Besides a wealth of Fortnite skins based on Disney IP, it hasn’t really been clear what the entertainment company has gotten in return for its $1.5 billion investment in Epic from 2024. That could change this November, Bloomberg reports, when Epic releases a Disney-themed extraction shooter. The game is one of three Disney projects the publisher is currently working on, and is reportedly expected to be Epic’s comeback after the company laid off 1,000 employees in March due to a “downturn in Fortnite engagement.”

The game is reportedly similar to Arc Raiders, a multiplayer shooter where players fight for resources before escaping through an extraction point, but with Disney characters fighting enemies instead of post-apocalyptic survivors. Bloomberg writes that internal reviewers have worried that the game’s mechanics are “not very original,” but the project is the most promising of the three Epic is developing. The second title received middling internal reviews, according to Bloomberg, and Epic moved resources off the third project “after reports that Disney was disappointed by Epic’s release timeline.”

While details of Epic’s work for Disney are coming into focus, it’s still unclear whether this new extraction shooter will be a standalone game or incorporated as a mode in Fortnite. In its efforts to sell the title as a “multiverse” and a competitor to Roblox, Epic has introduced multiple games inside Fortnite over the last few years with distinct mechanics. The developer announced that it would shut down three of those titles — Rocket Racing, Ballistic and Fortnite Festival Battle Stage — as part of its recent round of layoffs. According to current and former Epic employees Bloomberg spoke to, several affected employees were also working on these unannounced Disney games.

When it invested in Epic in 2024, Disney suggested it would build an “entertainment universe” with the developer, where players could “play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.” Epic’s current plans sound far less ambitious than that, but if they manage to increase engagement with Fortnite and Disney’s brand, that might not matter.

In short: Amazon’s satellite internet service, rebranded from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in November 2025, entered enterprise beta on April 8, 2026, with commercial availability targeted for mid-2026 per Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter. The service offers three terminal tiers delivering up to 1 Gbps for enterprise users, with Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, JetBlue, and NASA among the beta partners. Amazon has approximately 210 to 241 satellites in orbit against a Federal Communications Commission requirement of 1,618 by July 30, 2026, has applied for a two-year deadline extension, and has contracted 22 additional launches to close the gap.

From Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo, the rebrand and the beta

Amazon received Federal Communications Commission approval for a 3,236-satellite low-earth-orbit constellation in 2020, then spent five years building the hardware, regulatory infrastructure, and carrier partnerships needed to turn that approval into a commercially viable service. The first production satellites launched in April 2025 aboard an Atlas V rocket operated by United Launch Alliance, and by November 2025 Amazon had enough operational hardware in orbit to retire the Project Kuiper name in favour of Amazon Leo, a rebrand that signals a deliberate shift from development programme to commercial product. A business preview programme opened to select enterprise partners shortly after the rebrand. The full enterprise beta launched on April 8, 2026. The following day, Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders confirmed mid-2026 as the commercial launch window, placing Leo alongside Amazon’s $50 billion Trainium chip investment as one of the defining bets in the company’s current capital allocation cycle. Beta customers span Verizon and AT&T in North America, Vodafone and Vodacom across Europe and Africa, JetBlue for in-flight connectivity, NBN Co in Australia, Vrio in Latin America, and NASA, along with enterprise logistics clients Hunt Energy and Crane Worldwide Logistics.

Three terminals, three speed tiers

Amazon has engineered three terminal models to address distinct market segments without forcing a single hardware compromise across all of them. The Leo Nano is the consumer and light-enterprise unit: seven inches square, 2.2 pounds, and rated to 100 Mbps download. The Leo Pro is aimed at small businesses, rural operators, and mobile backhaul deployments: eleven inches square, 5.3 pounds, priced at under $400, and rated to 400 Mbps. The Leo Ultra is the enterprise flagship, a 20-by-30-inch installation weighing 43 pounds and capable of 1 Gbps download with 400 Mbps upload, designed for maritime vessels, commercial aircraft, and large-campus enterprise deployments. Jassy claimed in his shareholder letter that Leo terminals deliver six to eight times better uplink performance and twice the downlink performance compared with the satellite internet alternatives currently available to enterprise customers, a claim that will be scrutinised closely once commercial service begins and independent benchmarks are possible.

