Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Valve finally answered the biggest question about its Steam Machine: $1,049. That's the starting price to put your whole Steam library on the living room TV.
It's well above a PS5 or Xbox Series X, and Valve says it's selling at cost with no subsidy. Will PC gamers pay more than console prices for it?
In today's recap:
Valve's Steam Machine starts at $1,049
SpaceX stock slides as AI spending fears spread
Meta hands WhatsApp to CRED's founder Kunal Shah
VALVE
Valve prices its Steam Machine at $1,049
Source: The Verge
Recaply: Valve just announced that its Steam Machine will start at $1,049. The living room PC plays your whole Steam library on a TV, and it costs well above the consoles it competes with.
Key details:
Steam Machine runs Linux-based SteamOS on a custom six-core AMD Zen 4 chip and a 28-compute-unit RDNA 3 GPU. It also packs 16GB of DDR5 memory.
Four configurations run from $1,049 for 512GB to $1,428 for 2TB with a Steam Controller. A digital PS5 costs $599.99 and an Xbox Series X costs $649.99, even after price hikes.
According to Valve, it sometimes couldn't get memory and storage parts at any price, Ars Technica reported. Buyers are limited to one reservation per household.
Valve randomizes everyone who signs up by Thursday, June 25, at 10am Pacific. Later sign-ups join the end of the waitlist, and the first purchase emails go out June 29.
Why it matters: Valve says it's selling the Steam Machine at the cost of its parts, with no subsidy. That's a hard sell in a memory crunch that's also pushed up PlayStation, Switch 2 and PC prices. Its pitch isn't raw power, since The Verge found it plays about like a PS5. It's your whole Steam library on a full Linux PC, and $1,049 will test what that's worth.
SPACEX
SpaceX stock tanks 16% as rally fades
Source: Reuters
Recaply: SpaceX's stock just slumped for a third straight session, as worries about AI spending hit big tech stocks across the board. Alphabet alone was on pace to lose more than $256B in market value.
Key details:
SpaceX started trading June 12 at $150 a share, above its $135 IPO price, and rallied hard. Its market value passed Amazon's and, briefly, Microsoft's before the slide began.
SpaceX fell 16% on Monday and nearly 24% over three sessions. Alphabet dropped 6%, Amazon 4.8%, and Meta and Microsoft about 3% each in the same selloff.
SpaceX also announced a bond offering Monday and disclosed $100.8B in cash, CNBC reported. It lost $4.9B in 2025 and $4.28B in this year's first quarter.
SpaceX's slide began last Wednesday and Thursday with drops of 5% and 3.6%, before the Juneteenth holiday. Monday's fall made it three straight losing sessions.
Why it matters: Aptus Capital Advisors' David Wagner says the market now splits between companies writing AI checks and those cashing them. Memory maker Micron rose 5.8% to a record high the same day. SpaceX's fall also stings its newest shareholders. Most people who bought after its June 12 debut had seen nearly all their gains vanish by the end of last week.
META
Meta taps CRED's founder to run WhatsApp
Source: The Verge
Recaply: Meta just named Kunal Shah, founder of Indian fintech CRED, as WhatsApp's new head, replacing Will Cathcart after seven years. It's also investing $900M in CRED as part of the move.
Key details:
CRED runs a members-only app for people with high credit scores, covering bill payments, lending, insurance and wealth management. Meta gets a minority stake but no access to CRED's customer data.
Meta's $900M investment values CRED at $4.5B, above its 2025 round of $3.5B but below its 2022 peak of $6.4B. CRED says it serves 17 million members a month.
India is WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 500 million users, Reuters reported. CRED says it processes more than 40% of India's credit card bill payments.
Zuckerberg announced the change Monday on Facebook. Cathcart, who's led WhatsApp since 2019, moves to a new role at Meta, and Miten Sampat becomes CRED's interim CEO.
Why it matters: Meta wants WhatsApp to grow beyond messaging into payments, commerce and business chats. Putting a fintech founder in charge shows where it expects that growth to come from, and India is the obvious test bed. Zuckerberg praised Shah's "builder mentality and global perspective." Still, running the world's biggest messaging app is a much bigger job than running a members-only fintech.
NEWS
Beyond the big stories in tech today
The White House plans to back Senator Marsha Blackburn's kids' online safety bills, including KOSA, as part of a federal AI preemption package. House Republicans and Senate Democrats were left out of the talks, and insiders doubt it can pass before the midterms.
Qualcomm is in advanced talks to buy AI startup Modular at about a $4B valuation, Bloomberg reported. That's up from $1.6B just nine months ago, and Qualcomm is separately in talks to buy Tenstorrent for $8B to $10B.
EA laid off an unknown number of staff across recruiting, customer support, trust and safety and IT, Kotaku reported, including longtime workers in Hyderabad. The cuts come ahead of EA's pending $55B sale to a group including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
China's LineShine supercomputer took the top spot on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest machines, beating the US's El Capitan. It uses Chinese-designed chips but ranked only fourth on a test closer to AI work.
Lucid Motors is cutting about 18% of its US workforce, more than a thousand people, and ending the second production shift at its AMP-1 factory. It expects about $158M in annual savings from its second round of layoffs this year.
Workday must face a proposed class action claiming its AI hiring software screened out job seekers who are older, disabled, Black or women. A federal judge in San Francisco mostly rejected Workday's bid to toss recent claims, and Workday says they're false.
Tesla faces new questions after a Model 3 smashed into a Texas home, killing a 76-year-old woman in her living room. Harris County investigators want to know if the driver was using Autopilot, which has been linked to thousands of crashes.
Tata Electronics confirmed a cybersecurity incident after ransomware group World Leaks posted more than 200,000 of its files, researchers told Reuters. They include purported design papers from Apple and Tesla, and a source said Tata received a ransom demand.
Polymarket allegedly paid at least 10 influencers to post fake winning bets, some filmed on dummy copies of its site, the Wall Street Journal reported. Creators got about $2,000 to $3,000 a month and were told not to disclose the deal.
Bending Spoons, the Italian owner of Vimeo and WeTransfer, is seeking up to $1.62B in a US IPO, two sources told Reuters. It would be valued at $19B at the top of the range, and it's targeting an early-July Nasdaq debut.
AMD released FSR 4.1 upscaling for its older Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards, which use RDNA 3, a bit ahead of its July target. FSR 4.1 already works in more than 300 games, and RDNA 2 support is due in early 2027.
Windows 11 writes your entire RAM to the SSD each time you hibernate. For a 32GB PC hibernating twice a day, XDA puts that at about 23TB a year. That's small next to a 600TB rating, though XDA says real-world drive life is likely shorter.
The UN launched an AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, asking AI firms to disclose their data centers' water, carbon and land use. Secretary-General António Guterres also wants them on renewable power, warning they could use more power than all but five countries by 2030.
Valve opened SteamOS to home-built PCs, saying that from SteamOS 3.8 you can build your own Steam Machine from any parts. Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais says Nvidia support is in the works, though it may not land this year.
Tesla showed Swedish and Dutch regulators FSD safety stats that independent researchers call misleading, Reuters found. Its claim that FSD could have saved 32,000 lives assumes every US vehicle, even trucks and motorcycles, becomes an FSD Tesla, researchers said.
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