Data center developer Crusoe is ramping up its energy storage capacity with battery buys from Form Energy and Redwood Energy.

The company said it will buy 12 gigawatt-hours of Form Energy’s 100-hour batteries. It’s the second large sale made by Form, which last month said it would build a 30 gigawatt-hour battery for Google in Minnesota. That deal was worth about $1 billion, according to The Information. 

Form, which didn’t disclose the value of the sale, will start delivering Crusoe’s batteries in 2027.

Crusoe’s smaller purchase should still bring Form hundreds of millions in new revenue as the battery company embarks on a $500 million funding round. Form has raised $1.4 billion to date, according to PitchBook. Previously, Form had signed smaller contracts with utilities interested in testing the technology.

Form’s iron-air batteries discharge when oxygen from the air flows over iron pebbles inside the battery. The oxidation process produces rust and electricity. To charge the battery, electricity essentially de-rusts the iron, releasing oxygen.

Form began expanding its first factory in West Virginia last year in anticipation of big contracts that are now materializing.

Crusoe also announced that it’s expanding a partnership with Redwood Materials, the battery recycling and reuse company founded by ex-Tesla CTO J. B. Straubel. The data center company has been operating a 12 megawatt, 63 megawatt-hour battery on a microgrid since June, which was the largest second-life battery installation at the time. Redwood will deliver an additional 8 megawatts of power using repurposed EV batteries.

With an overflowing war chest from its $5 billion raise that closed last month (not to mention billions in revenue), Databricks is acquiring.

The company, best known for its cloud data analytics platform, announced on Tuesday that it was launching a new security product called Lakewatch. Lakewatch takes Databricks’ ability to store massive amounts of data and performs classic Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tasks, like detecting and investigating threats. Only it does so with the help of AI agents powered by Anthropic’s Claude.

Databricks bought two startups to underpin this new product: Antimatter, in an undisclosed-until-now deal that closed last year, and SiftD.ai, in a deal that flew together over the last couple of weeks and closed on Monday, the company told TechCrunch.

Terms were not disclosed for either deal. Antimatter, founded by security researcher Andrew Krioukov, raised $12 million led by New Enterprise Associates in 2022, according to PitchBook estimates. If tiny SiftD.ai had raised money, PitchBook wasn’t aware.

SiftD.ai was so young, it had only launched its product in November: an interactive notebook (like a Jupyter notebook) intended to be a tool where people and agents worked together. The Databricks team knew the startup’s co-founder CEO Steve Zhang from his many years as chief scientist at Splunk (through 2021). He created the Search Processing Language while there. (His LinkedIn also says he was CTO of Astronomer, of the Coldplay CEO scandal, but left there in 2023 before founding SiftD.)

Both of these acquisitions were of small startups — only a few people in SiftD’s case and less than 50 for Antimatter, according to LinkedIn. SiftD appears to be an acqui-hire. With Antimatter, Databricks probably gained some IP, too. Krioukov had demonstrated Antimatter’s tech onstage in 2024 at RSA’s Innovation Sandbox Contest. Antimatter was working on a “data control plane” tool that allowed enterprises to deploy agents securely, while protecting sensitive data.

While Databricks declined to say how many employees it acquired, it confirmed that the startups’ employees did join the company. Krioukov, who’s been at Databricks for months now, is leading the Lakewatch team.

We asked Databricks if it was going to keep shopping for startups and a spokesperson essentially said, yes, that it continuously has its feelers out. “We’re always looking to what’s next — our goal is to stay ahead of the market and close gaps in what our customers need,” the spokesperson said.

At a time when AI slop is flooding music streaming platforms, Spotify is beta testing a new “Artist Profile Protection” feature that allows artists to review releases before they go live on their profiles. The idea behind the new tool is to give artists more control over which tracks are associated with their name on the streaming service.

“Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse,” Spotify wrote in a blog post. “That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and that’s why we’ve made protecting artist identity a top priority for 2026. Today, we’re announcing a first-of-its-kind solution to a problem that’s affected streaming for years.”

Artists in the beta have the ability to review and approve or decline releases delivered to Spotify. Only the releases that they approve will appear on their artist profile, contribute to their stats, and show up in users’ recommendations.

Spotify’s announcement comes a week after Sony Music said that it has requested the removal of more than 135,000 AI-generated songs impersonating its artists on streaming services.

Spotify says that while open distribution has made it easier for independent artists to release music, it also creates opportunities for mistakes and bad actors. Tracks can end up on the wrong artist’s profile due to metadata errors, confusion between artists with the same name, or malicious attempts to attach music to an artist’s profile.

“When that happens, it can impact your catalog, your stats, your Release Radar, and how fans discover your music,” Spotify explains. “We know how frustrating this can be for both artists and fans alike and one of the top requests we’ve heard from artists over the past year is that you want more visibility before music appears under your name.”

Spotify notes that while the new feature isn’t necessary for every artist, it’s designed for artists who have experienced repeated incorrect releases, have a common artist name, or want more control over what appears on their profile.

Artists who are included in the beta will see the feature in their “Spotify for Artists” settings on desktop and mobile web. If they turn “Artist Profile Protection” on, they’ll receive an email notification when music is delivered to Spotify with their name attached to it. From there, they can approve or decline the request.