This Week in Tech (Week Ending Sept 26, 2025)
TL;DR - 📉Market sell-off; 💰Those H-1Bs; 🤑Billions and Beggars
Hey folks!
Happy Friday! 😎 A lot happened this week - it was the September equinox, meaning fall 🍂, and apparently the rapture?? Tech news below.
TL;DR -
📉The stock sell-off this week: was prompted by Jay Powell’s remarks that the Fed faces a “challenging situation”: both inflation and unemployment in the U.S.
💰President Trump signed a proclamation Friday requiring employers to pay a hefty $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications that caused some chaos for companies adjusting to the news.
💃TikTok’s new U.S. entity would lease its algorithm from Chinese owner ByteDance under a proposed deal between the U.S. and China.
🤑Billions and beggars: ⭐️Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion into OpenAI. // xAI is raising $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation // Oracle raised $18 billion in a debt offering that was upsized from an earlier $15 billion target due to strong demand. // Meanwhile….Intel has approached Apple to seek an investment as part of the struggling chipmaker’s efforts to shore up its business.
🌎 Macro (Economic) and Trends
📉The stock sell-off this week: was prompted by Jay Powell’s remarks that the Fed faces a “challenging situation”: both inflation and unemployment in the U.S. are rising. Cutting interest rates to bolster the labor market could reignite inflation if done too quickly. But holding rates steady could drive employers to hold back on hiring.
🛬Major European airports including Heathrow, Brussels, and Berlin faced significant delays this weekend following a “cyber-related incident.”
💰President Trump signed a proclamation Friday requiring employers to pay a hefty $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications—an enormous jump from the current $215 lottery registration fee. In light of the news, the largest tech companies warned foreign staffers to stay in the US or return immediately, causing chaos over the weekend. However, the White House on Saturday clarified that the fee will only apply to new applicants for H-1Bs, not those on existing visas or seeking renewals
U-turn: President Trump said this week that he believes Ukraine can “win” the war against Russia — an extraordinary 180-degree shift in his position on the war.
☎️ Authorities uncovered an enormous, hidden telecom network that could have jammed cell phone service and 911 during the U.N. General Assembly. It’s one of the biggest telecom threats ever discovered in the U.S.
After some 🎶drama 🎭 over the weekend, “Jimmy Kimmel Live” returned to air on Tuesday on select ABC stations. ~25% of the ABC stations in the U.S. didn’t air his show.
🏡More than half a million new apartment units are expected to be completed this year — down roughly 21% from last year’s record. The pipeline is slowing as higher building costs, higher interest rates and a surplus of supply in some markets make developers cautious to start new projects. With fewer new apartments coming, rents could climb faster again.
📈An index measuring the confidence of small-business owners surged to its highest level since 2017
What’s the pricetag of the American dream these days? $5mill apparently. (Cue “5 million is a nightmare Greg”)
🔬 Micro (Tech Companies)
💃TikTok’s new U.S. entity would lease its algorithm from Chinese owner ByteDance under a proposed deal between the U.S. and China.
🤳 Instagram now has 3 billion monthly users, putting it on par with Facebook and WhatsApp.
👀Meta is being sued by Strike 3 Holdings, a porn company, for infringing its content and using it to train AI models. Strike 3 alleges Meta’s motive was partly to obtain otherwise difficult to scrape visual angles, parts of the human body, and extended, uninterrupted scenes—rare in mainstream movies and TV—to help it create what Mark Zuckerberg calls AI “superintelligence.”
💰Amazon reached a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission
🇮🇱Microsoft has disabled certain services and subscriptions by Israel’s defense ministry, after finding evidence that it used the tech company’s cloud services to surveil Gaza citizens.
🇮🇳Rapido, an Uber rival in India, doubled its valuation to $2.3B after a secondary share sale by Swiggy, a food delivery company based in India. Swiggy has offloaded its entire 12% stake in Rapido for ₹24 billion (about $270 million).
💸Stripe is in talks to buy back shares from investors at a price that values the payments company at $106.7 billion
👗Depop launched a new styling and collaging tool that allows users to design curated outfits.
⭐️🤳Neon, a new app that has hit No. 2 social app on the Apple App Store, pays users to record their phone calls and sells data to AI firms. But later in the week, Neon was pulled offline after a security bug allowed any logged-in user to access the call recordings and transcripts of any other user.
☕️Starbucks plans to close 1% of its stores and cut about 900 nonretail jobs. The effort, which Starbucks said would cost about $1 billion, is part of its latest effort to turn around its fortunes.
Layoffs: SoftBank plans to lay off nearly 20% of the 300-plus staff working on its Vision Fund as SoftBank concentrates its investments in a smaller number of leading AI firms. In total: Thus far, there have been more than 22k tech layoffs in 2025 alone.
🤖 AI News
📰Microsoft is preparing to launch a new marketplace that would let makers of AI products pay U.S. publishers for content that the AI products surface.
xAI has reached a deal with the U.S. GSA to sell Grok to federal agencies for 42 cents over 18 months, undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI and Anthropic are offering their enterprise and government versions of ChatGPT and Claude, respectively, for $1 for a year. Why 42? The price point is either part of a running joke Musk has of using variations of 420, a marijuana reference, or a nod to one of Musk’s favorite books, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which references the number 42 as the answer to the meaning of life and the universe.
☁️ OpenAI plans to spend roughly $100 billion renting servers from cloud providers for backup computing power between 2026 and 2030
A great read from Wired about the shift in Silicon Valley: Some excerpts:
“But here’s something that took me by surprise: how quickly and decisively the visionaries I chronicled aligned themselves with Trump, a man whose values violently clashed with the egalitarian impulses of the digital revolution. How did I miss that? I revisited my familiar turf—which in this era seems suddenly unfamiliar—to find out.”
“the narrative in my stories had changed. I used to draw on the tale of David versus Goliath. Now I was writing the Icarus legend. I kept seeing that figure’s hubris in the tech elite. And it led them to Donald Trump.”
🤝 Select M&A, Fundraises, IPO, Partnerships
M&A
eBay acquired social marketplace platform Tise. The acquisition indicates that eBay is looking to modernize its platform to attract younger shoppers, expand its social commerce tools, and build a stronger presence in the sustainable retail market.
Fundraising
⭐️xAI is raising $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation.
Nvidia is nearing a deal to invest $500 million in Wayve, a self-driving car company based in the U.K.
Oracle raised $18 billion in a debt offering that was upsized from an earlier $15 billion target due to strong demand.
Intel has approached Apple to seek an investment as part of the struggling chipmaker’s efforts to shore up its business.
Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, is in early talks with investors to raise between $15 billion and $20 billion in exchange for about 3% stake.
IPO
Fermi America, a data center site developer founded by former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, is targeting a roughly $13 billion valuation in its initial public offering on the Nasdaq exchange.
Partnerships
⭐️Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion into OpenAI. The companies said the partnership will enable OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for its artificial intelligence data centers to train and run its next generation of models. Nvidia has committed to investing the first $10 billion of a planned $100 billion investment in OpenAI at the startup’s recent $500 billion valuation and then will make the remaining staggered investments at future valuations.
Oracle is in talks with Meta Platforms about a cloud computing deal worth around $20 billion over multiple years.
⚱️ Gold Panning - For those who reached the bottom
BFF? A spray-painted bronze statue titled “Best Friends Forever” that depicts President Trump and financier Jeffrey Epstein holding hands appeared on the National Mall in front of the U.S. Capitol early Tuesday morning. A group calling itself “The Secret Handshake Society” was issued a permit by the National Park Service to install the political artwork. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be - the National Park Service and U.S. Park Police removed the statue Wednesday morning “due to it not being in compliance with the permit”. Plus: The Onion legit made an unhinged Jeffrey Epstein mockumentary and it launches in theaters for one day on Oct 2, after which it’ll be available online. #ReleasetheEpsteinFiles
👵🏻The number of centenarians — people aged 100 or older — in the U.S. grew by 50% from the 2010 census to the 2020 count. The 2020 Census counted about 80,100 centenarians, up from around 53,400 in the 2010 version.
🎭Andrew Lloyd Weber’s latest project is an immersive reimagining of “The Phantom of the Opera”.
*cue DJ Khaled* Another one: Meghan Markle released another jar money-maker - this time an orange marmalade.
🐻 My bear don’t jiggle jiggle, it roars: It’s Fat Bear Week! A wildly popular annual contest that honors feeding season at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, Fat Bear Week includes a bracket to vote on - you guessed it - the fattest bear lol Voting ends Sept 30th.
👙In case you were curious what the plastic surgery of choice was per metro:
In mountain states and the west coast - ppl wanna look sleek and trim, like they actually go outside
SoCal (no surprise) - wants big (like way bigger than normal) boobs
Northeast and midwest - tummy tucks, liposuction and breast lifts
Texas is split - Austin and Houston prefers a more natural look, while Dallas goes for dramatic changes.
Florida likes curvier silhouettes - think augmentations, lifts, large-volume implants and fat transfers.
⌚️Trending - watches: At least for kids. The smartphone ban in New York schools has sparked a rush on retro watches among Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z.
💋Miley Cyrus is the new face of Maybelline
🎼🎥Taylor Swift is celebrating the release of her 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” in movie theaters Oct 3 through Oct 5th. The film has already sold more than $15 million in presale tickets.
🙏Tiktok thought the rapture was supposed to happen this past Tuesday. So I guess if you’re reading this you didn’t make the cut? it’s ok, neither did i 🫶🏼 Context please? The date of Sept. 23, 2025 as the rapture appears to have originated from Joshua Mhlakela of South Africa - just a… random person. Mhlakela said that Jesus came to him in a dream in 2018 and told him, the context for the rapture was so that there would be no World Cup in 2026… 🤷🏻♀️
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