via" and refers to the microscopic copper wiring that passes vertically through each layer to carry electrical signals when DRAM is stacked in multiple layers, as in HBM. It is a highly demanding process in which a DRAM wafer is thinned down to several tens of micrometers, a fraction of the thickness of a human hair, after which thousands of tiny holes are drilled through that thin silicon plate and filled completely with copper. A single hole that is misaligned or not properly filled can cause the entire layer to be rejected, making it one of the semiconductor processes with the most stringent precision requirements. The consensus in the industry is that this is the process where the technology gap between CXMT and the leading companies is widest. According to analysis by semiconductor research firm Nomad Semi, Samsung Electronics' HBM2 (second generation HBM) has more than 5,000 TSVs per die and SK hynix's HBM3 has more than 8,000, while CXMT's is understood to have only around 3,000. A smaller number of TSVs means sacrificing bandwidth (data processing speed) in exchange for lower process difficulty, yet even so CXMT's yields still fall far short of Samsung and SK hynix. TSV is a process that is challenging even for the industry leader: SK hynix itself publicly disclosed in 2024 that the yield of the standalone TSV process was only 40 to 60% at the time. On top of this, yield losses also occur in the back end (stacking and bonding) stage where the dies are actually stacked and joined. If even one of the eight dies is misaligned, if a microscopic void forms at a bonding interface, or if a layer warps during the thermocompression bonding process (warpage), the entire stack is scrapped. Because the number of possible failure points grows with each additional layer, the difficulty rises exponentially. Given that CXMT is already showing such poor yields at 8-High, some expect it to face even greater difficulties when moving to higher stacks such as 12-High. A semiconductor industry official explained, "The TSV process is an area that only stabilizes after years of accumulated wafer handling know how. Chinese companies have rapidly closed the gap in the fine process technology of DRAM itself, but back end know how such as TSV and bonding is difficult to catch up on in a short period." He added, "That said, Samsung Electronics also had initial HBM4 (sixth generation HBM) production yields below 60% in February this year and raised them to 80% within six months, so it is too early to declare CXMT's 25% yield a 'failure.'"

I've been discussing Huawei's τ scaling (temporal scaling) with people recently, and noticed the conversation tends to stay at the surface level without reaching its substance — likely because many participants don't come from an EE background and aren't familiar with the classical meaning of τ in circuit theory. The very first time constant you learn in a circuits course is τ = RC: the resistance of a wire multiplied by its capacitance gives the order of magnitude of the time a signal needs to traverse that wire. The longer the wire, the greater the resistance and capacitance, and the slower the signal. Within this framework, the past sixty years of geometric scaling are reinterpreted as one particular implementation of temporal scaling. Transistors were shrunk to shorten switching delay; circuits were packed more tightly to shorten metal interconnects and reduce signal propagation delay. Geometric scaling was only ever the means — compressing delay was always the end. Huawei's thesis is that once geometric scaling stalls, you find other ways to keep compressing delay. As it happens, He Tingbo's τ scaling paper released its v2 a couple of days ago, expanding from 16 to 23 pages. I compared the two versions: the data and conclusions are unchanged. The additions are essentially responses to several points of criticism the industry raised about v1. Three are worth discussing. The most important addition is the test evidence now backing the previously bare claim of "41% energy efficiency improvement." In v1, that number had no baseline and no test conditions — the most obvious target for scrutiny. V2 supplies a full comparison table. The baseline is the 2025 Kirin 9030 Pro. Both chips use the same mature process node; the key difference is that the baseline uses a conventional planar design, while Kirin 2026 folds critical paths across two vertically bonded wafers. Folding shortens interconnects and reduces interconnect delay. The timing margin freed up on the critical path translates directly into a higher maximum clock frequency: 3.1 GHz at 1.1 V supply, 13% above the baseline. The "41% energy efficiency improvement" comes from a separate operating point specifically configured for an iso-performance comparison: voltage scaled down to 0.9 V, frequency scaled down to 2.5 GHz, with measured power at 25°C coming in at 0.59× the baseline. A back-of-the-envelope estimate checks out: dynamic power scales roughly with the square of supply voltage, so an 18% voltage reduction contributes about one-third of the power drop from the square term alone. Factor in the 9% frequency reduction and the interconnect capacitance eliminated by folding, and you land right around 0.59×. So the precise meaning of "41% energy efficiency improvement" is power reduction at iso-performance. In essence, the timing margin gained from folding is traded for lower power consumption; the efficiency gain comes from logic folding. As a side note, v2 also reports that power density after dual-layer stacking is actually 5.6% lower than the baseline. The second addition addresses the question peers are most likely to ask: 3D stacking has been around for years — AMD's 3D V-Cache and Intel's Foveros are both in volume production — so what's new about LogicFolding? To understand the paper's answer, you first need to know how two layers of silicon communicate. They rely on inter-layer