alive

Alive and Kicking: Tesla Semi Charging Corridor Project Survives Biden Administration Funding Snub

Tesla Semi Charging
Combined with around $24 million of its own money, Tesla wanted to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations between Laredo, Texas and Fremont, California. “The project will help create a hydrogen corridor from southern California to Texas,” the Department of Transportation wrote in a statement in January. “Funding hydrogen stations will go down as purely wasted money,” Patel told TechCrunch this week. While he no longer speaks on behalf of Tesla, he also criticized funding hydrogen infrastructure when he was still with the company. Despite all this, the Tesla Semi program is still slowly attracting customers.

Inflection Devoured by Top Investor Microsoft After Raising $1.3B

Bosch Close Up 1
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently). Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it. Ultimately Microsoft got a bit of extra leverage on the company instead of eating it alive. Whether it was OpenAI or Inflection, Microsoft was feeding their cash and compute addictions, whispering in their ear about partnerships, and then as soon as they tripped, out came the hidden fork and knife.