We often think about weather controlling wildfires: Dry air, heat, wind and lightning determine when fires start and how quickly they spread. However, once a wildfire becomes intense enough, the relationship can flip. Instead of simply responding to the weather, the fire begins to create its own weather.
I study wildfires and air quality at the University of Texas at Arlington. Here are four key ways wildfires influence the weather around them:
1. Updrafts and fire tornadoes
Wildfires release a large amount of heat. As the air above the flames heats up rapidly, it becomes lighter than the surrounding air. As a result, the warm air rises.
The process is very similar to how a typical tornado forms, though fire tornadoes tend to be smaller and, because they feed off the heat, confined to the fire area.
As water vapor condenses, it releases additional heat, making the rising air even more buoyant. If the fire is intense enough and the atmosphere is unstable, the cloud can continue expanding upward into the upper troposphere. It may eventually develop into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud – a thunderstorm generated by the fire itself.
3. Fire-generated lightning
As the pyrocumulus cloud rises above the point in the atmosphere where the air temperature drops below freezing, cloud droplets begin to freeze, producing ice crystals, supercooled water droplets and graupel – a soft version of hail.
Collisions among these particles separate positive and negative electric charges within the cloud. Over time, the charge imbalance becomes strong enough to produce lightning.
Some of these lightning strikes can ignite new fires beyond the original fire perimeter, making firefighters’ jobs even harder.
Lightning is a frequent cause of wildfires. Wildfire smoke can fuel storm clouds that generate more lightning, which can start new fires.AFP via Getty Images
In late July 2026, a severe wildfire near Saumos in southwestern France became intense enough to generate a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. Lightning from the storm ignited new fires outside the original burn area, allowing the fire to spread beyond its initial blaze.
4. Smoke can change weather downwind
Wildfire smoke can also affect weather far from the flames. Smoke can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles. Along the way, it can influence how clouds form and how lightning develops.
Smoke contains large numbers of tiny particles. These particles act as seeds on which water vapor condenses to form cloud droplets. Scientists call these seeds cloud condensation nuclei. When wildfire smoke arrives over a region, it increases the number of cloud condensation nuclei in the atmosphere. As a result, the same amount of water is divided among many more cloud droplets, making each droplet smaller.
Smaller droplets take longer to merge into raindrops, which can delay rainfall or shift it to another location downwind. This is one reason why forecasting precipitation becomes more challenging during major wildfire events.
A pyrocumulus cloud builds over the Gold Mountain Fire on July 26, 2026, in western Colorado. Sláinte Farms.
Scientists have also found that wildfire smoke can alter lightning patterns in downwind thunderstorms.
Positive lightning is more powerful and damaging than negative lightning. It carries larger electrical currents, lasts longer and releases more energy. As a result, it is more likely to ignite new wildfires and can pose greater risks to people and infrastructure.
In some smoke-affected thunderstorms, positive flashes accounted for more than 40% of all cloud-to-ground lightning. In the most extreme cases, the fraction exceeded 90%, meaning that nearly all cloud-to-ground lightning was positively charged.
Living with fire and its consequences
The next time wildfire smoke turns the sky hazy, remember that the smoke is not simply drifting through the atmosphere – it is becoming part of the atmosphere.
Wildfires and their smoke can shape clouds, rainfall and lightning in ways we are only beginning to understand. As large wildfires become more frequent, living with them will require more than fighting fires. We must also learn to anticipate and adapt to their far-reaching effects on air quality, health and even the weather.
Explaining stock market movements is always a little bit of a fool’s errand; no one really understands why stocks boom or crash on a given day or in a given week. Over the long run, the stock market displays lots of “excess volatility” — prices move up and down much more than is warranted by changes in earnings or other measures of fundamental value.
There are plenty of theories about why those swings happen, but it’s very hard to know which of those — if any — is in operation at any given time. And so although every big stock market movement is followed by lots of articles claiming to know why, you should take them all — including this one — with several grains of salt.
Anyway, having said all that…
The Korean stock market has been crashing for weeks now. Around March, Korean stocks went on an epic tear; the KOSPI index rose from around 5,000 to over 9,000. Then, just over a month ago, it all went into reverse, with the index falling back to around 5,500:
There are probably two stories regarding why this happened — one about fundamentals, and another about finance. In fact, this is typical for bubbles and crashes, not just in stocks but in every asset class.
There’s almost always some kind of connection to fundamentals — some story about how we’re in a new economy, followed by doubts about whether that story is really true, and so on. But the big market movements are almost always accelerated by purely financial factors — “noise traders” armed with piles of excess cash, opportunistic speculators looking to ride the wave of sentiment and so on.[1]
For Korea, the fundamental story was about memory stocks. Korean companies like SK Hynix and Samsung make a lot of the world’s computer memory. Under normal circumstances, computer memory isn’t a great business to be in — the technology is fairly commoditized, the industry is brutally competitive, it takes a LOT of capital to build the factories, and it’s very risky to make long-term bets on the evolution of memory technology.
But computer memory is really important for AI data centers. And so the AI boom kicked off the mother of all memory booms. Only a few companies had the scale to meet a large amount of this demand explosion, and the two biggest of these were in South Korea. SK Hynix’s operating profit went from under US$10 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to over $35 billion in the first quarter of 2026:
Hynix, which specializes in memory, briefly had a higher market capitalization than Samsung, simply because the memory boom is so huge. Korea’s exports rose over 70% in just one year; in fact, the country’s whole national GDP growth rate increased by a noticeable amount over the past two quarters, just because of this one product:
That’s a pretty strong fundamental story about why South Korean stocks should be worth a lot more. So it’s no surprise that the Korean stock market boomed as soon as people realized in early 2026 that AI technology is going to be extremely valuable. Here’s a thread about just how epic the runup in these companies’ stock prices was:
What happened?
Chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung saw historic gains, rising +1,900% and +600% in one year, respectively.
These two stocks accounted for as much as 50% of South Korea’s stock market last month.
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) July 29, 2026
What happened? Chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung saw historic gains, rising +1,900% and +600% in one year, respectively. These two stocks accounted for as much as 50% of South Korea’s stock market last month. Never in history has growth at this scale happened so quickly.
