Techmeme
September 20, 2025, 2:56 PM

Top News

Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
A White House official says the $100K H-1B fee will not apply to renewals or existing holders of valid visas re-entering the US, only new applicants  —  A new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas goes into effect Sunday, but it will not be applied to existing holders of valid visas re-entering the country, a White House official tells Axios.
Yun Li / CNBC:
Memos: Amazon, which employs the most H-1B holders at 14K+, and Microsoft advise H-1B staff to avoid travel and return to the US before 12:01am ET on Sept. 21  —  Major technology companies and foreign governments are rushing to respond after President Donald Trump late Friday announced plans …
Reuters:
President Trump signs an EO forcing companies to pay an annual $100,000 fee per holder for H-1B visas, a move that could significantly impact the tech industry  —  - Visas are used principally by tech sector  — Over 70% of beneficiaries of H-1B visas enter US from India
More: Politico, The White House, Business Insider, The White House, New York Sun, Associated Press, Salon, Fox Business, The Post Millennial, CNN, NDTV Profit, Times of India, One America News Network, CBS News, Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, Forbes Middle East, Bloomberg, Inc42 Media, The Indian Express, Türkiye Today, Modern Diplomacy, Press Trust of India, Fortune India, Tech Xplore, San Francisco Chronicle, Moneycontrol, Engadget, TechCrunch, The Guardian, Benzinga, Wall Street Journal, Daily Sabah, Sky News, The American Bazaar, Le Monde, Implicator.ai, Hindustan Times, Business Insider, Al Jazeera, NBC News, Axios, Newsweek, Financial Times, and The Daily Caller
Reuters:
Collins Aerospace, which provides check-in and boarding systems, confirms a “cyber-related disruption” as Heathrow and other European airports report issues  —  - London's Heathrow, airports in Berlin, Brussels affected by disruption  — RTX experiencing ‘cyber-related disruption’ in airport software
Ben Berkowitz / Axios:
Karoline Leavitt confirms Oracle will handle TikTok's data and security, and says the US is “100% confident” a deal is done and it “just needs to be signed”  —  - Congress passed a ban last year with bipartisan support, but President Trump has repeatedly ordered …
Rani Molla / Sherwood News:
Similarweb: TikTok had 183M US MAUs on iOS and Android in August 2025, up 16% YoY, vs. Instagram's 169M, Facebook's 157M, Pinterest's 100M, and Snapchat's 70M  —  Oracle's potential TikTok takeover is a big deal to US competitors like Meta and Snap.  —  1H
X: @ranimolla.  Bluesky: @carnage4life and @sherwood.news.  Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to
Emmett Lindner / New York Times:
xAI:
xAI launches Grok 4 Fast, a multimodal model with a 2M context window and a unified architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning modes  —  Pushing the Frontier of Cost-Efficient Intelligence  —  We're thrilled to present Grok 4 Fast, our latest advancement in cost-efficient reasoning models.
Robert Booth / The Guardian:
Meta faces a backlash after using Instagram photos of teenage schoolgirls, posted by their parents with visible faces and names, to promote Threads to a man  —  Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says
Isabelle Bousquette / Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft says it will bring a $3.3B data center in Wisconsin online in early 2026 and calls it “the world's most powerful AI datacenter”  —  The $3.3 billion project in Wisconsin is expected to come online in early 2026, said Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith.
Bailey Lipschultz / Bloomberg:
BitGo's S-1 shows it had net income of $12.6M on revenue of $4.19B in H1 2025, compared with net income of $30.9M on revenue of $1.12B a year earlier  —  BitGo Holdings Inc. has filed for an initial public offering in the US, adding to an active market for digital assets.

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Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: