AT&T is acquiring wireless spectrum licenses from EchoStar for roughly $23 billion in cash. The acquisition will provide AT&T an average of approximately 50MHz of low-band and mid-band covering virtually all U.S. markets, bolstering connectivity across 5G and fiber, according to CEO John Stankey. AT&T says the deal will accelerate its ability to expand converged subscriber base, customers with both AT&T’s mobile 5G and home Internet services. EchoStar and AT&T have amended their network services agreement to enable EchoStar to operate as a hybrid MNO under the Boost Mobile brand, with AT&T as the primary network services partner. Continue reading AT&T Agrees to Purchase EchoStar Spectrum for $23 Billion

Nvidia has unveiled the Blackwell Server Edition GPU designed for enterprise servers. The reveal was made at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 computer graphics conference, which started Sunday and runs through Thursday in Vancouver. The company also introduced a host of resources for robotics developers that include a new AI family called the Cosmos World Foundation Models, or Cosmos WFMs, which generate “physics-aware” videos. Notable among them is Cosmos Reason, an open and customizable 7-billion-parameter reasoning vision language model (VLM) for physical AI and robotics. Continue reading SIGGRAPH: Nvidia Touts Server Chip, Cosmos World Models

As the smart home world prepares for the Matter 1.5 update this fall, the Connectivity Standards Alliance is releasing a 1.4.2 update designed to bridge the gap, making devices more secure and efficient. Improvements include support for Wi-Fi-only commissioning. Using Wi-Fi Unsynchronized Service Discovery (USD), the protocol bypasses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios in onboarding devices to Matter over Wi-Fi, providing a path to more affordable devices. A host of security upgrades includes cryptographic Vendor ID (VID), ensuring that the admins installed on a device are authentic. Continue reading Matter Releases an Update as a Next Step Toward Version 15

Software development platform Hugging Face is taking orders on Reachy Mini, a table-top robot that lets people use the latest AI models to develop, test, deploy, and share real-world AI applications from their desk. The tiny test subject is 11 inches at work and nine inches in sleep mode. Due to begin shipping later this summer, Reachy Mini comes in two configurations: a $299 Lite version that must be tethered to a computer running Mac or Linux OS (Windows coming soon) and a wireless $449 model that has a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer built-in. Continue reading Hugging Face Opens Preorders on New ‘Reachy Mini’ Robots

Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers will soon have as many robots as human employees reading destination labels, packing orders and loading conveyor belts. Amazon serves 310 million customers worldwide, using various robot configurations to aid 1.56 million employees to process and deliver inventory and handle other businesses. Now the company has delivered its one millionth robot, to a facility in Japan. With artificial intelligence making a beeline toward white-collar work and warehouse robots poised to elbow aside manual laborers, global economics could shift on the practices of this company alone. Continue reading Amazon Deploys Millionth Factory Robot, Workforce Shrinks

Google DeepMind has released a new vision-language-action (VLA) model, Gemini Robotics On-Device, that can operate robots locally, controlling their movements without requiring an Internet connection or the cloud. Google says the software provides “general-purpose dexterity and fast task adaptation,” building on the March release of the first Gemini Robotics VLA model, which brought “Gemini 2.0’s multimodal reasoning and real-world understanding into the physical world.” Since the model operates independent of a data network, it’s useful for latency sensitive applications as well as low or no connectivity environments. Google is also releasing a Gemini Robotics SDK for developers. Continue reading Google Gemini Robotics On-Device Controls Robots Locally

Chinese smartphone giant Vivo is entering the XR headset market with a device called the Vivo Vision that is drawing comparisons to Apple’s Vision Pro in name and looks. The headset debut coincides with the announcement of the Vivo Robotics Lab, signaling a strategic expansion beyond mobile phones. Vivo EVP and COO Hu Baishan said that AI and robotics currently represent the height of technological achievement in the digital and physical worlds, and that the mobile phone industry, with its massive consumer base and advanced infrastructure is well-positioned to bridge the two worlds, “blending digital connectivity with physical capabilities.” Continue reading Smartphone Maker Vivo Intros Vision XR and Robotics Group

