• Link & Load
  • Posts
  • 🛰️ China’s orbital supercomputer | ⚡ Qualcomm & Nvidia’s server-chip alliance | 🚖 Uber rides India’s ONDC rails

🛰️ China’s orbital supercomputer | ⚡ Qualcomm & Nvidia’s server-chip alliance | 🚖 Uber rides India’s ONDC rails

Satellite AI ascends, silicon titans team up, and a rickshaw-ready commerce coup redraws the tech map.

Author

Sascha Thiele
May 19, 2025

In partnership with

🔥 Warm-Up

Welcome back, you pixel-powered powerhouse — let’s plug in.

• China just put a supercomputer in orbit because “the cloud” is so 2024.
• Qualcomm wants back into the data-center game and it’s calling Nvidia for backup.
• Uber’s latest ride? India’s government-run commerce rails.
• Alabama discovered its state servers had an uninvited guest — and it wasn’t sweet tea.
• Nvidia returned to Computex flashing shinier AI silicon than ever.

🖋 Editor’s Note

Mondays can feel like a standing desk without the anti-fatigue mat, but today’s lineup has enough wattage to keep your brain buzzing past lunch. From satellites with swagger to Southern servers on life support, the news reminds you that innovation and turbulence share the same gate at departure. Speaking of smooth takeoffs, a quick nod to our sponsor, artisan.co: they build AI-powered “digital teammates” that tackle the grunt work—think customer onboarding docs, repetitive ticket triage, or late-night slide decks—so the humans on your crew can tackle the fun stuff. So crack open the feed, let the bots handle the boring bits, and enjoy the dopamine drip of staying one headline ahead.

––Sascha Thiele

Automate Prospecting Local Businesses With Our AI BDR

Struggling to identify local prospects? Our AI BDR Ava taps into a database of 200M+ local Google businesses and does fully autonomous outreach—so you can focus on closing deals, not chasing leads.

Ava operates within the Artisan platform, which consolidates every tool you need for outbound:

  • 300M+ High-Quality B2B Prospects

  • Automated Lead Enrichment With 10+ Data Sources Included

  • Full Email Deliverability Management

  • Personalization Waterfall using LinkedIn, Twitter, Web Scraping & More

💰 The Finance Overview

Moody’s U.S. downgrade rattled risk markets overnight, pushing the 30-year Treasury above 5 % while S&P futures and the dollar both drooped. Asian shares followed suit after soft Chinese retail data, though Europe’s post-election calm cushioned losses. Safe-havens caught a bid — gold popped 1 % and Bitcoin briefly topped $106 K before whipsawing lower. Oil slid on fresh supply whispers, and traders are already side-eyeing Fed Chair Powell’s mid-week remarks for clues on whether June’s meeting will float a pivot or more patience. In short: volatility’s back — keep dry powder handy.

TL;DR: A brutal short squeeze catapulted BTC to a fresh $106 K high, liquidating $600 M in positions, before profit-takers yanked it back to $103 K. Traders blame macro jitters and thin liquidity.

Further read: https://cointelegraph.com/news/107k-fakeout-or-new-all-time-highs-5-things-bitcoin-this-week>

TL;DR: Ethereum’s co-founder wants lighter nodes that verify everything but store only what users care about, hoping to keep decentralization alive as gas limits grow.

Further read: https://crypto.news/vitalik-buterin-proposes-partial-stateless-nodes-to-ease-ethereum-full-node-burden/

TL;DR: Bukele’s treasury now boasts 6,181 BTC, up $137 M in a month, cementing the nation as crypto’s sovereign whale.

Further read: https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-continues-bitcoin-purchases-despite-imf-agreement

How do you like the Crypto News?

Let us know if you want more of this juicy crypto stuff.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

🚀 Today in Tech

TL;DR: A dozen “Star Compute” satellites packing 8-billion-parameter models are now whirring above us, the first slice of a 2,800-bird constellation targeting 1,000 POPS. Laser links move data at 100 Gbps, and the Sun foots the energy bill.

Further read: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/19/asia_tech_news_roundup/
Deep dive: https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-center-on-the-moon

TL;DR: After a seven-year hiatus, Qualcomm will build Arm-based server chips with baked-in NVLink to cozy up to Nvidia GPUs, taking aim at Intel and AMD with promises of lower power and Saudi-backed customers.

Further read: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/19/qualcomm_datacenter_products/

TL;DR: Uber will plug into ONDC to haul goods between Indian businesses and may add metro tickets next. Why did the package call an Uber? It couldn’t handle being boxed in.

Further read: https://www.reuters.com/technology/uber-explores-metro-bus-bookings-partnership-with-indias-ondc-source-2024-02-22/

TL;DR: State officials admit credentials were compromised across multiple systems but say citizens’ data looks safe — for now. Forensics teams are scrubbing servers while agencies limp along offline.

Further read: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/personal-data-taken-uk-legal-aid-cyber-attack-govt-says-2025-05-19/

TL;DR: Jensen Huang rolled out “Lepton” software to create a GPU capacity marketplace and teased rack-scale systems with twice the memory bandwidth, all aimed at keeping rivals in the rear-view mirror.

Further read: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidia-software-aims-create-marketplace-ai-computing-power-2025-05-19/

✅ Ars Technica — What NASA’s moon plans look like without SLS

✅ Rest of World — Apple’s impossible break-up with China

✅ TechCrunch — Moonvalley raises $53 M to put generative video in your pocket

✅ The Guardian — AI agents learn to gossip like humans, study says

✅ Github — Of course there has to be an AI-lead hedge fund.

Got a killer link we missed? Hit reply and share the goods. 💌

What do you think about Link & Load?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

🏁 Sign-off

Stay curious, stay caffeinated, and we’ll link up tomorrow. ✨

Start your own newsletter and get a 30-day trial + 20% off for 3 months. Sign up here.

Reply

or to participate.