TechCrunch Top 3

Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models: Anthropic-backed Ode launches as AI labs bet that embedding forward-deployed engineers inside enterprises is the key to accelerating enterprise AI adoption. Read More

India bets billions on breaking China's grip on smartphone manufacturing: New Delhi announced a $6.5 billion smartphone manufacturing program and a $13.3 billion semiconductor push to deepen India's electronics supply chain. Read More

US charges Russian 'bulletproof' web hosts over cyberattacks that netted $62M from cybercrime victims: The 2024 indictment, now unsealed, accuses three Russians and two web hosts of aiding hackers and profiting from cybercrime. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

OpenAI's first hardware device is reportedly a screenless speaker that can move: The device is weirdly described as involving "mechanical elements that can move on their own" and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to "feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT." Read More

A SpaceX vet raised $65M to pull wire harnesses out of the Cold War era: Someone has to bundle all the wires that go into rockets, missiles, and satellites. Read More

Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet: The guy behind TCP/IP is working on a standard for identifying AI agents in the wild. Read More

Backed by $60M in funding, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess that AI agents are making worse: Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, Israeli identity management startup Oak is emerging out of stealth with $60 million in seed funding. Read More

Why Realta Fusion is building a fusion reactor at an old hot dog factory: An old Oscar Mayer factory in Wisconsin will become America's latest fusion power research and development hub. Read More

Last but Not Least

OpenAI researcher Miles Wang in talks to launch AI drug discovery startup valued at $2B: The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences. Read More