📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: SpaceX Is Building Its Own Particle Accelerator Terbaru

The Sun unleashes a torrent of charged particles. Some of them slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering breathtaking auroras in the night sky.

But for equipment that’s orbiting our planet in outer space, solar weather can quickly turn into a major headache. The particles have been shown to wreak havoc on the on-board electronics of satellites, endangering their mission and longevity.

As part of an effort to bring the study and testing of the phenomenon in-house, SpaceX is now developing its own particle accelerator in Florida. The planned facility is a cyclotron, which can accelerate individual protons to near the speed of light, allowing them to study how radiation affects their spacecraft, including its broadband-beaming Starlink satellites.

SpaceX’s VP of Starlink, Michael Nicolls, confirmed the news in a tweet last week, announcing that the company is “hiring elite engineers at our new 230 [Meta-electronvolt] cyclotron facility in Florida, where we are bringing single-event radiation testing in house to accelerate development across all SpaceX vehicles.” (Meta-electronvolts, or MeV, are a commonly-used unit to measure the amount of kinetic energy that a single particle can gain.)

Put simply, cyclotrons use a magnetic field to bend the path of charged particles into a circular shape, allowing them to be accelerated to high energies. The idea is to blast these particles at certain materials to simulate the effects of space radiation here on Earth.

Job pages posted to ZipRecruiter suggest the goal is to study how computer chips react to a bombardment of highly energetic particles.

“This proton particle accelerator will be used to screen and characterize electronics across all of our vehicles and platforms, unlocking unprecedented agility for chip and [Printed Circuit Board Assembly] level performance characterization that will be critical as we build and scale our AI constellations and deep space exploration vehicles,” reads a posting for an Electronics Test Engineer.

“As a member of our fast-paced Radiation Effects team, you will be responsible for ensuring avionics hardware performance across our fleet of vehicles (Dragon, Falcon, Starship, Lunar Human Landing System, etc.) and satellites (Starlink, Starshield) through some of the harshest and varied radiation environments imaginable,” the job posting reads.

At 230 MeV, SpaceX’s cyclotron would be quite powerful — but with less than the juice than the 590 MeV Ring Cyclotron at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, which is considered the most powerful in the world by beam power. (CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is not a cyclotron, but a different type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron.)

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have already had to endure the damaging effects of space weather, particularly during solar storms. These bursts of electromagnetic activity in orbit have been found to shorten the lifespans of Starlink satellites, causing them to de-orbit much sooner than expected.

Beyond orbit, conditions get even more extreme. Well past the protective boundaries of the Earth’s atmosphere, which extends thousands of miles beyond our planet’s surface, spacecraft are exposed to the full brunt of space radiation — a major challenge for missions into deep space, crewed or uncrewed.

While the risks to electronics are considerable, scientists are still studying the effects of space radiation on the human body as well. Astronauts are exposed to 2.6 times as much radiation on the surface of the Moon, for instance, as they would be when spending the same amount of time on board the International Space Station.

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The post SpaceX Is Building Its Own Particle Accelerator appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure.

TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

"As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."

The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors.

Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants

Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.

"When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents."

The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers.

These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000.

"The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes."

Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch

What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town."

The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout.

This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not.

"The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity."

How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue

Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month.

Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive."

The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works.

"We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came."

From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion

Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects.

Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month.

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com