Daily Tech & GNSS News Digest - March 25, 2026

SpaceX’s long-anticipated IPO moves from rumor to imminent reality as the company is said to be filing a prospectus as soon as this week, targeting a raise that would shatter every record in history. Meanwhile, Arm upended the semiconductor industry by releasing its first in-house chip in 35 years — with Meta as the launch customer — and Kleiner Perkins closed its largest-ever fund on a pure AI thesis. On the positioning side, Marlink’s fleet-wide data shows maritime GNSS interference has surged 50% and is spreading beyond conflict zones, while VectorNav expanded its tactical inertial series to handle the extreme dynamics of hypersonic and interceptor missions.

Tech News

SpaceX Targets $75 Billion IPO Filing as Soon as This Week

SpaceX is preparing to file its IPO prospectus with U.S. regulators as soon as this week, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, setting the stage for what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is targeting a capital raise in excess of $75 billion — more than double Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion 2019 record — with a June 2026 public debut on the table. Valuation models from financial advisers place SpaceX in a range of $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, which would make it larger than every company in the S&P 500 except Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The engine behind that valuation is Starlink, the company’s satellite internet service. Morningstar estimates SpaceX generated nearly $16 billion in revenue and $7.5 billion in EBITDA in 2025, driven almost entirely by Starlink subscriber growth. The filing would come after SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk’s xAI in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion — adding AI capabilities to its broadband and launch businesses. Bloomberg held a live Q&A Wednesday morning on the risks of the pre-IPO rush into SpaceX and OpenAI, reflecting how much retail and institutional demand has built around the anticipated debut.

The prospectus filing, if confirmed this week, would kick off a regulatory review period targeting a June listing — making SpaceX potentially the first of a trio of historic mega-IPOs, with OpenAI and Anthropic anticipated to follow.

Arm Releases First In-House Chip in Its 35-Year History — Meta Is the Debut Customer

In a landmark strategic pivot, Arm Holdings unveiled its first ever self-manufactured chip — the AGI CPU — marking the semiconductor giant’s transition from pure architecture licensing to competing in physical silicon. CEO Rene Haas announced the chip at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday. Meta is the first committed customer, with seven other companies signed on, including OpenAI, Cloudflare, and SAP. Arm stock jumped 15% on the news.

The AGI CPU packs up to 136 cores, draws 300 watts, and is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). Arm is forecasting the chip business will generate approximately $15 billion annually within five years — a figure that would fundamentally reshape the company’s economics, which today depend entirely on royalties paid by Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and Qualcomm. Meta’s participation is strategically significant: the company plans to deploy multiple gigawatts of AI data center capacity and is budgeting up to $135 billion in capital expenditures this year, giving Arm an immediately credible anchor volume customer.

The move puts Arm in direct competition with the very companies that license its architecture — a tension that will define the chip industry’s next chapter as hyperscalers seek to reduce dependence on any single silicon provider.

Kleiner Perkins Closes $3.5 Billion AI Fund — Largest in Its History

Kleiner Perkins raised $3.5 billion across two new funds dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported, marking the largest fundraise in the venture firm’s half-century history. The capital is structured as $1 billion for its 22nd early-stage fund targeting promising AI startups and $2.5 billion in a growth-stage vehicle for larger, cash-intensive AI companies — up sharply from the firm’s $2 billion raise less than two years ago.

The firm has positioned itself at the center of the AI funding wave with early stakes in Together AI, Harvey, and OpenEvidence, alongside existing positions in Anthropic and SpaceX — two companies expected to IPO this year. The fund’s focus extends across software, healthcare, transportation, and autonomy. The raise comes as AI growth-stage companies are consuming capital at unprecedented rates, with infrastructure players needing sustained injections to fund compute, talent, and deployment at scale.

Additional Headlines

Harvey Raises $200M at $11 Billion Valuation: Legal AI startup Harvey closed a new funding round co-led by GIC and Sequoia to expand its AI agents and grow legal engineering teams embedded with customers — cementing it as the dominant AI platform in enterprise law.
Kuaishou Q4 Revenue +12% on AI Monetization: Beijing-based Kuaishou Technology reported fourth-quarter revenue of 39.6 billion yuan ($5.7 billion), citing the rapid scaling of its generative AI tools as the primary growth driver, signaling that Chinese consumer AI is increasingly converting into revenue.
AI Is Upending Enterprise Software Contracts: Bloomberg reports that enterprise customers are increasingly refusing long-term software contracts, fearing AI-accelerated obsolescence — a structural shift that is forcing vendors to renegotiate deal structures and shorten commitment periods.
Iran War Seen Splitting the AI Boom: A Bloomberg opinion column argues the Iran conflict is bifurcating the AI investment landscape between defense-adjacent, resilient-infrastructure winners and consumer/enterprise applications exposed to energy price volatility and supply chain disruption.

