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Honda plans to halt production in Japan and China from December 29 to January 6, showing the ongoing fallout of the global chip shortage and Nexperia takeover (Bloomberg)

Sources: Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500M for his startup at a ~€3B valuation, and plans to name Alexandre LeBrun as CEO, ahead of a January launch (Financial Times)

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr tells a Senate committee the FCC "is not an independent agency"; the agency removed "independent agency" from its site as he testified (Axios)

An in-depth look at a recent research paper that offered a roadmap to the viability of 3D HBM-on-GPU integration for improved AI performance and utilization (Gavin Bonshor/More Than Moore)

Rome-based Exein, which offers cybersecurity tools for protecting connected devices including cars and home routers, raised €100M led by Blue Cloud Ventures (Rose Henderson/Bloomberg)

Sources detail how Tiger Global fueled the COVID-era unicorn bubble that burst ahead of the AI boom; the firm recently shared its $12.7B 2021 fund is now up 16% (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)

Filing: Sony and Tencent reach a "confidential settlement" over Tencent's Light of Motiram, a game that Sony alleged was a "slavish clone" of its Horizon series (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Tokyo-based Resonac, a crucial cutting-edge chip chemicals supplier whose shares are up 40%+ YTD, says it has bolstered China production capacity to meet demand (Bloomberg)

Oilfield service companies are moving into the data center business by supplying power and cooling tech as demand from traditional drilling customers weakens (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

Sources: Pinduoduo and Temu owner PDD fires dozens following a fistfight between employees and Chinese officials probing fraudulent deliveries on its platform (Bloomberg)

Tim Sweeney says Fortnite will not return to iOS in Japan in 2025, as Apple is "charging a competition-crushing 21% junk fee on third-party in-app payments" (Tim Sweeney/@timsweeneyepic)

In a letter, Rocket Internet minority shareholder Scherzer & Co accuses the company of marking down startup valuations to buy out backers at "bargain prices" (Financial Times)

Manus says it crossed $100M ARR eight months after launch and is growing at 20%+ MoM since Manus 1.5's release; its total revenue run rate is now over $125M (Jake Rudnitsky/Bloomberg)

SoftBank Group was among the Japanese tech stocks that fell on December 18, as Wall Street's AI infrastructure spending worries crossed into the Asian markets (Lim Hui Jie/CNBC)

Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer says Amazon canceled a $150M advance for a Texas AI data center campus; FRMI fell 34% on December 12 after saying a tenant canceled (Dakin Campbell/Business Insider)

Wall Street clearinghouse DTCC selects the Canton Network blockchain as a real-world asset tokenization partner after receiving a No-Action Letter from the SEC (Ian Allison/CoinDesk)

India-listed RRP Semiconductor surged 55,000%+ in the 20 months through December 17, despite negative revenue; a source says India's SEBI is examining the jump (Chiranjivi Chakraborty/Bloomberg)

Tebra, which offers practice management tools for private healthcare providers, raised $250M led by Hildred, mostly in equity, to accelerate its AI capabilities (FinSMEs)

Sources: General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning, is in late-stage talks to raise several hundred million dollars at a $2B+ valuation (Alex Heath/Sources)

How Apple is helping filmmakers and developers create immersive media for the Vision Pro and share best practices (Harry McCracken/Fast Company)

OpenAI opens app submissions for review and publication in ChatGPT, where users can discover or search for apps in a new app directory (OpenAI)

Apple unveils iOS changes in Japan to comply with local law, including alternative app stores and payment options, a new fee structure, and new default controls (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Sources: US FTC is probing Instacart's AI pricing tool, after a study showed different prices for the same items at the same stores; CART drops 8%+ after hours (Jody Godoy/Reuters)

Sources: OpenAI has held preliminary discussions with investors about raising tens of billions of dollars, and as much as $100B, at a valuation of around $750B (The Information)

Coinbase is rolling out stock trading, more advanced trading tools, prediction markets via Kalshi, and more, amid a push to be a one-stop financial app (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)

