‍In this update:

• Flyover of the Austin campus
• The Samsung partnership
• An X post from Elon
• The latest published patent
• The newest surgical breakthrough
• The newest patients
• Interview with Neuralink's President
• Patient spotlight
• Midjourney Medical
• BCI from China
• Meta's brain interface

Flyover of the Austin campus

We start with a flyover taken by S. E. Robinson, Jr., who flew his drone a few weeks ago outside the largest Neuralink campus, just east of downtown Austin and the Tesla Gigafactory. The primary three-story building, called ATX1, houses offices, a machine shop, cleanrooms for manufacturing, a clinic, and animal-care facilities. Seeing the whole campus from above makes the scale of the investment clear.

Neuralink also has buildings in Fremont, California and in South San Francisco. The South San Francisco building is larger by floor area at 144,000 square feet, versus the 112,000 square foot building in Austin, but the Austin site sits on a much larger 37-acre plot. There are now job openings at each location, so if you know someone who would be a good fit and is genuinely passionate about these medical devices, point them to neuralink.com/careers.

The Samsung partnership

Samsung's foundry division is developing Neuralink's fourth-generation brain-implant processor, referred to in some reports as the "O1." The earlier chips were primarily built with TSMC. Given Neuralink's aim to scale to thousands of implants and beyond, it matters that a partner can deliver the volumes the company wants, and diversifying away from a single supplier reduces geopolitical risk. On Tesla's earnings call at the end of January, Elon framed the same concern:

"We're gonna have to build a Tesla Terafab, a very big fab that includes logic, memory, and packaging, domestically. And that's also going to be very important to ensure that we are protected against any geopolitical risks. I think people may be underweighting some of the geopolitical risks that are gonna be a major factor in a few years."

That lines up with the broader push to support domestic chip production, from Nvidia and AMD to Tesla's Terafab project with Intel, plus Micron and SanDisk.

An X post from Elon

Elon replied to a post from one of Tesla's top Autopilot engineers, Yun-Ta Tsai, who wrote:

This would be a form of real-life telepathy. Our brains generate detailed ideas very quickly, but the constraint is turning those ideas into words. If you have a design for a new car in your mind, describing it in words is slow, so beaming the image straight to someone else with a Neuralink would be far faster. That leaves three things to look forward to soon: an attempt at this kind of telepathic communication, the Blindsight trials, and trials in the UAE.

The latest published patent

A patent published on June 9th, with 10 listed inventors, is titled "Polychlorotrifluoroethylene (PCTFE) polymer enclosure for an implantable device." I read through it, then asked Grok for a plain-language summary:

"Neuralink invented a special strong plastic box to protect the tiny computer chips they put inside people's heads for brain implants."

The box is made of a tough material called PCTFE. It lets hundreds or thousands of very thin wires pass through to connect to brain cells, packed close together. Older enclosures made of glass or metal would crack or leak when too many wires tried to pass through, but this plastic one stays sealed for years. It works by sandwiching the flat bundle of wires between two pieces of the plastic, then pressing them together with heat, around 250°C, so the plastic flows around every wire and joins the halves into one waterproof case.

Why it matters: rigid materials like glass, metal, or ceramic crack when you need to pass thousands of wires through the enclosure for high-channel devices. PCTFE allows a reliable, largely hermetic seal around densely packed wires, often just 10 to 50 micrometers apart, protecting the electronics from body fluids while enabling far more connections. In the long run, that supports clearer signals, better control of robotic arms, restored sight or hearing, and treatment of brain diseases.

The newest surgical breakthrough

For the first time, the Neuralink team implanted the device without a neurosurgeon cutting through the brain's tough outer layer, the dura mater. From the announcement:

Neuralink's Head Neurosurgeon, Dr. MacDougall, described the milestone:

"In May of 2026, as part of our ongoing clinical trials, we performed the very first transdural Neuralink surgery, alongside Dr. Lozano at UHN in Toronto, Canada. It's the most cutting-edge version of this surgery that we've yet performed."

Safer, less invasive, faster, and more scalable are exactly the qualities Neuralink is optimizing for. The team also showed how they still avoid blood vessels while inserting threads: because the dura moves, dye and advanced cameras keep the vessels in view.

The newest patients

Eoin, patient 20, shared an update recently, and it is good to see more patients from outside the US. Neuralink patient CJ then posted: "Our Cyborg family has grown to 27. Say hello to P26."

Patient 26 is Lee Marten, a Vancouver police sergeant with 18 years on the force plus prior military service. The department's Chief wrote:

To clarify, Lee appears to be the first Canadian patient with ALS to receive the implant. Last year, two quadriplegic Canadian men, both around 30, received their Neuralinks at Toronto Western Hospital in late August and early September, as reported by the CBC.

One detail worth highlighting is the 25 team members on the procedure. Each hospital site works hard to give more people access while making sure every patient and family gets real personal care, and that 25 does not even count the hundreds of people who built the device, the robot, and the progress behind it. Paralysis, ALS, and other brain diseases affect everyday people, regardless of occupation, nationality, age, or gender. Just today, former NFL running back Chris Johnson announced he has ALS. Around 40% of the world's population has a brain disorder of some kind, and by age 75 more than half of us are expected to have one. The day when your neighbor has a brain chip is approaching quickly.

