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Many AI founders now find it necessary to raise at valuations requiring absolute domination of the field; Brex, once valued at $12B, shows the downsides of this (Jason Lemkin/SaaStr)

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A profile of Mercor, which pays about $2M daily to ~30K experts training AI models at $95/hour on average, with roles like radiologists earning up to $375/hour (Bethan Staton/Financial Times)

Power prices surge in Virginia, home to the world's largest data center hub; record demand is expected during the winter storm, partly due to data center needs (Tim McLaughlin/Reuters)

Meta's decision to deprioritize VR in favor of AI and internet-connected glasses has chilled the VR industry, leading to concerns about its future (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)

A deep dive into Apple's AI strategy reset, as it prepares to announce a Gemini-powered personalized Siri next month and a reimagined chatbot-like Siri at WWDC (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)

Q&A with David Liu, CEO of PlusAI, which is slated to go public next month, on the ongoing commercial trial of its autonomous truck driving software, and more (Rani Molla/Sherwood News)

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Domain Name Stat: the number of .ai domains has surpassed 1M; data suggests Anguilla, the UK territory managing the domain, made ~$70M in fees in the past year (Sherwood News)

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HSBC: JioHotstar had 300M paying subscribers in India in 2025, compared with 65M for Amazon Prime Video and 20M for Netflix; ~24% of OTT users pay for content (Manish Singh/India Dispatch)

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Analysis: scientists who appeared to use LLMs posted 33% more papers on arXiv than those who didn't, as concerns grow over AI slop in scientific publishing (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic)

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A look at Clawdbot, an open-source personal AI agent that runs locally on the user's computer and integrates with multiple LLMs and messaging services (Federico Viticci/MacStories)

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EquipmentShare, which runs a jobsite tech and equipment rental platform for the construction industry, raised $747.3M in its IPO, valuing the company at $7.16B (Reuters)

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Tests show GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT is citing Grokipedia as a source on some obscure topics, including Iranian political structures (Aisha Down/The Guardian)

21h

Source: OpenAI mulls new tools to help business users understand the financial benefits of using its products and has made changes to its sales force strategy (The Information)

SanDisk's stock has surged ~1,000% since August, driven by AI demand for its data storage products; SanDisk has a cost advantage due to its JV with Kioxia (Matt Phillips/Sherwood News)

Nifty Gateway, the NFT trading platform which had facilitated $300M in sales by mid-2021, enters withdrawal-only mode and plans to shut down on Feb. 23, 2026 (CoinDesk)

Microsoft confirms it does provide BitLocker recovery keys for encrypted data if it receives a valid legal order and the user has stored the keys on its servers (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

Sources: the EU's executive arm is drafting new legislation aimed at promoting tech sovereignty and openly discussing the security risks posed by US tech (Wall Street Journal)

Elliptic: ruble-backed stablecoin A7A5 surpassed $100B in transactions in under a year, but demand cooled and daily volume fell from a peak of $1.5B+ to ~$500M (Melos Ambaye/Bloomberg)

Counterpoint: India smartphone shipments were flat YoY at ~153M; Apple shipped 14M iPhones, raising its share of shipments to a record 9%, up from 7% in 2024 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's rise; reports say Polymarket had 491K monthly active traders in December 2025, and <0.04% of addresses took 70% of profits (Benjamin Wallace/New York Times)

OpenAI and longtime US government contractor Leidos announce a partnership to roll out generative and agentic AI tools for specific missions at federal agencies (Miranda Nazzaro/FedScoop)

Sources: the Trump administration dismissed two Commerce Department officials, who focused on Chinese tech threats, raising concerns about a softening stance (Wall Street Journal)

Memo: TikTok CEO Shou Chew hailed the establishment of the TikTok USDS JV as "great news", and said the app is used by 200M US users and 7.5M US businesses (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

Intel's stock, riding high for months after the US government took a 10% stake, crashed 17% on Jan. 23, after the company flagged continued operational issues (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Grab's planned acquisition of GoTo has hit a snag over Indonesian carrier Telkomsel's unwillingness to sell its ~2% stake in GoTo at current valuations (Bloomberg)

Google acquires Common Sense Machines, which offers AI models that create 3D assets from 2D images; the startup was founded in 2020 and last valued at $15M (The Information)

TikTok users in the US were presented with a new privacy policy; the changes were part of the app's ownership transition and now allow precise location tracking (Reece Rogers/Wired)

Court filing: SEC drops a case against Gemini Trust, founded by the Winklevoss twins, major Trump donors; the case stemmed from Gemini Earn's implosion (New York Times)

Google Photos' latest generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", lets users create memes from their own images, launching first in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Source: Greenoaks, one of Brex's top investors, will return twice its investment after Capital One's Brex acquisition for $5.15B in a half-cash, half-stock deal (The Information)

Solos Technology sues Meta and EssilorLuxottica, alleging they willfully violated several patents that cover "core technologies in the field of smart eyewear" (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Sources: the US DOJ opened a criminal probe and sent out grand-jury subpoenas in recent weeks over allegations that Deel recruited a spy inside rival Rippling (Rolfe Winkler/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: China deepens its probe into Meta's Manus acquisition in December to investigate cross-border currency flows, tax accounting, and overseas investments (Bloomberg)

Sources: Richard Socher's Recursive is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $4B pre-money valuation to build self-improving superintelligent AI (Bloomberg)

Source: Databricks obtained $1.8B in fresh debt and now has over $7B in debt ahead of a potential IPO; it raised $4B+ in December at a $134B valuation (Jordan Novet/CNBC)

Source: Binance considers reintroducing stock tokens after removing them in 2021; OKX, Kraken, Bitget, and others are expanding their tokenized stock offerings (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Source: smart ring maker Oura plans a tender offer for early investors at a 25% discount to its $11B valuation from Series E, aiming to stay private longer (Bloomberg)

Meta says it is temporarily pausing teens' access to its AI characters globally across all its apps as it develops a new version of AI characters (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Mews, which makes AI-powered hospitality management software, raised a $300M Series D led by EQT Growth at a $2.5B valuation (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Cubby, which makes software for self-storage operators, raised a $63M Series A led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)

Source: by the end of 2025, Claude Code's ARR had grown by at least another $100M from the $1B announced in November, making up 12% of Anthropic's total ARR (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Sources: Ledger is working with banks on a US IPO that could value the French cryptocurrency company at more than $4B; it was valued at $1.5B in 2023 (Financial Times)

Booz Allen Hamilton commits $400M to a16z's newest set of funds, for which a16z raised $15B+ in January; this is Booz Allen's first LP stake in any VC fund (Lucinda Shen/Axios)

R&D firm Merkle, which sold Farcaster, says it plans to repay VCs the $180M they invested in the social media project, and says Farcaster is not shutting down (Suvashree Ghosh/Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance that they can prepare orders for Nvidia's H200 chips, suggesting Beijing is close to approving imports (Bloomberg)

How Chinese tech companies navigate geopolitical tensions: TikTok and Manus adopted a "China shedding" strategy, while Shein and Meituan seek non-US growth (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)

Sources: UBS plans to make cryptocurrency investing available for some private banking clients in Switzerland, starting with bitcoin and ether (Bloomberg)

Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)

Malaysia lifted its temporary ban on Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot after xAI added safety measures; Grok remains subject to continuous monitoring by authorities (Anisah Shukry/Bloomberg)

Anthropic details how it had to redesign its take-home test for hiring performance engineers as Claude kept defeating it, and releases the original test (Anthropic)