Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta's Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19. In announcing that price increase on Thursday, the company cited the "global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—[that] is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR."

But unlike many of the other tech companies that have been pushed into similar price increases in recent months, Meta's own spending priorities are at least partly to blame for the rising prices of those components. The company's recent hard pivot to the "AI superintelligence" race has directly contributed to the conditions that are now making its own Quest headsets more expensive.

Spending like a drunk sailor

In January, Meta announced that it plans to spend $115 billion to $135 billion on capital expenditures this year, up significantly from $72 billion in 2025 and just $28 billion as recently as 2023. The vast majority of that investment is going into AI infrastructure, including a recent $21 billion in new investment in data center company CoreWeave (in addition to $14.2 billion originally committed) and an additional $10 billion recently committed to a planned El Paso data center (up from $1.5 billion initially).

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Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since 1972. What a mission it was! Now, attention turns to completing development of a lander to get astronauts down to the Moon's surface. Among other things, we chronicle the latest progress of NASA's two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, in this week's Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Moonshot from the last frontier. Israel-based space launch company Moonshot Space will site its first electromagnetic accelerator in Fairbanks, Alaska, under a memorandum of understanding signed at Space Symposium with spaceport operator Alaska Aerospace Corporation (AAC), Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Moonshot, which emerged from stealth mode in December with $12 million in fundraising, is developing a high-power electromagnetic launcher system to propel payloads and enable cargo deliveries into space at hypersonic speed using electricity rather than chemical fuels, The Times of Israel reports.

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Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government.

The lynchpin of the "collision" attack was an exploit of MD5, a cryptographic hash function Microsoft was using to authenticate digital certificates. By minting a cryptographically perfect digital signature based on MD5, the attackers forged a certificate that authenticated their malicious update server. Had the attack been used more broadly, it would have had catastrophic consequences worldwide.

Getting uncomfortably close to the danger zone

The event, which came to light in 2012, now serves as a cautionary tale for cryptography engineers as they contemplate the downfall of two crucial cryptography algorithms used everywhere. Since 2004, MD5 has been known to be vulnerable to "collisions," a fatal flaw that allows adversaries to generate two distinct inputs that produce identical outputs.

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After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

fivenewscrypto    avril 19, 2026   

NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It's a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and of all things, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

You can trace the history of Europe's Rosalind Franklin mission back nearly a quarter-century. A few years after NASA landed its first rover on Mars in 1997, the European Space Agency came up with a plan to send its own mobile robot to the red planet. The European rover was part of a program named Aurora, and officials hoped to launch it in 2009. Russia would have supplied a Soyuz rocket to send the rover on its way.

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Lucasfilm drops The Mandalorian and Grogu final trailer at CinemaCon

Lucasfilm drops The Mandalorian and Grogu final trailer at CinemaCon

fivenewscrypto    avril 18, 2026   

Lucasfilm released the final trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu last night at CinemaCon, to much applause. And why wouldn't there be? The trailer has all the elements that mark the best of the Star Wars franchise.

As previously reported, Grogu (fka “Baby Yoda”) won viewers’ hearts from the moment he first appeared onscreen in the first season of The Mandalorian, and the relationship between the little green creature and his father-figure bounty hunter, the titular Mandalorian, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), has only gotten stronger. With the 2023 Hollywood strikes delaying production on season 4 of the series, director Jon Favreau got the green light to make this spinoff film.

Per the official logline:

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Intel refreshes non-Ultra Core CPUs with new silicon for the first time

Intel refreshes non-Ultra Core CPUs with new silicon for the first time

fivenewscrypto    avril 18, 2026   

Intel's Core Ultra laptop CPUs have been its flagships ever since it retired the older generational branding scheme and the i3/i5/i7/i9 branding a few years back. The Core Ultra Series 1, Series 2, and Series 3 processors been the ones with the newer CPU and GPU designs, and newer manufacturing technology.

Intel has also offered non-Ultra Core CPUs, but these have never been particularly interesting, mostly because both the Series 1 and Series 2 chips were based on Intel's old Raptor Lake architecture. Raptor Lake was the code name for 2023's 13th-generation Core family, and most versions of Raptor Lake were the same silicon used for 2022's 12th-generation Core CPUs.

But the naming and renaming of Raptor Lake apparently couldn't last forever. Intel's new, non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors are new silicon, a return to the days when you could expect high-end and midrange Intel chips to include many of the same advancements despite their performance differences.

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OpenAI starts offering a biology-tuned LLM

OpenAI starts offering a biology-tuned LLM

fivenewscrypto    avril 18, 2026   

On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields.

In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI's Life Sciences Product Lead, said the system was designed to tackle two major roadblocks faced by current biology researchers. One is the massive datasets created by decades of genome sequencing and protein biochemistry, which can be too much for any one researcher to take in. The second is that biology has many highly specialized subfields, each with its own techniques and jargon. So, for example, a geneticist who finds themselves working on a gene that's active in brain cells might struggle to understand the immense neurobiological literature.

Wang said the company had taken an LLM and trained it on 50 of the most common biological workflows, as well as on how to access the major public databases of biological information. Further training has resulted in a system that can suggest likely biological pathways and prioritize potential drug targets. "We're connecting genotype to phenotype through known pathways and regulatory mechanisms, infer likely structural or functional properties of proteins, and really leveraging this mechanistic understanding," Wang said.

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