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South Korean trade data: South Korea's chip exports rose 38.5% YoY to a record $17.26B in November, driven by strong data center demand and higher memory prices (Reuters)

Shopify says it fixed an issue in its login authentication flow, resolving a December 1 outage that left some merchants unable to log in or access POS systems (Neil J Kanatt/Reuters)

Nvidia announces Alpamayo-R1, an AI model for autonomous driving research, and calls it the "first industry-scale open reasoning vision language action model" (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)

Texas AG Ken Paxton says he is investigating Shein to determine whether it violated state laws on unethical labor practices and the sale of unsafe products (Jonathan Stempel/Reuters)

Google, with its structural advantages, is a threat for both OpenAI and Nvidia; OpenAI has a real moat with 800M+ ChatGPT users, but needs an advertising model (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal that could top $5B; Celestial was valued at $2.5B in March 2025 (The Information)

Internal memo: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares a "code red" to shift more resources into improving ChatGPT amid rising competition, delaying other plans like ads (The Information)

AWS and Google Cloud announce a jointly built multicloud networking solution and a new open interoperability spec; AWS plans a rollout with Azure later in 2026 (Ryan Christoffel/9to5Mac)

The Trump administration agrees to inject up to $150M in xLight, which develops lasers for EUV machines and has Pat Gelsinger on its board, for an equity stake (Wall Street Journal)

Samsung says the Galaxy Z TriFold will go on sale in South Korea on December 12 for ~$2,440, in China later in 2025, and in the US as early as Q1 2026 (Heekyong Yang/Reuters)

Samsung unveils the Galaxy Z TriFold, with a 6.5" outer screen, a 10" inner screen, a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC, and a 3.9mm body at its thinnest point (Allison Johnson/The Verge)

Marques Brownlee plans to shut down his wallpaper app Panels on December 31; Appfigures: it had 900K downloads and $95K in user spending since its 2024 launch (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)

Amazon launches Amazon Now, a new service that aims to deliver household essentials and groceries in ~30 minutes or less, available in Seattle and Philadelphia (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)

Kalshi says users can now trade tokenized versions of their wagers on Solana, in a bid to court crypto holders; Polymarket already allows on-chain trading (Liz Napolitano/CNBC)

Apple says its AI chief, John Giannandrea, is stepping down; former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya will lead AI, reporting to Craig Federighi (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Vanguard will allow ETFs and mutual funds that primarily hold cryptocurrencies to be traded on its platform starting Tuesday, reversing a longstanding position (Emily Graffeo/Bloomberg)

Dozens of US universities and colleges have announced new AI departments and programs over the last two years; an AI program is now MIT's second-largest major (Natasha Singer/New York Times)

Shopify suffers an outage, leaving some merchants unable to log in or access POS systems, and says it has fixed an issue and is seeing signs of recovery (Annie Palmer/CNBC)

Memo: Adam Mosseri asks Instagram US staff to return to office five days a week, starting February; sources: it's the first such RTO mandate for a big Meta unit (Alex Heath/Sources)

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A look at ElevenLabs, as ~50% of its $193M in trailing 12-month revenue now comes from corporates, like Cisco, and ~50% from YouTubers, podcasters, and authors (Iain Martin/Forbes)

Michael Saylor's Strategy creates a $1.44B cash reserve funded by stock sales after cutting full-year profit and BTC yield targets due to bitcoin price drops (Stephen Alpher/CoinDesk)

Car sharing service Zipcar UK plans to shut down after London extended its Congestion Charge to EVs; Zipcar had losses of £11.7M in 2024 vs. £364,000 in 2023 (Simon Hunt/City A.M.)

