 | Jun 03, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Tuesday! Samsung is close to a deal to invest in Perplexity. Google agrees to spend $500 million to settle shareholder litigation over antitrust claims. Elon Musk's xAI is allowing employees to sell $300 million worth of shares to investors.
| | | | Google has agreed to spend $500 million over 10 years and create new compliance committees to settle shareholder litigation accusing it of antitrust violations, according to court documents filed Friday. Shareholders led by pension funds in Michigan and Pennsylvania sued Google's parent company Alphabet and its board of directors for breaching its duty to shareholders by exposing them to antitrust risks. Under the settlement, which still needs to be approved by a federal judge in California, Google would create a new board committee and management-level committees for compliance and regulatory issues. The settlement doesn't settle either of the two antitrust cases the Department of Justice has won against Google over the past year, on search and advertising technology. Google has said it will appeal those verdicts. In a statement on the shareholder settlement, a spokesperson said, "To avoid protracted litigation we're happy to make these commitments as we continue to prioritize our compliance obligations." | | | | Samsung is close to a deal to invest in Perplexity and put the AI startups's search tech onto its phones, Bloomberg reported, a potential blow to Google. Samsung has long been Google's most important partner in Android, giving Google distribution for its apps on Samsung devices. The Bloomberg report said that Samsung and Perplexity were in talks to preload Perplexity's app on Samsung phones and its web browser. The report highlights how AI startups are increasingly focused on securing distribution for their apps, by striking deals with phone makers, just as Google has long done for its search and other apps. In testimony in a Google antitrust trial, an internal Google presentation from last year showed that OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms had each approached Samsung about striking deals to put their AI chatbots onto Samsung phones. | | | | Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is allowing employees to sell $300 million worth of shares to investors, in a deal that values the company at $113 billion. That's the same price for the company Musk announced in March, when xAI bought his social media service X. The secondary offering follows similar sales by xAI's biggest competitors, Anthropic and OpenAI, and are part of a rising trend in Silicon Valley to offer employees a way to liquidate a portion of their shares. Musk's other company, SpaceX, also regularly arranges sales for its employees. XAI is also raising a $5 billion debt offering, arranged by Morgan Stanley, said one person familiar with the matter. The offering was first reported by Bloomberg. | | | | Shares of data center developer Applied Digital rose 50% after the company said it leased part of a large facility to CoreWeave, a firm that rents out Nvidia chips to artificial intelligence developers. The announcement confirmed The Information's earlier reporting that the firms were in talks about a deal. The surge gave Applied Digital a market capitalization of $2.3 billion. Its North Dakota data center was a risky bet: Applied built it in a remote location and before locking in a major customer. Before the CoreWeave deal, Applied had struggled to find a large customer to rent the 400-megawatt facility. Applied said the deal with CoreWeave involves two leases that span 15 years and could generate $7 billion in total revenue. One part of the North Dakota facility, which would require 100 megawatts of power, will be ready for CoreWeave to use before the end of this year. | | | | Banking app Chime plans to sell shares in an initial public offering at a price that would value it at between $10.3 billion and $11.1 billion, on a fully-diluted basis, the company said in a new securities filing Monday. The company set the price range ahead of a roadshow to meet investors over the next week, ahead of its IPO. The per-share price of the range, between $24 and $26, is more than 60% below the price at which it sold shares to investors privately in 2021. It is the latest in a streak of so-called down-round IPOs, The Information reported last week. The company plans to sell about 26 million shares in the IPO, raising about $650 million for the business, while existing shareholders plan to sell about $150 million worth of shares. By far the largest selling shareholder in the IPO is Cathay Innovation, the Paris-based venture capital firm that led Chime's Series B round in 2017. It plans to sell about $100 million worth of shares. The updated IPO filing also shows that Chime's founders, Christopher Britt and Ryan King, each own between 4% and 5% of the company, on a fully-diluted basis. They own a special class of shares that give the two founders a combined 74% of the voting power. | | | | Voyager Technologies said on Monday it is aiming to raise up to $319 million in an initial public offering that could value the defense and space company as high as $1.6 billion. Denver-based Voyager