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Techmeme

Andrea Vallone, who left OpenAI in November as the head of its safety research team, joins Anthropic's alignment team (Hayden Field/The Verge)

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The US says Taiwanese companies will invest $250B+ in chip production in the US as part of a trade deal, with Taiwanese government guaranteeing $250B in credit (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

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Symbolic.ai, founded by ex-eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes, partners with News Corp to offer AI tools to WSJ, Barron's, and others (Ben Sherry/Inc)

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Equal1, which was spun out from University College Dublin, raised $60M to deploy its new quantum server for data centers, bringing its total funding to $85M (Ciara O'Brien/The Irish Times)

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Letter: a top House Republican warns severe DRAM and HBM3E supply shortages will constrain H200 export licenses; Nvidia says it "can serve all approved" orders (Maggie Eastland/Bloomberg)

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Google releases TranslateGemma, a suite of Gemma 3-based open translation models available in 4B-, 12B-, and 27B-parameter sizes, with support for 55 languages (The Keyword)

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X revises its developer API policies to "no longer allow apps that reward users for posting on X (aka "infofi")", amid a backlash about increasing AI slop on X (André Beganski/Decrypt)

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Sources: Apple now needs to fight for TSMC production capacity amid the AI boom; Nvidia was likely TSMC's top customer in at least one or two quarters in 2025 (Tim Culpan/Culpium)

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OpenAI says it issued a request for proposals to US-based hardware manufacturers as it seeks to push into consumer devices, robotics, and cloud data centers (Bloomberg)

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Amazon files an objection to Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, and says its $475M investment in the department store is now effectively "worthless" (CNBC)

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Brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs, which Sam Altman co-founded, raised a $252M seed from OpenAI, Bain Capital, Gabe Newell, and others (Ike Swetlitz/Bloomberg)

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AI video startup Higgsfield raised an $80M Series A extension from Accel and others at a $1.3B+ valuation, and says it hit a $200M annualized revenue run rate (Krystal Hu/Reuters)

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Boston-based Tulip, which offers an AI-powered frontline operations platform used by 60K workers, raised a $120M Series D led by Mitsubishi at a $1.3B valuation (Forbes)

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Researchers detail WhisperPair, vulnerabilities in Google's Fast Pair protocol affecting 17 audio device models from 10 brands; Google rolled out updates (Wired)

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BlackRock raises $12.5B as part of its Microsoft partnership to bankroll data centers and energy infrastructure, bringing it closer to its $30B goal from 2024 (Silla Brush/Bloomberg)

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Bitmine, the largest corporate holder of ether, invests $200M in MrBeast's Beast Industries, set to close on January 19; Bitmine holds 4M+ ETH valued at ~$13.6B (Francisco Rodrigues/CoinDesk)

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India's Supreme Court rules Tiger Global's $1.6B Flipkart stake sale to Walmart in 2018 is subject to taxes, a ruling that will shape future cross-border deals (Reuters)

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Anthropic researchers say rich countries' higher AI adoption risks deepening economic disparities and widening living standard gaps, assuming productivity gains (Financial Times)

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AWS signs a two-year supply deal with Rio Tinto to access its Arizona copper mine, the US' first new source in 10+ years, as AI data centers create huge demand (Ryan Dezember/Wall Street Journal)

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Spotify plans to raise its Premium subscription by $1 to $12.99/month in the US, its first US price hike since July 2024, and increase it in Estonia and Latvia (Molly Schuetz/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the US cyberattack that plunged Caracas into darkness during the Maduro mission shows its offensive capabilities; Senators plan to question officials (New York Times)

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Wikimedia celebrates Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, marking its growth from 100 pages to 65M+ articles with nearly 15B monthly views, and releases a docuseries (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Berlin-based Parloa, which develops AI customer service agents for Booking.com and others, raised $350M at a $3B valuation, taking its total raised to $560M+ (Financial Times)

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Polymarket and Kalshi count Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser, and Trump Media plans to launch Truth Predict, raising ethical questions during Trump's second term (Sharon LaFraniere/New York Times)

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Self-help gurus like Tony Robbins, Gabby Bernstein, and Matthew Hussey are charging up to $99 per month to access AI chatbots that promise personalized advice (Sara Ashley O'Brien/Wall Street Journal)

