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How the huge data center buildout is heating up local politics in US towns across red and blue states on issues like water, electricity, and noise (Evan Halper/Washington Post)

Sources: Discord files confidentially for a US IPO, working with Goldman and JPMorgan; Discord was valued at $15B in 2021, and rejected a $12B Microsoft offer (Bloomberg)

Brands complain Amazon's "Buy for Me" AI-powered shopping tool features their products on Amazon without permission and shows descriptions with errors (Allison Smith/Modern Retail)

In the first successful US prosecution of a spyware operator in 10+ years, pcTattletale founder pleads guilty to promoting surveillance apps for unlawful uses (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)

Mobileye is acquiring Israeli humanoid robot startup Mentee Robotics in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $900M; Mentee was founded in 2022 and has raised $50M (Marissa Newman/Bloomberg)

Internal memo: Hark, the new AI lab from Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock, backed by $100M of his own capital, has hired 30+ engineers from Apple, Meta, and others (Rocket Drew/The Information)

Google will now publish new source code to the Android Open Source Project twice per year, down from releasing source code for every quarterly Android release (Mishaal Rahman/Android Authority)

Jensen Huang says he isn't concerned about a billionaires tax under consideration in California and plans to remain in the state; Nvidia is based in Santa Clara (Bloomberg)

xAI raised a $20B Series E, exceeding its $15B targeted round size, with participation from Valor, Nvidia, and others, and says Grok 5 is currently in training (xAI)

Sandisk's stock jumped 25%+ after Jensen Huang highlighted the need for memory and storage at CES; SNDK is up 40%+ in the first three trading sessions of 2026 (Felice Maranz/Bloomberg)

Nvidia brings its G-Sync Pulsar tech to four monitors, which reduces motion blur by using a "rolling scan" scheme that briefly pulses the monitors' backlight (Kyle Orland/Ars Technica)

Buyout firm Hg agrees to acquire financial software maker OneStream for ~$6.4B in cash, a 31% premium on its January 5 stock price, set to close in H1 2026 (Bloomberg)

Amazon raised AWS' EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML prices by ~15% on January 3, saying the adjustment "reflects the supply/demand patterns we expect this quarter" (Corey Quinn/The Register)

Asus redesigns the Zenbook Duo with a new "hideaway" hinge that shrinks the gap between the laptop's two 3K 144Hz Lumina Pro OLED displays to just 8.28 mm (Sam Rutherford/Engadget)

Meta names C.J. Mahoney, former Microsoft legal executive and deputy US Trade Representative during Trump's first term, as its chief legal officer (Sara Fischer/Axios)

Chinese robot vacuum maker Roborock unveils the Saros Rover, a concept robot vacuum cleaner with two wheel-legs for climbing stairs, as robotics dominates CES (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg)

Commonwealth Fusion Systems teams up with Nvidia and Siemens to build an AI digital twin of its SPARC fusion reactor, accelerating its push to commercial fusion (Zachary Skidmore/DatacenterDynamics)

UMG announces a partnership with Nvidia "to pioneer responsible AI for music discovery, creation, and engagement", centered on Nvidia's Music Flamingo model (Dan Rys/Billboard)

Marvell says it will acquire networking equipment provider XConn for ~$540M to expand its networking portfolio; the deal is expected to close in early 2026 (Arsheeya Bajwa/Reuters)

Vancouver-based quantum computing startup Photonic raised CA$180M led by Planet First Partners, bringing its total funding to CA$375M (Madison McLauchlan/BetaKit)

Meta unveils teleprompter and EMG handwriting features for Meta Ray-Ban Display and expands Pedestrian Navigation for the glasses to four new US cities (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)

LMArena, which runs leaderboards that rank AI models based on their performance, raised a $150M Series A led by Felicis and UC Investments at a $1.7B valuation (The Information)

Razer plans to invest $600M in AI over "the next couple of years", as the gaming peripherals maker unveils new AI products like headphones with built-in cameras (Dana Wollman/Bloomberg)

Ring revamps its home sensors, including door, window, and break glass sensors built on the Amazon Sidewalk protocol, and expands the protocol internationally (Daniel Cooper/Engadget)

American Airlines partners with AT&T to add free, high-speed satellite-based Wi-Fi across its entire fleet, with a target spring 2026 completion date (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

