Rakuten satellite project to get up to $926m Japanese government grant
THE SO WHAT
Japan putting roughly $926M behind a Rakuten-led LEO network is about sovereign resilience—governments don’t want critical connectivity dependent on a single foreign constellation. If your product assumes always-on mobile or IoT connectivity in Asia, start mapping how multi-constellation support and local regulatory alignment will matter to customers.
READ THE SOURCE
MORE FROM THE WIRE
Deep & Emerging TechASML, Chip-Tool Stocks Soar as Samsung, SK Plan Investments
Samsung and SK’s capex wave into advanced nodes is pulling ASML and the rest of the tool chain up with it—AI demand is now dictating the tempo of global semiconductor equipment cycles. If you rely on cutting-edge chips, treat toolmaker capacity and lead times as a strategic constraint, not a background assumption.
Deep & Emerging TechThe summer heat is hitting data centers hard — and outages and downtime may only get worse
With more than half of global data center capacity exposed to heatwaves, drought, and water stress, uptime risk is now a climate problem as much as an engineering one. Map your workloads to specific facilities and regions this week—then stress-test failover and multi-region plans against realistic heat and water scenarios, not just power loss.
Deep & Emerging TechDid RAM suppliers fix memory prices? This lawsuit says they did — but I don’t think it will fix the RAMpocalypse
Allegations that RAM vendors steered pricing toward HBM for AI data centers highlight how AI demand can distort component markets for everyone else. If your roadmap depends on commodity DRAM, assume price and availability volatility and lock in supply or design alternatives early.
Deep & Emerging TechBlue Origin still does not know why New Glenn exploded but plans to fly again this year
Planning a return-to-flight while the New Glenn root cause is still under investigation shows how much schedule pressure is baked into commercial launch. If you depend on space-based infrastructure, diversify launch providers and build delay tolerance into your deployment timelines.