The OnePlus 13 was rumored to include a 6,000mAh battery. Well, that has just been confirmed. The OnePlus 13 will ship with a beefy 6,000mAh battery pack, and upgrade to the 5,400mAh battery of its predecessor.

The OnePlus 13 will feature a beefy battery pack, a 6,000mAh unit

Just to be clear, that 5,400mAh battery was already great considering the phone it’s in. It trumped the vast majority of the competition, both in capacity and longevity. Well, this new addition should bring things to a whole new level.

The phone will likely retain the same display size as its predecessor, or at least close to it. Its chip will be more power efficient, so we’re expecting to see even better battery life this time around.

How do we know it will include a 6,000mAh battery, though? Well, thanks to a certification listing from China, China’s TAF certification, which you can see below. The phone will actually include two 2,920mAh battery packs, it seems. That comes to 5,840mAh battery, but it will be marketed as a typical battery capacity of 6,000mAh.

Using a 6,000mAh battery in a phone is not new for OnePlus, though. The OnePlus Ace 3 Pro which arrived back in June has a 6,100mAh battery pack on the inside.

The device will launch at some point this month, at least it’s expected to

The OnePlus 13 is expected to launch in OnePlus’ home market at some point this month. OnePlus still didn’t confirm anything, however, so it remains to be seen. Plenty of flagship-grade phones are coming this month as this is the launch month of the two most important mobile processors.

The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 has already launched, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite is coming soon. The OnePlus 13 will be fueled by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, as OnePlus always utilizes the latest Snapdragon chip.

It was confirmed recently, by a trusted tipster, that the OnePlus 13 will feature the BOE X2 quad micro-curved display. That will be the 8T LTPO panel with a 2K resolution and an adaptive refresh rate of up to 120Hz. An ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner will also be used.

A new season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is almost here, with a trailer to prove it. The fifth, and unfortunately final, season looks to feature the same unchecked shenanigans and in-the-know humor that has made the show so beloved to Trek fans.

The trailer’s filled with wacky hijinks and jokes pulled from the wide world of Star Trek. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the Borg, the weird sexy decontamination sauna from Star Trek: Enterprise and a whole bunch of Harry Kims. That’s right. There looks to be at least seven Harry Kims floating around this trailer. My Delta Quadrant bestie is finally getting the respect he deserves.

For the uninitiated, Star Trek: Lower Decks is an animated show helmed by Mike McMahon, who created Solar Opposites and worked on the early seasons of Rick and Morty. It follows some low-level Starfleet officers just after the events of the 1990s shows, like Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s very funny, particularly for long-time fans. It was also recently cancelled.

Now I don’t know anything about viewership numbers, as Paramount+ keeps that stuff close to the (red) vest. However, Star Trek: Lower Decks seems fairly popular right? Also, it’s a cartoon, so it can’t be as expensive to make as something like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I can’t imagine that Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome command jaw-dropping salaries, so why cancel it? You know what I’m getting at. #SaveLowerDecks.

The data center industry is expanding rapidly to keep up with the flywheel growth of AI. While these data centers are necessary AI infrastructure, they store an AI company’s compute, they are expensive to build, seemingly more so to run, and they are a huge energy suck. Startups are looking to make data centers more efficient and sustainable, but it isn’t that simple.

The global data center market is estimated to be worth $301 billion, according to P&S Intelligence, and predicted to more than double into a $622.4 billion market by 2030. Data centers consume about 4% of the total power in the U.S. today, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, and it’s predicted to more than double to 9% by 2030.

Data centers, and the big companies that rely on them, are scrambling for power. Last month Microsoft inked a deal with Constellation Energy to restart its nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island to keep up with demand.

In tandem with the increase of data centers is the growth of the number of startups looking to solve the data center industry’s energy crisis and environmental impact. Startups like Incooling and Submer are looking to tackle the space by cooling down existing data center technology so they produce less heat. Others like Phaidra are using software to help data centers more efficiently manage their cooling.

Some are looking to build an entirely new model. Verrus is building a more “flexible” data center using microgrids. Sage Geosystems is building a way to use hot pressurized water to power data centers instead of natural gas.

Sophie Bakalar, a partner at Collab Fund, which is an investor in Phaidra, told TechCrunch that while there were entrepreneurs looking to build data center tech before the AI boom — data centers play a large role in cloud computing and bitcoin mining as well — she’s noticed a 10x increase in founders looking to build tech for this space over the last year.

“We’ve seen a company that is building data centers in space, it runs the whole gambit,” Bakalar said. “Whenever you have such an obvious problem in supply and demand, it’s natural you will see a lot of entrepreneurs eager to tackle the issue from different angles.”

But although data centers are expanding quickly and will need solutions to be more efficient, that doesn’t mean startups should think it will be easy to get their tech adopted.

Data center challenges

Francis O’Sullivan, a managing director at S2G Ventures, told TechCrunch that the speed with which this space is growing may actually make it harder for startups to find partners willing to test their tech or take a chance on it.

“[Data centers] are enormously expensive assets, multi-billion-dollar facilities. The reality there is they must work,” O’Sullivan said. “Therefore the real meaty data center world is not a forum for experimentation.”

The customer base for this kind of tech is also arguably more concentrated, and with that, likely harder to penetrate, said Kristian Branaes, a partner at climate-focused VC Transition. Branaes added that his firm has spent a lot of time researching and going deep into the data center tech category, but while they’ve found cool companies building novel tech, they haven’t been able to gain enough conviction to invest.

