|
|
|
Aug 13, 2025
|
|
|
|
|
|
Happy Wednesday! Perplexity makes a $34.5 billion bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser. CoreWeave’s quarterly revenue more than triples to $1.2 billion. Elon Musk threatens to sue Apple for alleged antitrust violations.
|
|
|
|
Artificial intelligence-powered search engine Perplexity has offered $34.5 billion to acquire Google’s Chrome browser, according to Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer. The three-year-old startup has made the offer—amounting to nearly twice its recent valuation—as the government decides whether it will force Google to sell Chrome over antitrust violations. It’s not clear how much Perplexity itself could put forward for a deal. The San Francisco startup has raised at least $1 billion from investors including Accel and IVP, most recently at a valuation of $18 billion last month. It had $850 million in the bank at the end of December. Google’s Chrome is estimated to be worth around $50 billion. Multiple large investors could fund the transaction in full, Dwyer said, without identifying them. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Perplexity indicated its interest in buying Chrome if the DOJ forces Google to sell in a letter to the company. In the event of an acquisition, Perplexity said it would keep Google as Chrome’s default search engine for users and will continue maintaining the open-source project Chromium that supports Chrome and other web browsers, according to Dwyer. The Department of Justice is expected to decide on legal remedies after a federal judge last August found Google violated
antitrust law by using distribution deals with mobile phone carriers and others to cement an illegal search monopoly. Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko, during an April trial to determine those remedies, said that it would be interested in buying Chrome. Perplexity has previously offered to buy assets far greater than its size would suggest is possible. In January said it would make a bid for TikTok’s U.S. operations, though it’s unclear if those talks ever progressed. Perplexity has also previously acquired much smaller AI startups, such as browser startup Sidekick.
|
|
|
|
CoreWeave’s revenue more than tripled to $1.2 billion in the three months ended June 30, reflecting new deals the AI chip rental firm has struck. But its cash burn rose to nearly $3 billion. In the quarter, CoreWeave said it signed a $4 billion expansion deal with OpenAI, which comes in addition to its previously announced $12 billion deal. CoreWeave said its revenue backlock—estimates based on commitments from customers—rose to $30 billion, due to its OpenAI deal and expansion deals with two unnamed cloud providers. In the quarter, Coreweave’s capital expenditures rose 12% to $2.9 billion, which the company funded by borrowing more money. The quarterly report was the second since Coreweave went public in March. The stock has risen sharply since then, although in after-hours trading on Tuesday it was down
8.4%. CoreWeave’s chief financial officer increased the firm’s full year revenue guidance to as much as $5.35 billion, up $250 million from the previous estimate.
|
|
|
|
Elon Musk threatened to sue Apple for alleged antitrust violations, claiming that the iPhone maker is unfairly favoring OpenAI’s ChatGPT over xAI’s Grok in its app store. “Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk said on X late Monday. As of Tuesday, the ChatGPT app ranked first on the U.S. iPhone app store’s top free apps, while Grok is ranked fifth. Musk claimed that Apple favors ChatGPT by
promoting the app on the homepage of its app store. However, at least two other AI apps—Deepseek and Perplexity—have reached number one on the app store in at least some countries this year. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. An Apple spokesperson said the app store is “designed to be fair and free of bias” and that the store features “thousands of apps through charts, algorithmic recommendations, and curated lists selected by experts using objective criteria.”
|
|
|
|
Merge Labs, which aims to develop brain-computer interfaces, is in early talks to raise $250 million at an $850 million valuation from investors including OpenAI, the Financial Times reported. Merge Labs would join a growing number of companies, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink, that are developing technology to allow people to control devices with their brains. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman plans to be a co-founder but will not invest in the company or be involved in day-to-day operations, according to the report. Alex Blania, who co-founded the blockchain project Worldcoin with Altman, will also help launch Merge Labs. In 2017, Altman wrote a blog post titled “The Merge” in which he laid out the need for humans and human-level AI to join forces. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have
it—in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond—they are going to have conflict,” he wrote. “My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
|
|
|
|
Stablecoin issuer Circle, which went public in a blockbuster IPO in April, reported second-quarter revenue of $658 million, up 53% a year ago, on growing circulation of its USDC tokens. But a rally in the stock which followed the earnings, sending shares up 1.3% by the close of trading, reversed in after-hours trading after Circle filed to sell 2 million new shares. Circle shares were trading down 6% at $153.50 in late afternoon trading. As part of the offering, existing shareholders including CEO Jeremy Allaire, will sell a total of eight million shares. Allaire is
unloading 357,812 shares, the filing said, worth $55 million at current prices. Circle announced plans to launch a blockchain, called Arc, designed for stablecoin payments, foreign exchange and capital markets applications. The blockchain will introduce a new source of revenue for Circle through so-called gas fees, which users pay to execute transactions on the blockchain. In an interview on TITV, Allaire said the blockchain will appeal to traditional financial institutions because it’s only for stablecoin-related activities and has the high standards for privacy and settlement that banks expect. Net loss in the second quarter was $482 million, in part driven by stock-based compensation. Circle makes the majority of its revenue through interest income generated by reserve assets backing its stablecoins, such as short-term Treasury bills. It shares a portion of the revenue with crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Binance to incentivize them to encourage their users to use USDC. Currently, there are $65.6 billion USDC stablecoins in circulation, up from $44 billion at the beginning of the year. In the second quarter, Circle’s revenue after distribution costs was $251 million, or 38% of total revenue. For full-year 2025, Circle expects revenue less distribution cost margin to be 36%-38%.
|
|
|
|
| |
