Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Welcome to TC PM! Today we are closely following the billionaire brawl on X — grab your popcorn; we are digging into all the new products and features announced at Samsung Unpacked; and we are still talking about TikTok. Onward!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: Jami Tarris

🍿 The real housewives of AI: Mere hours after the White House announced its AI infrastructure project Stargate, which will funnel $500 billion into data centers for OpenAI, Elon Musk was throwing jabs at the project in posts on X. Multiple tech leaders clapped back, and it's only gotten more dramatic from there. Read more

✨ New, new: YouTube announced today that it's experimenting with some new features for its premium users, including higher-quality audio, a faster playback speed option on mobile, and the ability to jump ahead to a video's most exciting part, among others. Read more

😬 Looks like a misfire: The Department of Homeland Security told members of several advisory committees that they were fired on Tuesday, including members of the Cyber Safety Review Board. The security community does not think this was a smart move. Read more

A Message from West Monroe

The high-tech and software industry's 2025 roadmap

An eye toward growth, reimagined data, and the AI transition: What's trending.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Samsung

🪐 Samsung Galaxy snippets: Samsung kicked off its Unpacked event today, where it revealed a new line of Galaxy phones: the S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra. Check out everything that you may have missed. Read more

🧟 Zombie reactor: The AI data center boom has South Carolina-owned utility company Santee Cooper looking to resume construction on a power plant that has sat unfinished for eight years. The project had originally been paused for going over budget and contributed to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. Read more

🎙️ VC's year ahead: TechCrunch's Julie Bort spoke with Crunchbase News' data editor Gené Teare for today's episode of Equity, digging into AI mania, how hard it is to raise a Series A round right now, and what's ahead for the startup market in 2025. Listen here

⏰ Time for a new TikTok: While the fate of TikTok remains undecided, and Meta's Reels is scrambling to capitalize on the confusion, TikTok competitor startups are rising. Favorited is one of them, and it just secured $1.3 million from VCs, as well as from a16z's Speedrun accelerator program. Read more

🫤 Speaking of TikTok: President Donald Trump said today that he would be open to either Elon Musk or Oracle chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok in a joint venture with the U.S. government. I can't think of anyone better to own an app beloved by Gen Z! Read more

💰 People are paying for AI: New data found that U.S. consumers spent more than $1 billion on AI via apps in 2024, an increase of 200% over 2023. The category could crack the top 10 this year. Read more

Around the web

♟️ Reddit isn't playing games: Dozens of large subreddits, like r/nursing and r/nintendo, have banned outgoing links to X after Elon Musk made a gesture that looked quite near identical to the Nazi salute. 404 Media has more

⛔️ No thanks: Meta users have been complaining that they couldn't seem to unfollow Trump's Instagram accounts, as well as the accounts of other members of the new administration. Meta said it isn't disallowing people to unfollow but that it might take some time for the unfollow requests to go through. Never heard of that happening before. Read more

Before you go

Image Credits: Disrupt

⭐ Dreaming of Disrupt: TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is already on our minds over here at TechCrunch. This year's event kicks off on October 27, and tickets just went on sale this morning. See you there! Read more