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A look at the rise of AI companion apps; a researcher counts 206 such apps on the App Store and 253 on Google Play, with 220M+ total downloads as of July 2025 (Financial Times)

Hundreds of megawatts of new data center capacity are being planned in Vernon, a city near LA, which is a key US-Asia cable-linking hub and is becoming crowded (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)

Sources: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could IPO in 2026; those three deals alone would exceed the total proceeds from roughly 200 US IPOs in 2025 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index rose 28% in 2025, its best percentage performance since 2017, driven by tech, AI, and semiconductor stocks (Wall Street Journal)

Analysts and manufacturers expect smartphone, PC, and consumer electronics prices to rise by as much as 20% in 2026, as AI demand drives up memory chip costs (Song Jung-a/Financial Times)

Report: China-based Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi models, raised a $500M Series C at a $4.3B valuation led by IDG Capital, with Alibaba and Tencent participating (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)

Some 2025 takeaways in LLMs: reasoning as a signature feature, coding agents were useful, subscriptions hit $200/month, and Chinese open-weight models impressed (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

IDC expects Apple to ship just 45,000 units of the Vision Pro in Q4 2025; Sensor Tower says Apple cut digital ad spend for the headset by 95% in 2025 (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

How AI labs are deploying on-site gas generators for power as the US electric grid struggles to keep pace with the growing demands of AI infrastructure (SemiAnalysis)

10h

Elon Musk says Neuralink plans to start "high-volume production" of brain-computer interface devices and move to an almost automated surgical procedure in 2026 (Reuters)

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Adam Mosseri details trends shaping Instagram and says it'll be more practical to authenticate real media than label AI, as AI gets better at imitating reality (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

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The FBI says fraudsters bilked Americans out of $333.5M via bitcoin ATM scams from January through November 2025, up from roughly $250M in 2024 (Lucien Bruggeman/ABC News)

14h

Thiel Capital opens an office in Miami, as Peter Thiel and others reportedly look to cut ties with California over a proposed ballot measure to tax billionaires (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

15h

TSMC says the US government has granted the company an annual license to import US chip manufacturing equipment to its facilities in Nanjing, China (Reuters)

15h

Internal docs reveal Meta's tactics to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers, including efforts to make scam ads "not findable" for regulators and others (Jeff Horwitz/Reuters)

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Filing: Chinese AI chip startup Biren raises ~$717M in its Hong Kong IPO; institutional and retail tranches were oversubscribed ~26x and ~2,348x, respectively (Himanshi Akhand/Reuters)

17h

Unsealed documents detail a US operation that stopped the alleged smuggling of $160M worth of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs to China between Oct. 2024 and May 2025 (CNBC)

18h

Sources: Uber is in talks to acquire the parking space reservation app SpotHero; the parking app was last valued at $290M (The Information)

19h

Trump Media, owner of Truth Social, plans to distribute a new token to shareholders with partner Crypto.com, expected to operate on the Cronos blockchain (Emily Nicolle/Bloomberg)

21h

Finland seizes a ship suspected of damaging an undersea cable linking Helsinki and Estonia in the Gulf of Finland; Estonia says a second cable was also damaged (Essi Lehto/Reuters)

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Dealroom: 76 European deep tech and life sciences companies spun out from universities reached $1B valuations or $100M in revenue in 2025, or both (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)

How the AI data center boom boosted Caterpillar's power and energy unit; generator sales are up 28% YoY through Sept. 2025, after growing 22% to $7.8B in 2024 (Bob Tita/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Nvidia has approached TSMC to ramp up H200 chip production; Chinese companies have placed orders for 2M+ H200 chips for 2026, while Nvidia holds 700K (Reuters)

Filing: China's top DRAM maker CXMT plans to raise $4.2B in a Shanghai IPO; CXMT held a 4% global share in Q2 2025 and targets HBM production by the end of 2026 (Reuters)

Data storage stocks led the S&P 500 in 2025, with SanDisk up 560%+ to become the top performer, followed by Western Digital in second and Seagate in fourth (Carmen Reinicke/Bloomberg)

