The Samsung S95H is the company’s new flagship OLED TV for 2026, and it’s a decidedly different beast compared to previous Samsung S95 series OLEDs. What’s most immediately different about the Samsung S95H is a beveled metal frame surrounding the set’s screen. Samsung calls this new design FloatLayer, and it gives the TV a picture frame look when flush-mounted to a wall.

Along those lines, the S95H is the first OLED TV to support the Samsung Art Store, a subscription service that lets viewers display a selection of over 3,000 artworks on the TV, including ones from leading museums like the Met, the Museo del Prado, and the Louvre.

The Samsung S95H features a new FloatLayer design that surrounds the screen with a metal frame.

Adding to the S95H’s high art credentials is a new version of Samsung’s Glare Free screen with OLED HDR Pro to better maintain contrast even when viewing in brightly lit rooms. A new QD-OLED Penta Tandem display panel used in the S95H is also said to be 30% brighter than last year’s S95F, which is another factor that will help with bright room viewing. Samsung is a bit cagey about revealing which raw panels are used in which screen sizes, but we believe the QD-OLED panel will be used in 55-inch, 65-inch and 77-inch screen sizes while the 83-inch model will use a W-OLED panel.

With the S95H series, which is available in 55, 65, 75, and 83-inch screen sizes and priced from $2,499 to $6,499, Samsung is clearly attempting to port its The Frame TV concept to the premium OLED TV market. Is it a comfortable fit? Let’s take a look and find out.

Before we do that, let’s briefly cover two additional OLED TV series Samsung announced for 2026. The S90H series is available in 42, 48, 55, 65, 77 and 83-inch screen sizes priced from $1,399 to $5,299. These models also feature a Glare Free screen. Rounding out Samsung’s new OLED offerings is the S85H series, which will be sold in 48, 55, 65, 77 and 83-inch sizes priced from at $1,199.99 to $4,499.99.

Features

The S95H series is Wireless One Connect Ready. That’s a new feature for a Samsung OLED TV, and one that gives you the option to pair it with Samsung’s Wireless One Connect Box. And doing so will also give you a total of eight HDMI 2.1 ports with 4K/165Hz support – four on the unit itself and 4 on the wireless One Connect box. That’s a lot of inputs. (The wireless connection is 4K/165Hz-capable.)

For the S95H series, Samsung is using the same NQ4 AI Gen3 Processor found in its 2025 flagship TVs. This processor brings a host of AI-based picture enhancements such as 4K AI Upscaling Pro for lower-resolution content, AI Motion Enhancer Pro, and an Adaptive Picture function that uses AI to optimize pictures based on the content genre. Another new feature is AI Customization, which can create a custom picture setting based on the viewer’s response to a series of images, and there’s also Real Depth Enhancer, a feature first introduced in 2025 Samsung TVs that analyzes pictures in real-time to enhance foreground detail.

Gamers who skip Samsung’s Wireless One Connect Box will still find plenty to work with. The S95H includes four HDMI 2.1 ports that support up to 165Hz, along with FreeSync Premium Pro and HDR10+ Gaming for smoother, more responsive play. Samsung’s Gaming Hub also returns with a deep bench of cloud services, including Xbox, NVIDIA GeForce Now, Luna, Blacknut, Antstream, and Boosteroid, giving players multiple ways to jump into games without a console.

A 4.2.2-channel, 70W speaker array is used for the S95H’s sound. Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound+ feature ensures that dialogue and sound effects accurately follow the onscreen action, and Active Voice Amplifier can be used to dynamically enhance dialogue. Owners of compatible Samsung soundbars can also take advantage of Q-Symphony, a feature that combines the output of the TV’s speakers with the soundbar for an enhanced presentation.

Last but not least, Samsung includes a set of support feet with the S95H for viewers who choose not to wall-mount the TV.

Hands-on with the Samsung S95H OLED TV

Samsung invited eCoustics to its New Jersey headquarters in early March to spend some hands-on time with the S95H and some of its other new TVs. As part of that process, I was able to make a full set of measurements on a 65-inch S95H.

As mentioned above, Samsung has said that the new S95H OLED is 30% brighter than last year’s Samsung S95F. While I didn’t review the S95F, I can confirm that the S95H is the brightest OLED TV I’ve yet measured, topping even the very bright LG G5 OLED on that front.

Measured on a 10% white window pattern, the S95H’s peak HDR brightness in the Standard picture mode was 2,553 nits, and it measured 251 nits on a 100% (fullscreen) pattern. Peak HDR brightness was notably lower in Filmmaker Mode, measuring 1,072 nits on a 10% window, and 251 nits fullscreen.

The S95H’s peak HDR brightness (10% window) in Standard mode is comparable to some of the best mini-LED TVs on the market, even exceeding Samsung’s own flagship QN90F mini-LED TV from 2025 on that parameter.

At the S95H’s default Filmmaker Mode picture settings, P3 color space coverage measured 99.9% and BT.2020 coverage was 88.4%. Those are stellar results, and they also exceed what I measured on last year’s OLED flagship from LG, the G5.

For subjective testing, I opted to use the TV’s Movie picture mode, which produced a brighter picture than Filmmaker mode. I also watched content in both dark and bright room conditions to evaluate the effectiveness of the S95H’s Glare Free screen.

Checking out Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (in 4K, using a Kaleidescape movie player as a source), the S95H’s picture looked nothing short of fantastic. Shadows were deep and detailed, and the movie’s rich colors popped on the screen. The computer-generated animation in Into the Spider-Verse is finely textured, and the S95H easily revealed the intricate patterns and graphic overlays in the backgrounds.

The movie Alpha is a known torture test for HDR tone mapping on TVs owing to its 4,000 nits HDR transfer. (Most 4K/HDR movies max out at around 1,000 nits.) Watching a scene where a figure is positioned against a bright sunset, the S95H’s excellent tone mapping preserved image contrast without eliminating highlight detail.

Next up on the S95H was the opening sequence from the movie Baby Driver – another torture test, this one for motion handling. Samsung’s OLED showed a fair amount of motion judder on this scene in the default Movie mode. As usual with Samsung TVs, adjusting the blur and judder settings in the Custom motion preset fixed the issue, and it didn’t introduce any of the dreaded “soap opera” effect that makes movies look like TV shows.

Switching to the TV’s Standard picture mode to let the S95H display pictures at maximum brightness, I turned on the lights and watched some clips from the movie F1. While color accuracy took a hit in Standard mode, the picture looked incredibly bright for an OLED TV. And the set’s Glare Free screen also did a great job of preventing reflections from the room’s overhead lights without losing black depth and detail.

The Bottom Line

The Samsung S95H’s fancy FloatLayer design may not be for everyone, but it’s not surprising given the trend of TV makers trying to make their flagship models more luxurious and living room friendly. If that idea doesn’t ring a bell, check out the LG OLED evo W6 Wallpaper TV the company introduced at CES 2026.

Along with making their best TVs more visually appealing, companies like Samsung are pushing the brightness capabilities of OLED and introducing screen glare-reduction tech to negotiate the picture quality compromises that come with installing TVs in well-lit living rooms. From what I saw during the hour or so that I spent going hands-on with it, Samsung’s new flagship OLED TV manages to look great in both dark and bright lighting conditions, and the performance of its Glare Free screen is a marked improvement over last year’s Samsung S95F (which itself improved on its S95D predecessor when it came to black level retention).

Will the Samsung S95H turn out to be the best OLED TV of 2026? It’s a bit early out of the gate to make that determination, but Samsung’s new flagship OLED is certain to grab attention.

Pros:

• High brightness for an OLED TV
• Refined overall picture quality
• Effective Glare Free screen
• Wireless One Connect Ready
• Samsung Art Store support

Cons:

• Pricey
• New FloatLayer design not for everyone
• Limited picture brightness in Filmmaker Mode

Where to buy:

• 55-inch S95H: $2,499.99
• 65-inch S95H: $3,399.99
• 77-inch S95H: $4,499.99
• 83-inch S95H: $6,499.99

Related Reading:

A publicly accessible Amazon-hosted storage server allowed anyone with a web browser to access potentially hundreds of thousands of people’s personal data without needing a password. This included driver’s licenses, passports, and other personal information collected by the Duc App, a money-transfer service owned by Toronto-based Duales.

The Canadian fintech company said it resolved the data exposure on Tuesday after TechCrunch alerted its chief executive that one of the company’s cloud storage servers was publicly listing its contents, without a password.

