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The AI boom is driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction, but there aren't enough skilled workers in the US, such as electricians, to keep up (Caroline Haskins/Wired)

A look at Michael Saylor's Strategy, known for buying bitcoin via creative financing strategies, as its stock trades way below its peak amid the crypto downturn (Rob Copeland/New York Times)

Luminate 2025 report: the global music industry hit 5.1T streams, up 9.6% YoY and a single-year record; AI artist Xania Monet had 125M on-demand audio streams (Maria Sherman/Associated Press)

ZachXBT: a crypto user lost $282M+ in BTC and LTC in a hardware wallet social engineering scam; XMR jumped as the attacker began converting the funds to Monero (Daniel Kuhn/The Block)

Micron signs a letter of intent to buy a fabrication site in Taiwan from Powerchip for $1.8B to expand DRAM memory chip production, expected to close in Q2 2026 (Valentine Baldassari/Bloomberg)

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Beaconcha.in: a record ~36M ethereum tokens, or 30% of ethereum's total supply, worth ~$119B, are now staked, as institutional investors grow their share (Sage D. Young/Sherwood News)

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Sources: following investor backlash, Monzo to give outgoing CEO TS Anil an expanded role after he steps down in February; he is likely to retain a board seat (Laith Al-Khalaf/Financial Times)

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TrendForce: data centers will use 70%+ of the high-end memory chips all manufacturers will produce in 2026, with little new manufacturing capacity until 2027 (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

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Filing: Elon Musk seeks $79B-$134B damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging OpenAI defrauded him by abandoning nonprofit roots and partnering with Microsoft (Robert Burnson/Bloomberg)

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Appfigures: Sora 2 had ~6M iOS downloads as of December 2025; the Android version, available since early November 2025, had ~3.1M, as growth begins to slow (Sherwood News)

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Adobe's stock has slumped more than 45% since the end of 2023, reflecting analyst concerns over the threat of AI-driven disruption to SaaS companies (Ryan Vlastelica/Bloomberg)

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Sources: the EU's cybersecurity proposal, to be presented on Jan. 20, is expected to phase out vendors such as Huawei from the bloc's critical infrastructure (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

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Luxembourg-based Hydrosat, which builds AI-based thermal infrared satellite tech to provide data for water resource management and more, raised a $60M Series B (Ingrid Lunden/Resilience Media)

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Anthropic appoints Irina Ghose, a former Microsoft India managing director, to lead its business in India, which has the second-largest user base for Claude (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

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Micron breaks ground in New York for its memory manufacturing complex, announced in 2022, that it says will be the largest semiconductor facility in the US (Glenn Coin/Syracuse Post-Standard)

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Grid operator PJM plans to require large data centers to either bring their own power generation or curtail electricity use to prevent a large-scale outage (Reuters)

Sources: suppliers of parts for Nvidia's H200 chips have paused production after Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the AI processors (Financial Times)

The US EPA rules that xAI acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power its Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in the Memphis area (Dara Kerr/The Guardian)

Sources: leaders at Thinking Machines Lab confronted Barret Zoph over an alleged relationship with another employee, who is no longer at the lab, in summer 2025 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Anthropic makes Claude Cowork available to $20/month Pro subscribers, after launching it for Max users, and says Pro users may hit their usage limits sooner (Ian Carlos Campbell/Engadget)

California's AG sends a cease-and-desist letter to xAI, demanding the company halt the generation and distribution of non-consensual intimate images and CSAM (Julianna Bragg/Axios)

Google says it's appealing the US v. Google ruling that found it has an illegal search monopoly and asks a court to pause some of the remedies during the appeal (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Sources: Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered US digital asset bank, is seeking to raise $200M to $400M, ahead of a possible IPO in 2027 (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)

Sources: Google is in talks with broadband operator Radiate to set up a JV to hold their fiber assets; Stonepeak Partners will invest $1B to support the deal (Bloomberg)

Claude Code represents a "ChatGPT moment repeated" and an "extinction-level event" for horizontal software companies focused on human-oriented consumption (Doug OLaughlin/Fabricated Knowledge)

