Daily Tech News 18 January 2026

• Same: Elon Musk wants $134 billion in his OpenAI lawsuit. (Tech Crunch)

  The figure comes from expert witness C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist whose bio says he has been deposed nearly 100 times and testified at trial more than a dozen times in complex commercial litigation cases.

  I have acted as an expert witness once. You couldn't pay me enough to do it again... Though $134 billion would be tempting.

  Wazzan, who specializes in valuation and damages calculations in high-stakes disputes, determined that Musk is entitled to a hefty portion of OpenAI's current $500 billion valuation based on his $38 million seed donation when he co-founded the startup in 2015.

  Much of the article is devoted to ad-hominem attacks by the partisan lunatics at Tech Crunch, who think fraud is okay against people for whom they feel irrational hatred.
  
  
  
• Better be quick, Elon because an analysis of OpenAI's finances suggests they could run out of money as soon as 2027. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're wondering why the beancounters at the big memory manufacturers are being wary of rapid expansion in the face of unprecedented demand, well, it's because they are able to read a spreadsheet and they do not like what they see.
  
  
  

• Also because they are. Well, not Samsung but Micron has broken ground on its new $100 billion, 1.2 million square foot factory in upstate New York, which is expected to be in production by 2030. (The Register)
  
  They originally planned to start construction in 2024, but were delayed by bats.

  The megafab - which would displace 500 acres of woods and wetlands, as well as two endangered species of bats - is scheduled to begin producing DRAM chips by 2030.
  
  Micron said it will create 1,216 acres of off-site bat habitat including maternity roosts to mitigate the potential damage its fab will cause to the Indiana and northern long-eared bat populations, as well as 628 acres of land to offset impacts to the sedge wren, short-eared owl, and northern harrier bird populations.

  Part of the land the factory will be built on is swamp, so Micron has been obligated to build a new swamp to replace the old one.
  
  
  
• Hardware Unboxed reported that there were no Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti review cards to be had for a planned model roundup, that Asus told them the 5070 Ti was "end of life", and that Australian retailers reported that there was zero stock of any model at suppliers.
  
  Nvidia insisted this was all lies and slander and slanderous lies and every model of the RTX 5000 lineup was still in production.
  
  For the real story, let's check Newegg, since their site can easily be filtered to exclude second-hand and out-of-stock items and cards from strange marketplace sellers in Uzbekistan.
  
  Total 5090 models available at any price: Zero.
  5080 - one, at 80% over MSRP.
  5070 Ti - one, at 40% over MSRP.
  5070 - 8 models starting at close to MSRP.
  5060 Ti 16GB - I initially found none at all, but a second search dug out one card.
  5060 Ti 8GB - the model all the reviews told you not to buy is readily available starting at MSRP.
  5060 - 20+ models in stock starting at MSRP.
  5050 - 4 models in stock starting at MSRP.
  
  So if you're looking for a low-end card or for the mid-range 12GB 5070, you're in luck - they're in stock and selling for their listed prices. But the cards with 16GB or more VRAM are gone.
  
  On the AMD side things are a little better. The three 16GB cards - the 9060 XT, 9070, and 9070 XT - all show multiple models available, but all starting at 5% to 20% above MSRP, a problem that has persisted since they launched except for a few short weeks late last year.
  
  Advantage: Team Unboxed.
  
  
  
• Well, that's... Something. Intel's Bartlett Lake embedded processors will bring up to 12 P-cores (full-size performance cores) and no E (efficiency / low power cores) running at up to 5.9GHz to Socket FC-LGA16A for the embedded market. (WCCFTech)
  
  No Intel consumer CPU has ever had 12 P cores; the largest number ever was with the 10-core 10900 introduced in 2020, and subsequent to that the maximum has been 8.
  
  But, you point out, these are embedded CPUs, not consumer models.
  
  True. But Socket FC-LGA16A is better known as Socket 1700, the same one used by Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation desktop CPUs, and for which inexpensive motherboards supporting both DDR4 and DDR5 are readily available.
  
  Might be worth keeping an eye out for these.
  
  
  
• There are no cheap PCIe 4.0 switches to expand the number of lanes available in PC motherboards... Except motherboard chipsets like the AMD B650 which does exactly that so people are using it in unintended ways. (WCCFTech)
  
  I mentioned this before but this is a nice roundup with pictures of expansion cards using the B650 to provide four additional M.2 slots and four SATA ports in a half-height form factor.
  
  It's an open source project but it would be interesting to see someone pick it up and run with it.
  
  
  
• Rebuilding New York... In Minecraft. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A project born of the Wuflu lockdown and weaponised autism. It's legitimately impressive.
  
  
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, I played some more Hytale. Despite being in early access and its developers apologising for its unpolished state, it's a fun game - and it only costs $20.
  
  The best way to think of it is that it's not a pure Minecraft clone but a combination of the best features of Minecraft and older action RPGs like Torchlight. The world can be taken apart and rebuilt block-by-block - mostly - but it's faster-paced and more action-oriented than Minecraft, and has story elements that Minecraft is mostly lacking.
  
  
  
• In praise of tyranny: Nearly 5 million social media accounts have been shut down in Australia, and the New York Times thinks that's a good thing. (New York Times)
  
  What The Times largely avoids mentioning is that the teenagers affected immediately created new accounts and worked around the ban. Traffic from the sites to Australia has not been reduced at all since the ban went into effect.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM

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