Tech

Another year, another Stripe tender offer where investors buy shares from employees that values the company at an enormous step up. On Tuesday, Stripe announced that this latest secondary transaction now values the company at $159 billion. Investors buying the shares include Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, and Stripe itself. In February 2025, Stripe announced its previous tender offer, which …

Google another data center in Texas and this one will use “advanced air-cooling technology” to limit . Google is claiming that water use will be limited to “critical campus operations” like kitchens. These specifics follow the previously announced two-year the company has pledged in the Lone Star State. The company is also touting some 7,800 megawatts of net energy generation …

YouTube is adding new features to its Premium Lite plan. The tier will offer background play and downloads for the mostly ad-free plan. The update comes a year after YouTube first launched the lower-cost plan. The Premium Lite tier is notable because for $8 per month you get most videos ad-free, emphasis on most. Currently, it still uses ads for …

YouTube is expanding its more affordable, $7.99 per month Premium Lite subscription service with new features, including the ability to download videos for offline access and watch videos in the background, even if the screen is off or you’re using other apps. These options were previously only available to customers on its full plan, which costs $13.99 per month. The …

The generative AI music tool ProducerAI will become part of Google Labs, the company announced on Tuesday. Backed by The Chainsmokers, the ProducerAI platform allows users to write natural language requests — something like “make a lofi beat”– to generate music. It uses Google DeepMind’s Lyria 3 music-generation model, which can turn text and even image inputs into audio outputs. …

Fintech giant Marquis is suing its firewall provider SonicWall, claiming that an earlier breach allowed hackers to steal sensitive information about customer firewalls that led to a ransomware attack on Marquis’ network. The lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, seeks a jury trial. It claims the 2025 breach at SonicWall “exposed critical …

Blizzard is finally bringing Overwatch to mobile devices, but not exactly in the way you think. The company isn’t making a port of the mainline game. Rather, it just announced a spinoff called Overwatch Rush, which is being described as a “top-down hero shooter designed specifically for mobile set in the Overwatch universe.” There have been rumors about an Overwatch …

Nooks CTO and co-founder Nikhil Cheerla. (Nooks Photo) Nooks is nestling into Seattle. The San Francisco-based startup, which builds AI software for sales teams, is expanding its engineering footprint in Seattle — growing from zero to six engineers recently and hiring for more platform and product engineering roles. The company plans to open a Seattle office and has been working …

Netflix, Disney+, Amazon’s Prime Video and other major video on-demand (VOD) streaming services are set to face stricter regulation in the UK. Platforms with a monthly average of more than 500,000 UK viewers will be deemed “Tier 1″ services that are subject to similar oversight as broadcasters like the BBC and ITV under the eye of media watchdog Ofcom. Streaming …

Jesse Collins. The two towers near Aberdeen weren’t supposed to be monuments. They were supposed to be engines. Drive west from Olympia and you’ll see the unfinished nuclear plant rising from the evergreen canopy. The project promised clean energy, jobs, and technological prestige. Instead, it became a cautionary tale of cost overruns and evaporating public confidence. Nuclear engineering remained sound. …