The FCC deadline and the launch shortfall

Amazon’s FCC licence for its Generation 1 constellation requires exactly half the planned 3,236 satellites, or 1,618, to be in orbit and operational by July 30, 2026. As of early April 2026, Amazon has between 210 and 241 satellites in orbit, a figure that makes the original deadline effectively unreachable. The company filed a formal request with the FCC in January 2026 for a two-year extension, citing a shortage of available launch vehicles. Alongside the extension filing, Amazon disclosed ten additional Falcon 9 launch contracts with SpaceX and twelve additional New Glenn contracts with Blue Origin. Bezos is betting heavily on orbital infrastructure beyond Leo itself: Blue Origin separately filed with the FCC for a 51,600-satellite Project Sunrise constellation and a 5,408-satellite TeraWave optical backhaul network, making the New Glenn launch pipeline central to multiple overlapping ambitions simultaneously. The FCC separately approved Amazon’s Generation 2 constellation in February 2026, clearing the path to a potential 7,727-satellite network once the current launch bottleneck is resolved. The contracted vehicle fleet now spans Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur (United Launch Alliance), Falcon 9 (SpaceX), Ariane 6 (Arianespace), and New Glenn (Blue Origin).

Taking on Starlink, and the Globalstar play

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Starlink is not a vulnerable incumbent. SpaceX’s satellite internet service generated $10.6 billion in revenue in 2025 at a 54 per cent EBITDA margin and serves more than 10 million paying subscribers across more than 100 countries, operating a constellation of 7,600 to 8,000-plus satellites. SpaceX has filed for the largest IPO in history, seeking to raise $75 billion at a valuation of up to $1.75 trillion, potentially as early as June 2026, which would cement Starlink’s position as a capital-markets-validated infrastructure business before Amazon Leo has completed its initial rollout. Amazon’s response involves two distinct moves. The first is distribution: Leo is being sold primarily through carrier partners and enterprise integrators in its launch phase, using Verizon’s, AT&T’s, and Delta’s existing customer relationships rather than competing for consumers directly. Delta has contracted Leo for in-flight Wi-Fi across 500 aircraft starting in 2028, with free access available to SkyMiles members. The second move is spectrum acquisition. Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire Globalstar for approximately $9 billion, a deal that would give Leo access to L-band spectrum currently anchoring Globalstar’s existing satellite network and Apple’s emergency satellite connectivity service. Apple holds a 20 per cent stake in Globalstar through a $1.5 billion investment, adding complexity to any acquisition. If the deal closes, Amazon would arrive at commercial launch with not just a new constellation but a second frequency band and an established spectrum position. The year 2025 established satellite internet as a serious enterprise infrastructure market rather than a connectivity experiment, and Amazon Leo’s mid-2026 commercial launch arrives precisely as that market enters its most contested phase.

• 8849 TANK Pad Ultra 1080p projector accurately projects clear images from 0.5 to 4 meters
• Night vision camera captures usable images even in near-total darkness conditions
• Rugged chassis resists drops, dust, and water for harsh environments

The 8849 TANK Pad Ultra is a rugged Android tablet which combines a 10.95 inch FHD 1200 x 1920 display with a built-in 1080p DLP projector rated at 260 lumens.

The projector can auto-focus and project images from 0.5 to 4 meters, supported by a micro-ranging laser which helps fine-tune the focal distance.

Words have no meaning when Black Friday falls in April and lasts two weeks. Originally coined to denote the pandemonium and chaos when holiday shopping met football games after Thanksgiving, Black Friday has come to blankly mean “discounts whenever.”

And so when The Home Depot says they’ve got a “Spring Black Friday” sale going, what they seem to be trying to say is that springtime might as well be Christmas for the DIY and backyard set. It’s when you buy stuff. Except probably for yourself.