Nvidia is hoping interest in artificial intelligence will translate to consumer sales of a relatively low-priced computer optimized for basic AI functionality. Last month, the company upgraded its Jetson line with a $249 “compact AI supercomputer,” the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. At half the price of the original, the model aims to attract students, developers, hobbyists, small- and medium-sized businesses, and anyone who is AI curious. “As the AI world is moving from task-specific models into foundation models, it provides an accessible platform to transform ideas into reality,” according to Nvidia. Continue reading Nvidia Targets Consumers with $249 Compact Supercomputer

CES has regularly featured robots over the years, but we’ve never really seen anything pivotal. CES 2025 marked a change in this area. “The ChatGPT moment for robotics is just around the corner,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his keynote, and we couldn’t agree more. And while attention was focused on LLMs, the field of industrial robotics has been unleashed like never before. According to World Robotics 2024, the International Federation of Robotics’ recent report, 4.3 million units were deployed in factories worldwide as of Q3 2024, a number that’s increasing at a clip of half a million units per year. This is double from 7 years ago, and the trend is accelerating. Continue reading CES: Is the ChatGPT Moment for Robotics Around the Corner?

The Eureka Park section at CES 2025 in Las Vegas is an exhibition area dedicated to thousands of startups and early-stage products from across the globe. Our reporting team visited the space organized specifically for Japanese startups and discovered a few that are developing innovative technologies that could potentially be applied to 3D computer graphics modeling, XR, and gaming. Among the standouts were Tokyo-based CalTa that developed the digital twin platform Trancity — and Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo’s exhibit of its ongoing Feel Tech system. Continue reading CES: Japanese Startups Showcase 3D Modeling, XR, Gaming

At CES 2025’s opening session on Tech Trends, futurist Brian Comiskey, the Consumer Technology Association’s senior director of innovation and trends, forecasted record retail revenues of $537 billion in 2025, representing a growth in hardware, software and services. He also enumerated the growth of AI as a continuing trend. Fueling this record growth is the dominance of Gen Z, which he dubbed “the first true digital natives.” Comiskey noted, however, that the incoming government proposal to establish tariffs threaten U.S. purchasing power for technology products. Continue reading CES: CTA Futurist Predicts the Impact of Latest Tech Trends

CES Unveiled 2025 offered a preview of new technologies two days ahead of the official opening of the massive CES show floor in Las Vegas on January 7. From AI-powered tools and robotics to energy-saving innovations and immersive displays, the event showcased a spectrum of advancements. Among the more notable highlights included cognitive AI demonstrated by Neural Lab, the latest brain-computer interface tech from Naqi Logix, AR and smart glasses developed by companies such as Rokid and Mustard, and a variety of interesting video- and audio-related offerings to be showcased at CES. Continue reading CES Unveiled: Preview of Tech to Be Featured at Trade Show

World Labs, the AI startup co-founded by Stanford AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has debuted a “spatial intelligence” system that can generate 3D worlds from a single image. Although the output is not photorealistic, the tech could be a breakthrough for animation companies and video game developers. Deploying what it calls Large World Models (LWMs), World Labs is focused on transforming 2D images into turnkey 3D environments with which users can interact. Observers say that reciprocity is what sets World Labs’ technology apart from offerings by other AI companies that transform 2D to 3D. Continue reading World Labs AI Lets Users Create 3D Worlds from Single Photo

Nvidia sales were up 94 percent to $35 billion in the most recent quarter when profits more than doubled, to $19.3 billion, telegraphing the strength of the artificial intelligence boom that took the company from the top supplier of graphics boards for gaming PCs to the world’s most valuable public company with a market cap of $3.59 trillion. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told analysts that demand for the company’s latest AI chip, Blackwell, has been “incredible,” driving projections of $3.59 trillion in revenue for the current quarter as customers begin to take shipments. Continue reading AI Boom Boosts Nvidia Sales by 94 Percent as Profits Double

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up what it thinks is a better way to teach robots general purpose skills. Derived from LLM techniques, the method provides robot intelligence access to an enormous amount of data at once, rather than exposing it to individual programs for specific tasks. Faster and more cost efficient, the approach has been referred to as a “brute force” approach to problem-solving, and machine learners have taken to it in lieu of individualized, task-specific “imitation learning.” Early tests show it outperforming traditional training by more than 20 percent under simulation and real-world conditions. Continue reading MIT Intros LLM-Inspired Teacher for General Purpose Robots