← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

France threatens to ban Shein and refers it to Paris prosecutor after an investigation found that sex dolls "resembling children" were being sold on the site (Liz Alderman/New York Times)

Sources: Trump decided not to discuss Nvidia's AI chip exports to China during his October 30 meeting with Xi Jinping following opposition from his top advisers (Wall Street Journal)

How Facebook Dating, launched in 2019, has become a surprise hit with 21M+ daily users, vs. Hinge's ~15M, a sign of how Facebook has been reinventing itself (Eli Tan/New York Times)

Hippocratic AI, which offers healthcare AI agents, raised a $126M Series C led by Avenir at a $3.5B valuation, up from $1.64B in January (Heather Landi/Fierce Healthcare)

Lambda announces a multibillion-dollar agreement with Microsoft for AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia chips; the specific deal value was not disclosed (Jaures Yip/CNBC)

Japanese trade association CODA, representing Studio Ghibli, Square Enix and others, demands that OpenAI stop using their copyrighted content to train Sora 2 (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

Indian digital payments company Pine Labs prices its IPO at $2 to $2.5/share, valuing it at $2.9B at the top end of the range, down from a $5B valuation in 2022 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Crypto.com strikes a deal with Hollywood.com to let users make predictions related to movies, actors, shows, and awards (Rob Golum/Bloomberg)

TikTok announces its first ever TikTok Awards show in the US; the live event will take place on December 18 and will be streamed on the TikTok app and on Tubi (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

arXiv says it will step up its moderation of CS review papers not vetted by an academic journal or a conference, after a surge in AI-generated papers (Matthew Gault/404 Media)

NY-based Teleskope, which offers smaller LLMs fine-tuned for specific security problems, raised a $25M Series A led by M13, taking its total funding to $32.2M (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)

Toronto-based quantum computing company Xanadu says it will go public in the US and Canada via a SPAC, in a deal that values the combined business at ~$3.6B (Josh Scott/BetaKit)

Cisco launches Unified Edge, an all-in-one system designed to help retail stores, health care facilities, and factories use AI with a single equipment rack (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

As part of its AWS deal, OpenAI says it will immediately begin running workloads on AWS infrastructure, tapping hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's GPUs in the US (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

OpenAI and AWS sign a seven-year deal in which OpenAI will pay $38B for AI compute, including training its models using Amazon's data centers and using its CPUs (Berber Jin/Wall Street Journal)

MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria is stepping down after 11 years, replaced by Cloudflare President of Product & Engineering Chirantan Desai, effective November 10 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Job listings show AI groups like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere have stepped up hiring for forward-deployed engineers to help businesses adopt their AI models (Financial Times)

Israel unveils tax incentives to reverse tech brain drain that increased during the war in Gaza and tax breaks for investors in Israeli funds and tech firms (James Shotter/Financial Times)

An Italian law requiring porn sites, including Pornhub, YouPorn, and OnlyFans, to verify the ages of their users will go into effect on November 12 (Jackson Chen/Engadget)

Online harassers are using AI tools to create more realistic death threats, posting hyper-realistic AI-generated images and sounds to social media platforms (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times)

A profile of David Bailey, Trump's informal crypto advisor who organizes the Bitcoin Conference, as he seeks to turn a Utah health clinic into a bitcoin bank (Nina Bambysheva/Forbes)

AI browsers can bypass some paywalls; OpenAI's Atlas seems to avoid content from companies suing OpenAI, providing summaries or alternate reporting instead (Columbia Journalism Review)

Copenhagen-based Formalize, whose compliance software serves organizations in 80+ countries, raised a €30M Series B co-led by Acton Capital and Blackfin Tech (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Nexperia's China unit says it has "sufficient inventories" to sustain order fulfillment "through year-end and beyond", after the parent suspended wafer supplies (Reuters)

Analysis: sports volumes on Kalshi approach $1B a week, with open interest in sports contracts regularly above $100M, significantly higher than other categories (Financial Times)

How the Venezuelan government is using crypto and stablecoins like USDT to manage the downturn; Venezuela sells most of its oil to China and is paid in crypto (Anatoly Kurmanaev/New York Times)

Oxford Economics: the AI boom is lifting global trade, with ~60% of US data center capex spent on imported IT gear, mainly from Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

Big Tech's dominance on the S&P 500 is becoming more extreme; the eight biggest tech stocks account for 60% of the gains since the market bottomed in April 2025 (George Steer/Financial Times)

How Google Cloud has become one of Alphabet's fastest-growing businesses under Thomas Kurian, driven by investments in AI, data centers, custom chips, and more (Kenrick Cai/Reuters)

A profile of Aaron Greenspan, who has spent years on a crusade to expose what he believes are financial problems at Tesla and at big tech companies (Noam Scheiber/New York Times)

Microsoft's AI tools still lag behind OpenAI's, as Microsoft struggles to create a cohesive AI experience and add new features by integrating OpenAI models (Austin Carr/Bloomberg)

Grokipedia content often closely mirrors Wikipedia except for some political topics but its use of AI makes it better than Wikipedia on obscure entries (Katie Notopoulos/Business Insider)

The White House says China has agreed to effectively end rare earth export controls issued in 2025 and 2022, and will also close probes of US chip companies (Hadriana Lowenkron/Bloomberg)

Q&A with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella about the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, OpenAI's restructuring and $100B revenue target for 2027, $3T AI buildout, more (@bg2pod)

Turkish state media reports that Faruk Fatih Ozer, the former CEO of failed crypto exchange Thodex, has been found dead in his prison cell (Baris Balci/Bloomberg)

Anduril conducts the first flight of its jet-powered unmanned drone, flying it "semi-autonomously", as the US Air Force plans swarms of unmanned jet drones (David Jeans/Reuters)

ESPN plans to make its College Gameday telecast available on host Pat McAfee's X account, as Disney and YouTube TV continue to spar over a new carriage deal (Brian Steinberg/Variety)

A profile of AI contractor marketplace Mercor, which is valued at $10B and whose three 22-year-old founders are Thiel Fellows, each holding a roughly 22% stake (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

MediaTek says it is on track to generate $1B in revenue from its data center AI accelerator ASIC chips in 2026, after reporting Q3 revenue up 7.8% YoY to $4.64B (Reuters)

Singapore seizes more than $115M in assets linked to Cambodia's Prince Group, which the US and UK accuse of stealing billions of dollars via online scam centers (Bloomberg)

China says it will allow some Nexperia semiconductor chip exports to resume to ease critical supply shortages impacting global auto production (Financial Times)

Nvidia says it will supply 260K+ of its most advanced AI chips to the South Korean government and major companies, including Samsung, Naver, and SK Group (Reuters)

Despite the hype around large AI models, many companies like Meta are using small models for routine tasks, finding them more practical and cost-effective (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

Shares of Seagate and Western Digital have sharply outperformed the broader market in 2025, surging ~200% on AI-related infrastructure demand for hard drives (Shashwat Chauhan/Reuters)

Vista Equity Partners buys a majority stake in Nexthink, which uses AI to let businesses track employees' device and app performance, valuing Nexthink at $3B (Paula Doenecke/Bloomberg)

Vodafone agrees to acquire Skaylink, a German company specializing in managing cloud deployments on Microsoft Azure and AWS, for €175M from PE firm Waterland (Yamini Kalia/Reuters)

NEC to buy US-listed CSG, a SaaS provider of customer care and billing services for telcos and other companies, for ~$2.9B in a deal expected to close in 2026 (Mayumi Negishi/Bloomberg)

Mumbai-based Snapmint, a BNPL partner to brands that lets consumers pay in monthly instalments via India's UPI, raised a $125M Series B led by General Atlantic (Shashank Pathak/Entrackr)

Tech companies, including Meta and xAI, are using SPVs to raise tens of billions for AI data centers, letting them keep the debt off their balance sheets (Carmen Arroyo/Bloomberg)

New York-based Kaizen, which provides a commerce platform for government agencies to offer services like utility billing, raised a $21M Series A led by NEA (Chris Metinko/Axios)