Anyway, most of this sale is not a barn-burner. But Home Depot loves a BOGO tool sale on the Milwaukee tools used and recommended by WIRED tester Scott Gilbertson. And Weber grills are $50 to $100 off, including a couple of WIRED’s favorite grills on earth.

Here are the deals WIRED is tracking on the Home Depot Black Friday Spring Sale, ending April 22. Or just check out the whole Home Depot Black Friday deals below.

$50 off the Best Gas Grill for Most Families

Weber

Spirit E-210 Gas Grill

For years, we’ve been recommending Weber’s straightforward 200-series Sprit grills as some of the best grills at the intersection of value and performance. The build quality is good, the cook is even, and the heat on the propane burners is easy to adjust. Like all Webers, you can build your grill’s workspace out with accessories and snap-on options until it’s tong heaven. Spirit already starts out pretty affordable, with a 10-year warranty and porcelain-coated cast iron grill grates that make for easy clean-up and clean cooks. An extra $50 off is a nice cherry on top.

But note that while a Spirit is likely all the grill you’ll ever need for a large family, grill cooks who throw a lot of parties might upgrade to the Genesis E-325 ($849) for the larger searing area and higher BTUs, added storage and prep, and the option on a top grill. That’s also on sale in April, for $100 off list price.

BOGO Deals on Milwaukee, Dewalt, and Ryobi Tools

The other thing The Home Depot likes to do is offer BOGOs on tools—in this case packaging a $200 tool with a free $200 power pack. This is, needless to say, a nice deal.

On the Milwaukee tool ecosystem used by WIRED reviewer and inveterate DIYer Scott Gilbertson—favored for its mix of value, durability and pure power, an assortment of tools come with a free power pack.

But these BOGos can be a bit maddening to sort out on Home Depot’s website. So I’ve done a little legwork for you. Here are the links to the BOGO deals for Milwaukee, Ryobi, and DeWalt. You’re welcome.

Steep Discounts on Ryobi Yard Tools

Longtime WIRED reviewer Parker Hall has long held the belief that Ryobi yard tools are the most most slept-on tool ecosystem for home gardeners and landscapers, from mowers to chain saws to trimmers.

Part of the reason is service: At least in our region (the Pacific Northwest), Ryobi doesn’t make you send in tools to be serviced somewhere else. They instead keep a repairman on retainer, and he comes to you and fixes your mower. This is a wonderful thing. In any case, Hall says that he’s rarely had cause to call on his repairman. He just likes to know he’s there.

A 20-year-old man was arrested by the San Francisco Police Department after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house, The New York Times reports.

In a statement shared on X, SFPD wrote that it responded to a request for a fire investigation in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco around 7:12 AM ET / 4:12AM PT. “At the scene, officers learned that an unknown male subject threw an incendiary destructive device at a home, causing a fire at an exterior gate.” After the man fled on foot, police found and arrested him around an hour later while responding to a business’ complaint about an “unknown male subject threatening to burn down the building.” That business turned out to be OpenAI’s headquarters and the subject happened to be the same man who threw the Molotov at Altman’s house.

“Early this morning, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home and also made threats at our San Francisco headquarters. Thankfully, no one was hurt,” an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed in a statement to Wired. “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation.”

As it’s become more commonplace, artificial intelligence has also become more divisive. While more and more people continue to use AI tools, public reaction to the encroachment of the technology, whether in gaming or customer service, is increasingly negative. Altman’s warnings of AI’s impact on employment, and a recent New Yorker investigation digging into his allegedly manipulative leadership style at OpenAI, have also raised questions about the CEO’s prominent role as a steward of the technology.

In short: SiFive, the RISC-V chip IP firm founded by the Berkeley engineers who created the open-source instruction set architecture, raised $400 million in an oversubscribed Series G on April 9, 2026, at a valuation of $3.65 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management and backed by Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, D1 Capital Partners, Point72 Turion, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Capital Group, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. CEO Patrick Little described it as the company’s final private funding round before an initial public offering.

