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The US imposes visa restrictions on five Europeans, including Thierry Breton, accusing them of pressuring US tech companies to censor certain US viewpoints (Fatima Hussein/Associated Press)

Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle, which is building next-gen AI personal assistants, raised an $8M seed at a $35M valuation and plans to exit stealth in 2026 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)

A US federal judge grants a temporary injunction blocking a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages from taking effect on January 1 (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)

Xbox had a terrible 2025: Microsoft canceled games and raised console and Game Pass prices, Costco stopped selling Xbox, and Valve's Steam Machine upstaged it (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget)

Lemon Slice, which launched a 20B-parameter model that creates digital avatars for AI agents, streaming video at 20 FPS on a single GPU, raised a $10.5M seed (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)

France's La Poste says it has suffered a suspected DDoS attack in "a major network incident" on December 22, which disrupted its postal and banking services (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)

After a yearlong review, the US says China is engaging in unfair chip trade practices, but holds off on additional chip import tariffs at least until mid-2027 (Jordan Fabian/Bloomberg Law)

US plans to impose tariffs on Chinese chips in mid-2027, USTR says (Reuters)

ServiceNow agrees to acquire cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75B in cash in a deal set to close in H2 2026, marking its largest acquisition to date (Bloomberg)

Brett Harrison, the former president of FTX US, raised a $35M Series A for his new perpetual futures exchange AX, a source says at a $187M valuation (Yueqi Yang/The Information)

Google's Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI's ChatGPT Images can make nonconsensual bikini deepfakes from photos of fully clothed women; Reddit bans r/ChatGPTJailbreak (Reece Rogers/Wired)

The Canada Pension Plan Board and Australia's Goodman agree to invest $2.6B+ in data centers in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris, starting to build in June 2026 (Angus Whitley/Bloomberg)

China's MiniMax releases M2.1, an upgrade to its open-source M2 model that it says has "significantly enhanced" coding capabilities in Rust, Java, and others (MiniMax)

Chinese automakers delay plans to mass-produce self-driving vehicles as Beijing becomes more cautious, after a fatal Xiaomi crash in March caused public concern (Keith Bradsher/New York Times)

The European Commission says Apple will bring AirPods-like pairing and iPhone notification access to third-party devices under the DMA in iOS 26.3 in 2026 (Juli Clover/MacRumors)

Samsung's Harman agrees to acquire ZF's radar and automotive computing driver-assistance business for €1.5B, as the European auto-supplier sector struggles (Bloomberg)

How AI can work across scales, from individuals to organizations to economies, like steel and the steam engine before it, as AI arrives as "infinite minds" (Ivan Zhao/@ivanhzhao)

US companies sold $1.7T of investment-grade bonds in 2025, nearing the $1.8T 2020 record, driven by AI infrastructure borrowing; Goldman says AI makes up ~30% (Kate Duguid/Financial Times)

Despite concerns, Labour MPs and other left-wing UK politicians stay active on X; the UK government says it stopped paid ads in 2024, after spending £9M in 2021 (Financial Times)

Chinese short-video app Kuaishou's Hong Kong stock fell as much as 6% to ~$8, the lowest since November 21, after it was hit by a cyberattack on December 22 (Reuters)

Sources reveal inconsistencies in Megaspeed's chip inventory, as the US probes the Singapore AI startup over alleged Chinese ownership and Nvidia chip smuggling (Bloomberg)

The Pentagon partners with xAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil as soon as early 2026 (Bonny Chu/Fox News)

The US FCC bans imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including from China's DJI and Autel, citing national security concerns (Heather Somerville/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: ByteDance has made preliminary plans to spend ~$23B in AI capex in 2026, up from ~$20B in 2025, and has budgeted ~$12B for AI processors (Financial Times)

Kargo, which uses cameras and sensors to inspect pallets in a warehouse and provide accurate inventory data, raised a $42M Series B led by Avenir (Colin Campbell/Axios)

