When Meta selected a site in Louisiana for its largest data center to date, it signed a deal with Entergy to power the site with three massive natural gas power plants. Earlier this week a state regulator approved Entergy’s plans.

The power plants are expected to come online in 2028 and 2029, and at full strength, they’ll generate 2.25 gigawatts of electricity. Ultimately, the AI data center could draw 5 gigawatts of power as it’s expanded. The power plant project has been controversial among Louisianans. 

Waymo has been granted a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in New York City, the first such approval granted by the city. The company told TechCrunch it plans to start testing “immediately.”

And a former software developer has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his former employer’s network after leaving the company.

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The debate over whether AI models could one day be conscious — and merit legal safeguards — is dividing tech leaders. In Silicon Valley, this nascent field has become known as “AI welfare,” and if you think it’s a little out there, you’re not alone. Also, more than two years after leaving the company, some former Twitter employees may finally receive their severance pay. Elon Musk’s X is tentatively settling a class action lawsuit filed by workers who were let go soon after he purchased Twitter.

This news comes in the form of a court filing where both parties asked the court to delay an upcoming hearing so that they could work out a deal.

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Earlier this year, two hackers broke into a computer and soon realized the significance of what this machine was. As it turned out, they had landed on the computer of a hacker who allegedly works for the North Korean government. 

The two hackers decided to keep digging and found evidence that they say linked the hacker to cyberespionage operations carried out by North Korea, exploits and hacking tools, and infrastructure used in those operations. 

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Late-night host Jimmy Fallon shouted,“I P 6 8! I P 6 8!,” trying and failing to fake excitement about the new Pixel smartphones. Fallon, who likely had never heard the technical term before, didn’t seem to realize that IP68 — a rating that indicates phones can survive being submerged in water — isn’t all that interesting as a selling point, nor is this water resistance feature new to Google’s Pixel line. It’s been around since the 2018 Pixel 3. We’re on the Pixel 10 now, for reference.

In a surreal moment that illustrated the tendency to overhype anything associated with AI advances, Google decided to pull out all the stops for its Pixel 10 live event on Wednesday.

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When James Cox, the former leader of Uber’s ride-share product, UberPool, left that company in 2019, the Silicon Valley giant had abandoned its autonomous vehicle development and sold off the division entirely. While UberPool had struggled to take hold, Cox felt a massive opportunity had been missed: taking the core of UberPool’s tech and applying it to robotaxis.

, one of the most annoying issues with using Notion was that you couldn’t get much done offline because of its cloud-first architecture. As TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta writes, the company has finally solved that problem, adding support for an offline mode to its apps.

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A federal appeals court handed SpaceX a win on Tuesday, in a ruling that prevents the National Labor Relations Board from prosecuting unfair labor practices against the company. The ruling by the Fifth District Court of Appeals, which suggests the structure of the NLRB is likely unconstitutional, could have far-reaching effects. Also, Meta is rolling out an AI-powered voice translation feature to all users on Facebook and Instagram globally, the company announced on Tuesday. The new feature, which is available in any market where Meta AI is available, allows creators to translate content into other languages so it can be viewed by a broader audience.

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In a move reminiscent of Facebook’s early days, TikTok is launching a new feature that allows college students to find and connect with others on their campus. The feature, called Campus Verification, lets users add their college campus to their TikTok profile and browse a list of students at their school. Also, On Friday, The Information reported that Meta was preparing to tear down its existing AI org and reorganize it into four new groups. Four days later, the change was made official with an internal memo, as reported by Bloomberg and The New York Times. The changes were announced by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta as chief AI officer in June. And, a lawsuit alleges that Google collected data from children watching YouTube videos; while this kind of data collection has become common, it remains illegal to collect data from children under the age of 13, per the longstanding COPPA legislation.

Though Google will settle the case, the company denies these allegations.

It’s possible that up to 45 million people in the U.S. could be eligible to receive small payments from this class action, which encompasses anyone in the U.S. who watched YouTube while under the age of 13 between July 1, 2013 and April 1, 2020.

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Elon Musk’s X is struggling on Android devices in terms of new installs, even while App Store downloads grow, according to new data from app intelligence provider Appfigures. In July 2025, X downloads on Google Play saw a significant decline, as new installs dropped by 44% year-over-year worldwide, even as iOS downloads grew by 15%. In other news, Spotify is introducing a new feature that allows subscribers to create more professional, personalized playlists. On Tuesday, the company launched a custom transitions feature that lets you either automatically add transitions between a playlist’s tracks or customize your own using preset options like fade, rise, or blend, along with other options.

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xAI’s website for its Grok chatbot is exposing the system prompts for several of its AI personas, including a “crazy conspiracist” that seems designed to handhold a user into beliefs that “a secret global cabal” controls the world. Also, the new interface adopts a block-first approach, letting you insert tables, columns, separators, lists and headers. You can also add rich text blocks to highlight information, add tips, or alerts. A sidebar hosts the AI assistant, which can summarize text, answer your questions, and provide writing suggestions.

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Earlier this week, Variety and other Hollywood publications reported that Matt and Ross Duffer, the brothers who created “Stranger Things” (and wrote and directed many episodes), were in talks to sign an exclusive deal with Paramount (now under the ownership of David Ellison’s Skydance). Then on Friday evening, Puck’s Matthew Belloni posted that the Duffers had in fact “made their choice” and were going to Paramount. Also, do A.I. chatbots packaged inside cute-looking plushies offer a viable alternative to screen time for kids? That’s how the companies selling these A.I.-powered kiddie companions are marketing them, but The New York Times’ Amanda Hess has some reservations. And, Anthropic has announced new capabilities that will allow some of its newest, largest models to end conversations in what the company describes as “rare, extreme cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions.” Strikingly, Anthropic says it’s doing this not to protect the human user, but rather the AI model itself.

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