Friday, August 2, 2024

Welcome to TechCrunch AM, and a Happy Friday to you all! This morning, we have notes on Intel's massive round of layoffs, more details on a major data healthcare breach, Threads' rise to mainstream use, and a former crypto king who's being sent home to face justice. We've also got the U.K. fighting the good fight against scam calls, iPads seeing a resurgence while Nintendo's Switch fades, and more AI copyright issues. Let's dive in! — Rebecca

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

1. Intel slashes thousands of jobs to save on costs: The chip giant is laying off more than 15% of staff, or 15,000 employees, as part of a plan to reduce spending by $10 billion in 2025. CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a memo to employees that Intel has struggled to capitalize on the AI boom as well as its competitors have. The company's revenue declined by 1% in Q2 2024 compared with a year earlier. Read More

2. Cencora data breach affected millions: TechCrunch has found that pharma giant Cencora has so far notified nearly 1.43 million people in the U.S. that their personal and healthcare information was stolen in a February data breach. TechCrunch's analysis involved searching for notices published by Cencora on several state AGs' websites, so the total is likely to be far higher. Read More

3. Threads hits 200 million active users: It's taken Meta 13 months, but Threads now has 200 million active users. While still far behind X, formerly Twitter, Threads is coming in hot — X has around 600 million monthly users, but many have decamped to Threads in response to Elon Musk's erratic change of the platform's direction since he took over. Read More

Morning Must-Reads

Image Credits: Apple

The return of the iPad: Apple's finally seeing more demand for iPads. Fueled by the company's latest refresh of its tablet, iPad sales in the second-quarter helped counter lower revenue from iPhone sales, which declined to $39.3 billion from $39.7 billion a year earlier. Read More

Do Kwon is getting sent home: Montenegro's appeals court ruled that Do Kwon, co-founder of crypto platform Terraform Labs, will be extradited to his home country of South Korea. The ruling follows a months-long legal battle after the U.S. and South Korea charged Kwon with fraud after Terraform wiped out at least $40 billion in market value and collapsed the crypto industry in May 2022. Read More

Training AI on copyrighted songs is legal, right? That's the argument AI music startup Suno is making in its defense after the Recording Industry Association of America sued the company. Suno admitted to using songs found on the open internet to train its models, which, the RIAA says, does not qualify as fair use. Read More

Indian internet pioneer gets acquired: Rediff.com was once an internet pioneer, the first Indian internet firm to list on the Nasdaq back in 2000. Now, payments infrastructure company Infibeam Avenue has acquired a majority stake in Rediff for $3 million. At its peak, Rediff was valued at over $600 million on the stock exchange. Read More

Around the Web

Scam calling platform gets pwned: The U.K.'s National Crime Agency has shut down Russian Coms, a caller ID spoofing platform that was used by criminals to make nearly 2 million scam calls since 2021, according to Bleeping Computer. Russian Coms is believed to have caused millions in losses across about 170,000 victims across the U.K. Read More

Nintendo hits a wall: Nintendo's profits fell 55% in its first fiscal quarter as sales of its aging Switch console decline, reports CNBC. The iconic gaming company sold 2.1 million Switch consoles, but that was still 46% less than it did a year earlier. Hopefully the successor to the Switch it's working on will buoy revenue back again. Read More

Feds investigate Nvidia deal: The DOJ is investigating Nvidia's acquisition of AI startup Run:ai, reports Politico. Run:ai's technology lets its customers do more with fewer chips, and it had a preexisting partnership with Nvidia, which is struggling to produce chips to meet surging demand for chips to power AI applications. Read More

Before You Go

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The tech layoff wave is still going strong: Sadly, this year has already had 60,000 jobs being cut across 254 companies, and we're barely into the second half of 2024. We're keeping a list of all the known layoffs in tech, so check it out to see the impact. Read More