Disney+ looks to TikTok creators to bring fan content

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0:59Try it with your team at scribe.how slash tzdaily and mention the show for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash tzdaily. China is an absolute totalitarian dictatorship. Talking about the leader is so off limits it's not even funny. I mean, people do face these jail times just for stuff they post online. It's actually just disappearing. So keep that in mind when we try to decode some of this language. People are literally risking their freedom and lives to post these things. LaWai86 reveals how Chinese citizens hide dissent in memes, emojis, and mythical creatures on episode 1299 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:39Disney Plus is looking to TikTok creators to bring fan content to its short-form video feed. I'm Imran Sheik on your Thursday Daily Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines and a little bit of startup news starts right now. Anthropik's been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months, and its latest move is reportedly a$10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta. Now, Bloomberg originally reported that Volta, founded earlier this year, will provide cloud compute to the cloud maker over a six-year period. Volta has a partner in this deal, Bitdeer, a crypto mining company that will help develop the data center to provide the compute capacity.

2:17Now, that facility will be located in Norway and will deliver a 133 megawatt capacity. It's going to be fueled by NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Systems, the chipmaker's state-of-the-art AI chip architecture. Volta is part of NVIDIA's cloud partner program, which is a consortium of AI cloud providers that use NVIDIA's GPUs in their data centers. Volta had spoken about a deal with an AI lab, but hadn't named the specific company it was working with. Bloomberg originally cited anonymous sources familiar with the deal. TechCrunch reached out to Anthropic for more info. Anthropic has sought to aggressively expand its compute capacity over the last several months as it wages a corporate battle with its competitors.

3:00The company also recently announced new compute deals with the likes of SpaceX and Amazon. SpaceX doubled its revenue compared to last year in large part thanks to the growth of its Starlink satellite internet service and deals it struck to rent out computing power to Anthropic and Google, The company revealed in its first quarterly earnings since going public. Total sales grew from$4 billion in the second quarter of 2025 to$7.8 billion in Q2 2026, a jump of 92%. Now, nearly$2 billion of that growth came from its AI division, while Starlink revenue also grew by$1.7 billion. The company still lost$541 million in the quarter, but that was down from$1 billion in the second quarter last year.

3:49SpaceX Chief Financial Officer Brett Johnson said on Tuesday that SpaceX has an additional$6.7 billion of cloud services revenue under contract over a six-month period that begins ramping starting in October of this year. He also said he believes that once it fully integrates AI startup Cursor, that it'll reach a$100 billion annualized revenue run rate, APR, by the end of this year. The company reported$18.67 billion in revenue in 2025. Now, after a successful post-IPO bond sale, the company now has a$100 billion war chest. And it's not slowing its spending. It reported more than$28 billion in capital expenditures through the first half of this year, up from just$7 billion through the first six months of 2025.

4:38Disney's partnering with TikTok to bring Disney-focused fan content directly into the Disney Plus app. Now, the companies are starting with a pilot program in the U.S. in the coming months and plan to expand to additional markets later on. As part of the agreement, fan-made videos on TikTok about Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and other franchises will be featured in the Verts section of Disney +, the streamer's short-form video feed that rolled out a few months ago. Now, Disney's been working to flesh out the amount and variety of content on the video feed. This partnership with TikTok seems, well, like a natural progression of that, especially as many streaming platforms are competing with social platforms for users' attention.

5:19This competition is partly why Disney launched the Verts feature in the first place, along with Netflix, HBO Max, and Prime Video. Now, the deal also indicates that Disney is acknowledging that the next generation of talent is on social media. The company said that through the newly launched Disney Creator Ambassador program, TikTok creators will gain access to the media giant's vast library of content, as well as opportunities to earn rewards, increase visibility, access, exclusive events, and career opportunities. The timing of the announcement aligns with Disney's Q3 results. The company reported its subscription video on-demand, SVOD, operating income more than doubled to$712 million from$329 million just a year earlier.

6:02Plus, in a restructuring move, Disney has decided to shift its consumer products business from the experiences division to studios. Let's now go to the latest in startup business news all in about one minute with our friend, producer Dennis. Imran, thank you, and let's talk about Wrinkles. This new app uses your location to automatically surface stories about the places around you. Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories. The idea behind the app is to allow you to move through the world while hearing the places around you come to life, without having to stare at your phone.

6:43As you explore, Wrinkles can tell you the secrets behind a building, the history of a street, and the other local lore. The startup has built a global foundation of 1.3 million wrinkles, or points of interest, across 177 countries. And Robinhood this week unveiled a financial instrument that lets anyone feel like they too can make money by backing Y Combinator startups. Robinhood Venture Fund 2, or RV2, is expected to become a publicly traded fund on August 13th at an opening price of$25 per share. The fund intends to raise as much as$200 million, Reuters reports, and use that money to invest in startups founded by current or former Y Combinator participants should those startups agree to sell their shares.

7:33And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Lucas Ropak, Lauren Forrestal, Sean O 'Kane, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow. Same Tech Time, same Crunch channel. And until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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