GNSS News

Marlink Reports 50% Surge in Maritime GNSS Interference, Outlines 2026–2027 Resilience Roadmap

In a technical bulletin published March 25, maritime connectivity provider Marlink reported a 50% increase in detected GNSS interference incidents across its global customer fleet — a fleet-wide view spanning thousands of commercial vessels in active service. The surge in jamming and spoofing is concentrated primarily in the Middle East and along high-traffic geopolitical corridors, but Marlink’s data makes clear the problem is no longer confined to active conflict zones. The operational consequence that most concerns fleet operators is the effect on SATCOM antennas: when GNSS data is corrupted or falsified, antenna beam-pointing algorithms lose their geographic reference, causing antennas to lose satellite lock and triggering total loss of broadband connectivity and distress alerting — a compounding safety failure layered on top of the navigation hazard.

Marlink has issued operational guidance to its customer base, advising crews to restart antenna control systems when incorrect GNSS data is suspected, cross-verify vessel position against ECDIS, radar, and other onboard systems, and power-cycle affected terminals if communication services are lost. Looking ahead, Marlink’s 2026–2027 roadmap commits to integrating terrestrial eDLoran — the enhanced long-range radio navigation system that provides a GPS-independent timing and positioning backup — alongside enhanced inertial navigation systems into its managed service architecture. “Zero-trust” navigation configurations, treating all satellite positioning data as unverified until corroborated by independent sensors, are expected to become standard for vessels operating in the Red Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and Baltic by late 2026.

The Marlink report adds a critical fleet-operator data layer to the broader GNSS interference picture: where earlier coverage documented the scale of discrete crisis events, Marlink’s figures capture a persistent, broadening baseline of interference that is now routinely affecting merchant shipping in multiple regions simultaneously.

VectorNav Extends Tactical IMU and GNSS/INS Series to High-G Mission Profiles

VectorNav Technologies announced the addition of 90G and 250G accelerometer ranges and a 4,000°/sec gyroscope rate to its Tactical Series inertial measurement unit and GNSS/INS product line, as published by Inside GNSS on March 25. The enhanced specifications cover the full VN-110 IMU and VN-210 / VN-310 INS families and are drop-in compatible with existing platform installations — no changes to form factor, connector, or software interface — allowing defense programs to upgrade without redesign. Engineering units are available immediately for test and evaluation.

The capability extension directly addresses the dynamics of next-generation defense platforms operating at the edge of classical inertial sensor performance: interceptors, precision-guided munitions, hypersonic glide vehicles, and aggressively maneuvering unmanned systems all regularly exceed the 30G to 50G ranges that standard MEMS tactical IMUs handle. In GPS-denied or GPS-degraded environments — which, as the Hormuz and Eastern European jamming environments have demonstrated, is increasingly the operational norm — maintaining navigation accuracy through high-dynamic flight phases requires inertial sensors that do not clip or saturate during maneuvers. VectorNav is also expanding its production footprint with a new 100,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in 2026 to support growing defense program volumes and R&D scale.

Update — ESA Celeste LEO-PNT Launch Scrubbed Again: The March 25 launch attempt for ESA’s Celeste Pathfinder A satellites aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron from Māhia, New Zealand, was scrubbed a second time due to adverse weather conditions violating cloud and lightning commit criteria. No new target date has been announced. ESA confirmed the postponement on social media; the mission remains on track once a suitable weather window opens.

Key Takeaways

SpaceX’s IPO would redefine public market scale: A $75B raise at a $1.5–1.75T valuation would be more than twice the size of the largest IPO in history — and positions Starlink’s broadband revenue as the rare infrastructure-grade growth story capable of justifying a trillion-dollar debut.
Arm’s pivot to physical silicon challenges the licensing model it built the industry on: Releasing the AGI CPU with Meta as launch customer forces every Arm licensee to reckon with a supplier that now competes with them — a structural shift that will accelerate hyperscaler custom silicon programs as customers seek independence.
GNSS interference is a persistent global maritime infrastructure risk, not just a crisis event: Marlink’s fleet-wide 50% surge data and its 2026–2027 eDLoran/INS roadmap show that maritime operators are treating jamming and spoofing as an engineering baseline assumption — and building redundant navigation architectures accordingly.