Open source, closed competition

RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) is an open-source instruction set architecture, the foundational specification governing how a processor interprets and executes instructions, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2010 onwards. Unlike the proprietary architectures maintained by Arm Holdings and Intel, RISC-V is free to implement, extend, and commercialise without per-unit royalties or usage restrictions. SiFive was founded in 2015 by three of the project’s principal architects: Krste Asanović, Andrew Waterman, and Yunsup Lee, working alongside David Patterson, a Turing Award winner and co-author of the standard text on computer architecture. The company’s business model is structurally similar to Arm’s: it designs CPU intellectual property and licences that IP to customers who integrate it into their own silicon, rather than fabricating chips itself. The critical difference is that SiFive’s designs sit on an architecture that no single company controls.

That independence became more commercially valuable in March 2026, when Arm launched its AGI CPU, its first in-house silicon product in its 35-year history, with Meta and OpenAI as debut customers. The move repositioned Arm from a neutral IP licensor into a company with direct hardware ambitions, creating the kind of vertical conflict that has historically pushed technology buyers toward open-standard alternatives, and generating fresh urgency for a competitor that owes no allegiance to any proprietary architecture owner. Intel attempted a different route into the space: in 2021 the chipmaker offered more than $2 billion to acquire SiFive outright, a deal that collapsed over valuation disagreements. Intel has since joined Elon Musk’s Terafab as a foundry partner in April 2026, committing its 18A process node to a $25 billion AI compute facility backed by Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, a strategic reorientation that leaves the RISC-V IP licensing position without Intel as a would-be acquirer or rival.

The Series G: who invested, and why

The $400 million Series G was led by Atreides Management, a Boston-based investment firm managed by Gavin Baker, who built his reputation running Fidelity’s OTC Portfolio before founding Atreides in 2019. New participants include Nvidia, Apollo Global Management, D1 Capital Partners, Point72 Turion, and T. Rowe Price Investment Management. Existing shareholders Prosperity7 Ventures, Capital Group, and Sutter Hill Ventures also participated. The round closed oversubscribed and lifts SiFive’s total valuation to $3.65 billion, up from the $2.5 billion set at the Series F in March 2022. Nvidia’s presence on the cap table is a technical statement as well as a financial one: in January 2026 SiFive announced it is integrating NVLink Fusion into its high-performance data centre platform, enabling RISC-V-based CPUs to connect directly to Nvidia GPUs via a coherent, high-bandwidth interconnect that reduces latency and improves system utilisation for large-scale AI inference. That compatibility positions SiFive’s CPU IP to work alongside the Vera Rubin platform Nvidia announced at GTC 2026, the company’s next-generation GPU architecture targeting agentic AI workloads.

The broader investment context is one of accelerating hyperscale demand for custom silicon. Amazon committed $50 billion to its Trainium chip programme in its April 2026 shareholder letter, positioning in-house AI silicon as a strategic infrastructure necessity rather than an optional enhancement. The deal between Google, Anthropic, and Broadcom for custom AI compute represents a parallel approach, using purpose-built ASICs to reduce dependence on commodity processors across hyperscale inference workloads. SiFive’s pitch is that it offers hyperscale customers a third path: RISC-V CPU IP that is fully customisable, architecturally independent, and built on an open standard that no single acquirer can lock down. “Hyperscale customers have made it very clear that it is time to accelerate the availability of open standard alternatives for the data centre,” said CEO Patrick Little. “Their consistent ask is for customisable CPU solutions in IP form, that will enable them to meaningfully differentiate their data centre compute solutions.”

