Elon Musk has announced the Terafab project, a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, to build the “largest chip manufacturing facility ever.” In his usual grandiose fashion, Musk claims Terafab is the next step towards harnessing the power of the sun and creating a “galactic civilization.”

Musk, CEO of all three companies, announced plans for the Terafab in a livestream on X. As the name implies, the project’s ultimate goal is to produce a terawatt of computing power each year so that it can match the companies’ growing demand for chips. Musk explained during the livestream that he’s grateful to existing supply chain partners like Samsung, TSMC and Micron, but the current capacity of chip manufacturers only adds up to about two percent to what Tesla and SpaceX needs in terms of future computing power needs.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips,” Musk said during the event. “And we need the chips so we’re going to build the Terafab.”

The Terafab project, estimated to cost at least $20 billion, will start with the Advanced Technology Fab in Austin, Texas, where Tesla is already headquartered. Musk said that the two types of chips will be produced in the Terafab: one for terrestrial purposes, like to power Full Self-Driving or Optimus robots, and another more high-powered, durable chip to be used in space. If you’re wondering what Musk has in store for space, the SpaceX CEO filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to launch a million satellites to create an “orbital data center” earlier this year. As promising as this sounds, it’s worth noting that Musk has previously overpromised and underdelivered on other projects, like the Hyperloop, a $40,000 Cybertruck and fully autonomous driving.

AI coding company Cursor launched a new model this week called Composer 2, which it promoted as offering “frontier-level coding intelligence.” 

However, an X user posting under the name Fynn soon claimed that Composer 2 was “just Kimi 2.5” with additional reinforcement learning — Kimi 2.5 being an open source model recently released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China). 

As evidence, Fynn pointed to code that seemed to identify Kimi as the model.

“[A]t least rename the model ID,” they scoffed.

It was a surprising revelation, since Cursor is a well-funded U.S. startup that raised a $2.3 billion round last fall at a $29.3 billion valuation, and is reportedly exceeding $2 billion in annualized revenue. Also, the company didn’t mention anything about Moonshot AI or Kimi in its announcement.

However, Cursor’s vice president of developer education Lee Robinson soon acknowledged, “Yep, Composer 2 started from an open-source base!” But he said, “Only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training.” As a result, he said Composer 2’s performance on various benchmarks is “very different” from Kimi’s.

Robinson also insisted that Cursor’s use of Kimi was consistent with the terms of its license, a point the Kimi account on X repeated in a subsequent post congratulating Cursor, where it said Cursor used Kimi “as part of an authorized commercial partnership” with Fireworks AI.

“We are proud to see Kimi-k2.5 provide the foundation,” the Kimi account said. “Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor’s continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support.”

So why not acknowledge Kimi upfront? Beyond any potential embarrassment in not creating a model from scratch, building on top of a Chinese model might feel particularly fraught right now, with the so-called AI “arms race” often framed as an existential battle between United States and China. (See, for example, Silicon Valley’s apparent panic after Chinese company DeepSeek released a competitive model early last year.)

Cursor co-founder Aman Sanger acknowledged, “It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start. We’ll fix that for the next model.”

A quieter week by headline standards, but one that reveals a great deal about where European venture capital is quietly concentrating: AI agents for physical industries, agritech automation, and the growing operator-to-VC pipeline.

What the week of 16-22 March delivered was something different in texture rather than volume: smaller rounds, more specific theses, and a pattern of investment that points more clearly at where European capital is actually building conviction. AI agents entering complex physical environments.

Agricultural automation that finally has the engineering to match its ambitions. A new generation of European VC funds drawing on operators who have scaled the continent’s own companies.

1. Upvest – $125M Series D | Berlin, Germany

Upvest has raised $125 million just a year after its last round, pushing its valuation to €640 million from €360 million.

The Berlin fintech powers the infrastructure behind investing apps used by clients including Revolut, N26, Openbank, and Zopa. Tencent’s backing also points to growing global interest in European fintech infrastructure.

2. Partech Impact Fund – €300M close | Paris, France

Partech has closed a €300 million impact fund aimed at one of Europe’s most persistent climate tech gaps: growth capital.

The Paris-based firm will back around 15 B2B companies with more than €10 million in revenue across sectors such as clean manufacturing, sustainable agriculture, green construction, mobility, and digital health. Its first investment is Luxembourg-based SustainCERT.

What makes the fund stand out is its structure. Partech has linked carried interest to impact performance, not only financial returns, and registered the vehicle as an Article 9 fund under EU sustainable finance rules.