The data was also stored unencrypted, meaning anyone with a link to the data was able to view it in full.

Anurag Sen, a security researcher at CyPeace who discovered the security lapse earlier in the week, contacted TechCrunch in an effort to notify the data’s owner. Sen said that anyone could view and download the data using their browser just by knowing the easy-to-guess web address of the storage server.

According to Sen, the Amazon-hosted storage server listed over 360,000 files containing government-issued documents and other information used by customers to verify their identity through “know your customer” checks. These files included user-uploaded selfies to prove their real-world likeness.

TechCrunch could not ascertain the precise number of exposed driver’s licenses and passports; however, several folders in the exposed bucket each contained tens of thousands of user-uploaded files, a sampling of which listed driver’s licenses, passports, and selfies.

Duales touts its app as a way for users to send money to other users, including overseas in Cuba and elsewhere. Its Android app listing on the Google Play app store shows more than 100,000 user downloads to date.

The files, which dated back to September 2020 and were being uploaded daily, also contained spreadsheets listing customer names, home addresses, and the dates, times, and details of their transactions.

When reached by email, Duales chief executive Henry Martinez González told TechCrunch that the data was stored on a “staging site,” referring to a website used primarily for testing, but did not explain why customers’ personal information was publicly accessible in the same database.

“All protections are in place,” Martinez said. “We are notifying the appropriate parties. We have not contracted any services from you.”

After TechCrunch emailed the company, the files on the storage server were made inaccessible, though a list of the server’s contents is still visible.

Martinez would not say if the company had the technical means, such as logs, to determine who or how many people accessed the data. 

Duc App’s website appeared briefly down on Thursday, and displayed a “bad gateway” error.

It’s not clear how or for what reason Duales left its Amazon-hosted storage server publicly open to the internet. In recent years, Amazon has added security checks to prevent users from inadvertently exposing their data to the internet after a series of high-profile incidents where several corporate giants, including a U.S. spy agency, published sensitive data to the web due to misconfigurations.

When reached by TechCrunch as part of our outreach to contact the app’s owner, Canada’s privacy regulator said it was seeking more information from the company.

“The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has reached out to the company to obtain more information and determine next steps,” a spokesperson for the regulator told TechCrunch by email, declining to comment further.

Duc App is the latest app in a list of recent security lapses involving the exposure of other people’s sensitive identity data. This data exposure comes as apps and websites are increasingly requiring their users to upload their government-issued documents to verify who they say they are but without taking enough steps to secure the data that they collect. 

Last year, popular app TeaOnHer exposed thousands of its users’ passports and driver’s licenses, which the app required users to upload before allowing them into the app’s gated community. Discord last year also confirmed a data breach affecting around 70,000 government-issued documents uploaded by users who sought to verify their age, amid a worldwide effort to enact online age checking laws.

• McAfee uncovers NoVoice malware hidden in 50+ Google Play apps with 2.3 million downloads
• Malware exploits old Android kernel and GPU flaws, persists even after factory reset
• Injects code into apps like WhatsApp to hijack sessions; Google has removed apps but infected devices remain compromised

Millions of Android devices were infected with malware spying on their WhatsApp chats and that even a factory reset wouldn’t wipe, experts have warned.

Researchers at McAfee have published an in-depth report on NoVoice, a new Android malware variant found in more than 50 apps hosted on the Google Play store, downloaded more than 2.3 million times combined.

Agustin Huerta discusses Anthropic’s new Code Review feature and the importance of AI governance.

As more and more organisations and professionals utilise technologies that make coding simpler, they potentially also introduce additional dangers, as the speed at which code can now be generated can lead to poor security practices and risky behaviours.  

In March, US AI and research company Anthropic launched Code Review, a new feature designed to catch and eliminate bugs before they ever make it into a software’s codebase. A move Globant’s senior vice-president of digital innovation, Agustin Huerta explained is reflective of a “shift in software development workflows as AI tools increasingly begin to own more of the software development lifecycle”.

He told SiliconRepublic.com, “It uses multiple specialised agents to review code for risks and bugs, cross-check amongst one another and prioritise the most relevant issues for reviewers.”