bond pads, which function like elevators connecting the upper and lower floors. In prior production 3D stacking, bond pad pitch ranges from 9 μm to tens of micrometers, yielding roughly ten thousand connections per square millimeter — enough to attach a bus to an entire cache block. So the established design approach has been to move complete functional blocks wholesale onto the upper tier. AMD, for example, stacks an entire cache die on top of a processor die; the two tiers are designed independently and connected through an interface. But inside a chip, a single square millimeter contains hundreds of millions of transistors. If you want adjacent logic gates to sit on different tiers — one on top, one on the bottom — that connection density falls far short. Kirin 2026 brings bond pad pitch down to 1.5 μm, yielding 440,000 connections per square millimeter. That approaches the density of the top-level metal wiring inside a chip. Routing a signal across tiers costs roughly the same as routing it across metal layers within a single die. At this point, the two silicon layers merge into a single entity in the circuit sense. EDA tools can decide at the individual logic-gate level which gate goes on which tier, handing the problem to algorithms for global optimization — a completely different degree of design freedom from what came before. The paper also explains why they didn't take the more aggressive route of fabricating a second device layer directly on top of the first. That approach offers the finest inter-layer connectivity, but manufacturing the second layer requires high temperatures that damage the already-completed first layer. It isn't production-viable today. The third addition is thermal management. Vertical stacking significantly increases thermal density per unit area, and the lower die's heat dissipation path is blocked by the upper die. This is the first objection anyone raises about 3D stacking, and v1 did not address it in depth. V2 openly acknowledges that thermal management remains a key challenge for the LogicFolding architecture. The countermeasure is thermally-aware partitioning and floorplanning: during the design phase, high-power circuits are excluded from folding candidates, and the floorplan avoids placing high-power blocks in vertical adjacency to prevent hotspot superposition. Whether this strategy is a set of manually imposed engineering constraints or has already been codified into an automated flow within their internal EDA tools, the paper does not say. It only identifies a multi-physics tool chain as the single most important investment for the next decade. Combined with the measured data showing power density 5.6% below the baseline at the iso-performance operating point, the thermal concern has at least received a direct response. That said, this approach is fundamentally avoidance-based. As stacking grows to three or four tiers, the design space eligible for folding will be progressively squeezed by thermal constraints — a boundary the paper does not explore. Additionally, v2 includes a cross-sectional micrograph of the bond interface between the two wafers and explicitly states that wafer-on-wafer hybrid bonding is used. This spec is worth benchmarking against the industry: 1.5 μm pitch wafer-to-wafer hybrid bonding on a production logic chip has no precedent. TSMC's SoIC is currently in production at 6 μm pitch; Intel's Foveros Direct is at 9 μm. Impressive, to say the least. After comparing the two versions, I'm left with two questions. One is about equipment: who supplied the bonding tools capable of this spec? The paper says only that it is the result of years of process development across a multi-vendor ecosystem. The other is about EDA: designing two wafers as a single chip is beyond what any commercially available EDA tool can do today. The paper acknowledges this, stating only that methodological details will be "published within months." Yet the frequency table shows that the 2027-generation Kirin at 3.39 GHz is already tagged as having physical silicon, meaning this toolchain was up and running inside Huawei long ago — and has been validated on at least two product generations. My personal guess is that this EDA capability was built in-house by Huawei. If anyone has insight on this, I'd welcome the discussion.

Grok Bot summary: IAC 2026 presentation by SpaceXAI President Michael Nicolls. 🎯 The main message - SpaceX was founded in 2002 to make life multi-planetary and "extend the light of consciousness to the stars." - He said the biggest risk as constellations grow is not debris. It's satellite operators not sharing data with each other. 🌍 How Starlink grew - Starlink began in 2019 with 60 V0.9 satellites. User service started in late 2020 as the "Better Than Nothing Beta." - V1.5 added space lasers, which let the satellites link into a mesh. That's when Starlink really took off, reaching oceans, Antarctica and airplanes. - V2 (2023) has 4x the capacity of V1. Falcon launches V2 satellites 2–3 times a week, and each launch adds about 3 terabits of capacity. - V3 launched on Starship about a week before the talk. Each V3 satellite has another 10x capacity, and each Starship launch carries 20–30x what a Falcon launch does. - Starlink now has over 11,000 satellites, about 60% of all active satellites in low Earth orbit. - It serves more than 13M customers in about 170 markets, plus ships and planes. - The laser mesh means Starlink doesn't depend on local ground infrastructure. During last year's fires and power outages in Spain, it kept tens of thousands of customers and emergency responders online. 