This Week in Tech (Week Ending Sept 12, 2025)
TL;DR - 📈Inflation; 🍎Apple’s iPhone Air; 💰AI fundraises
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 Tech news below.
TL;DR -
📈Inflation: Consumer prices in August were up 2.9 percent compared with last year, the fastest inflation rate since January
⭐️🍎Apple’s hardware event was this past week and we finally saw the ultra-thin iphone Air
💰Alot of fundraises in the AI space - for Sierra, Perplexity, Databricks, Mistral, Cognition AI, and Nebius
⭐️ OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
🇫🇷France’s government collapsed this past week after just nine months. François Bayrou, France’s centrist prime minister, was the country’s fourth prime minister in 20 months.
🇮🇱Israel has ordered a full evacuation of Gaza City, where nearly a million Palestinians were believed to reside this summer. Israeli officials have instructed people to head for a “humanitarian zone” in the southern half of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people have already taken refuge.
📰“I’m the eldest boy!”: The Murdoch family has finally settled a yearslong civil war for control of its empire. Lachlan’s three eldest siblings — Prue, Liz and James — will get $1.1 billion each for their shares in the Murdoch empire in return for ending their fight against Rupert and Lachlan.
Popular MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed earlier this week while speaking at Utah Valley University.
📈 Grocery prices rose last month by about 0.6% — the biggest one-month jump since August 2022. Coffee is up 20.9% year over year. Steaks are up 16.6%. Fruits and vegetables overall were up 2.3% year over year. Apples rose 9.6%, and bananas increased 6.6%. "Bad weather, shortages of farm workers and tariffs are potential culprits behind high grocery prices”.
📈Inflation: Consumer prices in August were up 2.9 percent compared with last year, the fastest inflation rate since January. The data is likely to keep the Fed cautious about lowering borrowing costs too quickly once it starts cutting interest rates, which could happen as soon as next week.
The summer we turned unemployed: Friday’s jobs data confirmed that the weak hiring in last month's report may indicate a trend - The economy added just 22,000 jobs in August. Plus, revisions showed the economy's 53-month job growth streak ended in May.
🙏Pope Leo XIV declared 15-year-old Carlo Acutis the Catholic Church's first millennial saint earlier this week.
Not one member of the Magnificent 7 — the basket of seven Big Tech stocks that double as market darlings — is in the top 50 performing stocks in the S&P 500 year-to-date
‘I’m Gonna Punch You in Your F--king Face’
Quote from a Real Housewives show? nope - it’s our Treasury secretary 😐
On the 24th anniversary of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, remembrances took place across New York: Unfortunately, the toll from the attacks continues to grow: Deaths over the years from illnesses caused by toxic materials in the air and in the rubble at ground zero have almost certainly surpassed those on Sept. 11 itself. More than 24,000 responders who worked at the site or at the debris-sorting pile on Staten Island have developed cancer.
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
⭐️🍎Apple’s hardware event was this past week and here are the highlights:
The ultra-thin iPhone Air was the biggest part of the event. This device has a profile thickness of 5.6 mm
The iPhone 17 has a slightly larger screen now and has new colors like lavender (😍), mist blue, black, white, and sage.
Apple Watch Ultra 3 was announced w a lager display and includes blood pressure monitoring capabilities
Airpods Pro 3 features smaller earbuds, improved audio and a new heart rate sensing feature, as well as live translation technology
Google was fined $3.5bn by the EU over adtech abuse. It was the EU’s largest antitrust penalty ever.
🏈YouTube’s first exclusive NFL broadcast attracted over 17M viewers
🚗Tesla’s board proposed a pay package that could make Elon Musk, its chief executive, the world’s first trillionaire.
Replit’s annualized revenue has skyrocketed from $2.8 million to $150 million in less than a year, earning them a $3B valuation.
👻Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says Snap is in a “crucible moment,” squeezed “between the tech giants and smaller competitors,” and he vowed to sharpen the company’s focus. He announced plans to shake up the company by creating a series of “working groups” to deal with key issues, including to improve the company’s computer systems.
Amazon’s autonomous ride-hailing company Zoox has started to accept rides from members of the public for stops along the Las Vegas Strip. Riders can call for a Zoox pick-up on the new Zoox smartphone app.
🎶Spotify is finally launching support for lossless - a format that preserves the original audio quality without compression - music streaming
🇫🇷🍎The French government says Apple sent out threat notifications to customers alerting them to spyware attacks earlier in September.