Sources: ElevenLabs seeks to raise hundreds of millions at a valuation of $11B, four months after a secondary share sale that valued it at $6.6B (Financial Times)

Some top California Democrats join Governor Gavin Newsom in opposing a ballot initiative led by a healthcare union seeking a one-time 5% tax on $1B+ in assets (Bloomberg)

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson says the agency is examining Big Tech's acqui-hires to make sure "they are not an attempt to get around" its merger review process (Bloomberg)

TikTok has launched a standalone micro drama app, PineDrama, in the US and Brazil, offering vertical serialized shows for free without ads or paywalls for now (Business Insider)

OpenAI expands its ChatGPT Go tier to the US and the rest of the world, after launching it in India and some other countries; it will cost $8/month in the US (Elissa Welle/The Verge)

OpenAI will match ads to conversation topics using some personalization data, but says it will not sell user data or expose user conversations to advertisers (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

OpenAI plans to test ads below ChatGPT replies for users of free and Go tiers in the US; source: OpenAI expects to make "low billions" from ads in 2026 (Financial Times)

Vietnam's military-run telecom company Viettel begins construction of the country's first chip plant, with trial production expected to start by late 2027 (Phuong Nguyen/Reuters)

Istanbul-based TaleMonster Games, the studio behind the puzzle game Match Valley, raised a $30M Series A led by Arcadia Gaming Partners and a16z (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)

Analysis: Colossus 2, one of the world's largest AI datacenters, uses roughly the same water resources required to supply 2.5 typical In-N-Out Burger locations (SemiAnalysis)

Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/Sources)

Unsealed docs from Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, set for a jury trial on April 27: Sutskever's concerns about treating open-source AI as a "side show", and more (Alex Heath/The Verge)

DoorDash Chief Revenue Officer Lee Brown is departing the delivery app company after less than six months; long-term VP Shanna Prevé will succeed Brown as CRO (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

ClickHouse, a Snowflake challenger that offers an OLAP database management system, raised $400M led by Dragoneer at a $15B valuation, up from $6.35B in May 2025 (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)

Source: Italian police searched the offices of the country's data protection agency, one of the EU's most proactive regulators, as part of a corruption probe (Reuters)

Q&A with Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos about the $83B WBD bid, Trump's involvement in the deal, maintaining a 45-day theatrical window for WBD releases, and more (Nicole Sperling/New York Times)

Cloudflare acquires AI data marketplace Human Native for an undisclosed sum, to help it develop a system where AI developers pay creators for training content (Davis Giangiulio/CNBC)

Italy's competition watchdog opens two investigations into Microsoft's Activision Blizzard over sales practices the regulator calls "misleading and aggressive" (Reuters)

TikTok says it will roll out new age detection tech, which analyzes profile information to predict whether a user is under 13, across Europe in the coming weeks (Supantha Mukherjee/Reuters)

A profile of Wikipedia as it faces myriad challenges, including attacks from Elon Musk and the far right, reduced traffic due to AI, and a legal battle in India (Darren Loucaides/Financial Times)

Sources: Chinese AI companies seek to rent compute in Southeast Asia and the Middle East for Nvidia Rubin access, as Zhipu and Alibaba warn of a widening US gap (Wall Street Journal)

Australia's eSafety Commissioner reports social media platforms "removed access" to ~4.7M accounts under its ban for under-16s, which took effect in December (New York Times)

SiFive says it will integrate Nvidia's NVLink Fusion with its RISC-V processor IP platforms, letting SiFive silicon communicate with Nvidia's and partner chips (Marco Chiappetta/Forbes)

California regulators unanimously approved Verizon's nearly $10B Frontier acquisition; deliberations included Verizon committing to the state's DEI requirements (Matthew Keys/TheDesk.net)

Meta says it will discontinue Workrooms, its VR space for workers, on February 16, and stop selling Quests and Horizon services to businesses from February 20 (Sean Hollister/The Verge)