Modern processors are fast, in part, because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger. Since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see. Chipmakers and operating system developers have spent years building defenses. A new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shows that a key assumption behind many of them doesn't hold. The defenses work by wiping or isolating the processor's prediction machinery, removing anything an attacker might have planted. The catch, as PhD student Daniel Trujillo and MIT Assistant Professor Mengjia Yan point out, is that the wipe and the moment the predictions get used can't happen at the same instant. There is always a gap ' sometimes only a handful of instructions wide. Anything that runs in that gap can dirty the machinery all over again. The researchers call this class of attack "TONTOU."...

U.S. battery startups hit a rough patch when the One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated battery and EV incentives, undercutting a chunk of future demand. But recently, they've found a lifeline in the defense world, helping to power everything from drones and torpedoes to infantry radios and fighter jets. The Trump administration, despite its open disdain for EVs, acknowledges that batteries are an inescapable part of modern life. And like many things in Washington these days, it's leaning on national security as justification for its recent decisions. The latest comes from the Department of Energy, which announced Thursday that it is awarding $500 million in grants to bolster the battery supply chain in the United States. The program aims to 'reduce reliance on foreign sources, bolster national security, and advance American energy dominance.' Much of the money went to startups. Defense applications of lithium-ion batteries are 'absolutely playing out in discussions,' a spokesperson for Coreshell, a battery materials startup, told TechCrunch. The company recently brought on ADS Ventures as an investor; the strategic VC's parent company, ADS, is a defense supplier, and it's working with another supplier of autonomous systems. Coreshell received a $50 million award from the DOE to expand manufacturing for its metallurgical silicon anode material....

Startup investors were busily closing on big rounds this week, with AI and defense among their favored target sectors. The biggest financing went to Castelion, a defense tech startup developing a hypersonic missile. Other sizable rounds went to companies developing AI inference technology, a video-creation platform, data centers and voice-to-text tools. 1. Castelion, $800M, defense tech: Castelion, a defense tech startup developing a hypersonic strike missile, raised new Series C funding consisting of $800 million in equity capital along with $250 million in debt financing. JPMorgan Chase, Andreessen Horowitz and Carlyle led the equity financing, which set a $13 billion valuation for the Torrance, California-based company. 2. Etched, $700M, semiconductors: San Jose, California-based Etched, a developer of inference clusters to accelerate AI computing, secured $700 million in a new funding round led by Jane Street and joined by a long list of prominent investors. The financing set a $21 billion valuation for the 4-year-old company....

Databricks is back raising another $5 billion, after it raised that amount eight months ago. The largest fundings also went to an AI neolab, data center and electricity storage, defense, coding and biotech. Let's take a look. 1. Databricks, $5B, data platform: Databricks has surpassed a $7 billion revenue run rate, with more than 80% year-over-year growth in Q2. The San Francisco-based company raised $ 5 billion in a funding round led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price, and new investor Sixth Street Growth, and raised its valuation to $190 billion. Databricks was valued at $134 billion back in December 2025 when the company announced it had surpassed a $4.8 billion revenue run rate. From its Series A funding of $13 million in 2013, the 13-year-old company has raised around $25 billion in funding over all time, per Crunchbase data. 2. River AI, $1.1B, AI reinforcement learning: Founded earlier this year, River AI raised $1.1 billion across its seed and Series A rounds led by AMP PBC and General Catalyst, with strategic investment from Nvidia and AMD Ventures. Its founder, Igor Babuschkin, has been at the center of AI developments at Google DeepMind, OpenAI and xAI over the past decade. The Palo Alto, California-based company seeks to build AI that is personalized and trained directly on what a company or person needs to accomplish, giving the end user control....