In Brief Chip company Nvidia gets the green light from the European Union to complete its acquisition of Run:ai.The EU came to a unanimous decision today that Nvidia could go ahead with its acquisition of Israeli GPU orchestration platform Run:ai, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The European Commission determined that if the merger went through other hardware options compatible with Nvidia would still be available on the market and thus this company combination would not create a monopoly. Despite t ...

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This will be the last newsletter of 2024! But don’t worry, we’ll be back in 2025 — sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Thank you for reading and your emails. I love to get them. Happy holidays and have a Happy New Year.I didn’t meet Jean Jennings until long after she had cemented her status as an automotive journalism icon. By then, Jennings (formerly Lindamood) had been editor of Car a ...

In Brief Tesla is evaluating multiple Texas cities where it wants to test a long-promised robotaxi service, including Austin, according to emails obtained by Bloomberg News. An employee has apparently been in touch with Austin officials since May, and recently held an event in December to “train first responders on how to best work with Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology,” which is still in development. The employee told the city that “Austin is obviously on our roadmap, but has not yet been decided wh ...

In Brief Apple and Meta are warring in Europe over the balance between interoperability and privacy, Reuters reports.The fight focuses on the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a competition regulation that requires designated gatekeepers (including Apple and Meta) not to restrict rivals’ access to so-called core platform services. In Apple’s case, this means: iOS, iPadOS, App Store, and Safari. But its concern here seems mainly focused on iOS. The iPhone maker has made no bones about its distaste ...

Group 1 - Microsoft purchased 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips in 2024, more than double the amount bought by its closest competitor, Meta, which acquired 224,000 chips [1] - The number of Nvidia chips purchased by Microsoft in 2024 more than tripled compared to its purchases in 2023 [1] Group 2 - Microsoft is developing its own custom AI chips named Maia, announced at the Ignite conference in late 2023 [2] - The company has strengthened its partnership with OpenAI, participating in a significant $6.6 billion funding round in October [2] - Microsoft signed a deal to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in September, securing a 20-year agreement to purchase all generated power for its data centers [2]

A U.S. court ruled in August that Google has a search monopoly, and while Google appeals, the Justice Department is figuring out what kind of potential penalties to impose — like breaking off Chrome. As part of this process, the DOJ wants to call on a specific witness, according to a recent court filing: Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer of Perplexity, an AI search provider most recently valued at $9 billion, per Reuters.   Perplexity and other generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search have ...

Group 1 - Salesforce plans to hire 2,000 new sales representatives to promote its AI tools, doubling previous hiring plans [1][2] - The company has already received 9,000 referrals for the 2,000 positions [1] - Salesforce is set to release the second generation of its AI agent software in February 2025 [2] Group 2 - CEO Marc Benioff anticipates that Salesforce will have over a billion AI agents operational within the next 12 months [2] - Benioff expressed unprecedented excitement about generative AI, stating it is the most thrilling development in his career at Salesforce [2]

With cloud spend continuing to surge, tech companies are scrambling to meet demand for the necessary infrastructure, with the growing need for AI compute only adding fuel to the fire.By way of example, Microsoft and BlackRock have created a $30 billion fund to support new data centers and energy infrastructure for the burgeoning AI boom, and Meta is planning a new $10 billion subsea cable that will span the entire globe. Google, for its part, recently announced Umoja, the first subsea fiber-optic cable to c ...

Meta has been fined €251 million (around $263 million) in the European Union for a Facebook security breach that affected millions of users which the company disclosed back in September 2018. The penalty, issued on Tuesday by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) — enforcing the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — is far from being the largest GDPR fine Meta has been hit with since the regime came into force over five years ago but is notable for being a substantial sanction for a single ...

In Brief Meta has agreed to a $50 million payment program to settle a long-running proceeding in Australia related to misuse of information for political ad targeting, the country’s information watchdog OAIC announced Tuesday.The settlement concerns the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when data on millions of Facebook users was exfiltrated without their knowledge or consent by a developer on its platform. The OAIC sued Facebook in March 2020 — pursuing damages for the 300,000+ local users believed to have ...