AI Hardware

A US Department of Defense procurement ban on rare earth elements from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea takes effect January 1, 2027, threatening supply chains for the magnets and semiconductors that power AI hardware. A wave of North American and allied-nation producers is racing to fill the gap, with the first vertically integrated heavy rare earth facility in North America now coming online in Saskatchewan.

Planet Labs is planning to deploy two prototype SunCatcher satellites equipped with Google TPUs in early 2027, marking a significant step toward real-time AI processing in orbit. The project, funded through a Google R&D partnership, aims to move machine learning inference off the ground and onto satellites themselves. If successful, the initiative could reshape how Earth observation data is analyzed, reducing latency and bandwidth demands for time-sensitive applications.

Broadcom has emerged as a critical AI infrastructure provider, securing over $21 billion in custom XPU and TPU orders from major hyperscalers including a combined $21B from Anthropic and other major cloud providers. The semiconductor giant's transformation signals the massive capital deployment underway as tech companies build out the computational capacity needed for next-generation AI systems.