Daily Crunch - Apple announces a chip design center in Germany

Apple is making a big investment in Germany, Russia takes aim at Twitter and Roblox goes public. This is your Daily Crunch for March 10, 2021.

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for TC Early Stage 2021, a virtual event focused on operations and fundraising that we’re holding on April 1 and 2!

Apple announces a chip design center in Germany

Apple said it will spend $1.2 billion to create its European Silicon Design Center, which will be based in Munich and focus on chip design for 5G and other wireless technologies.

This is not Apple’s first facility in Munich — in fact, it says it already employs 1,500 engineers in the city, making it the company’s largest engineering hub in Europe. These teams were initially focused on power management, but have subsequently expanded their focus to other areas of chip design.

You can see a rendering of the planned building below.

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The tech giants

Russia is trying to throttle Twitter — Russian state agency Roskomnadzor said it’s taking the action after Twitter did not remove banned content.

Adobe delivers native Photoshop for Apple Silicon Macs and a way to enlarge images without losing detail — Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs.

Facebook challenges FTC’s antitrust case with Big Tech’s tattered playbook — Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Why Terry Crews is launching a social currency — With the help of social currency startup Roll, Crews is launching his own social currency, $POWER.

EV subscription service Onto partners with Shell to expand access to charging — The partnership will give Onto customers access to more than 3,400 Shell Recharge charge points in the U.K.

Rent the Runway’s first iOS team launches Runway, an easier way to coordinate app releases — With Runway, teams can connect their existing tools to keep track of the progress of an app’s release, automate many of the manual steps along the way and better facilitate communication among all those involved.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors — As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share.

Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the H-1B, O-1A and EB-1A? — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

Proactive CEOs should prioritize European expansion — FrontlineX Partner Brendan O’Donnell argues that the EMEA region is your best growth lever.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

NFTs are changing cultural value creation — The latest episode of Equity is all about non-fungible tokens.

Passive collaboration is essential to remote work’s long-term success — The adjustment to a fully remote workforce has been challenging for everyone.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt dives into tech’s reckoning with online hate — We spoke with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on proposed policy solutions and tech’s coming era of accountability.

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