Crypto industry groups sue IRS over broker reporting rule ... and more tech news
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Three crypto industry groups, the DeFi Education Fund, the Blockchain Association, and the Texas Blockchain Council, are suing the Internal Revenue Service to block new regulations that require decentralized finance entities to report customer information. The IRS has been finalizing crypto tax regulations as part of the Biden administration's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The IRS says these new rules should help close the information gap with respect to digital assets. The lawsuit, on the other hand, claims that this approach would unduly burden DeFi trading front ends, basically online platforms that allow users to access crypto protocols but don't necessarily effectuate transactions

The suit argues against defining these front-ends as brokers, in part because there is simply no broker-like entity involved in a decentralized transaction. The Blockchain Association's head of legal, Marissa Koppel, said in a statement that the new rules are an infringement on the privacy rights of individuals using decentralized technology and would also push this entire burgeoning technology offshore.

The chip-making giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, in the first half of the new year, confirms the Financial Times, Nvidia is launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor. The move

which was expected, is part of an evolving, years-long strategy. NVIDIA doesn't plan to compete directly with manufacturers like Tesla, but rather provide the hundreds of thousands of robot makers in the world with a kind of underlying OEM, as its vice president of robotics, Deepu Tala, told reporters last month in Tokyo.

As for why now, Tala tells the FT that the shift owes to two technological breakthroughs, the explosion of generative AI models and the ability to train robots on them using simulated environments. What NVIDIA isn't saying, but is also plainly the case, its push into AI-powered robots comes as major customers like Amazon and Google work to lessen their dependence on the outfit's AI chips by developing their own.

The proliferation of data centers aiming to meet the computational needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg. Using the 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the households showing the worst power distortions live within 20 miles of significant data center activity.

In other words, there appears to be a link between data center proximity and bad harmonics, a term for the less-than-ideal flow of electrical power into homes. Bloomberg says this distorted power could eventually destroy plugged-in appliances, increase vulnerability to electrical fires, and even lead to brownouts and blackouts.

And AI data centers could be even more problematic because of their volatile energy requirements. No grid is designed to be able to handle that kind of load fluctuation, not only for one data center, but for multiple data centers at the same time, said Bloom Energy's chief commercial officer, Aman Joshi. A spokesperson for Chicago's Commonwealth Edison told Bloomberg the utility strongly questions the accuracy and underlying assumptions of Whisker Labs' claims. ♪

German electric air taxi company Volocopter has filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest in a string of similar startups to hit financial turbulence. The company plans to keep operating while it searches for new investors. We are ahead of our industry peers in our technological, flight test, and certification progress that makes us an attractive company to invest in while we organize ourselves with internal restructuring, CEO Dirk Hokey said in a statement.

Volocopter's decision comes after it spent months teetering on the edge of falling apart.

It also comes just one week after fellow German electric vertical takeoff and landing startup Lilium ceased operations, only to be apparently saved by a consortium of investors just one day later. That deal is set to close in January. Volocopter is one of the more well-funded electric air taxi startups, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly a decade with backing from major automakers like Germany's Mercedes-Benz and China's Geely.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told Google employees that 2025 will be a critical year for the company. CNBC reports that it obtained audio from a December 18 strategy meeting where Pichai and other executives put on ugly holiday sweaters and laid out their priorities for the coming year. I think 2025 will be critical, Pichai said. I think it's really important we internalize the urgency of this moment and need to move faster as a company. The

the stakes are high. The moment, of course, is one where tech companies like Google are making heavy investments in AI, and often with mixed results, Pichai acknowledged that the company has some catching up to do on the AI side. He described the Gemini app, based on the company's AI model of the same name, as having strong momentum while also acknowledging we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.

Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year," he said. Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the ride-hailing company over $100 million in taxes, Bloomberg reports. The lawsuit alleges that, over the course of five years, San Francisco unfairly labeled money earned by Lyft drivers as company revenue. In the complaint, Lyft maintains that its drivers are its customers, not employees.

Accordingly, Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers, the complaint reads. The lawsuit is just the latest chapter in a years-long debate over how gig economy apps should classify drivers.

Last summer, Lyft, Uber, and DoorDash notched a win after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 22, which allows the companies to classify drivers as independent contractors, meaning the companies do not have to provide drivers with full employee benefits. That's all for now. For more stories like this one, visit TechCrunch.com.