The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) closed an AWS-3 re-auction with gross winning bids topping $3.5 billion in what was the agency’s first spectrum sale after a four-year lapse in activity.

Bidding concluded for Auction 113 yesterday (23 June) after 72 rounds for the 200 licences across the 1695-1710MHz, 1755-1780MHz and 2155-2180MHz bands.

All the licences received bids in the process, which had 17 qualified participants and began on 2 June.

The frequencies were originally auctioned to Dish Network, which is now part of EchoStar, in 2014 but never made it into service after a series of defaults and bid withdrawals left them sitting unused in the FCC’s inventory for more than a decade.

In 2015, Dish Network affiliates Northstar Wireless and SNR Wireless surrendered a number of spectrum licences worth $3.5 billion after a dispute with the FCC over discounts.

In April, the FCC and EchoStar reached an agreement which included the latter dropping a lawsuit it filed in a US Court of Appeals over the defaults by Northstar and SNR.

The financial total carries significant regulatory implications. Up to $3.3 billion of the proceeds will be legally directed to cover funds borrowed for the FCC’s Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, commonly known as the “rip and replace” initiative to swap out Huawei and ZTE gear from US networks.

Surpassing the $3.5 billion mark clears the $2.9 billion threshold required for EchoStar to avoid paying a potential shortfall payment to the regulator under a prior settlement framework.

While specific winning bidders remain anonymous under strict anti-collusion quiet period rules, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US and SpaceX are widely expected to have driven the demand.

The event marks a milestone for FCC chair Brendan Carr, representing the return of the agency’s auction power.

“After years on the sidelines, FCC auctions are finally back,” Carr stated. “Today’s successful auction generated billions of dollars in competitive bids to put spectrum to effective commercial use, and it bolsters competition in the wireless marketplace.”

The FCC plans to carry the momentum into its upcoming Upper C-Band auction, tracking on schedule to meet a congressional deadline to auction at least 100MHz of the spectrum by July 2027.

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SpaceX reportedly signed a significant computing power deal with Reflection AI, making the open-source start-up the latest outside company to tap Elon Musk’s Colossus infrastructure.

CNBC reported Reflection will get access to Nvidia’s GB300 chips, the company’s top-tier hardware for training and running advanced AI models, housed at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 facility in Memphis, Tennessee.

Reflection agreed to pay SpaceX $150 million per month starting 1 July through 2029, with total payments reaching roughly $6.3 billion if the agreement runs its full term.

Either party can terminate the contract with 90 days’ notice after the first three months. Bloomberg reported Reflection will pay SpaceX’s AI division, SpaceXAI, under the arrangement.

Colossus was originally built in part to power Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot as a rival to ChatGPT, but SpaceX has increasingly opened the infrastructure to outside AI companies seeking compute capacity.

The deal is smaller than two of SpaceX’s other compute agreements. According to TechCrunch, SpaceX’s existing contracts with Anthropic and Google cost those companies $1.25 billion and $920 million per month, respectively, with both agreements also running through July 2029.

CNBC reported SpaceX has also struck a computing power-related deal with Cursor prior to buying the company for $60 billion earlier this month.

In October 2025, Nvidia led a $2 billion funding round for the open-source start-up, directly contributing $800 million of the total to value Reflection AI at $8 billion.

Reflection AI was founded in 2024 by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, both alumni of Google’s DeepMind lab.

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Groq raised $650 million in funding as the company revamps itself from a chip startup into a data centre operator focused on AI inference.

The round was led by growth-focused investment company Disruptive and hedge fund Infinitum, both of which already hold board seats at Groq.

The funding follows a non-exclusive licensing agreement Groq struck with Nvidia in December 2025. At Nvidia’s GTC event earlier this year, the chipmaker unveiled its next-generation LPX platform, which incorporates Groq’s inference technology.

US-based Groq stated it plans to use the new cash to expand its network of 13 data centres in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and quadruple total capacity to 200 megawatts by the end of 2027.

The new capital will also fund the fit-out of its existing footprint with Groq’s latest inference technology, including Nvidia’s new LPX system.

In September 2025 Groq raised $750 million, which valued it at $6.9 billion. Its backers include KDDI, Samsung Electronics, Cisco Systems and BlackRock.

Groq chair Alex Davis stated the company spent years building the technology, infrastructure and operational expertise needed for AI’s next phase, adding it is positioned to become a foundational layer of the AI economy.

Groq also announced several executive additions alongside the funding news. Alan Rice, who previously worked on xAI’s Colossus data centre project and Meta data centres, is now COO.

Sinclair Schuller will start as CTO in July, with Rakesh Malhotra joining as chief product officer the same month. Schuller and Malhotra previously worked together at enterprise cloud platform Apprenda and later co-founded a separate software engineering firm.

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