This is where the financial story rears its head, though. A bunch of traders saw this enormous price rise and decided to buy into it.
You’d think a lot of these would be foreign, but international investors mostly avoided the boom (except for a few who bet big on Korean memory stocks). The most frenzied buyers were regular Korean people — the proverbial taxi drivers and teenagers.
These investors probably didn’t understand the fundamental story about AI and data centers and so on. Instead, they probably had extrapolative expectations — they see the price go up and up, and they figure stocks are just a “goer upper.”
As more and more buy in and the stock goes up more and more, the perception of a structural upward trend is only reinforced, causing yet more people to buy in. This isn’t the only explanation for coordinated “noise trader” buying frenzies, but it’s probably the most likely.
Normal people don’t have a lot of cash sitting around. But earlier this year, regular Korean people got the opportunity to effectively borrow lots of money to invest it in stocks, via the introduction of leveraged single-stock ETFs. When you buy a share in a leveraged single-stock ETF in SK Hynix, it’s like borrowing money to buy SK Hynix stock.
A whole lot of Koreans used leveraged ETFs and other borrowing methods to borrow huge amounts of money and buy lots and lots of Korean stocks — especially the memory company stocks that were driving everything.
There were some people selling — notably, foreign investors “taking profits” and getting out. But the noise traders overwhelmed all the selling pressure, and sent stock prices soaring.
Then something happened last month — either something fundamental or something financial. Hynix and Samsung are doing fine in terms of earnings growth, but it’s possible that something suddenly gave traders reason to doubt the overall story about the AI boom sending these companies’ profits to the moon.
The other possibility is that Korea simply ran out of hotheaded day traders willing to borrow more and more in order to bet on stocks, and the influx of cash naturally came to a halt.
Whichever it was, at that point the price faltered and began to fall. All that borrowed money accelerated the fall on the way down. When prices fall, leveraged ETFs have to sell some of what they hold.[2] When a bunch of leveraged ETFs do this at the same time, it pushes prices down, forcing others to sell.
In the meantime, people who had borrowed money to buy stock faced margin calls (or bankruptcy), forcing them to sell stock to raise cash. All of this created extra selling pressure, and so increased the rate at which Korean stock prices fell since late June.
Anyway, that’s the financial story. It’s a very old story — financial leverage plus unsophisticated new buyers plus a strong fundamental story often produces a bubble and crash, or exacerbates one that was already in progress. No wonder Korea is now moving — a little belatedly — to restrict leveraged ETFs.
But while financial factors affected the timing and the size of the stock price boom and bust, the fundamental story is more interesting. Fears of an AI bubble are quietly creeping back.
In 2025, as consumer chatbots struggled to find a market big enough to justify the kind of investments being made, there was a lot of talk about an AI bubble. One possibility was that AI revenues wouldn’t grow fast enough to justify the amount being invested in data centers. Another possibility was that AI companies wouldn’t have enough of a “moat” to make them consistently profitable.
In 2026, Claude Code exploded onto the scene, and everyone realized that AI had finally found “product-market fit.” We now know at least one thing that AI is incredibly useful for — writing computer code. Suddenly, an AI bubble seemed much less likely. Spending on AI was skyrocketing, and Anthropic — the new market leader — was successfully capturing much of the profits.
Cybersecurity and other zero-sum applications — where having the absolute best model can matter a lot — started to seem like the “moat” that AI had previously lacked. Suddenly, the giant data center construction boom seemed a lot more reasonable.
But slowly, doubts have begun to creep back in. AI is amazing at writing software, but writing software is different from selling it. So far, huge increases in coding productivity are translating into only minor increases in the amount of software being shipped:
It’s possible that a significant fraction of the explosion in the use of coding agents is just “tokenmaxxing” — companies trying to use as much AI as they can, either to learn to use the tools, or perhaps just to look like they’re doing something. If so, we can expect a retrenchment and a temporary slowdown of AI spending growth.
It’s also possible that even the revenue growth we’ve seen isn’t enough to offset the enormous costs of the data center boom. Here’s a recent report from The Economist:
A back-of-the-envelope calculation finds that covering AI capex through identifiable AI income requires revenue on the order of $2.5trn per year, more than tech’s entire combined revenue today…Anthropic pulls in perhaps $75bn, annualised; OpenAI makes tens of billions; Google, via its AI model Gemini, and Microsoft probably get a bit less. SpaceX may have a few billion dollars’ worth of revenue from enterprise AI this year. Meta also makes a few bucks from AI. Add this up and you land at roughly $150bn a year. [emphasis mine]
AI revenue is growing very fast, but if these calculations are right, it’ll have to grow by 17x from where it is now in order to justify the capital being spent. In other words, even Claude Code isn’t enough; AI revenue has to accelerate even further, and while it’s perfectly plausible that it could do that, it’s a big question mark.
There’s also the possibility that the moat of companies like Anthropic is less invincible than it looked just a couple of months ago. A Chinese company called Moonshot AI has released a model called Kimi K3 that nearly equals the best available American models.
American companies are using cheap Chinese AI models more and more for daily tasks. If Anthropic and OpenAI lose the overall b2b market to cheap Chinese competition — which is undoubtedly supported, of course, by China’s usual blizzard of subsidies and government supports — there’s not much chance that they’ll be able to pay for the data center boom.
And at that point, there could be a big, big bust — similar to when railroads went under in 1873. Investors are probably already beginning to worry about this. It isn’t just Korean AI-related stocks that have taken a hit recently. Here’s Nvidia, which designs and furnishes the chips that run data centers:
And here’s Micron, America’s top memory chip maker:
And here’s Microsoft, a big part of whose business is installing AI data centers:
There are similar (if less dramatic) stories at Google and Amazon, who also run a ton of data centers.
Here’s Bloomberg’s story about the decline of the so-called “Magnificent 7” tech stocks:
Wall Street is growing increasingly concerned about the hundreds of billions of dollars Big Tech is spending on artificial intelligence…“The real problem is the amount of spend that’s going on,” said Ken Mahoney, chief executive officer of Mahoney Asset Management. “No one knows what the return on investment is.”…The selloff is coming as investors grow increasingly cautious about the massive sums that Big Tech firms are spending to build out their AI infrastructure. The Mag 7 index is now down 11% from a record reached in late May, erasing $2 trillion in market value.
