☕️ Musk plans AI satellite factory on the Moon

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

Plus: 🎁 13 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 2 papers.

🌙 Musk plans AI satellite factory on the Moon LINK

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 founding team has now left LINK

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 develops its own AI chip with Samsung LINK

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 Super Heavy booster completes four-day cryoproof testing LINK

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 explores superconductors to power data centers LINK

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 exits recordable Blu-ray market LINK

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 you might like

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• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried asks for a new trialLINK

• 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 independenceLINK

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

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

• OpenAI policy exec who opposed chatbot’s “adult mode” reportedly fired on discrimination claimLINK

• A.I. Personalizes the Internet but Takes Away ControlLINK

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

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

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

🧰 Trending tools

happycapy: browser-based AI coding environment powered by Claude that runs without installation, letting you build and execute code directly in-browser or mobile.LINK

Atyla: monitors brand mentions across AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, helping marketing teams optimize visibility in AI-generated responses.LINK

Tines: a no-code automation platform that lets you build security workflows, integrate tools, and orchestrate incident response without writing code or managing infrastructure.LINK

Doraverse's All-in-One AI for Meetings: orchestrates multiple AI models in a secure workspace to handle meeting transcription, summaries, and collaborative tasks with enterprise-grade controls.LINK

Willow for Developers: a voice dictation tool that converts natural speech into formatted text across any application, eliminating filler words and reducing typing by up to 90%.LINK

Showboat and Rodney: tools enabling AI agents to create and share interactive demonstrations of applications they've built autonomously.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Researchers warn about cherry-picking AI results: testing multiple models or tweaks then reporting only the best outcome inflates performance claims, misleading other scientists about what actually works.LINK

Removing AI Safety with One Prompt: feeding a language model a single carefully chosen phrase can erase its safety training, making it answer harmful questions it normally refuses.LINK

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