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Trump family's World Liberty Financial says its entity World Liberty Trust has applied for a US banking license, which would let it issue the USD1 stablecoin (Vicky Ge Huang/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Larry Page bought two Miami estates in December and January for a combined $173.4M; Sergey Brin is also said to be in discussions to buy a Miami home (Wall Street Journal)

WhatsApp rolls out new group chat features: member tags that show user roles, text stickers generated from any word, and custom event reminders (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)

Alphabet surpassed Apple in market cap for the first time since 2019 after its shares closed up 2.5% on Wednesday, valuing it at $3.89T vs. Apple's $3.85T (Barron's Online)

Lux Capital raised $1.5B for its ninth fund, the largest in its history, to back companies focusing on fields like breakthrough science and national security (Lizette Chapman/Bloomberg)

Apple announces JPMorgan Chase as the new issuer of the Apple Card, taking over from Goldman Sachs, with an expected transition in about 24 months (Wall Street Journal)

OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Health, which lets users import medical records and other data from health apps into ChatGPT, available to a small group via a waitlist (Ina Fried/Axios)

Docs: Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits with families of teenagers who killed or harmed themselves after interacting with Character.AI's chatbot (Amrith Ramkumar/Wall Street Journal)

Sources: Anthropic plans to raise $10B led by Singapore's GIC and Coatue Management at a $350B valuation before the new investment, up from $183B in September (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)

Cambodia extradites Chen Zhi, the chairman of online scam conglomerate Prince Group, to China; in October, the US DOJ seized Chen's bitcoin worth nearly $12B (Gabriele Steinhauser/Wall Street Journal)

Utah launches a pilot program with health tech startup Doctronic to let AI systems handle routine prescription renewals for patients with chronic conditions (Politico)

Source: Ant Group's Ant International grew revenue by 20% to 25% in 2025 to an estimated $3.7B, or ~10% of Ant's total 2025 revenue, as it competes with Visa (Jing Yang/The Information)

Polymarket agrees to supply Dow Jones outlets like the WSJ and Barron's with prediction market trading data for online and in print, its first media partnership (Katherine Doherty/Bloomberg)

Sources: China has told some local tech companies to temporarily halt purchase orders for Nvidia's H200 chips while officials deliberate whether to approve them (Qianer Liu/The Information)

Spotify launches Listening Activity on iOS and Android, letting users view friends' real-time listening via the sidebar alongside chats, as an opt-in feature (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)

Crypto infrastructure provider Fireblocks agrees to acquire accounting platform TRES Finance, sources say for $130M in cash and equity; TRES raised $11M in 2023 (Ben Weiss/Fortune)

London-based e-commerce logistics startup Swap raised a $100M Series C led by DST Global and Iconiq, after raising a $40M Series B in March 2025 (Axios)

As Trump and Big Tech aim to build SMRs to "win" the AI race, a look at the issues they face; none of the 50+ SMRs under development have a US operating license (Jamie Smyth/Financial Times)

Nike quietly sold its digital products subsidiary RTFKT on December 16 for an undisclosed sum, after Nike acquired it in 2021 and shuttered the NFT unit in 2024 (Matthew Kish/Oregonian)

Memo: JPMorgan's asset management unit cuts all proxy advisory firm ties and will use its AI-powered Proxy IQ platform to assist on US votes, an industry first (Jack Pitcher/Wall Street Journal)

London-based data center startup GTR raised $1.5B from KKR and ~$400M from Oak Hill to develop its facilities in England, Barcelona, Zurich, and Tel Aviv (Financial Times)

Intel spinout and enterprise AI startup Articul8 raised over half of a $70M Series B at a $500M pre-money valuation and expects the round to close in Q1 2026 (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

Roblox expands mandatory age estimations for chat features to all regions using Persona's tech, after a rollout in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands (Jay Peters/The Verge)

WBD's board unanimously rejects Paramount's amended $108.4B acquisition offer, saying the bid still has "significant" risks compared to Netflix's $83B offer (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)

Researcher: Grok generated ~6,700 sexually suggestive or "nudifying" images per hour on X between January 5 and January 6; 85% of all Grok images are sexualized (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)

Filing: Samsung plans to acquire $1.73B of its stock for employee and executive compensation, as part of a performance-linked scheme introduced in October 2025 (Kyu-seok Shim/Reuters)

Jensen Huang says Nvidia has "fired up" H200 production in the expectation of resumed China sales and it is working on the "last details" with the US government (Michael Acton/Financial Times)

Samsung says it expects memory chip supply shortages to raise prices across the electronics industry, including potentially among its own consumer products (Bloomberg)

Polymarket is disputing that the US mission to capture Nicolás Maduro constituted an "invasion", refusing to pay out bets on a contract with $10.5M+ in wagers (Financial Times)

Chinese AI startups Zhipu and MiniMax are set to go public in Hong Kong on January 8 and 9, respectively; MiniMax has 210M+ users, and Zhipu has 8,000+ clients (Bloomberg)

GWI: LinkedIn's 2025 revenue rose to $17B from $7B in 2020 as users doubled to 1.3B; 4.7% of US users checked more than once per day in 2025, from 3.9% in 2020 (Stu Woo/Wall Street Journal)

A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's lucrative shift toward sports, as high-profile real-world bets raise questions about access, integrity, and US CFTC regulation (Bloomberg)

As data center development puts pressure on power grids, US officials propose requiring data centers to power down or switch to a backup as blackout risks rise (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)

An interview with Google DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu on his new role as Google's chief AI architect, Gemini 3, progress toward the goal of AGI, and more (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)

How Google's ambitious approach to training Gemini on text, code, audio, images, and video helped it stage a powerful comeback, triggering a Code Red at OpenAI (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)

PitchBook-NVCA: global VC investments hit $512B in 2025 with AI accounting for 50%+; VC fundraising fell to a 10-year low of $118.6B, ~$100B less than in 2024 (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)

Dutch fintech Bunq applies to become a US bank; the OCC conditionally approved national trust bank charters for several crypto firms in 2025, including Circle (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)

The US FDA says it will limit regulation of non-medical wellness wearables and AI software, provided they don't make claims about disease diagnosis or treatment (Puyaan Singh/Reuters)

China unveils rules banning major platforms like Alibaba from forcing merchants into discounts or practices seen as disrupting market order, effective February (Bloomberg)

Filing: Larry Page moved assets out of California ahead of the proposed CA wealth tax, meeting an end-of-2025 deadline; a source said he has left the state (Hugh Langley/Business Insider)

Motorola unveils the Razr Fold, its first book-style foldable phone, with a 6.6" front display and an 8.1" 2K LTPO inner screen, expected to launch this summer (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)

Lenovo introduces Qira, a system-level, cross-device AI assistant for both its computers and Motorola smartphones, arriving later in Q1 2026 (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)

Sources: Chinese officials are reviewing Meta's $2B Manus acquisition for possible tech export control violations, including when Manus relocated to Singapore (Financial Times)

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)