Rocket Lab bought a satellite company to go up against Starlink and Leo, Google capped Meta's use of Gemini AI for coding and another reminder that you don't own digital content

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Rocket Lab bought a satellite company to go up against Starlink and Leo.
Google kept Meta's use of Gemini AI for coding, and yet another reminder that you do not own digital content. It's Monday, June 29th, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in and around tech this morning from Engadget.
These days, it's not enough to own a company that sends things up into space. You also need to own the things you're sending up. Rocket Lab, one of the smaller names in the private spaceflight sector, announced it's buying Iridium Communications in a deal worth $8 billion. In essence, it's an attempt to buy the capacity it needs to go toe-to-toe with SpaceX's ever-growing Starlink network. If all the regulatory hurdles are cleared, Rocket Lab will own Iridium's network of 80 satellites, which connect some of the most remote locations on Earth, as well as its wireless spectrum. If the name Iridium rings a distant bell, it's because it's the company Qualcomm partnered with to bring satellite texting to Android devices. Qualcomm dreamt up Snapdragon Satellite as an alternative to Apple's space-based emergency SOS feature. Sadly, the program was scuttled back in 2023 after phone manufacturers turned their noses up at the plan, and the only mainstream handsets with satellite connectivity are the Pixel 9 series. The growing adoption of Starlink and SpaceX's mad valuation have led plenty of its would-be rivals to buy in extra capacity.
Back in April, Amazon announced a merger between its Leo satellite internet service and GlobalStar, which provides the satellite backbone for Apple's emergency SOS service. In a statement, Rocket Lab said the deal would give it an immediate foothold in various space-based markets. That includes direct device communications and Internet of Things networks, as well as global positioning, navigation and timing services for major infrastructure providers. Rocket Lab will also likely see benefits for the various military satellite contracts it services. And while Iridium's network has not grown for a while due to its financial troubles, Rocket Lab is committing to build upon it to scale into untapped markets and pioneer new space-based services to the benefit of global customers.
Google was forced to cap Meta's use of its Gemini AI model after Mark Zuckerberg's company exceeded its computing capacity. That's according to sources familiar with the matter, as they told the Financial Times. The incident reveals that even tech giants with their own LLMs are having trouble finding enough computing power for themselves, let alone their customers. Meta does not operate its own cloud business and is trying to rapidly expand its own data center buildout, having pledged $600 billion in cloud computing investments over the next two years. Google reportedly warned the social media company about its capacity limits back in March, in turn forcing Meta to request that employees use tokens more efficiently. Gemini AI is being used by Meta for customer service, advertiser, chatbots and coding, alongside processes like harmful content takedowns and scam detection. Meta initially chose Gemini for those things because it outperformed its own llama open-source models. The company also employs other models like Anthropix Cloud for similar purposes. Despite the billions spent so far on data centers, big companies are struggling to get enough capacity for their usage needs. Google itself recently agreed to pay SpaceX $920 million a month to use XAI's data centers due to the extra computing power required for Gemini Enterprise. AI power users are benefiting from the boom, but providers like OpenAI are not profiting yet since revenue earned from AI so far is a small percentage of the costs. Recently, token prices have surged, forcing some companies to back off on AI usage, including, it appears, the AI companies themselves.