🚀 The life of a Starlink satellite - **Before launch:** SpaceX checks that deploying the satellites won't bring them close to anything else, and shares where they'll be. - **Deploy:** satellites are released below 300 km, where almost no other operators fly. - **Orbit raising:** each climb path is checked against other satellites and crewed space stations, and SpaceX publishes the satellites' positions every hour on the way up. - **Lower orbits for safety:** the original plan was about 1,000 km. Now every satellite flies below 500 km, and V3 will fly at about 350–360 km. At these heights a dead satellite falls back to Earth within months instead of staying up for centuries. 🛡️ How they avoid collisions - Each satellite makes small station-keeping moves about once a day and a collision-avoidance move about every 10 days. - Across the fleet, that's about 1,000 avoidance moves a day. - Starlink's threshold for moving is nearly 100x more cautious than the industry standard, so the whole fleet's collision risk is about the same as a much smaller constellation's. - "Ducking" moves turn the satellite so it presents a smaller target during a close pass, cutting the collision risk about 10x more. - Automated software makes these decisions, which is why Starlink tries to stay in contact with every satellite at all times. 📡 Always connected - Starship's live launch video was streamed over Starlink. - The new V3 satellites connected to the network within 2 minutes of release, because Starlink terminals are built into the satellites. Their lasers link into the mesh within tens of minutes. - The goal is to make contact right away and never lose it. 🌬️ Space weather - During a 2024 solar storm, air density in orbit jumped 5x in a few hours, which throws off predictions of where satellites will be. - Starlink is "probably one of the best sensors" for this. It measures density in real time and automatically corrects its position forecasts. 🔭 Working with astronomers - **Optical:** SpaceX tried Vantablack paint and sun visors. What finally worked was a mirror-like film that reflects sunlight away from the ground, combined with careful steering. A V2 satellite now looks about as bright as a sheet of paper. This was done with groups like the Vera Rubin Observatory. - **Radio:** working with observatories like the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Starlink steers its beams and frequencies around where the telescopes are pointing. As a result, the telescopes can now observe more often. ♻️ End of life - SpaceX uses statistics to predict when parts will fail and deorbits satellites early. Many of those satellites would have kept working. - Retired satellites are steered down within weeks, not left to drift for the 5 or 25 years regulations allow. - They're built to burn up completely, and reentry is aimed over the ocean. - Of about 10,000 satellites launched by early 2026, only a few dead ones remain in orbit. The goal is zero. - "Reliability and rate go together." ⚠️ The biggest danger: other operators - Tracked debris is like obstacles on a road: if you can measure it, you can avoid it. - What you can't avoid is a satellite that maneuvers without telling anyone. Starlink has had passes as close as tens of meters this way. - Starlink has maneuvered around satellites from about 650 operators in recent months, but shares position data with only about half of them. "That number is too low." - SpaceX shares data with China's space station and some Chinese operators. Many operators don't share at all, including some in the US, Europe and Japan. ⭐ Stargaze: Starlink's own space tracking - Over 30,000 star trackers on Starlink satellites spot passing objects as streaks against the stars. - Stargaze now tracks over 17,000 objects, including about 90% of the maneuvering satellites that cross Starlink's orbits. - In one example, an untracked satellite's predicted 9 km miss shrank to about 60 m after it maneuvered toward Starlink. Stargaze caught the move and the Starlink satellite dodged in time. - He said it's still no substitute for operators sharing their plans in advance. 🤝 The ask: share your data - SpaceX runs its own space safety data platform, and over 100 operators have signed up. - Operators can upload their satellite positions and check them against Starlink and against Stargaze tracking. - His message to every operator was to join the platform and share their positions. 🧠 StarMind: AI compute in space - StarMind is SpaceX's planned AI satellite constellation, starting launches and scaling next year. - The goal is to move AI compute off Earth. He expects StarMind to drive demand for Starship launches the way Starlink did for Falcon. - On the ground, SpaceX is building over 2 GW of compute in Memphis. He said AI demand will be nearly limitless, and Earth's resources make that hard to keep scaling there. - In space, the satellites run on solar power and shed heat through large radiators. - Each satellite is simpler than a Starlink: basically a computer with big solar panels and radiators. - Each one has about 250 kW, roughly one NVL72 rack of compute. - They'd fly in tight clusters of about 10 satellites linked by about 10 terabits of bandwidth, then connect to Starlink. - SpaceX has filed for up to **1 million satellites**, in low-inclination and sun-synchronous orbits. Building them could mean thousands of satellites a week. - New challenges include much higher reliability and redundancy, flying in close formation, and micrometeoroids. Dead satellites might be sent away from Earth instead of burning up in the atmosphere. 🌙 Beyond Earth - Starlink is developing very high-bandwidth lasers to connect the Moon, then Mars, building an "interplanetary mesh." - All of that depends on getting safety right in low Earth orbit first. 💡 Key takeaways - Starlink is the world's biggest constellation, and it's moving lower to be safer. - It makes about 1,000 collision-avoidance moves a day, with nearly 100x more caution than the industry standard. - The biggest risk is operators who don't share where their satellites are going. - StarMind could scale to 1 million AI satellites, with launches starting next year. - "Coordination is a key element for realizing all of our ambitions."