Reporting on the business of technology, startups, venture capital funding, and Silicon Valley.
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Trump administration’s legal setbacks are good news for offshore wind — and the grid
The Trump administration suffered a series of legal setbacks this week after judges allowed work to restart on several offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. The Department of the Interior had ordered a stop to five projects totaling 6 gigawatts of generating capacity in December,
Oshen built the first ocean robot to collect data in a Category 5 hurricane
Anahita Laverack was set on becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after a realization at an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to launch Oshen, a company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data. In 2021, Laverack, a storied sailor, decided to build
Musk wants up to $134B in OpenAI lawsuit, despite $700B fortune
Elon Musk wants a jaw-dropping $79 billion to $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the AI company defrauded him by jettisoning its nonprofit mission, Bloomberg first reported. The figure comes from expert witness C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist whose bio says he has been
AI cloud startup Runpod hits $120M in ARR — and it started with a Reddit post
Runpod, an AI app hosting platform that launched four years ago, has hit a $120 million annual revenue run rate, founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh tell TechCrunch. Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come. The story inc
California AG sends Musk’s xAI a cease-and-desist order over sexual deepfakes
Earlier this week, the California attorney general’s office announced that it was investigating xAI over reports that the startup’s chatbot, Grok, was being used to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of women and minors. On Friday, the government followed up by sending a cease-and-desist letter to
Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits $15B valuation
Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Vent
TikTok quietly launches a microdrama app called ‘PineDrama’
TikTok has quietly released a new stand-alone short drama app called PineDrama in the U.S. and Brazil. The app offers access to microdramas, which are essentially bite-sized TV shows that can be watched in a series of one-minute episodes. Think TikTok, but every video you come across is a short epis
EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used
Elon Musk’s xAI has been illegally operating dozens of natural gas turbines to power its Colossus data centers in Tennessee, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled Thursday. The AI company has argued that because the turbines were being used on a temporary basis, they were exempt from regulations
From OpenAI’s offices to a deal with Eli Lilly — how Chai Discovery became one of the flashiest names in AI drug development
Drug discovery, the art of identifying new molecules to develop pharmaceuticals, is a notoriously time-consuming and difficult process. Traditional techniques, like high-throughput screening, offer an expensive scattershot approach — one that is not often successful. However, a new breed of biotech
Supreme Court hacker posted stolen government data on Instagram
A hacker posted the personal data of several of his hacking victims on his Instagram account, @ihackthegovernment, according to a court document. Last week, Nicholas Moore, 24, a resident of Springfield, Tennessee, pleaded guilty to repeatedly hacking into the U.S. Supreme Court’s electronic documen