Marketplace Tech

This week, Palantir announced on X it’s relocating its headquarters to Miami. Plus, we look at the controversy around Ring's Search Party feature. But first, an update to Google's AI search summaries. If you use AI-enabled search on Google, it’ll spit out an AI-generated summary with source links to the right. Now, the company is making links more prominent when users hover over certain words in t...

Meta anticipates up to $135 billion worth of capital expenditures this year, nearly double the company’s outlay in 2025. One driver of that expenditure growth is what Meta calls its "Superintelligence Labs." This kind of spending puts it right up there with other tech giants pouring money into their AI capabilities. And it's a shift from a company that used to be hyper-focused on virtual reality....

As artificial intelligence companies roll out more sophisticated agents, many analysts and investors raised concerns that AI could replace traditional software. Some are dubbing this the “SaaSpocolypse.” New AI tools allow users to “vibe code,” or describe what you’d like to create in plain language and have the AI generate the code for you. This could make some software easier for companies to cr...

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the number of students enrolling in computer and information science decreased this past fall from the year before. That's at both the graduate and undergraduate level and the first drop since 2020. Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association says there's been a decline in a number of computing-related majors. Marketplace’s Stephan...

Caterpillar, which manufactures heavy duty equipment like asphalt pavers, diesel engine locomotives, and industrial gas turbines, has been around for 101 years. And now, the company seems to be one of the big winners of the AI infrastructure build out. Big tech companies are working as fast as possible to get their data centers up to power artificial intelligence. Some are building their own natur...

This week, we look at Spotify's stellar quarter. Plus, there's a new AI-only social network called Moltbook. But first, Alphabet, parent of Google, went to the debt markets this week, raising tens of billions of dollars to fund its AI spending. One of the bonds Alphabet is offering, issued in British pounds, has a maturity date of 100 years from now. This is very unusual in the corporate world. Ma...

Cryptocurrency is being used more frequently in illegal transactions — about $158 billion was used in illicit crypto activity last year. That’s an all-time high, according to a new report from the startup TRM Labs. This comes as the overall crypto ecosystem is growing and, it should be said, legitimate uses of crypto are growing at a faster rate than illegitimate ones. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hugh...

NASA’s Artemis II mission, which will send humans around the moon for the first time in over five decades, could launch as early as March. This is part of a larger campaign to establish a long-term presence on the moon and eventually prepare for human space flight to Mars. Meanwhile, China also has a goal of landing humans on the moon by 2030, setting up a kind of modern space race. One reason for...

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the most important commodity in the AI boom — and have made Nvidia a multi-trillion dollar company. But the tensor processing unit (TPU) could present itself as competition for the GPU. TPUs are developed by Google specifically for AI workloads. And so far, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta have reportedly made deals for Google’s TPUs. Christopher Miller, hist...

According to surveys by the FINRA Foundation, our knowledge of personal finance here in the U.S. went down by 15% between 2009 and 2021. But what if it actually didn't? What if the technology we use to answer the questions is now getting in the way? In 2021, over half of all respondents used a smartphone to fill out the survey. In 2009, none of them used one, according to data from FINRA’s Nationa...

On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we take a look at Nvidia's changing investment relationship with OpenAI. Plus, a stormy start for the new U.S. version of TikTok. But first, SpaceX, one of the world’s largest rocket companies, announced this week that it’s buying xAI, a two-and-half-year-old artificial intelligence startup. Both companies are controlled by Elon Musk. The ne...

A landmark lawsuit that accuses social media companies of intentionally designing their platforms to be addictive — and causing harm to children and teenagers' mental health — is in court this week in Los Angeles. The defendants in this case are Meta and YouTube, both of which dispute the allegations. Snap and TikTok both settled in advance of the trial. Some are calling this social media's "Big T...

You can get a pretty good workout plan from a chatbot, but the tech is also being incorporated into all kinds of existing fitness apps, from Apple's Workout Buddy, which motivates you through earbuds, to the Fitbit AI health coach, to Peloton's AI-enabled camera that tracks your form. Nicole Nguyen, personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal, gave some of the most popular ones a spin. She...

In his new book, Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims offers a guide for getting the most out of the technology. He's compiled two dozen "Laws of AI" to shed light on the best ways to use these generative tools. Yesterday we talked about how individuals can improve their productivity with AI, and today we're digging into how organizations can use — or sometimes misuse — it.

With all the fanfare surrounding AI these days — the utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares — it can be hard to see the technology as simply a tool that anyone can use to improve their lives. That's what tech columnist Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal focuses on his new book "How to AI: Cut Through the Hype. Master the Basics. Transform Your Work.” In it, he outlines two dozen “AI Laws...

Is AI a bubble? It's the trillion-dollar question in the economy. So Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino decided to look to history for some answers in this week’s special episode of “Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” McCarty Carino spoke with David A. Kirsch, a historian and management professor at the University of Maryland. He’s also co-author of the book "Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of T...

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino takes a tour of Redwood Material’s new R&D Lab with CTO Colin Campbell. Redwood, an EV battery recycling startup, is now offering off-grid, renewable energy grids to AI data centers and it’s looking to scale up its operations in this AI boom.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Paul Vixie, vice president at AWS Security and an early internet innovator, about the rapid buildout of fiber optic networks during the dot-com boom, and what happened when the bubble burst.

529 Bryant St. in Palo Alto, California, is home to a key landmark in tech history. Now owned and operated as a data center by Equinix, the building has been a networking hub to a variety of firms, including the earliest telephone switch board operators and early internet firms like Alta Vista. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino visited the data center to learn more.

Billions of dollars has been poured into the AI economy in recent years. As part of a new series about what the AI economy means for you, Marketplace Tech is looking at the infrastructure build-out behind the AI boom, starting with a visit to an Amazon Web Service lab in Cupertino, California, where AWS developers are squeezing as much networking efficiency out of their servers as possible for the...

A Micron memory chip factory in upstate New York is wrangling with local groups who want legal assurances the project will benefit the local community. Plus, YouTube plans to crack down on AI slop. But first, it's shaping up to be a big year for very big initial public offerings. Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public at an anticipated valuation of around $1.5 trillion. AI compani...

In the era of AI, sometimes a story is really just too good to be true, even if the initial evidence suggests otherwise. And as artificially engineered content becomes mainstream, journalists need to go the extra mile to verify a story’s authenticity. Casey Newton from Platformer spoke with “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino about his recent wild goose chase that ended in an AI hoax.

Information Apocalypse Now. AI content is flooding social feeds and its getting increasingly hard to determine what is real versus what is fake. Aviv Ovadya , founder and CEO of the AI and Democracy Foundation, has been warning of this apocalypse for a decade now. “Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ovadya about the state of our information ecosystem and protecting our institu...

Consumers have heard of “dynamic pricing,” when the prices are based on demand within a single moment. But whether they know it or not, they’re also contending with “surveillance pricing,” where companies use personalized consumer data to serve up personalized prices. Marketplace's Kristin Schwab reports.

In an industry known for pushing the bounds of human innovation, tech elites are now trying to push the bounds of their own bodies. The hot new biohacking trend is injectable peptides — similar to the ones found in GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. But these are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. These gray-market peptides, largely from Chinese manufacturers, are being used by tech wo...