What the capital will build

SiFive has outlined three areas of deployment for the Series G capital. Advanced research and development takes the largest share, focused on expanding the roadmap of high-performance scalar, vector, and matrix RISC-V CPU IP, accelerator cores, and system IP targeting data centre deployments. A second allocation covers software ecosystem development, including existing efforts to port CUDA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu to RISC-V, work that is critical to making the architecture practically deployable in production data centres where software compatibility is as important as raw performance. The third allocation supports customer enablement: the direct engineering collaboration that helps hyperscale clients and system vendors integrate SiFive IP into their own silicon programmes. Little framed the company’s open-standard positioning as a structural advantage that compounds over time: “RISC-V was created by our founders to be similar to other open standards, driven and continually improved by collaboration and cross-pollination across a broad community of innovators. This ensures choice and flexibility for customers, and ultimately benefits consumers.” He argued that the market is becoming more receptive to open-standard alternatives precisely as Arm moves further into selling its own branded hardware.

Ten billion cores and the IPO signal

SiFive reported record growth in 2025, with its IP featured in more than 500 semiconductor designs and more than 10 billion RISC-V cores shipped to date across consumer electronics, automotive systems, and data centre processors. The company has framed the data centre segment as a potential $100 billion-plus addressable market, driven by the agentic AI infrastructure buildout that has prompted every major hyperscaler to commit tens of billions of dollars annually to compute expansion. Patrick Little told Reuters that the April 2026 fundraise is the company’s final private round before an IPO, though no exchange or pricing timeline has been confirmed. The signal carries weight: a valuation of $3.65 billion and a roster of investors that includes a major GPU manufacturer, a bulge-bracket alternative asset manager, and two prominent long-only asset managers suggests SiFive is preparing for the kind of institutional scrutiny that accompanies a public filing. As AI chip investment reached record levels in 2025, with capital flowing to custom silicon programmes at every major cloud provider, SiFive’s timing places it squarely at the centre of a market transition it has been building toward for a decade.

We all love encryption. If you use Gmail in an enterprise setting, especially if your work includes sensitive information, you probably love it even more. Certain Gmail app users on iOS and Android phones can now send and receive encrypted emails within the app itself — no add-ons necessary.

Previously, Gmail users could only send emails via end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on their desktops. Google’s announcement said there is “no need to download extra apps or use mail portals.” Customers can simply compose and read encrypted emails on the Gmail app itself on their iOS and Android phones.

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But not all Gmail consumers will be able to use the new feature. It’s only available for Enterprise Plus subscribers with the Assured Controls or Assured Controls Plus add-on. Enterprise Plus is a subscription plan, one of several within Google Workspace. Plus is intended for large businesses and other organizations and offers higher data security and client-side encryption, which the less expensive Enterprise Standard lacks.

Assured Controls and Assured Controls Plus are designed to increase digital sovereignty, data residency and compliance.

More from ZDNET: The Best Email Encryption Software of 2026: Expert Tested

Google said the feature is designed to allow users to “engage with your organization’s most sensitive data from anywhere on their mobile devices while ensuring data remains compliant.”

With the new feature, Gmail app users can send encrypted emails to anyone, even if they aren’t using Gmail. If the recipient is using the Gmail app, the encrypted email will appear like any other email in their inbox. If the recipient is not using the Gmail app, they can still read the encrypted email and reply to it on their own browser — with the entire conversation remaining encrypted.

For example, say a Gmail app customer sends an encrypted message to someone using an iPhone with the native iPhone email app. That person using the iPhone will still be able to read the encrypted email and then answer back with an encrypted message.

Enterprise Plus customers can use the new feature now, whether they are on either the Rapid Release or Scheduled Release domains. To encrypt an email, click the lock icon and select additional encryption. Then create your message.

Business and organization administrators must enable the Android and iOS clients in the CSE admin interface in the Admin Console to grant access to their Gmail users.

Proton is an alternative for businesses and consumers

Proton Workspace, an enterprise solution that launched last month, also has end-to-end email encryption but with the added benefit of being based in Europe (Switzerland), which does have to comply with the US CLOUD Act and, thus, hand over data to the US government.

For the everyday consumer, Proton Mail has end-to-end email encryption and is available for free or in paid plans, some of which include bundled privacy and security apps, like a VPN and a password manager.

By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubits has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams.

That’s exactly the challenge that was faced by scientists working on the MITRE Quantum Moonshot project, which brought together scientists from MITRE, MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Sandia National Laboratories. The solution they developed came in the form of an image projection technology that they realized could also be the fix for a host of other challenges in augmented reality, biomedical imaging, and elsewhere. The device is a one-square-millimeter photonic chip capable of projecting the Mona Lisa onto an area smaller than the size of two human egg cells.

“When we started, we certainly never would have anticipated that we would be making a technology that might revolutionize imaging,” says Matt Eichenfield, one of the leaders of the Quantum Moonshot project, a collaborative research effort focused on developing a scalable diamond-based quantum computer, and a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Each second, their chip is capable of projecting 68.6 million individual spots of light—called scannable pixels to differentiate them from physical pixels. That’s more than fifty times the capability of previous technology, such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) micromirror arrays.

“We have now made a scannable pixel that is at the absolute limit of what diffraction allows,” says Henry Wen, a visiting researcher at MIT and a photonics engineer at QuEra Computing.

The chip’s distinguishing feature is an array of tiny micro-scale cantilevers, which curve away from the plane of the chip in response to voltage and act as miniature “ski-jumps” for light. Light is channeled along the length of each cantilever via a waveguide, and exits at its tip. The cantilevers contain a thin layer of aluminum nitride, a piezoelectric which expands or contracts under voltage, thus moving the micromachine up and down and enabling the array to scan beams of light over a two-dimensional area.

Despite the magnitude of the team’s achievement, Eichenfield says that the process of engineering the cantilevers was “pretty smooth.” Each cantilever is composed of a stack of several submicrometer layers of material and curls approximately 90 degrees out of the plane at rest. To achieve such a high curvature, the team took advantage of differences in the contraction and expansion of individual layers caused by physical stresses in the material resulting from the fabrication process. The materials are first deposited flat onto the chip. Then, a layer in the chip below the cantilever is removed, allowing the material stresses to take effect, releasing the cantilever from the chip and allowing it to curl out. The top layer of each cantilever also features a series of silicon dioxide bars running perpendicular to the waveguide, which keep the cantilever from curling along its width while also improving its length-wise curvature.

A micro-cantilever wiggles and waggles to project light in the right place.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

What was more of a challenge than engineering the chip itself was figuring out the details of actually making the chip project images and videos. Working out the process of synchronizing and timing the cantilevers’ motion and light beams to generate the right colors at the right time was a substantial effort, according to Andy Greenspon, a researcher at MITRE who also worked on the project. Now, the team has successfully projected a variety of videos from a single cantilever, including clips from the movie A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The chip projected a roughly 125-micrometer image of the Mona Lisa.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers. The Quantum Moonshot program’s mission is to build a quantum computer that can be scaled to millions of qubits. So clearly, it needs a scalable way of controlling each one, explains Wen. Instead of using one laser per qubit, the team realized that not every qubit needed to be controlled at every given moment. The chip’s ability to move light beams over a two-dimensional area, would allow them to control all of the qubits with many fewer lasers.

Another process that Wen thinks the chip could improve is scanning objects for 3D printing. Today, that typically involves using a single laser to scan over the entire surface of an object. The new chip, however, could potentially employ thousands of laser beams. “I think now you can take a process that would have taken hours and maybe bring it down to minutes,” says Wen.

Wen is also excited to explore the potential of different cantilever shapes. By changing the orientations of the bars perpendicular to the waveguide, the team has been able to make the cantilevers curl into helixes. Wen says that such unusual shapes could be useful in making a lab-on-a-chip for cell biology or drug development. “A lot of this stuff is imaging, scanning a laser across something, either to image it or to stimulate some response. And so we could have one of these ski jumps curl not just up, but actually curl back around, and then move around and scan over a sample,” Wen explains. “If you can imagine a structure that will be useful for you, we should try it.”