The Compute 100 — Friday July 10, 2026

Micron said July 9 it is raising its planned U.S. manufacturing and R&D commitment to more than $250B through 2035, up $50B from last year’s pledge. The company poured first concrete a quarter ahead of schedule at its Clay, New York DRAM megafab, which CEO Sanjay Mehrotra called the largest semiconductor manufacturing site in U.S. history in a post on X. A separate, same-day $3B commitment includes a $500M financing tie-up with GlobalWafers to onshore raw-silicon wafer supply for a Texas fab. The target is 40% of Micron’s global DRAM output made in America and more than 90,000 jobs. This is the second upsizing of the commitment in thirteen months, evidence Micron is treating U.S. DRAM capacity as structurally undersupplied by AI-driven demand rather than chasing a subsidy window — and it lands the same week SK Hynix priced a $28B Nasdaq listing to fund Korean capacity instead, a real divergence in how the memory oligopoly is financing the next leg of the buildout.

Private Companies

SpaceX filed with the FCC on July 9 for a “Gen-3” constellation of up to 100,000 satellites in lower orbits, using phased-array beamforming and optical inter-satellite links, with filing language citing AI compute demand directly: uplink capacity “necessary for real-time decision-making and industrial automation,” per Via Satellite. It extends the same vertically integrated push behind Musk’s acquisition of Mesh Optical, below — chips, optical interconnect, and now satellite backhaul.

The FTC cleared Elon Musk and SpaceX in late June to acquire Mesh Optical Technologies, a silicon-photonics maker building high-speed optical transceivers for AI data centers, Tom’s Hardware reported, framing interconnect as AI’s tightest bottleneck. Deal terms are undisclosed; Mesh’s last priced round was a $50M Series A in February, led by Thrive Capital. The reported rationale: SpaceX’s Colossus clusters and its compute-rental deal with Anthropic exposed network latency bottlenecks that Mesh’s Alpha C1 transceiver — 1.6T, roughly a third the power draw of rival parts — is built to fix. It is one more piece of Musk vertically integrating the AI compute stack, from xAI’s silicon through the optical layer to Starlink’s satellite backhaul.

FuriosaAI deployed its RNGD inference chips at Equinix’s Lisbon data center, its first production footprint in Europe, letting EU enterprises test the Korean challenger’s silicon without a Korea-based rollout, per The Register. It follows FuriosaAI’s deal with Samsung SDS to run Korea’s first NPU-as-a-Service offering, extending the same non-Nvidia inference pitch into a market where sovereign-AI preferences are pushing enterprises to look past Nvidia’s default channel.

Public Markets

Cerebras jumped after saying it will invest “billions of dollars” to build 200MW of European AI compute by the end of 2027, positioning itself as the alternative to Nvidia-backed infrastructure across a continent where Nvidia powers more than 90% of announced “AI factory” projects, per GlobeNewswire.

SK Hynix began trading on Nasdaq today, raising $28.2B in the largest-ever U.S. listing by a foreign company — its ADR opened above the $149 offering price and is trading near $173, the first hard market test of memory-sector valuations set by U.S. investors rather than Seoul.

Emerging

Munich’s QuantumDiamonds raised €91M — €15M in equity led by World Fund, plus €76M in non-dilutive EU Chips Act and German federal and Bavarian grants — becoming the first startup, rather than an established fab, to receive EU Chips Act manufacturing funding. Its nitrogen-vacancy diamond sensors map electrical activity buried inside 3D-stacked chip packages, a defect-inspection gap conventional optical and X-ray tools can’t reach, and the company says nine of the world’s ten largest chipmakers are already testing it. As 3D stacking becomes the default for AI silicon, buried-defect metrology is an underappreciated chokepoint one layer below the packaging story itself, and Brussels funding a startup rather than only a fab opens a new capital channel for European deep-tech.

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