“Melania,” a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, is exceeding box office expectations, with Sunday estimates suggesting it will make $7.04 million on its opening weekend. The documentary is coming in third overall for the weekend, behind the Sam Raimi-directed thriller “Send Help” ($20 million) and “Iron Lung” ($17.8 million), a video game adaptation from YouTuber Mark Fischbach (better known as Markiplier). Amazon paid $40 million to acquire “Melania” and is reportedly spending $35 million to promote it. So even though the documentary is outperforming pre-release estimates predicting a $3 to $5 million opening weekend, it’s unlikely to make a…

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent months — years? — trying to position his company as something more than just a maker of electric vehicles. When Tesla acquired Solar City in 2016, he (and his comms team) pitched it as a sustainable energy company. Over the past year, he has pushed the idea of Tesla as an AI and robotics company.  Musk’s aspirational branding has slammed…

Indonesia has followed Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting a ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok. The Southeast Asian countries banned Grok after it was used to create a flood of nonconsensual, sexualized imagery on X (now a subsidiary of xAI), including images of real women and minors. In late December and January, Grok was used to create at least 1.8 million sexualized images of women, according to separate analyses by The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a statement, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs said that it was lifting the ban after X…

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…