Tutor Intelligence, which makes AI-powered warehouse robots, raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)

Swiss and German law enforcement agencies jointly shut down Cryptomixer, a major bitcoin mixing platform suspected of laundering money from criminal activities (Ludwig Burger/Reuters)

The reaction to NYT's David Sacks story aside, Sacks is pushing policies to help the US win the AI race, which also benefit him, his allies, and even his foes (Dan Primack/Axios)

Nevis, which develops AI agents to automate wealth advisers' grunt work, raised a $35M Series A from Sequoia and others at a $200M valuation, after a $5M seed (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which it calls "reasoning-first models built for agents", after releasing V3.2-Exp in September (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)

An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: 80+ tech startups passed $1B valuations in 2025 so far, many of them AI-related, save for exceptions like Kalshi (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)

Runway debuts the Gen-4.5 AI video generation model, highlighting its physical accuracy; it holds the top spot on Artificial Analysis' Video Arena leaderboard (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

OpenAI takes a stake in Thrive Capital's Thrive Holdings and says it will embed agents in its companies, which already include an accounting and an IT business (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)

Nvidia buys $2B of Synopsys' common stock and unveils a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and AI engineering products, including with CUDA libraries (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)

Netflix quietly removes support for casting from its mobile app to most modern TVs and streaming devices, including Chromecasts, regardless of subscription tier (Adamya Sharma/Android Authority)

Sources: consultancies like McKinsey froze graduate pay offers for 2026, the third consecutive year, as AI reshapes the industry and threatens its pyramid model (Financial Times)

ByteDance launches an AI voice assistant powered by its Doubao LLM, available first on ZTE's Nubia M153 smartphone prototype; Doubao has an estimated 159M MAUs (Reuters)

Germany-based Black Forest Labs, which develops the open-source Flux image generation models, raised a $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation, up from $1B in 2024 (Financial Times)

Indian government order: India's telecom ministry privately gives smartphone makers 90 days to preload state cybersecurity app Sanchar Saathi on all new devices (Reuters)

HSBC signs a Mistral deal to access Mistral's AI models and co-develop models for tasks like financial analysis, translation, onboarding clients, and AML checks (Ortenca Aliaj/Financial Times)

Omnicom's DM9 returned three Cannes awards after a North Carolina state senator and CNN Brazil found DM9 used AI to manipulate their content and used it for ads (Emmanuel Felton/Washington Post)

The AI boom has led to high demand and more pay for the construction workers who build data centers; a trade group estimates there's a shortage of ~439K workers (Te-Ping Chen/Wall Street Journal)

China's central bank reaffirmed its stance on crypto, calling virtual currency activity illegal and saying stablecoins fail KYC and anti-money-laundering rules (Reuters)

New York becomes the first US state to require that retailers disclose using algorithmic pricing tied to personal data; 10+ states are considering similar bills (Tim Balk/New York Times)

How Animaj, a startup in the Disney Accelerator Program, uses its generative AI tool to expedite the animation process, while claiming artists stay in control (Corinne Reichert/CNET)

US startups are increasingly adopting open-weight Chinese AI models, which are cheaper, more customizable, and sufficiently capable compared to frontier US ones (NBC News)

Q&A with ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on the "decay" at Intel, the Chip Act's terrible execution, the irony of Lip-Bu Tan broadly following his strategy, and more (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

How a Chinese entrepreneur amassed 10M+ IPv4 addresses, mostly from Africa, to lease them outside Africa, leaving African ISPs struggling to expand capacity (Alexandra Wexler/Wall Street Journal)

Anthropic says over 60% of its business customers use more than one Claude product, a trend it began noticing after Claude Code's rise in popularity (Richard Nieva/Forbes)

Sources: Databricks is raising $5B at a $134B valuation, expects sales to grow 55% in 2025 to $4.1B, and is operating at roughly breakeven (Cory Weinberg/The Information)

An in-depth look at TPUv7 Ironwood, the latest generation of Google's TPU, and how it positions Google as a serious challenger to Nvidia's AI chip dominance (Dylan Patel/SemiAnalysis)

South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; the country has a population of 51.7M (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg)