CATL and the Battery Race & Thoughts on Space Conflict

January 4, 2022 No. 13

Highlights this week: 🔋CATL and the battery race, ⚔️thoughts on space conflict, and 👨‍🔧the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure.

🔗 Last week’s most-clicked link: A book on hacking the xbox and reverse engineering.

CATL holds the future 🔮

“China’s problem with internal combustion engines was they were forever playing the game of catch-up,” said Bill Russo, a former chief of Chrysler in China who is now a Shanghai electric car consultant. “Now, the United States has to play the game of catch-up with electric vehicles.”

CATL, Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited, a Chinese battery manufacturer and technology company has emerged as one of the biggest winners of the electric car boom. CATL holds one-third of the global electric-car-battery market. Its biggest rival globally is LG, with a one-quarter share. CATL is building a vast factory more than three times the size of Tesla and Panasonic’s electric car battery gigafactory in the Nevada desert.

At one point, a CATL rival showed that CATL batteries explode under the common “nail test”. China’s response was to remove the test from manufacturing requirements altogether, showing their commitment to nurturing a corporate champion with a strong and growing sway over the future of driving. CATL has given China a commanding lead in electric car batteries, a technology central to the broader green revolution. The company already supplies batteries to almost all of the world’s automakers, including GM, Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla.

Its founder and chairman, Robin Zeng, is one of the wealthiest men in Asia, with a fortune of about $60 billion.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out as China holds the keys to a critical technology of the future.

⚡️ Analog Insights: government study on automotive semiconductor market 🚙

Startup News 🚀💰:

Kandou, a Swiss semiconductor startup, has raised $75M in its Series D round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners along with DC Investment Partners and others.
Liquid Death, a water brand that went viral in 2018 with this video raised $75 million in Series C funding led by the startup studio Science.
Hair Extension Manufacturing startup Hair Forever raised $150,000 from several angel investors in a pre-seed round led by the serial entrepreneur Ashish Tiwari, after Healthkhoj and Hair Originals.
Groyyo, a B2B manufacturing and automation company, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation
Iridia, a developer of DNA-based memory chips for the data storage market closed a $6 million financing round with Prime Movers Lab.
Cold-brew coffee startup Brewbike has raised $3 million in its latest round with CEAS Investments, Connetic Ventures, Koto, Techra Investments, Mats Lederhausen’s Be-Cause Ventures, Westbrook Inc., Joe Mansueto and Venetia Kontogouris.

Interesting Links 🔗:

A ~150pg writeup by Nadia Eghbal on the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure, and how our social media, news, medical records, bank, etc. are all using free and public code. OpenSSL, for example, has largely been a one-man team running some of the world’s most important code. Donations have never amounted to much of a living salary, and even after the Heartbleed bug incident and awareness of the under-funding situation, the OpenSSL team has just a few developers on staff now.
As you age, you accumulate old (senescent) cells. These cells are dysfunctional and in sufficient quantity might cause harm to your body such as chronic inflammation. Researchers found a plant-derived compound (procyanidin C1 or PCC1) which can not only limit the harm due to senescent cells but also eliminate some of them. It is so beneficial that treated mice live longer.
A U.S. jury on Monday found Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes guilty of conspiring to defraud investors in the blood testing startup. Holmes was convicted on four of 11 counts.
As the United States and the world discuss the possibility of conflict extending into space, it is important to have a general understanding of what is physically possible and practical. Scenes from Star Wars, books, and TV shows portray a world very different from what we are likely to see in the next 50 years, if ever, given the laws of physics. To describe how physics constrains the space-to-space engagements of a conflict that extends into space, this paper lays out five key concepts: satellites move quickly, satellites move predictably, space is big, timing is everything, and satellites maneuver slowly.
IBM unveiled a new transistor technology, VTFET, which can be used to provide two times the performance or up to 85 percent reduction in energy use compared to the scaled finFET alternative. VTFET layers transistors perpendicular to the silicon wafer and directs current flow vertical to the wafer surface. This new approach addresses scaling barriers by relaxing physical constraints on transistor gate length, spacer thickness, and contact size so that these features can each be optimized; either for performance or energy consumption.