Field Reliability Engineer

Musk's SpaceX to build $100bn launch facility in Louisiana. 3 hours ago Osmond ChiaBusiness reporter Multi-billionaire Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX has announced that it will build its largest launch site yet in the southern US state of Louisiana. Construction of the $100bn (£73bn) project - named Starbase, Louisiana - is due to start next year, with the 125,000-acre (50,585-hectare) site expanding on the company's operations beyond its current Texas headquarters and locations in Florida. It will be used to "support thousands of Starship flights a year with missions launching to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond," SpaceX said on Tuesday. In June, SpaceX shares started trading on New York's technology-focused Nasdaq in the world's biggest ever stock market debut. SpaceX said it aims to launch its first Starship flight from the new Louisiana base in 2029. The facility will add more than 3,000 jobs to the region, the company said. The Louisiana Economic Development agency said the average wage of workers at the base - the largest of its kind in the world - would be 192% more than the region's current average salary. It will also create more than 8,100 new jobs indirectly, the agency estimated. "The historic project will establish Louisiana as a global hub for next-generation aerospace, with the capacity and infrastructure needed to dramatically increase launch frequency and expand access to space," it added. The facility in Louisiana will share its name with another SpaceX site on the southern tip of Texas. In 2025, residents in an area of Cameron County, where the company has testing and development operations, approved incorporating the patch of land as a city called Starbase. Musk has set out ambitious goals for SpaceX, including plans to reach Mars, develop artificial intelligence (AI) models and launch data centres into space. In August, SpaceX and Tesla - Musk's electric vehicle and robotics firm - announced plans to build a $16.8bn artificial intelligence (AI) chip making complex in Texas called the Terafab. The facility aims to meet the companies' growing demand for computing power to support its projects including developing AI and robotics technology over the coming years. The newly-listed SpaceX is under pressure to convince investors that it will be profitable even as it pursues its expansion plans. Its shares have tumbled by more than 30% from the highs reached shortly after it began trading but are still higher than their $135 offer price.

Tesla doubles down on custom AI chips as Musk claims AI5 can beat NVIDIA on efficiency and cost. Ariel Lee, Taipei Aug 27, 2026, 08:00 0 Credit: AFP Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said the company's upcoming AI5 inference chip could deliver two to three times the performance per watt of Nvidia products when deployed in autonomous vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots, potentially at just around 10% of the... Picks for you