OpenAI details efforts to secure its ChatGPT Atlas browser against prompt injection attacks, including building an "LLM-based automated attacker" (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)

Coinbase agrees to acquire prediction markets startup The Clearing Company for an undisclosed sum; the startup was founded in 2025 and raised a $15M seed (Yogita Khatri/The Block)

Sources: Nvidia's DGX Cloud is merging with the engineering unit, pivoting from selling cloud services to enterprises to supporting internal AI development (The Information)

Vince Zampella, head of EA-owned Respawn Entertainment, ex-CEO of Infinity Ward, and co-creator of Call of Duty, died on December 21 at 55 in a single-car crash (NBC Los Angeles)

Chinese AI startup Z.ai releases GLM-4.7, an open-weight model that Z.ai says delivers significant improvements in coding performance compared to GLM-4.6 (Z.ai)

OpenAI rolls out Your Year with ChatGPT, a Spotify Wrapped-like feature, to Free, Plus, and Pro users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

FanDuel and CME Group launch a prediction market app called FanDuel Predicts in five US states, just days after DraftKings rolled out a similar product (Denitsa Tsekova/Bloomberg)

Italy's competition watchdog fines Apple €98.6M, saying the company's ATT rules are "disproportionate" and "harmful" to app developers and advertisers (Joe Rossignol/MacRumors)

Sources: Erebor, Palmer Luckey's digital bank, raised $350M led by Lux Capital at a $4.35B post-money valuation; it secured FDIC approval last week (Axios)

Alphabet agrees to acquire data center company Intersect for $4.75B in cash, plus its existing debt, as part of its push to expand its AI data center footprint (Bloomberg)

Instacart scraps all item price tests after customer pushback, and won't charge different prices for the same items bought from the same store at the same time (Chris Wack/Wall Street Journal)

Paramount says Larry Ellison "agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4B" for its WBD bid, after WBD's board raised concerns about the offer (Sara Salinas/CNBC)

Investigation: in 22 US states, Uber approves drivers with many types of convictions, such as violent felonies, that are over seven years old to keep costs low (Emily Steel/New York Times)

Sources: Nvidia plans to begin shipping its H200 chips to China before mid-February 2026 and expects initial shipments to be ~40,000 to 80,000 H200 units (Reuters)

Chinese AI chipmaker Biren Technology plans to raise up to ~$623M in a Hong Kong IPO, pricing shares at ~$2.19 to ~$2.52, and expects trading to start January 2 (Sherry Qin/Wall Street Journal)

Investigation: internal Binance files show it failed to stop hundreds of millions in crypto from flowing through suspicious accounts, even after a 2023 US deal (Financial Times)

Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B+ into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others (Abram Brown/The Information)

How the global AI boom is driven by thousands of newcomers, diluting Big Tech's infrastructure dominance; US data center credit deals hit $178.5B in 2025 so far (Bloomberg)

Filings: Chinese AI startups Zhipu and MiniMax report 2024 revenue of $44.4M and $30.5M, respectively, as both prepare for Hong Kong IPOs in the coming weeks (Bloomberg)

Google's TPUs and Gemini are competitive but Nvidia's and OpenAI's first-mover advantage makes their lead seem durable, and Google faces the innovator's dilemma (SiliconANGLE)

Some US schools are deploying AI surveillance tech like facial recognition and listening devices; critics say there is little evidence they make school safer (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)

A look at Google's TPU evolution, its decision to sell chips to competitors after 12 years of internal use, the TPU vs. GPU architecture showdown, and more (The Chip Letter)

A look at stablecoin-powered neobanks like Rizon and Dakota that are offering dollar-denominated digital banking services to customers worldwide (Emily Mason/Bloomberg)

Q&A with iRobot co-founder Colin Angle on the company's Chapter 11 bankruptcy, regulatory pressure that killed Amazon's deal, his new robotics startup, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)

Adam Mosseri says "maybe we'll need" premium longform video for Instagram, and that TikTok's US sale turmoil has given Meta time to retune algorithms (Max Tani/Semafor)