OneWeb, a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellite venture, is aiming to roll out coverage globally after successfully launching the final batch of satellites needed for its broadband service over the weekend.
The British startup launched an additional 36 satellites Sunday morning from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, taking its total constellation so far to 618 satellites. The satellites launched 9 a.m. local time Sunday on an LVM3 rocket developed by India’s state-owned NewSpace India Limited.
While OneWeb has a few more satellites to deploy in May and June, it now has enough to deliver internet connectivity to any spot in the globe, according to company executives. The company hopes to offer its clients worldwide coverage by the end of the year.
“This means that we will be able to provide what has been missing for a long period of time: high-speed, low latency broadband connectivity onto every ocean-going vessel — yachts, maritime industry, oil rigs offshore — every aircraft will now be connected with a high speed, low latency connectivity,” OneWeb Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said on a call with reporters Monday morning.
“Desert, forest, mountain, Himalayas — hard-to-reach areas will all start to get covered.”
Barring a few ground stations which are yet to be established, Mittal said most of the “critical” Earth-based infrastructure for its network is now in play.
Founded in 2012, OneWeb wants to beam high-speed internet to the Earth from a network of low-Earth orbit satellites at an altitude of about 750 miles.
OneWeb plans to launch 648 satellites in total, of which 588 satellites are required for global coverage. The rest will serve as spares that can step in, in case some other satellites on the network go rogue.
OneWeb competes with a range of companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Amazon and Inmarsat.
In July last year, it agreed a deal to combine with Eutelsat, the French satellite company. Management expects the merger to be finalized by the summer.
Following the deal’s completion, OneWeb plans to pursue a secondary listing on the London Stock Exchange.
The firm is up against some fierce competition. Starlink, the space internet unit of Musk’s SpaceX, has launched thousands of satellites to bring network connectivity to places with patchy internet.
Mittal said OneWeb had “some catching up to do” but added the firm is seeing “robust” demand from its target markets, which include North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Australia, Latin America and Africa.
The company, which is lossmaking, is currently generating revenue in the millions of dollars every month, according to Mittal. It expects to one day attract hundreds of millions of dollars of income.
Unlike Starlink, which sells broadband packages to consumers, OneWeb says it is targeting enterprise clients.
It has done deals with major telecoms firms including Australia’s Telstra and France’s Orange. By the end of March, OneWeb had 15 customers in total.
OneWeb was rescued from bankruptcy in a $1 billion financing package backed by the U.K. government and Indian telecommunications conglomerate Bharti Global.
In the face of numerous setbacks, including the inability to launch satellites from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, OneWeb has continued to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from previous backers SoftBank to fuel its costly ambition of delivering from space.
“The promise I made to to British government has been realized,” Mittal said Monday.
The government holds a 20% stake in OneWeb and is its second-largest shareholder.
Following the transaction with Eutelsat, the government will retain some control through a “special share” that grants it a say on the location of future OneWeb launches and the national security safeguards the firm has in place.
Google-owned YouTube on Monday said it may remove channels including Fox Broadcast Network, Fox News and Fox Sports from its TV streaming platform if it doesn’t reach an agreement with Fox Corporation.
YouTube TV’s renewal date with Fox is coming on Wednesday, and while the two companies have been in ongoing negotiations, they’ve been unable to reach a deal, the YouTube team wrote in a blog post. The company also emailed YouTube TV subscribers about the potential fall out with Fox.
“Fox is asking for payments that are far higher than what partners with comparable content offerings receive,” YouTube wrote in the blog. “Our priority is to reach a deal that reflects the value of their content and is fair for both sides without passing on additional costs to our subscribers.”
If YouTube is unable to reach a new agreement by 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, the Fox channels will become unable on YouTube TV, the Google company said. YouTube pays broadcasters like Fox to carry their channels, and a blackout could have implications on advertisers and millions of viewers who cut their cords to stream Fox’s various channels on YouTube TV.
“While Fox remains committed to reaching a fair agreement with Google’s YouTube TV, we are disappointed that Google continually exploits its outsized influence by proposing terms that are out of step with the marketplace,” the media company said in a statement.
The Fox standoff represents the latest contract dispute between content companies and delivery networks as viewers increasingly ditch cable.
In February,Paramount Globalnotified YouTube TV subscribers that more than 20 channels including CBS, BET, Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon could go dark on the service if the two didn’t reach a deal. Shortly after, YouTube TV and Paramount announced a multi-year distribution deal.
YouTube TV’s base plan costs $82.99 per month and includes over 100 live channels and unlimited cloud DVR. YouTube said a key part of its commitment to users is its partnership with content providers like Fox, “which allows us to carry a wide variety of channels.”
If Fox does go offline for an extended period of time, YouTube will give its members a $10 credit, the Google company wrote. Users will also be able to watch Fox content by signing up for Fox One, Fox’s streaming service, the blog said.
YouTube recently overtook Netflix, which has a market cap of $515 billion, as the top streaming platform in terms of audience engagement. Google does not provide official subscriber numbers for YouTube TV, but in its February 2024 letter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced that the service had more than 8 million subscribers. MoffettNathanson principal analyst Michael Nathanson has estimated that YouTube TV has approximately 9.4 million paying subscribers.
The lawsuit, filed by Musk’s AI startup xAI and its social network business X, alleges Apple and OpenAI have “colluded” to maintain monopolies in the smartphone and generative AI markets.
Musk’s xAI acquired X in March in an all-stock transaction.
It accuses Apple of deprioritizing so-called “super apps” and generative AI chatbot competitors, such as xAI’s Grok, in its App Store rankings, while favoring OpenAI by integrating its ChatGPT chatbot into Apple products.
“In a desperate bid to protect its smartphone monopoly, Apple has joined forces with the company that most benefits from inhibiting competition and innovation in AI: OpenAI, a monopolist in the market for generative AI chatbots,” according to the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
An OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement: “This latest filing is consistent with Mr. Musk’s ongoing pattern of harassment.”
Representatives from Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Tesla CEO launched xAI in 2023 in a bid to compete with OpenAI and other leading chatbot makers.
Read more CNBC tech news
Musk earlier this month threatened to sue Apple for “an unequivocal antitrust violation,” saying in a post on X that the company “is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store.”
After Musk threatened to sue Apple, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”
An Apple spokesperson previously said its App Store was designed to be “fair and free of bias,” and that the company features “thousands of apps” using a variety of signals.
Apple last year partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products.
Several users replied to Musk’s post on X via its Community Notes feature saying that rival chatbot apps such as DeepSeek and Perplexity were ranked No. 1 on the App Store after Apple and OpenAI announced their partnership.
The lawsuit is the latest twist in an ongoing clash between Musk and Altman. Musk co-founded OpenAI alongside Altman in 2015, before leaving the startup in 2018 due to disagreements over OpenAI’s direction.
Musk sued OpenAI and Altman last year, accusing them of breach of contract by putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”
In a counter claim, OpenAI has alleged that Musk and xAI engaged in “harassment” through litigation, attacks on social media and in the press, and through a “sham bid” to buy the ChatGPT-maker for $97.4 billion designed to harm the company’s business relationships.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.
The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.
After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.
CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.
“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.
The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.
Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.
Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.
However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.
Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.
The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.