Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🌙 Musk plans AI satellite factory on the Moon

🚪 Half of xAI founding team has now left

🤖 ByteDance develops its own AI chip with Samsung

🚀 SpaceX Super Heavy booster completes four-day cryoproof testing

⚡ Microsoft explores superconductors to power data centers

📀 Sony exits recordable Blu-ray market

🎁 + 13 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 6 trending tools

📚 + 2 trending papers & reports

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• Elon Musk told xAI employees at an all-hands meeting that the company needs a lunar manufacturing facility - a factory on the moon that would build AI satellites and launch them into space using a giant catapult.
• Musk did not explain how any of this would be built, and the meeting came right after two more xAI co-founders announced they were leaving, bringing total departures to six of the company's 12 founding members.
• The moon push is a recent shift for SpaceX, which focused on Mars for most of its 24-year existence, and it raises legal questions under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty about who can claim or extract lunar resources.

• Half of xAI's 12-person founding team has now left the company, with co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu becoming the fifth departure after announcing his exit on X Monday night.
• Four of the five departures happened in the last year alone, with founders leaving for OpenAI, new ventures, and personal reasons, though all splits have reportedly been amicable.
• The exits come as xAI faces an upcoming IPO, ongoing issues with Grok's bizarre behavior and deepfake pornography problems, and growing pressure to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

• ByteDance is developing an AI chip codenamed SeedChip and is in talks with Samsung Electronics to manufacture it, as the TikTok parent company works to secure supply of processors.
• The company aims to receive sample chips by end-March and plans to produce at least 100,000 units designed for AI inference tasks this year, potentially ramping to 350,000 units.
• ByteDance plans to spend over 160 billion yuan ($22 billion) on AI-related procurement this year, with more than half going toward purchasing Nvidia chips and advancing its in-house chip.

• SpaceX's upgraded Super Heavy V3 booster has finished a multi-day cryogenic proof test at Massey's Test Site in Texas, passing a stage that destroyed the previous booster back in November.
• Ground crews loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the 237-foot stainless-steel rocket four times over six days, testing its redesigned propellant systems and structural strength under repeated thermal and pressurization cycles.
• Technicians will now mount 33 Raptor 3 engines, which are lighter and produce more thrust, with plumbing and sensors built into the main structure, removing the need for heat shields between engines.

• Microsoft is researching high-temperature superconductors as a way to transmit electricity to its data centers without the voltage drops or heat loss that come with traditional copper and aluminum wires.
• HTS cables are lighter, take up less space, and only need a 2-meter-wide trench instead of the 70 meters of clearance that overhead lines typically require to prevent electrical interference between cables.
• The company faces a real challenge: HTS materials still need cryogenic cooling around -200 degrees C, and Microsoft is pursuing this partly because CEO Satya Nadella said it has idle AI GPUs due to insufficient electricity.

• Sony will stop selling all of its recordable Blu-ray disc recorders globally this month, ending shipments of remaining models sequentially after February 2026, with no successor models planned.
• The company said the cold storage market never took off as hoped, and it had already confirmed in January 2025 it was leaving the recordable media market entirely.
• Sony's standard Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players are not affected, though the future is uncertain as TCL takes over Sony's home entertainment division next year.

Other news & articles you might like

• "Discord alternatives" searches jump 10,000% overnight as the gaming platform introduces global age verification - Is a total collapse imminent? LINK

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried asks for a new trial LINK

• OpenAI deploys custom ChatGPT on GenAI.mil, providing secure AI tools for military personnel. LINK

• Mistral's revenue grows 20x in one year as Europe pushes for AI independence LINK

• OpenAI's Deep Research now runs on GPT-5.2 and lets users search specific websites LINK

• Amazon gets FCC approval to launch 4,500 Leo internet satellites LINK

• OpenAI policy exec who opposed chatbot's "adult mode" reportedly fired on discrimination claim LINK

• A.I. Personalizes the Internet but Takes Away Control LINK

• Anthropic executive takes a thinly-veiled swipe at OpenAI over spending and ads LINK

• Cloudflare pops 10% as AI agent wave led by viral Moltbot boosts security demand LINK

• Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation LINK

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📚 Trending papers & reports

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