So although South Korea’s epic stock crash was probably related to Korea-specific financial factors, it could also herald the return of the “AI bubble” story. AI is far and away the most important thing going on in the American economy right now, so any hint of a bubble is worrying.
Notes
1 For the best simple explanation of how financial markets can go haywire, I recommend the famous paper by DeLong et al. (1990). If you don’t feel like reading through a mathematical model, just ask AI to explain it to you in simple terms.
2 Usually, futures or options or some other derivatives tied to the value of the underlying stock.
Gaza hospital director warns of worsening humanitarian and health crisis
Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, warned on Wednesday that approximately 1.6 million people in the Gaza Strip are at risk of famine and malnutrition amid the continuing humanitarian crisis.
In radio remarks, Abu Salmiya said the at-risk population includes 74,000 children suffering from varying degrees of malnutrition and 25,000 pregnant women facing the risk of severe anemia. He warned that deteriorating conditions are placing increasing strain on Gaza’s healthcare system.
According to Abu Salmiya, rising rates of malnutrition and infectious diseases, combined with shortages of medicines and medical supplies and severe transportation constraints, are pushing the territory toward what he described as a complete health and humanitarian collapse.
He said hospitals continue to receive dozens of people killed or injured each day, including patients with complex injuries requiring specialized surgical care. Abu Salmiya added that some injured children have required amputations and said restrictions on the entry of essential medicines and medical supplies have further complicated treatment.
Abu Salmiya also reported that around 70 percent of ambulances in Gaza are out of service because of shortages of tires, spare parts, and lubricants, warning that this could severely disrupt the transport of patients, medical personnel, and the deceased between different parts of the territory.
He further stated that approximately 4,000 cancer patients are unable to receive chemotherapy and said medical teams are recording between four and five deaths daily among those patients.
In addition, Abu Salmiya said shortages of hormones and other essential medicines have affected kidney dialysis patients, while a lack of insulin pens for children with diabetes has resulted in increased admissions to intensive care units due to complications.
He called for urgent international intervention to facilitate the entry of medical and humanitarian assistance through Gaza’s border crossings, saying healthcare workers are increasingly unable to provide the treatment needed to save the lives of patients.
Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year
When we last checked in on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in February, NASA was announcing that it had formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.
At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to “fully understand the risks associated” with the Starliner spacecraft, and to remediate them. Starliner would not fly its next mission, a cargo flight to the International Space Station, until those problems were identified and remediated. He declined to put a date on the test flight.
However, it now appears this work is proceeding apace.
“Going quite well”
During a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Boeing Chief Executive Officer Kelly Ortberg offered some encouraging remarks in response to an analyst’s question about Starliner and other space projects at the company.
“The redesign of the Starliner deficiencies is going quite well, and we’re feeling pretty good about that,” Ortberg said.
The deficiencies he referred to primarily involve the vehicle’s propulsion system, which imperiled the flight of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams to the International Space Station during Starliner’s first crewed mission. The astronauts had to be returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle in early 2025.
During the earnings call Ortberg suggested much of that work was completed, and that the primary issue now is scheduling a launch date with NASA for Starliner to ferry cargo to the space station to ensure there was an open docking port and astronaut time to unload the vehicle.
“We’ve got to work with NASA to align on the launches,” Ortberg said. “I don’t at this time anticipate that’s going to create a cost problem for us, but we do have some uncertainty here that we’ve got to work with NASA to get that put to bed, and we are working with them right now.”
An official confirmed to Ars that this is indeed the case, that the primary factor now for when Starliner launches is port availability on the space station. It is therefore possible that Starliner launches this year. If this cargo test flight goes well, and modifications to Starliner address the vehicle’s propulsion concerns, a crewed mission is possible in late 2027.
Further delays, Ortberg indicated during the call, would only further put Boeing into the red on the fixed-price contract the company signed with NASA in 2014 under the Commercial Crew program. To date Boeing has taken approximately $2 billion in charges due to delays in Starliner’s development, and the need for additional test flights after various software and propulsion failures.
Dragon’s dilemma
If Starliner were to come online in the next year or two, it would do so at an intriguing moment in crew access to low-Earth orbit.
As Ars previously reported, there are uncertainties about the availability of Crew Dragon in the 2030s, and more recently SpaceX has been telling industry officials that it plans to retire Crew Dragon (which flies on the Falcon 9 rocket) no later than 2030. This raises serious concerns for not just NASA, which may seek to fly to the International Space Station into the early 2030s, but also for planned private space stations intended to take its place. These companies are having difficulties negotiating crew transportation services as a result.
Crew Dragon is, for now at least, by far the preferred option. Not only has it proven to be reliable, the vehicle also offers the lowest cost due to its reusability and the fact that it flies on the Falcon 9 rocket.
Starliner, by contrast, has several disadvantages. Its Service Module, which houses all of the costly propulsion systems, does not return to Earth after each flight but rather burns up in the atmosphere. Sources said this expendable module costs tens of millions of dollars. There is also the fact that, after its initial run of NASA missions, Starliner will have no rocket following the retirement of the Atlas V vehicle. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is an option, but there would be not-inconsiderable costs to human-rate the rocket, and it would be more expensive than a Falcon 9.
Could someone else acquire Starliner? Boeing did begin shopping some of its space assets, including Starliner, a year and a half ago. No sale has been closed however, and one person told Ars that it is because Boeing has been asking too high a price. One potential industry partner with deep pockets, Blue Origin, has instead decided to press on with development of its own in-house crew vehicle.
In a world where SpaceX seeks to retire Dragon in favor of Starship, and in which the space community is not yet comfortable launching humans on Starship, and in which Starliner is actually flying, things could get interesting.
One thing does seem clear. No matter what happens, the cost of human spaceflight into low-Earth orbit during the 2030s is going to be significantly more expensive than the cost in the 2020s, at least until Starship really takes off.
What does Infantino’s proposal to sell stakes in FIFA subsidiary entail?
