TECH NEWS

Starcloud raises $250 million for orbital data centers as launch options dry up

Starcloud, a startup developing satellites that can perform AI inference in orbit, told TechCrunch that it has added a $250 million extension to its March $170 million Series A funding round. The extension values the company at $2.3 billion.

The additional capital will allow the company to open a larger manufacturing facility and advance its largest orbital data center spacecraft, Starcloud-3, which is intended to fly on SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket. CEO Philip Johnston is also amassing capital to ensure that he can launch his satellites as the market for rocket transportation tightens up.

“We can see what’s coming—we’re going to need to book an enormous amount of launch,” Johnston told TechCrunch. Starcloud has already requested permission from the FCC to operate 88,000 spacecraft.

“As soon as we can, we want to get under contract with things like Starship,” Johnston said. “One of the biggest costs is now on...

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Betting brands are off Premier League shirts. Enterprise software moved in

Premier League clubs are playing this season without gambling brands on the front of matchday shirts, forcing eight of the 20 to find new partners at once. Fulham’s went to ClickHouse, an American data infrastructure company valued at $15bn. The most valuable advertising space in world sport has changed

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Google's $10 million bid to buy old business data from Spirit Airlines so it can use it to train AI has hit…

* Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal business data for $10 million * The package runs to roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Teams items, decades of payroll and crew records, and about 30 million lines of code, with customer and loyalty data excluded * However the sale has

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These travel-focused smart glasses helped me find my way around my Greek vacation idyll — but I looked like a bit of an idiot

L’Atitude is a new player in the smart glasses game, and an exciting one, thanks in part to the brand’s European roots. However, while the 52°N are promising debut specs, offering a bolder look than Meta with similar hardware specs, they’re not without their issues, chiefly

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Frontier AI labs still won’t say how they’d contain a rogue model

Few of the top AI labs have published or demonstrated containment response plans, according to a recent study. A containment plan spells out what happens once an AI is caught trying to subvert human control — what access gets cut, and when the system gets shut down entirely. That’s the

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Betting brands are off Premier League shirts. Enterprise software moved in

Google's $10 million bid to buy old business data from Spirit Airlines so it can use it to train AI has hit…

These travel-focused smart glasses helped me find my way around my Greek vacation idyll — but I looked like a bit of an idiot

Frontier AI labs still won’t say how they’d contain a rogue model