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SpaceX Appeals US FCC Rejection of Rural Broadband Subsidies

An exterior of the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California May 29, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
An exterior of the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California May 29, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
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SpaceX Appeals US FCC Rejection of Rural Broadband Subsidies

An exterior of the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California May 29, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
An exterior of the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California May 29, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

SpaceX on Friday challenged the US Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) decision to deny the space company's satellite internet unit $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies, calling the move "flawed" and "grossly unfair," in a regulatory filing.

The FCC last month turned down applications from billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX and LTD Broadband for funds that had been tentatively awarded in 2020 under the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a multibillion dollar program in which SpaceX was poised to receive $885.5 million to beam satellite internet to US regions with little to no internet connections.

"The decision appears to have been rendered in service to a clear bias towards fiber, rather than a merits-based decision to actually connect unserved Americans," SpaceX's senior director of satellite policy, David Goldman, wrote in a scathing appeal filed Friday evening.

SpaceX's Starlink, a fast-growing network of more than 3,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit, has tens of thousands of users in the US so far, with consumers paying at least $599 for a user terminal and $110 a month for service.

Announcing the rejection in August, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said Starlink's technology "has real promise" but that it could not meet the program's requirements, citing data that showed a steady decline in speeds over the past year and casting the service's price as too steep for consumers.

SpaceX under the program had sought to provide 100/20 Mbps service to 642,925 locations in 35 states. The company in its appeal said the FCC erroneously evaluated Starlink's performance.
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr in a statement last month opposed the FCC's decision and slammed the agency for rejecting the funds without a full commission vote.

"To be clear, this is a decision that tells families in states across the country that they should just keep waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide even though we have the technology to improve their lives now," Carr said.

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Lenovo Unveils AI Agent to Bridge PCs, Phones and Wearables at CES

Attendees gather for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2026. (AFP)
Attendees gather for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2026. (AFP)
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Lenovo Unveils AI Agent to Bridge PCs, Phones and Wearables at CES

Attendees gather for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2026. (AFP)
Attendees gather for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, 2026. (AFP)

Lenovo, the world's top PC maker, unveiled its own AI assistant Tuesday at the CES tech show in Las Vegas, promising a tool that follows users seamlessly across laptops, smartphones and connected devices.

The Beijing-based company commanded 28 percent of global PC market share in the third quarter of 2025, ahead of rivals HP at 21.5 percent and Dell at 14.5 percent, according to US research firm Gartner.

Lenovo's new artificial intelligence agent, dubbed Qira, is designed as an autonomous interface capable of performing tasks rather than simply generating content on demand, a move Lenovo hopes will showcase the breadth of its product portfolio.

Unlike rivals focused on single categories, Lenovo was the only major manufacturer whose offering spanned laptops, tablets and smartphones -- under its Motorola brand, acquired in 2014 -- as well as servers and even supercomputers.

The company also unveiled prototypes of connected glasses and an AI-powered pendant, still in testing, that captures "important moments" with user consent by recording conversations, said Motorola's Angelina Gomez.

Codenamed the AI Perceptive Companion, the pendant features a microphone and camera and "sees what you see and hears what your hear," Lenovo vice president Luca Rossi told reporters.

An interaction with Qira can start via the pendant, continue on a smartphone and end on a laptop, with the agent retaining user context across devices.

It can summarize the highlights of a user's day, draft and send emails, or even select photos from archives to post on social media.

Lenovo stressed it is not positioning Qira as a rival to Microsoft's Copilot and announced the integration of Copilot into Motorola smartphones.

For major hardware makers, the challenge now is proving the utility of generative AI in everyday applications rather than simply flaunting cutting-edge tech.

Amid lingering geopolitical tensions with Washington, Lenovo was the only Chinese firm to take center stage at CES, choosing Las Vegas's futuristic Sphere venue for its showcase.

Executives emphasized the company's global footprint, with most revenue generated outside China and several top managers from overseas.

Technology

At CES, Auto and Tech Companies Transform Cars into Proactive Companions

The Afeela Prototype 2026 displayed during a Sony Honda Mobility news conference ahead of the CES tech show, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas. (AP)
The Afeela Prototype 2026 displayed during a Sony Honda Mobility news conference ahead of the CES tech show, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas. (AP)
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At CES, Auto and Tech Companies Transform Cars into Proactive Companions

The Afeela Prototype 2026 displayed during a Sony Honda Mobility news conference ahead of the CES tech show, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas. (AP)
The Afeela Prototype 2026 displayed during a Sony Honda Mobility news conference ahead of the CES tech show, Monday, Jan. 5, 2026, in Las Vegas. (AP)

In a vision of the near future shared at CES, a girl slides into the back seat of her parents' car and the cabin instantly comes alive. The vehicle recognizes her, knows it’s her birthday and cues up her favorite song without a word spoken.

“Think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family,” Sri Subramanian, Nvidia's global head of generative AI for automotive, said Tuesday.

Subramanian's example, shared with a CES audience on the show's opening day in Las Vegas, illustrates the growing sophistication of AI-powered in-cabin systems and the expanding scope of personal data that smart vehicles may collect, retain and use to shape the driving experience.

Across the show floor, the car emerged less as a machine and more as a companion as automakers and tech companies showcased vehicles that can adapt to drivers and passengers in real time — from tracking heart rates and emotions to alerting if a baby or young child is accidentally left in the car.

