Commonwealth Fusion Systems closed on its latest $84 million in new funding two weeks ago. The U.S. was still very much in the lockdown phase and getting a deal done, especially a multi-million dollar investment in a new technology aiming to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality after decades of hype, was “an interesting thing” in the words of Commonwealth’s chief executive, Bob Mumgaard. 

It was actually one time when the technical complexity of what Commonwealth Fusion is trying to achieve and the longterm horizon for the company’s first test technology was a benefit instead of an obstacle, Mumgaard said. 

“We’re in a unique position where it’s still something that’s far enough in the future that any of the recovery models are not going to affect the underlying needs that the world still has a giant climate problem,” he said. 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems purports to be one solution to that problem. The company is using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to leapfrog the current generation of nuclear fusion reactors currently under development (there are, in fact, several nuclear fusion reactors currently under development) and bring a waste-free energy source to industrial customers within the next ten years.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems core innovation was the development of a high power superconducting magnet that could theoretically be used to create the conditions necessary for a sustained fusion reaction. The reactor uses hydrogen isotopes that are kept under conditions of extreme pressure using these superconducting magnets to sustain the reaction and contain the energy that’s generated from the reaction. Designs for reactors require their hydrogen fuel source to be heated to tens of millions of degrees.

The design that Commonwealth is pursuing is akin to the massive, multi-decade International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project that’s currently being completed in France. Begun under the Reagan Administration in the eighties, as a collaboration between the U.S., the Soviet Union, various European nations and Japan. Over the years, membership in the project expanded to include India, South Korea, and China.

While the ITER project also expects to flip the switch on its reactor in 2025, the cost has been dramatically higher — totaling well over $14 billion dollars. The project, which began construction in 2013, will also represent a much longer timeframe to completion compared with the schedule that Commonwealth has set for itself.

Picture taken on January 17, 2013 in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, southern France shows the model of the reactor of the future International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) . The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), based at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) research center of Cadarache in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, was set up by the EU, which has a 45 percent share, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the US to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves. AFP PHOTO / GERARD JULIEN (Photo credit should read GERARD JULIEN/AFP via Getty Images)

“We have set off to build what has been our big goal all along, which is to build the full scale demonstration magnet… we’re in the act of building that,” said Mumgaard. “We’ll turn that on next year.”

Upon completion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems will have built a ten-ton magnet that has the magnetic force equivalent to twenty MRI machines, said Mumgaard. “After we get the magnet to work, we’ll be building a machine that will generate more power than it takes to run. We see that as the Kitty Hawk moment,” for fusion, he said.

Other startup companies are also racing to bring technologies to market and hit the 2025 timeline. They include the Canadian company General Fusion and the United Kingdom’s Tokamak Energy.

Within the next six to eight months, Commonwealth Energy hopes to have a site selected for its first demonstration reactor.

Financing the company’s most recent developments are a slew of investors new and old who have committed over $200 million to the company, which formally launched in 2018.

The round was led by Temasek with participation from new investors Equinor, a multinational energy company, and Devonshire Investors, the private equity group affiliated with FMR LLC, the parent company of Fidelity Investments.

Current investors including the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures; MIT’s affiliated investment fund, The Engine; the Italian energy firm ENI Next LLC; and venture investors like Future Ventures, Khosla Ventures; Moore Strategic Ventures, Safar Partners LLC, Schooner Capital, and Starlight Ventures also participated. 

“We are investing in fusion and CFS because we believe in the technology and the company, and we remain committed to providing energy to the world, now and in a low carbon future,” said Sophie Hildebrand, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President for Research and Technology at Equinor, in a statement.

The company said it would use the new financing to continue developing its technology which would offer fusion power plants, fusion engineering services, and HTS magnets to customers. Funding will also be used to support business development initiatives for other applications of the company’s proprietary HTS magnets, the key component to its SPARC reactor, which also has various other commercial uses, the company said. 

Helping the cause, and potentially accelerating the timelines for many fusion players is a new initiative from the federal government that could see government dollars go to support construction of new facilities. The Department of Energy recently released a request for information (RFI) on potential cost share programs for the development of nuclear fusion reactors in the U.S.

Modeled after the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program which brought the world SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other U.S. private space companies, a cost-sharing program for fusion development could accelerate the development of low-cost, pollution free fusion reactors across the U.S.

“The COTS program transitioned the space industry from ‘Here’s a government dictated space sector’ to a vibrant commercial launch industry,” said Mumgaard.

One investor who’s seen the value of public private partnerships to spur commercial innovation is Steve Jurvetson, the founder of Future Ventures, and a backer of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Jurvetson acknowledged the necessity of fusion investment for the future of the energy industry.

“Fusion energy is an investment in our future that offers an important path toward combating climate change. Our continued investment in CFS fits strongly within our mission as we seek long-term solutions to address the world’s energy challenges,” said Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director and Founder, Future Ventures.

China’s space program will launch a Mars mission in July, according to its current plans. This will include deploying an orbital probe to study the red planet, and a robotic, remotely-controlled rover for surface exploration. The U.S. has also been planning another robotic rover mission for Mars, and it’s set to take off this summer, too – peak time for an optimal transit from Earth to Mars thanks to their relative orbits around the Sun.

This will be the first rover mission to Mars for China’s space program, and is one of the many ways that it’s aiming to better compete with NASA’s space exploration efforts. NASA has flown four previous Mars rover missions, and its fifth, with an updated rover called ‘Perseverance,’ is set to take place this years with a goal of making a rendezvous with Mars sometime in February 2021.

NASA’s mission also includes an ambitious rock sample return plan, which will include the first powered spacecraft launch from the red planet to bring that back. The U.S. space agency is also sending the first atmospheric aerial vehicle to Mars on this mission, a helicopter drone that will be used for short flights to collect additional data from above the planet’s surface.

China has a number of plans to expand its space exploration efforts, including development and launch of an orbital research platform, its own space station above Earth, by 2022. The nation’s space program also recently test-launched a new crew spacecraft, which will eventually be used in its mission to land Chinese astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

Meanwhile, NASA has issued a new set of draft rules that it is proposing for continued international cooperation in space, particularly as they related to reaching the Moon and setting up a more permanent human presence on Earth’s natural satellite. The agency is also hoping to return human space launch capabilities to the U.S. this week with a first demonstration launch of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on Wednesday.

China’s space program will launch a Mars mission in July, according to its current plans. This will include deploying an orbital probe to study the red planet, and a robotic, remotely-controlled rover for surface exploration. The U.S. has also been planning another robotic rover mission for Mars, and it’s set to take off this summer, too – peak time for an optimal transit from Earth to Mars thanks to their relative orbits around the Sun.

This will be the first rover mission to Mars for China’s space program, and is one of the many ways that it’s aiming to better compete with NASA’s space exploration efforts. NASA has flown four previous Mars rover missions, and its fifth, with an updated rover called ‘Perseverance,’ is set to take place this years with a goal of making a rendezvous with Mars sometime in February 2021.

NASA’s mission also includes an ambitious rock sample return plan, which will include the first powered spacecraft launch from the red planet to bring that back. The U.S. space agency is also sending the first atmospheric aerial vehicle to Mars on this mission, a helicopter drone that will be used for short flights to collect additional data from above the planet’s surface.

China has a number of plans to expand its space exploration efforts, including development and launch of an orbital research platform, its own space station above Earth, by 2022. The nation’s space program also recently test-launched a new crew spacecraft, which will eventually be used in its mission to land Chinese astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

Meanwhile, NASA has issued a new set of draft rules that it is proposing for continued international cooperation in space, particularly as they related to reaching the Moon and setting up a more permanent human presence on Earth’s natural satellite. The agency is also hoping to return human space launch capabilities to the U.S. this week with a first demonstration launch of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on Wednesday.

Conservative members of the United Kingdom’s government have pushed Prime Minister Boris Johnson to draw up plans to remove telecom equipment made by the Chinese manufacturer Huawei from the nation’s 5G networks by 2023, according to multiple reports.

The decision by Johnson, who wanted Huawei’s market share in the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure capped at 35 percent, brings the UK back into alignment with the position Australia and the United States have taken on Huawei’s involvement in national communications networks, according to both The Guardian and The Telegraph.

The debate over Huawei’s role in international networking stems from the company’s close ties to the Chinese government and the attendant fears that relying on Huawei telecom equipment could expose the allied nations to potential cybersecurity threats and weaken national security.

Originally, the UK had intended to allow Huawei to maintain a foothold in the nation’s telecom infrastructure in a plan that had received the approval of Britain’s intelligence agencies in January.

“This is very good news and I hope and believe it will be the start of a complete and thorough review of our dangerous dependency on China,” conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith told The Guardian when informed of the Prime Minister’s reversal.

As TechCrunch had previously reported, the Australian government and the U.S. both have significant concerns about Huawei’s ability to act independently of the interests of the Chinese national government.

“The fundamental issue is one of trust between nations in cyberspace,” wrote Simeon Gilding, until recently the head of the Australian Signals Directorate’s signals intelligence and offensive cyber missions. “It’s simply not reasonable to expect that Huawei would refuse a direction from the Chinese Communist Party.”

Given the current tensions between the U.S. and China, allies like the UK and Australia would be better served not exposing themselves to any risks from having the foreign telecommunications company’s technology in their networks, some security policy analysts have warned.

“It’s not hard to imagine a time when the U.S. and China end up in some sort of conflict,” Tom Uren of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) told TechCrunch. “If there was a shooting war, it is almost inevitable that the U.S. would ask Australia for assistance and then we’d be in this uncomfortable situation if we had Huawei in our networks that our critical telecommunications networks would literally be run by an adversary we were at war with.”

U.S. officials are bound to be delighted with the decision. They’ve been putting pressure on European countries for months to limit Huawei’s presence in their telecom networks.

“If countries choose to go the Huawei route it could well jeopardize all the information sharing and intelligence sharing we have been talking about, and that could undermine the alliance, or at least our relationship with that country,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told reporters on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, according to a report in The New York Times.

In recent months the U.S. government has stepped up its assault against the technology giant on multiple fronts. Earlier in May, the U.S. issued new restrictions on the use of American software and hardware in certain strategic semiconductor processes. The rules would affect all foundries using U.S. technologies, including those located abroad, some of which are Huawei’s key suppliers.

At a conference earlier this week, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping admitted that while the firm is able to design some semiconductor parts such as integrated circuits (IC), it remains “incapable of doing a lot of other things.”

“Survival is the keyword for us at present,” he said.

Huawei has challenged the ban, saying that it would damage the international technology ecosystem that has developed to manufacture the hardware that powers the entire industry.

“In the long run, [the U.S. ban] will damage the trust and collaboration within the global semiconductor industry which many industries depend on, increasing conflict and loss within these industries.”

Chinese stocks have seen the highest highs and the lowest lows in recent weeks. While the country suffered the first economic shocks of the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China’s aggressive containment strategy has allowed the country to reopen in recent weeks, sending stocks at least temporarily to multi-year highs.

Yet, those bold numbers aren’t always what they seem. Multiple scandals in recent weeks have raised serious questions about the state of Chinese accounting practices, and whether stock exchanges are doing enough to protect investors from fraud and scandal.

The most notable story the past few weeks has been the fall of Luckin Coffee, which announced that it may have overstated sales by hundreds of millions of dollars. The company has since fired its CEO and COO, and has declined in value on Nasdaq by nearly 91% from its mid-January peak. The company in a filing with the SEC said that it delayed releasing its financials due to COVID-19 (as well as, just maybe, the fraud investigation as well).

A quieter scandal has been a similar accounting irregularity at TAL Education Group, a China-based tutoring company also traded on Nasdaq. And then overnight, Muddy Waters, the same research firm that first brought potential fraud at Luckin Coffee to light, released a new report on GSX Techedu indicating potential fraud, accusations which were denied by the education company. In its report, Muddy Waters claims that almost 70% of GSX’s students are “bots” and the company is wildly overstating its financials.

Given all these controversies, it looks like Nasdaq is ready to shore up its standards and protect its market for investors.

In new filings with the SEC, Nasdaq proposed amending its ruled to allow for tighter listing standards for companies based in a jurisdiction “that has secrecy laws, blocking statutes, national security laws, or other laws or regulations restricting access to information by regulators of U.S. listed companies.” While the rules would apply equally to all countries with information restrictions, context clearly points at China as being the biggest target. The new rules would require greater financial minimums and accountability standards to qualify for listing.

In addition, Reuters reported overnight that Nasdaq has sent notice to Luckin Coffee that it intends to delist the company’s ADR shares from the exchange. A press contact for Nasdaq did not respond to requests for comment on the news.

Tightening the rules on Nasdaq is ultimately a positive, since strong and transparent markets ultimately encourages more investors to place their money behind companies.

That wasn’t the only positive news for Chinese tech stocks though. The Hang Seng Index, which is the most important barometer in Hong Kong’s finance world, will consider adding companies with dual-class voting structures as well as equities that are located in markets outside of Hong Kong. While there is always grumbling among some investors at these corporate governance structures, American exchanges have mostly acceded to these models in recent years, and many tech IPOs have dual-class voting structures today.

Opening the Hang Seng Index to more locations is and remains complicated. For instance, Alibaba is traded on Nasdaq, but conducted another IPO late last year in Hong Kong that became the largest IPO of 2019, out-fundraising Uber with a haul of $11.2 billion. For some tech companies with global interests, tapping multiple global equities markets is key to gaining access to the most liquidity and market depth possible.

The addition of non-Hong Kong stocks to Hong Kong’s most important stock index in some ways mirrors the inclusion of Chinese stocks in MSCI’s popular emerging markets ETFs in mid-2018. Even as the world puts up more financial borders, companies and their stocks are increasingly global, and indices are following right along with them.

Better accountability and more access makes it a pretty good news day for Chinese stocks. Plus, Luckin Coffee announced last week that it is introducing new lifestyle products, so that might solve the whole damn thing over there quickly, no?

A livestreamed “debate” yesterday between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a European commissioner shaping digital policy for the internal market, Thierry Breton, sounded cordial enough on the surface, with Breton making several chummy references to “Mark” — and talking about “having dialogue to establish the right governance” for digital platforms — while Zuckerberg kept it respectful sounding by indirectly addressing “the commissioner”.

But the underlying message from Europe to Facebook remained steely: Comply with our rules or expect regulation to make that happen.

If Facebook chooses to invest in ‘smart’ workarounds — whether for ‘creatively’ shrinking its regional tax bill or circumventing democratic values and processes — the company should expect lawmakers to respond in kind, Breton told Zuckerberg.

“In Europe we have [clear and strong] values. They are clear. And if you understand extremely well the set of our values on which we are building our continent, year after year, you understand how you need to behave,” said the commissioner. “And I think that when you are running a systemic platform it’s extremely important to understand these values so that we will be able to anticipate — and even better — to work together with us, to build, year after year, the new governance.

“We will not do this overnight. We will have to build it year after year. But I think it’s extremely important to anticipate what could create some “bad reaction” which will force us to regulate.”

“Let’s think about taxes,” Breton added. “I have been a CEO myself and I always talk to my team, don’t try to be too smart. Pay taxes where you have to pay taxes. Don’t got to a haven. Pay taxes. Don’t be too smart with taxes. It’s an important issue for countries where you operate — so don’t be too smart.

“‘Don’t be too smart’ it may be something that we need to learn in the days to come.”

Work with us, not against us

The core message that platforms need to fit in with European rules, not vice versa, is one Breton has been sounding ever since taking up a senior post in the Commission late last year.

Although yesterday he was careful to throw his customary bone alongside it too, saying he doesn’t want to have to regulate; his preference remains for cooperation and ‘partnership’ between platforms and regulators in service of citizens — unless of course he has no other choice. So the message from Brussels to big tech remains: ‘Do what we ask or we’ll make laws you can’t ignore’.

This Commission, of which Breton is a part, took up its five-year mandate at the end of last year — and has unveiled several pieces of a major digital policy reform plan this year, including around sharing industrial data for business and research; and proposing rules for certain ‘high risk’ AI applications.

But a major rethink of platform liabilities remains in the works. Though yesterday Breton declined to give any fresh details on the forthcoming legislation, saying only that it would arrive by the end of the year.

The Digital Services Act could have serious ramifications for Facebook’s business which explains why Zuckerberg made time to dial into a video chat with the Brussels lawmaker. Something the Facebook CEO has consistently refused the British parliament — and denied multiple international parliaments when parliamentarians joined forced to try to question him about political disinformation.

The hour-long online discussion between the tech giant CEO and a Brussels lawmaker intimately involved in shaping the future of regional platform regulation was organized by Cerre, a Brussels-based think tank which is focused on the regulation of network and digital industries.

It was moderated by Cerre, with DG Bruno Liebhaberg posing and choosing the questions, with a couple selected from audience submissions.

Zuckerberg had brought his usual laundry list of talking points whenever regulation that might limit the scope and scale of his global empire is discussed — seeking, for example, to frame the only available options vis-a-vis digital rules as a choice between the US way or China.

That’s a framing that does not go down well in Europe, however.

The Commission has long talked up the idea of championing a third, uniquely European way for tech regulation — saying it will put guardrails on digital platforms in order to ensure they operate in service of European values and so that citizens’ rights and freedoms are not only not eroded by technology but actively supported. Hence its talk of ‘trustworthy AI’.

(That’s the Commission rhetoric at least; however its first draft for regulating AI was far lighter touch than rights advocates had hoped, with a narrow focus on so-called ‘high risk’ applications of AI — glossing over the full spectrum of rights risks which automation can engender.)

Zuckerberg’s simplistic dichotomy of ‘my way or the China highway’ seems unlikely to win him friends or influence among European lawmakers. It implies he simply hasn’t noticed — or is actively ignoring — regional ambitions to champion a digital regulation standard of its own. Neither of which will impress in Brussels.

The Facebook CEO also sought to leverage the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — claiming the episode is an example of the risks should dominant platforms be required to share data with rivals, such as if regulation bakes in portability requirements to try to level the competitive playing field.

It was too much openness in the past that led to Facebook users’ data being nefariously harvested by the app developer that was working for Cambridge Analytica, was his claim.

That claim is also unlikely to go down well in Europe where Zuckerberg faced hostile questions from EU parliamentarians back in 2018, after the scandal broke — including calls for European citizens to be compensated for misuse of their Facebook data.

Facebook’s business, meanwhile, remains subject to multiple, ongoing investigations related to its handling of EU citizens’ personal data. Yet Zuckerberg’s only mention of Europe’s GDPR during the conversation was a claim of “compliance” with the pan-EU data protection framework which he also suggested means it’s raised the standards it offers users elsewhere.

Another area where the Facebook CEO sought to muddy the water — and so lobby to narrow the scope of any future pan-EU platform regulations — was around which bits of data should be considered to belong to a particular user. And whether, therefore, the user should have the right to port them elsewhere.

“In general I’ve been very in favor of data portability and I think that having the right regulation to enforce this would be very helpful. In general I don’t think anyone is against the idea that you should be able to take your data from one service to another — I think all of the hard questions are in how you define what is your data and, especially in the context of social services, what is another person’s data?” he said.

He gave the example of friends birthdays — which Facebook can display to users — questioning whether a user should therefore be able to port that data into a calendar app.

“Do your friends need to now sign off and every single person agree that they’re okay with you exporting that data to your calendar because if that needs to happen because in practice it’s just going to be too difficult and no developer’s going to bother building that integration,” he suggested. “And it might be kind of annoying to request that from all of your friends. So where would we draw the line on what is your data and what is your friends is I think a very critical question here.

“This isn’t just an abstract thing. Our platform started off more open and on the side of data portability — and to be clear that’s exactly one of the reasons why we got into the issues around Cambridge Analytica that we got into because our platform used to work in the way where a person could more easily sign into an app and bring data that their friends had shared with them, under the idea that if their friend had shared something with you, for you to be able to see and use that, you should be able to use that in a different app.

“But obviously we’ve seen the downsides of that — which is that if you bring data that a friend has shared with you to another app and that app ends up being malicious then now a lot of people’s data can be used in a way they didn’t expect. So getting the nuance right on data portability I think is extremely important. And we have to recognize that there are direct trade-offs about openness and privacy. And if our directive is we want to lock everything down from a privacy perspective as much of possible then it won’t be as possible to have an open ecosystem as we want. And that’s going to mean making compromises on innovation and competition and academic research, and things like that.”

Regulation that helps industry “balance these two important values around openness and privacy”, as Zuckerberg put it, would thus be welcomed at 1 Hacker Way.

Breton followed this monologue by raising what he called “the stickiness” of data, and pointing out that “access to data is the number one asset for the platform economy”.

“It’s important in this platform economy but — but! — competition will come. And you will have some platforms allowing this portability probably faster than you think,” he said. “So I think it’s already important to anticipate at the end of the day what your customers are willing to have.”

“Portability will happen,” Breton added. “It’s not easy, it’s not an easy way to find an easy pass but… what we are talking about is how to frame this fourth dimension — the data space… We are still at the very beginning. It will take probably one generation. And it will take time. But let me tell you something but in terms of personal data, more and more the customers will understand and will requests that the personal data belongs to them. They will ask for portability one way or the other.”

On “misinformation”, which was the first topic Zuckerberg chose to highlight — referring to it as misinformation (rather than ‘disinformation’ or indeed ‘fakes’) — he had come prepared with a couple of stats to back up a claim that Facebook has “stepped up efforts” to fight fakes related to the coronavirus crisis.

“In general we’ve been able to really step up the efforts to fight misinformation. We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of harmful misinformation. And our independent fact-checking program has yielded more than 50M warnings being shown on pieces of content that are false related to COVID,” he said, claiming 95% of the time people are shown such labelled content “they don’t end up clicking through” — further suggesting “this is a really good collaboration”.

(Albeit, back of an envelop math says 5% of 50M is still 2.5 million clicks in just that one narrow example… )

Breton came in later in the conversation with another deflator, after he was asked whether the current EU code of practice on disinformation — a self-regulatory initiative which several tech platforms have signed up for — is “sufficient” governance.

“We will never do enough,” he rejoined. “Let’s be clear. In terms of disinformation we will never do enough, This is a disease of the center. So everything we have done has to be followed.”

“It’s a huge issue,” Breton went on, saying his preference as a former CEO is for KPIs that “demonstrate we’re progressing”. “So of course we need to follow the progress and if I’m not able to report [to other EU institutions and commissioners] with strong KPIs we will have to regulate — stronger.”

He added that platforms cooperating on self regulation in this area gave him reason to be optimistic that further progress could be made — but emphasized: “This issue is extremely important for our democracy. Extremely… So we will be extremely attentive.”

The commissioner also made a point of instructing Zuckerberg that the buck stops with him — as CEO — lightly dismissing the prospect of Facebook’s newly minted ‘oversight board‘ providing any camouflage at all on the decision-making front, after Zuckerberg had raised it earlier in the conversation.

“When you’re a CEO at the end of the day you are the only one to be responsible, no one else… You have an obligation to do your due diligence when you take decisions,” said Breton, after scattering a little polite praise for the oversight board as “a very good idea”.

“Understand what I’m trying to tell you — when you are the CEO of an important platform you have to deal with a lot of stakeholders. So it’s important of course that you have bodies, could be advisory bodies, could be a board of director, it could be any kind of things, to help you to understand what these stakeholders have to tell you because at the end of the day the mission of a CEO is to be able to listen to everyone and then to take the decision. But at the end of the day it will be Mark that will be responsible.”

In another direct instruction, Breton warned the Facebook CEO against playing “a gatekeeper role”.

“Be careful to help our internal market, don’t play a role where you will be a systemic player, the gatekeeper controlling others to play with. Be careful with the democracy. Anticipate what’s going to happen. Be careful with disinformation. It could have a bad impact on what is extremely important for us — including our values,” he said, appealing to Zuckerberg “to work together, to design together the right governance tools and behavior” — and ending with a Silicon Valley-style appeal to ‘build the future together’.

The inescapable point Breton was working towards was just “because something is not prohibited it doesn’t mean that it’s authorized”. So, in other words, platforms must learn to ask regulators for permission — and should not expect any forgiveness if they fail to do this. This principle is especially important for the digital market and the information society at large, Breton concluded.

A particular low point for Zuckerberg during the conversation came earlier, when Liebhaberg had asked for his assessment of the effectiveness of content moderation measures Facebook has taken so far — and specifically in terms of how swiftly it’s removing illegal and/or harmful content. (Related: Last week France became the latest EU country to pass a law requiring platforms quickly remove illegal content such as hate speech.)

Zuckerberg made a nod to his usual “free expression vs content moderation” talking point — before segwaying into a claim of progress on “increasingly proactive” content moderation via the use of artificial intelligence (“AI”) and what he referred to as “human systems”.

“Over the last few years… we’ve upgraded all of our content review systems to now… our primary goal at this point is what percent of the content that’s going to be harmful can our systems proactively identify and take down before anyone even sees that? Some of that is AI and some of that is human systems,” he said, referring to the up to 30,000 people Facebook pays to use their brain and eyes for content moderation as “human systems”.

“If a person has to see it and report it to us we’re not going to catch everything ourselves but in general if someone has to report it to us then that means that we should be doing a bit better in future. So there’s still a lot of innovation to happen here,” Zuckerberg went on, adding: “We’re getting a lot better at this. I think our systems are continually improving.”

His use of the plural of “systems” at this point suggests he was including human beings in his calculus.

Yet he made no mention of the mental health toll that the moderation work entails for the thousands of people Facebook’s business depends upon to pick up the circa 20% of hate speech be conceded its AI systems still cannot identify. (He did not offer any performance metrics for how (in)effective AI systems are at proactively identifying other types of content which human moderates are routinely exposed to so Facebook users don’t have to — such as images of rape, murder and violence.)

Just last week Facebook paid $52M to settle a lawsuit brought by 11,000 current and former content moderators who developed mental health issues including PTSD on the job.

The Verge reported that under the terms of the settlement, every moderator will receive $1,000 which can be spent how they like but which Facebook intends to partly fund medical treatment, such as for seeking a diagnosis related to any mental health issues a moderator may be suffering.

There has been a steady drumbeat of news on the U.S.-China trade front since the start of the Trump administration. President Trump has made decoupling from China’s economy on on-again, off-again proposition. There was the trade conflict with weekly changes in American tariff policy, the threats against ZTE and Huawei, the responses from China against Qualcomm and NXP, and the launch of new restrictions on China investment in U.S. startups and telecom infrastructure.

With COVID-19 and the ensuing global economic collapse, much of that conflict was put on the back burner. A tentative agreement between the U.S. and China — agreed to before the worst of the pandemic — seemed to get even broader support as the economic indicators from the globe’s two superpowers started to trickle out.

Then this week happened, and in almost no time at all, the U.S.-China trade detente has been torn apart.

Overnight, there were three critical stories that are going to reshape U.S.-China trade for the foreseeable future, with plenty more stories lurking beneath the surface.

First, you have the announcement this morning from the Department of Commerce that the Trump administration is going to ban Huawei from using U.S. software and hardware in certain strategic semiconductor processes, a move designed to limit the leading Chinese chip manufacturer from growing its market power and technological capabilities. Earlier yesterday, the administration also announced an extension to the government’s export ban on Huawei and ZTE.

The Trump administration has threatened moves like this since almost the president’s first day in office, and Commerce even couched the language, saying that it is “narrowly and strategically” targeting the Chinese company. Nonetheless, Huawei’s importance as one of China’s leading technology companies can’t be overstated, and the two moves combined is already being perceived as a direct assault on China’s recovering economy.

Second, you have a major announcement overnight from TSMC — the world’s largest chip foundry and one of the only foundries that can handle the manufacturing of the most advanced chips — that the Taiwanese company will invest and launch a major, $12 billion factory in Arizona. The release says that the factory will be capable of producing the world’s most advanced 5-nanometer chips when it launches in a couple of years. The announcement came after weeks of debate in Washington aimed at cutting off TSMC’s ability to build chips for mainland Chinese companies like Huawei — a move that TSMC argued would dramatically hurt its profitability and ability to invest in further R&D.

Third, you had the announcement this morning that Foxconn’s profits dived 90% due to COVID-19 and declining smartphone shipments. Foxconn, a Taiwanese hardware assembly company (among many other things), has been caught in the smoldering U.S.-China trade conflict, and even attempted at one point to build its own $10 billion manufacturing facility in Wisconsin with Trump’s felicity only to scuttle that plan entirely in an embarrassing setback.

Meanwhile, the trade deal that had calmed tensions between DC and Beijing appears increasingly in doubt.

And that’s just what happened overnight.

There are so many individual data points on U.S.-China trade that it can be hard to see the patterns. Policies have hardened, policies have softened, but at its core the U.S. and China have attempted to keep the trade flowing, if only to maintain growth in their economies. That’s what coupling has been all about: while there can be massive disagreements between the two sides, each has something the other wants. China wants to build and grow, while America wants to design and buy.

The past few months of COVID-19 have changed that calculus, as has an election year in the United States where wariness of China has hit record, bipartisan highs according to polls. The intense conflagration of the American economy, with tens of millions jobless and growth stalled for the time being, means that even more intense scrutiny is being placed on anything that might be harming the country’s financial math. We are now seeing the fruits of that new normal.

There will be more decoupling maneuvers in the coming weeks. There will also almost certainly be a renegotiation of the U.S.-China trade deal, despite comments that neither side is interested in reopening those discussions.

Yet, the real interesting dynamic to watch is going to be Taiwan, which is home to strategically critical sectors of the chip industry. TSMC’s announcement accepts the reality of decoupling, but attempts to work around it by recoupling the United States to the safety of Taiwan. Taiwanese companies and the island’s politicians have avoided ceding its technology to other countries, creating a dependence that they have hoped would protect the island in the event of a mainland Chinese invasion. After all, if the Pentagon can’t get its chips, it’s going to have to intervene, or so the thinking holds.

In this new world though, TSMC building an American factory doesn’t undermine that narrative, it actually strengthens the bonds between the U.S. and Taiwan. More jobs, more trade, more travel and ultimately, a deeper appreciation of the importance of each other. The question is how far the Trump administration is willing to go here. Taiwan is bidding to rejoin the World Health Organization, where it was an observer up to 2016. How deep are those ties? Will the U.S. go beyond its own diplomatic framework to intensely push for Taiwan’s reentry in spite of Chinese opposition?

That’s what is next, but what is clear today is that the world of semiconductors, of internet infrastructure, of the tech ties that have bound the U.S. and China together for decades — they are frayed and are almost gone. It’s a new era in supply chains and trade, and an open world for new approaches to these huge existing industries.

Ettitude, the Los Angeles-based, direct-to-consumer startup making sustainable bedding and sleepwear from bamboo fibers, has raised a sustainably sized round that should keep the company going even in the face of an economic recession.

Co-founded by the Melbourne, Australia native Phoebe Yu and serial entrepreneur Kat Dey, ettitude sells high-end bamboo bedding made using a process she first heard about in her old job working as an exporter helping chain stores source textiles in China.

Sourced from a factory in Zhejiang, China, near Shanghai, the bamboo textiles are made using non-toxic solvents and a closed-loop system that reuses water for the process, according to Yu.

Yu started selling the cleanBamboo-branded bedding under the etitude label in Melbourne first, but when she saw the orders begin to pick up from the U.S. she relocated and took her company with her.

Upon arrival, Yu realized that she’d need a strong co-founder with experience in branding to help her navigate the massive market in the U.S. So Yu turned to AngelList which is where she found Dey.

A serial entrepreneur with a background in retail, whose first company TryTheWorld was acquired by EarthBox in 2017, Dey was looking for her next project.

“Phoebe sent me a sample and i had the best night of sleep in my life,” Dey said. From then on in the two co-founders began the long, hard slog of marketing their business. 

Sales are growing, according to the two women, and the company’s chances have certainly been improved by the capital infusion from Drumbeat Ventures and TA Ventures, a European female-founded fund focusing on technology innovation.

The $1.6 million financing will be used to boost sales and marketing as the company expands beyond bedding — with an average price of $178 for a queen-sized sheet set — and into sleepwear and other categories.

“Phoebe, Kat and their brand, ettitude, are as genuine a combination of passion, purpose, and proprietary product that I’ve seen in the marketplace in my 20 years,” said Drumbeat Ventures founder, Adam Burgoon, in a statement. “They are perfectly positioned to bring their mission of sustainability and comfort to a broader audience.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been touting forthcoming battery technology improvements, going so far as to dub a forthcoming company talk “battery day” in prior public comments. Now Reuters is reporting that the automaker plans to unveil new advanced in battery technology it has developed that can produce power sources for its EVs which last for “millions of miles” and can be produced at low costs – allowing the automaker to sell cars at or below the market cost of equivalent gas-guzzling internal combustion cars.

This would be a watershed moment for Tesla, if true. Reuters reports that the development is the result of joint R&D work conduced with China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology, and that it is based on work done by a team of crack Tesla battery technology researchers coming from an academic background that were enlisted by Musk specifically to change the economics of electric power storage.

Battery capacity and production costs has long been a limiting factor in terms of the manufacturing costs of electric vehicles, and is one big reason why EVs carry a price premium when sold to customers. Ordinarily, automakers including Tesla point to lifetime fuel savings and tax incentives provided by local, state and federal governments as mitigating factors that mean the lifetime cost of an EV is equal to or less than that of a gas car, but if Tesla’s new battery tech can change the dynamics so that the price on the sticker is also lower than a gas vehicle, that would be a significant driver of broader EV adoption.

Tesla will first launch the new battery in China, Reuters says, beginning with the Model 3. It then plans to roll it out to other vehicles and markets, and ultimately produce batteries with new manufacturing processes that are meant to bring down labor costs while raising output volume, at so-called “terafactories” that would span up to 30 times the space of the current Tesla Gigafactories, including the one in Nevada.

The battery tech that Tesla is working on will include low-cobalt and cobalt-free versions of chemicals uses, as well as newly developed materials and internal coatings to reduce the stress upon the active components and prolong their useful life, per Reuters. Simultaneously, it’ll also introduce a new system developed by its partner Contemporary Amperex Technology that removes the step of having to bundle cells prior to their installation in final battery packs, which will bring down battery pack unit weight and costs. It’s also developing new recycling technologies for the components in tits batteries so that its vehicle power sources can eventually be used across its other energy products to extend their useful life.

The Minneapolis-based outdoor furniture brand Yardbird, which makes its wares in part from recycled plastic harvested from beaches and ocean-bound waterways, has raised $4.4 million in financing.

Even heading into the teeth of a pandemic, American consumers won’t be denied their sustainably manufactured patio furniture.

Yardbird, which closed the round in March, makes its furniture from recycled plastic that the company says is repurposed ocean plastic sourced from beaches, waterways and ocean-bound susceptible locations. The company said it incorporated over 75,000 pounds of this material into its furniture in 2020 alone — meaning roughly half of every piece of resin-based wicker furniture that the company makes contains that recycled material.

It’s not only the feedstock that makes the company green. The company said it offsets its entire carbon footprint — from commuting, product transportation, and warehouse, showroom and office electricity and heating — with a service called CarbonFund.

Since the coroanvirus outbreak hit in late March, the company has worked to change several aspects of its business, according to company co-founder Jay Dillon.

The digital nature of the business means that the company didn’t have much in the way of a physical footprint to shut down, but its emphasis on building a direct to consumer brand has meant increased investment in the company’s website.

“Our supply chain runs through China and in mid-February when the outbreak hit them the hardest, I was very concerned about supply concerns and was up all night talking with factories. At the time, we wanted to get as much product in-hand as possible to manage inventory, but now we are scaling that back because there are so many unknowns in the U.S. even though China is back on the grid,” wrote Dillon in an email.

The company moved to contactless delivery of its furniture in late March and has seen steady online sales for its outdoor furniture as consumers invest in sprucing up the only outdoor spaces they can access in some fases.

“We still believe in our model, and so do our investors—we have secured bank lines of credit to help us weather this storm but as of right now, we don’t know how long the storm will last,” Dillon wrote.

When it comes to corporate venture capital, semiconductor giant Intel has shaped up to be one of the most prolific and prescient investors in the tech world, with investments in 1,582 companies worldwide, and a tally of some 692 portfolio companies going public or otherwise exiting in the wake of Intel’s backing.

Today, the company announced its latest tranche of deals: $132 million invested in 11 startups. The deals speak to some of the company’s most strategic priorities currently and in the future, covering artificial intelligence, autonomous computing, and chip design.

Many corporate VCs have been clear in drawing a separation between their activities and that of their parents, and the same has held for Intel, but at the same time, the company has made a number of key moves that point to how it uses its VC muscle to expand its strategic relationships and also ultimately expand through M&A. Just earlier this month, it acquired Moovit, an Intel Capital portfolio company, for $900 million (a deal that was knocked down to $840 million when accounting for its previous investment).

“Intel Capital identifies and invests in disruptive startups that are working to improve the way we work and live. Each of our recent investments is pushing the boundaries in areas such as AI, data analytics, autonomous systems and semiconductor innovation. Intel Capital is excited to work with these companies as we jointly navigate the current world challenges and as we together drive sustainable, long-term growth,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement.

The tranche of deals come at a critical time in the worlds of startups and venture investing. Many are worried that the slowdown in the economy, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will mean a subsequent slowdown in tech finance. Intel says that it plans to invest between $300 million and $500 million in total this year, so this would go some way to refuting that idea, along with some of the other monster deals and big funds that we’ve written out in the last couple of months.

The list announced today doesn’t include specific investment numbers, but in some cases the startups have also announced the fundings themselves and given more detail on round sizes. These still, however, do not reveal Intel’s specific financial stakes.

Here’s the full list:

• Anodot uses machine learning for to monitor business operations autonomously, covering areas like app performance, customer incidents, and more. The idea is that using the platform to monitor for these incidents means detection and response time can be faster. The full $35 million round was announced back in April.

• Astera Labs is a fabless semiconductor startup focused on connectivity solutions for data-centric systems to remove performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads in areas like AI. It announced its Series B of an undisclosed amount two weeks ago, and prior to this it had raised just over $6 million according to PitchBook.

• Axonne develops next generation high-speed automotive Ethernet network connectivity solutions for connected cars: addressing the issue of merging legacy or proprietary systems with the demands of advanced next-generation applications. Intel invested as part of a $9 million round that actually closed in March.

• Hypersonix uses big-data analytics to determine and predict customer demand for e-commerce, retail and hospitality customers. One of its customers is Amazon — which uses Hypersonix’s platform in its supply chain division. That may come as a surprise, but according to Hypersonix’s CEO the e-commerce giant does not have dedicated analytics teams to serve every division in the company, so sometimes they do buy from third parties. The round was actually announced at the beginning of this month: an $11.5 million deal.

• KFBIO out of China is one of Intel’s biotechnology bets. The company has designed and built a digital pathology scanner, which aims to replace microscopes with its big data, cloud-based, and AI-powered insights. The obvious connection and interest here for Intel is on the processor side, but potentially brings Intel into a sphere where it can flex its muscle around a range of AI and cloud computing applications as well. The deal was closed at the beginning of April and totals around $14.2 million.

• Lilt has built an AI-powered language translation platform, not to compete with the likes of Google Translate for consumers, but to help those with international-facing websites and apps localise their services more efficiently. The company actually announced its round today: a $25 million Series B led by Intel.

• MemVerge focuses on “in-memory” computing, an architecture that makes it easier to deploy heavy, data-centric applications. It closed its round of $24.5 million at the beginning of April, and while it’s always worked with Intel processors, Intel’s investment was not public until today.

• ProPlus Electronics, also out of China, is an electronic design automation (“EDA”) startup that speeds up chip design and fabrication for semiconductor companies manufacturing a variety of chips at scale. It closed its round also at the beginning of April. The exact amount was undisclosed except to note that it was in the “hundreds of millions of Chinese Yuan” (or tens of millions of US dollars).

• Retrace is an under-the-radar dental data startup that uses AI to improve “dental decision making,” but according to its site seems also to focus on other healthcare areas. It’s not clear how big the round is or when it closed.

• Spectrum Materials out of China is another stealthy company that supplies gas and other materials to semiconductor makers.

• Xsight Labs based in Israel is building chipset designs to accelerate data-intensive workloads that you typically get with AI and analytical applications. Israel has a huge R&D centre in Israel focused on autonomous driving, one of the applications that’s going to demand a lot in processing power, so this looks like a clearly strategic bet. The company raised $25 million in February, but Intel was not disclosed in that round previously.

Arch Rao closed the $10.1 million financing round for Span, his company pitching homeowners on an upgrade to the fuse box, in the middle of February.

The company had already seen what was happening in China and had a sense of how tough things could be, but was undeterred by the bad news and its potential implications for fundraising or its business.

“I don’t think that the COVID situation was particularly negative,” for the Span business, said Rao. Indeed, Rao said things are already beginning to recover. “With the shelter in place being partially lifted [and] with solar and storage installation having been deemed essential… the large installers like SunRun saw their online sales had increased,” Rao said. “The limitation of this pandemic has been a shift of about a quarter for our upward slope to take effect.”

The forced downtime actually helped the company, said Rao, which worked on new product development and readied itself for what could be a busy season of sales. The pressures that are pushing customers to adopt solar and energy storage technologies — especially in states like California — haven’t gone away.

The state looks prepped for another bad season of wildfires and the stress of power outages and rolling blackouts could again drive owners to invest in off-grid power generation and storage, he said.

But Rao sees Span as far more than just a smart fuse box. Sitting at the intersection of the utility energy grid and the home electrical network gives Span’s device a unique vantage point from which to monitor and manage devices in the home and energy coming to or from it.

And he’s gotten some unique, expert validation of his vision in the form of an investment from Matt Rogers, one of the founders of Nest, which was the first billion dollar company to try and tackle home energy use and efficiency.

Through his investment firm, Incite Ventures, Rogers participated in the latest round for Span. 

 “We founded Nest to reinvent the largest energy user at home, the thermostat. We replaced an ugly household device with something that invited interaction and saved energy,” Rogers said in a statement. “Span has the potential to solve that for every load in the home. That’s why I’ve come on board as an investor to Span and an advisor to Arch.”

Image courtesy of Span

 Rao’s vision for Span is just as expansive as the original idea that brought Nest to the world. 

“Think of our software stack being very similar to an android device,” said Rao. “We have first party apps that Span is deploying and will offer an up our [sotware development kit] that third party vendors will use.”

A user can download the app and select the circuits or loads that they would want to allow an outside vendor to control in exchange for some kind of economic benefit, according to Rao.

“We’re trying to bring what the mobile industry has done for the last decade is an analogous model to what we want to bring in to the digital energy space,” Rao said. Given that the panel sits in a home for roughly thirty years, there’s an opportunity to lock customers in to the Span platform in a way that mobile phones never could.

Some partnerships — like the one Span has signed with battery supplier LG (a company that also makes appliances) gives an idea of the breadth of Rao’s vision.

“LG is a home appliance manufacturer and the road map is for us to tie into other home appliances as well,” said Rao. “You can extrapolate from that to the world of home appliances.”

Investors in the $10.1 million round for the company were led by ArcTern Ventures and joined by new backers Capricorn Investment Group, Incite Ventures. Previous financiers in the company included Wireframe Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Energy Foundry, Hardware Club, 1/0 Capital, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, and some of those firms returned for the new funding, the company said.

Driving their interest was the company’s position at the intersection between the grid and the home — and its attendant ability to monitor and control onside generation, storage and the majority of a consumer’s energy loads.  

The company is focusing its initial sales efforts on the markets of Hawaii and California where strong government incentives can help to subsidize costs and drive demand, the company said.

In addition to the new investment round, Mary Powell, former chief executive of Vermont utility Green Mountain Power will join Span’s board as an independent member. Powell and Rao have a relationship that dates back to the startup executive’s work with Tesla. 

“She set an example of what a customer-focused utility could look like, bringing the Tesla Powerwall to thousands of customers in the state of Vermont,” said Rao. “I’m excited to work with her again as we bring our panel to market.”

Image Credits: Span (opens in a new window)