FIFA plans to create a $20 billion subsidiary to run the World Cup and its other events, offering stakes of up to 20% in FIFA Forward Enterprise to external investors, in a heavily criticised proposal by president Gianni Infantino that would provide member associations with a dramatic increase in funding.
WHAT IS BEING PROPOSED
FIFA wants to create FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) — a separate subsidiary that would bundle together all of FIFA’s money-making activities (broadcast rights, sponsorship, ticketing, licensing, and event delivery) into one commercially-focused company.
KEY NUMBERS
FIFA is valuing the new commercial venture at around $20 billion based on JPMorgan’s estimate.
FIFA would sell a minority stake (up to 20%) to outside investors while keeping majority control. FIFA is working with bankers at JPMorgan to raise billions of dollars by bringing in external investors.
FINANCIAL BENEFITS FOR MEMBER ASSOCIATIONS
If approved, each of the 211 member associations could unlock up to $40 million for the 2027-30 cycle: up to $20 million in a one-off Fast-Forward funding and $20 million in FIFA Forward development funding for the 2027-30 cycle.
This would continue increasing to $22m for the 2031-34 cycle and $24m for 2035-38.
HOW THE DECISION WORKS
Infantino says the decision on the new FFE subsidiary will be a fully democratic one and approval requires: (1) support from a majority (over 50%) of the 211 associations, and (2) FIFA Council sign-off.
INFANTINO’S ULTIMATUM
According to a letter seen by The Times from Infantino to member associations, if the plan is rejected, associations will receive the much smaller pre-planned increase from the Forward Programme, worth roughly $10m per association for the next cycle, as part of a $2.7bn total package rather than $10bn.
“Should you wish to proceed, this USD 10bn package will become available as of 1 January 2027, ushering in the next phase of our journey together,” Infantino wrote in the letter.
“In exchange, all that is required is your continued trust — everything else remains the same.”
The one-off Fast-Forward funding will only be available to those member associations who decide to participate and make their decision by September 19, 2026.
NO CHANGE TO FIFA GOVERNANCE MODEL
Infantino says that the rights and obligations of member associations and the retention of FIFA’s existing governance structure will remain unchanged.
FIFA would retain a perpetual majority ownership of FFE, and would continue to have exclusive control over all competition-related matters.
REACTION AND CRITICISM
FIFA announced the proposal on Tuesday, following media reports detailing the plan, leading to criticism from governing bodies who had not been consulted or made aware of Infantino’s idea.
UEFA said the proposal “crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” and “the soul and governance of football are not assets to trade — especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”
After learning of Infantino’s letter on Wednesday, UEFA released another statement.
“Today we have learned of FIFA’s deadline to associations to support their proposals or have the one-off payout offer withdrawn,” UEFA said.
“This says everything you need to know about this plan.”
CONCACAF said they “share the disappointment of many within our region and the game that this level of detail has been designed and shared publicly before any discussion with the relevant governance bodies and stakeholders has taken place”.
The English FA said they were “completely unaware of this proposal and have no substantive details, including what the proposition actually is, and what conditions are attached”.
Infantino’s predecessor Sepp Blatter told Reuters that “football belongs to no individual and to no institution. It belongs to the people”.
“If FIFA were transferred into a profit-oriented corporate structure, it would lose its soul,” he added, noting he would never have considered such a move while he was in charge.
Netanyahu’s Trump meeting suggests his star is waning in Washington
Appearing increasingly isolated and weakened, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to Washington this week, where he had a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump – his eighth of the US president’s second term.
Netanyahu is desperate to revive his image as the closest ally of the most powerful man in the world, but his star has fallen dramatically in Washington since his last trip.
The US president has problems of his own, so he clearly had little appetite for a photo opportunity with a deeply unpopular Israeli leader widely blamed for convincing him to launch an unwinnable war against a state few Americans saw as a serious threat.
The war has already cost at least US$37.5 billion, a 15-25% increase in gasoline prices, persistent inflation, and the deaths of 18 American servicemen. After months seeking an invitation, Netanyahu got his opportunity while in Washington for the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress.
But even before the Israeli entourage departed for Washington, Trump was plainly irritated by Israeli briefings that Netanyahu intended to present him with intelligence concerning Iran’s deeply buried “Pickaxe Mountain” nuclear facility.
In an interview with Fox News, Trump dismissed the idea that Netanyahu could tell him anything new and appeared to lend credence to the view that Israel was trying to push him towards a prolonged campaign in Iran.
Trump also brushed aside Israeli concerns about his intention to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, warning Netanyahu not to try to influence his decision. He then lavished praise on Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and – in a dig at Netanyahu’s international isolation – added that “Turkey’s not a big fan of Israel, not a great fan of Bibi. But they’ve been great for me.”
The lack of fanfare surrounding this meeting underscores Trump’s frustration that he cannot extricate himself from their disastrous joint military enterprise in Iran. After being quietly ushered into the White House through a side entrance, there was no question-and-answer session with journalists – unlike many previous Trump-Netanyahu meetings.
Only minimal information has been released by the White House, and Trump has been conspicuously discreet about what was discussed.
Netanyahu under pressure
With an election looming at the end of October, Netanyahu is trailing in the polls behind rival contender, Daid Eisenkot. So his immediate attempt to put a positive spin on the meeting suggested how desperate he is for Trump’s political endorsement.
Shortly after the talks concluded, Netanyahu released a video message declaring, without explanation, that: “This was one of the best conversations I have had with our friend, US President Donald Trump.”
Trump and his war may be unpopular in America, but the opposite is true in Israel. Trump remains extremely popular there. So Netanyahu’s association with him, and the sense of protection this symbolizes in Israel, is a significant political asset.
The war is unpopular in the US because few Americans see Iran as a serious threat. Consequently, few care how the war ends so long as a ceasefire or peace deal brings prices down.
In contrast, the criticism Netanyahu faces from his own voters is that Israel has not finished the job and that he been forced to agree to a ceasefire which his critics argue has only emboldened Iran.
As recently as last week, Netanyahu’s team would have been buoyed that Trump appeared to be on the cusp of resuming major military operations against Iran. But the day before the meeting, Trump abruptly decided to halt military operations.
