TOKYO, Feb 2 (Reuters) – Japan’s Honda Motor Co (7267.T) said it will start producing a new hydrogen fuel cell system jointly developed with General Motors Co (GM.N) this year and gradually step up sales this decade, in a bid to expand its hydrogen business.
Honda will target annual sales of around 2,000 units of the new system in the middle of this decade, the company said on Thursday, aiming to boost that to 60,000 units per year in 2030.
The Japanese carmaker is seeking to expand the use of its new system not only for its own fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), but also commercial vehicles such as heavy trucks, as stationary power stations and in construction machinery.
Honda will start production of the hydrogen fuel cell system through its joint venture with GM this year, Honda senior managing executive director Shinji Aoyama told reporters during a company event in Tokyo.
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With the “next-generation” system, the company aims to more than double durability compared with its older fuel cell system and to bring costs down by two-thirds.
“While commercial vehicles are in use all over the world, they’ll likely see electrification just as with passenger cars,” said Tetsuya Hasebe, general manager of Honda’s hydrogen business development division.
That would likely lead to a divergence in trucks using batteries and those running on fuel cells, he added.
Reporting by Daniel Leussink; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Jamie Freed
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WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters) – The United States plans to test a spacecraft engine powered by nuclear fission by 2027 as part of a long-term NASA effort to demonstrate more efficient methods of propelling astronauts to Mars in the future, the space agency’s chief said on Tuesday.
NASA will partner with the U.S. military’s research and development agency, DARPA, to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it to space “as soon as 2027,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during a conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
The U.S. space agency has studied for decades the concept of nuclear thermal propulsion, which introduces heat from a nuclear fission reactor to a hydrogen propellant in order to provide a thrust believed to be far more efficient than traditional chemical-based rocket engines.
NASA officials view nuclear thermal propulsion as crucial for sending humans beyond the moon and deeper into space. A trip to Mars from Earth using the technology could take roughly four months instead of some nine months with a conventional, chemically powered engine, engineers say.
That would substantially reduce the time astronauts would be exposed to deep-space radiation and would also require fewer supplies, such as food and other cargo, during a trip to Mars.
“If we have swifter trips for humans, they are safer trips,” NASA deputy administrator and former astronaut Pam Melroy said Tuesday.
The planned 2027 demonstration, part of an existing DARPA research program that NASA is now joining, could also inform the ambitions of the U.S. Space Force, which has envisioned deploying nuclear reactor-powered spacecraft capable of moving other satellites orbiting near the moon, DARPA and NASA officials said.
DARPA in 2021 awarded funds to General Atomics, Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin to study designs of nuclear reactors and spacecraft. By around March, the agency will pick a company to build the nuclear spacecraft for the 2027 demonstration, the program’s manager Tabitha Dodson said in an interview.
The joint NASA-DARPA effort’s budget is $110 million for fiscal year 2023 and is expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars more through 2027.
Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and David Gregorio
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Jan 20 (Reuters) – T-Mobile (TMUS.O), the No.3 U.S. wireless carrier by subscribers, said on Thursday it was investigating a data breach involving 37 million postpaid and prepaid accounts and that it could incur significant costs related to the incident.
The company, which has more than 110 million subscribers, said it identified malicious activity on Jan. 5 and contained it within a day, adding that no sensitive data such as financial information was compromised.
However, some basic customer data — such as name, billing address, email and phone number — was obtained, and it had begun notifying impacted customers, said T-Mobile.
“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company said.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has opened an investigation into the data breach, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing an FCC spokesperson.
FCC and T-Mobile did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the reported investigation.
“While these cybersecurity breaches may not be systemic in nature, their frequency of occurrence at T-Mobile is an alarming outlier relative to telecom peers,” said Neil Mack, senior analyst for Moody’s Investors Service.
“It could negatively impact customer behavior, cause churn to spike and potentially attract the scrutiny of the FCC and other regulators.”
Last year, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million and spend an additional $150 million to upgrade data security to settle litigation over a cyberattack in 2021 that compromised information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company’s shares fell 2% in after-hours trade.
