Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Welcome back to TC PM! We've got lots to cover today — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's GTC keynote; why Wiz won't be a Google-only shop; and wisdom from Cendana Capital's founder. Let's dive in!

TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg

💽 Chips 'n' GPUs: Nvidia announced a whole new slew of GPUs that will be released over the coming months, including Vera Rubin, which will be released in the second half of 2026 and features 288TB of memory. We're keeping track of all the announcements out of GTC 2025.

🦙 Lotta llamas: Meta has seen strong demand for its "open" AI model family, Llama. Mark Zuckerberg said Llama has now surpassed 1 billion downloads, which is particularly notable because the company hit 650 million downloads just three months ago.

🫢 Oops! The Trump administration slashed federal jobs across several departments in its first few weeks. Now a judge said these were "unlawful" fires. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is trying to bring its employees back, but it can't find all of them.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images

🌤️ Digging into the details: Google acquired cybersecurity startup Wiz on a qualifier that Wiz would be positioned as a "multicloud" offering, meaning it won't be a Google-only shop. Why would Google agree to that? For a few reasons, actually.

💧 What's liquidity? On today's episode of StrictlyVC Download, Cendana Capital's Michael Kim talks about the rise of secondaries, the firm's recent $600 million fundraise, and why, despite overall market conditions, 2024 was one of the firm's most liquid years yet.

🌳 Climate cash: Just Climate, an offshoot of Al Gore's Generation Investment Management, raised $175 million in fresh funds from the likes of Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund and pension fund CalSTRS. This new fund will focus on natural climate solutions.

🙀 Coding copycats: Google added a new feature to its Gemini-powered chatbot called Canvas, which gives users an interactive space to create and share coding projects. Sound familiar? That's because OpenAI has a very similar tool that's also named Canvas.

💰Cash for coding: AI coding assistant startups are becoming a hot category. Graphite announced that it raised $52 million through a Series B round led by Accel. A quarter of the most recent YC batch had 95% of their codebases generated by AI.

Around the web

🇮🇳 Tesla is trying: As Tesla's popularity is waning in some of its more established markets, the company is looking to expand into new markets like India. Tesla has reportedly leased a sprawling showroom in Mumbai for the next five years.

🎭 The drama! Keith O'Brien is the man in the middle of the whole Rippling and Deel debacle. O'Brien, who once used to appear on payroll-focused podcasts, is now being accused by his employer, Rippling, of spying for his old employer, Deel.