Meta is testing limiting Facebook professional accounts and Pages to posting just two links per month, unless they subscribe to $14.99+/month Meta Verified (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Sources: China built a working prototype of an EUV machine in early 2025 with a team of former ASML engineers who reverse-engineered the company's EUV machines (Fanny Potkin/Reuters)

Micron reports Q1 revenue up 57% YoY to $13.64B, vs. $12.84B est., net income up 180% to $5.24B, and Q2 revenue forecast above est.; MU jumps 5%+ after hours (Kif Leswing/CNBC)

A UK family and a US family sue Meta for the alleged wrongful deaths of their teenage sons, who died by suicide after falling victim to sextortion on Instagram (David Ingram/NBC News)

Parents of sextortion victim sue Meta for alleged wrongful death (Libby Brooks/The Guardian)

Pornhub is being extorted by ShinyHunters after the search and watch history of its Premium members was reportedly stolen in a recent Mixpanel data breach (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)

In a proposed settlement, the US FTC says crypto bridge Nomad must repay the victims of a July 2022 cyberattack that led to $186M worth of funds being stolen (Connor Jones/The Register)

Amazon's AGI team lead, Rohit Prasad, is leaving at the end of 2025; AWS SVP Peter DeSantis will lead a group combining AI, silicon, and quantum computing teams (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)

The Academy signs a multi-year deal that will give YouTube the exclusive global rights to the Oscars, beginning in 2029 and running through 2033 (Scott Feinberg/The Hollywood Reporter)

Meta says it has "paused" its third-party Horizon OS headset program, announced in April 2024 with Asus and Lenovo as its first partners to build the headsets (Ben Lang/Road to VR)

Gemini 3 Flash costs $0.50 per 1M input tokens and $3 per 1M output tokens, vs. Gemini 2.5 Flash's $0.30 per 1M input tokens and $2.50 per 1M output tokens (Tulsee Doshi/The Keyword)

Google makes Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and Search's AI mode; it scored 33.7% without tool use on Humanity's Last Exam vs. 3 Pro's 37.5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

Google unveils Gemini 3 Flash, which it says has Pro-grade reasoning with lower latency, outperforming 2.5 Pro "while being 3x faster at a fraction of the cost" (Abner Li/9to5Google)

Google sues the Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group known as Darcula, allegedly behind a US text message phishing ring, in the US, seeking a restraining order (Kevin Collier/NBC News)

Google brings its vibe coding tool Opal to Gemini on the web, letting users create their own custom AI-powered mini apps, called Gems, which can be reused later (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sources: Google is working on a new initiative to make its AI chips run PyTorch better and is working closely with Meta, as the two discuss Meta using more TPUs (Reuters)

OnePlus 15R review: the $700+ phone is fast with a big battery and a vibrant 165Hz OLED, but has one fewer camera than 2024's 13R and only four years of support (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

Circana: US game console spending fell 27% YoY in November to $695M, the lowest in the pivotal month for holiday shopping since 2005, in a tough year for gaming (Vlad Savov/Bloomberg)

a16z releases a nine-pillar AI policy framework for Congress, including restricting AI use for under-13s without parental consent and keeping a role for states (Punchbowl News)

Oracle says final equity deal negotiations for its Michigan data center project are "on schedule" and Related Digital, not Blue Owl Capital, will be its partner (Lynn Doan/Bloomberg)

Sources: Binance has been exploring ways to reboot its Binance.US affiliate, including a recapitalization to cut CZ's stake, which is a hurdle to expansion (Bloomberg)

Coursera plans to acquire rival online education platform Udemy in an all-stock deal valued at $2.5B, combining two of the largest US-based learning platforms (Akash Sriram/Reuters)

Sources: Blue Owl Capital won't back Oracle's planned $10B, 1GW data center in Michigan, after funding talks stalled due to concerns over debt terms and delays (Financial Times)

AI chip startup Mythic, which develops "analog processing units" to perform AI computations within memory, raised $125M led by DCVC; its CEO is a Nvidia veteran (Ian King/Bloomberg)

Hut 8 partners with Fluidstack to build an AI data center in Louisiana for Anthropic, backed by a 15-year, ~$7B lease, starting with 245MW of computing capacity (Akash Sriram/Reuters)