Techmeme
September 19, 2025, 5:50 PM

Top News

The Information:
Sources: OpenAI is recruiting from Apple's hardware, design, manufacturing, and supply chain teams, as it targets late 2026 or early 2027 for its first devices  —  As OpenAI's plans to make devices infused with its artificial intelligence get closer to reality, the company is increasingly plucking talent …
Jez Corden / Windows Central:
Microsoft plans to raise Xbox Series X price by $50 to $649.99 and Series S by $20 to $399.99 starting Oct. 3, citing “changes in the macroeconomic environment”  —  Microsoft cites challenging “macroeconomic” environment for the price increases, which sees the Xbox Series X hit a whopping $649.99.
Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
Trump claims he and Xi Jinping approved a deal for TikTok's US operations; Chinese media's readout only says that China respects the wishes of businesses  —  President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke about a TikTok deal Friday, but details on the social media platform's U.S. future remain unclear.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: investors in the TikTok US deal are expected to pay the Trump administration a multibillion-dollar fee for negotiating a deal with China  —  Fee would be latest example of government getting paid for involvement in private-sector deals  —  The Trump administration is expected …
Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Sources: xAI has raised $10B at a post-money valuation of $200B, weeks after reportedly raising $10B in debt and equity at a ~$150B valuation  —  Elon Musk's xAI is raising $10 billion from investors in a round that values the artificial intelligence startup at $200 billion, sources told CNBC's David Faber.
New York Times:
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Meta CTO says the technical issues during live demos of its new smart glasses were due to a self-inflicted DDoS and a bug that put Zuckerberg's glasses to sleep  —  Meta ran into some spectacularly embarrassing technical issues during the live demos of its new smart glasses this week, and now we know why.
Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times:
Sources: Nvidia is in advanced discussions to invest $500M in UK self-driving car startup Wayve, as part of a £2B pledge for UK startups; Wayve is evaluating  —  AI chipmaker's chief tells London audience that UK's first trillion-dollar company will be an AI business
Bloomberg:
Sources: Oracle is in discussions with Meta to provide computing power for training and deploying AI models, in a deal worth about $20B  —  Oracle Corp. is in discussions with Meta Platforms Inc. for a cloud computing deal worth about $20 billion, providing further evidence that the company …
The Information:
Sources: Apple told at least two suppliers to boost their daily output of entry-level iPhone 17 by at least 30%, after strong pre-orders last weekend  —  Apple is rushing to boost production of its newly released entry-level model iPhone 17 after strong pre-orders last weekend.
Sri Muppidi / The Information:
Sources: OpenAI plans to spend ~$100B on backup servers rented from cloud providers through 2030, in addition to the $350B already projected for server rentals  —  When OpenAI in March released ChatGPT features that could turn photos into animated characters, a spike in usage forced the company to put temporary limits on the features.
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Mastodon, the nonprofit that maintains the social network, plans to offer paid hosting, moderation, and support services for organizations joining the fediverse  —  Mastodon, the non-profit organization that maintains the software powering the decentralized alternative to social networks like Threads and X …

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Earlier Picks

Alex Wickham / Bloomberg:
Kieran Smith / Financial Times:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy / Sherwood News:
Reece Rogers / Wired:
Leah Nylen / Bloomberg: