Tech
Nvidia-Run:ai deal to be reviewed under EU’s merger rules
The European Union has tossed a wrench in the works of chipmaker Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of Tel Aviv-based AI workload management startup Run:ai. The deal, which was announced back in April — with a price tag of $700 million per our sources — will be reviewed by the bloc after a request by competition regulators in Italy under the EU Merger Regulation (EUMR).
Nvidia cannot implement the transaction before notifying and obtaining clearance from the Commission. So, at a minimum, the referral may add a few weeks to its timeline for completing the deal. However, if the EU’s preliminary check identifies specific issues of concern, the bloc may move to a deeper investigation — which could add months of delay and uncertainty.
The proposed transaction does not meet the EUMR’s standard notification thresholds. However, EU law allows a national regulator to notify a transaction to the Commission if it believes it poses serious risks for competition locally and which could affect trade within the bloc’s Single Market.
“Italy submitted a referral request to the Commission pursuant to Article 22(1) of the EUMR. This provision allows Member States to request the Commission to examine a merger that does not have an EU dimension but affects trade within the Single Market and threatens to significantly affect competition within the territory of the Member State(s) making the request,” the Commission wrote in a press release Thursday.
The EU’s acceptance of the referral means it agrees the proposed transaction meets the criteria for referral under Article 22.
“In particular, the transaction threatens to significantly affect competition in the markets where NVIDIA and Run:ai are active, which are likely to be at least European Economic Area-wide and therefore include the referring country Italy,” the EU wrote. “The Commission also concluded that it is best placed to examine the transaction given its knowledge and case experience in related markets.”
The Commission has now asked Nvidia to notify the transaction — a formal step that means the chipmaker must prepare documentation to inform the bloc’s competition enforcers of the details of the proposed merger so they can assess impacts.
While Big Tech enjoyed many years of minimal oversight of its (killer) acquisitions of startups and smaller rivals, there has been a change of approach over the last few years as regulators recognized the anti-competitive legacy of sitting on their hands for so long while a few platform giants gobbled up market power.
With AI, the rapidly developing software field where innovation is dependent upon access to a small number of key inputs — such as the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that Nvidia has geared toward training AI models — the specter of a rapid repeat of the market concentration issue has encouraged swifter vigilance from antitrust enforcers.
Though, as yet, no harder action has been taken. So it will certainly be interesting to see what the Commission’s review concludes here.
Nvidia spokesman John Rizzo emailed a statement responding to the EU’s merger review. “We are happy to answer any questions regulators may have about Run:ai,” the company wrote. “After the acquisition closes, we’ll continue to make AI available in every cloud and enterprise, and help customers select any system and software solution that works best for them.”
This report was updated with comment from Nvidia.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
Galaxy rally from 2-0 deficit, earn draw with FC Dallas
Minnesota United blank Timbers for 3rd straight win
