Google joins the $3T club

PLUS: Facebook may send you $30

AuthorAuthor

Jennifer Mossalgue & Rowan Cheung
September 16, 2025

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Alphabet hit $3T this week, but the real story isn't the valuation — it's how Google just survived Washington's biggest breakup attempt in decades.

A federal judge kept Search and Chrome together, preserving Google's ad empire intact. Now the question isn't whether Big Tech is too powerful, but whether the government has any tools left to rein it in.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Alphabet hits $3T after dodging DOJ breakup

  • Meta writes checks to Facebook users

  • Nothing hits $1.3B valuation

  • Stealth startup targets geothermal goldmine

  • Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ALPHABET

Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown

The Rundown: Alphabet shattered the $3T market cap barrier Monday, hitting $3.05T by closing bell and joining the exclusive club with Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia — but the real story is how Google just survived its closest brush with a government breakup.

The details:

  • Shares surged 4% in a single session after months of uncertainty over how deep antitrust cuts might slice into Google's empire.

  • A federal judge dialed back the DOJ's breakup demands, keeping Search and Chrome together instead of forcing the split that prosecutors wanted.

  • The ruling preserves Google's ad goldmine, the $200+ billion search ads business that generates most of Alphabet's profits.

  • Google now controls nearly 90% of the global search traffic, a dominance that has remained largely unchallenged despite years of antitrust litigation.

Why it matters: Google's ad engine generates more revenue than most countries' GDP, creating a regulatory catch-22 where breaking up dominant platforms could destabilize the digital economy they now underpin. But the question is whether traditional antitrust tools still work in a platform-dominated world.

TOGETHER WITH AUGMENT CODE

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With Augment Code, you can:

  • Index and navigate millions of lines of code

  • Get instant answers about any part of your codebase

  • Automate processes across your entire development stack

META

Image source: Ideogram/The Rundown

The Rundown: Notice a random $30 hitting your bank account this week? Meta is finally cutting checks from its massive $725M privacy settlement — the bill for letting Facebook play fast and loose with user data for over a decade.

The details:

  • Payments just launched and will roll out over 10 weeks via direct deposit, Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, or old-school paper checks.

  • The settlement stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and 15 years of privacy violations that exposed millions of users' personal data.

  • Over 19M validated claims were processed for U.S. Facebook users with active accounts between May and December 2022.

  • Only users who filed valid claims by the August 2023 deadline qualify, so no retroactive windfalls for the unprepared.

Why it matters: Meta admits no wrongdoing but chose to settle rather than roll the dice at trial. Still, these payouts represent more than pocket change — they signal that Big Tech's seemingly bulletproof legal shield may have a crack or two. Whether $30 compensates for years of data harvesting is another question entirely.

NOTHING

Image source: Nothing

The Rundown: British smartphone maker Nothing just cemented its status as one of the most stylish disruptors in consumer tech after closing a $200M Series C funding, pushing its valuation up to $1.3B — all while plotting an ‘AI-first’ pivot.

The details:

  • Nothing’s latest flagship, the Phone (3), features a Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processor, triple rear cameras, and the “Glyph Matrix” LED interface.

  • AI is at the heart of Nothing’s vision, with its Essential Space organizational suite and ongoing plans to make on-device intelligence the core differentiator.

  • Nothing has tapped Sélim Benayat, former Linktree exec and founder of Bento, to spearhead its push into AI services.

  • Despite a global market share of less than 1%, Nothing saw rapid growth in India, where it commands 2% market share and shipped over 5M units globally.

Why it matters: CEO Carl Pei pushes hardware that pops, with see-through cases, signature Glyph LEDs, and premium materials that slice through Android sameness. The company plans to launch AI-focused devices next year, targeting consumers seeking design options to conventional smartphones typically priced at $1K and above.

CLIMATE TECH

Image source: Andrey Zharkikh / flickr, creative commons)

The Rundown: Rodatherm Energy is emerging from stealth with $38M in Series A funding and technology that could finally break geothermal power out of its volcanic prison, bringing clean baseload energy to America's heartland.

The details:

  • Rodatherm's patented closed-loop system swaps water for refrigerants, delivering up to 50% more efficiency than conventional geothermal plants.

  • The tech unlocks power generation in sedimentary basins, expanding geothermal's reach far beyond traditional volcanic hotspots in the western U.S.

  • The startup says its refrigerant system uses roughly one-fifth the fluid required for traditional geothermal methods and drastically reduces water consumption.

  • Toyota Ventures leads the funding round to power Utah's first-of-its-kind pilot plant, launching operations in 2026.

Why it matters: Geothermal has been clean energy's sleeping giant — abundant but trapped by volcanic hotspots. Rodatherm's tech could unlock sedimentary formations nationwide for 24/7 baseload power. The catch: drilling costs tens of millions per site, and the reliability of refrigerant underground remains unproven.

QUICK HITS

Amazon’s Project Kuiper will bring satellite internet to the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, and the UK by the end of Q1 2026, Bloomberg reports.

The UK and the U.S. are set to sign a landmark tech partnership this week, deepening collaboration between their trillion-dollar tech sectors as part of Trump’s state visit.

Alphabet is investing £5B ($6.8B) over two years to boost UK AI infrastructure and research, leading a wave of major U.S. tech investments tied to Trump’s state visit.

The UK is building a $335M biotech center to develop pandemic R&D and vaccine development ahead of future health threats, with opening slated for 2030.

Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI laid off 500 members of its data annotation team, which provides critical training data for its Grok chatbot.

Stellantis scrapped its plans for the all-electric Ram 1500 REV pickup, shifting focus to the extended-range Ram 1500 REV (formerly Ramcharger) instead.

Micro1, a three-year-old startup specializing in human-powered data labeling for AI, raised $35M, at a 500M valuation.

COMMUNITY

That's it for today's tech rundown!

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Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team

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