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Baidu's AI chip unit Kunlunxin confidentially files for a Hong Kong IPO, paving the way for a spin-off; a recent fundraising reportedly valued it at ~$3B (Sneha Kumar/Reuters)

SpaceX plans to lower its Starlink satellites from orbiting at ~550km to ~480km in 2026 to improve space safety and reduce the likelihood of debris collisions (Rishabh Jaiswal/Reuters)

Brookfield is starting cloud company Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, after saying it plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)

How AI automation can fulfill Thomas Piketty's predictions on rising economic inequality, and why highly progressive taxes on capital can help slow the spiral (Philosopher Count)

A look at US tech laws coming in 2026, like California's SB 53 AI transparency law and Virginia's new social media limits for minors, effective from January 1 (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

Ukraine has become a live-fire test range for AI drones like the Bumblebee, provided by a secretive Eric Schmidt-led venture, raising alarms in Kremlin circles (C.J. Chivers/New York Times)

DeepSeek researchers detail mHC, a new architecture they used to train 3B, 9B, and 27B models, finding it scaled without adding significant computational burden (Vincent Chow/South China Morning Post)

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Sources: OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its AI-powered personal device, which is expected to be largely audio-based (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)

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Startups have started to offer free nicotine pouches as a perk, as some employees claim the products help them focus during the workday, despite health hazards (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)

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

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

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Sources: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could all go public in 2026; those three deals alone would outstrip the total proceeds from the ~200 US IPOs in 2025 (George Hammond/Financial Times)

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Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index rose 28% in 2025, its best percentage performance since 2017, driven by tech and Hong Kong reclaiming the top spot in IPOs (Wall Street Journal)

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

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

20h

Some LLM takeaways for 2025: 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)

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

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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)

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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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)