Ramp has hit $1bn in annualized revenue and investors now value the startup at $22.5bn
Layoffs: Rivian is laying off around 150 workers — its second staff cut in recent months
🤖 AI News
⭐️OpenAI increased its financial forecasts, and projected they will burn $115 billion from this year through 2029. This figure is approximately $80 billion higher than the company’s previous estimates, underscoring the rapidly growing costs of developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Driving the cash burn will be OpenAI’s ballooning expenses for computing power to train and run its AI models
A group of web publishers — including Reddit, People Inc., Medium and Quora – are backing a new open-source standard that aims to let the crawlers from AI firms better compensate publishers. The new open source standard, Real Simple Licensing or RSL, would add to the existing protocol for web crawlers, Robots.Txt, which helps websites give permission on whether they want their site to be scraped, but doesn’t give any guidance on how publishers would be paid for scraping
A California bill that would regulate AI companion chatbots is close to becoming law. If SB 243 is enacted, California would become the first state to require operators to implement safety protocols for AI companions and hold companies legally accountable if their chatbots fail to meet those standards
Nvidia unveiled a new graphics processing unit designed to power existing artificial intelligence, known as inference workloads. The move signals that Nvidia believes data centers of the future need a specific chip for running AI-powered applications like ChatGPT rather than its general purpose GPU, which companies such as OpenAI and xAI use to handle inference workloads and to train new AI models.
Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted books.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is by far the most popular AI chatbot in the world. With nearly 6 billion monthly desktop and mobile visits, ChatGPT receives around 8 times more monthly visits than its next closest competitor, Google's Gemini, and around 9 times more than the open-source Chinese app DeepSeek.
🗣️Is AI shaping how we talk? A new study found that terms favored by large language models like ChatGPT (“delve,” “boast,” “meticulous”) are now seeping into everyday speech. “The deeper concern is that the very same mechanism could shape not just vocabulary but also beliefs and values.”
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal.
Minute Media, the parent company to sports and entertainment sites like The Players' Tribune and Mental Floss, has acquired VideoVerse, a software platform that fuels real-time sports highlights for content companies.
Fundraising
Sierra, Bret Taylor’s customer service AI agent startup, raises $350M at a $10B valuation.
Perplexity has secured commitments from investors for $200 million in new funding at a $20 billion valuation. Perplexity has raised money once roughly every two months for the past half year, and in total has raised over $1 billion.
Databricks has confirmed another $1 billion raise (Series K) at a $100 billion valuation just months after raising $10 billion. Databricks reported that it passed $4 billion in annualized sales in its July quarter, growing 50% year over year, and became cash flow positive over the previous 12 months. The disclosure suggests that Databricks is well ahead of Snowflake, its main rival, in selling AI products to large companies.
ASML, a Dutch semiconductor equipment giant, has invested $1.5 billion in French artificial intelligence developer Mistral, valuing it at $11.7 billion, up from a $6 billion valuation last year
Cognition AI raised $400M at a $10.2B valuation.
Amazon has taken a stake in the Latin American rapid-delivery startup Rappi. Amazon will initially invest $25 million in Rappi via a convertible note, the report said, and is entitled to buy as much as 12% of Rappi through warrants if the company meets certain milestones.
Nebius, a neocloud, said that it plans to raise $2 billion in convertible notes and $1 billion in new shares, two days after announcing a partnership w Microsoft (see below)
IPO
StubHub set the preliminary pricing for its initial public offeirng at between $22 and $25 a share, valuing the company at around $9 billion, well short of the $16 billion valuation it had hoped for last year when it was first planning an IPO.
Klarna priced its shares at $40, significantly above the $35-to-$37 range it had forecast, valuing it at about $15 billion as investor demand proved robust. On opening day, shares popped and opened at $52, but quickly settled down to around $46 mid-day.
Partnerships
⭐️ OpenAI signed a contract with Oracle to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years. The deal is one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed, reflecting how spending on AI data centers is hitting new highs despite mounting concerns over a potential bubble. The Oracle contract will require 4.5 gigawatts of power capacity, roughly comparable to the electricity produced by more than two Hoover Dams or the amount consumed by about four million homes. Oracle stock is up ~25% this week on the news - Oracle stock has nearly doubled this year thanks to several other cloud deals.
Microsoft is planning to use models from Anthropic to power AI features in its Office 365 software, after previously relying on OpenAI’s models for the AI features.
SpaceX has agreed to acquire 50MHz of wireless spectrum and Mobile Satellite Service spectrum licenses from EchoStar for about $17 billion in cash and stock for its Starlink satellite network.
Microsoft signed a multi-year deal to rent servers with Nvidia graphics processing units from Nebius
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
🎥 Follow your dreams: This 25 yr old went from making $800 Youtube movies to selling his horror feature Obsession for over $15 million, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival
💰The Powerball lottery this past week was the 2nd largest ever at $1.8bn and 2 winning tickets were sold in Missouri and Texas.
🏆🎾At the celebrity-filled US Open, Aryna Sabalenka and Carlos Alcaraz won the women’s and men’s finals this past weekend.
📺The most anticipated fall TV - Postscript edition: The full list from NYT is here
Black Rabbit - Like The Bear but make it a crime thriller and starring Jason Bateman and Jude Law.
Slow Horses Season 5 - love it, and who wouldn’t want to see the future Mr Darcy in action?
Chad Powers - Glen Powells stars in a comedy movie based on a sketch done by former NY Giants QB Eli Manning.
👜Back to School fashion ain’t just for the kids: new work bags for fall
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