Bosch debuted its new AI vehicle extension that aims to turn the cabin into a “proactive companion.” Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom, announced Alpamayo, its new vehicle AI initiative designed to help autonomous cars think through complex driving decisions. CEO Jensen Huang called it a “ChatGPT moment for physical AI.”

But experts say the push toward a more personalized driving experience is intensifying questions about how much driver data is being collected.

“The magic of AI should not just mean all privacy and security protections are off,” said Justin Brookman, director of marketplace policy at Consumer Reports.

Unlike smartphones or online platforms, cars have only recently become major repositories of personal data, Brookman said. As a result, the industry is still trying to establish the “rules of the road” for what automakers and tech companies are allowed to do with driver data.

That uncertainty is compounded by the uniquely personal nature of cars, Brookman said. Many people see their vehicles as an extension of themselves — or even their homes — which he said can make the presence of cameras, microphones and other monitoring tools feel especially invasive.

“Sometimes privacy issues are difficult for folks to internalize,” he said. “People generally feel they wish they had more privacy but also don’t necessarily know what they can do to address it.”

At the same time, Brookman said, many of these technologies offer real safety benefits for drivers and can be good for the consumer.

On the CES show floor, some of those conveniences were on display at automotive supplier Gentex’s booth, where attendees sat in a mock six-seater van in front of large screens demonstrating how closely the company’s AI-equipped sensors and cameras could monitor a driver and passengers.

“Are they sleepy? Are they drowsy? Are they not seated properly? Are they eating, talking on phones? Are they angry? You name it, we can figure out how to detect that in the cabin,” said Brian Brackenbury, director of product line management at Gentex.

Brackenbury said it's ultimately up to the car manufacturers to decide how the vehicle reacts to the data that's collected, which he said is stored in the car and deleted after the video frames, for example, have been processed. "

“One of the mantras we have at Gentex is we're not going to do it just because we can, just because the technology allows it,” Brackebury said, adding that “data privacy is really important.”

Technology

Nvidia CEO Huang Says Next Generation of Chips Is in Full Production

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a Nvidia keynote address at CES 2026, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US January 5, 2026. (Reuters)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a Nvidia keynote address at CES 2026, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US January 5, 2026. (Reuters)
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Nvidia CEO Huang Says Next Generation of Chips Is in Full Production

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a Nvidia keynote address at CES 2026, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US January 5, 2026. (Reuters)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during a Nvidia keynote address at CES 2026, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US January 5, 2026. (Reuters)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday that the company’s next generation of chips is in "full production," saying they can deliver five times the artificial-intelligence computing of the company’s previous chips when serving up chatbots and other AI apps.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the leader of the world's most valuable company revealed new details about its chips, which will arrive later this year and which Nvidia executives told Reuters are already in the company's labs being tested by AI firms, as Nvidia faces increasing competition from rivals as well as its own customers.

The Vera Rubin platform, made up of six separate Nvidia chips, is expected to debut later this year, with the flagship server containing 72 of the company’s graphics units and 36 of its new central processors.

Huang showed ‌how they can ‌be strung together into "pods" with more than 1,000 Rubin chips and said they could improve ‌the ⁠efficiency of generating ‌what are known as "tokens" - the fundamental unit of AI systems - by 10 times.

To get the new performance results, however, Huang said the Rubin chips use a proprietary kind of data that the company hopes the wider industry will adopt.

"This is how we were able to deliver such a gigantic step up in performance, even though we only have 1.6 times the number of transistors," Huang said.

While Nvidia still dominates the market for training AI models, it faces far more competition - from traditional rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices as well as customers like Alphabet's Google - in delivering the fruits of those models to hundreds of millions of users of chatbots and other technologies.

Much of ⁠Huang’s speech focused on how well the new chips would work for that task, including adding a new layer of storage technology called "context memory storage" aimed at helping chatbots ‌provide snappier responses to long questions and conversations.

Nvidia also touted a new generation ‍of networking switches with a new kind of connection called co-packaged ‍optics. The technology, which is key to linking together thousands of machines into one, competes with offerings from Broadcom and Cisco ‍Systems.

Nvidia said that CoreWeave will be among the first to have the new Vera Rubin systems and that it expects Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet to adopt them as well.

In other announcements, Huang highlighted new software that can help self-driving cars make decisions about which path to take - and leave a paper trail for engineers to use afterward. Nvidia showed research about software, called Alpamayo, late last year, with Huang saying on Monday it would be released more widely, along with the data used to train it so that automakers can make evaluations.

"Not only do we open-source the models, we also open-source the data that we use ⁠to train those models, because only in that way can you truly trust how the models came to be," Huang said from a stage in Las Vegas.

Last month, Nvidia scooped up talent and chip technology from startup Groq, including executives who were instrumental in helping Alphabet's Google design its own AI chips. While Google is a major Nvidia customer, its own chips have emerged as one of Nvidia's biggest threats as Google works closely with Meta Platforms and others to chip away at Nvidia's AI stronghold.

During a question-and-answer session with financial analysts after his speech, Huang said the Groq deal "won't affect our core business" but could result in new products that expand its lineup.

At the same time, Nvidia is eager to show that its latest products can outperform older chips like the H200, which US President Donald Trump has allowed to flow to China. Reuters has reported that the chip, which was the predecessor to Nvidia's current "Blackwell" chip, is in high demand in China, which has alarmed China hawks across the US political spectrum.

Huang told financial analysts after his keynote ‌that demand is strong for the H200 chips in China, and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Nvidia has applied for licenses to ship the chips to China but was waiting for approvals from the US and other governments to ship them.