But he noted, while this does help teams to better manage higher volumes of code, it doesn’t replace human reviewers and raises a few concerns of its own when it comes to long-term security and best practice. 

Critical coding concerns?

“The concern isn’t that code can write and review itself, but that organisations may assume less oversight is needed,” said Huerta, who elaborated, saying that in reality the same principles that dictate and govern traditional software development remain equally as important when AI agents are involved, if not more so.

“The processes and workflow structures that once governed human coders should be adapted to govern agents, including workflow integration, human review, data readiness and observability. Teams need clear visibility into how code is generated, reviewed and promoted across environments, along with defined checkpoints to validate outputs.” 

He said, though agents can carry out a number of tasks, for example assist with, recommend and even execute prompts within a set of defined guidelines, code quality and risk management should remain the responsibility of people who themselves follow a clear process. 

He finds that nowadays, too many organisations are electing to delegate tasks, such as debugging and code writing to AI agents, rather than a real employee, amplifying the potential for risk, though it isn’t only AI hallucinations and errors sneaking past the automated workforce. 

“A more significant concern is an overreliance and unchecked trust in agent autonomy. Overdependence on agent-driven work without the right checks and balances can create blind spots and amplify small issues into larger problems, such as system outages or security risks.

“For example, version control systems and code repositories are a way to maintain observability over human-written code, supported by structured review processes. When these workflows become automated without incorporating an additional layer of human oversight, organisations risk compounding mistakes and introducing larger structural issues that are harder to detect or resolve.”

He finds, while human involvement is irreplaceable, equally as important, across the development lifecycle, is organisational transparency. “Organisations need visibility into how agents are accessing data, how they’re reasoning and why tasks are deemed complete. This level of observability is key in managing human-agent workflows, identifying areas for growth and maintaining accountability.”

Moreover, when correctly implemented and supervised there are clear and significant benefits.

Enterprising AI

AI agents undoubtedly bring a new element to the workplace, for better or for worse, but there are tangible benefits, such as the ability to boost productivity, minimise laborious, data complex tasks, support developers in the coding process and identify the issues or patterns that are often overlooked by people. 

Huerta said, “By taking on repetitive work that was previously handled by people, agents allow teams to focus on higher-value tasks and activities. These benefits are best realised when AI is used as an enhancement, not a replacement, for human judgment.

“The most successful models are a hybrid of human-agent teams, where the speed and scale of AI are combined with human oversight to refine and improve workflows, instead of just automating them.”

A key challenge going forward, he explained, will be in establishing balance between the adoption and implementation of AI agents and blending it seamlessly with responsible use. He said, as agents become more advanced and more capable, organisations risk losing sight of basic best practices in crucial areas such as those that govern software development.

“Leaders must continue to prioritise observability, governance and human-agent collaboration despite pressures to prove ROI from AI systems.”

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AiOs, or all-in-one computers, have been around for quite some time. And their promise is simple. They give you the big-screen experience of using a desktop, without the hassle of finding the right components and building a PC yourself. Despite me being a tech reviewer, AiOs have had me intrigued for a long time, since, spoiler alert, I cannot build a PC myself. It’s just intimidating, and the risk of ending up with something that doesn’t really work well for my workflow isn’t one I want to take. Asus is one of the few brands active in the AiO market, and their recently introduced VM670KA is the best of the bunch. That’s because it packs Ryzen AI 7 350, 16GB of RAM, and a 27-inch Full HD touchscreen display.

All this at a price of ₹1,12,990 sounds like a pretty sweet deal, especially considering the current world situation, which is plagued by sky-high RAM prices (blame your AI companions, please). But is it though? I called Asus and arranged to have the VM670KA AiO in for review. To do it justice, I swapped my MacBook and used the AiO as my primary WFH machine for over two weeks. Here’s how it stacked up.

Design & Hardware

My job as a tech reviewer is to work from home, meaning all I do every day is stare at my MacBook’s screen. It never really occurred to me that a 13-inch screen might be too small. However, the minute I configured the VM670, it struck me how much I was missing out. Everything was spaced out to perfection, which put less strain on my eyes. Coming back to the design, I think Asus has done an excellent job. It’s a sober yet sophisticated AiO that looks premium without being too loud. I do love the white color. Asus has shaved off 25% of the thickness compared to the VM670’s predecessor, and the bottom bezel is now narrower. All this translates to a sleeker setup that can rival any modern monitor.

The AiO comes with a stand that attaches easily with a single screw. The stand is made from metal, and it’s pretty sturdy since I’ve accidentally bumped into the table a few times. While there are no height-adjusting settings, you can tilt the screen up or down, which came in handy when I wanted to work standing up. The only gripe I have with the design is the retractable camera. Sure, it’s a great tool to protect one’s privacy by hiding away the webcam, but it also takes away the ability to mount any monitor lightbar. I’m a fan of those, so it was an annoyance. That said, the webcam quality was solid in artificial lighting.

Unlike modern laptops, the VM670 is full of useful ports. The backside houses three USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port, a LAN, a DC-in (for power), an HDMI-in for making the AiO a secondary display for your laptop, and an HDMI-out to connect to external monitors. There’s more, as underneath the belly, there’s one more USB 2.0 port for connecting the keyboard and mouse, an HDMI mode switcher, a Kensington Lock, and a headphone/microphone jack.

Keyboard & Mouse

To help you get running quickly, Asus bundles a mouse and keyboard with the VM670, and both connect via a 2.5GHz dongle stored inside the mouse. While I wouldn’t describe the keyboard as groundbreaking, it’s not bad either. There’s ample travel, and there’s some feedback when they are pressed. It’s just that the keys aren’t as sharp as the ones on my MacBook. You can sometimes feel that mushiness, but it’s not a big con, and I did get used to the keyboard quickly, without losing much of my typing speed.

The mouse, on the other hand, is plenty good. I had no problem with its tracking, even when playing some games, for that matter. The grips felt comfortable in my hand, and my wrists, which are super prone to fatigue, did not ache after long periods of use. Beyond that, the clicks were accurate, and the latency wasn’t noticeable to my eyes.

Display & Speakers

The Asus VM670KA features a 27-inch FHD IPS display with a 93% screen-to-body ratio and a 75Hz refresh rate. When I first got the AiO, I was worried that the 1080p resolution might not be enough for such a large display. Fortunately, I was proven wrong pretty quickly. From a normal viewing distance, I didn’t notice much pixelation when typing this review on the device. Still, I’d have loved to see a 1440p panel at this price. On the flip side, Asus has taken care of the color accuracy, with 100% coverage of the sRGB color space.

I recently caught up to the Breaking Bad hypetrain and decided to watch the season 3 finale on the VM670, and it was a very enjoyable experience. Colors looked super nice, the motion was smooth, and there wasn’t any glare from the light behind me since the display is matte-coated. The Dolby Atmos stereo speakers deserve the same praise as they can easily fill an entire room with powerful sound, without sounding harsh at higher volumes. The bass is decent, and the dialogue remains legible.

As mentioned earlier, the VM670KA has one more trick up its sleeve, and that’s a touchscreen. You might be wondering — what’s the point of a touchscreen on a desktop? The answer to that is children. An AiO makes perfect sense for parents to get for their children who might have online classes or need to work on a project. A touchscreen is a handy tool for that, and makes navigation much simpler.

Performance

Performance is what makes or breaks the experience with AiOs or any desktop, for that matter. If it can’t handle everyday work, then it’s of no use. At the beating heart of the Asus VM670KA sits the AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor, with 8 cores and 16 threads, rated for a maximum frequency of 5 GHz. Graphics is handled by the integrated Radeon 860M, and there’s 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD.

All of this results in strong everyday performance. The VM670 doesn’t struggle with typical workloads at all. Run 30 Chrome tabs at once? Watch HDR videos on YouTube or quickly switch from a game to an eBook before your parents notice. Not a problem. Never once did I notice a stutter in these tasks, and if your work mainly involves the browser, as mine does, then the performance is more than good enough.

I’m no video editor, but as this is a review, I decided to try my hand at it. The experience? Not bad at all. For those who mainly edit reels in 1080p or even 4K, the VM670 packs a punch. The timeline played smoothly, and render times weren’t too high.

While benchmarks don’t tell the full story of performance, they do paint a picture of a device’s performance ceiling. The VM670 scored 2,833 in Geekbench’s single-core and 10,254 in the multi-core test. Then I moved away from stressing the CPU to stressing the GPU, where the Radeon 860M scored 22,042 in the Geekbench test. For context, this performance is similar to that of the Intel Core i7-13620H processor found in the Asus ExpertBook P1.

