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The top 10 US tech billionaires collectively added $550B+ to their combined net worth in 2025, reaching $2.5T by December 24, up from $1.9T at the year's start (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Chinese state media: China launches three VC funds of $7.1B+ each to back early-stage "hard technology" startups valued below ¥500M, or about $71M (Reuters)

Cursor CEO Michael Truell warns that "vibe coding" advanced projects may create "shaky foundations" and eventually "things start to kind of crumble" (Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez/Fortune)

As startups flood the market with AI shopping agents, Amazon is playing defense by blocking agents' access to its site and investing heavily in its own tools (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

A US judge temporarily blocks the Trump administration from detaining CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, one of the Europeans the US barred on claims of promoting censorship (Aishvarya Kavi/New York Times)

10h

An interview with Citizen Lab founder Ronald Deibert about the US adopting authoritarian digital practices, the research group's accomplishments, and more (Finian Hazen/MIT Technology Review)

11h

Apple settles with a Brazilian regulator to allow alternative app stores; report: Apple will charge a 5% fee for alt app stores and 15% on App Store link-outs (Hartley Charlton/MacRumors)

13h

Xiaomi unveils the $995+ Xiaomi 17 Ultra in China with a 200MP periscope camera, a 50MP 1" sensor, and an ultrawide; Leica edition gets a mechanical zoom ring (Siddharth/GSMArena.com)

14h

AI sector minted 50+ new billionaires in 2025; Crunchbase: investors poured $200B+ into AI startups in 2025, or about 50% of global funding, up from 34% in 2024 (Alicia Park/Forbes)

16h

Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin significantly trails Waymo, deploying an estimated 30 cars with safety drivers, vs. Waymo's 200 cars without human monitors (Jack Ewing/New York Times)

19h

A look at the humans employed to rescue robotaxis; Waymo uses the Honk app to pay $20 to $24 to manually close robotaxi doors and $60 to $80 to tow its cars (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)

21h

A look at Detroit's Apple Developer Academy, launched after the BLM protests, which spends $20K per student, nearly 2x the budget of local community colleges (Paresh Dave/Wired)

22h

PitchBook: crypto M&A hit $8.6B across 267 deals in 2025 vs. $2.17B in 2024; 11 crypto IPOs raised $14.6B worldwide, up from $310M from four IPOs in 2024 (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)

How Larry Ellison is helping his son David build a media empire, including making the case to Trump for why Paramount, not Netflix, should acquire WBD (Theodore Schleifer/New York Times)

Sources: Nvidia's licensing deal with Groq, which has raised ~$1.8B, includes payouts to Groq's key execs and investors, including BlackRock and Tiger Global (The Information)

A teardown of Huawei's Mate 70 Pro and Pura 80 Pro shows 57% of components were made in China; similarly priced Huawei phones in 2023 had 32% Chinese components (Takehiro Hasegawa/Nikkei Asia)

Q&A with Google DeepMind VP of Research Pushmeet Kohli on launching AlphaFold 2 five years ago, hallucinations, building an "AI co-scientist", and more (Sandro Iannaccone/Wired)

Chinese humanoid robot startup Galbot raised over $300M led by China Mobile's industry investment fund at a $3B valuation, bringing its total funding to $800M (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)

Nvidia agrees to a licensing deal with Groq; CEO Jonathan Ross and other top executives will join Nvidia; Groq says it will continue operating independently (Ian King/Bloomberg)

Disruptive CEO Alex Davis says Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq for $20B in cash; leaked email: Jensen Huang says Nvidia is not acquiring Groq (David Faber/CNBC)

Analysis: Oracle has moved $66B of debt for building AI data centers off its balance sheet using SPVs; Meta has moved $30B, xAI moved $20B, and CoreWeave $2.6B (Tabby Kinder/Financial Times)

The Trump administration's travel ban on five Europeans includes researchers working to tackle online disinformation and abuse, like CCDH founder Imran Ahmed (Adam Satariano/New York Times)

Beijing-based DP Technology, which develops AI tools used by researchers for tasks like computer-aided drug design and battery design, raised a ~$114M Series C (Eunice Xu/South China Morning Post)

