Techmeme RSS Feed

TikTok US says it is working to restore services after a power outage at a data center and any algorithm changes users noticed were likely due to the outage (Dan Whateley/Business Insider)

29m

Microsoft unveils the Maia 200, its 2nd-generation AI accelerator built on TSMC's 3nm process, deploying today in its Azure US Central data center region (Tom Warren/The Verge)

59m

Sources: the US DOT plans to use Gemini to draft federal regulations, cutting the process to just 30 days; the DOT used it to draft a still-unpublished FAA rule (Jesse Coburn/ProPublica)

The EU Commission says WhatsApp's Channels fall under the DSA's Very Large Online Platform rules, joining Instagram and Facebook, requiring it to address risks (Anupriya Datta/Euractiv)

Source: OpenAI targets ~$60 per 1,000 views for ChatGPT ads, on par with live NFL broadcasts and above Meta's sub-$20 CPM, while offering little conversion data (The Information)

Nvidia announces its Earth-2 Medium Range weather model, built on its Atlas architecture, claiming it outperforms Google DeepMind's GenCast in 70+ variables (Tim De Chant/TechCrunch)

Apple unveils a second-gen AirTag with an updated speaker and the same second-gen Ultra Wideband chip as in the iPhone 17, costing $29 for one and $99 for four (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

Intel Panther Lake laptop CPU review: the 18A-based Core Ultra X9 388H outperforms Apple's M5 and AMD's top-tier Strix Halo in some tests like 4K video exports (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

As tech CEOs stay silent after two fatal shootings, 450+ workers at Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and others urge CEOs to cancel any ICE contracts and speak out (Axios)

How the explicit deepfake ecosystem evolved from images to high-quality video; an analysis shows 1.4M+ Telegram accounts signed up to 39 deepfake creation bots (Matt Burgess/Wired)

Nvidia invests an additional $2B in CoreWeave to help speed up adding 5GW+ of AI computing capacity by 2030 and deploy Nvidia's new Vera CPU; CRWV jumps 9%+ (Bloomberg)

TSMC's conservative capex approach is resulting in supply-demand imbalances and foregone revenue, and hyperscalers must build up Samsung or Intel as its rivals (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Sources: NY-based Tandem, which uses AI to automate the paperwork for writing and receiving medical prescriptions, raised a $100M Series B at a $1B valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)

Interviews with 100+ therapists and psychiatrists on clients' AI chatbot usage show, while there are some upsides, conversations also deepened negative feelings (New York Times)

OpenAI says nearly 1.3M weekly users are discussing "advanced topics in hard science" in January, with an average of 8.4M ChatGPT messages on those topics (Ashley Gold/Axios)

Ricursive, founded by ex-Google researchers to automate advanced chip design, raised $335M from Sequoia, Radical, Lightspeed, and others at a $4B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)

Morgan Stanley: UK companies reported that AI led to 8% net job losses over the past 12 months, above Japan's 7%, Germany's 4%, Australia's 2%; the US added 2% (Irina Anghel/Bloomberg)

Documents: China's military is focused on harnessing AI to deploy swarms of drones, robot dogs, and other autonomous systems, learning from hawks and coyotes (Josh Chin/Wall Street Journal)

The EU opens a formal DSA investigation into xAI over Grok generating sexualized images of women and children; xAI faces fines of up to 6% of global revenue (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)

Claude Code can feel daunting, and most people's problems are not software-shaped, but it is clearly autonomous and the home-cooked app renaissance is great (Jasmine Sun/@jasmine's substack)

Digital Realty, QTS, and NTT Data warn the data center industry is doing a poor job of combating local opposition; 24+ US projects were blocked in January alone (Rafe Rosner-Uddin/Financial Times)

Chinese autonomous trucking company DeepWay raised ~$173M ahead of its planned Hong Kong IPO, filed in November 2025; DeepWay reported ~$215M in H1 2025 revenue (Dong Cao/Bloomberg)

Quantum computing company IonQ acquires US chipmaker SkyWater for ~$1.8B, paying $35/share, in IonQ's biggest deal yet; SkyWater will operate as a subsidiary (Lauren Thomas/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: SoftBank halts talks about a ~$50B acquisition of US data center operator Switch, a setback to Masayoshi Son's goal to roll out Stargate infrastructure (Bloomberg)

London-based enterprise AI video startup Synthesia raised a $200M Series E led by GV at a $4B valuation, up from $2.1B after raising $180M in January 2025 (Nat Rubio-Licht/The Deep View)

Manufacturers say that AI is fundamentally changing how some new products are created, finding unexpected solutions and reducing R&D time from weeks to days (John Keilman/Wall Street Journal)

Entropy, a decentralized crypto custodian that raised a $25M seed led by a16z in June 2022, is shutting down after "several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs" (Zack Abrams/The Block)

10h

Sources: Samsung enters the final qualification phase to supply its HBM4 chips to Nvidia, and targets mass production in February; Samsung's shares jumped 3.2% (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)

12h

Gallup: 12% of employed US adults reported using AI daily in their job in Q4 2025, compared to 10% in Q3 and 8% in Q2; 49% say they never use AI in their role (Andy Kemp/Gallup)

15h

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)

18h

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

20h

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)

22h

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)

23h

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)