Items tagged with “Techcrunch”.
Mitti Labs uses AI to measure methane emissions from flooded rice paddies and partners with The Nature Conservancy to expand regenerative, no-burn farming in India, while tracking carbon credits to support farmers.
Meta signs a $100 million, 100 MW solar farm deal with Silicon Ranch in South Carolina to power a planned AI data center, with most equipment made in the U.S. Operations expected in 2027.
Two former Harvard students claim to be building Halo X, discreet smart glasses with an always-on microphone, real-time transcription, and AI-driven prompts — raising questions about privacy, security, and legality.
Cloudflare says Perplexity ignored robots blocks, masked its crawler identity, and scraped content from sites that asked AI scrapers not to access them. Perplexity disputes the claim.
Obvio raises $22M in Series A to deploy solar-powered, AI-driven stop-sign cameras that detect serious infractions, process footage on-device, and forward verified violations to municipalities—while enforcing strict data retention and sharing limits.
Microsoft’s 2025 sustainability report shows emissions rose 23.4% since 2020 due to rapid data center expansion, with Scope 3 driving the majority of the footprint. The 2030 pledge requires cutting emissions by more than half and scaling carbon removal.
Gridcare uses grid mapping and generative AI to uncover more than 100 GW of latent data-center capacity, then matches developers with utilities. The seed round reached $13.5M, led by Xora, with multiple investors.
Meta expands its renewable energy portfolio by 650 MW more solar capacity via AES, bringing its total renewables to over 12 GW as it scales AI operations.
Northwind Climate maps climate-conscious behavior beyond demographics, identifying 'climate doers' and other groups via surveys. The platform offers a subscription-based data and analytics service, plus AI tools for marketing insights.
As data centers expand to meet AI-driven demand, solar PPAs over 100 MW have surged globally in 2025. Major deals across Meta, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, and others illustrate solar’s near-term advantage in cost, deployment speed, and scalability.
Nvidia teams with EPRI to form the Open Power AI Consortium, building open-source, domain-specific AI models to tackle grid challenges driven by AI workloads and rising data-center demand.
Microsoft adds 475 MW of solar capacity via AES deals for three Midwest projects, expanding its AI data-center footprint. This follows February’s 389 MW and a broader rush to renewables.
ElevenLabs opens its Reader app to authors to publish AI-generated audiobooks, with engagement-based royalties, a planned marketplace, and a Spotify partnership.
A new study suggests modest curtailment by data centers could unlock 76 GW of US power capacity, highlighting data centers as flexible demand-response participants amid AI-driven growth.
San Diego startup Self Inspection closes a $3 million seed round to scale its AI-driven vehicle inspections, delivering detailed PDF reports via smartphone-driven workflows for lenders, dealerships, and rental partners.
Meta expands solar power deals as it accelerates data-center growth for its AI agenda, adding 595 MW in Texas and 200 MW from Engie while targeting 12+ GW of renewables under contract.
Step-by-step guide to disable Apple Intelligence on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Includes how to turn off Siri for privacy and an overview of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute approach.
Gridware has built solar-powered sensor boxes mounted on utility poles that listen for sounds and vibrations to detect outages and grid hazards. On-device AI analyzes signals, then reports to the cloud via cellular or satellite.
As AI drives soaring data-center power demand, 2025 hinges on nuclear and fusion potential, hydrogen subsidy risks, and shifting investment as grids, regulators, and big tech race to secure electricity.
TechCrunch catalogs 49 U.S.-based AI startups that raised at least $100M in 2024, framing the year with major megafunds from OpenAI and xAI and a funding backdrop dominated by AI rounds.
Explains world models (world simulators), their origins, current developments like Sora, potential applications, challenges, and implications for developers and enterprises.