Sources: OpenAI staff discussed prioritizing sponsored content in ChatGPT when users ask relevant queries and created mockups with ads in sidebars or as pop-ups (The Information)

The EU warns of possible action after the US imposes travel bans on five Europeans, saying it will defend its "regulatory autonomy against unjustified measures" (Lorne Cook/Associated Press)

How CEO Lip-Bu Tan gave Intel a lifeline after meeting with Trump in August; sources say Nvidia tested Intel's 18A to make chips but stopped moving forward (Reuters)

AST launches its largest-ever satellite from India, hosting the BlueBird Block-2, the first in a series of deployments to challenge SpaceX in satellite internet (Sana Pashankar/Bloomberg)

Italy's antitrust authority orders Meta to suspend contractual terms that bar rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp; Meta calls the decision "fundamentally flawed" (Elvira Pollina/Reuters)

Chainalysis and TRM Labs estimate that $2.7B was stolen in crypto in 2025 in total, up from $2.2B in 2024; the biggest hack was the $1.4B breach at Bybit (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

Sources: India raises concerns about the misuse of Indian phone numbers on WhatsApp, which banned 9.8M Indian accounts per month on average in 2025 to October (Kiran Rathee/The Economic Times)

A look at the growing reliance of US data centers and the Pentagon on Chinese batteries, a dependence increasingly viewed as a national security threat (New York Times)

YouTube dominates daytime TV streaming, with 6.3M viewers at 11am in October on average, above Netflix's 2.8M, per Nielsen; prime-time viewership is more even (John Koblin/New York Times)

Bitcoin miners that are retooling data centers for AI have boosted their stocks; the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF is up ~90% YTD even as bitcoin has slumped (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Over the past month, the US paused talks on a tech pact with the UK, canceled a South Korea trade meeting, and threatened the EU over Big Tech regulations (Politico)

Sources: China's AI regulations, which require chatbots to pass a 2,000-question ideological test, have spawned specialized agencies that help AI companies pass (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal)

HCLSoftware, a subsidiary of Indian IT company HCLTech, agrees to acquire business intelligence company Jaspersoft from Cloud Software Group for $240M in cash (Urvi Malvania/Financial Express)

Waymo says it is updating its fleet to improve navigation during widespread outages, after pausing its service during blackouts in San Francisco on December 20 (Ari Levy/CNBC)

South Korean prosecutors allege China's CXMT mass-produced 10nm-class DRAM using leaked Samsung tech, indicting 10 employees who previously worked for Samsung (Heo Kyungjun/The Asia Business Daily)

Starlink says it hit 9M "active customers" across 155 countries, territories, and other markets, up from 8M in November, 7M in August, and 4.6M in December 2024 (Polly Thompson/Business Insider)

The Trump administration plans to replace the lottery system for H-1B visas with a "weighted" system prioritizing higher-paid individuals, starting February 27 (Aime Williams/Financial Times)

Sources: Snowflake is in talks to buy app monitoring startup Observe for around $1B; Observe has raised more than $470M (The Information)

Fleet management software provider Motive files for a US IPO, reporting a $138.5M net loss on $327.3M in revenue for the nine months ended September 30 (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

The US imposes visa restrictions on five Europeans, including Thierry Breton, accusing them of pressuring US tech companies to censor certain US viewpoints (Fatima Hussein/Associated Press)

Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle, which is building next-gen AI personal assistants, raised an $8M seed at a $35M valuation and plans to exit stealth in 2026 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

A US federal judge grants a temporary injunction blocking a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages from taking effect on January 1 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Xbox had a terrible 2025: Microsoft canceled games and raised console and Game Pass prices, Costco stopped selling Xbox, and Valve's Steam Machine upstaged it (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget)

Lemon Slice, which launched a 20B-parameter model that creates digital avatars for AI agents, streaming video at 20 FPS on a single GPU, raised a $10.5M seed (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

France's La Poste says it has suffered a suspected DDoS attack in "a major network incident" on December 22, which disrupted its postal and banking services (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

After a yearlong review, the US says China is engaging in unfair chip trade practices, but holds off on additional chip import tariffs at least until mid-2027 (Jordan Fabian/Bloomberg Law)

US plans to impose tariffs on Chinese chips in mid-2027, USTR says (Reuters)