Branaes is worried about how companies will be able to scale. He thinks some of the startups he’s found fall under the classic climate tech conundrum of being cool tech but not necessarily a company that can produce venture-like returns. He said that it’s hard to build a venture-scale company that only sells into a handful of large companies like Microsoft and Apple.

“We have come to [the] view: It is very, very hard to build a large company only selling to AWS and Microsoft and whatever; they are ruthless at procurement,” Branaes said. “They are not in the business of giving away a lot of margins. If you start to make too much money, they want to circumvent that or start doing it internally.”

Powering on

While some investors remain skeptical, many startups in this space are seeing traction. Impending regulations in both Europe and in data center-heavy U.S. states like Virginia mean that even if these large customers aren’t shopping for solutions now, they will likely have to in the future.

Helena Samodurova, the co-founder of Incooling, a Netherlands-based startup looking to cool data centers down, launched her company six years ago, before the current AI hype. While data centers, and the energy they used, was an issue then, the demand for Incooling’s tech has completely changed.

“Back in the day, people didn’t really know about it,” Samodurova said. “In the last six years, that has changed tremendously. As we went through this journey, we really had to educate people on what this was. Fast forward six years later, that’s not the case. We are being sought out.”

Samoduorva said interest has increased from both potential customers and investors, too. She added that the data center industry is more broad than just the Amazons and Googles of the world and that helping improve data center emissions is not just focused on those few large companies.

“You have a bus to go to the station, you have a car to take your family to go out, you have a Ferrari to go racing, everything has four wheels but the mechanics of it is different,” Samodurova said. “We provide cooling solutions or computing solutions to fix whatever bottleneck you are.”

O’Sullivan said that for him, while a lot of data center tech is a bit too nascent to get excited about at the moment, there are other categories of companies to back that help solve some of the same issues data center tech is aiming for. One is: solving the issues involved with getting the actual energy to the data center and making sure that power grids can handle that level of power.

For startups focused on data centers, adoption might just be too early for some of the category’s earliest entrants. Unlike Incooling, many companies have just been founded in the past few years. While the data center tech market may be in its earliest innings, AI, and the data centers needed to power the industry, aren’t going away anytime soon.

“I think the main point to consider is there is a real urgency here,” Bakalar said. “The growth is really outpacing the current infrastructure that we have. We need newer, better, faster ways to achieve the promise we have heard about AI.”

In September of 2023, Danny and Steven Sanicki played a round of minigolf. The Sanickis are twins, are both competitive golfers, and were budding content creators at the time, so of course they filmed the whole round. Danny edited the footage on his phone, recorded a quick commentary track, slapped a scoreboard over top of the video, and posted the tournament as a six-part series on his TikTok channel. Neither brother really expected anything to happen.

The videos went viral. And since then, the Sanicki twins have been posting tournaments every day, bringing new friends into the fold, and building out a Putt-Putt empire all around the web. They built a complex system of tournaments and points, started awarding money to winners, and began planning for how to make things even bigger.

On this episode of The Vergecast, the first in a two-part series we’re calling How to Make It in the Future, we chart the rise of Twin Tour Golf (as they’d prefer to be known) and talk with Danny and Steven about their experience as creators. We talk about the process of deciding to go all in on minigolf, the way they’ve tried to expand their offering without compromising what people like about it, how they split up workflow, how they monetize on various channels, and much more. The Sanickis’ story is a classic creator journey, and they’ve hit so many of the milestones and forks in the road that come for everyone who wants to make it on the internet.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:

Dolby Atmos is a phrase you’ll come across when you’re shopping for a new TV, soundbar or home theater speakers. An extension of the more traditional 5.1-channel surround sound, Dolby Atmos aims to create a more immersive experience by adding height channels to mixes, creating a ‘dome’ effect that envelops you.

Dolby Atmos has now become a staple feature of home theater tech through clever virtual processing by some of the best soundbars, such as the Sonos Beam Gen 2, and in physical form by some of the best Dolby Atmos soundbars, such as the excellent Samsung HW-Q990D, which uses up-firing drivers on the soundbar itself and the system’s wireless surround speakers.

Although it wasn’t a massive success at the box office, Ready or Not has continued to accumulate fans since the movie first debuted in 2019. Now, Deadline is reporting that the film is getting a sequel with star Samara Weaving set to return alongside directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who are also known as RadioSilence. The news that a sequel was in the works was first announced at a 2019 screening of the original film. An exact release date, casting announcements and other details about the project have yet to be unveiled.

The original film follows Weaving as a woman marrying into a wealthy family who discovers that this family participates in a bizarre ritual that turns into a battle for their own survival. It cost only $6 million to produce and made more than $28 million in the U.S. alone.

“I’m all in. I think we’re all in, I don’t know. I think we’re all in…I don’t know if we’ve had our blood handshake, but pretty much. We’ve done the spit handshake, but we haven’t cut each other’s hands and rubbed our blood together,” Weaving said of doing a sequel in a recent interview with Comicbook.com.

Since the movie’s release, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have gone on to direct both Scream V and Scream VI and also directed the vampire horror comedy Abigail. While we don’t yet know exactly what this new Ready or Not sequel will be about, the return of the directing duo and the film’s original star will likely have many eagerly anticipating it.