Tech
The Washington Post is retreating from Silicon Valley when it matters most
To say we live in a tech-centric society is an understatement.
Software, specifically machine learning and AI, coupled with advanced manufacturing, has delivered technology to street corners, schools, offices, factories, and even farm fields. This tech, much of it created in Silicon Valley, sits on your wrist, is carried in your pocket, is integrated in the movies you watch, and maybe in the music you listen to. And it is certainly the means by which that Amazon package was ordered, sorted, and delivered to your doorstep.
It has turned their founders, executives, and middle managers into king-like figures, whose wealth and political influence mirrors the Gilded Age. Seven of the top 10 richest people in the world can tie their wealth directly to tech. Amazon co-founder, chairman, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is third, behind just Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, according to Forbes, which tracks wealth and the people who have it. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer round out the list.
Now, in this moment, the Bezos-owned Washington Post has gutted its coverage of them and the tech industry at large as part of a sweeping set of layoffs that affected more than 300 people. The team that includes tech, science, health, and business was cut by more than half — from 80 to 33 people — according to Post tech reporter Drew Harwell. The tech desk alone cut 14 people. Its San Francisco bureau is a shell.
Among those affected include reporters covering Amazon, artificial intelligence, internet culture, and investigations. The newspaper also laid off staff covering the media industry (which had previously reported on Bezos’ ownership over their own paper).
The Post cut its entire sports bureau and nearly annihilated its foreign reporting teams, including its Middle East desk, and reporters and their editors covering Ukraine, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and others. It closed its Books section, decimated coverage of culture and the Washington, D.C., metro area, and laid off all reporters and editors covering race and ethnicity issues nationally.
The coverage of tech isn’t more important than social, economic, and geopolitical issues. But never before have the people exerting outsized influence on the world’s geopolitics and economy also been so directly responsible for stemming the global flow of information about it.
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Yet even as the world centers on tech and is tied to the GDP growth — or retreat — of its superpowers, tech’s most powerful executives are asking the public to place their attention elsewhere.
The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray couched the layoffs as a reboot of sorts aimed at reaching readers and eventually profitability, according to the New York Times, which included comments he made to staff.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming a more crowded, competitive, and complicated media landscape,” he reportedly said during a Zoom meeting with staff.
It’s no secret The Post has lost money and subscribers in recent years, in some cases due to policies crafted or backed by Bezos. For instance, his directive to end presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, axing a drafted piece backing Kamala Harris, reportedly led to “hundreds of thousands” of canceled subscriptions, per the New York Times. It reportedly suffered $100 million in losses in 2024, in part because of the cancellations.
Its web traffic has also declined. Semafor reported that daily visits were down to around 3 million by the middle of 2024, from 22.5 million in January 2021.
The Post cut its staff from 1,000 to under 800 last spring, with CEO Will Lewis calling out the $100 million loss from the previous year.
The layoffs at The Post, of course, don’t exist in a vacuum. The media industry, and not just legacy players, has been plagued by a fragmented audience and changes to Google Search algorithms that have directed readers away from news outlets and toward its own AI-generated answers.
The size, scope, and location of those cuts merit scrutiny, however — particularly considering the shift in media ownership over the past 15 years.
Bezos’ acquisition of the Post in 2013 for $250 million was met with a mix of skepticism and hope from weary journalists who had experienced consolidation, layoffs, and the growing pains of moving from a print-only to digital-dominant media industry.
His acquisition became part of a broader trend at the time in which billionaires, many with backgrounds in tech, snapped up beleaguered media organizations well worn from the previous go public-private equity cycle.
A few years after Bezos bought The Post, Laurene Powell Jobs purchased The Atlantic, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff bought Time Inc., and pharmaceutical executive Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired the Los Angeles Times.
Bezos, like Benioff and Soon-Shiong (who also blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris), moved closer to Trump after he won the 2024 election. His spaceflight company Blue Origin relies on federal contracts, and Amazon had faced increased scrutiny under previous administrations.
Lewis was reportedly not present to oversee the staff cuts and changes at The Post (Murray told Fox News that the CEO “had a lot of things to tend to today”). Nor was Bezos. As his newspaper prepared to cut one-third of its staff, Bezos spent Monday with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in Florida, leading him on a tour of Blue Origin’s facilities.
Less than 48 hours later, The Washington Post would lay off the journalist who reported on Blue Origin.
The darkness, it seems, is creeping in.
Tech
Meta turns to AI to make shopping easier on Instagram and Facebook
Meta is looking to leverage AI’s ability to inform and potentially influence shoppers to increase sales on the company’s social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram.
At the Shoptalk 2026 conference this week, the tech giant announced it will begin testing a new experience that allows consumers to see more product information and a summary of user reviews after they click on an ad or visit a website from Facebook or Instagram.
The feature is similar to Amazon’s use of generative AI to enhance its product reviews, introduced in 2023. Instead of requiring users to read through hundreds of reviews to get a sense of what people say about a given product, Amazon uses AI to summarize the reviews into a short paragraph that appears on the product page.
Meta will also use AI in the same way. In the new pop-up experience that appears, the AI feature can offer a round-up of “what people are saying” about the given product. This may include a brief intro followed by key bullet points.
However, in Meta’s apps, the feature will also provide other general information, including details about the brand itself, recommended products, potential discounts or sales, and, on an individual product’s page, a button to add the item to the user’s cart.
This is followed by an updated checkout flow, built in partnership with payment providers Stripe and PayPal, which allows consumers to complete the purchase in just a tap. Meta says it’s already working on other integrations with Ayden and Shopify, which will roll out in the future.
The advertiser is in control of which checkout partner they use, so when a consumer taps the “Buy Now” button, they can complete the purchase and fulfill the order, while the user remains in Meta’s app.
The changes to checkout come alongside other updates to Meta’s product discovery tools and features.
This includes an update aimed at creators that offers an expanded range of affiliate partners for them to work with on Facebook, as competition with TikTok heats up. The affiliate additions include Amazon, eBay, and Temu in the United States, Mercado Libre in Latin America, and Shopee in Asia.
On Instagram later this year, Meta will also test affiliates like Amazon (U.S.) and Shopee (Asia). The partners will choose which products they want featured and set the commission rates for sales that the creator receives when someone buys through their account.
In addition, Instagram Reels creators will gain access to product catalogs from businesses in 22 countries that will help them find products to feature in their videos.
Tech
Arbor Energy just landed a billion-dollar order to bring rocket turbine tech to the power grid
Energy startup Arbor Energy on Wednesday said it had sold up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of its modular turbines to GridMarket, a company that helps arrange power projects for data centers and industrial users.
“Everyone wants more power. They wanted it yesterday,” Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor, told TechCrunch. “The time frames are compressing and the scale is getting larger.”
Arbor’s Halcyon turbines are based on rocket turbomachinery, high-performance engine technology originally developed for spaceflight, and its first commercial turbines will be 3D printed and capable of generating 25 megawatts each. GridMarket’s order, if fully fulfilled, represents 200 units.
Neither company disclosed the exact price of the deal, though Hartwig said that Arbor has seen a “willingness to pay upwards of $100 per megawatt-hour.” A person familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the total is in the single-digit billions of dollars.
The startup plans to connect its first turbine to the grid in 2028 and ramp production through 2030, at which point it hopes to deliver more than 100 turbines annually. The goal, Hartwig said, is to eventually produce enough for 10 gigawatts of new capacity every year.
Arbor’s initial designs intended for Halcyon to subsist on a vegetarian diet — the power plant would ingest organic material like crop waste and wood scraps from farms and timber operations, which would be turned into syngas — a combustible gas mixture — and burned in the presence of pure oxygen. The result would be pure CO2, which could be captured and stored underground.
Under that process, each Halcyon turbine would generate carbon negative power. The organic matter it consumes would otherwise have decayed, releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
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Since then, Arbor has modified Halcyon to accept natural gas in addition to biomass — making it, in effect, more of an omnivore. The process otherwise remains the same, meaning the CO2 that emerges can still be sequestered.
Because it’s using natural gas, it wouldn’t be carbon negative in that configuration. In fact, because methane leaks from pipes and valves throughout the supply chain, Halcyon turbines running on fossil fuel will still produce some greenhouse gas emissions while also fostering continued demand for natural gas. Hartwig said that the company is working with low-leak natural gas suppliers, and that it’s “economically a benefit to sequester that CO2.”
“We see a long-term path to less than 10 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour,” Hartwig said. That’s significantly lower than typical natural gas power plants without carbon capture, which release about 400 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour.
Arbor hasn’t abandoned its biomass-powered projects, and the sale to GridMarket isn’t restricted to one specific fuel. However, other announced deals built around biomass are considerably smaller than the one signed with GridMarket.
Like many energy startups, Arbor has gotten a meaningful boost from the data center boom. Makers of traditional gas turbines were caught flat-footed, and given the volatility of such markets in the past, they’ve been reluctant to significantly increase production. Hartwig said that they’d be hard-pressed to quickly ramp production, even if they wanted to.
“Those supply chains largely all get bottlenecked by blades and vanes for traditional turbines. Those are fairly inelastic supply chains, both in how artisanal the production method is — doing directionally solidified, single-crystal turbine blades — as well as very specialized labor, the workforce behind it,” he said. “If you were to get in line for a turbine today, you’d be waiting until 2032.”
Arbor is betting that its machined and 3D-printed parts will help it get to market quicker. “People want power in the next few years and they want a lot of it,” Hartwig said.
Tech
Meta launches new initiative to support entrepreneurship, drive AI adoption
Meta is launching Meta Small Business, a new company wide initiative focused on supporting entrepreneurship and driving AI adoption, Axios reported on Wednesday.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff that small businesses have always been a big part of the company’s business model, and that tens of millions of entrepreneurs already use its platforms to grow and connect with customers. The company now plans to do more in the space.
“In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.”
Axios reports that Meta Small Business will be led by Meta President and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick and Head of Product Naomi Gleit.
Zuckerberg has asked product managers, designers, engineers, and other employees to reach out if they’re interested in working on the new initiative.
Meta turns to AI to make shopping easier on Instagram and Facebook
Arbor Energy just landed a billion-dollar order to bring rocket turbine tech to the power grid
