DTN 114: China's Orbital Supercomputer

Plus: UAE announces major AI projects, no boom supersonics, mini-satellite quantum messaging, new magnetic superconductor discovered, gene delivery system for brain cells, and more.

May 23, 2025

“If my goal is to make the world a better place, we need to solve energy… we've designed a solution that allows us to undercut the cost of energy across the board in any market anywhere.”

“China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite network. The satellites, created by the company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to process the data they collect themselves, rather than relying on terrestrial stations to do it for them.

The satellites are part of ADA Space’s “Star Compute” program and the first of what it calls the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has an onboard eight-billion parameter AI model and is capable of 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Space says they can manage five peta operations per second, or POPS.”

The Verge

John Nees (left) and laser engineer Paul Campbell (right) work in Target Area 1, where the first 2 petawatt user experiment will take place. ZEUS is now the most powerful laser in the U.S. Credit: Marcin Szczepanski, Michigan Engineering

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan is now the most powerful laser in the United States, reaching a peak output of 2 petawatts, which is roughly double the power of any other U.S. laser. It supports advanced research in fields such as quantum physics, plasma science, medicine, and astrophysics, and is open to scientists worldwide through a proposal-based selection process. The team is working to achieve even higher energies using techniques like wakefield acceleration, aiming for a future experiment at zettawatt-equivalent levels. (via Phys.org)

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