3. Montis VC – €50M first close | Warsaw, Poland

Montis VC has reached a €50 million first close for a new fund focused on European startups in energy transition, industrial tech, and AI. Backers include the European Investment Fund, Poland’s Development Fund, and family offices from across Central and Eastern Europe.

The fund plans to invest €0.5 million to €2 million in 20 to 25 pre-seed and seed-stage companies, with half the capital reserved for follow-ons. Its launch also reflects a broader trend, as CEE investors push deeper into climate and industrial deep tech with support from both public and private capital.

4. Parallel – €20M Series A | Paris, France

Parallel, a Paris-based startup building AI agents for hospital billing and medical coding, has raised a $20 million Series A led by Index Ventures, less than a year after its seed round.

The company focuses on the French public hospital system, using AI to navigate legacy software without deep integrations. Parallel says that approach can cut deployment times dramatically and could eventually expand into broader hospital workflows.

5. Rivia – €13M close | Zurich, Switzerland

Rivia, a Zurich-based startup building AI for clinical trial operations, has raised €13 million to expand its agentic data platform.

The company says its system helps biotech teams unify fragmented trial data, surface insights, flag anomalies, and manage operational risks in regulated environments. The round follows a €3 million seed in 2024 and marks a bigger bet on AI tools that do more than store data.

6. Kupando – €10M Series A | Schönefeld, Germany

Kupando has added €10 million to its Series A, bringing the round to €23 million as it pushes its lead drug, KUP101, into a Phase 1b trial. The German biotech is developing an innate immunity therapy for advanced solid tumours and drug-resistant infections, a less crowded path in immunotherapy.

The funding suggests investors believe the science is finally ready to move from preclinical promise into patients.

7. eternal.ag – €8M seed | Cologne, Germany

Eternal.ag, a greenhouse robotics startup founded by former Honest AgTech co-founder Renji John, has raised €8 million. Based in Cologne and Bengaluru, the company is building autonomous harvesting systems for greenhouses, starting with tomatoes.

Its pitch rests on simulation-led development: robots are trained in virtual greenhouses using NVIDIA Isaac Sim before being deployed in real ones. Eternal.ag says this speeds up testing and iteration in one of agtech’s toughest automation problems.

8. Choice – €7.1M Series A | Prague, Czech

Choice, a Prague-founded restaurant tech startup, has raised $7.1 million in Series A funding to expand from Central and Eastern Europe into Western Europe, starting with Portugal.

The company offers an all-in-one platform for restaurants, covering ordering, payments, reservations, and delivery integrations, and says it now serves more than 7,000 paying customers across nine markets.

9. Ofiniti – $6.8M | Oslo, Norway

Ofiniti, an Oslo-based maritime fuel software startup spun out of DNV, has raised $6.8 million to expand beyond Singapore into major global bunkering hubs.

Its platform digitises fuel delivery paperwork, scheduling, and compliance, and the company says it processed more than 25,000 bunker operations in 2025 while capturing about 40% of Singapore’s digital bunkering market.

10. Reson8 – €5M pre-seed | Amsterdam, Netherlands

Reson8, an Amsterdam startup building speech AI for Europe’s linguistic complexity, has raised a €5 million pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital.

The company’s platform supports more than 20 European languages and adapts to industry jargon, accents, and speaking patterns without retraining. Its focus is on high-precision sectors such as healthcare, logistics, legal, and finance.

11. BBLeap – €5M | Rijen, Netherlands

BBLeap, a Dutch agritech startup focused on precision spraying, has raised €5 million in a round led by ESquare Capital, with backing from Yield Lab Europe and existing investors.

Its technology retrofits existing sprayers to control each nozzle individually and, with its LeapEye system, adjusts treatment in real time based on what crops actually need. The funding will support LeapEye’s commercial rollout and international expansion.

12. Homaio – €3.6M seed | Paris, France

Homaio, a Paris startup opening the carbon allowance market to retail investors, has raised €3.6 million in seed funding led by RAISE Ventures.

The company lets individuals buy securities physically backed by EU carbon permits and says it has drawn users from more than 30 countries since its public launch in September 2024. The new capital will help it expand beyond carbon allowances into broader energy transition markets.

13. Elea & Lili – €2.5M seed | Finland

Elea & Lili, a Finnish spinout from VTT, has raised €2.5 million in seed funding led by Lifeline Ventures to commercialise a cellulose-based alternative to the fossil-derived absorbents used in diapers and agriculture.

The company says its material matches conventional performance while being biodegradable and microplastic-free, though industrial-scale validation is still ahead.

