TechCrunch Top 3

US investors will soon get access to SK Hynix, another memory maker riding the AI boom: SK Hynix is experiencing a boom credited to AI. It will ride that to a multibillion-dollar U.S. IPO, expected to take place on Friday. Read More

Netflix invented binge-watching. Now it may have outgrown it.: A new report suggests Netflix viewers aren’t sticking around for Season 2. The bigger issue may be that binge-watching itself is no longer the advantage it once was. Read More

The first American autonomous ground vehicles are fighting in Ukraine: Forterra has deployed more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs in conflict zones in Ukraine. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

If you use Google, you're training its AI. Here's how to opt out.: Consider this a belated PSA: A recent change to Google’s privacy settings is allowing the company to store more of your data, including media such as “images, files, and audio and video recordings,” to improve its AI models. Read More

Microsoft lays off nearly 5,000 employees across Xbox, commercial sales: Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on Monday — the latest in a series of layoffs that’s stoking fears of AI replacing jobs. The layoffs will hit Xbox and commercial sales the hardest. Read More

Hacktivists call out Trump by hacking and defacing US Army websites: The U.S. Army has fixed two of its websites that were hacked to display messages calling President Trump a "pedophile" and a "thief." Read More

AI law startup Norm raises $120M, hits unicorn valuation: AI law startup Norm has raised a $120 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures, valuing the startup at $1.2 billion. Read More

This startup pits dealerships against each other to bid on your used car: Bidbus, which lets dealerships bid on used cars, has raised $15 million in a Series A round that was led by early-stage mobility fund Ibex Investors. Read More

Last but Not Least

The 'first' AI-run ransomware attack still needed a human: An AI agent carried out the technical execution of a real-world ransomware attack for the first known time, but new details show a human still chose the victim, set up the infrastructure, and supplied stolen credentials — meaning it wasn't quite the fully autonomous cybercrime debut that last week's headlines suggested. Read More