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Amazon partners with payments startup Slope to offer loans of up to $5M to merchants selling on its platform, using Amazon sales data for candidate selection (Spencer Soper/Bloomberg)

Netflix announces a partnership with iHeartMedia to exclusively publish 15+ video podcasts from early 2026, including The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder (Jessica Testa/New York Times)

Google launches CC, an experimental AI assistant that delivers a personalized daily "Your Day Ahead" briefing email based on users' emails and calendar (Robert Hart/The Verge)

The US threatens economic penalties against European companies like Spotify if the EU does not roll back regulations and lawsuits targeting US tech giants (New York Times)

Leona Health, the maker of an AI copilot that integrates with doctors' WhatsApp accounts for patient chats in Latin America, raised a $14M seed led by a16z (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

OpenAI updates ChatGPT Images to generate images up to 4x faster and edit more precisely, and adds a new section in ChatGPT's app and website for images (Rachel Metz/Bloomberg)

OpenAI hires former UK chancellor George Osborne to lead OpenAI for Countries, the global expansion arm of its $500B Stargate data center initiative (Financial Times)

Source: OpenAI rolled back ChatGPT's model router, which sent some queries to reasoning models, for Free and $5/month Go tiers, as it was costly and hurt DAUs (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Event software company Cvent acquires video content platform Goldcast; source: Cvent paid just under $300M to acquire Goldcast, which had raised around $38M (Dan Primack/Axios)

DoorDash launches Zesty, a standalone AI-powered social app for users to find nearby restaurants, in public testing in San Francisco and New York (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)

OpenAI launches FrontierScience, a benchmark to measure models' expert-level scientific reasoning with 700+ questions, finding GPT-5.2 is its strongest model (OpenAI)

A look at Apple's iPhone roadmap; sources say the iPhone 18 Pro lineup will get under-screen Face ID, and the front camera will move to the top-left corner (The Information)

Meta launches prompt-based sound separation model SAM Audio in its Segment Anything Playground, letting users isolate individual sounds from complex recordings (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Instagram unveils its first TV app, initially available on Amazon's Fire TV as a test with plans to expand to other TV platforms (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)

Orbital solar data centers' cost-per-watt of compute is $51.10/W, far above $15.85/W for terrestrial sites; SpaceX is uniquely positioned to try orbital (Andrew McCalip)

Sequence, which builds AI agents to automate B2B companies' revenue operations, raised a $20M Series A led by 645 Ventures, bringing its total funding to ~$40M (Ryan Lawler/Axios)

Q&A with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe on founding Rivian in 2009, production challenges, the VW partnership, autonomy, AI, EVs, chips, CarPlay, and more (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Adobe adds a prompt-based video editor to its Firefly app that uses Runway's Aleph model, and adds image and video models from Black Forest Labs and others (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Mozilla appoints Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its CEO, after years of its for-profit arm juggling layoffs, restructuring, its Google dependence, and the AI landscape (David Pierce/The Verge)

Databricks is raising a $4B Series L at a $134B valuation, up from $100B in September and $62B in December 2024, and had a $4.8B annual revenue rate in October (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)

Visa says it will allow US banks to settle transactions using Circle's USDC stablecoin over Solana, the US' first full deployment of a stablecoin settlement (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Elizabeth Warren and two other Democratic senators write to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and others about AI data centers' role in rising electricity bills (New York Times)

Sources and a memo: Amazon plans to cut 370 jobs, or ~8.5% of its 4,370 employees, at its European HQ in Luxembourg, the country's biggest layoffs in 20 years (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)

VW plans to end vehicle production at its Dresden plant, which opened in 2001, and convert it into a research hub focused on AI, robotics, and chip design (Gregory Schmidt/New York Times)

As Europe rearms, Anduril is trying to break through in the UK by co-funding major programs, cutting manufacturing deals, and billing itself as "Anglo-American" (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Analysis: of the 8,808 global data centers in October 2025, ~7,000 are in areas outside the optimal 18C to 27C temperature range; 600 are in areas above 27C (Rest of World)

China approves two Level 3 autonomous cars from state-owned Changan Auto and BAIC Motor, the first such approvals; the cars can drive in Chongqing and Beijing (Reuters)

Global smartphone shipments in 2026 are set to shrink 2.1% due to rising memory costs, led by Chinese OEMs; DRAM prices could further raise costs by 10% to 15% (Counterpoint Research)

How the rise of AI has divided Hollywood: some oppose all AI use while others like director Timur Bekmambetov say they are exploring ways to utilize AI tools (Lucas Shaw/Bloomberg)

Sources: Monzo CEO TS Anil, who announced his exit and handover to ex-Googler Diana Layfield in October, was pushed out by the board over an IPO timing clash (Financial Times)

Shares in Chinese companies critical to AI infrastructure surged in 2025, with CATL up 45% and Sungrow up 130%, as exports boost margins despite Trump's tariffs (William Sandlund/Financial Times)

CoreWeave lost $33B in market value in six weeks amid construction delays at its Denton, Texas AI data center, criticism from short seller Jim Chanos, and more (Robbie Whelan/Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI Chief Communications Officer Hannah Wong plans to leave in January; Wong joined in 2021 and led PR during Sam Altman's brief ouster and return in 2023 (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)

Sources: the US pauses a tech trade deal with the UK, signed in September, over disagreements about the UK's online safety rules and digital services taxes (New York Times)

Allen Institute for AI launches Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, claiming they are "the first fully open byte-level language models", built on its Olmo 3 models (Emilia David/VentureBeat)

Tesla's shares closed at a 2025 high on December 15 after the company confirmed it is testing driverless vehicles in Austin without a human safety operator (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

PayPal says it has filed applications to establish PayPal Bank to provide loans more efficiently to US small businesses and reduce its reliance on third parties (Katherine Hamilton/Wall Street Journal)

Ford plans to repurpose its US battery manufacturing capacity to launch a battery energy storage business for data centers, amid a shift away from large EVs (TechCrunch)

Shares of Broadcom, CoreWeave, and Oracle, companies tied to the AI infrastructure buildout, extend last week's decline; ORCL is down 46%+ since September 10 (Ari Levy/CNBC)

Intel names Robin Colwell, deputy assistant to President Trump, as its head of government affairs, and Pushkar Ranade, the CEO's chief of staff, as interim CTO (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)

Sources: Disney's Sora deal is entirely in OpenAI stock rather than a cash licensing fee; Disney has the option to buy additional stock beyond the $1B stake (Bloomberg)

Sources: Notion told staff it is doing a $300M tender offer at an $11B valuation, ahead of a potential IPO, and passed $600M in ARR, half of it from AI products (Anna Tong/Forbes)

How crypto entrepreneur Bill Zanker helped Trump and Melania launch memecoins; as of December 10, $TRUMP was down 92% since its peak and $MELANIA was down 99% (Bloomberg)

The US FTC, along with 21 states and DC, files an amended complaint against Uber, alleging deceptive billing and cancellation practices related to Uber One (Reuters)

Cloudflare 2025 report: global internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, ChatGPT was the most popular AI service, global traffic from Starlink grew 2.3x, and more (Cloudflare)

GM is adding native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023 (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Sources: xAI has created an enterprise AI sales group, but xAI's lack of experience in selling to big businesses is holding potential customers back (Theo Wayt/The Information)

Lidar manufacturer Luminar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and says it reached a deal to sell its semiconductor subsidiary to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M (Reshmi Basu/Bloomberg)

Mexico-based fintech Plata raised up to $500M in a financing deal arranged by Nomura Securities International, as it moves toward becoming a full-fledged bank (Prakhar Srivastava/Reuters)

Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)