Skyroot Aerospace, India's first space-tech unicorn, launched its Vikram-1 rocket from ISRO's Sriharikota facility at 12:05pm IST on Saturday. The seven-storey rocket travelled 280 miles to reach Low Earth Orbit in a 16-minute flight, carrying six payloads including a robotic arm for space-debris removal, an Earth observation camera, and satellites from Indian and German operators.
Founders Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, both former ISRO engineers, built the company on a simple pitch: satellite launches should work like booking a cab, not waiting for a train. Instead of sharing a ride on a fixed-schedule rocket, customers book a dedicated mission tailored to their satellite's orbit — the same model Rocket Lab uses in the US.
India opened its space sector to private firms in 2020, targeting a jump from 2% to 10% of the global space market by 2030. Skyroot says it can build one rocket a month at its Hyderabad factory, with commercial launches targeted for next year and roughly 70–80% of demand expected from the global market.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on Thursday, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model roughly 75% larger than DeepSeek's V4 Pro. It introduces two new architectural tricks — Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals — and ships with a 1-million-token context window and native visual understanding.
Moonshot says K3 performs competitively with Claude Fable 5 and clearly outperforms Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol on coding and agent tasks, though it still trails the top two overall. Full weights land July 27; API pricing is set at $3/$15 per million tokens.
Microsoft is preparing to launch Project Perception, an AI-powered security platform that uses a "model router" to send each vulnerability-scanning task to whichever model handles it best. The tool is the brainchild of Hayete Gallot, Microsoft's security chief, who has been steering the division toward AI-native products.
Its pitch is cost: Anthropic's Mythos-class models are estimated to run far more expensively than Opus or GPT-class systems. Microsoft hasn't finalized pricing, but positions Perception as bringing similar bug-hunting power to businesses that can't justify Mythos-level spend.
TSMC posted Q2 2026 revenue of $40.2 billion, up 36% year-over-year, with net profit surging 77.4% to a record NT$706.6 billion — its ninth straight quarter of double-digit profit growth. High-performance computing, the segment anchored by AI accelerators, now makes up 66% of total wafer revenue, up from a smartphone-led mix just a few years ago.
CEO C.C. Wei raised 2026 capex guidance to $60–64 billion and committed another $100 billion to Arizona, lifting total US investment to $265 billion. Chips at 7nm or below — the nodes AI accelerators depend on — accounted for 77% of wafer revenue this quarter.
Twenty-nine countries — including Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and Kazakhstan — signed the founding agreement for the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) on the eve of Shanghai's World AI Conference. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi signed for Beijing; the body will be headquartered in Shanghai.
WAICO frames itself around UN Charter principles and a "people-centered" approach to safe, fair AI development. No major US tech firm sent representatives, underscoring a widening split between Washington-aligned and Beijing-aligned approaches to AI governance.