The space race gets a new heavyweight
The day's biggest deal came from orbit. Rocket Lab, the company best known for its small Electron launcher, announced plans to acquire satellite communications firm Iridium in an all-stock transaction valuing Iridium at $8 billion. Reported by both The Verge and TechCrunch, the move marries two halves of the space business — launch and connectivity — and extends what TechCrunch describes as Rocket Lab's ongoing buying spree. The clear ambition: become a credible challenger to SpaceX and Amazon in the satellite arena.
Space was busy elsewhere, too. Nvidia's Jetson AI platform ran in lunar orbit for the first time, a milestone achieved by Firefly Aerospace, which operated the hardware around the Moon. And the infrastructure buildout to feed AI demand keeps globalizing: Australia's Firmus Technologies signed a long-term partnership with Nvidia to build a 360-megawatt, 170,000-GPU data center in Batam, Indonesia — its first facility there, per Bloomberg and Reuters.
Nvidia, everywhere
If there's a through-line today, it's Nvidia. Beyond the Moon and Indonesia, the chipmaker teamed with Palantir on a strategic collaboration to deliver a secure AI platform built for government agencies, putting Nvidia silicon at the center of public-sector deployments. Three very different stories — defense software, lunar hardware, overseas data centers — all routing through the same vendor.
A privacy win at the Supreme Court
In a significant ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday limited how law enforcement can use "geofence" warrants, finding that people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in their cell-phone location data, according to TechCrunch. Geofence warrants let police sweep up data on everyone near a location at a given time; the decision reins that practice in and lands as a notable check on digital surveillance.
Robotaxis part ways
Waymo and Uber have quietly ended their robotaxi partnership in Phoenix, the companies confirmed to TechCrunch. The arrangement wound down in May after nearly three years, meaning riders can no longer hail a Waymo through Uber in the city, as CNBC also reported. The self-driving cars themselves aren't going idle — but this particular alliance is over.
Hardware odds and ends
A cluster of gadget news rounded out the day. Flipper Devices, makers of the mischievous Flipper Zero, took a gentler turn with the Busy Bar, a $249 customizable LED display whose whole job is to broadcast one message: leave me alone. OpenAI, meanwhile, edged into physical products through a partnership with hardware maker Work Louder on a Codex-branded input device aimed at developers — the first photos are out. And MicroVision shipped a batch of its MOVIA lidar sensors to an unnamed "major AI company" for testing in robotics and other advanced applications, a tantalizing hint at who's building what behind closed doors.
One more for your contacts
Finally, WhatsApp has begun letting users reserve a unique username, getting ahead of a coming feature that will eventually let people chat without sharing their phone numbers. Per Techmeme citing 9to5Mac, the rollout has started — so if you want to claim your handle before the land grab, now's the time.
A day defined by big bets: Rocket Lab's on space, Nvidia's on being everywhere at once, and the courts' on user privacy.