Interview with Neuralink's President

Neuralink's President, DJ Seo, was interviewed by Shaun McGuire of Sequoia Capital. Asked what smart people most underappreciate about the company, Seo said:

"Even at the founding and Day One of the company, we had scale in mind. Not just the device, but all of the infrastructure around it, to be able to do the surgery, do the deployment, build really hard factories for building these devices. That sheer scale requires a lot of capital and a lot of boldness, but that formula seems to work really well."

On vertical integration:

"Vertical integration is really the life blood of Neuralink and Elon companies, and what really enables us to have that fast iteration loop, from design, develop, deploy, and then being able to stack literally the best talent across the entire tech stack. The sheer scale of even the robotic surgery that we had in mind, making it like a LASIK surgery that can be deployed to millions, billions of people eventually, is something people fully do not appreciate."

Building everything in-house is much harder than buying from suppliers, but it makes the whole system more optimized and customizable. If they want to change something, they tell the person in the next room instead of waiting months on an overseas vendor. Seo also mentioned early results from a "neural foundational model," where transformer networks are fine-tuned on neural data and pick up counterintuitive patterns. The long-term advantage of the detailed brain data Neuralink will gather is enormous, from potentially building a digital model of the brain to predicting conditions like dementia, depression, or seizures.

Patient spotlight

Neuralink released a moving video showing Audrey, who has a new perspective on life after getting her implant and has returned to making art.

This is what Neuralink is all about. The impact is already remarkable, and the company is still just getting started, which is also true of AI in medicine more broadly.

Midjourney Medical

Midjourney, previously known for AI image generation, announced a move into medical tech:

"Today we're gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope. That's why we are announcing Midjourney Medical. We're building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies. We've dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa."

Neuralink patient Brad reacted: "I have a computer in my head, so I can't do any MRI scans. REALLY COOL STUFF!" The device is described as a full-body scanner marketed like a spa visit: you step into a water bath and a ring of chips send sound through your body, rebuilding the echoes into a 3D map, with no radiation or magnets, in about 60 seconds. It is another example of the medical advances AI is set to unleash.

BCI from China

A Chinese company has received approval to use its invasive brain chip beyond clinical trials. The device, called NEO, is a coin-sized implant from the startup Neuracle Technology with Tsinghua University. One trial patient, a 39-year-old man named Dong Hui, was paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash and received his implant in November 2024. After a simple surgery and a few weeks of training with a robotic glove, he could grab a ball within nine days and even write his name.

China's National Medical Products Administration now lets doctors in regular hospitals use the device on qualifying patients, and it was added to the national health insurance list, so eligible patients pay only part of the cost. China's latest five-year plan lists BCI as one of six key future industries. As one researcher noted, a big advantage may be that patients there tend to welcome the technology, while in the US and Western Europe it can trigger an "ick factor."

NEO uses just eight sensors that sit on top of the dura, which makes it slightly easier to approve than Neuralink's threads that go inside the brain tissue, though Neuralink is now implanting through the dura rather than cutting it open, which reduces complications. The NEO surgery takes around 90 minutes and is covered by insurance for adults 18 to 60 with similar spinal injuries. Competition is a good thing, and it is heating up.

Meta's brain interface and the smart-glasses wave

Meta shared its next milestone in non-invasive brain-to-text:

Their press release notes that "for our best participant, we achieve a 78% word accuracy, where more than half of all sentences are decoded with one word error or less."

On the wearable side, Snap introduced its SPECS augmented-reality glasses. I think of these as Neuralink-lite: eventually, true augmented and virtual reality will stimulate the brain directly. CEO Evan Spiegel called glasses "the next major leap in computing, from phones to glasses," and showed practical uses like directions, measurements, and real-time translation. SPECS was introduced at $2,195, which is steep for what the visualizations currently offer.

Meta, meanwhile, announced a new set of smart glasses at $299, aiming for a more accessible price point on top of its Ray-Ban and Oakley lines. Google also said it is building eyewear with Warby Parker using its Gemini model. Interestingly, CJ, Neuralink's 24th patient, initially turned down Neuralink over the invasive approach, tried non-invasive devices, and found they did not work for him. These non-invasive options may improve, but it is hard to see how they compete once Neuralink is available.

Neuralink turns ten

A fun note: Neuralink was officially incorporated in Delaware on June 21, 2016, and changed its state of incorporation to Nevada two years ago. For reference, SpaceX is 24, Tesla is 23, and the Boring Company is 9.

To mark the decade, here is how I see the road ahead.

We are watching a genuinely historic technology develop in real time. The idea of implanting a device to regulate electrical pulses in the brain used to live in academic labs, and Neuralink is bringing it to the masses by making it mass-manufacturable, so that anyone can choose to connect their biological brain to digital supercomputers. In the meantime, the mission I find most inspiring is relieving pain and suffering from a wide range of brain and spine problems.

We have already seen the impact on the first 27 human trial participants. Almost half the world's population has some brain problem. Today, Neuralink employs over 300 people, was valued at around $9 billion last year, and has a 1,024-channel device that can read neurons. My prediction: in 11 to 12 years, the company will have implanted 1,000,000 people, employ 30,000, be worth over $1 trillion, and have a 1,000,000-channel device that can both read and stimulate neurons. Beyond the numbers, the real impact will be helping us understand consciousness and the brain, reducing suffering from brain and spine problems, and connecting us to digital superintelligence.

Thank you for reading. You can find me on X @NeuraPod, and I will see you in the next update.