This Week in Tech (Week Ending July 25, 2025)
TL;DR - 🤖The new “AI Action Plan”; 📈 Meme-stocks are back; ⭐️ Apple released iOS 26 in beta; Plus: 🍑Sydney Sweeney's collab w AI
Hey folks!
Happy Friday 😎 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
The White House released the administration’s long-awaited “AI Action Plan”
📈 Meme-stock mania is back with “DORK.” It refers to the first letters of stock symbols for the latest big movers: Krispy Kreme (DNUT), Opendoor (OPEN), Rocket Mortgage (RKT) and Kohl’s (KSS). Plus Sydney Sweeney?
⭐️ Apple released iOS 26 in public beta, which includes its Liquid Glass design.
😳Paramount and Skydance Media’s merger was formally approved by the FCC. But it feels like the internet is more interested in the conspiracy theories (Paramount, which owns CBS, cancelling Stephen Colbert’s show bc he criticized Trump) and in talking about the outrageous South Park premiere episode, which roasted Trump viciously for 20 minutes straight - after Paramount signed a $1.5bn deal with South Park creators.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
On Friday, Trump signed stablecoin legislation, the Genius Act, into law, delivering the first major legislative win for the crypto industry. The legislation provides a regulatory framework for stablecoins, crypto tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar.
⭐️The White House released the administration’s long-awaited “AI Action Plan”, laying out a blueprint which, if followed, would give AI companies more room to expand with fewer restrictions. The document, which was developed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, lays out three central pillars for the plan: 1️⃣ accelerating AI innovation, 2️⃣ building American infrastructure and 3️⃣ leading international AI diplomacy and security.
One group of winners from the plan are large cloud providers and tech firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. The plan said it would review all Federal Trade Commission probes, orders or settlements started under the Biden administration to make sure they don’t “unduly burden AI innovation.”
Another one? Trump is suing The Wall Street Journal over a story published about birthday letters sent to Jeffrey Epstein. The WSJ reported Trump sent Epstein a letter and Trump denies it.
📈 Meme-stock mania is back with “DORK.” It refers to the first letters of stock symbols for the latest big movers: Krispy Kreme (DNUT), Opendoor (OPEN), Rocket Mortgage (RKT) and Kohl’s (KSS). ⭐️The latest addition, American Eagle, might mess up the acronym but AE’s stock soared after the company announced that actress Sydney Sweeney will headline AE’s latest ad campaign
🔥 Central Oregon's is unfortunately experiencing what is now the country's largest active wildfire, named Cram Fire. The fire has burned nearly 100,000 acres
💺The end of an era: Southwest Airlines passengers can start buying assigned seats next week for flights in January and beyond. It's a big change from Southwest's trademark open-seating system.
In one of the toughest job markets in years for recent grads (7.3% unemployment in June), second-tier cities like Raleigh, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Austin, and Birmingham are emerging as top landing spots for Gen Z workers.
Home prices rose to a new high in June while the crucial spring sales season fizzled, signs that a housing-market recovery is unlikely in 2025.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
⭐️ Apple released iOS 26 in public beta, which includes its Liquid Glass design.
🇺🇸🇨🇳Tension in US-China tech relations: Microsoft said it will end a program involving China-based employees who worked on cloud servers that the company rents out to the Pentagon and other agencies. Amazon is closing its artificial intelligence lab in Shanghai due to rising U.S.-China tensions,
Microsoft warned customers over the weekend that hackers were exploiting a previously undiscovered security flaw in its SharePoint file-sharing software and urged them to update their software to fix the vulnerability.
😳 After a particularly humiliating week of internet meme-dom fame, the Astronomer CEO of Coldplay-kisscam notoriety resigned.
Elon Musk says his xAI will launch an AI targeted at children that will be called “Baby Grok.“
📣 Earnings
Alphabet’s revenue grew 14% year-over-year, a slight acceleration from 12% reported in the first quarter, reflecting stronger growth in Search and Cloud revenues. Alphabet raised its estimate for 2025 capital expenditures to $85 billion, from its initial estimate of $75 billion, amid what CEO Sundar Pichai called “strong and growing demand for our Cloud products and services.”
Tesla reported a steep decline in profit and revenue as sales of the company’s electric vehicles continued to fall.
ServiceNow surpassed its revenue forecast by around $80 million and said deals that include its AI tools are getting larger and closing more frequently.