Can you game?

Given the decent performance and appeal towards children, gaming may be on your radar as well. And I will set the expectations straight. You won’t be able to play AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 without dropping the quality to PS3 levels on the Asus VM670KA. If that’s a priority for you, the Strix or ROG line would serve you better.

That said, if you play light titles like Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, Fall Guys, or even F1 2025, then the AiO could be handy. I played all four and got over 60 fps in both Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant at medium settings. Fall Guys hit 60 FPS pretty easily, too, and F1 clocked about 45 FPS in medium settings. GTA V also runs, but the frame rates are limited to about 35-40.

Verdict

At ₹1,12,990, the Asus VM670KA isn’t cheap. But what it promises isn’t something anyone else can do. For the money, you get a big-screen desktop to work or study on without fiddling with a separate PC. The display is plenty decent, albeit a little less pixel-dense than I’d like. The speakers are super, and the performance can handle everyone’s workdays and even some light gaming/video editing. Not to mention the beautiful white design that makes the VM670KA look sweet.

A new quantum algorithm ran a 15-step nonlinear fluid simulation around a solid obstacle on real quantum hardware, the most physically complex publicly documented demonstration of its kind. The technique reduces qubit requirements and circuit depth, bringing industrial CFD applications closer to feasibility.

Finnish simulation company Quanscient and quantum middleware developer Haiqu have demonstrated what they describe as the most physically complex quantum computational fluid dynamics simulation run to date on real hardware.

The two companies ran a 15-step nonlinear fluid simulation around a solid obstacle,  fluid flowing around a shape, the kind of problem relevant to aircraft wing design or vehicle aerodynamics, on IBM’s Heron R3 quantum computer, using a new algorithm they developed together called the One-Step Simplified Lattice Boltzmann Method (OSSLBM).

Computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, is one of the most resource-intensive branches of engineering simulation. Modelling how fluids behave around complex shapes requires enormous classical computing power, and the demands grow non-linearly as simulations become more detailed.

Quantum computing has long been theorised as a potential path to simulations beyond classical limits, but turning that potential into practice has been constrained by the sheer number of qubits and the circuit depth, the length of the quantum computation, required to run even moderately complex scenarios without the calculation being overwhelmed by errors.

The OSSLBM algorithm addresses this directly. Built on the quantum Lattice Boltzmann Method (QLBM), an established approach to mapping classical fluid equations onto quantum computation, the new framework reduces the computational overhead of each step, allowing a longer multi-step simulation to stay within what current quantum hardware can reliably execute.

Haiqu’s middleware layer was central to this: it reduced circuit depth, developed new algorithmic subroutines, and applied targeted error-reduction techniques that allowed the system to complete a workflow that would otherwise have been out of reach for today’s devices.

The significance of the result lies in the obstacle. Previous quantum CFD demonstrations have largely focused on simpler linear scenarios, fluid behaviour without the complications of interacting with a solid boundary.

Modelling how a fluid moves around an object is a prerequisite for any industrially meaningful application. Professor Oleksandr Kyriienko, Chair in Quantum Technologies at the University of Sheffield, described the work as “an interesting and timely contribution to quantum CFD,” adding that more research of this kind is needed to reach industrially relevant quantum solutions.

Quanscient and Haiqu have been collaborating on quantum CFD since at least 2024, when they were finalists in the Airbus and BMW Quantum Mobility Challenge, and have previously demonstrated work on IonQ hardware via Amazon Braket. Industrial applications remain years away; the current work is a research milestone establishing that the approach is feasible on current hardware at this level of complexity.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems said on Thursday it would sell high-temperature superconducting magnets to Realta Fusion, the second in a string of deals that suggests the company will lean heavily on its magnet technology in the coming years to bring in much-needed revenue.

“It’s the largest deal of this kind to date for CFS,” Rick Needham, the company’s COO, told reporters on a call. 

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, or CFS, previously sold magnets to the WHAM experiment at the University of Wisconsin, which fusion startup Realta collaborates closely with. The physics behind WHAM underpins Realta’s approach to fusion power, which is known as a magnetic mirror reactor. 

