grants

Disrupting 2024: Aria Simone of Fearless Fund Set to Make Waves

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TechCrunch has kept readers informed regarding Fearless Fund’s courtroom battle to provide business grants to Black women. Today, we are happy to announce that Fearless Fund CEO and co-founder Arian Simone will speak at the Disrupt 2024 Builders Stage in a fireside chat discussing her organization’s fight for racial equity. This June, an appeals court ruled that Fearless Fund’s business grant likely violates Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and has banned the grant’s deployment indefinitely. Fearless Fund is one of many organizations facing the heat for having programs focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Register for your Disrupt pass today and join 10,000 tech leaders for 3 days of startup innovation this October.

US to invest $11.6B in TSMC for enhanced chip production in Arizona

Tmsc Getty Ransomware Lockbit
This grant, pegged for the company’s U.S. subsidiary, TSMC Arizona, is the latest step by the U.S. to strengthen its domestic supply of semiconductors as it seeks to reshore manufacturing of chips amid escalating geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. The Act is primarily aimed at attracting manufacturing stateside, and also prohibits recipients of the funding from increasing their semiconductor manufacturing footprint in China. With the new investment, Taiwan-based TSMC, which is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors, is broadening its plans for its fabrication plants in Arizona. Intel could receive approximately $20 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS and Science Act for its semiconductor manufacturing. Meanwhile, Samsung, which announced a $17 billion additional investment in Taylor, Texas, is expected to receive more than $6 billion in grants for its chip facility in Texas.

“Boosting Bluesky: Developer Projects Powered by Funding”

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Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth. The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol. Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more. The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol. Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.