Google will launch a prototype satellite on October 1 in its first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, a research effort exploring whether space could host AI data centers powered by solar energy. The fridge-sized experimental satellite will test AI processors in orbit.
Rome-based cybersecurity startup Exein has raised $270 million in a funding round led by Headline, achieving unicorn status with a $1.7 billion valuation. The company provides AI-powered security solutions for physical AI devices including robots, drones, and autonomous machines.
Perplexity has launched Hybrid Compute, allowing users to combine cloud and local AI models while keeping sensitive data on their Mac, and open sourced Lily, a Rust + Metal inference engine for running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple Silicon that powers the local processing capability.
Liquid AI open-sourced Pipette, a benchmarking suite for on-device AI models, while Perplexity launched Portable Computer for local AI processing. The releases reflect a broader industry shift toward running AI models directly on user hardware rather than cloud servers.
Perplexity has released Portable Computer, a local-first AI agent platform that runs entirely on Nvidia DGX Spark hardware with zero per-token costs for local operations, only accessing the cloud when explicitly needed.
Starcloud, a startup developing satellites that can perform AI inference in orbit, has raised $250 million in an extension to its March Series A funding round, bringing its valuation to $2.3 billion. The company is building data centers in space as launch access becomes increasingly constrained.
Tatung is set to complete a proof of concept for its self-built AI data center by September 2026 and has secured an order for edge AI solutions, marking the company's expansion into AI infrastructure.
Meta announced the release of Muse Glimmer, a new open-source AI model designed to run on laptops, and plans to release an open-weight version of its most advanced Muse Spark 1.2 model. Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay advocating for American open-source AI development as a counter to Chinese rivals.
Ukraine-based app developer MacPaw has announced a strategic partnership with Liquid AI to develop on-device AI technology for macOS, starting with its Eney assistant and eventually making the stack available to developers building apps for its Setapp platform.
Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors is reportedly negotiating to acquire Ambarella, a specialist in edge-AI vision processors used in autonomous vehicles and security cameras. Ambarella's shares surged nearly 17% on the news while NXP fell over 3%.
Spire Global has partnered with SATE on STRAIDE, an 18-month research and development program funded through Italian Space Agency and UK Space Agency subscriptions to the European Space Agency, with programmatic support from ESA. The partners aim to develop and validate an AI system for satellite health monitoring, anomaly diagnosis and predictive failure analysis that could support more autonomous constellation operations.
Apple is evaluating technology from Silicon Valley startup PrismML that can compress large AI models to run directly on iPhones. The startup has demonstrated its compression technology by shrinking Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 language model to run on the iPhone 17 Pro.
Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, an open-source AI model that can analyze audio and video while running entirely on enterprise laptops with 16GB of RAM, marking a focus on smaller, locally-deployable models rather than larger cloud-based alternatives.