14. Ringtime – €1.8M seed | Ghent, Belgium

Ringtime, a Ghent startup building AI agents for blue-collar recruitment, has raised €1.8 million in funding led by Volta Ventures.

Its platform automates candidate outreach, screening, and matching across 22 languages, targeting sectors such as logistics, retail, food processing, and construction. The company is led by Vincent Theeten, the former CEO of Belgian software firm Cheqroom.

15. eYou – €300K pre-seed | Bucharest, Romania

eYou, a Bucharest-based social media startup, has raised €300,000 in pre-seed funding from Fil Rouge Capital ahead of its planned May launch.

The platform aims to tackle misinformation and echo chambers with built-in AI fact-checking and tools that show users how recommendation systems profile them.

Positioned around GDPR compliance and European data sovereignty, eYou is pitching itself as a trust-first alternative to mainstream social media.

The week’s dominant investment theme was not frontier AI models or data-centre buildout, but AI agents entering physical and institutional environments where automation has historically struggled: hospital administration, greenhouse harvesting, farm spraying, blue-collar recruitment, and many more. 

Marshals, a new Yellowstone spinoff starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, is airing on CBS right now. You can also tune in with Paramount Plus. The Yellowstone sequel series sees Grimes as a former Navy SEAL who joins an elite unit of US Marshals to bring range justice to Montana, according to a synopsis from CBS.

The show includes Yellowstone actors Gil Birmingham as Thomas Rainwater, Mo Brings Plenty as Mo and Brecken Merrill as Tate. Spencer Hudnut is the showrunner of Marshals — formerly known as Y: Marshals — and Taylor Sheridan is an executive producer.

When to watch new Marshals episodes on Paramount Plus

Episode 4 of Marshals airs on CBS on Sunday, March 22. Viewing options for Paramount Plus customers vary by subscription tier. You can watch the episode live if you have Paramount Plus Premium, which includes your local CBS station. If you subscribe to Paramount Plus Essential, you can watch the installment on demand the following Monday, but not live on Sunday.

Here’s a release schedule for the next three episodes of Marshals.

• Episode 4, The Gathering Storm: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on March 22 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on March 23.
• Episode 5, Lost Girls: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on March 29 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on March 30.
• Episode 6, Out of the Shadows: Premieres on CBS/Paramount Plus Premium on April 5 at 8 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT/7 p.m. CT. Streams on Paramount Plus Essential on April 6.

You can also watch CBS and the fourth episode of Marshals without cable with a live TV streaming service like YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV or the DirecTV MyNews skinny bundle. In addition to offering a lower-cost option, Paramount Plus lets you watch the other two Yellowstone spinoffs: the prequels 1883 and 1923.

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After a price increase in early 2026, the ad-supported Essential version runs $9 per month or $90 per year. The ad-free Premium version runs $14 per month or $140 per year. Paying more for Premium gives you downloads, the ability to watch more Showtime programming than Essential and access to your live, local CBS station.

Nvidia’s GTC conference had everything: trillion dollar sales projections, graphics technology that can yassify video games, grand declarations that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy, and even a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recapped CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and debated what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a big part of our discussion focused on poor Olaf, whose microphone had to be turned off when he started rambling.

Even if the demo had gone flawlessly, Sean might still have had some reservations, as he noted these presentations always focus on “the engineering challenges” and not the “really messy gray areas” on the social side.

“But what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over?” Sean asked. “And then every other kid who sees Olaf get kicked or knocked over has their whole trip to Disney ruined and it ruins the brand?”

Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: [CEO Jensen Huang] was basically saying that every company needs to have an OpenClaw strategy now. I think that is just a very grand statement that’s meant to be attention grabbing; I think it’s also interesting coming at this kind of transitional moment for OpenClaw. 

The founder has gone to OpenAI. So it’s now this open source project that potentially can flourish and evolve beyond its creator, or it could languish. If companies like Nvidia are investing a lot into it, then [it’s] more likely that it’ll continue to evolve. But it’ll be interesting to see a year from now, whether that looks like a prescient statement or everyone’s like, “Open what?”

Kirsten: In the case of Nvidia, it costs them nothing in the grand scheme of things to launch what they call NemoClaw, which is an open source project, which they built with the OpenClaw creator. But if they don’t do something, they have a lot to lose. So really that message to me, the way I translated it when Jensen was like, “Every enterprise needs to have an OpenClaw strategy,” it was, “Nvidia needs to have a solution or strategy for enterprises, because if it’s successful, it is another way or another pathway for Nvidia to be part of numerous other companies.” So doing nothing is a greater risk than doing something that doesn’t go anywhere.