Accenture agrees to acquire UK AI startup Faculty, which works with the UK government, for an undisclosed sum; Faculty CEO Marc Warner will become Accenture CTO (Mark Bergen/Bloomberg)

Meta and Garmin show an early demo of using Meta's wrist-based neural band inside of a car to control an infotainment system, as part of Garmin's Unified Cabin (Karissa Bell/Engadget)

Meta says it is pausing the release of its Ray-Ban Display glasses to the UK, France, Italy, and Canada due to "unprecedented demand and limited inventory" (Steve Dent/Engadget)

German car parts supplier Bosch plans to invest €2.5B+ in AI by the end of 2027 and unveils AI-based driver-assist systems with features like automatic parking (Dominic Chopping/Wall Street Journal)

HP unveils the Eliteboard G1a, a compact desktop PC in the form of a keyboard, powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 300-series chip, set for March launch; pricing is TBC (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)

Intel unveils the Arc B390 integrated GPU, offering improved gaming performance, and says it will power gaming handhelds built by MSI, Acer, Microsoft, and more (Madeline Ricchiuto/IGN)

Singapore-based data center operator DayOne raised a $2B Series C led by Coatue to build hyperscale campuses in Lahti and Kouvola, Finland, and elsewhere (Reuters)

Even if AI could take over every job, humans will invent new work for themselves, because we value human effort and connection, not just output (Ben Thompson/Stratechery)

Nvidia announces native apps for its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service for select Linux distributions and Amazon Fire TV sticks, available in early 2026 (Tom Warren/The Verge)

AMD teases its next-generation CDNA 6-based MI500 AI chips built on a 2nm node, claiming 1,000x performance gains over predecessors, launching in 2027 (Reuters)

AMD unveils Ryzen AI 400 Series chips for AI PCs, with up to 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, built with TSMC's N4X node, available in Q1 2026 (Jake Roach/Tom's Hardware)

Nvidia rolls out DLSS 4.5 with new 6x Multi Frame Generation for the RTX 50 series, and a second-generation Super Resolution transformer model for all RTX GPUs (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Analysts expect Samsung's Q4 operating profit to jump 160% YoY to ~$11.7B, driven by a severe global shortage of memory chips amid booming AI demand (Hyunjoo Jin/Reuters)

Telegram bonds worth $500M are frozen in Russia under Western sanctions; filings: its H1 2025 revenue rose 65% YoY to $870M, driven by $300M from Toncoin deals (Financial Times)

AMD unveils the 12-core Ryzen AI Max+ 392, and the 8-core AI Max+ 388 processors, both with 40 graphics compute units and offering 60 TFLOPS of GPU performance (Sean Hollister/The Verge)

AMD unveils new AI PC processors for general use and gaming at CES (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips are in "full production"; Nvidia says Rubin can train some LLMs with roughly one-fourth the chips Blackwell needs (Lauren Goode/Wired)

Xreal partners with Asus to unveil ROG Xreal R1 gaming glasses with 1080p micro-OLED displays and a 240Hz refresh rate, launching in H1 2026 (Cameron Faulkner/The Verge)

Nvidia says it's seeing "strong" demand from China for its H200 chips but is awaiting approvals from both Washington and Beijing before sales could begin (Nikkei Asia)

Apple's macOS Tahoe adds icons to every menu item, resulting in menus that are hard to use and go against the long-standing Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (Niki Tonsky/tonsky.me)

A look at Nvidia's Level 2 driving system, set to roll out to more carmakers in 2026, after a ~40-minute drive around San Francisco in a Mercedes-Benz CLA sedan (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)

X faces fresh probes in Europe, India, and Malaysia after Grok generated explicit images of women and children; the UK says it has requested related info from X (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

Nvidia announces the Alpamayo family of AI models, tools, and datasets for AVs, and details a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz on its first full-stack AV effort (Larry Dignan/Constellation Research)

Boston Dynamics partners with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics models into Atlas robots, boosting their object-manipulation capabilities and more (Will Knight/Wired)

Intel details its 2nm 18A-process Panther Lake chips, showing major performance gains; laptops with Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips will debut on Jan. 27 (Michael Justin Allen Sexton/PCMag)