At 6:36 pm Cape Canaveral time, NASA’s SLS rocket lifted off without incident with the four members of the Artemis II spacecraft aboard. During the first few hours, Orion will complete its journey into Earth orbit and, throughout the first day, will conduct critical navigation and systems tests. Around the third or fourth day, the spacecraft will begin its trajectory toward the moon and cross its gravitational sphere of influence. In total, the mission will last approximately 10 days.

The mission includes the first woman and the first Black person on a crewed mission to lunar orbit. The launch comes 53 years after Apollo 17, the last crewed mission to the Moon.

The Artemis II crew will not land on the moon (that will happen on Artemis IV ). Instead, their capsule will fly at altitudes between 6,000 and 9,000 kilometers above the surface of the far side of the moon, circle it, and begin the return journey to Earth. The mission’s main objective is to demonstrate that the space agency has the technological capability to send people to the Moon safely and without incident.

Once they achieve this, NASA will begin preparations for new moon landings in the following years, which will aim to establish the first lunar bases in history and, with them, the sustained and sustainable presence of humans on the satellite.

The launch was successful and occurred on schedule. The launch window opened on Wednesday, April 1, at 6:24 pm Eastern Time (EDT) and could have been extended for two hours, if necessary. NASA would have had five more days to attempt another launch.

IBM has begun working with chipmaker Arm to develop what it calls dual-architecture hardware to provide flexibility when running enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) and data-intensive workloads.

Their overall goal is to combine IBM’s experience in systems reliability, security and scalability that it offers on Z-series mainframe systems with Arm’s expertise in power-efficient architectures and supporting a broad software ecosystem to build flexible and scalable computing platforms for the future.

Arm has been on a path to deliver an alternative to x86-powered servers in the datacentre. The company has introduced the Arm Agentic AI (artificial intelligence) central processor unit (CPU) which it positions as a processor that is tasked with keeping distributed AI systems operating efficiently at scale. This includes orchestrating AI accelerators, managing memory and storage, scheduling workloads and moving data across systems.

This latest collaboration appears to be focused on deliver enterprise reliability to the Arm platform. It builds on IBM’s heritage of offering coprocessors for the Z-series hardware such as the Integrated Facility for Linux, which was introduced in 2000. The mainframe manufacturer later introduced a Linux system based on the Z-series architecture, called LinuxOne, designed to let enterprise customers run Linux workloads in situ with data that resides on the mainframe system.

Christian Jacobi, chief technology officer and IBM fellow of IBM systems development, said: “This moment marks the latest step in our innovation journey for future generations of our IBM Z and LinuxOne systems, reinforcing our end-to-end system design as a powerful advantage.”

Mohamed Awad, executive vice-president of the cloud AI business unit at Arm, said: “Our collaboration with IBM builds on this progress, extending the Arm ecosystem into mission-critical enterprise environments and giving organisations greater flexibility in how they deploy and scale these workloads.”

The two companies said they are exploring how to expand virtualisation technologies that allow Arm-based software environments to operate within IBM’s enterprise computing platforms. According to IBM and Arm, this work is designed to expand software compatibility and streamline how developers and enterprises bring Arm applications into mission-critical environments. 

In the security and reliability front, the pair plan to investigate new ways to support the performance and efficiency demands of modern workloads, including AI and data-intensive applications. IBM and Arm said they will be looking at how to enable enterprise systems to recognise and execute Arm applications. 

The two companies also hope to provide a broader software ecosystems and greater flexibility in how applications are deployed and managed. IBM plans to offer new systems for its customers that incorporate Arm’s technology.

Tina Tarquinio, chief product officer of IBM Z and LinuxONE, said: “Our aim is to expand software choice and improve system performance while maintaining the reliability and security our clients expect.” 

The collaboration is seen as a signal of how enterprises may eventually deploy scalable, flexible IT infrastructure to support different types of application workload.

Patrick Moorhead, founder, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, added: “What IBM and Arm are signaling here is a meaningful step toward that future that could broaden how enterprises think about deploying and scaling modern workloads. While the full implications will take time to unfold, it’s clear this reflects a deeper level of investment in long-term platform innovation and ecosystem expansion than we typically see at this stage.” 

Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before the Wednesday deadline for firms to make their first disclosures.

“The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) has announced that it plans to initiate rulemaking in response to comments by various stakeholders relating to the Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Law,” the state agency posted on its website in mid-March. “Implementation and enforcement of the [law] will be suspended pending completion of the rulemaking and until final regulations are in place.”

California lawmakers first passed the measure in 2023, and it was signed into law shortly thereafter by Governor Gavin Newsom. For decades, women and people of color have received only a small share of overall startup funding relative to their representation in the US population. Lawmakers hoped putting more public scrutiny on investment decisions would help foster greater equity in the market, including for people who are disabled, retired military, or LGBTQ+.

The law called for venture capital and some other investment firms to file annual reports starting March 1 of last year about the overall makeup of the founding teams they had invested in and the amount of money they provided to diverse founders. Firms were meant to collect the demographic data through a voluntary survey that was then anonymized. California authorities planned to publish the filings online. Lawmakers amended the law in 2024 to delay reporting until April 1, 2026, and enable the state to levy daily fines for noncompliance.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the authority it used to sidestep the deadline set by lawmakers. Newsom’s office also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Financiers focused on funding entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds had supported the law. But the National Venture Capital Association, the tech investment industry’s leading trade group, opposed it. The group argued that voluntary data collection would inflate diversity statistics and that publishing inaccurate data could lead to unfair attacks on investors genuinely trying to tackle diversity issues. Over the past year, the Trump administration has defunded and attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives in both the public and private sectors, leading many businesses and organizations to pull back from them.

In February, the venture capital association wrote to Newsom asking for the reporting deadline to be pushed back again because, in its view, the state had bungled the process. California authorities didn’t publish the standardized survey that founders were supposed to fill out until early this year, and at the time they still hadn’t introduced a way for firms to register with regulators as required by the law, according to the association. “This administrative timeline creates an environment ripe for error and threatens to produce the misleading and counterproductive data we previously warned against,” association president and CEO Bobby Franklin wrote.

Last month, as the deadline for the first reports loomed, some entrepreneurs and investors began complaining on social media about the survey effort. “The latest California malarky is a requirement for venture investors to collect/report racial and gender statistics,” wrote Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of venture-backed aviation startup Boom Supersonic. “I want to live in a world where merit matters—not skin color or what you have between your legs.”