News
Automakers will focus on self-driving technology at CES 2017
The 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas opens to the public on January 5 but will be preceded by press and preview days on January 3 and 4. This year’s show will span across 2.5 million square feet of floor space spread across multiple venues and feature 3,800 exhibitors.
“One of the big themes is going to be connectivity,” Jeff Joseph, senior vice president for communications and strategic relationships at the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES. “For example, Internet of Things, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, voice-activated communication with things like Alexa and Google Home and higher-value content – 4K-produced content that you can move from device to device.”
Faraday Future
In the past few years, more and more car companies and automotive suppliers have used CES to showcase their technological prowess, particularly in the area of self-driving cars. Faraday Future says it will reveal its first production car via a live stream beginning at 6:00 pm on January 3. The all electric vehicle appears to be a crossover SUV based on teaser videos the company has released ahead of the show.
Hyundai Ioniq
Hyundai says it will be providing show goers rides in its new Ioniq equipped with autonomous driving technology. In a preview earlier this year, C/Net RoadShow reporter Antuan Goodwin found the self driving Ioniq competent if a little boring. The car never exceeds the speed limit, for instance, and deals with pedestrians and turns within city limits with painfully slow precision.
Chrysler Pacifica
Chrysler is expected to introduce a battery electric version of its Pacifica minivan at CES 2017. The car is not expected to be available for sale before 2018 and little is known at this time about battery size, range, or other specifications. Chrysler has just started selling a plug-in hybrid version of the Pacifica in the US. 100 of those cars have been modified at a separate facility in Detroit to use Google’s self driving technology. Google has recently announced that it is no longer considering manufacturing its own self-driving car.
Honda NeuV
Honda will bring a “box on wheels” concept electric car to the Las Vegas show. Called the NeuV, the car can recognize the occupants’ mood and adjust lighting, visual displays, and driving characteristics to match. It will also showcase vehicle to vehicle communication systems designed to speed the flow of traffic in congested urban areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-XMA6YAh5c
Rinspeed
Not to be outdone in the goofiness department, Rinspeed will present its highly unusual and totally unique Oasis concept. The car is intended to answer the question, “What will drivers and passengers do with their time when self driving cars become the norm?” One answer, says Rinspeed, is an onboard garden that occupants can tend to while under way.
MobilEye
MobilEye, Tesla’s former partner for autonomous driving systems, has linked up with Delphi, a major component supplier to the automotive industry, to create a self driving platform that will be marketed to various car makers. The two companies will offer show visitors a 6.3 mile long test drive of their Centralized Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP) automated driving system. It won’t be production ready until 2019, but the two companies insist it is “the first turnkey, fully integrated automated driving solution with an industry-leading perception system and computing platform.”
https://vimeo.com/193388153
Keynote speakers at CES 2017 will include Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who will talk about “the latest in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, VR, and gaming.” Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault-Nissan, is also scheduled to give a keynote address.
CES is about more than automobiles. New advances in televisions, smartphones, and personal assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo will be featured as well as advances in gaming and virtual reality technology. No one could see, touch, and experience everything that every exhibitor will bring to the show.
We will attempt to keep you informed about new technologies that will apply to the automotive and mobility industries, beginning with the first press conferences next Tuesday, January 3. Like us on Facebook and get a behind the scenes look from CES 2017.
News
SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.


