As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 on services sold outside the country if they run those workloads from Indian data centers — a bid to attract the next wave of AI computing investment, even as power shortages and water stress threaten expansion in the South Asian nation. On Sunday, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced (PDF) the proposal in the country’s annual budget, offering a tax holiday — effectively zero taxes — on revenues from cloud services sold outside India if those services are run from data…

January was such a long month that it has already brought us five fresh European unicorns: from Belgium to Ukraine, several tech startups raised funding at valuations above the $1 billion threshold. But before we take a closer look at who joined the club, two caveats. First: This count includes startups that may be incorporated elsewhere but have their roots or a large part of their team in Europe. Until a pan-European corporate structure exists (often called “EU Inc”), this split will remain common — and we’ve decided to overlook it. Take Lovable, which is incorporated in Delaware but cannot…

Waymo has nearly finalized a new $16 billion funding round that will value the robotaxi company at $110 billion, according to the Financial Times. More than three-fourths of that funding will reportedly come from a source close to home — Alphabet, where Waymo is a subsidiary. (The company was incubated as part of Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” X.) The FT reports that Waymo is bringing on new investors Dragoneer, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global, with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala also participating in the round. When contacted by TechCrunch, a company spokesperson said in a statement,…

SpaceX has filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission to launch a constellation of up to 1 million solar-powered satellites that it said will serve as data centers for artificial intelligence. The company’s filing lays out a grandiose vision, not just describing these planned satellites as “the most efficient way to meet the accelerating demand for AI computing power” but also framing them as “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization — one that can harness the Sun’s full power” while also  “ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future amongst the stars.” The Verge argued that the 1 million satellite number is…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Saturday that a recent report of friction between his company and OpenAI was “nonsense.” Huang’s comments came after The Wall Street Journal published a story late Friday claiming that Nvidia was looking to scale back its investment in OpenAI. The two companies announced a plan in September in which Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI and also build 10 gigawatts of computing infrastructure for the AI company. However, the WSJ said Huang has begun emphasizing that the deal is nonbinding, and that he’s also privately criticized OpenAI’s business strategy and expressed concerns…

A few years ago, Selina Tobaccowala’s daughter started leaving post-it notes around the house, telling everyone to “turn off the lights” and such. Tobaccowala had just sold her last startup, Gixo, to OpenFit and was looking for a new challenge. “I saw the kids and thought, ‘Let me see if there’s something there on the sustainability and climate side,’” she told TechCrunch. “There had to be something more than like turning our lights off.” Without a background in climate science or hardware engineering, she wasn’t sure where to start. So Tobaccowala turned to something she knew well: surveys. “Given my…

The Polish government said Russian government hackers broke into parts of the country’s energy grid infrastructure, taking advantage of its poor security. On Friday, Poland’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), which is part of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, released a technical report about an incident at the end of last year, where suspected Russian government hackers hacked wind and solar farms and a heat-and-power plant. According to the report, the hackers didn’t face a lot of resistance. The targeted systems used default usernames and passwords and did not have multi-factor authentication enabled, both incredibly basic mistakes.  The hackers tried…

Billionaire tech mogul Reid Hoffman is urging his fellow tech moguls in Silicon Valley to not just condemn the killings of two American citizens at the hands of Border Patrol agents, but to stop pacifying President Trump. In posts on X and an opinion column penned for The San Francisco Standard, Hoffman writes: “We in Silicon Valley can’t bend the knee to Trump. We can’t shrink away and hope the crisis fades. Hope without action is not a strategy ––  it’s an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.” There’s been…

Self-driving truck startup Waabi’s billion-dollar fundraise isn’t just about trucks.   The deal, for $750 million up front plus another $250 million from Uber tied to deployment milestones, marks a major expansion into robotaxis for the company founded by former Uber AI chief Raquel Urtasun. It also feels like another chip from Uber on the autonomous vehicle roulette table. With more than 20 AV partners worldwide, the question isn’t just whether Waabi can deliver on its plans to deploy over 25,000 robotaxis, but whether Uber’s bet-on-everything strategy actually works.  Watch as Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane and Anthony Ha discussed Uber’s AV partnership strategy, why Waabi’s “simulation-first” approach might be different, and…

The viral personal AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it had briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name. The latest name change wasn’t prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger made sure to avoid copyright issues from the start. “I got someone to help with researching trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” the Austrian developer told TechCrunch via email. “The lobster has molted into…