Good morning. It's Monday, March sixteenth, twenty twenty-six. Here's what's happening in the world of tech and space.

**The biggest day in AI hardware kicks off in San Jose.** NVIDIA's GTC conference opens today with Jensen Huang's keynote at eleven AM Pacific — and if recent leaks are right, this one's going to be dense. Reuters confirms he'll detail the Feynman architecture, NVIDIA's next-generation AI chip named after the legendary physicist. Vera Rubin, the company's HBM4-equipped data center platform, should get a full reveal alongside Vera Ultra, slated for the second half of twenty twenty-seven. Also expected: details on how NVIDIA plans to integrate Groq's SRAM dataflow technology — the twenty billion dollar acquisition from December — to tackle the agentic AI inference bottleneck that Blackwell can't efficiently handle alone. With more than thirty thousand attendees from over a hundred and ninety countries packed into the SAP Center, this is the conference that sets the AI hardware roadmap for the next two years. Worth watching live if you can.

**China's number two chipmaker just cracked seven nanometers.** A Reuters exclusive this morning reports that Hua Hong Group's contract manufacturing arm, Huali Microelectronics, has developed seven nanometer chipmaking technology at its Shanghai plant — and is readying it for production. Until now, SMIC was the only domestic Chinese fab at that node. The kicker: Huawei has been collaborating with Hua Hong on this process. This matters because despite Washington easing some chip export controls — letting NVIDIA sell its second-most-powerful AI chips to China — Beijing has been pushing domestic firms to buy homegrown silicon instead. A second Chinese fab capable of seven nanometer production significantly strengthens that self-sufficiency playbook.

**NASA's ESCAPADE twins are awake and heading for Mars.** The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft — that's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers — launched last November and just activated their full instrument suites as of February twenty-fifth. This is the first mission to study Mars' magnetosphere from two points simultaneously, which lets scientists watch in real time how the solar wind strips atmosphere from the planet. Mars lost most of its atmosphere billions of years ago, transforming from a warm, wet world into the frozen desert we see today. Understanding exactly how that process works isn't just academic — it directly informs radiation shielding and space weather protocols for future crewed missions to Mars. Data collection is underway during the cruise phase, with orbital insertion expected later this year.

**And on a lighter note** — eight of the biggest names in tech, including Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe, LinkedIn, and Match, have signed a voluntary pledge to share threat intelligence about how scammers are abusing their platforms. The Axios-reported accord aims to coordinate responses as online fraud losses continue to soar globally. Whether a voluntary pledge moves the needle remains to be seen, but it's the first time this many competitors have agreed to share scam data across platforms at this scale.

That's your Monday morning briefing. GTC is going to dominate the rest of this week, so expect fireworks from San Jose later today. Have a good one.