This Week in Tech (Week Ending Aug 15, 2025)
TL;DR - ⭐️ Nvidia, AMD's deal w Trump; 🎭 Musk / Apple / OpenAI; 🏀 Perplexity trying to buy Chrome
Hey folks!
Happy Friday ☀️ Tech news below.
TL;DR -
⭐️ Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China.
🎭More drama: Elon Musk announced on X that xAI is taking legal action against Apple over pushing OpenAI’s products in the App Store and suppressing rivals like Grok, with the conversation spiraling after Sam Altman accused X of similar tactics. Apple dismissed Musk’s accusations.
🏀 Shoot your shot: Perplexity offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance. Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion.
✨Taylor Swift announced her 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl” on her bf’s podcast.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇺🇸President Trump announced this week that he's seizing control of D.C.'s police force and deploying the National Guard into the city. Why it matters: It's a major escalation of a federal crackdown already underway in the nation's capital as Trump targets crime in the District following the assault of a former DOGE staffer,
📈Trending - stock repurchases: American companies are repurchasing their shares at a record pace, boosting their balance sheets and fueling the U.S. stock rally.
😬🍟Consumer sentiment is tepid: Fast-casual restaurants are seeing sales slow as cost-conscious consumers grow wary of the economy. Why it matters: Last week I mentioned that fast food has already been affected by low-income consumers pulling back. Fast-casual chains usually fare better thanks to higher-income customers but the rising strain on low-income households is now dragging down the entire industry. Affected restaurants include: Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Cava and Wingstop
📺Streaming’s profitable era: Most major streamers (just not Peacock) in the US have started to turn a steady profit.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
⭐️ Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China. But! this may not be as lucrative as Trump hoped - The Chinese government has reportedly sent notices to local firms, urging them not to use Nvidia’s H20 processors after the Trump administration lifted export bans earlier this week. Although the Chinese government did not outright ban the use of H20 chips, it warned particularly against the use of these chips for government and national security-related work.
📣 Earnings
📉 In Chime’s first earnings call as a public company since its IPO in June, Chime said it made $528 million in sales in Q2, up 37% yoy. However, its executives predicted that its sales growth for the full year would slump to 28% or 29%, lower than the 31% rate it posted in 2024.
CoreWeave’s revenue more than tripled to $1.2 billion in Q2, reflecting new deals the AI chip rental firm has struck. But its cash burn rose to nearly $3 billion. Coreweave increased the firm’s full year revenue guidance to as much as $5.35 billion, up $250 million from the previous estimate.
Apple is testing a version of Siri that will be able to take actions on your behalf across various apps by following voice commands. They’re also planning to put an animated version of its Siri voice assistant at the center of a new robotic device that could launch in 2027. Make it look like Eva in Wall-E!
Amazon rolled out same-day delivery of perishable groceries in 1,000 US cities.
🥊 Paramount bought exclusive media rights to UFC in a $7.7 billion, seven-year deal starting in 2026. It's the first major deal since Paramount's $8 billion merger with Skydance — and eliminates the pay-per-view model currently used by ESPN in its deal with UFC.
🤖 AI News
🎭More drama: Elon Musk announced on X that xAI is taking legal action against Apple over pushing OpenAI’s products in the App Store and suppressing rivals like Grok, with the conversation spiraling after Sam Altman accused X of similar tactics. Apple dismissed Musk’s accusations.
Plus: A judge ruled against Elon Musk’s request to dismiss claims by OpenAI that Musk’s attacks on the startup in court and in the media amount to a “years-long harassment campaign”.
OpenAI’s GPT-5 roll-out was a bit of a mess. Users were annoyed with technical failures, and the abrupt removal of older models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and team members even held a Reddit Q&A last Friday to calm users.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the ChatGPT creator should keep “running at a loss” as it continues to invest in training new models, as long as it shows continuing improvements in the performance of its models.
Anthropic suffered a blow in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Anthropic when the judge overseeing the case denied Anthropic’s request to delay the case while it appealed to a higher court. Anthropic is appealing the federal district court’s ruling that downloading and storing over 7 million “pirated” books does not qualify as fair use and the court’s decision to make the case a class action lawsuit.
Reddit is limiting the Internet Archive’s access to Reddit posts because it says AI companies have scraped Reddit data from the Wayback Machine.
Lovable, the “vibe coding” app, projects $1B in ARR within next 12 months.
AI companion apps, which anthropomorphize AI interactions by allowing users to converse with custom characters, including friends, lovers, girlfriends or boyfriends, fantasy characters, and more, are growing rapidly - they’re currently on track to pull in $120mill in 2025.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
🏀Shoot your shot: Perplexity offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance. Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion.
Anthropic acquihired the Humanloop team, a platform for prompt management, LLM evaluation, and observability.
Rumble, the video company that hosts Truth Social, is considering a $1.2 billion acquisition of Northern Data, which runs a cloud and data center business.
Fundraising
Cohere announced that it had raised an oversubscribed $500 million round, bringing its valuation to $6.8 billion. This is up from the $5.5 billion valuation it landed a little over a year ago when it raised its previous round, also $500 million.
IPO
🎟️ StubHub is giving an initial public offering another go, and will have to explain lumpy business results to prospective investors - The company publicly filed first-quarter financial information earlier this week and they revealed that revenue growth had slowed to 10% in the first quarter to $398 million, compared to 30% annually last year.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
♀🙂↔️♂Word of the week - heteropessimism: “They found that even when men earn far less than their wives — even when they’re unemployed and making bupkes — their contribution to housework stays remarkably low. In fact, women’s time spent on housework actually fell after they divorced, and men’s rose, indicating that men technically could perform basic chores but were simply electing not to.” 🤯
🔪Gen Alpha word of the week - chopped: Get annoyed if you’re called this.
Doesn’t bode well for us: Conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined) is dropping across all age groups but especially quickly among young adults. (link to the FT article)
🧬Meanwhile… GATTACA has come to life: Parents in Silicon Valley are obsessed with having smarter babies and are selecting high-IQ embryos.
🥒Trending - pickle-flavored products! Popeyes released a limited-time pickle menu in April. Cup Noodles debuted pickle ramen in June. Pringles, Cheetos and Goldfish are selling versions of pickle-flavored snacks.
Latest (mundane) viral moment: C’mon HBO - do better.
🫖Sure I’ll take some celebrity tea post-mortem: Kelly Clarkson’s ex-husband, Brandon Blackstock, passed away last week at 48 after he lost his battle with cancer. Clarkson and Blackstock did not end on good terms (her 2023 Grammy-nominated ‘chemistry’ album featured the arc - and demise- of their relationship) and it showed in her music. Now, in Blackstock’s obituary, it’s become clear that Blackstock had taken up with Clarkson’s former assistant - timing unclear 👀🤨😮💨 but also RIP i guess.
✨Taylor Swift announced her 12th studio album, "The Life of a Showgirl.” No release date was announced, but vinyl editions will ship before Oct. 13. Swift announced the news on her bf’s podcast, New Heights, and the Youtube episode already has 13.5 million views as of Thur evening.
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