Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for all things “future of transportation.” To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! It’s been a minute, folks! As you might recall, the newsletter took a little holiday break. We’re back and well into 2026. …
Read More »The AI healthcare gold rush is here
AI companies are clustering around healthcare and fast. In just the past week, OpenAI bought health startup Torch, Anthropic launched Claude for healthcare, and Sam Altman-backed MergeLabs closed a $250 million seed round at an $850 million valuation. The money and products are pouring into health and voice AI, but so are concerns about hallucination …
Read More »Trump administration wants tech companies to buy $15B of power plants they may not use
The Trump administration wants the largest electricity grid to add $15 billion worth of new power generation — and he wants tech companies to pay for it, even if they don’t need the capacity. The White House and the governors of several states in the region want grid operator PJM to …
Read More »ChatGPT users are about to get hit with targeted ads
An ongoing conversation — both within and outside of the tech community — has been about just how and when OpenAI, which is currently valued at $500 billion, will make money. Well, there’s one surefire way to do that, and that is through advertising. In the near term, that seems …
Read More »Supreme Court hacker posted stolen government data on Instagram
A hacker posted the personal data of several of his hacking victims on his Instagram account, @ihackthegovernment, according to a court document. Last week, Nicholas Moore, 24, a resident of Springfield, Tennessee, pleaded guilty to repeatedly hacking into the U.S. Supreme Court’s electronic document filing system. At the time, there …
Read More »Why Silicon Valley is really talking about fleeing California (it’s not the 5%)
If you’ve been following the billionaire exodus from California with some confusion, here’s what’s actually driving the nervousness: it’s not the 5% rate. As highlighted Friday in the New York Post, the proposed wealth tax would hit founders on their voting shares rather than the actual equity they own. Take …
Read More »Who gets to inherit the stars? A space ethicist on what we’re not talking about
In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades” and “mostly,” he’d said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the …
Read More »Oshen built the first ocean robot to collect data in a Category 5 hurricane
Anahita Laverack was set on becoming an aerospace engineer, but her career took a different turn after a realization at an autonomous robotics challenge inspired her to launch Oshen, a company that builds fleets of robots that collect ocean data. In 2021, Laverack, a storied sailor, decided to build and …
Read More »Trump administration’s legal setbacks are good news for offshore wind — and the grid
The Trump administration suffered a series of legal setbacks this week after judges allowed work to restart on several offshore wind farms under construction on the East Coast. The Department of the Interior had ordered a stop to five projects totaling 6 gigawatts of generating capacity in December, citing national …
Read More »From OpenAI’s offices to a deal with Eli Lilly — how Chai Discovery became one of the flashiest names in AI drug development
Drug discovery, the art of identifying new molecules to develop pharmaceuticals, is a notoriously time-consuming and difficult process. Traditional techniques, like high-throughput screening, offer an expensive scattershot approach — one that is not often successful. However, a new breed of biotech companies are leveraging AI and advanced data technologies in …
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