← Back to news

T

Techmeme RSS Feed

Sources: the European Commission wants to decide if AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud should face new restrictions under the DMA, after several major cloud outages (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says he is "nervous about the size of these investments in these data centers"; he owns stakes in OpenAI, Perplexity, and xAI (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times)

Meta says its 2Africa subsea internet cable project remains incomplete in the southern Red Sea due to security risks; Google's Blue-Raman cable is also delayed (Bloomberg)

In an informal survey of 300+ Cerebral Valley AI Conference attendees asking which $1B+ valuation startup to short, most voted Perplexity, followed by OpenAI (Ben Bergman/Business Insider)

Voize, an ambient AI voice startup targeting skilled nursing facilities, raised a $50M Series A led by Balderton Capital and aims to sign US clients in Q1 2026 (Brock E.W. Turner/Axios)

Q&A with OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo on joining OpenAI, ChatGPT users' mental health, profitability, data center deals, her chronic illness, and more (Zoë Schiffer/Wired)

US filing: Peter Thiel's Thiel Macro sold 537,742 Nvidia shares, worth ~$100M as of September 30, during Q3, amid rising concerns about an AI investment bubble (Bloomberg)

Copenhagen-based Flatpay, which facilitates card payments for SMBs, raised €145M at a €1.5B valuation and says it "crossed €100M of ARR in October" (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

Sources: UK companies tell the UK that a planned ban on paying ransoms to ransomware gangs is unlikely to stop attacks and could result in services collapsing (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)

Freedom on the Net 2025 report: for the 15th consecutive year, global internet freedom is in decline; of the 72 countries assessed, Kenya fell the most (Tech Policy Press)

Investigation: $28B+ in crypto tied to illicit activity flowed into crypto exchanges like Binance over the past two years, as President Trump embraced crypto (New York Times)

Chinese toymaker FoloToy suspends sales of its GPT-4o-powered teddy bear, after researchers found the toy gave kids harmful responses, like about fire and kinks (Brandon Vigliarolo/The Register)

Sources: AI startup Project Prometheus raised $6.2B, including from Jeff Bezos, who is its co-CEO, his first operational role since leaving Amazon in July 2021 (Cade Metz/New York Times)

An interview with Chris Gilliard on his new book Luxury Surveillance, how smart wearables could normalize pervasive surveillance, X's political shift, and more (Anika Collier Navaroli/Tech Policy Press)

Chinese chipmaker Cambricon's revenue surged 500%+ in the past year and its stock jumped 765%+ in two years, as China pushes local chips amid US sanctions (Bloomberg)

The FT's Tim Cook retirement story could be a "trial balloon" from people close to him, if Cook decides to leave on a high note after Apple's Q1 earnings report (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Tokyo-based Turing, which is developing an AI model for self-driving vehicles, raised a $99M Series A, sources say at a ~$388M valuation (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai have each discussed lunar and orbital AI data centers, which could offer steady solar power with fewer regulations (Tim Higgins/Wall Street Journal)

Empower: US BNPL use has grown to 91.5M users, with 25% financing groceries, as default rates accelerate and most loans aren't reported, creating "phantom debt" (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center are increasingly leaning on Google's new DeepMind prediction model, though questions about its methods remain (Eric Holthaus/The Guardian)

Tokyo-based Sakana AI raised a ~$135M Series B from MUFG, Khosla Ventures, and others at a ~$2.6B valuation, becoming Japan's most valuable unicorn (Nikkei Asia)

A look at Flighty, a flight-tracking app that often beats airline updates; downloads went up 3x when the FAA cut air traffic during the US government shutdown (Ben Cohen/Wall Street Journal)

Samsung, SK Group, and others announce billions in domestic investment after the US-South Korea trade deal; Samsung plans to invest $310B, and SK pledged $88B (Kim Tong-Hyung/Associated Press)

Sources: Apple plans three high-end iPhones next fall, with lower-end iPhones and likely a new Air in Q2 2027; Mac Pro gets deprioritized; Jeff Williams retires (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Sources: Demis Hassabis pursued a Nobel as a DeepMind goal and favored high-minded work over short-term revenue or a stronger AI race position for Alphabet (Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters)