Tiktok lost Blackstone as a potential investor: Blackstone withdrew from a consortium of investors looking to invest in TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Elon Musk’s xAI is turning to an investor (Valor Equity Partners) to raise $12 billion for purchasing artificial-intelligence chips it would then lease to the AI company,
⌚️ Meta researchers are developing a gesture-controlled wristband that can interact with a computer: The goal of this wristband is to provide less invasive tools to interact with computers for people with motor disabilities.
Random but ok: Tesla’s retro diner and charging station — which Musk first hinted at over seven years ago — officially opened this week in Los Angeles. The restaurant serves burgers in Cybertruck-shaped boxes and features giant screens that play movie clips.
💃Uber will soon roll out its "women preference" feature in the U.S. allowing women riders in the US match with women drivers, starting with Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Roblox is developing a dating feature for ID-verified users 21+. While in-game romance is currently banned due to the platform’s large under-13 user base, this new feature targets older Gen Zers experiencing dating app fatigue and in-person social hesitation; nearly half of young men aged 18-25 say they’ve never asked someone out in person.
Lovable (vibe coding) has now crossed the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark.
Remember VSCO girls? VSCO's iPhone camera app is now available globally. The iOS camera app, Capture, available across the world, following a limited launch in June, when the app came to Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
🥤The Coca-Cola Co. is launching a new Coke product this fall made with U.S.-grown cane sugar. The move follows President Trump's statement on social media that the company would use sugar, rather than high fructose corn syrup, in its sodas.
🤖 AI News
Alibaba’s Qwen team just took the open-source crown with the release of an updated, non-thinking Qwen3 model that beats Kimi K2 across the board and challenges top closed-source models like Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.
Meta Platforms will not sign the European Union’s code of practice for artificial intelligence, a voluntary framework meant to help companies comply with the EU’s AI Act. Meta said the code is a form of overreach.
72% of US teens have used AI companions, with "companion" defined as AI chatbots designed for users to have more personal conversations with, not AI assistants that work as homework helpers, image generators, or voice assistants that just answer questions.
ChatGPT receives 2.5 billion prompts from global users every day.
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Paramount and Skydance Media’s merger was formally approved by the FCC.
Amazon acquires Bee, the AI wearable that records everything you say
Polymarket, a populate betting platform which is blocked from allowing US users on its platform, announced that it had acquired a small derivatives exchange, paving the way for Polymarket to legally resume operations in the US.
That comes after the Justice Department last week dropped an investigation into the site as the Trump administration continues its embrace of the crypto industry.
Fundraising
xAI is working to secure up to $12 billion for ambitious expansion plans. xAI just raised $10bn weeks ago.
CoreWeave said it would raise $1.5 billion in debt, two months after it raised $2 billion to help refinance existing debt. CoreWeave’s stock has soared more than 200% in trading since its March initial public offering, when it came to the stock market with about $8 billion in debt.
Gupshup, a business messaging startup that became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new $60 million round.
LegalOn, AI-powered contract review software, raised $50M to streamline legal workflows with AI.
Partnerships
OpenAI and Oracle said that they agreed to develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity for $30bn in the U.S., increasing their earlier agreement ninefold.
OpenAI and SoftBank’s joint venture to develop $500 billion worth of data centers for artificial intelligence is off to a slow start. The companies have scaled back their initial plans due to disagreements and may only develop a small data center by the end of the year,
IPO
Figma looks to offer more than 36 million shares with an expected price range between $25 and $28 a share in its IPO.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
Wrestling icon Hulk Hogan and rock legend Ozzy Osbourne passed away this week.
D.C. dethroned Los Angeles to become the country's worst city for traffic.
🍂The unofficial start of fall now has a date: Aug. 26, when Starbucks will resurrect the Pumpkin Spice Latte aka PSL.
Meet the new persona to know: “Normans” - aka “mullet-wearing, sandwich-worshipping, softboy-adjacent urbanites” who dig graphic tees and €20 house reds.
CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and there was an uproar in support of Colbert. Theories emerged that the timing was suspect - Colbert, a frequent Trump critic, had criticized his parent company for paying off a $16mill lawsuit to Trump and was axed the following week. However, the financials might confirm the network’s claim that the cancellation was a financial decision: Colbert’s ad revenue collapsed from $75.7M in 2022 to just $57.7M in 2024 and the show loses $40M+ annually with production costs exceeding $100M per season, despite leading ratings for nine straight seasons. Sad to see him go though 😢
🤣 Also, South Park (A Paramount property) premiered its new season and it was basically a 20 minute roast of Trump. The episode also features Satan and Jesus, and Trump is voiced by Cartman.
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