He appears to have done so for three reasons. Omani-mediated talks over the Strait of Hormuz, have reportedly been making progress.
Meanwhile senior US military commanders have warned the US president that the bombing campaign had reached the limits of its effectiveness and America’s stock of air defense interceptors were becoming dangerously depleted.
And the expansion of the conflict into the Red Sea, where attacks from Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Saudi shipping pushed oil prices back above US$100 a barrel.
Israel’s wishlist
Before he had even arrived at the White House, therefore, Netanyahu had been warned against trying to push Trump towards resuming major operations in Iran.
But the Israeli prime minister still has other items on his wishlist. This includes persuading Trump to support Israel’s refusal to withdraw its troops from Lebanon until Hezbollah’s military infrastructure has been completely dismantled.
But the leaked recording of Trump’s expletive-laden rebuke of Netanyahu at the beginning of June for refusing to heed his advice to de-escalate Israeli operations in Lebanon, suggests that this might also be a tough sell for the Israeli leader.
Netanyahu was once able to exploit Trump’s unpredictability and appeal to his instincts for self-aggrandizement. Now, he is a much-diminished figure in Washington, and his political interests seem to be best served by actions that Trump has identified as threats to his own.
He is now the one buffeted by Trump’s erratic decision-making and tendency to blame anyone but himself for failure. Shutting Israel out of negotiations with Iran, selling F-35s to Turkey and raising the prospect of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia all run counter to Israeli interests.
But Iran’s increasing boldness may yet play in Netanyahu’s favor. Tehran’s has rejected Oman’s proposal to share management of the Strait of Hormuz. It then launched strikes against a US military base in Jordan, despite Trump’s decision to halt military operations. The US and Saudi Arabia responded by attacking Iran-based militias in Iraq.
Iran’s refusal to abandon its core strategic objectives, and its apparent interpretation of Trump’s restraint as weakness, may ultimately give Netanyahu the renewed US involvement in the conflict he has been seeking.
Saudi Arabia Taps Veteran Diplomat as Ambassador to Syria
[DAMASCUS] Saudi Arabia has appointed diplomat Ghazi bin Rafea Al-Enezi as its new ambassador to Syria, succeeding Faisal Al-Mujfel, in the latest step in the restoration of relations between Riyadh and Damascus. The process formally began in 2023 and gained further momentum following the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in December 2024.
Al-Enezi took the oath of office before Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, on behalf of King Salman bin Abdulaziz, during a ceremony held in Jeddah on Tuesday. The ceremony included several newly appointed Saudi ambassadors to other countries.
Faisal Al-Mujfel, the outgoing ambassador, oversaw the initial phase of the restoration of Saudi diplomatic representation in Damascus before being appointed the Kingdom’s ambassador to France. Earlier this month, Al-Mujfel presented a copy of his credentials to the French Foreign Ministry.
Al-Enezi is regarded as one of Saudi Arabia’s leading experts on Syrian affairs. He previously served as director-general of the Saudi Foreign Ministry’s Department of Arab Countries and participated in several official visits and meetings concerning Syria.
In May 2023, while holding the rank of minister plenipotentiary, Al-Enezi led a Saudi technical delegation to Damascus to discuss the technical and logistical arrangements for reopening the Kingdom’s embassy and resuming the diplomatic mission’s operations.
Saudi Arabia closed its embassy in Damascus and withdrew its diplomats in 2012 in response to the Assad government’s violent crackdown on protests.
After more than 11 years of suspended relations, Riyadh and Damascus agreed in May 2023 to resume operations at their diplomatic missions as Syria was readmitted to the Arab League.
Saudi Arabia officially reopened its embassy in Damascus in September 2024, approximately three months before the fall of the Assad regime. Riyadh subsequently expanded its contacts with Syria’s new leadership while supporting efforts to restore stability and strengthen political and economic cooperation with Damascus.
The selection of Al-Enezi, who was directly involved in the initial arrangements to reopen the embassy, reflects Riyadh’s desire to maintain continuity in its handling of the Syrian portfolio as relations between the two countries move from restoring diplomatic representation toward broader bilateral cooperation.
Woman Dies After ‘Freak’ Wine Glass Accident at Party
A 32-year-old woman who died after allegedly falling onto a wine glass during a dinner party is now at the center of a chilling death investigation after police said witness accounts did not add up.
Ilda Beatriz Goyochea died nearly a week after suffering a severe neck wound inside her home in La Rioja, a province in northwestern Argentina, according to Argentinian outlet La Voz. What was first described as a horrifying freak accident is now being investigated as a possible crime.
The incident reportedly happened during a gathering at Goyochea’s home. Witnesses initially claimed she fell onto a wine glass, causing the fatal injury. But attorneys for her family say the wound raises disturbing questions about what really happened that night.
According to the family’s attorney, Fernando Gabriel Brizuela, Goyochea suffered a straight cut to her neck measuring between three and four inches long.
“That characteristic would not be compatible with a wound caused by a broken glass, which normally produces an irregular cut,” Brizuela said.
The troubling detail appears to have pushed authorities to take the case more seriously. Two people who were at the dinner party were taken into preventative custody after a judge found contradictions in their statements about the incident.
The judge also ordered the Homicide Division of the La Rioja Police to investigate Goyochea’s death.
“An arrest warrant of this nature is never issued without solid grounds,” Brizuela said.
Still, an attorney for the suspects insists there was no attack and no motive. Lawyer Soledad Varas said the gathering was simply a night among longtime friends that ended in tragedy.
“It was a gathering of friends. They’ve known each other for years, and there were no prior conflicts between them,” Varas said.
Prosecutors, however, have argued that the absence of an obvious motive does not rule out criminal intent.
An autopsy is expected to play a key role in the case, especially in determining whether Goyochea’s neck wound could have been caused by broken glass or whether it points to something more sinister.
Goyochea was initially taken to a private clinic after the incident, but she was later transferred to a hospital because of the severity of her injuries. She died nearly a week later.
Her family is now demanding answers about what happened inside the home, including how long it took the other party guests to call for help after she was injured.
Investigators are also reviewing security camera footage from the area to determine whether anything suspicious happened outside the home on the night of the gathering.
