 | Apr 28, 2025 | | | | | | Welcome back! Elon Musk's xAI Holdings is in talks to raise $20 billion. China's Huawei is testing a new AI chip it has developed with the aim of replacing some of Nvidia's high-end chips. DoorDash offers to buy Deliveroo for about $3.5 billion.
| | | | Elon Musk's XAI Holdings, formed from merging his xAI startup with social media company X, is in talks to raise $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported. The new investment could value the combined company at $120 billion, the report said. The giant round could be used to pay down some of the debt that X, then called Twitter, took on when Musk took it private in a leveraged buyout three years ago. XAI, the maker of chatbot Grok, has previously raised about $13 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock and sovereign wealth funds MGX and Qatar Investment Authority. | | | | Huawei Technologies is talking to Chinese tech companies about a powerful new artificial-intelligence chip it has developed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Huawei is aiming for the chip to replace some high-end products from Nvidia, the U.S. chipmaker that dominates AI chips, the Journal said. The new chip, called the Ascend 910D, is still in early stages of development and will require testing before it can be shipped to customers. Huawei expects to get the first of the new chips in about a month, the Journal reported. The company hopes the chip will be more powerful than Nvidia's H100. Huawei is aiming to help China become self-sufficient in high-end chips. The U.S. is trying to prevent that from happening by cutting off China from buying chip-making gear and from high-end chips like those from Nvidia. Nvidia took a $5.5 billion charge this month when Washington restricted sales in China of its H20 chip. That had been the top processor the company could sell inside China without a license. Restrictions like these have pushed China to develop its own technologies. Huawei has already released a high-end smartphone with domestically made chips. | | | | San Francisco-based food delivery company DoorDash has offered to buy London-based food delivery company Deliveroo for $2.40 a share, according to Deliveroo. That offer, 29% higher than its Thursday closing share price, values the company at about $3.5 billion. Deliveroo talked to DoorDash about a takeover last year but couldn't settle on valuation, according to Reuters. DoorDash shares ended New York trading slightly higher. Deliveroo was founded in 2013 and went public in London 2021 after raising more than $1.7 billion from investors including Amazon. The stock has dropped 62% since the IPO. The company, which operates in 10 companies, reported its first net profit last year. DoorDash reported $1.8 billion in free cash flow last year. In 2021 it bought Wolt, another European food delivery company, for $8.1 billion. DoorDash sent Deliveroo the proposal earlier this month and has until May 23 to make a firm offer, Deliveroo said. | | | | Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said late Thursday that he could foresee people owning cars with Waymo's self-driving car systems. There's "future optionality around personal ownership" of Waymo's technology, Pichai said in a call to discuss the company's first quarter results. Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, doesn't sell its robotaxis to the public, which are estimated to cost over a quarter of a million dollars, according to autonomous vehicle experts. It's not clear if the company would sell the vehicles or just the self-driving systems to operate another car marker's vehicles. A spokesperson for Waymo declined to elaborate. Putting Waymos in the hands of individual owners or businesses could increase the pressure on Tesla. The electric vehicle maker has said that Tesla owners would be able to make money off their cars that operate as robotaxis. Tesla said earlier this week that the Austin launch will consist of 10 to 20 cars. Pichai said Waymo also now completes 250,000 paid trips weekly, five times more than it did last year. Waymo operates robotaxis in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles, and has an expansion into Atlanta planned for this summer and Washington next year. | | | | Deel, the fintech software company accused of spying on archrival Rippling, hit back with a lawsuit that claims the spy that Deel allegedly paid was actually a whistleblower trying to bring to light wrongdoing by Rippling. Deel's lawsuit, filed in the superior court of Delaware on Thursday, claims that Rippling has defamed Deel and interfered with its business by making false and misleading statements about the company to the press, government officials and third parties. Deel said some customers had told Deel they would not continue their negotiations with Deel due to claims Rippling allegedly made about Deel's business. Among Deel's accusations was that Keith O'Brien, a Rippling employee who confessed to spying on Rippling, was trying to expose payments Rippling made to sanctioned entities in Russia. Rippling sued Deel over the alleged spying in California and Ireland, where the accused spy worked. In a sworn affidavit, the alleged spy, Keith O'Brien, said he was managed and paid by Deel's top executives, including CEO Alex Bouaziz and his father, Deel chairman Philippe Bouaziz. Deel also filed a motion to dismiss Rippling's lawsuit. Deel lawyers at Skadden Arps, asked the California court to throw out Rippling's lawsuit under the anti-SLAPP statute, laws that usually protect individuals from frivolous litigation intended to intimidate them for exercising their right to free speech. Deel alleged that O'Brien took directions from this journalist–Michael Roddan–as I was working on a story about Rippling and Deel. But as The Information previously reported on March 20, I didn't know O'Brien existed until he was named by Rippling in a lawsuit in the High Court of Ireland. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad, in a post on X, said Deel failed to dispute Ripping's central allegation that Alex Bouaziz personally recruited a spy to steal Rippling's trade secrets. | | | | A Virginia court will hear preliminary arguments May 2 on how Google's ad tech operations—which handle the sale of ads on independent websites—should be restructured to comply with antitrust law, a judge ordered Friday. A judge in that court had ruled last week that Google was a monopoly in certain parts of its advertising technology business. Earlier on Friday, Google and the Justice Department had jointly told the court they had agreed on a timeline for how to decide on the appropriate remedies for the antitrust violations, including a trial in September. But the judge issued a notice later in the day that said the two parties are requesting too much time to argue about remedies, which could mean a trial could be moved up or not happen at all. The case is separate to the antitrust hearing underway this week in a Washington court over the remedies to be applied to its search monopoly, relating to the Justice Department's first antitrust lawsuit against the company which led to a ruling last August that Google operated a monopoly in search. That trial, where the government has proposed Google sell its Chrome browser and make other changes to its business practices, is scheduled to run through May 9. | | | | Sentiment around how conditions for technology companies will fare over the next six months is the most pessimistic it has been since February 2023, according to an April survey of The Information's readers. Roughly 65% of respondents said they feel pessimistic while 20% said they feel optimistic about tech firms' prospects—the most negative reading since The Information's monthly surveys began two years ago. The findings are an indication of how much new U.S. tariffs and recent stock market swings have hurt confidence in the tech sector. Antitrust proceedings for large tech companies may have also played a role. Gauges of readers' confidence in 11 of 14 top technology companies—including Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta Platforms—also sank to their lowest levels since February 2023. In total, 315 people responded to our survey. Netflix was the only company that saw its sentiment score tick higher this month. Pro subscribers can explore and download our full historical Tech Sentiment Tracker data. | | | | Temu and Shein have hiked at least some prices in the U.S. ahead of a planned Trump administration move to end a trade rule that has allowed e-commerce sites to ship orders into the country from China without paying tariffs. Both China-founded sites published nearly identical statements last week warning customers that they planned to raise prices on April 25 due to "recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs." While Temu and Shein frequently change prices, many items appeared to be more expensive across the board on Friday—for example, a Shein dress that had cost $12.07 earlier in April now costs $21.49, according to e-commerce consultant Juozas Kaziukenas. Temu users took to forums like Reddit to complain about price hikes. It was not immediately clear whether Amazon had started raising prices on Haul, its Temu competitor that also uses the same trade rule. The U.S. plans to stop allowing importers to bring individual packages worth less than $800 from China and Hong Kong to the U.S. without paying tariffs under an executive order set to go into effect May 2. The administration has also said it plans to end use of the trade rule for packages coming from other countries but has not yet set a date for the ban to go into effect. | | | | Axiom Space has elevated chief revenue officer Tejpaul Bhatia to the CEO role, succeeding co-founder Mike Suffredini. The shakeup comes as the Houston-based firm is sending its next batch of private astronauts to the International Space Station in May. Bhatia, who has founded several firms in his career but joined Axiom in 2021 from Google, said he brings a startup mentality to the helm. Commercial space is the next dot com boom, Bhatia said. Not every company will be successful, and the market is still coming together. "This is a game of uncertainty," he said. "I feel like I have something to prove." Bhatia acknowledged but didn't confirm a March report that Axiom is raising funds at a $2 billion valuation. Axiom plans to build the first space station with a commercial purpose. Starting in 2027, Axiom plans to launch a series of modules that will attach to the ISS, then break off to create a separate space station. Axiom is also building new spacesuits for NASA through a partnership with Prada. It plans to collaborate next with Oakley on visors. | | | Popular articles By Kevin McLaughlin and Stephanie Palazzolo
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