China’s giant ultra-high voltage grid is ambitious as its high speed rail

Ultra-high voltage energy grids are needed for efficient power transmission across large distances. A 100 mile (160 km) power line at 765 kilovolt carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. A 345-kilovolt line carrying the same load across the same distance has losses of 4.2%. China’s 1.1 megavolt line can …

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Softbank Vision fund invests $2.25 billion in GM self driving cars

SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2.25 billion in General Motors Co’s (GM.N) autonomous vehicle unit, Cruise, the companies said on Thursday, announcing a deal that validates the venerable Detroit automaker’s leadership in self-driving cars and sent GM shares up 10 percent. The partnership with SoftBank’s $100-billion Vision Fund – one of the largest investments to …

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D-Wave Quantum systems gets $20 million more in funding and talks to Softbank about hundreds of millions

D-Wave Systems, the leader in quantum computing systems and software, announced that it has met the key conditions to lock in new funding of $20 million. In April 2017, D-Wave closed on the first $30 million tranche of convertible notes and received a conditional commitment from Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) for an …

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Softbank Vision is to invest a trillion dollars in at least a thousand Unicorns over the next ten years

Softbanks’s CEO Masayoshi Son is creating a mechanism to increase their funding ability from 10 trillion yen to 20 trillion yen to 100 trillion yen. The funds will probably have invested in at least 1,000 [unicorn] companies within 10 years. According to Nikkei, all the Vision Funds are expected to chiefly target unicorns — aka …

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