Tech
Rivian was saved by software in 2025
Rivian is, by every measure, a maker and seller of EVs. But in 2025, it was the company’s software and services that helped its annual revenue grow by 8%.
Rivian reported Thursday $5.38 billion in total revenue in 2025, up from $4.97 billion from the prior year. That rosy picture dulls a bit when looking just at its automotive revenue, which fell 15% to $3.8 billion in 2025. The fall was fueled by a $134 million drop in regulatory credit sales and lower vehicle deliveries, which were partially offset by higher average selling prices, according to Rivian.
Meanwhile, software and services revenue grew more than threefold to $1.55 billion for the year. And the joint venture with Volkswagen Group was behind most of that growth, according to Rivian. The “services” component of this line item, which Rivian doesn’t break out, includes a variety of items, including vehicle repair, vehicle trade-ins, and maintenance services. The remainder, and the bulk of the revenue, is from software, and specifically due to the joint venture with VW Group.
VW and Rivian formed a technology joint venture in 2024 that is worth up to $5.8 billion. The joint venture is milestone-based and in 2025 Rivian hit the mark, which meant a $1 billion payout in the form of a share sale. Under the terms of the JV, Rivian will supply VW Group with its existing electrical architecture and software technology stack.
Rivian received an initial $1 billion convertible note in 2024 and another $1 billion payment in July 2025.
Rivian is expected to continue to receive payments from VW Group through 2027. Rivian is expected to receive an additional $2 billion of capital as part of the joint venture in 2026, CFO Claire McDonough said Thursday on the company earnings call. About $1 billion of that is subject to the successful completion of winter testing, which is underway. The remaining $1 billion is nonrecourse debt, which is expected to be received in October.
And while the funds provide a hefty stopgap, Rivian’s financial success in 2026 will hinge largely on the rollout of its next EV, the R2.
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Rivian confirmed in its earnings report Thursday that the R2 SUV, which is designed to be cheaper to build and less expensive for customers, will come to market by June 2026. That “cheaper to build” line item is particularly crucial for Rivian, which has historically lost money on every vehicle it makes.
Rivian has spent years trying to push the cost of goods sold figure down. And it has made progress with the rollout of its second-generation flagship R1T truck and R1S SUV. For instance, McDonough said “in the fourth quarter it was able to deliver $92,000 of cogs per unit and that was about a $4,000 per unit improvement relative to the third quarter.” Rivian’s cogs per unit was $99,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The company saw its total automotive cost of revenue decrease year-over-year from $1.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $898 million in the same quarter in 2025. Notably, the company’s cost of revenue for software steadily inched up throughout 2025.
The R2 SUV, which will initially launch as a dual motor all-wheel-drive model, is an opportunity to further reduce costs. The company is expected to release more information about the R2, including final specs, on March 12.
Rivian’s guidance for 2026 suggests that it is banking on demand for R2 and its ability to ramp up production. The company said Thursday it expects to deliver between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles in 2026 — which could provide up to a 59% bump from last year. Rivian delivered 42,247 vehicles in 2025, which includes its two R1 consumer vehicles and the electric delivery van (EDV).
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe noted that the company expects some growth in EDV sales in 2026. Rivian plans to produce an all-wheel-drive version and a larger battery pack variant of the EDV, for which Amazon is its primary customer.
“Both of those are to help unlock specific use cases within the Amazon network,” Scaringe said. “We’re working really closely with Amazon in defining the requirements of those and excited to get those launched.”
The company isn’t signaling profitability — on an adjusted basis — just yet. But it is offering up considerable improvement on that front. Rivian reported a $3.6 billion net loss in 2025; it expects an adjusted net loss of between $1.8 billion and $2.1 billion for 2026. Rivian also projects capital expenditures will be between $1.95 billion and $2.05 billion this year.
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.
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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].”
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