is developing Starlab, a private space station in a joint venture with Airbus, Mitsubishi, MDA Space and Palantir. The project received a $217.5 million development grant from NASA and is meant to replace the International Space Station by the end of 2030. The planned IPO comes as the space industry is capitalizing on planned increases in government spending on commercial exploration and other projects. | | | | Amazon's technique for choosing which offers from outside merchants to prominently display on its e-commerce site likely violates German antitrust laws and discourages price competition across online retail, the country's antitrust regulator said Monday. Amazon awards the "Buy Now" and "Add to Cart" buttons on listings based on its own rules and algorithms, which the German Federal Cartel Office said are not transparent. Amazon can take away the "Buy Now" and "Add to Cart" buttons if it finds the same products for lower prices on other websites. The regulator said the practice of setting what it called "price caps" for items is "not based on any objective, verifiable principles" and is not "sufficiently transparent in Amazon's Marketplace Policy or communication with third-party sellers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company strongly disagrees with the antitrust regulator's assessment, and that changing its pricing policies would "mislead customers into thinking they're getting good value when, in reality, they're not." The complaints from the top antitrust regulator in Germany, which is Amazon's second largest market, resemble allegations from the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. Amazon's pricing policies are a major component of a FTC lawsuit against the company that's due to go to trial next year. | | | | Elon Musk on Sunday announced plans for an encrypted messaging platform called XChat that will feature vanishing messages and the ability to make audio and video calls without a phone number. The first version will be available this week on his social media platform X "if there are no scaling issues," he said. The service, an upgraded version of the direct messaging he inherited as part of his Twitter takeover, is essentially Musk's bid to compete with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and China's WeChat. The announcement comes a week after Telegram founder Pavel Durov said he signed a partnership with xAI to use the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok on his platform. Musk publicly refuted the $300 million deal, which was to be paid by xAI to Telegram, and Durov later clarified that it was only "agreed in principle" with "formalities" pending. | | | | Uber is promoting Andrew Macdonald from senior vice president of mobility and business operations to the position of president and chief operating officer, a role that has not been filled at the rideshare startup since 2019, Bloomberg reported. Macdonald will succeed Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, who served as senior vice president for Uber's delivery business. The move could help unify Uber's mobility and delivery divisions. In a memo seen by Bloomberg, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote, "While we've made progress, today less than 1 in 5 of our consumers use both mobility and delivery in a given quarter." The company will also promote three employees to its leadership team, according to the report. Pradeem Parameswaran will serve as global head of mobility, Susan Anderson will be global head of delivery and Sarfraz Maredia will become global head of autonomous mobility and delivery. A spokesperson for Uber did not reply to a request for comment. | | | | Alibaba Group is quickly establishing itself as a leader in open-source artificial intelligence models thanks to the successful launch of its latest models known as Qwen3. And that's triggering changes both inside and outside the Chinese tech giant. Alibaba's various business units are now working on projects to develop more capable AI agents powered by Qwen3, while some Alibaba apps that earlier used DeepSeek's R1 model for their AI features are now switching to Qwen3, The Information reported. While Alibaba's open-source models are accelerating China's domestic AI adoption among businesses, the tech giant is also trying to increase the global presence of Qwen models. Alibaba has come a long way. The company in 2023 launched the first generation of its Qwen AI models, but even some of Alibaba's own AI application teams were unimpressed by Qwen's capabilities back then and kept using other companies' AI models, such as Meta Platforms' Llama, well into 2024, The Information reported. Over the past year, Alibaba's AI model team has made a significant headway, leading to the recent breakthrough with Qwen3. During the development of Qwen3 earlier this year, Jack Ma, Alibaba's iconic founder who had stepped down from executive and board roles six years ago, frequently asked the AI team to provide him with updates on the progress of Qwen3 development. The unusual attention from Ma reminded the team how critical Qwen3 was for the future of Alibaba. | | | Popular articles By Wayne Ma and Aaron Tilley
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