A look at some themes at this year's Hill and Valley Forum: embracing government-led industrial policy to onshore manufacturing, AI's unpopularity, and more (Newcomer)
Investment in Austin-based startups grew to a record high of $7.19B in 2025, up from $4.37B in 2024 and topping a pandemic peak of $6.1B in 2021 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
Unity plans to shut down its ironSource advertising network on April 30 and has begun the process of divesting Supersonic, its casual game publishing arm (Sophie Shulman/CTech)
SoftBank says it has secured a $40B bridge loan maturing in 2027 from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and other banks, to fund further investment in OpenAI (Akash Sriram/Reuters)
Sources: Alibaba and ByteDance plan to order Huawei's new 950PR AI chip after tests show better CUDA compatibility; Huawei targets ~750K 950PR shipments in 2026 (Reuters)
Sources: Moonshot AI may scrap its Cayman structure for a China or Hong Kong entity to prepare for a Hong Kong IPO and plans to raise funding at ~$18B valuation (Wall Street Journal)
Uber partners with China's Pony AI and Croatia-based, Rimac-spinoff Verne to launch Europe's first commercial robotaxi service, initially debuting in Zagreb (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)