TechCrunch Top 3

Image Credits: T-Mobile under a license

☎️ Ring, ring, hello? Deutsche Telekom announced that it is building an "AI Phone" in collaboration with AI search startup Perplexity and Picsart. The phone hits the market next year with a cool $1,000 price tag. Read more

🇨🇳 Chips for China: While the U.S. is attempting to restrict its homegrown AI chips from getting exported to China, that continues to happen. Buyers in countries such as Taiwan, Malaysia, and Vietnam are legally buying the hardware and selling a portion to Chinese buyers. Read more

🇺🇸 Chips for the U.S.: Chipmaker TSMC aims to invest at least $100 billion into chip manufacturing plants over the next four years as part of an effort to expand the company's network of semiconductor factories. Read more

A Message from Google Cloud

What businesses need to know about AI in 2025

Hear from 23 industry leaders, including Amin Vahdat (Google Cloud), Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital), Harrison Chase (LangChain), Crystal Huang (GV), and more. They share their perspectives on the most critical cloud and AI trends, opportunities, investment areas, and challenges that business leaders need to be aware of in 2025 in Google Cloud's Future of AI: Perspectives for Startups report.

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Afternoon must-reads

Image Credits: Ramp

🚀 Ramp ramps up: Expense management startup Ramp has crossed $700 million in annualized revenue as of January this year; the fintech crossed $300 million just 18 months ago. Oh yeah, and the startup also is now valued at $13 billion. Read more

🫢 Complain and you shall receive: After Mozilla received backlash over its updated Firefox browser terms and conditions, Mozilla has rewritten them in an attempt to clear up any confusion around how Mozilla interacts with user data. Read more

📈 Big day for startup valuations: AI startup Anthropic also announced today that it has seen a big boost in its valuation: The company announced a $3.5 billion round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation. It's starting to smell like venture spring out there. Read more

🐒 The great outdoors: Google open sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, that's designed to identify animal species. SpeciesNet was trained on more than 65 million publicly available images of animals and is an AI modeI I can actually get behind. Read more

🤝 Another AI agent: Google's cloud-based notebook tool for coding, data science, and AI, called Google Colab, is getting an AI agent tool. Google's Data Science Agent, which was announced last year as a stand-alone product, will now integrate into Colab. Read more

Around the web

🎫 Crypto golden ticket: In the U.S. there are limits to how much crypto people can withdraw and which crypto exchanges they can use. Never fear! It's apparently very easy to get digital residency from countries like the Republic of Palau to bypass those silly laws. Read more

🔥 Cool, cool, cool: President Donald Trump's federal work cuts have hit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is the federal agency that produces weather forecasts and climate research. These cuts could have devastating effects. Yay! Read more