Reporting by Eva Mathews and Lavanya Ahire in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Maju Samuel, Rashmi Aich and Savio D’Souza
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Jan 16 (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) on Monday said it is widening access to hugely popular software from OpenAI, a startup it is backing whose futuristic ChatGPT chatbot has captivated Silicon Valley.
Microsoft said the startup’s tech, which it so far has previewed to its cloud-computing customers in a program it called the Azure OpenAI Service, was now generally available, a distinction that’s expected to bring a flood of new usage.
The news comes as Microsoft has looked at adding to the $1 billion stake in OpenAI it announced in 2019, two people familiar with the matter previously told Reuters. The news site Semafor reported earlier this month that Microsoft might invest $10 billion; Microsoft declined to comment on any potential deal.
Public interest in OpenAI surged following its November release of ChatGPT, a text-based chatbot that can draft prose, poetry or even computer code on command. ChatGPT is powered by generative artificial intelligence, which conjures new content after training on vast amounts of data — tech that Microsoft is letting more customers apply to use.
ChatGPT itself, not just its underlying tech, will soon be available via Microsoft’s cloud, it said in a blog post.
Microsoft said it is vetting customers’ applications to mitigate potential abuse of the software, and its filters can screen for harmful content users might input or the tech might produce.
The business potential of such software has garnered massive venture-capital investment in startups producing it, at a time funding has otherwise dried up. Already, some companies have used the tech to create marketing content or demonstrate how it could negotiate a cable bill.
Microsoft said CarMax, KPMG and others were using its Azure OpenAI service. Its press release quoted an Al Jazeera vice president as saying the service could help the news organization summarize and translate content.
Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Leslie Adler
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Jan 8 (Reuters) – A mobile air-launched rocket system to be used in Britain’s first domestic satellite launch could sow the seeds for a globally dispersed rapid-response capability to put extra eyes in space in times of war, executives and analysts said.
Virgin Orbit (VORB.O), part-owned by billionaire Richard Branson, plans to launch nine satellites from a LauncherOne rocket attached under the wing of a modified Boeing 747, to be flown from a new spaceport in Cornwall on Monday.
Barring delays, it will be the first time a satellite has departed from western European soil.
For now the focus is on commercial payloads from companies such as Space Forge, which is developing in-orbit manufacturing.
But the launch is also seen by many as a blueprint for quicker launches of limited satellite capacity for tactical military purposes, in what planners call “Responsive Launch”.
“Ukraine woke up the world in a lot of ways,” Virgin Orbit Chief Executive Dan Hart told a news conference in southwest England on Sunday.
“Clearly there is a hope of a pan-European, as well as a U.S. collaboration … and that we have responsiveness so that if something happens in the world, we can get assets there right away,” he told the pre-launch briefing, monitored online.
Virgin Orbit said last year Britain’s Royal Air Force was doing exercises to demonstrate the value of “Responsive Launch”.
Britain had a brief foray into space launch activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when its Black Arrow rocket was cancelled after just one successful mission.
The rocket’s four launches took place in Australia in an era when commercial satellites barely existed.
Now, constellations of miniaturised satellites are heading an explosion of commercial activity in low Earth orbit.
‘FLEXIBLE AND AGILE’
Lobbing small satellites into low orbit at short notice would do little more than fill temporary gaps in coverage from large spy satellites, but experts say the technology has some dual civil and military potential and could spread costs.
“It gives you greater resilience or redundancy or duality of systems, whether that’s for position, navigation and timing or quicker access … as we’ve seen in Ukraine,” Ian Annett, deputy chief executive of the UK Space Agency, told Sunday’s briefing.
“It’s a natural transition that helps us develop security capabilities, but also, for government, keeps costs down whilst providing commercial opportunities as well.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX activated its Starlink constellation over Ukraine after Russia’s invasion last February. Its communication links have been used by civilians and by Ukraine’s military.
Luxembourg said in October it had signed a letter of intent with Virgin Orbit to develop a “rapid and flexible response to different threats”, for NATO and other allies.
Its defence ministry has called for “new, more flexible and agile satellite launch procedures and techniques from Europe”.