For now, what began as a reported freak accident has turned into a disturbing mystery, with police trying to determine whether Goyochea’s death was truly the result of a shattered wine glass — or something far darker.
Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed.
By the end of 2020, Kentucky’s newly elected Gov. Andy Beshear had one goal above all others: Keep people alive. The state was battling two merciless threats. COVID-19 was killing hundreds of people each month, and deadly drug overdoses were among the highest in the nation. Calling addiction a disease that breeds in isolation, Beshear worried people would stop seeking treatment for fear of contracting COVID-19.
So Beshear set out to make drug treatment easier to access. Kentucky joined more than 40 other states in lifting some restrictions on Medicaid, which served most of the Kentuckians enrolled in substance abuse programs: Recovery centers were allowed to offer expensive treatment to clients without seeking approval from state Medicaid insurers.
By 2023, as the pandemic waned, other states restored Medicaid requirements that treatment centers gain prior approval before providing addiction treatment. Kentucky stayed the course. That year, providers offered more than 1,100 spots for people seeking long-term treatment that allows them to live in a facility, a state record and more slots per capita than any other state.
But as the Medicaid bills for all that treatment started piling up, so did the warnings.
In 2024 letters to Beshear’s administration and in at least three public meetings, experts across the health industry said that as a result of the 2020 changes, drug treatment providers were billing too much for subpar care that was leading to worse outcomes. By December 2025, the Kentucky attorney general’s office said Medicaid fraud in drug treatment had become a primary “area of concern.”
Despite the warnings, the Beshear administration did little to rein in the skyrocketing state spending.
Almost all those warnings came true.
In a February 2025 meeting about soaring Medicaid costs, Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Lisa Lee said the previous year’s spending on behavioral health and addiction treatment had reached an unprecedented $2.3 billion. Stuart Owen, who works for a Kentucky Medicaid insurer, told a state advisory committee months earlier that much of that spending was driven by the drug treatment industry, including “unscrupulous providers who are exploiting the heck out of that for money.”
The payout was especially lucrative for one company, Addiction Recovery Care. ARC was Kentucky’s largest drug treatment provider and the largest recipient of state funds between 2019 and 2025. This spring, the Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported on how ARC exploited Kentucky’s loosened spending controls and may have falsified billing.
Beshear has been unapologetic about state spending on drug treatment. In an interview in early June with ProPublica and the Lexington Herald-Leader, he pointed to the continued decline in drug overdose deaths as proof that he made the right choice when he did not force treatment centers to show that costly drug recovery services were medically necessary before treating people for addiction.
“If we’d gone back in time too early and changed things too drastically, how many more people would have died that we’ve saved? With four straight years of drug overdose decreases, they can throw blame at me,” Beshear said. “We’ll talk about dollars, but there are people’s kids that are still alive today because they were able to get addiction treatment services and get them quickly.”
While Kentucky’s overdose deaths declined significantly between 2020 and 2025, experts said the drop was not unique. Other states hit hard by the opioid epidemic also saw year-over-year decreases in fatal overdoses, including states that didn’t loosen Medicaid billing rules, like Tennessee and West Virginia.
Academic studies mostly agree that the drop in the death rate around the country had more to do with declining opioid prescriptions, an increase in the use of the drug naloxone to reverse overdoses, and less fentanyl in the drug supply. Medicaid and behavioral health experts in Kentucky have said in state hearings that some of the services drug treatment companies billed the most for were not directly associated with a decline in overdose deaths.
Nonetheless, Kentucky’s policies allowed ARC and other companies to bill more and more for services like peer support groups rather than those led by a licensed doctor or therapist. At one time ARC treated about one-third of the Kentuckians seeking drug treatment in the state; more than half of the services it billed for were the same lower-level services that Medicaid experts warned were being abused, according to state data.
The FBI has been investigating ARC for two years, and more recently, the company’s troubles have intensified. This week the Department of Justice announced it had reached a $16 million settlement with ARC over Medicaid fraud allegations. The company directed employees to falsely bill Medicaid for services like peer support, according to the allegations, which stem from a 2023 whistleblower lawsuit filed by three former ARC employees.
The settlement resolved the allegations, the Department of Justice said, and there has been no determination of liability. In another investigation, the DOJ last month indicted ARC’s leader, Tim Robinson, for wire fraud and money laundering for a separate alleged scheme to defraud multiple lenders. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
The company said in April it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”
The Department of Justice recently indicted Tim Robinson, right, founder of Addiction Recovery Care, for wire fraud and money laundering.Ryan Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader
ARC has over the last two years been forced to close most of its facilities, resulting in a 56% decrease in long-term residential treatment beds statewide, according to the most recent data available.
By 2025, Republicans had seen enough and passed a bill requiring treatment centers to seek approval from insurers before providing treatment services. Beshear vetoed the bill, saying it “will put up barriers to and delay healthcare for Kentuckians.” Republicans overrode the veto, citing waste, fraud and abuse.
A Raft of Warnings
At public meetings and in letters throughout 2023 and 2024, Medicaid insurers and actuaries warned that Beshear’s decision not to reinstate the spending guardrails sooner had allowed billing abuse by drug treatment providers to proliferate.
Some of those Medicaid insurers sent warning letters to providers, some who were suspected of overbilling, on how to appropriately bill. At least one also tried to limit excessive billing by setting its own guidelines for services deemed “intensive, high cost and/or have the potential for overutilization,” according to a memo from Passport by Molina Healthcare, one of Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers, referring to peer support services. Peer support is similar to a 12-step program.
In August 2024, the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, which represents the state’s Medicaid insurers, sent a letter telling the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services that weak oversight had allowed “unnecessary” spending on treatment and that the services treatment centers were billing the most for weren’t leading to better health outcomes for patients.
The letter warned that addiction treatment providers were overbilling for services that weren’t based on evidence or provided by a licensed doctor or therapist.
Part of the solution, the association said in subsequent public hearings, was to reinstate the spending guardrails, known as prior authorization, that Beshear had removed during the pandemic. The prior authorization process is supposed to prevent providers from billing fraudulently or excessively for medically unnecessary services by forcing providers to get permission from insurance companies before administering care.
Tom Stephens, president of the group representing Kentucky’s five Medicaid insurers and the letter’s author, said in an interview that it was not the first time Medicaid insurers had shared concerns with the Beshear administration; it was “simply one example of concerns that had been raised over time.”
Asked about this letter, Beshear spokesperson Scottie Ellis wrote that the governor “monitored the concerns expressed publicly and those shared with his administration” and that the state health agency worked with Medicaid insurers to address them. Ellis declined to answer follow-up questions about what specific measures the administration took during that time.
More warnings followed. The next month, Somerset Mayor Alan Keck also wrote to the Beshear administration asking it to reinstate Medicaid spending controls.
Keck, whose rural southeastern Kentucky county was hit hard by opioids, told the state health secretary that treatment centers across his region were recruiting patients from out of state and using company addresses to establish residency for them in order to bill Kentucky Medicaid. He also said some companies were fraudulently billing Medicaid by misrepresenting the services they provided.
“Our communities are seeing an influx of sober living facilities that are taking advantage of Kentucky’s Medicaid system and the lax requirements that linger from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Keck wrote to then-health Secretary Eric Friedlander.
Keck, who lost a Republican primary for governor in 2023, said recently that Friedlander never responded to his letter. He believes Beshear’s administration should’ve done more to rein in the drug treatment industry’s “explosive growth.”
Beshear’s spokesperson didn’t address questions about whether the administration responded to Keck.
In November and December 2024, officials from Anthem and WellCare, two Medicaid insurers, reinforced their concerns in meetings with legislators and Medicaid officials.
The state’s own data from that period supports the insurers’ claim that the state was paying heavily for services that required little or no time from licensed doctors and therapists: Kentucky behavioral health providers were paid more than $147 million for peer support services in 2023 and 2024, Lee, the state Medicaid commissioner, told lawmakers in February 2025. During that time, Medicaid payments for psychoeducation jumped from $40.4 million to more than $168 million.
Psychoeducation is normally a part of regular appointment when a clinician explains a diagnosis and treatment plan to a patient. Most of the money spent in Kentucky on psychoeducation went to ARC. Medicaid insurers warned Kentucky was one of the only states that allowed this service to be billed for separately, and providers were abusing it.
At the heart of all of this was the suspension of prior authorization, which had served as the only check on the overuse and overbilling for low-quality care. Without it, Kentucky’s treatment landscape became a Medicaid free-for-all, said Shelby Steuart, a professor who studies health policy at the University of Maryland.
“It just became an opportunity for people to make money,” she said.
When asked about these warnings and the reasons Beshear didn’t reinstate Medicaid spending guardrails sooner, the governor’s office said his decision “helped save lives.”
Ellis, the spokesperson for Beshear, said in an email that amid the public warnings, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the state’s health agency, met with Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers “to discuss concerns” about the spike in spending on drug treatment.
She said that the administration sent a letter in November 2024 to clarify when and how to bill for certain services Medicaid insurers had flagged, which resulted in a more than $100 million decline in billing from 2025 to 2026. But, as the attorney general’s Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control told lawmakers in December 2025, billing increased by $40 million for other services that experts warned were being abused.
Ellis said the policies should be measured by lives saved. “In the end, actions taken by Gov. Beshear and his administration have decreased overdose deaths for four straight years,” she said.
“Willfully Ignorant, Derelict in Their Duties”
In 2024, ARC disclosed what it called billing errors that resulted in overpayments from the state, according to emails obtained through Kentucky’s open records laws.
About that time, Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers began to raise questions about excessive billing and started to sever contracts with the company. ARC turned to the state’s health agency for help, asking the health secretary to delay reinstating spending controls and to enact a system that would force Medicaid insurers to continue working with ARC.
“Time is of the essence,” ARC founder Robinson wrote in a September 2024 email to Friedlander.
Beshear’s administration balked at forcing insurers to work with the company, but ultimately declined to reinstate tighter spending controls. That year ARC was paid a record $103 million by Kentucky Medicaid, mostly for services Medicaid insurers warned were being abused.
In a June interview, Beshear defended that decision and denied that his 2020 order led to a rise in Medicaid fraud or abuse.
Beshear said that by the time Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature reinstated spending controls in July 2025, he was in the process of coordinating with the state’s health agency to enact some spending guardrails, but acknowledged that “admittedly, the Cabinet was probably taking too long,” he said.
Read More
Republicans have accused Beshear of mismanaging the state’s Medicaid program. During the 2025 legislative session, they revoked the governor’s power to make changes to Kentucky Medicaid without their permission. Beshear vetoed that bill, which included a provision to reinstate tighter spending controls, but the legislature overrode his veto.
Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel, who championed the bill, said in March 2025 that Beshear’s administration “had to be one of three things: willfully ignorant, derelict in their duties, or complicit. It was just too much money in one space for them not to have known better.”
Beshear in June said he’ll take the hit; at the end of the day, he said, the tide of addiction in Kentucky has receded, and it was worth it.
“If we continue at this pace, there’s a chance we end an epidemic that started in our lifetime,” Beshear said. “Opening up services through Medicaid in general to more people has been one of, if not the, most important things we’ve done to get people back on track.”
Yet more qubit tech: New quantum dot options, diamond vacancies
If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech’s ability to scale. We’ll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any complex computations, and the ability of any technology to get us there is the subject of debate.
So even as some technologies can now support thousands of qubits, some competitors are still working on a small handful of qubits—the companies behind them are convinced that they have the potential to scale more effectively.
One of those technologies involves quantum dots that hold a single electron. Their advantage is that we can manufacture them using the same tech we use to build traditional processors, an approach that has proven to be scalable. This week saw two new papers describing different ways of using quantum dots, one of which was appealing enough that IBM bought the company that developed it. Separately, another company has released a processor showing 100 individual electrons being held in diamond defects, technology that wasn’t obvious could scale.
Flipping spins
The first news comes from a publication in Nature from a company called HRL Laboratories, the descendant of the research program launched by Howard Hughes. HRL is using manufactured quantum dots, a distinct technology from the dots used in displays, although it relies on some of the same physics principles. Both approaches use a structure that traps electrons in a region smaller than the electron’s wavelength. In displays, this allows control of the wavelength that the material emits.
For qubits, the traps are far smaller and serve to hold a single electron in place. Critically, they can be manufactured; with the right wiring, electromagnetic interactions can trap a single electron in a small patch of silicon. Once trapped, the electron’s spin, which can be up, down, or a superposition of the two, can be used as a qubit. While this technology can scale easily—we’re very good at putting wiring into silicon at scale—electron spins are hard to keep stable and are typically controlled via microwaves, requiring a separate control system.
But “typically” doesn’t mean “always,” and HRL is describing a different tech. It requires three separate quantum dots, each holding an electron, with the surrounding electronics controlling how much the spins of these three electrons can interact. That’s critical because, under certain conditions, no two electrons can have the same spin. This explains why atomic orbitals fill up the way they do, with each energy level holding just a pair, one spin-up, the other spin-down. Enabling them to interact can alter their spins.
To do operations on this kind of qubit, you simply need to control which electrons are interacting and to what extent. That is controlled electronically, allowing us to eliminate microwaves entirely. Everything is handled via wiring, eliminating the need for lots of microwave-carrying cabling into the refrigeration system that keeps the hardware near absolute zero.
HRL spends much of the paper describing its control system, which sits at an intermediate level of refrigeration and consists of a traditional processor optimized for low-temperature and low-power operations, consuming less than 3.5 watts despite being manufactured on a 130 nm process. Instructions for operating the qubits are compiled elsewhere, then loaded into the controller, after which it operates autonomously. Communications with the chip that holds the qubits are handled by a superconducting ribbon cable.
The system HRL describes had 18 qubits, and the company ran a simple error-correction code on it, demonstrating a logical error rate of less than 1 percent. That’s well below what has been achieved with other technology, but it’s an important validation that the problems HRL is facing are likely to be in the realm of engineering rather than physics.
Hybrid machines
Although the paper was published by HRL, the progress it has made has since become the property of IBM. That’s notable because IBM has bet big on competing technology in which qubits are held in a manufactured device called a transmon and controlled with microwave pulses—precisely the control system that HRL was trying to avoid. It’s not an obvious fit at first, so we asked IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta about the decision.
“At a high level, I’m a strong believer in silicon technology—superconducting qubits are built on silicon, spins are built on silicon,” Gambetta told Ars. “It gives us flexibility to keep both parts going in parallel, build on the same foundation.” Right now, that foundation allows rapid iteration and testing of designs. IBM has typically released a new processor architecture every year, refining it over two or three generations before the next one arrives.
But Gambetta suggested that in the longer term, this raises the possibility that HRL tech will appear in an IBM system, operating alongside IBM’s existing tech. “As we look at the error correction codes going forward, some codes are better at being memories, some are better at being magic state creation,” Gambetta said. “I want to have the flexibility to build my hardware that maximizes both of them.”
Other spin tech
The same issue of Nature includes a separate paper on quantum-dot qubits from a group at Delft University of Technology. We covered their technology in May, but in short, it involves qubits based on single electrons in quantum dots and focuses on moving electrons and their spins around.
One problem with quantum dots and other manufactured qubits is that their connections are dictated by the wiring of the chip they’re on. Since error correction codes are based on the geometry of the connections among qubits, this means committing to one or a small number of error correction codes when the chip is manufactured. If better code is developed or if some operations are easier to perform with a different code, you’re out of luck until the next generation of chips.
Qubits based on trapped ions or neutral atoms don’t have this limitation. The qubits can be moved around so that any one can hypothetically be connected to any other. This provides a great deal of algorithmic flexibility and efficiency; their backers expect it’s enough to overcome the relatively slow operations compared to silicon-based qubits.
In May, however, the Delft team showed that an individual spin could be moved from one quantum dot to a neighboring, unoccupied one and that this approach could scale—the spin could be moved through several intervening dots and end up on the opposite side of the chip from where it started. In theory, this means any two spins could be moved around arbitrarily, brought into proximity, and entangled. The approach combines the advantage of manufacturing with the flexibility of atom-based systems.
Wednesday’s paper expands on that, creating a bus that electrons can be moved along, with a number of bus stops where they can be stored when not needed. We need a lot more hardware to get this to work, but that hardware is very compact, and the flexibility can be powerful.
The team describes a 1.2 micrometer bus route and says that the fidelity of sending a spin from one end to another and back is nearly 98 percent. Using a handful of spins, the researchers implement a small error-correction code. They also characterize the sources of error in their system, finding that most of it stems from two sources: noise that arises during the spin exchanges needed for entanglement and the loss of coherence while the qubits are being moved or idling, a common problem with spin qubits.
Diamonds are a qubit’s best friend?
A separate technology went pretty quiet after we looked at it a decade ago: nitrogen vacancies in diamonds. A diamond is a regular array of carbon atoms, all sharing bonds with their neighbors. But impurities can be scattered throughout the array, including the incorporation of nitrogen. Nitrogen can form one less bond than carbon, so it leaves a neighboring carbon with a single unbonded electron. The spin of that electron can be manipulated just like the spin of one held in a quantum dot.
The problem has been that it’s very difficult to control where nitrogen vacancies end up within the diamond. While it’s relatively easy to run wires to them after they’re identified, every chip made to work with nitrogen vacancies is bespoke; if you use a standardized chip layout, there’s no guarantee that there will be one—and only one—nitrogen vacancy where the wiring expects it to be. Saxon Q, a spinout of the Universität Leipzig, has apparently developed a technique that can put nitrogen vacancies within a 10-nanometer radius.
The company’s hardware is striking in several ways, most notably because it runs at room temperature. The machines it is building fit in a standard rack mount and plug right into a normal power supply. The other notable feature is its modular design; the company builds a “core” with eight qubits and can integrate multiple cores in a single rack. It announced last week that it is selling units with over 100 qubits total, which it expects to begin shipping within a few months. Larger systems are expected next year.
Both will be too small to do interesting error-corrected computations. But Saxon Q says its individual hardware qubits have a gate fidelity of over 99.9 percent, making the technology competitive with others on the market. So once again, we return to where we started: The key question remains whether the technology can scale.