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ASML hits a $500B+ market cap for the first time, the third European company to reach the milestone, after TSMC reported strong earnings; ASML is up 18% YTD (Bloomberg)

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WitnessAI, which intercepts employees' custom GenAI models usage and applies safeguards, raised $58M led by Sound Ventures, taking its total funding to $85M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)

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The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get "tuned" API access; Google is already a member (Emma Roth/The Verge)

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Yield Sec: the top 10 pirate sports streaming sites in the UK, largely funded by ads from unlicensed gambling operators, had 1.6B views in H1 2025, up 33% YoY (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)

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South Korea dropped Naver's and NCSoft's teams from its competition to develop its first sovereign AI model, as LG's, SK Telecom's, and Upstage's teams advanced (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

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AWS launches European Sovereign Cloud, creating a new parent company for its sovereign cloud that will be locally controlled in the EU and run by EU citizens (Arjun Kharpal/CNBC)

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TSMC projects capital spending in 2026 at between $52B and $56B, up 25%+ from 2025, and forecasts ~30% YoY revenue growth in 2026, both above analyst estimates (Bloomberg)

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Scientists say that AI has become a powerful and rapidly improving research tool, and that whether it is generating ideas on its own is, for now, a moot point (Cade Metz/New York Times)

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Chinese chipmaker SpacemiT, whose RISC-V-based K1 chip is used in industrial systems, robotics, edge computing, and AI devices, raised an ~$86M Series B (Bloomberg)

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Appfigures: global consumer mobile app spending on Apple's App Store and Google Play rose 21.6% YoY to $155.8B in 2025, but app downloads dropped 2.7% to 106.9B (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

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Microsoft agrees to buy a record 2.85M soil carbon credits from Indigo Carbon linked to regenerative US agriculture; a source values the deal at $171M to $228M (Reuters)

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Hong Kong-based WeLab, which operates two digital banks in Hong Kong and Indonesia, raised $220M in equity and debt from HSBC, Prudential Hong Kong, and others (Denise Wee/Bloomberg)

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Blockchain-based lender Figure unveils the On-Chain Public Equity Network to issue, trade, and lend stocks natively on a blockchain, not as tokenized replicas (Kyle Baird/The Block)

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Source: Apple's Gemini deal is a cloud contract where it pays Google several billion dollars; a source says OpenAI declined to be Apple's custom model provider (Financial Times)

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OpenAI quietly rolls out ChatGPT Translate, a standalone website that currently supports plain text translations across 50+ languages (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

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TSMC reports Q4 net profit up 35% YoY to a record ~$16B, above $15.17B est., as it benefited from surging demand for AI chips and hit $100B in 2025 revenue (Reuters)

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Sources: China is drafting rules for Nvidia H200 purchases, limiting how many chips local companies can buy and requiring them to justify the need (Nikkei Asia)

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A source close to Thinking Machines alleged that ex-CTO Barret Zoph, who is returning to OpenAI, had shared confidential company information with competitors (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

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GlobalFoundries agrees to acquire Synopsys' ARC processor IP business, which includes ARC-V (RISC-V) and ARC CPU IP, and integrate it into its MIPS business (Nitin Dahad/EE Times)

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Bengaluru-based edtech startup Emversity raised a $30M Series A led by Premji Invest, sources say at a $120M post-money valuation, up from $60M in April 2025 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Alibaba links Qwen to its online shopping and travel services, including Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, aiming to build a one-stop AI app for its 100M users (Luz Ding/Bloomberg)

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CoinDesk data: Binance's spot crypto trading market share fell to 25% in December 2025, its lowest since 2021, and it is losing ground in derivatives trading (Sidhartha Shukla/Bloomberg)

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Project Eleven, which builds tools to prepare blockchains for post-quantum threats, raised a $20M Series A led by Castle Island at a $120M post-money valuation (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

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Thinking Machines parts ways with CTO Barret Zoph, with Soumith Chintala taking over the role; sources say the termination is due to "unethical conduct" (Kylie Robison/@kyliebytes)

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Fidji Simo says Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz are returning to OpenAI from Thinking Machines and the move "has been in the works for several weeks" (Fidji Simo/@fidjissimo)

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