Tech News — 2026-06-29#

Story of the Day#

South Korea’s government and leading tech firms, including Samsung and SK Hynix, announced a colossal $1 trillion investment blueprint to secure global dominance in memory chips, AI data centers, and humanoid robots by 2028. The massive capital injection aims to ease the global memory shortage and cement the nation’s status as a tech powerhouse amid an intensifying international AI race.

Top Stories#

Rocket Lab acquires Iridium for $8 billion to take on SpaceX · Ars Technica Rocket Lab is buying satellite communications veteran Iridium in an $8 billion cash-and-stock deal. The acquisition merges Rocket Lab’s launch and manufacturing capabilities with Iridium’s constellation of 80 low-Earth orbit satellites and 2.5 million subscribers. This aggressive vertical integration positions CEO Peter Beck’s company as a formidable, full-stack competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper in the orbital economy.

Supreme Court ruling guts government’s use of geofence warrants · Ars Technica In a major win for digital privacy, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” effectively restricting law enforcement’s use of sweeping geofence warrants. The decision establishes that the government must demonstrate reasonable cause and secure a warrant before turning third-party location data from companies like Google into a mass surveillance tool.

Comcast is splitting its media and broadband properties · Ars Technica Comcast is officially separating its profitable broadband and wireless operations from its media businesses, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky into a new publicly traded entity. Expected to take a year to complete, the tax-free spin-off reflects the intense pressure traditional media faces from streaming rivals and industry consolidation, prompting Comcast to insulate its core connectivity brand.

Anthropic’s Mythos 5 Cleared by US for Wider Use · Bloomberg Anthropic has won US approval to release its powerful Mythos 5 AI model to trusted organizations and federal agencies. Access had previously been restricted by the government over national security concerns, but the Biden administration cleared the deployment after concluding that appropriate safeguards are now in place.

IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip · Slashdot IBM unveiled “NanoStack,” a sub-1-nanometer 3D transistor architecture capable of packing 100 billion transistors onto a fingernail-sized die. By staggering CMOS devices vertically, IBM claims the technology will deliver up to 50 percent higher performance or 70 percent lower power consumption than current top chips, providing a critical advancement for future AI accelerators and mobile SoCs.

Uber and Waymo Have Ended Their Robotaxi Tie-Up in Phoenix · Bloomberg Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo have quietly wound down their nearly three-year robotaxi partnership in Phoenix. The dissolution highlights the shifting dynamics in the autonomous vehicle space, as Uber looks to potentially lean more on its own driverless technologies rather than external partnerships.

Also Worth Knowing#

• WhatsApp is launching usernames: here’s how to reserve yours · The Verge: The platform is rolling out handle reservations to its 3 billion users, allowing people to connect without revealing their personal phone numbers.
• Scientists Think Neptune and Uranus May Not Be the Ice Giants We Imagined · Slashdot: New modeling suggests the two outer planets contain vast, well-mixed magma oceans rather than interiors composed strictly of water, ammonia, and methane ice.
• Google reportedly capped Meta’s use of Gemini AI for coding and chatbots · Engadget: Google limited Meta’s access to its Gemini AI models due to capacity constraints, delaying several of Meta’s internal AI projects.
• OpenAI is teasing new hardware… for Codex · The Verge: OpenAI is partnering with keyboard maker Work Louder to release a macro-pad device designed to upgrade Codex shortcuts for developers.