OpenAI financial data: its stock-based pay averaged ~$1.5M per employee in 2025, ~7x Google pre-IPO and ~34x the average pay of other pre-IPO peers, per Equilar (Wall Street Journal)

Chinese AI firms are leading a wave of IPOs in Hong Kong, where at least 25 companies debuted in December 2025, the busiest month for deals since November 2019 (Jeanny Yu/Bloomberg)

Filing: Chinese chip designer OmniVision Integrated Circuits seeks to raise up to ~$617M in a Hong Kong IPO; HKEX: Hong Kong IPOs have raised ~$36B in 2025 (Sneha Kumar/Reuters)

Sources: bids for GroqCloud, Groq's AI inference platform, are expected to exceed $1B after Nvidia's $20B non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

Trump Mobile delays plan to launch its gold-coloured smartphone, initially promised for August 2025, saying the recent US government shutdown delayed deliveries (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

How Manus distanced itself from its Chinese roots to court US investors; a source says Meta's $2.5B deal includes a $500M retention pool for Manus' employees (Wall Street Journal)

Japanese NAND flash memory maker Kioxia is up 500%+ in 2025 so far, outperforming all other MSCI World Index members, after its Tokyo IPO debut in December 2024 (Alice French/Bloomberg)

Filing: Chinese chipmaker GigaDevice aims to raise up to ~$600M in a Hong Kong IPO, offering 28.9M shares at up to ~$21 each (Nichiket Sunil/Reuters)

Kalshi and Polymarket have partnered with social media accounts purporting to be breaking news reporters, some of which have repeatedly posted false information (Jordy Fee-Platt/The Athletic)

Sources: ByteDance plans to spend about $14B on Nvidia's AI chips in 2026, an increase of about 18% from 2025 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)

SoftBank says it has completed a $22.5B investment in OpenAI, finalizing its up to $40B investment commitment announced in March and taking its stake to ~11% (SoftBank Group Corp.)

Filing: Chinese AI startup MiniMax seeks to raise up to ~$538.5M in a Hong Kong IPO, offering 25.4M shares at a price range of ~$19.40 to ~$21.20 per share (Shivangi Lahiri/Reuters)

The US Treasury has lifted sanctions on three executives tied to spyware maker Intellexa, reversing a designation imposed by the Biden administration in 2024 (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)

Elon Musk says xAI bought a third building called "MACROHARDRR", reportedly adjacent to Colossus 2, that will take the company's training compute to almost 2GW (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

A reflection on AI advances in the past decade and how scaling and time-horizon trends might point to far greater capabilities in the decade ahead (Zhengdong Wang)

Review of Samsung's Galaxy Z TriFold: sturdy but poor camera performance and has some unique design flaws that make it even less polished than regular foldables (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

IDC expects shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% YoY in 2026 due to global memory shortages, as demand from AI data centers continues to outstrip supply (Zak Killian/Tom's Hardware)

Two ex-staffers of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint plead guilty to targeting US companies in 2023's BlackCat ransomware attacks (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Sources: Nvidia is in advanced talks to acquire Tel Aviv-based AI21, which is building its own LLMs, for $2B to $3B; the deal would resemble an acquihire (CTech)

Z.ai launches a share sale to raise ~$560M in a Hong Kong IPO at a valuation of ~$6.6B, which would make it the first LLM developer listed in Hong Kong (Themis Qi/South China Morning Post)

Meta just bought into the enterprise market with its Manus deal, which may eventually help it expand into cloud offerings like those of its Big Tech peers (M.G. Siegler/Spyglass)

Sources: SoftBank has completed its $40B investment in OpenAI (Samantha Subin/CNBC)

China's draft AI rules have measures to protect kids, like time limits and parental consent, ban gambling promotion content, and add suicide chats restrictions (Osmond Chia/BBC)

Sources: MiniMax has secured backing from Alibaba and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, among others, for its upcoming Hong Kong IPO in January (Bloomberg)

Sources: China is requiring chipmakers to use at least 50% domestically made equipment for adding new capacity, in a rule that is not publicly documented (Reuters)