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The Super Heavy booster returns to its launch pad after the SpaceX Starship continued to space after it was launched on its eighth test at the company’s Boca Chica launch pad in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., March 6, 2025. 

Joe Skipper | Reuters

SpaceX has been granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration to launch and land its massive Starship rockets and Super Heavy boosters up to 25 times per year from the company’s Starbase spaceport in Texas.

The aerospace and defense contractor run by Elon Musk was previously restricted to five Starship launches per year from the site. While SpaceX submitted the proposal to increase its launch cadence on the Texas Gulf Coast during the Biden administration, a final environmental assessment was just announced on Tuesday, more than three months into President Donald Trump’s term.

Musk has been a central figure in President Trump’s second administration, leading an effort to shrink the federal government and regulatory agencies, including those that oversee his companies.

The decision that the FAA announced on Tuesday is one piece of the agency’s license review process for launches.

“There are other licensing requirements still to be completed,” the FAA said in an emailed statement, with ongoing reviews that pertain to “policy, payload, safety, financial responsibility and environmental impacts.”

“Once the evaluation process is complete, the FAA will make a determination to approve or deny the license application,” the agency said.

In its final environmental assessment, the FAA decided that SpaceX’s proposal for more launches from Boca Chica, Texas, would have “no significant impact” to the environment in the vicinity. The determination follows a string of SpaceX Starship test flights and explosions, and legal clashes between the company, environmental groups and the FAA.

SpaceX's Starship rocket explodes a few minutes after the launch

SpaceX originally designed its Starship rockets with the goal of launching cargo, and as many as 100 people at a time, to space. Musk has long promised SpaceX would conduct manned missions to Mars in the near future with Starship, though a realistic timeline for his goal remains elusive.

SpaceX’s first integrated Starship vehicle launched from the Boca Chica facility in April 2023, and exploded mid-flight. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service soon disclosed details about the aftermath of that explosion, including that a “3.5-acre fire started south of the pad site on Boca Chica State Park land,” following the test flight. Fire and debris destroyed nests, eggs and fragile habitat of endangered species in the area, the New York Times reported.

The next month, the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental advocates, sued the FAA over purportedly inadequate environmental reviews before granting SpaceX permission to conduct those launches.

By August 2024, Texas state and federal environmental regulators had fined SpaceX after determining the company had violated the Clean Water Act at Starbase, repeatedly polluting waters in the area. Musk then threatened to sue the FAA for “regulatory overreach” when the agency said it would levy fines against SpaceX after alleged licensing and safety-related violations during two other launches in 2023.

Musk didn’t sue, however. Instead, he spent almost $300 million to propel Trump back to the White House.

A senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, Jared Margolis, said in an email to CNBC on Tuesday, that his group was “incredibly disappointed, though not surprised, that the FAA has allowed SpaceX to drastically increase the number of launches and the associated harm to an ecologically critical area without taking the time to fully analyze and mitigate the impacts to the community and wildlife.”

A SpaceX spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The decision by the FAA comes days after SpaceX won an election over the weekend to incorporate Starbase as its own city. The mayor and two city commissioners both come from SpaceX’s employee ranks.

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Michael Dell says ‘at some point there’ll be too many’ AI data centers, but not yet

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Michael Dell says 'at some point there'll be too many' AI data centers, but not yet

Dell CEO Michael Dell: AI demand is very solid

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.

“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”

The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.

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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.

Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.

The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.

The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.

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OpenAI’s Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

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OpenAI's Sora 2 must stop allowing copyright infringement, Motion Picture Association says

Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images

The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.

Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.

“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.

But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.

Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.

However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.

“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.

Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.

Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.

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Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says ‘valuations in AI are at a bubble’

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Billionaire tech investor Orlando Bravo says 'valuations in AI are at a bubble'

Orlando Bravo: AI valuations are in a bubble

Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.

But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.

Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.

Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.

“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”

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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.

Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.

Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.

Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.

Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.

“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.

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