Sean: The real question here is why have we not talked about what is clearly the end game for Nvidia, and the thing that is going to turn it into the first $100 trillion company, which is an Olaf robot.

Anthony: How could I forget?

Kirsten: Anthony, just go to the end of the two and a half hours to watch this.

So, the Olaf robot comes out, and this is something that Jensen loves to do. He loves to have these demos and some of them go better than others. It is also to demonstrate Nvidia’s technology in robotics, and I don’t know if Olaf was actually speaking in real time or if it was programmed — it felt a little programmed, or it had specific keywords that it used.

But the greatest part about it is that they had to cut its mic at the end because it just started rambling and speaking to the crowd. And then it went over to its little passageway and was slowly lowered. And you could see it on the video. It was still talking, but no mic.

Sean: Now we just need to give this little robot a wheelbase. And I know the perfect founder who can provide it. 

I mean, these demos are always silly. I don’t want to get up on my soapbox, because I know that we’ve talked about this a little bit earlier this week, but this was an impressive demo up until the moment where it fell a little bit short.

This is another really good example, though, of [how] robotics is a really interesting engineering problem and a really interesting physics problem and a really interesting integration problem, and all of this stuff, but this was presented as, in partnership with Disney, and it’s supposed to be the future of Disney parks and things like that: You’re going to be able to walk around and see Olaf from “Frozen” and take pictures of them and everything.

But these efforts never consider — or certainly don’t put front and center in events like this — all the other things you have to consider when you roll stuff out like this. There’s a really good YouTuber, Defunctland, that did a really good video about this — four hours long, not too long — about the history of Disney trying to get these kinds of robotics into their park, these automatons.

The engineering challenges are really interesting and it’s fun to see that history, but it always comes back to the same question of: Okay, but what happens when a kid kicks Olaf over? And then every other kid who sees Olaf get kicked or knocked over has their whole trip to Disney ruined and it ruins the brand?

There’s just so much on the social side of this. And that sounds silly, but this is the question that we’re kind of asking about humanoid robots, too. There’s so much hype about all this other stuff and we just don’t really hear as much conversation about the really messy gray areas on the social side of these things, and also just integrating them into people’s lives. We only ever really hear about the engineering challenges — which again, are really impressive.

Kirsten: I have a counterpoint and then we have to get to our next [topic]. This is a job creator, because Olaf will have to have a human babysitter in Disneyland, probably dressed up as Elsa or something else. You can imagine that actually, what we’re doing is creating jobs [with] this engineering experiment.

A new video (above) out of South Korea features the field tests and interaction capabilities of KAIST Humanoid v0.7, developed at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

The impressive humanoid robot was developed at KAIST’s Dynamic Robot Control & Design Laboratory (DRCD) and deploys actuators and other technology that was developed in-house.

In the video below, you can watch the bipedal bot walk, jog, and jump in an incredibly human-like way. It also shoots a soccer ball toward a goal (disappointingly there’s no robot goalkeeper there to challenge it), and performs a perfect moonwalk along astroturf. And it was the moonwalk that created a bit of a buzz in the comments accompanying the video.

“Moonwalk was flawless,” wrote one, while another commented, “Okay all of this was impressive, but you convinced me with the moonwalk.”

In its robotics work, KAIST deploys Physical AI, a form of AI technology that enables machines to understand and act in the physical world, helping to explain why robots such as the KAIST Humanoid v0.7 appear to move in such a human-like manner.

Instead of just “thinking in words” like typical AI, Physical AI gives machines a sense of space and timing in real environments.

Under KAIST’s broader collaborative intelligence initiative led by Young Jae Jang, the approach trains robots and systems to learn continuously through simulation and real time feedback, rather than relying only on enormous historical datasets.

Essentially, Physical AI merges brain and body by tightly integrating software intelligence with hardware such as motors and sensors so that the machines do not only compute, but also act, react, and collaborate in complex environments, whether as part of fully automated factories or in humanoid robots doing something like kicking a ball.

Engineers are refining the KAIST Humanoid v0.7 with the aim of enhancing its mobile and dexterous capabilities, thereby building on its existing walking and dynamic movement skills. By further integrating AI with mechanical hardware, it plans to get the robot to perform more complex tasks like carrying items or operating machinery, bringing Physical AI to real-world humanoid robot applications.

KAIST is one of South Korea’s top universities and is often compared to top global tech schools like MIT in the U.S. Founded in the early 1970s to drive Korea’s scientific and technological growth, KAIST focuses heavily on research in fields such as AI, robotics, physics, and engineering.