Bill Tai

Another major leap forward for AST SpaceMobile and for space-enabled telecom. This week, AST announced a formal commercial agreement with Verizon to bring direct-to-cell services to Verizon customers starting in 2026. It builds on Verizon’s $100M strategic investment made last year and follows a series of successful trials. AST now holds commercial agreements with AT&T, Vodafone, and Verizon, a powerful endorsement of its direct-to-device model. Meanwhile, Verizon continues to work with Skylo, another Seraphim Space portfolio company, in the growing non-terrestrial connectivity space. Two Seraphim-backed pioneers at the centre of a market that’s redefining what “always connected” truly means. More on the news here: https://lnkd.in/ey8wU8RZ #SeraphimSpace #SpaceTech #Connectivity #DirectToCell #Telecom #Innovation #5G #NewSpace #ASTSpaceMobile #Skylo

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Impressive progress from our portfolio Array Labs with a $20m Series A to scale radar manufacturing and prepare for launch. Designing radar systems for mass manufacturing, borrowing from consumer electronics and telecoms, is a powerful unlock for cost, speed, and deployment at scale. The traction speaks for itself: nine-figure contracted revenue, multiple government awards, and expanding product lines. Exciting to see this next phase of execution begin. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/e93jz4k8 #SpaceTech #DualUse #Radar #DefenceTech #NewSpace

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SpaceX and Elon Musk are seeking to solve the impending AI data storage bottleneck problem by launching up to a million solar-powered satellites. They will be well-served to contact Lior Bar-Shalom of Arbell Energy LTD, whose revolutionary technology doubles the efficiency of current solar energy capture. Just this past week, Arbell - a recent graduate of CREATION-SPACE's Expand accelerator - won the Audience Choice Award at Israel Space Forum's IL Space Pitch 2026 in Tel Aviv. #solarenergy #Israelitech #startupnation #accesstospace #spacetech #ai #spacex #energyefficiency https://lnkd.in/eZJkaYC5

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Great speaking with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network. We covered a lot of pressing semiconductor topics, including: - The importance of creating export policies that balance economic and security objectives. - How the U.S. Department of Commerce’s LOI investment of $150M in xLight Inc. will help drive chip innovation here at home. - Why new technologies, like extreme ultraviolet lithography, should allow us to wake up Moore’s Law. - And the critical role energy plays in advancing our AI capabilities. https://lnkd.in/gQtzJ9VB

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Last year, we invested in Cognichip: what we expect to be a generational semiconductor company by making chip design as simple and accessible as vibe coding. They came out of stealth today with a vision for how we will design chips in the future. Today, building chips is nowhere nearly as simple as uttering these commands. In fact, this very task requires going through thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of experienced engineer time. It gets worse with every tech node. Chip design is tedious, which is why chips cost a fortune to design, and take forever to bring to market, resulting in only a handful of (giant) chip companies. Faraj Aalaei, who personally built, grew, and took several chip companies public over the past 3 decades, founded Cognichip with Simon Sabato and Ehsan Kamalinejad to disrupt this status quo: https://lnkd.in/gAkM_k6Q He sounded the alarm a decade ago, and as a dear friend of Lux, he was kind enough to share his vision that became Cognichip: Cognichip has attracted Olympiad-medalist mathematicians and veteran chip designers to make chip design as accessible as coding apps. We expect Cognichip to enable a future where there are as many chip companies as there are software companies, rapidly accelerating compute. We are excited to embark on this journey with the fabulous team Faraj has assembled, along with our friends at Mayfield and FPV Ventures

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As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE

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AI compounds improvements. In August we continued to deploy AI to build AI for investment alpha. August AI product releases from Decasonic include: 💪 Today, we stand at 125 AI teammates to 4 human teammates, a ratio of 31:1 🤖 We shipped +45 agents, 56% MoM growth, above plan ⚖️ We launched our AI Due Diligence Team, comprised of 35 agents performing human quality due diligence at 30x+ speed 📲 We integrated our 10 AI applications in an AI Operating System, unifying how they orchestrate within our workflows 📊 We added +10 agents in our Data Team, focused on on-chain, sentiment and technical market data 🌃 Kudos for the team's hard work, 9-9-7, nights and weekends on top of their day jobs, to ship world class AI. We now have AI that works 365-24-7 More to come...

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Amazon's AGI Lab unveils Nova Act, a general purpose AI agent to control a web browser and independently perform some simple actions, and a Nova Act SDK.

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🚨California Takes Action with Passage of 3 Bills to Scale CDR Innovation This weekend, California made unprecedented progress in creating compliance mechanisms to help grow Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) by providing pathways for all CDR approaches to gain market traction and grow responsibly in the state: ✅ CDR is included for the first time in the Cap & Invest program via AB1207, which creates a pathway for CDR to be permanently integrated as a compliance offset category ✅ The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was reauthorized via SB804, and now includes a framework for CDR to be included in future allocations from the fund for climate tech innovation, including as part of an $85M climate tech innovation program ✅ The passage of SB643 creates a Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Program to purchase CDR credits from eligible suppliers With these actions, California has created the framework to responsibly scale CDR, creating both economic and environmental benefits for Californians. These benefits include addressing affordability by generating good paying jobs and lowering CDR technology costs, as well as deploying technologies that tackle critical challenges such as wildfire fuel load reduction (such as the pictured Charm pilot in the Inyo National Forest) and orphaned wells. In addition, this program is technology-inclusive - enabling the state to deploy a wide range of technologies that support meeting CA’s climate goals by tackling legacy and residual emissions. Over the past few years, Charm Industrial has been collaborating with legislators, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and numerous NGO, industry, and academic partners to explore these concepts - what is the right mix of technologies for California? How can CDR help plug the gaps for residual and hard to abate emissions, and what are the benefits for Californians? We are incredibly proud of this progress, and this suite of new mechanisms provides support for R&D, supply, and demand, which together will support the scaling of the CDR industry - coupled with additional resources allocated to CARB for scaling SB905, the Carbon Capture Removal and Storage bill passed in 2022, which provides the framework to support this work. This is also yet another example of California leading the nation by fully integrating responsible CDR into its programs, creating a huge opportunity for the state to lead on scaling a wide range of technologies that will not only create environmental and economic benefits, but are also critical to helping the state stay on track for net zero and reaching California’s climate goals. Thank you to our partners in the legislature and agencies for your vision and commitment to scaling these solutions, and to all of our NGO, industry, and academic partners for all of the painstaking work to come up with the right set of solutions for California. We’re looking forward to working together to implement these important programs! 

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Silicon Valley’s AI Data Centers Sit Idle Amid Severe Power Grid Bottlenecks Power-Hungry Facilities Ready—But Grid Isn’t Two state-of-the-art data centers in Santa Clara—Digital Realty’s 48MW SJC37 and Stack Infrastructure’s 48MW SVY02A—are completed but sit unused. Despite their readiness to support AI-intensive computing, both remain unpowered due to electricity shortfalls. Together, they represent nearly 100 megawatts of idle capacity—a stark illustration of infrastructure lag in the AI era. Key Facility and Grid Challenges • Digital Realty’s SJC37: – 430,000 sq. ft. across four stories, designed for 48MW of critical load. – Remains offline with no energization timeline. • Stack Infrastructure’s SVY02A: – Includes 8 data halls and its own substation. – Also designed for 48MW, but power delivery is on hold. • Santa Clara’s utility, Silicon Valley Power (SVP): – Managing 57 data centers (active or in-progress). – Investing $450M in grid upgrades, expected by 2028. – Power delivery is being sequenced as substations and transmission lines come online. National Trend of Grid Strain • Northern Virginia, Pacific Northwest, Southeast U.S.: – Facing 2–5 year delays for data center connections. – Microsoft has acknowledged idle GPUs due to power shortages. • AI infrastructure now demands hundreds of megawatts per cluster—overwhelming current grid capacity timelines. Why It Matters The bottleneck in energy availability isn’t just a local hiccup—it reflects a systemic lag between digital infrastructure growth and utility modernization. While AI builders race ahead with new compute demands, local grids are stuck in regulatory and construction bottlenecks. These idle sites—mere minutes from Nvidia’s HQ—underscore that even global tech giants can’t outpace the grid. The risk: AI innovation stalls not from lack of chips, but from lack of electricity. I share daily insights with 33,000+ followers and 11,000+ professional contacts across defense, tech, and policy. If this topic resonates, I invite you to connect and continue the conversation. Keith King https://lnkd.in/gHPvUttw

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I’ve been working on the theory of why small, shippable factories are the perfect inversion to the centralized prefab factory model. It all collapsed into one line of math (credit to Gilles Retsin): Factory Efficiency = Usage × (Throughput × Product Value ) / ( CapEx + Deployment OpEx) The idea is that the closer you can drive Usage to 100 % while keeping the denominator tiny, the faster the flywheel spins.  A shippable microfactory tackles this by primarily focusing on a high Usage factor. Because the microfactory can be packed up afterwards and reused, its CapEx gets amortized over multiple projects, effectively raising its overall Usage across the year. If one project alone doesn’t fully occupy the factory, it can simply roll over to another job to maintain high Usage. Its CapEx is often an order of magnitude lower than a centralized factory (< $1M vs. $10-50M min), so the breakeven throughput is more achievable on a small pipeline of work. The real breakthrough here is portability. There is near-zero stranded capital and almost no idle time. To flesh this theory out, I wrote 3000 words on the topic for Brad Hargreaves and Thesis Driven. The article breaks down: - why “fixed factories, shipped goods” is being inverted to shipped factories, fixed goods - what a sub‑$1 M robotic cell does to CapEx per home versus a £45 M off‑site plant - early production/cost data on a shippable microfactory from Mollie Claypool, Gilles Retsin, Sam Baker and the Automated Architecture (AUAR) team - the hybrid reality of robots tackling the heavy structural components and human crews assembling faster and cheaper - technical constraints to pull this model off and future considerations on the optimal business model (own vs. rent) Major shoutout to Gilles Retsin for helping me pull this together. https://lnkd.in/eRTnbZPa

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