Sources: Vinted is exploring a share sale that could value the company at ~€8B; Vinted says it expects 2025 revenue to cross €1B+, up from €813M in 2024 (Financial Times)

Dealogic: 51 US tech IPOs raised $16.8B in 2025, driven by AI and crypto, above the past three-year average but far below 2021's 127 IPOs raising $74.4B (Valida Pau/The Information)

A cat's killing by a Waymo robotaxi sparked outrage in San Francisco, as some questioned why deaths caused by human drivers don't get the same level of concern (Heather Knight/New York Times)

Some experts question Anthropic's claims of cyberattack breakthroughs using its tools, noting that white-hat hackers report modest gains from AI-aided hacking (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

The current AI strategies of China and the US are complementary, as unlike the US, China isn't "AGI-pilled" yet, focusing on embodied AI and open source models (Dean W. Ball/Hyperdimensional)

Apple updates App Review Guidelines to require apps to disclose and obtain users' permission before sharing personal data with third-party AI providers (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Political fixer Bradley Tusk's nonprofit releases VoteSecure, an open-source cryptographic protocol for mobile voting, amid skepticism from cryptographers (Steven Levy/Wired)

A look at the global AI data center buildout, its limits, and ROI concerns; in 2025, US capacity that is built, underway, planned, or stalled has topped 80 GW (Wall Street Journal)

A California federal jury says Apple must pay Masimo $634M for infringing a blood-oxygen patent used in Watch workout and heart-rate alerts; Apple will appeal (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

A profile of Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, reportedly leaving after being sidelined, who says LLMs are a dead end for AGI and backs world models instead (Meghan Bobrowsky/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Apple is intensifying CEO succession planning as Tim Cook, now 65, may step down as early as next year, with John Ternus seen as the likely successor (Financial Times)

Data Center Watch: local opposition blocked or delayed 17 US data center projects worth $98B in Q2 2025, vs. 16 projects worth $64B from May 2024 to March 2025 (Molly Taft/Wired)

Sources: Apptronik, a humanoid robot maker backed by Google, is in the process of raising at least $400M led by B Capital at a $5B pre-money valuation (The Information)

X replaces DMs with Chat, a new messaging system that it says is E2EE, supports file sharing, video calling, and more, rolling out first to iOS and the web (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Digital asset treasuries increasingly rely on in-kind contributions, with sponsors using their own crypto instead of cash, shifting risk to retail investors (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Opera says in the 12 months ending with October, it saw a 88% surge in daily active iOS users across Europe, partly due to the changes mandated by the DMA (Marcus Mendes/9to5Mac)

OpenAI says ChatGPT will now avoid em dashes if users tell it to; em dashes have become telltale signs that supposedly signals text written by AI (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Meta, TikTok, Google, and YouTube sue California over a new law that prohibits personalized feeds for minors without parental consent, claiming it violates 1A (Bernie Pazanowski/Bloomberg Law)

Filing: Berkshire Hathaway discloses a $4.3B stake in Alphabet in Q3, a surprising move given Warren Buffett's reluctance toward high-growth, tech-driven stocks (Yun Li/CNBC)

Google says it plans to invest $40B through 2027 in three new data centers in Texas, including one co-located with a new solar and battery energy storage plant (Bloomberg)

Elon Musk says Grok 5 would be released "in Q1 sometime", later than a deadline he previously set of releasing the model by the end of 2025 (Theo Wayt/The Information)

Internal memo: Meta plans to assess employees on their "AI-driven impact", which will be a "core expectation" of their performance from 2026 (Jyoti Mann/Business Insider)

Microsoft signs a deal with a legal advocacy group to resolve claims it denied discounts to conservative religious nonprofits; OpenAI and Asana also made deals (Jeff Green/Bloomberg)

JPMorgan Chase secures deals with fintech middlemen, like Plaid, covering 95%+ of third-party data pulls, and will receive payment for access to customer data (Hugh Son/CNBC)

WH national security memo: Alibaba provides tech support for China military's "operations" against targets in the US; Alibaba says it is "complete nonsense" (Demetri Sevastopulo/Financial Times)