| |  | Sep 03, 2025 | | | | | | Happy Wednesday! A federal judge rules that Google won't be forced to sell Chrome. Anthropic raises $13 billion at a $170 billion valuation. OpenAI acquires product analytics startup Statsig for $1.1 billion.
| | | | An antitrust judge rejected the Justice Department's most drastic proposals for how Google's search business should be overhauled to make up for its illegal monopoly, saying in a decision Tuesday afternoon he wouldn't require the company to sell either its Chrome browser or its Android operating system. The judge barred Google from entering into exclusive contracts for distributing its search engine and ruled that Google must share some data with rival search engines. But the judge said Google could pay for distribution of search and its AI products, which suggests Google may continue to pay $20 billion a year to Apple for making Google its search provider on Safari, as long as the deal isn't exclusive. The judge said that the government "overreached in seeking forced divesture of these key assets." Google also will be allowed to continue making non-exclusive deals for distributing Google Search, Chrome and its generative AI products. The judge noted that "cutting off payment from Google almost certainly will impose substantial—in some cases, crippling—downstream harms to distribution partners, related markets and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban." In a statement, Google said the decision "recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI." The Justice Department called the decision "significant remedies," although Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater also said that the department would "continue to review the opinion to consider the Department's options and next steps regarding seeking additional relief." Also on Tuesday, the European Union paused plans to fine Google over its adtech business, for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, Bloomberg reported. | | | | Anthropic on Tuesday said it had raised $13 billion at a $170 billion valuation before the financing, in a round co-led by new investor Iconiq and returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Fidelity Management. The funding nearly tripled its valuation from a round led by Lightspeed at the start of this year. The size and price of the investment in OpenAI's main rival reflect anticipation among venture capitalists that the leading AI companies are on their way taking huge shares of corporate and consumer spending, as they enter markets from drug discovery to shopping. The company as of August was generating $5 billion in annualized revenue, up from $1 billion at the start of the year. Anthropic has over 300,000 enterprise customers, and its coding copilot product, Claude Code, is generating over $500 million in annualized revenue. The size and price of the round increased over the last few weeks, as Anthropic's recent growth drove up demand. In July, The Information first reported that investors floated a new financing at valuations above $100 billion. Other investors in the most recent round include Altimeter, Blackstone, General Catalyst, Jane Street and Insight Partners. Kleiner Perkins made its first investment into a model maker business in this round, as well. | | | | OpenAI said Tuesday it has agreed to acquire Statsig, a startup that helps businesses test how well their products are working, for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal, representing about 0.4% of OpenAI's shares. That's the same valuation Statsig, which was part of The Information's most promising startups of 2023, got in an equity financing announced earlier this year. With the acquisition, Statsig CEO Vijaye Raji will become OpenAI's CTO of Applications, reporting to Fidji Simo, the CEO of Applications. In his new role, Vijaye will head product engineering for ChatGPT and the company's artificial intelligence coding product Codex. Several other OpenAI executives are also taking on new roles. Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer for the past year or so, said he is moving to OpenAI's research organization to lead a new group called OpenAI for Science, which is aiming to build an "AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery." Simo will now oversee the product organization. Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI's vice president of engineering, also said in a post on LinkedIn that he will be CTO of B2B Applications at OpenAI. OpenAI sells ChatGPT to enterprises and has also been developing productivity app features similar to those of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace. | | | | Nvidia has acquired Solver, a three-year-old software development startup, The Information reported Tuesday. The startup, formerly known as Laredo Labs, had developed an AI coding agent and raised $8 million in financing from investors including Radical Ventures and Horizons Ventures. Nvidia regularly buys small startups, including several whose technology can lower the cost of using its chips. The firm's recent acquisitions include Run.ai, Deci and OctoAI. Additionally, in March, Nvidia acquired Lepton AI, which rents out servers powered by Nvidia's chips. Solver marks a change from those acquisitions because it built a coding agent for developers. | | | | The Trump administration has revoked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's authorization to ship chipmaking tools to China without a license, the chipmaker said on Tuesday. This decision, part of Washington's broader strategy to limit China's access to U.S. technology, comes despite Trump's recent actions to loosen some export control measures introduced by the Biden administration. Last week, the Trump administration revoked the waivers for South Korean companies Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to ship U.S. chipmaking equipment to their China-based chip plants. TSMC has a facility in Nanjing, China, where it produces chips for consumer electronics and industrial applications, and another plant in Shanghai that uses older technology not regulated by U.S. export controls. The company's most advanced products, such as Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips, are made in Taiwan and the U.S. While the revocation does not completely ban TSMC from exporting U.S. chipmaking tools to China, the company will have to obtain approval from the Commerce Department to do so. The Taiwanese chipmaker said it is currently evaluating the situation and engaging with U.S. officials to ensure the facility in Nanjing can continue to operate without disruption. | | | | UK-based buy-now pay-later firm Klarna took the next step towards going public, filing an updated IPO filing revealing it will offer 34.3 million shares for sale, priced between $35 and $37, raising a total of $1.2 billion. The offering would value the company at up to $14 billion. Most of the shares to be sold are held by Klarna shareholders, including Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake and Mubadala Investment. The company itself is only selling 5.5 million shares. The filing reveals that Sequoia is by far the biggest shareholder, holding 21% of the stock, while co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski owns about 7% of the stock. | | | | KKR is bringing on former Amazon Web Services boss Adam Selipsky as a strategic advisor to bolster the private equity firm's big bets on data centers and the technical infrastructure powering artificial intelligence. Selipsky will advise on strategy, capital allocation and governance for KKR's $179 billion real assets business and work with leadership teams at the firm's portfolio companies, KKR said on Wednesday. Selipsky will help KKR and its companies think about AI applications and infrastructure "from the molecules to delivering electrons," said Waldemar Szlezak, a partner and global head of digital infrastructure at KKR. "Adam has a unique perspective from where he sat at AWS." Like many of its peers, KKR is making a big push into data centers for AI. The firm said it's invested $42 billion of equity in data centers, fiber and wireless infrastructure, in addition to $20 billion in power and renewable energy assets. Its portfolio includes CyrusOne, a data center developer that's among the largest in North America. Selipsky exited Amazon last year following a three-year run as CEO of AWS, where he oversaw significant revenue growth and the cloud unit's response to the rise of generative AI. Before that, he was CEO of cloud software company Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019 for $15.7 billion. | | | | Amazon is ending a program that allowed Prime members to share their free shipping benefit with others, according to an email to shoppers and a customer service page on Amazon's site. The Prime Invitee Program, which Amazon originally launched in 2009, will end on Oct. 1, the website page says. Amazon will continue to let Prime members share their benefits with other people living in the same household through its Amazon Family program, which includes Prime's free shipping as well as access to Prime Video, Amazon Music and other perks like free Grubhub memberships and fuel discounts. Amazon Family plans can include one other adult and up to four children's profiles. To share Prime benefits, both users must live at the same address and agree to share access to payment information. "The Invitee program, which enabled sharing of the Prime shipping benefit only, is being phased out, and Prime members can instead share a broad range of Prime benefits with Amazon Family," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. | | | Popular articles
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