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Chinese AI chipmaker Biren Technology plans to raise up to ~$623M in a Hong Kong IPO, pricing shares at ~$2.19 to ~$2.52, and expects trading to start January 2 (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

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Investigation: internal Binance files show it failed to stop hundreds of millions in crypto from flowing through suspicious accounts, even after a 2023 US deal (Financial Times)

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Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B+ into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others (Abram Brown/The Information)

How the global AI boom is driven by thousands of newcomers, diluting Big Tech's infrastructure dominance; US data center credit deals hit $178.5B in 2025 so far (Bloomberg)

Filings: Chinese AI startups Zhipu and MiniMax report 2024 revenue of $44.4M and $30.5M, respectively, as both prepare for Hong Kong IPOs in the coming weeks (Bloomberg)

Google's TPUs and Gemini are competitive but Nvidia's and OpenAI's first-mover advantage makes their lead seem durable, and Google faces the innovator's dilemma (SiliconANGLE)

Some US schools are deploying AI surveillance tech like facial recognition and listening devices; critics say there is little evidence they make school safer (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

A look at Google's TPU evolution, its decision to sell chips to competitors after 12 years of internal use, the TPU vs. GPU architecture showdown, and more (The Chip Letter)

A look at stablecoin-powered neobanks like Rizon and Dakota that are offering dollar-denominated digital banking services to customers worldwide (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Q&A with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle on the company's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, regulatory pressure that killed Amazon's deal, his new robotics startup, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Adam Mosseri says "maybe we'll need" premium longform video for Instagram, and that TikTok's US sale turmoil has given Meta time to retune algorithms (Max Tani/Semafor)

Waymo resumes its robotaxi service in SF after suspending it during a blackout, and says most trips finished before vehicles returned to depots or pulled over (CNBC)

Uber plans to trial driverless taxis in London using Baidu's Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis, starting in H1 2026 with services available by the end of 2026 (Bloomberg)

Some experts in the human-computer interaction field say making AI chatbots act humanlike creates cognitive dissonance for users over how much to trust them (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)

Pirate activist group Anna's Archive says it scraped 86M music files and 256M rows of track metadata from Spotify, and releases them in ~300TB of torrent files (Mitchell Peters/Billboard)

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A look at military tech startup Shield AI, recently valued at $5.6B, and its new CEO Gary Steele, who aims to grow annual revenue from $300M to $1B by 2028 (Jessica Mathews/Fortune)

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Private equity firms led by Permira and Warburg Pincus agree to buy Clearwater Analytics, in a deal valuing the financial software maker at $8.4B including debt (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)

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Echo, which uses AI agents to build Docker images that eliminate vulnerabilities at the source, raised a $35M Series A, bringing its total funding to $50M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

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Sources: DHS is investigating whether six staffers misled CISA's acting director into taking a polygraph that he failed, compounding instability at the agency (John Sakellariadis/Politico)

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Source: OpenAI's share of revenue after the cost of running AI models for paying users has jumped to ~70% in October, up from ~52% at the end of 2024 (Sri Muppidi/The Information)

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Sources detail SoftBank's efforts to raise funds as it races to close its $22.5B funding commitment to OpenAI by the end of this year (Reuters)

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Sources: tech lobbyists say that David Sacks' push for an EO blocking state AI laws undercut their efforts to craft a permanent, bipartisan federal solution (Politico)

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Q&A with Blizzard President Johanna Faries on company staff bonus transparency, working under Xbox leadership, restoring the NetEase partnership, and more (Jason Schreier/Bloomberg)

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US CHIPS Act-funded SMART USA Institute, focused on digital twins for chipmaking, says the Department of Commerce will terminate its $285M five-year contract (Samuel K. Moore/IEEE Spectrum)

Q&A with Harvard economist Jason Furman, who consults for OpenAI, on the similarities between the AI boom and the dot-com era, AI's impact on jobs, and more (Shirin Ghaffary/Bloomberg)

DataLane, which is using AI to build an identity graph to map local businesses across the US, raised a $22.5M Series A led by Amplify Partners (Chris Metinko/Axios)

Waymo says it temporarily suspended its ride-hailing service in San Francisco during a citywide blackout, as downed traffic lights appeared to halt its vehicles (Joe Rivano Barros/Mission Local)

A look at Tokyo-based neocloud provider Datasection, which sources say has a $1.2B+ contract giving Tencent access to a large share of its 15K Blackwell chips (Financial Times)

METR: Claude Opus 4.5 has a 50% task completion time horizon of about 4 hours and 49 minutes, more than double that of Claude Opus 4 released earlier this year (@metr_evals)

Chinese AI chipmaker Moore Threads announces a new generation of chips slated for mass production from 2026, just weeks after its blockbuster IPO in China (Bloomberg)

Surveillance tools exported by China, based on US tech and obtained by Chinese companies, to countries like Nepal are being used to stifle Tibetan refugees (Associated Press)

A profile of Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs who is credited with turning around the Gemini app, growing its MAUs from 350M in March to 650M by October (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)

S&P Global: data center deals hit $61B globally in 2025; debt issuance nearly doubled YoY to $182B, with Meta raising $62B debt since 2022, ~50% of that in 2025 (April Roach/CNBC)

Google and Apple advise employees on H-1B and other visas not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules (Business Insider)

The RAISE Act requires AI companies with $500M+ in revenue to publish safety protocols and disclose safety incidents within 72 hours, with fines up to $3M (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)

Morgan Stanley: ad tiers account for 30% of Netflix subscribers and 50% of Disney+ subscribers; ad tiers accounted for all US net subscriber additions in 2025 (Max Knoblauch/Sherwood News)

Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices; Google previously planned to complete the transition by the end of 2025 (Mariella Moon/Engadget)

Inside NeurIPS 2025, and how it has transformed from a small academic conference into a massive industry event with 24,000+ attendees, yacht parties, and more (Wall Street Journal)

Security company Koi finds browser extensions with 8M+ total installs that collected users' conversations with AI chatbots and sold them for marketing use (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)

Micron projects FY Q2 sales to grow over 2x YoY to $18.7B and adjusted operating income to rise over 5x to $11.3B, signaling higher memory chip prices in 2026 (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Meta's 2GW Hyperion data center in Louisiana, with the first phase opening in 2028; an analysis shows sales tax breaks on GPUs could total $3.3B+ (Jon Keegan/Sherwood News)

OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system (OpenAI)

YouTube's head of products for podcasts Steve McLendon says viewers streamed 700M+ hours of podcasts on TV in October, up from 400M hours in October 2024 (Ashley Carman/Bloomberg)

Filings: Tether-owned Northern Data sold its bitcoin mining unit, Peak Mining, for up to $200M to a group including companies controlled by Tether executives (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

Sources: TSMC plans to move chipmaking tools into its second Arizona fab in summer 2026, in line with its push to accelerate US production by "several quarters" (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)

China issues new rules letting online merchants set their own prices across platforms for goods and services they sell, effective April 10, 2026, for five years (Bloomberg)

Sources: Resolve AI, which is developing an autonomous site reliability engineering tool, raised a Series A at multiple valuation tiers, including at $1B (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

Google plans to charge developers $2.85/app and $3.65/game if a US user follows a link that takes them outside of the Play Store to install it within 24 hours (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

OpenAI rolls out an update to let users adjust ChatGPT's characteristics, including how warm or enthusiastic it is, and its use of headers, lists, and emojis (Emma Roth/The Verge)

Sources: AI chipmaker Cerebras plans to file for a US IPO as soon as next week, targeting a Q2 2026 listing, after withdrawing its prior IPO filing in October (Echo Wang/Reuters)