Britain’s own 2022-25 space roadmap calls for dual-use capabilities in Earth Observation and Space Domain Awareness.
Virgin Orbit is also talking to Japan and Australia.
Questions remain, however, over how quickly the mobile launch concept could work its way into actual budgets, which are dwarfed by U.S. spending on space.
“Everyone is playing up military space as the next big thing,” said UK-based defence analyst Francis Tusa. “But ministries of defence have eyes larger than their stomachs.”
The system’s liquid propellant and final rocket assembly also require some local infrastructure, and Europe’s crowded airspace has thrown up significant regulatory obstacles.
“At the moment, it’s a bit bigger on the commercial side, but we see the defence and national security side growing so I think in this steady state, it’ll probably end up being 50/50,” Hart told Reuters.
Reporting by Tim Hepher; Additional reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by David Holmes
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Dec 26 (Reuters) – SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Monday that the company is now close to having 100 active Starlinks, the firm’s satellite internet service, in Iran, three months after he tweeted he would activate the service there amid protests around the Islamic country.
Musk said, “approaching 100 starlinks active in Iran”, in a tweet on Monday.
The billionaire had said in September that he would activate Starlink in Iran as part of a U.S.-backed effort “to advance internet freedom and the free flow of information” to Iranians.
The satellite-based broadband service could help Iranians circumvent the government’s restrictions on accessing the internet and certain social media platforms amid protests around the country.
The Islamic Republic has been engulfed in protests that erupted after the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody after being arrested by the morality police for wearing “unsuitable attire”.
Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Sandra Maler
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OAKLAND, Calif., Nov 7 (Reuters) – U.S. chip maker Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) is offering a new advanced chip in China that meets recent export control rules aimed at keeping cutting-edge technology out of China’s hands, the company confirmed on Monday.
Nvidia responded to Reuters’ reporting that Chinese computer sellers are advertising products with the new chip.
The chip, called the A800, represents the first reported effort by a U.S. semiconductor company to create advanced processors for China that follow new U.S. trade rules. Nvidia has said the export limitations could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
U.S. regulations set in early October effectively banned export of advanced microchips and equipment to produce advanced chips by Chinese chipmakers, part of an effort to hobble China’s semiconductor industry and in turn the military.
In late August, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc AMD.O both said that their advanced chips, including Nvidia’s data center chip A100, were added to the export control list by the U.S. Commerce Department. The Nvidia A800 can be used in place of the A100 and both are GPUs, or graphics processing units.
Such advanced chips can cost thousands of dollars each.
“The Nvidia A800 GPU, which went into production in Q3, is another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China. The A800 meets the U.S. Government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.
The logo of technology company Nvidia is seen at its headquarters in Santa Clara, California February 11, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/File Photo
Nvidia declined comment on whether it consulted the Commerce Department about the new chip. A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment.
At least two Chinese websites by major server makers offer the A800 chip in their products. One of those products previously used the A100 chip in promotional material.
A distributor website in China detailed the specifications of the A800. A comparison of the chip capabilities with the A100 shows that the chip-to-chip data transfer rate is 400 gigabytes per second on the new chip, down from 600 gigabytes per second on the A100. The new rules restrict rates of 600 gigabytes per second and up.
“The A800 looks to be a repackaged A100 GPU designed to avoid the recent Commerce Department trade restrictions,” said Wayne Lam, an analyst at CCS Insight, basing his comments on the specs shared by Reuters, and noting that eight is a lucky number in China.
“China is a significant market for Nvidia and it makes ample business sense to reconfigure your product to avoid trade restrictions,” said Lam.
Lam said the chip-to-chip communications abilities of the A800 represented a clear performance downgrade for a data center where thousands of chips are used together.
Major Chinese server makers Inspur and H3C which offer servers with the new chips did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did chip distributor OmniSky, which posted the A800 specs online.
Nvidia has said that about $400 million worth of chip sales to China could be impacted in its fiscal third quarter ended in October due to the limits on high-end chips. Having a replacement chip could help lessen the financial blow. The company is to report quarterly results on Nov. 16.
Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee in Oakland, Calif.
Addditional reporting by Josh Horwitz in Shanghai and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Peter Henderson, Matthew Lewis and Leslie Adler
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Nov 1 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc will charge $8 a month for its Blue service, which includes its sought-after “verified” badge, new boss Elon Musk said on Tuesday as he seeks to boost subscriptions and make the social media network less reliant on ads.
“Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month,” Musk said in a tweet, adding that the price will be adjusted by “country proportionate to purchasing power parity.”
A blue check mark next to a person’s user name on the social media platform means Twitter has confirmed that the account belongs to the person or company claiming it. Twitter is currently free for most users.
Billionaire Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last week.
Since the takeover, he has moved quickly to put his stamp on the company, firing its previous chief and other top officials.
Twitter’s advertising chief, Sarah Personette, tweeted on Tuesday that she had resigned her post last week, adding further uncertainty for advertisers.
Musk on Tuesday said subscribers with blue check marks would get priority in replies, mentions and search and would be able to post longer videos and audios. They would see half as many ads.
He also offered subscribers a pay wall bypass from “publishers willing to work with us.”
Musk’s comments follow media reports that he was looking at the process of profile verification and how the blue check marks were given. Twitter used to give these to noteworthy profiles based on its own criteria.
More than 80% of Twitter users who took part in a recent poll said they would not pay for the checkmark. Some 10% said they were willing to pay $5 a month.
Twitter already has a subscription service called Twitter Blue, which was launched in June last year and offers access to features such as an option to edit tweets.
Amid speculation that Twitter may soon start charging verified users a monthly fee of $20 for blue ticks, bestselling author Stephen King tweeted: “If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Separately, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Twitter to B- on “significant” debt increase following the acquisition.
Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Sayantani Ghosh in San Francisco
Editing by Anil D’Silva and Matthew Lewis
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Oct 19 (Reuters) – The concept of a flying car is not new – inventors have been trying to add wings to wheeled motor vehicles for decades, with only limited success.
Jim Dukhovny, founder of Alef Aeronautics, hopes to change that equation. His California-based firm has come up with a novel approach to moving terrestrial vehicles into the skies and has attracted at least one prominent venture capitalist.
Alef’s Model A, which is just emerging from a seven-year gestation period, looks less like the flying cars in old movies and more like Bruce Willis’ flying taxi in the 1997 film “The Fifth Element.”
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The unusual appearance – which features a body that flips on its side to become the wing after lift-off – is just one aspect that attracted Tim Draper, an early investor in Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) and SpaceX whose Draper Associates Fund V has backed Alef with $3 million in seed money.
After Draper had made a modest initial investment, “I put more (money in) when I saw that they had created a small drone prototype that did exactly what they told me it would do,” he said in an email. “The design is extraordinary. The sides of the car become the wings when the plane goes horizontal.”
Based in Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, Alef has designed the Model A – a swoopy yet relatively conventional-looking electric car – with the ability to take off and land vertically. And of course, to fly.
Dukhovny, who is Alef’s CEO, has never built a car until now. He is a computer scientist, software designer, science-fiction buff and serial entrepreneur who once ran an online gaming site called Intellectual Casino.
In an interview, he said the hand-built Model A is designed to sell for $300,000, with production and initial deliveries slated in 2025. That price tag, by the way, is the same starting price planned for the Cadillac brand’s electric-vehicle flagship, the Celestiq, which should start arriving for customers in early 2024, according to Cadillac parent General Motors Co (GM.N).
One feature that sets the Model A apart from earlier versions of flying cars is how it flies. Once it lifts off the ground, the cockpit swivels and the carbon-fiber body turns over on its side, then moves forward, driven by an array of propellers. Most other recent attempts by competitors resemble giant drones – and are not capable of wheeled travel on the ground.
“The whole car is the wing,” said Dukhovny.
Alef estimates a driving range of 200 miles (322 km) and a flight range of 100 miles.
Dukhovny has an even bigger trick up his sleeve for 2030: A proposed Model Z sedan, with a flight range of 200 miles and a driving range of 400 miles – and a projected price tag of $35,000.
“This is not more complicated than a Toyota Corolla,” he said. “Our goal is to make sure it has the same price point.”
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Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit
Editing by Matthew Lewis
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Oct 11 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms (META.O) unveiled its Quest Pro virtual and mixed reality headset on Tuesday, marking a milestone for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s break into the higher-end market for extended reality computing devices.
The headset, introduced at Meta’s annual Connect conference, will hit shelves on Oct. 25 at a price of $1,500, and will offer consumers a way to interact with virtual creations overlaid onto a full-color view of the physical world around them.
The launch is an important step for Zuckerberg, who last year announced plans for the device – then called Project Cambria – at the same time that he changed his company’s name from Facebook to Meta to signal his intention to refocus the social media giant into a company that operates a shared immersive computing experience known as the metaverse.
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Zuckerberg has since poured billions of dollars into that vision. Reality Labs, the Meta unit responsible for bringing the metaverse to life, lost $10.2 billion in 2021 and has lost nearly $6 billion so far this year.
In a speech at the event, Zuckerberg, recorded partially in video and partially as an avatar, said he expects the blending of the physical and digital worlds to give rise to new uses for computing.
“You’re going to see entirely new categories of things getting built,” he said.
The Quest Pro features several upgrades over Meta’s existing Quest 2 headset, which overwhelmingly dominates the consumer virtual reality market.
Most strikingly, it has outward-facing cameras that capture a sort of 3D livestream of the physical environment around a wearer, enabling mixed reality novelties like the ability to hang a virtual painting on a real-world wall or have a virtual ball bounce off a real table.
The Quest 2, by contrast, offers a more rudimentary grayscale version of this technology, called passthrough.
The Quest Pro feels lighter and slimmer than its predecessors, with thin pancake lenses and a relocated battery that sits at the back of the headset, distributing its weight more evenly while reducing overall bulk.
For fully immersive virtual reality, Meta has added tracking sensors to the Quest Pro that can replicate users’ eye movements and facial expressions, creating a sense that avatars are making eye contact.
PITCHING PRODUCTIVITY
Meta is pitching the Quest Pro as a productivity device, aimed at designers, architects and other creative professionals.
In addition to offering its own Horizon social and workspace platforms, the company has also made virtual versions of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) work products like Word, Outlook and Teams available, a partnership Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Zuckerberg to announce.
Matthew Ball, a venture capitalist whose writings about the metaverse have drawn Zuckerberg’s praise, said he considered such partnerships significant because they suggested the companies’ commitment to interoperability, or the idea that different systems should connect with each another.
“There is a lot of skepticism in the market as to whether an interoperable and open metaverse is even possible, let alone likely,” he said, noting that Microsoft and Meta compete on several products in the extended reality space.
At a preview of Quest Pro days before its launch, Meta gave reporters a glimpse of the type of user it had in mind for its productivity pitch by showcasing apps like Tribe XR, a virtual training environment for DJs.
Tribe XR is already available in virtual reality, but a demonstration showed how passthrough technology may enable DJs to use the app to play real-world gigs, as it means they can look out past their virtual equipment at actual partygoers.
Meta plans to sell the Quest Pro in consumer channels to start, while adding enterprise-level capabilities like mobile device management, authentication and premium support services next year, executives said at the press event.
They said the device is intended to complement rather than replace the entry-level Quest 2, which sells for $399.99.
For now, that means the Quest Pro stops short of enabling the complex commercial applications Meta has suggested it wants its metaverse technology to support.
The company is still working on a mixed reality experience for its Horizon Workrooms app that would make a person’s avatar appear to be present in a real-world conference room with other users, which it is calling Magic Rooms.
It is also planning to add legs to its avatars, which are currently displayed from the waist up, Zuckerberg said.
Still, the Quest Pro’s price point puts it well under the cost of existing enterprise-focused devices like Microsoft’s Hololens 2, which was released for commercial use in 2019 and is already present in operating rooms and on factory floors.
An entry-level Hololens 2 sells for $3,500.
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Reporting by Katie Paul in Palo Alto, Calif.
Editing by Kenneth Li, Jonathan Oatis and Matthew Lewis
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