In a magnetic mirror, plasma is confined into a shape that resembles two 2-liter soda bottles connected at the base. On each end, powerful magnets punch the plasma and force it back toward the center. Weaker magnets encircle the middle of the bottle shape. 

To make a more powerful reactor, Khosla-backed Realta would only need to expand the middle section, and because those magnets are less powerful, they’re cheaper. Per kilowatt-hour costs should fall as Realta’s reactors increase in size.

CFS is pursuing another form of magnetic confinement fusion called a tokamak. In a tokamak, D-shaped magnets cast powerful fields to keep plasma circulating in a doughnut-like shape inside. Over the years, the company has refined its magnets in pursuit of putting electrons on the grid from Arc, its future commercial-scale reactor that’s slated to be built in Virginia.

Both CFS’s and Realta’s existence stems from the magnets themselves. CFS was founded in 2018 after scientists at MIT realized that a new class of commercially available high-temperature superconductors could underpin a viable tokamak design. Realta was founded a few years later when physicists at the University of Wisconsin “saw that there was a new technology, a game changer that would enable us to go back to the [magnetic] mirror and avail of those engineering advantages that the concept has,” co-founder and CEO Kieran Furlong said.

In addition to the Realta and WHAM deals, CFS has also licensed its high-temperature superconducting magnet technology to Type One Fusion, which is working on a third type of reactor design known as a stellarator. While the latter deal doesn’t include CFS building actual magnets for the company, it could lead to that one day, Christine Dunn, CFS’s head of external communications, told TechCrunch.

The deals will help CFS pay off its investment in magnet manufacturing. The startup spent seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars building a factory capable of producing high-temperature superconducting tape designed to fusion-power specifications. So far, that material has gone toward building Sparc, the company’s demonstration reactor, which won’t turn on until later this year. There will be a gap until work begins in earnest on its commercial-scale power plant Arc. These deals keep the factory running in between.

“With Spark now 70% complete, it was excellent timing to start supporting Realta with our magnet manufacturing,” Needham said.

Because Realta and Type One are pursuing different reactor designs, CFS apparently doesn’t view them as directly competitive at the moment. In the marketplace, Realta and CFS are even further apart, with the former focusing initially on industrial applications that need large amounts of heat.

To date, CFS has raised nearly $3 billion — a large chunk of all venture dollars raised by fusion startups. That’s put the company in an enviable position, giving it the means to build key facilities like its magnet factory before competitors can. The startup pitches these deals as a service to the broader fusion industry, making available technologies that would cost many millions to replicate. That’s certainly true, but it also gives it access to even more venture investment, even if it’s in a roundabout way.

United Airlines is updating its iOS and Android mobile apps with several new features, including estimated security wait times to give travelers a better idea of when they should arrive at the airport. The move comes as the ongoing partial government shutdown has left TSA checkpoints understaffed.

In the “Travel” section of the United mobile app, travelers can now view security wait times for the airline’s U.S. hub airports in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York/Newark, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Users will see estimated wait times for specific lanes, including standard security and TSA PreCheck, throughout terminals serving United customers.

“We appreciate the work and professionalism of our TSA agents, and while most began receiving back pay earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shutdown continues and people want to stay informed about expected security wait times at our airports,” Jason Birnbaum, United’s chief information officer, said in a press release. “Our customers rely on our mobile app for all their travel needs, and this new feature lets them know what to expect and better plan their trip.”

The app is also rolling out updates designed for passengers with connecting flights. Travelers will now receive personalized, turn-by-turn directions to their next gate, complete with estimated walking times, real-time status updates, and tips for longer layovers. It will also provide a “heads up” if United can hold a plane for passengers with tight connections.

The app will offer automatic rebooking assistance as well. Instead of waiting in line to speak with an agent or manually searching for alternatives, United’s self-service tools will automatically present travelers with rebooking options, along with baggage tracking details and meal and hotel vouchers if they’re eligible for them, in cases where a flight is delayed or canceled.

The app has also integrated Apple’s “Share Item Location” feature for AirTag, allowing travelers who use an AirTag or other Find My network accessory to share their item’s location with United’s customer service team in the event that their baggage is lost.

Users will also receive text updates featuring real-time radar maps to inform them on how severe weather in one region of the country can affect flights in another.