Daily Tech News 12 February 2026

• Why the economics of orbital AI datacenters are so brutal. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It doesn't make much sense unless you're both a major AI company and the world leader in orbital launch capacity, which narrows it down to slightly less than one company.
  
  Even for SpaceX it's not viable until Starship goes into volume production. So far, as the article notes, the rocket hasn't yet achieved orbital flight.
  
  The other major problem is the lifespan of the datacenters. If SpaceX uses cheap silicon solar panels, those will degrade fairly quickly in space. But the current economics of AI chips limits the useful lifetime of the hardware to a similar period to the solar panels - about five years.
  
  But then what? Drop entire datacenters into the ocean? Do the fish need that much compute capacity?
  
  
  
• Meanwhile SpaceX's SuperHeavy booster - used to launch Starship - has passed the latest round of testing with flying colours. (Ars Technica)
  
  The company may be ready for a test of its updated Starship V3 by the end of March.

• An overclocked 9800X3D performs exactly like a 9850X3D. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No surprise since the 9850X3D is an overclocked 9800X3D.
  
  
  
• The 9800X3D remains the best selling CPU at retail outlets. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is interesting, because it's not exactly cheap.
  
  Second-best seller is the five year old 5800X, which uses DDR4 memory. That's where system builders on a budget are spending their money.
  
  Intel is barely an afterthought in retail CPU sales.
  
  
  
• Intel's high-end Nova Lake chips are expected to be large and expensive. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 24-core (8P + 16E) chiplets with the large L3 cache are expected to measure 150mm2, about 50% larger than AMD's 12-core (all Performance cores) Zen 6 chiplets with the cache die included. And the top-of-the-line models will include two of those chiplets, manufactured on TSMC's 2nm and Intel's 1.8nm processes.
  
  Still, 48 cores (plus 4 low-power cores on the I/O chiplet) and 288MB of L3 cache is an awful lot for a desktop processor, even if 32 of the cores are efficiency models.
  
  With both these and AMD's 24-core Zen 6 CPUs set to show up later this year, it will be interesting to see how they compare, and if they can still deliver when attached to standard dual-channel DDR5 memory.
  
  
  
• Claud Code got dumbed down. (Symmetry Breaking)
  
  Not the AI service itself, but the interface.
  
  Previously it told users what files the AI was examining. Now that feature has been removed and you can only get a summary so devoid of detail as to be useless, or a stream-of-consciousness firehose so packed with detail as to be useless.
  
  The developers working on the tool at Anthropic appear to be actively fighting requests from an increasing number of users to simply change things back.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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