Walmart now fast-charges EVs at 100 stores in 20 states. Walmart's own-brand EV charging network now covers 100 stores in 20 states, with up to 400 kW per stall and both CCS and NACS plugs - a direct challenge to Tesla, Ionna and Electrify America on retail sites. Walmart said its company-owned EV fast-charging network has reached 100 store locations across 20 US states, with most sites carrying eight to 16 charging points rated up to 400 kW and fitted with both CCS and NACS connectors. Walmart Inc. (WMT) has crossed a threshold that turns a pilot into infrastructure: the retailer now runs its own electric-vehicle fast chargers at 100 store locations spread across 20 US states. Most of those sites carry eight to 16 charging points, each rated at up to 400 kW, and every stall is fitted with both CCS and NACS connectors - meaning a Tesla and a Ford can pull in side by side without an adapter. The milestone, electrive reported, marks the point at which Walmart stops being a landlord for other people's chargers and becomes a charging operator in its own right. That distinction matters more than the round number. Why 100 sites is a bigger number than it looks. Charging networks are usually counted in ports, not sites, and the site-level arithmetic here is unusually dense. With most locations carrying eight to 16 charging points, 100 stores implies something in the range of 800 to 1,600 individual stalls - an illustrative range based on the per-site figures Walmart disclosed rather than a reported port count. Either end of that band puts the retailer among the more meaningful DC fast-charging footprints built in the United States by a company whose main business is selling groceries. Density is the operational point. Networks fail customers not when they are absent but when they are occupied or broken. Eight to 16 stalls per site means a queue is unlikely and a single dead unit is an inconvenience rather than a wasted detour. Compare that with the two- and four-stall installations that characterised much of the first wave of US highway charging, and the design intent is obvious: Walmart is building for peak weekend traffic at a supercentre, not for the median Tuesday. Both plugs, no adapter, no argument. Fitting CCS and NACS to every stall is the quiet strategic decision inside this announcement. CCS - the Combined Charging System - is the connector standard most non-Tesla EVs sold in North America were designed around. NACS, the North American Charging Standard, is the Tesla-originated plug that most major automakers have since adopted for new models. Any network built for only one of them is, by construction, a network for half the parking lot. Dual-cable stalls cost more per unit and complicate the hardware, but they eliminate the single most common cause of a failed charging stop: the wrong plug. For a retailer whose entire charging thesis rests on capturing an incremental shopping trip, a driver who cannot connect is a customer who drives somewhere else. The 400 kW peak rating serves the same commercial logic - the faster the session, the more cars per stall per day, and the closer the dwell time gets to the length of an actual grocery run. Against Tesla, Ionna and Electrify America. Walmart is entering a market with three distinct incumbents and is not really competing with any of them on their own terms. * Tesla's Supercharger network is the scale benchmark and the reliability benchmark, built originally to sell cars and now opened progressively to other brands. Its siting logic is corridor-first. * Ionna, the automaker-backed joint venture, is explicitly trying to build the high-amenity charging "lounge" - comfort and canopy as differentiators. * Electrify America grew out of regulatory settlement money and has long been the default third-party option at retail and highway sites alike. What none of them own is the real estate. Walmart does. The economics of a charging site are dominated by land cost, grid connection and utilisation, and a retailer that already holds a paved, lit, permitted parking lot near a highway exit has removed the most expensive and slowest variable from the equation. It also has an ancillary revenue line the pure-play networks lack: the basket. Charging can be priced thin, or even at cost, if the session reliably pulls a shopper through the door. Charging can be priced thin, or even at cost, if the session reliably pulls a shopper through the door. That is the same insight convenience-store chains and coffee groups have been circling for years. Walmart's advantage is that its dwell time already matches a fast-charging session, without needing to invent a reason to linger. What the buildout means for battery and grid demand. Every 400 kW stall is a substantial grid connection request, and a site with eight to 16 of them is effectively a small industrial load dropped into a suburban parking lot. Utility interconnection queues, transformer lead times and demand charges - the fees utilities levy for peak power draw rather than total energy - are now the binding constraints on this kind of expansion, more than charger hardware itself. Sites of this density are also the natural home for stationary battery storage, used to shave peak draw and soften the demand-charge bill. For the upstream battery supply chain, retail fast charging is a demand-side signal rather than a direct order book. Charging density is what converts EV consideration into purchase for drivers without home charging - apartment dwellers, renters, anyone parking on a street. Removing that friction at 100 sites across 20 states nudges the addressable EV buyer pool wider, which is ultimately what cathode, anode and cell capacity decisions are priced against. Where the shares sat. Walmart shares last traded at 106.49, up 2.69% from a prior close of 103.70, with a session range of 104.00 to 106.59, as of the close on Monday, 24 August 2026. That was a conspicuously strong day against a mixed tape: the S&P 500 tracker (SPY) finished at $763.47, down 0.29%, and the Nasdaq 100 tracker (QQQ) closed at $706.32, down 1.00%, while the Dow 30 tracker (DIA) rose 0.27% to $533.65. Charging is not what moved the stock - a 100-site network is a rounding error against Walmart's capital budget. But it is a datapoint in the argument that has supported the shares for some time: that the store estate is an asset with uses beyond shelf space, whether that is pickup, last-mile delivery, advertising or, now, kilowatt-hours. What to watch next. Three things will show whether this is a genuine network or an amenity that plateaus. First, the pace of additions beyond 100 sites and whether the 20-state footprint broadens or deepens - filling in dense corridors is a different business from planting flags. Second, pricing: whether Walmart charges at market rates or uses electricity as a loss-leader to pull traffic, which would put real pressure on third-party operators at retail locations. Third, uptime, the metric on which every US charging network has so far been judged and mostly found wanting. Key facts. * Locations live: 100 Walmart stores across 20 US states * Per-site capacity: Most sites have 8-16 charging points, up to 400 kW * Connectors: Both CCS and NACS fitted * WMT last close: 106.49, +2.69% as of 24 Aug 2026, 20:00 GMT Frequently asked questions. How many Walmart stores now have fast chargers? Walmart operates company-owned EV fast chargers at 100 of its store locations, spread across 20 US states. Most of those sites are built with eight to 16 individual charging points, making them relatively dense installations by US standards rather than the two- or four-stall sites common in the first wave of American fast-charging deployment. What charging speed do Walmart's chargers deliver? The chargers are rated at up to 400 kW. That is a peak figure rather than a sustained rate for every vehicle, since actual charging speed depends on the car's battery, its state of charge and temperature. Still, 400 kW puts the hardware at the fast end of currently deployed US DC fast-charging equipment. Can Teslas use Walmart's chargers? Yes. Every stall is fitted with both CCS and NACS connectors. NACS is the Tesla-originated North American Charging Standard now adopted by most major automakers, while CCS is the standard most earlier non-Tesla EVs use. Dual connectors mean drivers of either plug type can charge without carrying an adapter. How does Walmart's network compare with Tesla's Superchargers? Tesla's Supercharger network remains far larger and is the benchmark for scale and reliability, with siting focused on highway corridors. Walmart's differentiator is not size but real estate: it already owns paved, permitted parking near major roads, and can pair a charging session with a shopping trip of roughly matching duration. Why does owning the parking lot matter for charging economics? Land acquisition, permitting and grid connection dominate the cost and timeline of a fast-charging site. A retailer that already controls suitable lots removes the slowest and most expensive variables. It also earns ancillary revenue from in-store spending, so charging itself can be priced thinly and still pay for the installation. Utility interconnection queues, transformer lead times and demand charges - the fees utilities levy on peak power draw - now bind harder than charger hardware supply. A site with eight to 16 stalls at up to 400 kW is effectively a small industrial load, which is why on-site battery storage is often paired with high-density charging hubs.