Back in 2011, the world held its breath after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan suffered a failure of its cooling systems, in the wake of the country getting hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. The worry was not unfounded: the resulting meltdown — which spread highly radioactive material in multiple directions […]
Sunamp’s thermal battery uses a chemical found in salt-and-vinegar potato chips
Nearly 20 years ago, Andrew Bissell was sitting in the living room of his beachfront home in the Edinburgh area. He and his wife, Susan Lang-Bissell, had just sold their medical imaging startup, and he was pondering his future. “Do we retire or do we go again?” Bissell told TechCrunch. Around that time, he was […]
IBM Cloud to offer Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI chips next year
Intel has found its first cloud customer for its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chip: IBM Cloud. IBM and Intel on Thursday said IBM Cloud will begin offering Gaudi 3 to customers early next year. The chip’s accelerators will be available for both hybrid and on-premise environments, and IBM says it plans to enable support for […]
Computing and shielding startups join forces to put AI-capable chips in space
Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s. San Francisco-based Aethero is aiming to bring more powerful computing systems to orbit, and their first payload launches this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. […]
Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week
Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers […]