Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
The flying car ceased to be a joke at some point. It occurred subtly, as most truly disruptive events do, through thousands of small decisions made in government offices, factories, and computer labs rather than in a single big announcement or keynote speech. The Santa Cruz, California-based company Joby Aviation appears to be the closest to fulfilling a century-old promise. And the most intriguing aspect of their approach may be the one that receives the least attention. The aircraft itself is remarkably silent, almost unnervingly so. It makes about the sound of a typical conversation as it takes off vertically,…
Just outside of Washington, in a peaceful area of College Park, Maryland, IonQ has accomplished something that the quantum industry has long promised but never quite fulfilled. The company released a complete engineering blueprint for fault-tolerant quantum computing on April 22. In this field, such documents typically come years late or never at all. It includes hardware, control systems, error correction, compiler design, and the choreography of ion movement through traps. The level of detail is astounding. The majority of quantum roadmaps resemble mood boards rather than build orders, not because they are uncommon. An end-to-end route to 10,000 physical…
This spring, the claw clip is the first thing you see when you stroll through any college campus. A decade ago, a twenty-year-old would have laughed at plastic that was a little too large. It looks unmistakable when paired with a pair of wired earbuds, a thrifted tank top, and baggy jeans. The children are dressed as though they are in 1998. Many of them would actually live there if they could, according to a recent NBC News Decision Desk Poll conducted by SurveyMonkey. 47% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 stated that they would prefer to…
It’s the kind of detail that initially seems nearly impossible to comprehend. While you wait for ChatGPT to complete a birthday message, a server rack is heating up somewhere—perhaps in Iowa, rural Georgia, or the high desert outside of Phoenix—and water is subtly evaporating into the sky to keep it cool. Give or take half a liter for each brief session. That seems insignificant. Until you realize that every day, about 2.5 billion prompts are sent in. The math quickly becomes uncomfortable. In 2023, data centers in the United States used about 17 billion gallons of water, which is sufficient…
He laughed when he held it for the first time. On his desk, next to a coffee mug that easily dwarfed it, was a small black cube that was only two inches on a side. That same CuBox-i4Pro is still kept by an Austin developer eleven years later on a shelf above his workstation, next to a pile of more recent, ostensibly smarter boards. He claims that he looks at it more frequently than he anticipates. The CuBox-i, manufactured by SolidRun in the northern Israeli town of Yokne’am, was never meant to be a game-changer. The entry-level model, which promised…
When Google held its Cloud Next conference last week at the Mandalay Bay convention center in Las Vegas, the atmosphere was the kind of thing you only witness when an industry feels like it’s on the verge of something. The demo floors were packed with engineers. Near the press rooms, reporters gathered. Additionally, Google and Nvidia officially announced on stage that their ten-year collaboration has entered a new phase centered around a class of cloud supercomputers that most businesses could only imagine a year ago. Google kept returning to the headline number, which was eye-catching. In comparison to the previous…
A woman in a Colorado suburb enters her kitchen, brews coffee, and greets her phone. Good morning back, the phone says. It remembers that she had trouble sleeping the night before, inquires about her sister’s surgery, and informs her that she might benefit from a peaceful morning. These days, none of this is unusual. In actuality, it is turning into the texture of millions of mornings: brief, personal conversations with a virtual friend who never grows weary, never quarrels, and never forgets a birthday. The figures are not nuanced. AI companion apps increased by about 700% between 2022 and mid-2025.…
The memo was published on a Thursday, April 23, 2026, and it read like the majority of corporate dispatches these days: cautious, a little bloodless, and full of references to “speed, simplicity, and precision.” The messenger was Nike’s chief operating officer, Venkatesh Alagirisamy. There were 1,400. The majority of them work in technology. Technically speaking, less than two percent of the world’s workforce, but when you’re one of the people receiving the HR call, that statistic seems smaller than it actually is. The Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton and the Nike India Technology Center are the two hubs where…
There was only one character in the AI hardware story for the majority of the previous three years. GPUs from Nvidia. The chips were leased, traded, hoarded, and even allegedly smuggled across international borders. The ability of their founders to get a call back from someone at a cloud provider was crucial to the survival of entire startups. The story is still ongoing. However, it is no longer the sole one. A second shortage has surfaced somewhere quieter, and this one has the industry looking a little ashamed. Suddenly, the CPU—the workhorse processor that has been humming inside servers for…
The number is so big that it hardly has any meaning. Forty billion dollars. This is what Alphabet has committed to investing in Anthropic, the four-year-old company that created Claude and was, until recently, thought to be Google’s most unsettling competitor in the competition to define artificial intelligence for the general public. Now, ten billion comes in cash. Thirty more dangles are available, provided Anthropic meets performance targets that the two businesses have mutually agreed upon. The check is real, but it has an odd shape that combines elements of an investment, a credit line, and something the industry hasn’t…